Has SOL reached its limit? Multidimensional data reveals the true picture of Solana.

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Author: @blocmates

Compiled by: Odaily Planet Daily

In the third quarter of 2025, it is a “two-faced story on the same chain” for Solana. On the surface, the “Meme retreat” has brought a noticeable cooling effect: daily active addresses are declining, and the user dominance is gradually being eroded by competitors. However, beneath the surface, the fundamentals of this chain are becoming increasingly solid. The Solana core team has consistently maintained high-frequency iterations, continuously advancing one of the most ambitious technology roadmaps in the crypto industry; meanwhile, its TVL increased by over 26% in the third quarter, and the supply of stablecoins has almost tripled since the beginning of the year.

This report will systematically outline the core technological upgrades that are defining the future of Solana (such as Alpenglow and Agave), conduct an in-depth analysis of on-chain data performance, assess the health of ecological applications, and summarize our key insights on how Solana can solidify its position as the “default high-performance public chain.”

Multilayered technological innovation

Although most users of the platform are busy chasing the latest meme emojis, the @solana core team has been advancing a highly ambitious roadmap for system-level upgrades. This is not just a patch for a single metric, but a comprehensive system engineering effort to enhance network performance, security, decentralization, and user experience. These upgrades can be roughly divided into three main categories.

Category One: Core Engine (Consensus and Client)

This is a fundamental overhaul of Solana's “engine”, aimed at enhancing performance, speed, and security from the most basic level. There is a great visualization chart here, which you can check out if you're curious about the current staking ecosystem.

Category Two: High-Speed Network (Throughput and Efficiency)

The focus of this part of the work is to widen the network “lanes” after improving the underlying performance, optimizing traffic scheduling to withstand higher future loads without congestion. If institutional users truly want to go on-chain in the future, low latency and a stable experience are fundamental, not optional.

Category Three: Destination (New capabilities in the ecological and application layers)

This type of upgrade is aimed directly at developers and end users, with the goal of providing more new features, supporting new types of application forms, and further enhancing the level of decentralization of the chain. In other words, this is a module that allows the “chain to do more things.”

The practical impact of technological improvements

From a practical usage perspective:

Alpenglow: With a final confirmation speed of less than 150ms, retail users can utilize high-frequency DeFi, gaming, or micropayment applications on-chain, with performance approaching Binance's 100ms and Aptos's 200ms levels.

Firedancer: The potential capacity of over 1 million TPS far exceeds that of Ethereum and its L2s (such as OP's approximately 2k TPS), Sui's 300,000 TPS, and centralized exchanges (Coinbase peaks at around 500,000 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 mitigation, and transaction size limit optimization: Enhance the overall experience when using the chain, enabling finer-grained microtransactions, ICOs (such as $PUMP), and fast transactions, while reducing failures caused by congestion.

Decentralization and the reduction of node costs: Allowing users with lower technical thresholds to run nodes, thereby enhancing the overall security and decentralization of the network.

ZK and privacy support: providing a compliant, private, and secure foundation for the entry of RWA and institutional users.

BAM (Fair Trading, Anti-MEV): Ensures the fairness of transactions and protects users from MEV losses, making the on-chain experience closer to a CLOB with a predictable low-cost environment.

ACE (Multi-Collateral Liquidity): Further promote the deepening of DeFi capital markets, allowing it to compete with platforms like Aave and support more complex financial instruments.

PUMP ICO: Verification of On-Chain Stress Testing

In July 2025, the ICO of Pump.fun became a true “stress test” for Solana's performance. @pumpfun raised $500 million and $100 million through on-chain and centralized exchanges, respectively, within just 12 minutes, achieving a valuation of up to $4 billion. During this period, 3,878 investors transparently completed subscriptions on Solana's DEXs such as Raydium and Jupiter, while some CEXs (like Bybit) experienced delays due to multiple API failures. Approximately 2,500 users who confirmed their investments were unable to place orders in time due to API delays and were forced to request refunds.

