Solana’s ecosystem had its strongest fiscal 12 months thus far in 2025, hitting report highs in income, lively customers, and buying and selling quantity although the community’s native token ended the 12 months practically 50% beneath its preliminary peak.
In response to crypto slate In response to the info, SOL rose to over $250 within the first quarter of 2025, however market-wide headwinds prompted the asset to fall to a low of $105 and finish the 12 months round $123.
Regardless of risky worth fluctuations, the community’s underlying financial system expanded at an unprecedented price.
Purposes and buying and selling venues constructed on blockchain are reported to have a 12 months outlined by high-frequency exercise, excessive quantity of asset issuance, and skyrocketing revenues. This painted an image of a thriving ecosystem, decoupled from the speculative worth of elementary belongings.
report income
The Solana Basis revealed that purposes constructed on Solana will generate $2.39 billion in income in 2025, a 46% improve year-over-year and a brand new all-time excessive.
This surge was not restricted to a single sector however distributed throughout completely different platforms. Seven completely different purposes, together with Pump.enjoyable, AxiomExchange, MeteoraAG, Raydium, JupiterExchange, tradewithPhoton, and bullx_io, every generated greater than $100 million in annual income.
Past these market leaders, the “lengthy tail” of small purposes generates complete income of greater than $500 million, demonstrating the deepening of the developer ecosystem.
On the community degree, income accelerated dramatically. REV, a metric that tracks complete community income, reached $1.4 billion, a 48x improve in two years.
In the meantime, blockchain community utilization metrics mirror this financial progress. The community processed 33 billion non-vote transactions, a 28% improve from the earlier 12 months.
Together with voting transactions, the whole throughput reached 116 billion, with a median of 1,054 non-voting transactions per second on the chain.
This exercise was fueled by a quickly rising consumer base, with distinctive lively wallets growing by 50% to a median of three.2 million per day, a brand new report. Moreover, no less than one transaction was recorded in 725 million new wallets throughout the 12 months.
Though pockets addresses don’t correspond one-to-one with particular person customers, analysts recommend that the numbers spotlight the very big selection of contributors flowing by way of Solana’s packages and buying and selling venues.
Buying and selling exercise expands
The strongest progress vector in 2025 was buying and selling exercise carried out on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and the specialised infrastructure that helps it.
Solana DEX buying and selling quantity will attain $1.5 trillion in 2025, a 57% year-over-year improve and a historic peak for the community. The liquidity of those trades has additionally deepened, with buying and selling quantity for the SOL and stablecoin pair reaching $782 billion, greater than doubling from the earlier 12 months.
Market energy was concentrated in a dozen main exchanges, every with over $10 billion in buying and selling quantity. Raydium led the area with a quantity of $347 billion, adopted by orca_so with $241 billion, humidifiers with $184.7 billion, SolFiAMM with $184.2 billion, and MeteoraAG with $182 billion.
Specifically, the mechanics of how transactions are routed have modified considerably in 2025. “Prop AMM” (proprietary automated market maker) has elevated its share of aggregator quantity from 19% to 54%, signaling a shift to extra skilled and environment friendly buying and selling algorithms.
On the similar time, the composition of buying and selling pairs has additionally developed, with SOL appearing because the paired token in 42% of all trades, and the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC accounting for 30%.
Rising classes additionally contributed to quantity progress. Synthetic intelligence (AI) brokers, automated software program packages that carry out on-chain transactions, accounted for $31 billion in buying and selling quantity.
In the meantime, the quantity of tokenized real-world belongings reached $598 million, and the quantity of project-specific tokens comparable to JUP and RAY totaled $86 billion.
On the aggregation entrance, platforms that route trades throughout a number of exchanges to seek out the very best worth dealt with $922 billion in buying and selling quantity, with throughput doubling from 2024. JupiterExchange dominated this area, accounting for $812 billion of its buying and selling quantity.
Skilled buying and selling platforms additionally surged, producing $940 million in income, a 44% improve, whereas processing $108 billion in buying and selling quantity. AxiomExchange captured practically a 3rd of this skilled market share.
