Summary of findings

In this dashboard, firstly, the growth of unique programs use was shown. The data showed that the number of daily unique programs used is growing. We can conclude that the Solana ecosystem is expanding.

Secondly, the top 5 most popular programs were identified. Here is the list and brief descriptions (descriptions were extracted from the programs official websites):

• Pyth Oracle Program: "Pyth Network is a specialized oracle solution for latency-sensitive financial data typically guarded by centralized institutions. Pyth Network is focused on bringing this unique data on-chain and aggregating it securely."

• Serum Dex Program v3: "Serum is a decentralized exchange (DEX) and ecosystem that brings unprecedented speed and low transaction costs to decentralized finance."

• Switchboard Oracle Program: "Switchboard is a community-driven, decentralized oracle network built on Solana that allows anyone to publish on-chain data for smart contract developers to reliably build upon."

• Mango Program v3: "Mango is built on Solana blockchain and utilizes Serum DEX for spot margin trading while perpetual futures are traded on Mango's own orderbook."

• System program : "program can create new accounts, allocate account data, assign accounts to owning programs, transfer lamports from System Program owned accounts and pay transaction fees."

As can be seen from the list and description above, the top popular unique programs has diverse use case. Two are used for dealing (financial) data, one is a DEX, one is used for trading and finally one is used for system.

Overview

One way to track developer growth in an ecosystem is through the number of unique contracts used. This dashboard focuses on unique programs and their popularity. First, the trend of use of new programs will be investigated by visualizing the number of unique programs used per day since the beginning of January. Then, the 5 most commonly used programs over that timeframe will be presented. Finally, why the identified top programs are so popular will be discussed.

Results

The below chart shows how many unique programs have been used daily on Solana blockchain since January 2022.

As can be seen from the chart, the number of unique programs used in that timeframe is growing.

Considering transactions which involves unique programs, we can identify number of usage of each program during the given timeframe.

The table below shows the top most popular (used) program address with their labels and number of used in transactions since 1st of January 2022.

The below donut chart compare the share of top programs.

The below charts depicts change in the absolute and relative number of top 5 program use over time.

As can be seen the first two top popular programs kept their dominance over the timeframe.