Solana soars in 2025 with record growth despite SOL’s price drop
Solana’s ecosystem recorded its strongest monetary yr so far in 2025, posting all-time highs in income, energetic customers, and buying and selling quantity even because the community’s native token completed the yr almost 50% beneath its early peak.
In keeping with CryptoSlate knowledge, SOL rallied to greater than $250 within 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.
Regardless of the unstable worth motion, the community’s underlying financial system expanded at an unprecedented charge.
Functions 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.
File income
The Solana Basis revealed that functions constructed on Solana generated $2.39 billion in income in 2025, a 46% year-over-year improve and a brand new all-time excessive.
This surge was not restricted to a single sector however was distributed throughout a various array of platforms. Seven distinct functions, together with Pump.enjoyable, AxiomExchange, MeteoraAG, Raydium, JupiterExchange, tradewithPhoton, and bullx_io, every surpassed $100 million in annual income.
Past these market leaders, the “lengthy tail” of smaller functions generated a mixed income exceeding $500 million, signaling a deepening developer ecosystem.
On the community degree, income accelerated dramatically. REV, a metric monitoring whole community income, reached $1.4 billion, marking a 48-fold improve over two years.
In the meantime, the blockchain community’s utilization metrics mirrored this monetary development. The community processed 33 billion non-vote transactions, a 28% improve from the earlier yr.
When together with vote transactions, the overall 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 energetic wallets averaged 3.2 million per day, a 50% improve and a brand new document. Moreover, 725 million new wallets recorded at the least one transaction in the course of the yr.
Whereas pockets addresses don’t correspond one-to-one with particular person customers, analysts counsel the determine highlights the immense breadth of participation flowing by means of Solana’s applications and buying and selling venues.
Buying and selling actions develop
Probably the most sturdy development vector in 2025 was the buying and selling exercise occurring on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and the specialised infrastructure supporting them.
Solana DEX quantity reached $1.5 trillion in 2025, a 57% year-over-year improve and a historic peak for the community. 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.
On the identical time, the composition of buying and selling pairs additionally advanced, with SOL serving because the pair token in 42% of all trades, whereas the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC accounted for 30%.
Rising classes additionally contributed to the amount enlargement. Synthetic Intelligence (AI) brokers, automated software program applications conducting on-chain transactions, accounted for $31 billion in quantity.
In the meantime, 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 most effective worth dealt with $922 billion in quantity, doubling their throughput from 2024. JupiterExchange dominated this vertical, accounting for $812 billion of that quantity.
Skilled-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 almost a 3rd of this skilled market share.
The speculative growth
Whereas Solana blockchain infrastructure matured, retail hypothesis remained a main engine of community exercise. Memecoins, cryptocurrencies typically primarily based on web jokes or viral tendencies, have pushed important turnover, regardless of questions on their long-term sustainability.
Memecoin quantity reached $482 billion. Though this represented a ten% lower year-over-year, it marked an 80-fold improve over a two-year horizon, highlighting the sector’s explosive development since 2023.
Notably, launchpads, platforms designed to simplify the creation of recent tokens, grew to become central to this pipeline.
Six launchpads, together with Pump.enjoyable, 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.enjoyable emerged because the defining retail utility of the yr. The platform was credited with drastically decreasing the technical boundaries to token creation, permitting customers to launch new belongings in seconds.
Nevertheless, the benefit of creation led to market saturation. Customers created 11.6 million new tokens by means of launchpads in 2025, greater than doubling the earlier yr’s depend.
But, the success charge for these belongings was minuscule. Solely 105,000 tokens “graduated” from their bonding curves, a mechanism that strikes a token to a normal alternate as soon as sufficient capital is raised.
This represents a commencement charge of simply 0.89%, reinforcing the high-risk, casino-like nature of this market section, the place the overwhelming majority of launches shortly lose traction.
In the meantime, political occasions 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 year long.
Low-cost transactions
A key issue enabling Solana’s means to deal with this various mixture of high-frequency buying and selling and large token issuance was its payment construction.
Regardless of each day pockets exercise and transaction counts reaching document highs, the price to make use of the community declined.
The typical transaction payment fell to $0.017 from $0.025 the earlier yr. Extra notably, the median payment dropped to $0.0011 from $0.0014.
This financial surroundings sustained high-frequency buying and selling behaviors which might 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 excessive velocity with out eroding revenue margins.
Institutional maturation: ETFs and Stablecoins
Past the retail frenzy, 2025 marked a turning level for Solana’s integration into conventional monetary markets.
A big milestone was the late-2025 rollout of US-listed spot Solana Trade Traded Funds (ETFs).
These merchandise opened the door for conventional fairness buyers to achieve publicity to SOL with out managing non-public keys. The ETFs recorded $1.02 billion in web inflows shortly after launch, signaling sturdy institutional urge for food.
On the identical time, some public corporations like Ahead Industries had additionally embraced cryptocurrency as their treasury asset and bought greater than 18 million SOL tokens.
Concurrently, the utilization of stablecoins, cryptocurrencies pegged to fiat forex, exploded.
Stablecoin provide on Solana ended 2025 at $14.8 billion, a brand new all-time excessive that greater than doubled the earlier yr’s determine.
USDC dominated this market, accounting for 66% of the provision. Complete 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 community additionally noticed development in tokenized belongings.
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 community grew fivefold to $33 billion.
Moreover, belongings from different chains, together with Zcash, Monad, and NEAR, debuted on Solana with a mixed provide of $32 million.
In consequence, token Terminal knowledge estimates that functions on Solana now maintain roughly $35 billion in consumer belongings.
Moreover, the ecosystem’s Complete Worth Locked (TVL) has risen by roughly $30 billion since January 2024, representing almost 10-fold development in simply two years.
This accumulation of worth means that customers should not merely transacting and leaving, however are more and more parking capital inside the Solana financial system.
