Part 3: Impact Case Studies
Solana’s speed and low fees make it a particularly practical tool for crypto giving. Major donation platforms now support the SOL token, helping nonprofits accept contributions without high transaction costs.
According to The Giving Block, more than $3.6 million in SOL donations had been processed by early 2025, making it a leading asset for charitable giving alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDC. This growth is tied to Solana’s price recovery in 2024 (up over 150% year-to-date at its November peak), which encouraged many long-term holders to make tax-efficient donations. For nonprofits, that means a new wave of crypto donors entering philanthropy with both strong gains and a desire to give back.
It’s also worth noting that Aid for Ukraine, a campaign co-founded by Anatoly Yakovenko of Solana Labs, raised $1.4 million worth of SOL donations to help cover urgent needs such as food, clothing, medicine, and even shortages of military equipment.
Some more experimental philanthropic projects include Somos Axolotl, a nonprofit validator on Solana. Instead of donations, people stake their SOL with the validator. The rewards generated then go to protecting the endangered axolotl in Xochimilco, Mexico. Co-founded by TIME “Hero of the Environment” Casson Trenor, Somos Axolotl combines blockchain, art, and local partnerships to restore wetlands and protect biodiversity. By turning a validator, normally a profit-driven role, into a conservation engine, they show how Web3 can create transparent, positive-sum systems where support is ongoing and verifiable on-chain.
🎙️Listen to our interview with Casson of Somos Axolotl for the Growing Good on Solana podcast series
Regenerative Finance (ReFi) redefines how capital can drive positive social & environmental outcomes. On Solana, this has meant mostly testing ways to align financial returns with regeneration, using transparent, programmable tools to prove impact.
ecoBridge is a great example of how that looks in practice. Back in 2023, it helped the Solana Foundation meet its carbon-neutrality pledge by retiring 5,000 metric tons of CO₂ and supporting the largest on-chain biodiversity offset to date. The project is now expanding beyond carbon credits, working on ways to support biodiversity, reforestation, and urban greening. Its goal is to create a global marketplace for verified ecological impact where credits are transparent, traceable, and accessible to more participants.
🎙️Listen to our interview with James of ecoBridge for the Growing Good on Solana podcast series
ReFi Hub takes a parallel approach, but focused on infrastructure. It tokenizes projects like solar farms and EV charging stations, letting anyone invest in them with USDC, earn on-chain yields, and track verified climate outcomes. Its first three deals sold out quickly, and its “Elements” gamification system is bringing community and storytelling into climate finance.
🎙️Listen to our interview with Christian of ReFi Hub on the Crypto Altruists podcast
Other experiments, such as Sunrise Stake, also showed what’s possible by redirecting staking rewards into carbon credit retirement while letting users keep liquidity through a gSOL token. Even if less active now, it highlighted how Solana’s infrastructure can be adapted for regenerative use cases.
Another emerging field of impact on Solana is decentralized science (DeSci). The focus here is on giving communities a direct role in deciding what research gets funded and how results are shared, moving science away from closed committees and towards more openness and participation.
pump.science, launched at Breakpoint 2024, is an early fun experiment in using blockchain to fund scientific research. It allows communities to fund longevity studies, starting with organisms like worms, through bonding-curve token markets. Once the funding threshold is met, the experiment is run and streamed live. Token holders not only provide the funding but also gain influence over how the research is conducted and how potential IP is used. The first two experiments were RIF, exploring the antibiotic Rifampicin, and URO, testing Urolithin A, a compound linked to cellular health. Both quickly attracted attention, with their tokens reaching millions in market capitalization.
On the DeSci infrastructure side, there is Molecule. Its IP-NFTs encode ownership and governance rights for scientific projects, which can then be fractionalized into BioDAOs. These DAOs let communities collectively decide how to fund, develop, and potentially commercialize research. Molecule has also partnered with pump.science, providing token allocations and grants to strengthen DeSci activity on Solana.
