Is SOL really done? Multidimensional data reveals the true picture of Solana

Author: @blocmates

Compiled by: Odaily Planet Daily

In the third quarter of 2025, Solana presents a "two-sided story on the same chain." On the surface, the "meme retreat" has brought about a noticeable cooling effect: daily active addresses have declined, and the user dominance is gradually being eroded by competitors. However, beneath the surface, the fundamentals of this chain are becoming increasingly solid. The core team of Solana has maintained high-frequency iterations, continuously advancing one of the most ambitious technology roadmaps in the crypto industry; meanwhile, its TVL grew by over 26% in the third quarter, and the supply of stablecoins has nearly tripled since the beginning of the year.

This report will systematically outline the core technological upgrades that are defining Solana's future (such as Alpenglow and Agave), analyze on-chain data performance, assess the health of ecological applications, and summarize our key insights on how Solana can consolidate its position as the "default high-performance public chain."

Multi-track Technological Innovations

While most users on the platform are busy chasing the latest meme trends, the @solana core team has been advancing a highly ambitious system-level upgrade roadmap. This is not merely patching a single metric but a comprehensive engineering effort to enhance network performance, security, decentralization, and user experience. These upgrades can be broadly categorized into three main types.

First Category: Core Engine (Consensus and Client)

This represents a fundamental overhaul of Solana's "engine," aiming to improve performance, speed, and security from the most basic level. There is a great visualization chart if you're curious about the current staking ecosystem.

Second Category: Network Highway (Throughput and Efficiency)

The focus of this part is to widen the network "lanes" after enhancing underlying performance, optimizing traffic scheduling to handle higher future loads without congestion. If institutional users truly want to go on-chain in the future, low latency and stable experiences are foundational, not optional.

Third Category: Destination (New Capabilities for Ecosystems and Applications)

This category of upgrades targets the most direct developers and end-users, aiming to provide more new features, support new types of application forms, and further enhance the chain's level of decentralization. In other words, this is a module that allows the "chain to do more things."

Actual Impact of Technological Improvements

From a practical usage perspective:

• Alpenglow: Final confirmation speed below 150ms allows retail users to utilize high-frequency DeFi, gaming, or micropayment applications on-chain, with performance approaching Binance's 100ms and Aptos's 200ms levels.
• Firedancer: A potential capacity of over 1 million TPS far exceeds Ethereum and its L2s (such as OP's approximately 2k TPS), Sui's 300k TPS, and centralized exchanges (Coinbase's peak around 500k TPS). It also significantly reduces the systemic risk of single client failures (Ethereum's Geth still accounts for 60% of nodes).
• Block Space Improvements, Congestion Relief, and Transaction Size Limit Optimization: Enhances the overall experience when using the chain, enabling finer-grained micropayments, ICOs (like $PUMP), and rapid transactions while reducing failures due to congestion.
• Decentralization and Lower Node Costs: Allows users with lower technical barriers to run nodes, thereby enhancing the overall security and decentralization of the network.
• ZK and Privacy Support: Provides a compliant, private, and secure foundation for the entry of RWA and institutional users.
• BAM (Fair Trading, Anti-MEV): Ensures transaction fairness and protects users from MEV losses, making the on-chain experience closer to a predictable low-cost environment like CLOB.
• ACE (Multi-Collateral Liquidity): Further promotes the deepening of DeFi capital markets, enabling competition with platforms like Aave and supporting more complex financial instruments.

PUMP ICO: Validation of On-chain Stress Testing

In July 2025, the ICO of Pump.fun became a real "stress test" for Solana's performance. @pumpfun raised $500 million and $100 million through on-chain and centralized exchanges, respectively, within just 12 minutes, corresponding to a valuation of up to $4 billion. During this period, 3,878 investors transparently completed subscriptions on Solana's Raydium, Jupiter, and other DEXs, while some CEXs (like Bybit) experienced delays due to multiple API failures, causing about 2,500 confirmed investors to miss timely orders due to API latency and be forced to refund.

Does this mean we are witnessing a potential future where the performance of decentralized blockchains begins to surpass that of centralized exchanges?

So, where does Solana currently stand? The Truth Revealed by Data

From the data perspective, as traders shifted from meme speculation to perpetual contracts, Solana's on-chain revenue metrics showed a significant impact: on-chain fees as a percentage of SOL's market cap have declined by over 60% since the peak in July.

Meanwhile, despite ongoing discussions about stablecoins on Capitol Hill and Wall Street, the leaders remain Ethereum and Tron, with Solana alongside Base, BSC, and Arbitrum in the "second tier."

