A Brief Analysis of SolanaFM: The Graph of the Solana Ecosystem
Coinhako and Etherscan jointly invested.Author: Azuma
On December 25, Solana data indexer SolanaFM announced the completion of its angel round financing co-led by Coinhako and Etherscan Ventures. The new funds will be used to accelerate the product development of SolanaFM, although the specific amount has not been disclosed.
SolanaFM CEO Nicholas Chen stated regarding this round of financing: "We received offers from many other VCs, but we ultimately decided to partner with Etherscan and Coinhako, firstly because they have a strong influence in the industry, and secondly because they have similar business lines and customer bases as SolanaFM."
SolanaFM is positioned as a data indexer focused on the Solana ecosystem. An indexer essentially does three things: first, it retrieves raw blockchain data from full nodes; second, it processes the raw data into a queryable format; third, it stores the queryable datasets in a database for users to access quickly and easily.
With the explosive growth of the Solana ecosystem, the demand for querying and analyzing data on this chain has also begun to rise. However, when users such as investors, developers, and data analysts attempt to access raw Solana data, they find it quite troublesome. This is because the current Solana ecosystem's block explorer has limited functionality, and there are also restrictions on API calls. This is the market gap that SolanaFM aims to fill.
Specifically, SolanaFM hopes to leverage its infrastructure to acquire and store all historical data on the Solana chain and provide dynamic APIs that allow various users to freely retrieve and access this data. Additionally, SolanaFM will visually present some commonly used data on a front-end dashboard for more intuitive access.
Currently, SolanaFM's products are live. From the dashboard product accessible to ordinary users, the SolanaFM team has organized and retrieved common data across six major categories: accounts, blocks, block rewards, projects, transactions, and tokens by calling its API.
Taking transactions as an example, when clicking "Explore," users can see clear charts showing multiple dimensions such as the average number of successful transactions per hour, the number of failed transactions, average sending value, average receiving value, and average transaction fees over a period of time on the Solana network.
It is worth mentioning that SolanaFM currently adopts a multi-tiered payment model. The first access level is the Starter level, which allows access to historical data from the last two months, with a maximum of 100 queries per month; the next level is the Pro level at $299 per month, which allows full historical data queries, increasing the monthly query limit to 2000 and the queries per minute (QPM) efficiency to 15; the final level is the Enterprise level for institutions, which not only includes full historical data queries but also increases the query limit and QPM to 100,000 and 150, respectively.
From a product positioning perspective, SolanaFM inevitably brings to mind The Graph, a data indexer for networks like Ethereum. Although The Graph announced earlier this year that it would integrate with Solana, perhaps due to the completely different development environments and programming languages of the two, this work has yet to be completed. As a native data indexing service for Solana, SolanaFM has already gained a first-mover advantage within the ecosystem.