Another great example is SCAI (SecureChain AI), addressing another layer: how knowledge itself is stored and accessed. It provides decentralized, AI-powered search and storage so that scientific data can remain permanent, tamper-proof, and resistant to censorship.
On Solana, impact decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are experimenting with how to fund, govern, and coordinate public goods, ranging from research to community initiatives and open infrastructure. These DAOs bring people together to pool funds, set priorities through voting, and oversee projects directly onchain.
One example is the Quantum Biology DAO, which applies this approach to frontier science. It funds and guides research in quantum biology through open working groups, grants, and proposal voting. Rather than operating alone, the DAO is part of a wider ecosystem: the Quantum Biology Institute, a nonprofit lab that conducts the core research, and the Quantum Biology Incubator, which develops talent and startups in the field. Together, these pieces link scientists, crypto enthusiasts, and industry experts in a structure where funding, governance, and knowledge are shared much more openly.
Solana has also hosted experiments in capital allocation mechanics. Cubik piloted quadratic funding (QF), where small donations are amplified by the number of contributors, directing over $150,000 toward open-source tools. In addition, the Solana Foundation and OpenBlock Labs introduced Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RPGF), which rewards past contributions to infrastructure and community work, ensuring that essential but underfunded projects remain supported. Other large DAOs in the ecosystem are beginning to follow suit. Jupiter Exchange, one of Solana’s biggest protocols, launched a public goods grants program with 100 million JUP tokens and 10 million USDC in its DAO treasury. The program lets anyone propose initiatives for ecosystem benefit, signaling a shift where protocol treasuries are increasingly being directed toward public goods and infrastructure.
Climate-focused projects on Solana are exploring how blockchain can make conservation efforts more transparent and participatory, particularly in areas like monitoring, tokenization, and community funding.
Atlantis has evolved from being framed primarily as a dMRV tool into a broader peer-to-peer impact network. Its platform now includes apps like Impact Miner (rewarding users for completing climate and social bounties), Impact Foundry (helping projects gain credibility and funding), and Impact Landscapes (recording and funding initiatives on-chain). MRV tools remain part of its offering, but the focus has shifted toward building regenerative communities and accelerating adoption of climate resilience practices.
AgroTree Ledger is using blockchain to make agroforestry investments transparent and liquid. Backed by patented technology, it tokenizes trees and projects as NFTs that can be traded on a secondary market, with AI and satellite data verifying growth in real time. This allows anyone to fund reforestation and monitor ecological impact directly, with live projects including mangrove restoration in Thailand.
Hivemapper is a decentralized, community-owned map built on Solana. Drivers use Bee dashcams to collect road data and earn HONEY tokens, with over 600 million kilometers mapped across 90+ countries by 2025, about a third of the global road network. The map is constantly updated by its contributors and already used by companies like Lyft and TomTom. Beyond navigation, the open geospatial data supports climate adaptation, disaster response, and urban planning, providing a layer of real-time information for environmental resilience.
Coral Tribe adds a cultural and community-driven dimension to climate action on Solana. Launched as an NFT collection, it created a Community Impact Fund where 50% of project revenue is directed into restoration efforts. So far, the fund has raised more than $500K, backing projects like mangrove planting and coral reef recovery. NFT holders also take part in deciding how the money is used, turning digital ownership into a way to collectively fund and guide ecological initiatives.
Billions of people remain excluded from reliable financial services due to high remittance fees, unstable banking systems, or lack of credit history. There are now several projects on Solana focused on solving these gaps, from cross-border payments to microfinance tools.
Sphere operates in more than 120 countries, combining bank transfers, credit cards, and crypto in a non-custodial platform built on Solana. To date, it has processed over $100 million in transactions. What makes it particularly noteworthy is how it integrates blockchain into existing payment methods, rather than requiring users to switch entirely to crypto. For small businesses and workers in higher-risk regions, this means a way to send and receive money internationally with fewer delays and failures through familiar financial tools.