Further breaking down the stablecoin TVL share reveals that Ethereum and Tron have almost consistently dominated over the past few quarters, while some emerging application chains—such as @Plasma—are gradually squeezing into this landscape.

Nevertheless, Solana still provides a fast, low-cost, and liquid USDC usage environment, which may be why Western Union chose to build its stablecoin business on Solana.

"Experimental" will become one of the core themes of this report, and this spirit is also reflected in the stablecoin ecosystem: new projects are gradually eroding USDC's dominance, bringing more competition to Solana's stablecoin landscape.

Which Ecological Participants are Driving Chain Growth?

From the perspective of TVL growth rate, staking products are the absolute highlight of Solana applications in the third quarter, with staking SOL provided by Binance and Bybit, as well as products from @Sanctumso, all recording over 50% growth in the third quarter.

In contrast, while DEX, DeFi, and infrastructure products also saw an increase in TVL, they failed to surpass SOL's own 28% rise—indicating that in SOL terms, these categories actually experienced net outflows in the past quarter.

The shortcoming of staking products is their weak profitability: on average, a staking protocol requires 21.7 times the TVL to reach the average revenue level of DEX in this sample. This again highlights a fact—the profits contributed by speculators far exceed those of savers in the crypto world.

In the DEX space, @Orca_so has consistently maintained a leading position in TVL efficiency (i.e., "trading speed"). Under a given liquidity scale, the trading frequency per dollar on Orca is the highest.

Although Solana has always been known for being "fast and cheap," this does not mean there are no exceptions. For example, some high-frequency deep users on trading platforms like @tradewithPhoton or @AxiomExchange have daily fee expenditures far exceeding expectations.

However, for the vast majority of users, using the most common applications on Solana only costs a few cents a day.

Horizontal Comparison of Solana and Core Competitors

The total TVL across the chain at the end of the third quarter was slightly below the historical peak of nearly $180 billion in 2021, but when compared horizontally with various competing public chains, the quarter-on-quarter changes in TVL among them are actually quite limited.

The market share chart below clearly shows how the TVL of these competitors fluctuates weekly. As Newton said, "Idle capital tends to remain idle," and once capital is settled, it is often difficult to migrate on a large scale.

In terms of user scale, Binance Smart Chain captured the most attention in the third quarter with its perpetual DEX—Aster—associated with CZ. A large number of users either chose to exit in early summer or migrated from Base and Solana to BSC.

Although Solana experienced a noticeable user growth in the second quarter, its share also receded in the third quarter, which almost coincides with the market's declining interest in meme trading.

However, it is worth noting that due to the surge in attention to stablecoins, Solana's stablecoin supply has nearly tripled from the beginning of the year to the end of the third quarter. It has been proven that "fast and cheap" is a significant selling point for attracting users to use stablecoins, especially in the context of Solana's already mature DeFi ecosystem.

Although these metrics depict the current landscape, they do not reflect the future direction. Solana's identity has always been that of an "experimental chain." To understand future use cases and narratives, we must observe where the funds are flowing towards new experiments.

VC Funding Trends: Which Projects are Securing Financing?

Here are some Solana projects that secured notable institutional investments in the third quarter:

• @raikucom: Completed a $13.5 million seed round in September 2025, focusing on real-time liquidity scheduling and cross-chain bridging as DeFi infrastructure on Solana, primarily serving high-frequency trading applications, supporting sub-second settlements while avoiding MEV risks. This round was led by @PanteraCapital, and the funds will be used for mainnet upgrades and further integration with DEXs (like @JupiterExchange).
• @bulktrade: Completed a $5 million seed round in August 2025, a perpetual DEX aimed at institutional users, featuring zero gas batch execution, with single transactions reaching up to $10 million. This round was led by @robotventures and @6thManVentures, with Solana co-founder @aeyakovenko participating as an angel investor. Its alphanet testnet launched in the third quarter.
• @meleemarkets: Completed a $3.5 million pre-seed financing in July 2025, a gamified prediction market protocol combining DeFi and social prediction, allowing users to earn yield-bearing tokens through accurate predictions. This round was led by @variantfund and @dba_crypto, with funds allocated for oracle integration and mobile launch. The project secured second place in the Solana Breakout Hackathon.
• @hylo_so: Completed a $1.5 million seed round in September 2025, a decentralized stablecoin protocol on Solana, supporting the issuance of yield-bearing stablecoins (like sUSD) through over-collateralization and automatic rebalancing mechanisms. This round was led by @robotventures, with participation from @SolanaVentures. Funds will be used for mainnet launch and integration with lending platforms like @Kamino.

Where are the Opportunities and Risks?

