Solana apps generate $2.4 billion, demonstrating that the network is finally separating from this fluctuating metric.

In 2025, Solana’s ecosystem achieved its most successful financial year to date, hitting record highs in revenue, active users, and trading volume, even though the network’s native token ended the year nearly 50% below its initial peak.

As per data from CryptoSlate, SOL surged to over $250 in the first quarter of 2025 before broader market challenges pulled the asset down to a low of $105, ending the year around $123.

In spite of the fluctuating price movements, the network’s foundational economy grew at an extraordinary pace.

Applications and trading venues operating on the blockchain experienced a year characterized by frequent activity, significant asset issuance, and increasing revenue. This illustrated a thriving ecosystem that was independent of the speculative value of its foundational asset.

Record revenue

The Solana Foundation disclosed that applications developed on Solana generated $2.39 billion in revenue in 2025, representing a 46% year-over-year growth and a new peak.

Solana Application Revenue (Source: Blockworks)

This increase was not confined to a single sector but was spread across a wide range of platforms. Seven separate applications, including Pump.fun, AxiomExchange, MeteoraAG, Raydium, JupiterExchange, tradewithPhoton, and bullx_io, each exceeded $100 million in annual revenue.

In addition to these market frontrunners, the “long tail” of smaller applications collectively generated over $500 million in revenue, indicating a growing developer ecosystem.

At the network level, revenue surged significantly. REV, a metric that tracks total network revenue, reached $1.4 billion, illustrating a 48-fold increase over two years.

Simultaneously, the blockchain network’s usage metrics reflected this financial growth. The network handled 33 billion non-vote transactions, a 28% rise compared to the previous year.

Solana Total Transactions (Source: Blockworks)

When including vote transactions, the total throughput reached 116 billion, with the chain averaging 1,054 non-vote transactions per second.

A rapidly growing user base fueled this activity, with unique active wallets averaging 3.2 million daily, a 50% increase and a new record. Additionally, 725 million new wallets executed at least one transaction throughout the year.

While wallet addresses do not directly correspond to individual users, analysts indicate that this figure underscores the extensive participation flowing through Solana’s applications and trading venues.

Trading activities grow

The most significant growth area in 2025 was the trading activity on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and the specialized infrastructure supporting them.

Solana DEX volume reached $1.5 trillion in 2025, marking a 57% year-over-year increase and a historical high for the network. The liquidity for these trades also improved, with SOL-stablecoin pair volume reaching $782 billion, more than doubling from the previous year.

Solana DEX Volume (Source: Blockworks)

Market share was concentrated among about a dozen major exchanges, each processing over $10 billion in volume. Raydium led the sector with $347 billion in volume, followed by orca_so at $241 billion, humidifi at $184.7 billion, SolFiAMM at $184.2 billion, and MeteoraAG at $182 billion.

Significantly, the mechanics of trade routing underwent a notable transformation in 2025. “Prop AMMs” (Proprietary Automated Market Makers) increased their share of aggregator volume from 19% to 54%, indicating a shift towards more specialized, efficient trading algorithms.

Concurrently, the composition of trading pairs also evolved, with SOL acting as the pair token in 42% of all trades, while the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC made up 30%.

New categories also played a role in the volume expansion. Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents, automated software programs conducting on-chain transactions, accounted for $31 billion in volume.

At the same time, volume for tokenized real-world assets reached $598 million, and project-specific token volume, such as JUP and RAY, totaled $86 billion.

On the aggregation side, platforms that route trades across various exchanges to secure the best price managed $922 billion in volume, doubling their throughput from 2024. JupiterExchange dominated this segment, accounting for $812 billion of that volume.

Professional-grade trading platforms also experienced a boost, generating $940 million in revenue, a 44% rise, while processing $108 billion in volume. AxiomExchange captured nearly a third of this professional market share.

The speculative boom

While the Solana blockchain infrastructure advanced, retail speculation continued to be a primary driver of network activity. Memecoins, cryptocurrencies often based on internet jokes or viral phenomena, have generated substantial turnover, despite concerns regarding their long-term viability.

