Solana's ecosystem had its strongest fiscal year to date in 2025, 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.
According to crypto slate According to the data, SOL rose to over $250 in the first quarter of 2025, but market-wide headwinds caused the asset to fall to a low of $105 and end the year around $123.
Despite volatile price fluctuations, the network's underlying economy expanded at an unprecedented rate.
Applications and trading venues built on blockchain are reported to have a year defined by high-frequency activity, high volume of asset issuance, and skyrocketing revenues. This painted a picture of a thriving ecosystem, decoupled from the speculative value of fundamental assets.
record profits
The Solana Foundation revealed that applications built on Solana will generate $2.39 billion in revenue in 2025, a 46% increase year-over-year and a new all-time high.
This surge was not limited to a single sector but distributed across different platforms. Seven different applications, including Pump.fun, AxiomExchange, MeteoraAG, Raydium, JupiterExchange, tradewithPhoton, and bullx_io, each generated more than $100 million in annual revenue.
Beyond these market leaders, the “long tail” of small applications generates total revenue of more than $500 million, demonstrating the deepening of the developer ecosystem.
At the network level, revenue accelerated dramatically. REV, a metric that tracks total network revenue, reached $1.4 billion, a 48x increase in two years.
Meanwhile, blockchain network usage metrics reflect this economic growth. The network processed 33 billion non-vote transactions, a 28% increase from the previous year.
Including voting transactions, the total throughput reached 116 billion, with an average of 1,054 non-voting transactions per second on the chain.
This activity was fueled by a rapidly growing user base, with unique active wallets increasing by 50% to an average of 3.2 million per day, a new record. Additionally, at least one transaction was recorded in 725 million new wallets during the year.
Although wallet addresses do not correspond one-to-one with individual users, analysts suggest that the numbers highlight the very wide range of participants flowing through Solana's programs and trading venues.
trading activity grows
The strongest growth vector in 2025 was trading activity conducted on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and the specialized infrastructure that supports it.
Solana DEX trading volume will reach $1.5 trillion in 2025, a 57% year-over-year increase and a historic peak for the network. The liquidity of these trades has also deepened, with trading volume for the SOL and stablecoin pair reaching $782 billion, more than doubling from the previous year.
Market power was concentrated in a dozen major exchanges, each with over $10 billion in trading volume. Raydium led the space with a volume of $347 billion, followed by orca_so with $241 billion, humidifiers with $184.7 billion, SolFiAMM with $184.2 billion, and MeteoraAG with $182 billion.
In particular, the mechanics of how transactions are routed have changed significantly in 2025. “Prop AMM” (proprietary automated market maker) has increased its share of aggregator volume from 19% to 54%, signaling a shift to more professional and efficient trading algorithms.
At the same time, the composition of trading pairs has also evolved, with SOL acting as the paired token in 42% of all trades, and the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC accounting for 30%.
Emerging categories also contributed to volume growth. Artificial intelligence (AI) agents, automated software programs that perform on-chain transactions, accounted for $31 billion in trading volume.
Meanwhile, the amount of tokenized real-world assets reached $598 million, and the amount of project-specific tokens such as JUP and RAY totaled $86 billion.
On the aggregation front, platforms that route trades across multiple exchanges to find the best price handled $922 billion in trading volume, doubling its throughput from 2024. JupiterExchange dominated this space, accounting for $812 billion of its trading volume.
Professional trading platforms also surged, generating $940 million in revenue, a 44% increase, while processing $108 billion in trading volume. AxiomExchange captured nearly a third of this professional market share.
Speculative boom
While the Solana blockchain infrastructure matured, retail speculation remained the primary driver of network activity. Meme coins are cryptocurrencies often based on internet jokes and viral trends that have driven significant sales despite questions about their long-term sustainability.
Meme coin trading volume reached $482 billion. This represented a 10% year-on-year decline, but an 80x increase in two years, highlighting the sector's explosive growth from 2023 onwards.
In particular, Launchpad, a platform designed to simplify the creation of new tokens, was central to this pipeline.
Six Launchpads, including Pump.fun, bonkfun, believeapp, MeteoraAG via DBC, moonit, and Raydium via LaunchLab, each drove more than $1 billion in transaction volume. Revenue from these launch pads doubled from the previous year to $762 million.
Pump.fun has emerged as the retail application of the year. The platform is credited with significantly lowering the technical barriers to token creation, allowing users to launch new assets in seconds.
However, the ease of creation has saturated the market. Users created 11.6 million new tokens through Launchpad in 2025, more than double the number from the previous year.
However, the success rate of these assets was negligible. Only 105,000 tokens “graduated” from the bonding curve, a mechanism that moves tokens to standard exchanges once enough capital is raised.
This equates to a graduation rate of just 0.89%, reinforcing the risky, casino-like nature of this market segment where the majority of launches lose momentum quickly.
Meanwhile, political events also influenced the speculative fever.
Donald Trump's return to politics sparked a wave of “PolitiFi” meme coins. Tokens like TRUMP and MELANIA, along with countless copycats, contributed significantly to the surge in DEX volumes throughout the year.
cheap deal
A key element that enabled Solana to handle such a diverse combination of high-frequency trading and large-volume token issuance was its fee structure.
The cost of using the network has decreased even as daily wallet activity and transaction numbers have reached an all-time high.
Average transaction fees fell to $0.017 from $0.025 a year ago. More importantly, the median fee decreased from $0.0014 to $0.0011.
This economic environment has sustained high-frequency trading behavior that would be cost-prohibitive on more expensive blockchain networks.
This facilitated the creation of 725 million new wallets and allowed bots and automated agents to operate faster without compromising profit margins.
Institutional maturity: ETFs and stablecoins
Beyond the retail frenzy, 2025 marked a turning point for Solana's integration into traditional financial markets.
A key milestone was the rollout of the US-listed spot Solana exchange-traded fund (ETF) in late 2025.
These products have opened the door for traditional stock investors to access SOL without managing private keys. The ETF recorded net inflows of $1.02 billion shortly after its launch, demonstrating strong appetite from institutional investors.
At the same time, some listed companies such as Forward Industries also adopted cryptocurrencies as financial assets and acquired over 18 million SOL tokens.
At the same time, there has been an explosion in the use of stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to fiat currencies.
Solana's stablecoin supply will be $14.8 billion by the end of 2025, more than double the previous year and a new record high.
USDC dominated this market, accounting for 66% of supply. Total stablecoin transfer volume reached $11.7 trillion, a seven-fold increase in two years, demonstrating that Solana is increasingly being used for global payments and payments.
Notably, the network also saw an increase in tokenized assets.
The stock debuted on-chain with a supply of $1 billion and trading volume of $651 million. Bitcoin supply on Solana doubled to $770 million, and Bitcoin transaction volume on the network increased five times to $33 billion.
Additionally, assets from other chains such as Zcash, Monad, and NEAR debuted on Solana, bringing the total supply to $32 million.
As a result, applications on Solana are now estimated to hold approximately $35 billion in user assets, according to Token Terminal data.
Furthermore, the total value locked (TVL) of the ecosystem has increased by approximately $30 billion since January 2024, representing almost 10x growth in just two years.
This accumulation of value suggests that users are increasingly keeping capital within the Solana economy, rather than simply trading and leaving.