Another important piece of the puzzle is remittances, where cost and reliability directly impact households. Sling Money uses Solana and stablecoins to let people send money abroad quickly, without needing to understand or even see the crypto layer underneath. A user can get paid in USD or EUR, hold funds in stablecoins, and cash out to local accounts in minutes. This makes it especially relevant for migrant workers and freelancers who depend on cross-border income but face long delays and hidden fees in traditional systems.
Beyond payments, people are also testing whether Solana can support microfinance. The idea is that tokenized credit could record repayment history on-chain, making it easier for lenders to trust new borrowers and for people without bank records to access small loans.
Nonprofits are beginning to test how they can leverage Solana’s governance infrastructure to improve accountability and decision-making. The principle is simple: when proposals, votes, and treasury flows are recorded on-chain, stakeholders no longer have to rely only on periodic reports. They can see governance decisions and financial movements as they happen.
On Solana, Realms has become the main governance platform. It was originally built for large DeFi protocols, but its tools are equally relevant for mission-driven organizations. Realms allows communities to manage treasuries with SPL tokens, set up structured voting systems, and keep decision histories visible to all members. Alongside this, Squads provides secure multisig wallets so that control of funds is distributed across several signers rather than concentrated in one administrator.
The scale of Solana’s DAO ecosystem shows that this infrastructure is already being applied in practice. More than a hundred DAOs operate on the network, collectively managing close to a billion dollars in assets. Governance portals such as Realms and Tribeca make this activity legible: anyone can view proposals, track results, and audit treasury activity in real time. For nonprofits, this points to a model where governance and funding are not only transparent but also flexible.
Blockchain tools are enabling new forms of community coordination and movement building that challenge traditional structures. On Solana, this is happening across NFTs, DAOs, social platforms, and more.
NFT communities like Solana Monkey Business (SMB) are a great example. What began as a profile picture (PFP) collection has evolved into an active DAO. SMB holders took collective ownership by uniting under MonkeDAO, raising funds to acquire control from the original creators and steering the project through a $10 million treasury. Their journey from art drop to self-governance shows how Solana-based communities are using NFTs to build sustainable, self-directed ecosystems.
Grape Protocol provides another layer of coordination by enabling token- and NFT-gated communities. It integrates with platforms like Discord and Telegram, linking social identities to on-chain ownership. Grape allows communities to form, moderate, and govern themselves without relying on centralized intermediaries, making it one of the most enduring social tools on Solana. In the communications domain, Dialect has become the main messaging protocol on Solana. It enables wallet-to-wallet chat, dapp notifications, and composable in-app actions. Already adopted by dozens of projects, Dialect shows how decentralized communication can be both functional and deeply integrated into everyday crypto use.
Even meme-driven projects show the power of grassroots coordination. BONK, launched in late 2022 after Solana’s bruising FTX fallout, was framed as a “community coin” to revive morale and bring builders together. Half of its supply was airdropped to NFT holders, traders, and developers across the ecosystem, creating instant grassroots buy-in. Its referral model and DAO structure turned what began as viral hype into longer-term participation, while cementing BONK as a cultural touchstone and liquidity driver across Solana dapps.
And at a global scale, Helium shows how communities can coordinate to build physical infrastructure. When the network migrated to Solana in April 2023, its blockchain state was mapped over, and every hotspot became a Solana NFT, tying rewards and governance directly into Solana’s ecosystem. By late 2024, more than 350,000 active hotspots across 80+ countries were providing wireless coverage and transferring over half a petabyte of data. What makes Helium so powerful is the mobilization itself. Individuals around the world contribute hardware, earn tokens, and collectively expand coverage, showing how decentralized networks can turn grassroots participation into global-scale infrastructure.
Solana’s speed and low costs make it an ideal testing ground for new education models. Instead of treating learning as a one-way process, projects are using the network to reward progress, fund creators directly, and connect talent with real opportunities.
