Solana applications generate $2.4 billion, proving the network is finally decoupling from this volatile metric
Solana’s ecosystem recorded its strongest monetary yr to this point in 2025, posting all-time highs in income, lively customers, and buying and selling quantity at the same time as the network’s native token completed the yr practically 50% beneath its early peak.
According to CryptoSlate knowledge, SOL rallied to greater than $250 in the first quarter of 2025 earlier than broader market headwinds dragged the asset to a low of $105, and it closed the yr round $123.
Despite the volatile value motion, the network’s underlying economy expanded at an unprecedented price.
Applications and buying and selling venues constructed on the blockchain reported a yr outlined by high-frequency exercise, huge asset issuance, and surging income. This painted an image of a flourishing ecosystem decoupled from the speculative worth of its base asset.
Record income
The Solana Foundation revealed that applications constructed on Solana generated $2.39 billion in income in 2025, a 46% year-over-year improve and a brand new all-time high.
This surge was not restricted to a single sector however was distributed throughout a various array of platforms. Seven distinct applications, together with Pump.fun, AxiomExchange, MeteoraAG, Raydium, JupiterExchange, tradewithPhoton, and bullx_io, every surpassed $100 million in annual income.
Beyond these market leaders, the “lengthy tail” of smaller applications generated a mixed income exceeding $500 million, signaling a deepening developer ecosystem.
At the network stage, income accelerated dramatically. REV, a metric monitoring complete network income, reached $1.4 billion, marking a 48-fold improve over two years.
Meanwhile, the blockchain network’s utilization metrics mirrored this monetary progress. The network processed 33 billion non-vote transactions, a 28% improve from the earlier yr.
When together with vote transactions, the complete throughput reached 116 billion, with the chain averaging 1,054 non-vote transactions per second.
A quickly increasing consumer base drove this exercise as distinctive lively wallets averaged 3.2 million per day, a 50% improve and a brand new document. Furthermore, 725 million new wallets recorded no less than one transaction throughout the yr.
While pockets addresses don’t correspond one-to-one with particular person customers, analysts counsel the determine highlights the immense breadth of participation flowing via Solana’s applications and buying and selling venues.
Trading actions develop
The most strong progress vector in 2025 was the trading activity occurring on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and the specialised infrastructure supporting them.
Solana DEX volume reached $1.5 trillion in 2025, a 57% year-over-year improve and a historic peak for the network. The liquidity for these trades additionally deepened, with SOL-stablecoin pair quantity hitting $782 billion, greater than doubling from the earlier yr.
Market dominance was concentrated amongst a dozen main exchanges, every processing greater than $10 billion in quantity. Raydium led the sector with $347 billion in quantity, adopted by orca_so at $241 billion, humidifi at $184.7 billion, SolFiAMM at $184.2 billion, and MeteoraAG at $182 billion.
Notably, the mechanics of how trades have been routed underwent a major shift in 2025. “Prop AMMs” (Proprietary Automated Market Makers) grew their share of aggregator quantity from 19% to 54%, suggesting a transfer towards extra specialised, environment friendly buying and selling algorithms.
At the identical time, the composition of buying and selling pairs additionally advanced, with SOL serving as the pair token in 42% of all trades, whereas the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC accounted for 30%.
Emerging classes additionally contributed to the quantity growth. Artificial Intelligence (AI) brokers, automated software program applications conducting on-chain transactions, accounted for $31 billion in quantity.
Meanwhile, quantity for tokenized real-world belongings reached $598 million, and project-specific token quantity, comparable to JUP and RAY, totaled $86 billion.
On the aggregation entrance, platforms that route trades throughout a number of exchanges to search out the greatest value dealt with $922 billion in quantity, doubling their throughput from 2024. JupiterExchange dominated this vertical, accounting for $812 billion of that quantity.
Professional-grade buying and selling platforms additionally noticed a surge, producing $940 million in income, a 44% improve, whereas processing $108 billion in quantity. AxiomExchange captured practically a 3rd of this skilled market share.