Does this mean that we are witnessing a possibility of the future - the performance of decentralized blockchains beginning to surpass that of centralized exchanges?

So where is Solana currently? The truth revealed by the data.

From the data, as traders shift from Meme speculation to perpetual contracts, Solana's on-chain revenue metrics have been significantly impacted: the ratio of on-chain fees to SOL's market capitalization has declined by over 60% since the peak in July.

At the same time, although stablecoins are constantly being discussed on Capitol Hill and Wall Street, the leaders remain Ethereum and Tron, while Solana, Base, BSC, Arbitrum and other chains are in the “second tier.”

Further breaking down the proportion of stablecoin TVL, it can be found that Ethereum and Tron have almost consistently dominated in the past few quarters, while some emerging application chains—such as @Plasma—are starting to gradually carve out a place in this landscape.

Nonetheless, Solana still offers a fast, low-cost, and liquid environment for using USDC, which may be the reason why Western Union chose to build its stablecoin business on Solana.

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

Which ecological participants are driving the growth of the chain?

In terms of TVL growth, staking products are the absolute highlight of Solana applications in the third quarter, with the staking SOL offered by Binance and Bybit, as well as @Sanctumso's products, recording over 50% growth in the third quarter.

In comparison, although the TVL of DEX, DeFi, and infrastructure products has also increased, they have not surpassed SOL's own increase of 28%—this means that when priced in SOL, these categories have actually experienced net outflows over the past quarter.

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

In the DEX space, @Orca_so has consistently maintained its leading position in TVL efficiency (i.e., “trading speed”). At 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 transaction fee expenditures that far exceed expectations.

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

A Horizontal Comparison of Solana and Its Core Competitors

The total TVL across the entire chain was slightly below the historical high of nearly $180 billion at the end of Q3 2021, but when comparing various competing public chains side by side, it can be observed that the quarterly changes in their TVL are actually quite limited.

The market share chart below clearly shows how the TVL of these competitors fluctuates weekly in sync. As Newton said, “Idle capital tends to remain idle;” once capital is locked in, 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 the perpetual DEX associated with CZ—Aster. A large number of users either chose to exit in early summer or migrated from Base and Solana to BSC.

Although Solana experienced a significant increase in users in the second quarter, its share also declined in the third quarter, which is almost in sync with the market's declining interest in Meme trading.

However, it is worth noting that, thanks to the surge in interest in stablecoins, the supply of stablecoins on Solana has nearly tripled from the beginning of the year to the end of the third quarter. It turns out that “fast and cheap” is a major selling point for attracting users to use stablecoins, especially in the context of Solana's already mature DeFi ecosystem.

Although these indicators depict the current landscape, they do not reflect the future direction. Solana's identity has always been that of an “experimental chain.” To understand the future use cases and narratives, we must observe which new experiments are attracting funding.

VC funding trends: Which projects are receiving financing?

Here are some Solana projects that received investment from well-known institutions in the third quarter:

@raikucom: Completed a $13.5 million seed round financing in September 2025, focusing on real-time liquidity scheduling and cross-chain bridging on Solana. It primarily serves high-frequency trading applications, supports sub-second settlement, and mitigates MEV risks. This round of financing was led by @PanteraCapital, and the funds will be used for mainnet upgrades and further integration of DEXs (such as @JupiterExchange).

@bulktrade: Completing a $5 million seed round in August 2025, it is 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 is set to launch in the third quarter.

@meleemarkets: Completed a $3.5 million Pre-seed funding in July 2025, it is a gamified prediction market protocol that combines DeFi with social forecasting, allowing users to earn yield-generating tokens through accurate predictions. This round was led by @variantfund and @dba_crypto, with funds used for oracle integration and mobile launch. The project won second place in the Solana Breakout Hackathon.