One such effort came from Calyptus, which in 2023–2024 ran a Solana-focused developer curriculum. Backed by ecosystem partners, the program offered modules on Rust and Anchor, rewarded learners with XP and USDC, and provided recruitment support for top graduates. While the initiative appears to have wound down, it showed how learn-to-earn could lower barriers for developers while linking education directly to jobs in Solana projects.
Trails by Phantom focuses on onboarding at scale through gamified micro-lessons. Users learn the basics of Solana projects such as Tensor or Famous Fox Federation by following short interactive walkthroughs. They earn XP for progress, climb leaderboards, and can compete for SOL rewards. This approach makes it easier for newcomers to explore the ecosystem while giving projects a way to educate and grow their user base.
Most recently, the One Solana Scholarship, launched by the Solana Foundation in 2025, has used micro-grants, community governance, and open-source tools to democratize blockchain education in emerging markets. In Argentina alone, the program helped catalyze $500,000 in foreign investment and an 83% rise in Solana developers globally that year. It shows how decentralized education can scale talent pipelines while also advancing Solana’s global adoption.
For developers looking for more structured training, 60 Days of Solana by RareSkills offers an intensive course for engineers who already have blockchain experience, particularly on Ethereum.
In places where information is tightly controlled, activists have used blockchains to preserve records that authorities could not delete. Once data is written to a decentralized ledger, it becomes permanent and tamper-proof. Solana’s open validator network offers the same guarantee, keeping knowledge, information, and even cultural memory accessible without relying on any single point of control.
Privacy is another essential part of equity, especially in contexts where surveillance is common or financial access is restricted. On Solana, new tools such as Privacy Cash are exploring how zero-knowledge proofs can make confidential SOL transactions possible while still remaining compliant with regulations. More than ten thousand private transfers have already been processed, showing that demand exists for systems that safeguard individual privacy without cutting people off from the wider financial system.
Identity also plays a role in justice. Unstoppable Domains integrated with Solana in 2023, enabling users to create NFT-based web and wallet names that serve as decentralized identifiers. That is vital for communities with fragile access to identity, helping them maintain continuity even in restrictive environments. By simplifying logins, payments, and services, these tools lower barriers for those excluded from traditional systems. The Solana Name Service adds a native option with simple .sol addresses, making transactions easier and rooting digital ownership directly in the ecosystem.
NFTs add another layer by enabling communities and creators to fund and protect culture in new ways. An interesting example was Realm of Historia, which set out to tokenize heritage sites and artworks, beginning with Armenia’s ancient Carahunge observatory. By bringing heritage on-chain and directing proceeds toward artists and preservation, it demonstrated how Solana’s NFT ecosystem could be used not only for collectibles but also to elevate marginalized voices and protect cultural memory.
On Solana, some of the most visible experiments in everyday use have come from health and fitness. The best-known example is StepN, a move-to-earn app where users buy NFT sneakers, exercise, and earn tokens. At its peak in Q2 2022, STEPN generated $122.5 million in profits, showing that blockchain incentives can drive large-scale participation. Users earn the in-app tokens GST and GMT by walking or running, which can then be swapped into stablecoins.
Moonwalk, also powered by Solana, organizes community run clubs around the world and uses simple point-based rewards for consistent activity. Users join step challenges, pool crypto with friends, and get their deposits back if they hit their goals. Missed days mean deductions that are redistributed to winners, creating a fair system of shared accountability. Games can be played in SOL, USDC, or BONK, and the focus is to drive motivation in the real world.
There’s also CUDIS, further widening the scope of web3 health on Solana. Its CUDIS Ring tracks sleep, heart rate, and activity while rewarding users with tokens, with more than 500,000 workouts and 4 billion steps logged so far. The goal is to give people ownership of their health data and tie it to positive incentives, building healthier habits while opening new ways to share data with research or longevity programs.