Speculative increase
Whereas the Solana blockchain infrastructure matured, retail hypothesis remained the first driver of community exercise. Meme cash are cryptocurrencies typically based mostly on web jokes and viral traits which have pushed important gross sales regardless of questions on their long-term sustainability.
Meme coin buying and selling quantity reached $482 billion. This represented a ten% year-on-year decline, however an 80x improve in two years, highlighting the sector’s explosive progress from 2023 onwards.
Specifically, Launchpad, a platform designed to simplify the creation of latest tokens, was central to this pipeline.
Six Launchpads, together with Pump.enjoyable, bonkfun, believeapp, MeteoraAG by way of DBC, moonit, and Raydium by way of LaunchLab, every drove greater than $1 billion in transaction quantity. Income from these launch pads doubled from the earlier 12 months to $762 million.
Pump.enjoyable has emerged because the retail utility of the 12 months. The platform is credited with considerably reducing the technical obstacles to token creation, permitting customers to launch new belongings in seconds.
Nevertheless, the convenience of creation has saturated the market. Customers created 11.6 million new tokens by way of Launchpad in 2025, greater than double the quantity from the earlier 12 months.
Nevertheless, the success price of those belongings was negligible. Solely 105,000 tokens “graduated” from the bonding curve, a mechanism that strikes tokens to straightforward exchanges as soon as sufficient capital is raised.
This equates to a commencement price of simply 0.89%, reinforcing the dangerous, casino-like nature of this market phase the place the vast majority of launches lose momentum rapidly.
In the meantime, political occasions additionally influenced the speculative fever.
Donald Trump’s return to politics sparked a wave of “PolitiFi” meme cash. Tokens like TRUMP and MELANIA, together with numerous copycats, contributed considerably to the surge in DEX volumes all year long.
low-cost deal
A key component that enabled Solana to deal with such a various mixture of high-frequency buying and selling and large-volume token issuance was its price construction.
The price of utilizing the community has decreased at the same time as each day pockets exercise and transaction numbers have reached an all-time excessive.
Common transaction charges fell to $0.017 from $0.025 a 12 months in the past. Extra importantly, the median price decreased from $0.0014 to $0.0011.
This financial setting has sustained high-frequency buying and selling conduct that will be cost-prohibitive on costlier blockchain networks.
This facilitated the creation of 725 million new wallets and allowed bots and automatic brokers to function sooner with out compromising revenue margins.
Institutional maturity: ETFs and stablecoins
Past the retail frenzy, 2025 marked a turning level for Solana’s integration into conventional monetary markets.
A key milestone was the rollout of the US-listed spot Solana exchange-traded fund (ETF) in late 2025.
These merchandise have opened the door for conventional inventory buyers to entry SOL with out managing non-public keys. The ETF recorded internet inflows of $1.02 billion shortly after its launch, demonstrating sturdy urge for food from institutional buyers.
On the similar time, some listed firms comparable to Ahead Industries additionally adopted cryptocurrencies as monetary belongings and bought over 18 million SOL tokens.
On the similar time, there was an explosion in using stablecoins, that are cryptocurrencies pegged to fiat currencies.
Solana’s stablecoin provide shall be $14.8 billion by the top of 2025, greater than double the earlier 12 months and a brand new report excessive.
USDC dominated this market, accounting for 66% of provide. Whole stablecoin switch quantity reached $11.7 trillion, a seven-fold improve in two years, demonstrating that Solana is more and more getting used for world funds and funds.
Notably, the community additionally noticed a rise in tokenized belongings.
The inventory debuted on-chain with a provide of $1 billion and buying and selling quantity of $651 million. Bitcoin provide on Solana doubled to $770 million, and Bitcoin transaction quantity on the community elevated 5 occasions to $33 billion.
Moreover, belongings from different chains comparable to Zcash, Monad, and NEAR debuted on Solana, bringing the whole provide to $32 million.
In consequence, purposes on Solana are actually estimated to carry roughly $35 billion in consumer belongings, in keeping with Token Terminal knowledge.
Moreover, the whole worth locked (TVL) of the ecosystem has elevated by roughly $30 billion since January 2024, representing virtually 10x progress in simply two years.
This accumulation of worth means that customers are more and more holding capital inside the Solana financial system, slightly than merely buying and selling and leaving.