@hylo_so: Completed a $1.5 million seed round in September 2025, it is a decentralized stablecoin protocol on Solana that supports the issuance of yield-bearing stablecoins (such as sUSD) through over-collateralization and automatic rebalancing mechanisms. This round was led by @robotventures, with participation from @SolanaVentures. The funds will be used for the mainnet launch and integration with lending platforms like @Kamino.

Where are the opportunities and risks?

Solana presented a state of “breakthroughs and burdens coexisting” in the third quarter. On one hand, innovative applications are continually approaching product-market fit, and companies in the Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) sector are shining brightly; on the other hand, the entire ecosystem has to confront some tricky issues.

Outstanding projects in Q3

Among the numerous dApps that have emerged this quarter, the following projects stand out particularly:

@Titan_Exchange is a new DEX aggregator launched in the third quarter, using an improved algorithm to extract depth from different liquidity pools with machine-level precision, thereby obtaining the best quotes, outperforming existing products in 80% of cases.

@DefiTuna is the new DeFi AMM launched in the third quarter, which directly integrates a real on-chain limit order mechanism 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 by licensed brokers, allowing crypto users to easily access the economic rights of the underlying stocks; it launched in early Q3 with a quarterly trading volume exceeding $800 million and a market share of approximately 60%.

Pump.fun (streaming + mobile) started a token buyback in the third quarter after experiencing significant selling pressure, and the live streaming function was relaunched. By the end of the quarter, the cumulative buyback amount reached 100 million USD.

@MetaDAOProject makes headlines due to the large-scale oversubscription projects, including Umbra. Projects launched through MetaDAO (see our report for reference) will bind legal, economic, and governance rights within their tokens, which are 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 their views with real money.

Development status of DAT

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

Nevertheless, Solana DAT still struggles to escape the mNAV contraction pressure commonly seen in the crypto DAT ecosystem during the third quarter.

Responding to common criticisms

Like almost all crypto projects, Solana itself is in a state of continuous evolution and is far from perfect. From our perspective, the criticisms outlined below are more like the growing pains of the process, but they are still worth paying attention to.

Maximum 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 period, attention has become increasingly scarce, and projects that can find product-market fit seem to be concentrated in only a few tracks and a very small number of applications. This stagnation gives competitors the opportunity to seize the narrative:

Perpetual contracts have migrated from general-purpose chains to application-specific chains like Hyperliquid.

Base leverages the Base app and Zora to deeply invest in the narrative of consumer applications, which was once the stronghold of Solana;

Stablecoin chains like Tempo, Plasma, Stable, and Arc continue to threaten the dominance of Ethereum and Tron in the stablecoin market.

This also leads to a core risk: yes, Pump is a revenue machine and has indeed withstood competition from “external” (Base/BSC) and “internal” (BonkFun) sources, but the side effect of this success is that it may permanently brand Solana as the “casino chain.”

To reverse this trend, Solana must drive a new narrative. Perhaps the answer still lies in Pump, but through its live streaming platform; it could also be the “non-runnable ICO” proposed by MetaDAO and the new governance structure; or it might be Toly's experimental solution with a personal touch, aiming at Hyperliquid. The ecosystem needs a new story that can dilute the stigma brought by “millisecond holding retail investors.”

Our judgment on the prospects of Solana

Although the market appears somewhat 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 in the long term.

The newly launched high-performance public chains (such as Sui, Aptos, Sei) have not posed a substantial threat to Solana as it did to Ethereum in the previous cycle. Even though some competitors theoretically have stronger technology, Solana is already “fast enough and cheap enough,” with a sufficiently good user experience and a large ecosystem.

Technical capabilities and a smooth experience are the foundation of adoption. Solana is not just maintaining its lead but is continually iterating rapidly (see the upgrade section earlier in this report) to stabilize its position and expand its capabilities. For these reasons, developers still choose Solana as their high-performance option, and we believe this trend will not reverse.

Solana represents the spirit of “dare to try, dare to compete, and extreme marketization” in the crypto space, and it is 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 that Solana will maintain its leading position in the general-purpose chain space.