Solana in 2025: $2.4 billion invested, DEX trading volume exceeds $1.5 trillion. Where is the next stop?

In 2025, Solana delivered a phenomenal annual performance report, with multiple core metrics reaching all-time highs, marking its complete evolution from a high-throughput technological narrative to a mature financial ecosystem with solid economic foundations. The total revenue of applications built on Solana for the year reached $2.39 billion, a 46% increase year-over-year; the total trading volume on decentralized exchanges surpassed $1.5 trillion, up 57%.

Meanwhile, the network’s daily active wallets reached 3.2 million, stablecoin supply soared to $14.8 billion, while average transaction fees decreased to $0.017. These figures together paint a picture: Solana has not only achieved a significant leap in scale but also made substantial breakthroughs in revenue generation, asset accumulation, and institutional adoption, establishing its position among the top trading and innovation platforms in the crypto world.

Ecosystem Prosperity Proven by Monetization: Total Application Revenue Hits $2.39 Billion

Measuring whether a blockchain ecosystem is healthy and mature, the most rigorous indicator is whether it can generate real revenue for applications and developers built on it. In 2025, Solana provided an unequivocal answer. The total revenue of applications within the entire Solana ecosystem reached an astonishing $2.39 billion, a 46% surge from 2024, setting a new record. The significance of this figure lies not only in its absolute size but also in the underlying ecosystem structural changes it reveals.

While the top-tier revenue effects remain prominent, seven applications stood out, entering the “billion-dollar revenue club.” According to published data, Pump.fun, Axiom Exchange, Meteora, Raydium, Jupiter, Photon, and BullX led the revenue race. Notably, this list covers multiple sectors such as DEXs, aggregators, derivatives trading, and liquidity management, demonstrating diversified revenue sources rather than reliance on a single application type. For example, Jupiter, as a leading aggregator,’s revenue growth directly reflects the robust trading demand within the ecosystem and the complexity of path optimization; Pump.fun’s top position is closely tied to the frenzy of Meme coin creation on Solana in 2025.

More encouraging trends are hidden in the long tail. Applications with revenue below $100 million collectively generated over $500 million. This indicates that Solana’s ecosystem prosperity is no longer driven by a few “star applications,” but by hundreds or thousands of small and medium projects participating in a “hundred-crew battle.” A healthy developer economy is forming: new ideas and projects can generate income by providing real value, gaining sustainable momentum, rather than relying solely on venture capital or token inflation. This broad revenue base is the strongest evidence that Solana’s ecosystem is shifting from an “experimental playground” to a “sustainable economy.”

Network Performance and Cost Efficiency: A Solid Foundation Supporting Billions of Users

Supporting this prosperity is Solana’s own excellent performance and affordable costs, which reached a delicate balance in 2025. Network revenue (REV, understood as captured underlying value) soared to $1.4 billion, a staggering 48-fold increase over two years, directly reflecting the efficiency of converting high-level economic activity into protocol value.

In transaction processing, Solana demonstrated its high-performance blockchain capabilities. The network processed a total of 33 billion non-voting transactions throughout the year; including voting transactions, the total reached 116 billion. This translates to an average of over 1,050 non-voting transactions per second. Such high throughput is a prerequisite for supporting trillions of dollars in trading volume and millions of daily active users. User growth data is equally impressive: daily active wallets reached 3.2 million, a 50% increase YoY; over 725 million new wallets executed at least one transaction during the year. These numbers indicate that Solana’s adoption is expanding exponentially, attracting a massive influx of new users.

Perhaps the most competitive advantage lies in costs. Despite the surge in network activity, the average transaction fee on Solana in 2025 dropped to $0.017, with median fees approaching one-thousandth of a dollar (about $0.0011). This “nearly free” user experience is key to attracting and retaining large user bases, especially those engaging in high-frequency, small-value transactions (such as Meme coin trading, SocialFi interactions, in-game operations). It greatly lowers the barrier for new users to try out the network and reduces interaction costs for experienced users, making on-chain activities on Solana an economically feasible daily routine rather than a luxury requiring careful budgeting. This “high performance, low cost” combination forms the core moat that differentiates Solana from other mainstream chains like Ethereum.

Asset Accumulation and Institutional Adoption: From Crypto Natives to Mainstream Finance

The ultimate value of a blockchain network lies in the scale of assets it hosts and facilitates. In 2025, Solana made leapfrog progress in asset diversification and institutionalization, extending far beyond native crypto assets. Stablecoins, serving as a bridge between traditional finance and crypto, are a key indicator of ecosystem financial depth. By the end of 2025, the total stablecoin supply on Solana reached $14.8 billion, more than doubling from the previous year, setting a new record. Even more impressive, the total value of stablecoins transferred on Solana during the year reached $11.7 trillion, a settlement volume comparable to many traditional financial payment networks, highlighting Solana’s potential as an efficient value settlement layer.

Asset innovation is accelerating. Tokenization of traditional financial assets has achieved tangible breakthroughs: the supply of tokenized equity assets reached $100 million, with $65.1 million in trading volume. This provides a trial window for global investors to trade fractional ownership assets 24/7. Meanwhile, Bitcoin-related assets on Solana are increasingly linked: trading volume of Bitcoin-related assets grew fivefold to $33 billion; on-chain Bitcoin holdings doubled in value to $77 million. This indicates Solana is becoming an important hub for Bitcoin liquidity spilling over into DeFi.

