Why solsearch?

There are multiple ways to search for and analyze Solana tokens - Coingecko, Dexscreener, Defillama, Solscan - so why another?

We believe many of the current offerings don't

• Take a stance on which metrics are important. Many platforms rely on market cap as the primary metric, but we believe it can be misleading as a success indicator. There are other metrics that should be surfaced first and foremost, in addition to market cap. Metrics that come top of mind for this are: liquidity, liquidity over time, and liquidity to market cap ratio. We acknowledge these metrics can be gathered elsewhere (albeit more difficult to find), it won't be with our approach and vision.
• Lacking in user experience and design. More subjective, but Solsearch is built by two friends who both agree that current analytics platforms suffer from cluttered interfaces that make it hard to extract meaningful insights, missing the "so what" when analyzing tokens.
• Listen to the community. We aim to surface harder-to-find, esoteric metrics based on real community demand. Existing sites recycle the same usual statistics, but we want to highlight unique and creative data points that can provide deeper perspectives.

We feel that liquidity is underemphasized and market cap is over emphasized. We don’t believe that market cap is meaningless, but we do think that it can be misleading when compared to liquidity. Market cap serves as a rough and ever-evolving benchmark for what an appropriate valuation of a given project should be. This is ultimately a self-fulfilling prophecy similar to technical analysis. There is no magical force behind a support line, but if enough people believe in it at scale, then it can influence market behavior. Similarly, market cap is just a calculation (circulation supply * current price).

There are projects that have huge market caps that don't appear on Coingecko or Coinmarketcap, likely because they are flagged or ignored, rightfully so. Take this LAMBO token as an example. At the time of writing, it has a ~$21B market cap, yet it has <$1 volume and $12k in liquidity. In this case, market cap is totally meaningless because there is no liquidity. At the same time, popular tokens like BONK or WIF have large market caps, and 'decent' liquidity, but as a community, what is 'decent'? We believe more of the community needs to prioritize liquidity and liquidity-to-market-cap ratios as more of a primary indicator when assessing projects. If enough of the community gains a consensus on a good liquidity to market cap ratio, then that metric becomes a more reliable indicator for valuing projects.

Market cap can be manipulated and volume can be gamed (e.g. wash trading), but can liquidity be gamed? Not in quite the same way. Faking liquidity is riskier for bad actors because it requires real capital that can work against them. Still, it can be misleading in its own way.

• One way liquidity can be misleading is if the intention of the liquidity is not genuine. Meaning, a whale or coordinated group can temporarily provide liquidity to a pool with the intent of pulling it out within the short term, but ultimately, the funds are there, whereas a volume metric can be completely artificially created by one actor.
• Another way is with concentrated liquidity pools, a liquidity provider can set tight ranges which can give off the impression that there is deep liquidity, but that liquidity may only exist within a tight range of say $1. For example, in an XYZ / SOL pool, maybe there is $1M of liquidity on XYZ token at prices $99-100, but outside of those prices, liquidity is negligible.

Still, liquidity remains a real, measurable number.

If you have ideas for unique metrics or any general feedback, we'd love to hear from you! Feel free to tweet at us.