Solana exhibited a state of "breakthrough and burden coexistence" in the third quarter. On one hand, innovative applications are continuously approaching product-market fit, and Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) companies are shining; on the other hand, the entire ecosystem must confront some thorny issues.

Projects that Shone in Q3

Among the numerous dApps that emerged this quarter, the following launched projects stood out:

• @Titan_Exchange is a new DEX aggregator launched in the third quarter, employing improved algorithms to extract depth from different liquidity pools with machine-level precision, achieving better quotes in 80% of cases compared to existing products.
• @DefiTuna is a new DeFi AMM launched in the third quarter, integrating a true on-chain limit order mechanism directly into the AMM design, avoiding security risks associated with off-chain matching, while allowing LPs to use up to 5x leverage for liquidity position allocation (leveraged yield).
• @xStocksFi tokenizes stocks held in custody by licensed brokers, enabling crypto users to easily access the economic rights of their underlying stocks; it launched in early third quarter, with a single quarter trading volume exceeding $800 million, capturing about 60% market share.
• Pump.fun (streaming + mobile) initiated a token buyback in the third quarter after facing significant selling pressure, and relaunched its live streaming feature, with a cumulative buyback scale reaching $100 million by the end of the quarter.
• @MetaDAOProject made headlines due to large-scale oversubscription projects, including Umbra. Projects sold through MetaDAO (refer to our report) bind legal, economic, and governance rights in their tokens, referred to as "ownership coins." Additionally, governance proposals are not decided by voting but are priced through trading in "futarchic markets," allowing participants to express opinions with real money.

DAT Development Status

In the third quarter, Solana's DAT raised approximately $4.25 billion through private placements, PIPE, and equity offerings, with Forward Industries (FORD) being the largest; approximately $3.5 billion was used to purchase 14.5 million SOL, accounting for 2.3% of SOL's circulating supply.

Nevertheless, Solana's DAT still struggled to escape the mNAV contraction pressure that the entire crypto DAT ecosystem faced in the third quarter.

Responding to Common Criticisms

Like almost all crypto projects, Solana is in a continuous evolution phase and is far from perfect. From our perspective, the following criticisms are more of the growing pains in the process, but they are still worth noting.

Biggest Risk: Brand Narrative

Solana has long been labeled as "the best place for experimentation." Trading bots, ICM, consumer applications, AI agents—where did these innovations first appear? Solana.

However, during this cycle, attention has become increasingly scarce, and projects that can find product-market fit seem to be concentrated in a few tracks and very few applications. This stagnation has given competitors the opportunity to seize the narrative:

• Perpetual contracts have migrated from general chain applications to application-specific chains like Hyperliquid;
• Base has deeply bet on the consumer application narrative with Base app and Zora, which was once Solana's stronghold;
• Stablecoin chains like Tempo, Plasma, Stable, and Arc continue to threaten the stablecoin dominance of Ethereum and Tron.

This also leads to the core risk: yes, Pump is a revenue machine and has indeed resisted competition from "external" (Base/BSC) and "internal" (BonkFun), but the side effect of this success may permanently lock Solana's brand as a "casino chain."

To reverse this trend, Solana must promote a new narrative. Perhaps the answer still lies with Pump, but through its live streaming platform; or it could be the "non-runnable ICO" and new governance structure proposed by MetaDAO; or it could be Toly's experimental proposal targeting Hyperliquid with a personal touch. The ecosystem needs a new story that can dilute the stigma brought by "second-level retail investors."

Our Judgment on Solana's Prospects

Although the market appears slightly sluggish after the end of the meme season, the significance of short-term price fluctuations is diminishing. Solana has established a solid position and is determined to exist long-term.

Newly launched high-performance public chains (like Sui, Aptos, Sei) have not posed a substantial threat to Solana as it did when challenging Ethereum in the previous cycle. Even if some competitors are theoretically stronger in technology, Solana is already "fast enough, cheap enough," with a user experience that is good enough and supports a vast ecosystem.

Technical capability and smooth experience are the foundations for adoption. Solana is not merely maintaining its lead but is continuously iterating rapidly (as detailed in the upgrade section earlier in this report) to stabilize its position and expand its capabilities. For these reasons, developers still regard Solana as the first choice for high performance, and we believe this trend will not reverse.

Solana embodies the spirit of "daring to try and compete, open competition, and extreme marketization" in the crypto field, making it the best arena for validating product-market fit. Regardless of where this cycle leads, Solana has the conditions to survive and continue to thrive. Even if some trading volume flows to application-specific chains, we still believe Solana will maintain its leading position in the general chain space.