Institutional capital inflows are another milestone. Solana-related exchange-traded products (ETPs) attracted net inflows of $1.02 billion in 2025. This substantial capital did not come from scattered retail purchases but from regulated financial products allocated by institutional and accredited investors. It signals that Solana’s fundamentals and technological prospects are increasingly being scrutinized and recognized by broader, more conservative capital. Additionally, staking as a passive asset allocation method reached a new high, with 421 million SOL staked, further enhancing network security and token economic stability.

Comprehensive Trading Ecosystem Prosperity: DEX, Meme Coins, and Launch Platforms in Full Swing

If assets are the blood, then trading venues and trading culture are the heart and pulse. In 2025, Solana undoubtedly became one of the world’s most active crypto trading hubs, with a thriving decentralized trading ecosystem. The total DEX trading volume for the year reached $1.5 trillion, up 57% YoY. Among them, trading pairs involving SOL and various stablecoins contributed $782 billion, more than doubling from the previous year, confirming SOL’s position as a core trading asset. The ecosystem is competitive and healthy, with as many as 12 DEXs exceeding $10 billion in annual trading volume.

Meme coin culture flourished on Solana, bringing massive liquidity and attention despite its speculative nature. The total Meme coin trading volume for the year was $482 billion. Although down 10% from the peak in 2024, over two years it still grew by 80 times. This trading activity sustains an entire industry chain from launch platforms, DEXs, to aggregators. Professional trading platforms (typically decentralized derivatives protocols offering high leverage and complex order types) also thrived, with revenue reaching $94 million and trading volume hitting $108 billion, catering to more advanced traders.

Solana 2025 Key Ecosystem Data Overview

Total application revenue: $2.39 billion (+46% YoY)

Total DEX trading volume: $1.5 trillion (+57% YoY)

Stablecoin total supply: $14.8 billion (+100%+ YoY)

Daily active wallets: 3.2 million (+50% YoY)

Average transaction fee: $0.017

SOL staked: 421 million

ETF net inflow: $1.02 billion

Meme coin trading volume: $482 billion

New tokens created: 11.6 million (via launch platforms)

Launch platforms, as “money factories” for new assets, are becoming increasingly important. Their annual revenue doubled to $762 million, and they helped create an astonishing 11.6 million new tokens. This demonstrates both the ease and low cost of issuing assets on Solana and the ecosystem’s rapid pace of financial experimentation and innovation, despite accompanying noise and risks. DEX aggregators, as infrastructure to improve trading efficiency, also saw trading volume double to $922 billion, indicating that users’ pursuit of best prices and minimal slippage has become a necessity.

Challenges and Concerns Under the Spotlight: Solana Faces Critical Tests

Despite the impressive data, at this new height, Solana also faces challenges commensurate with its scale. First, network stability remains a “Damocles sword” hanging overhead. As trading volume and complex interactions grow exponentially, even minor vulnerabilities or resource contention could be amplified, leading to congestion or outages. While no large-scale network failures occurred in 2025, localized performance drops and spam attacks targeting emerging protocols (like Pump.fun alternatives) still happen from time to time. This requires the core development team to continuously optimize consensus mechanisms, network architecture, and spam filtering to maintain market confidence in its “reliability.”

Second, the regulatory sword of Damocles has also fallen. The rampant Meme coin issuance and trading within the ecosystem, with many exhibiting fraud, pump-and-dump, or securitization features, are attracting increasing scrutiny from global regulators. Actions by agencies like the US SEC against unregistered securities offerings could impact the most active assets and platforms on Solana. How to guide the ecosystem toward more compliant and sustainable development without stifling innovation is a governance challenge for the Solana Foundation and community. Additionally, centralization concerns (such as validator sets and influence of core developers) remain a focus of criticism.

Finally, external competition remains fierce. Ethereum and its Layer 2 ecosystem, with ongoing upgrades (like Dencun, significantly reducing L2 fees) and a large developer community, are regaining ground. New high-performance chains are also challenging in specific verticals. Whether Solana can maintain its lead depends on its ability to convert current traffic and capital advantages into deeper developer engagement, richer exclusive applications (Killer DApps), and stronger institutional partnerships. Past success was based on “speed” and “cheap,” but future dominance requires “stability,” “depth,” and “breadth.”

Investor Insights: How to Find Opportunities in Solana’s New Stage

For investors, Solana’s 2025 performance report is not just a historical summary but a treasure map pointing to potential value capture directions. First, investors need to update their understanding: Solana has moved from a simple “Beta game” (investing in its overall growth) to an “Alpha mining” phase. This means that simply holding SOL may no longer be the most profitable strategy; in-depth research and investment in its rapidly growing, revenue-generating top protocols could yield outsized returns. For example, examining whether those applications earning over $100 million annually have tokenomics that effectively pass revenue back to token holders is a key research area.

Second, focus on infrastructure and tooling projects. As the ecosystem expands, demand for efficiency, security, and user experience tools will explode. This includes, but is not limited to: advanced data analytics platforms (like a Solana version of Dune Analytics), smart contract auditing and monitoring services, cross-chain liquidity solutions, institutional custody and trading tools. These “water sellers” often carry lower risk than direct application-layer protocols but share in the ecosystem’s growth dividends.

Finally, be vigilant of the risks accompanying prosperity. The Meme coin frenzy has created enormous wealth but also numerous traps. Ordinary investors should follow strict principles: only invest funds they can afford to lose, conduct thorough community research rather than just price speculation, and set clear stop-loss and take-profit points. More importantly, recognize the cyclical nature of the Solana ecosystem and its correlation with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and macro environments. When the overall market turns bearish, highly leveraged and speculative assets within Solana’s ecosystem may face sharper corrections. Building a balanced portfolio, with Solana exposure as an aggressive component rather than the entire allocation, is a more rational long-term strategy.