Solana DeFi: An Overview of the Ecosystem

Solana DeFi is built on six layers — wallets, DEXs/aggregators, lending, liquid staking, yield farming, and perpetuals — and almost everything you’ll do fits into one of them. Understanding how these layers relate to each other makes the rest of the ecosystem far easier to navigate than learning protocols one at a time.

The core layers

Wallets are the base layer — every interaction starts with a self-custody wallet like Phantom, Solflare, or Backpack signing a transaction. See our wallets guide.

DEXs and aggregators handle price discovery and swaps. AMMs like Raydium, Orca, and Meteora hold the actual liquidity pools; Jupiter routes trades across all of them to find the best combined price. This layer is the most heavily used in the ecosystem simply because almost every other action eventually requires a swap at some point.

Lending markets like Kamino, Save, and MarginFi let you earn yield by supplying assets, or borrow against collateral without selling it. This is where interest-rate dynamics and liquidation risk live.

Liquid staking protocols like Jito, Marinade, Sanctum, and BlazeStake let you stake SOL while keeping a liquid, usable token in return. LSTs are widely accepted as collateral elsewhere in the ecosystem, which is part of why liquid staking has become so central to Solana DeFi specifically — staked SOL doesn’t have to sit idle.

Yield farming and liquidity provision sit on top of the DEX layer — depositing into AMM pools to earn trading fees, sometimes with additional incentive rewards layered on top. This is generally the highest-complexity, highest-risk category covered here, because it combines smart contract risk, impermanent loss, and often reward-token price risk simultaneously.

Perpetuals platforms like Pacifica, Jupiter Perps, and newer entrants like Bulk Exchange let you trade leveraged derivatives directly on-chain, which is a fundamentally higher-risk activity than the categories above due to leverage and liquidation mechanics.

Why Solana specifically

Solana’s low fees and fast confirmation times make DeFi actions that would be prohibitively expensive on other chains — like frequent rebalancing, small trades, or active liquidity management — practical at almost any transaction size. That’s a large part of why categories like automated liquidity vaults (Kamino) and unified LST liquidity (Sanctum) developed as distinctly Solana-native products.

Where to go from here

If you’re new, start with getting started with Solana DeFi. If you already understand the basics and want to go deeper on a specific category, the categories page breaks each one out with its own evaluation criteria and risks.