Memecoin volume reached $482 billion. Although this reflected a 10% decline year-over-year, it represented an 80-fold increase over a two-year span, underscoring the sector’s remarkable growth since 2023.

Notably, launchpads, platforms designed to simplify the creation of new tokens, became integral to this process.

Six launchpads, including Pump.fun, bonkfun, believeapp, MeteoraAG via DBC, moonit, and Raydium via LaunchLab, each facilitated over $1 billion in trading volume. Revenues for these launchpads doubled year-over-year to $762 million.

Pump.fun emerged as the standout retail application of the year. The platform was recognized for significantly lowering the technical barriers to token creation, enabling users to launch new assets in mere seconds.

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However, the ease of creation resulted in market saturation. Users generated 11.6 million new tokens through launchpads in 2025, more than doubling the count from the previous year.

Yet, the success rate for these assets was minimal. Only 105,000 tokens “graduated” from their bonding curves, a mechanism that transitions a token to a standard exchange once sufficient capital is raised.

This corresponds to a graduation rate of merely 0.89%, highlighting the high-risk, casino-like nature of this market segment, where the vast majority of launches quickly lose momentum.

Simultaneously, political events also influenced the speculative excitement.

The return of Donald Trump to political office ignited a surge of “PolitiFi” memecoins. Tokens such as TRUMP and MELANIA, along with numerous imitations, contributed significantly to DEX volume spikes throughout the year.

Cheap transactions

A crucial factor enabling Solana’s capacity to manage this diverse mix of high-frequency trading and extensive token issuance was its fee structure.

Despite daily wallet activity and transaction counts reaching unprecedented highs, the costs associated with using the network decreased.

The average transaction fee dropped to $0.017 from $0.025 the prior year. More importantly, the median fee fell to $0.0011 from $0.0014.

This economic landscape supported high-frequency trading practices that are prohibitively expensive on pricier blockchain networks.

It facilitated the creation of 725 million new wallets and allowed bots and automated agents to operate swiftly without diminishing profit margins.

Institutional maturation: ETFs and Stablecoins

Beyond the retail excitement, 2025 marked a pivotal moment for Solana’s integration into traditional financial markets.

A significant development was the rollout of US-listed spot Solana Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) in late 2025.

These products provided traditional equity investors access to SOL without the necessity of managing private keys. The ETFs attracted $1.02 billion in net inflows shortly after their launch, indicating a robust institutional appetite.

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Simultaneously, some public firms like Forward Industries embraced cryptocurrency as a treasury asset, acquiring over 18 million SOL tokens.

In parallel, the use of stablecoins, cryptocurrencies pegged to traditional currency, surged.

Stablecoin supply on Solana concluded 2025 at $14.8 billion, a new all-time high that more than doubled the figure from the previous year.

Solana Stablecoin Supply (Source: Blockworks)

USDC dominated this space, making up 66% of the supply. Total stablecoin transfer volume soared to an astounding $11.7 trillion, a seven-fold increase over two years, indicating that Solana is increasingly utilized for global settlements and payments.

Remarkably, the network also experienced growth in tokenized assets.

Equities launched on-chain with $1 billion in supply and $651 million in trading volume. Bitcoin supply on Solana doubled to $770 million, while Bitcoin trading volume on the network grew fivefold to $33 billion.

Additionally, assets from other chains, including Zcash, Monad, and NEAR, made their debut on Solana with a combined supply of $32 million.

Consequently, Token Terminal data estimates that applications on Solana now hold approximately $35 billion in user assets.

Solana Ecosystem TVL (Source: Token Terminal)

Moreover, the ecosystem’s Total Value Locked (TVL) has increased by roughly $30 billion since January 2024, representing nearly ten-fold growth in just two years.

This accumulation of value suggests that users are not merely transacting and departing, but are increasingly choosing to store capital within the Solana economy.

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