The speculative growth
While Solana blockchain infrastructure matured, retail speculation remained a main engine of network exercise. Memecoins, cryptocurrencies usually primarily based on web jokes or viral traits, have pushed important turnover, regardless of questions on their long-term sustainability.
Memecoin quantity reached $482 billion. Although this represented a ten% lower year-over-year, it marked an 80-fold improve over a two-year horizon, highlighting the sector’s explosive progress since 2023.
Notably, launchpads, platforms designed to simplify the creation of recent tokens, grew to become central to this pipeline.
Six launchpads, including Pump.fun, bonkfun, believeapp, MeteoraAG through DBC, moonit, and Raydium through LaunchLab, every facilitated over $1 billion in buying and selling quantity. Revenues for these launchpads doubled yr over yr to $762 million.
Pump.fun emerged as the defining retail application of the yr. The platform was credited with drastically decreasing the technical limitations to token creation, permitting customers to launch new belongings in seconds.
However, the ease of creation led to market saturation. Users created 11.6 million new tokens via launchpads in 2025, greater than doubling the earlier yr’s rely.
Yet, the success price for these belongings was minuscule. Only 105,000 tokens “graduated” from their bonding curves, a mechanism that strikes a token to a regular change as soon as sufficient capital is raised.
This represents a commencement price of simply 0.89%, reinforcing the high-risk, casino-like nature of this market phase, the place the huge majority of launches quickly lose traction.
Meanwhile, political events additionally influenced the speculative fervor.
The return of Donald Trump to political workplace triggered a wave of “PolitiFi” memecoins. Tokens comparable to TRUMP and MELANIA, together with numerous copycats, contributed considerably to DEX quantity spikes all through the yr.
Cheap transactions
A key issue enabling Solana’s skill to deal with this numerous mixture of high-frequency buying and selling and massive token issuance was its fee structure.
Despite each day pockets exercise and transaction counts reaching document highs, the price to make use of the network declined.
The common transaction price fell to $0.017 from $0.025 the earlier yr. More notably, the median price dropped to $0.0011 from $0.0014.
This financial surroundings sustained high-frequency buying and selling behaviors which can be cost-prohibitive on dearer blockchain networks.
It facilitated the creation of 725 million new wallets and allowed bots and automatic brokers to function with high velocity with out eroding revenue margins.
Institutional maturation: ETFs and Stablecoins
Beyond the retail frenzy, 2025 marked a turning level for Solana’s integration into conventional monetary markets.
A major milestone was the late-2025 rollout of US-listed spot Solana Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).
These merchandise opened the door for conventional fairness buyers to achieve publicity to SOL with out managing personal keys. The ETFs recorded $1.02 billion in net inflows shortly after launch, signaling robust institutional urge for food.
At the identical time, some public companies like Forward Industries had additionally embraced cryptocurrency as their treasury asset and purchased greater than 18 million SOL tokens.
Simultaneously, the utilization of stablecoins, cryptocurrencies pegged to fiat forex, exploded.
Stablecoin supply on Solana ended 2025 at $14.8 billion, a brand new all-time high that greater than doubled the earlier yr’s determine.
USDC dominated this market, accounting for 66% of the provide. Total stablecoin switch quantity reached an astronomical $11.7 trillion, a seven-fold improve over two years, indicating that Solana is more and more getting used for international settlement and funds.
Notably, the network additionally saw growth in tokenized assets.
Equities debuted on-chain with $1 billion in provide and $651 million in buying and selling quantity. Bitcoin provide on Solana doubled to $770 million, whereas Bitcoin buying and selling quantity on the network grew fivefold to $33 billion.
Additionally, belongings from different chains, together with Zcash, Monad, and NEAR, debuted on Solana with a mixed provide of $32 million.
As a consequence, token Terminal knowledge estimates that applications on Solana now maintain roughly $35 billion in consumer belongings.
Furthermore, the ecosystem’s Total Value Locked (TVL) has risen by roughly $30 billion since January 2024, representing practically 10-fold progress in simply two years.
This accumulation of worth means that customers are usually not merely transacting and leaving, however are more and more parking capital inside the Solana economic system.
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