Solana Ecosystem Report (H1 2025)

Many thanks to Lostin, Brady, Mert, and Jacob Creech for reading earlier drafts of this report, and to Tzvi Wiesel, Uncle G, and kdot for their insights and feedback on their respective case studies.

Actionable Insights

Network Performance

• Solana has achieved over 15 months of continuous uptime since February 2024—its longest streak since launch.
• Solana consistently processes over 162 million transactions daily with median fees well under a penny, even during peak demand periods like the TRUMP-mania of January 2025.
• Solana is sufficiently decentralized regarding its validator set, the ASN and geographic distribution of its stake, and the multitude of different developers working on its clients—no single entity, developer, hosting provider, or country controls a majority of stake and could halt the network.
• Slot times consistently average around 390 ms following Agave’s 2.1 release, while the networking stack’s memory usage has been reduced from 2.6 GB to 124 MB.
• Solana executes more successful transactions daily than all other blockchains combined.

Economic Dominance

• Since October 2024, Solana has consistently outperformed every other blockchain in Real Economic Value (REV), generating over $550 million USD in January 2025 alone.
• Solana commanded 81% of all DEX transactions across crypto in 2024, with over $890 billion USD in DEX trading volume for the first five months of 2025.
• Jito tips comprise 41.6 to 66% of Solana’s REV, highlighting the maturation of MEV infrastructure.
• Local fee markets prevent fee contagion—during Trump’s memecoin launch, Solana’s median fee was only $0.003178 USD.
• Solana Economic Zones (SEZs) foster real economic activity, with SEZ Argentina generating over $500,000 USDC in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and more than 80 B2B partnerships.

Developer and Ecosystem Growth

• Solana displaced Ethereum as the top ecosystem for new developers in 2024, with 7,625 new developers joining, boasting an 83% increase in developer growth.
• Colosseum’s Breakout hackathon set a new industry standard with 1,412 submissions—the highest ever recorded for a blockchain-related hackathon.
• Superteam, a collective of developers, founders, and grantees dedicated to accelerating Solana’s growth, now operates in 19+ countries globally. Events, such as Startup Village Toronto, have generated over 1,210 check-ins.

Institutional Adoption

• Franklin Templeton’s CEO called Solana “one of the first institutionally focused chains.”
• Multiple SOL ETF applications from prominent asset managers have a 91% chance of approval in 2025, according to Polymarket.
• CME Group launched Solana futures with standard contracts representing 500 SOL and micro-contracts representing 25 SOL.
• R3, managing over $10 billion USD in RWAs, has chosen Solana for its enterprise blockchain convergence.
• Major TradFi players have launched tokenized versions of their flagship money market funds on Solana, including BlackRock’s BUIDL, Franklin Templeton’s FOBXX, and VanEck’s VBILL.

DeFi Innovation

• Solana’s DeFi TVL hovers around $8-9 billion USD, second only to Ethereum, with 18% quarter-on-quarter growth.
• Jupiter Perps averaged $1 billion USD in daily perpetual trading volume in Q1 2025, commanding 79.2% market share.
• Trading bots account for roughly half of all swaps, with Axiom dominating the market at a 55.2% market share and generating over nine figures in fees in just 117 days.
• JitoSOL commands ~39% of the liquid staking market, offering both staking and MEV rewards.
• The DeFi landscape has become increasingly competitive, with new entrants such as Titan, PumpFun, 1inch, Ranger, and SolFi, among others.

Real-World Applications

• Solana’s stablecoin supply grew over sevenfold in 18 months from ~$1.5 billion USD to ~$11.7 billion USD, with Circle minting $1.75 billion USDC on Solana in May alone.
• Helium Mobile surged with ~300,000 new subscribers in Q1 while major carriers lost or failed to gain that many subscribers in comparison.
• Hivemapper has mapped one-third of the global road network (i.e., over 540 million km) with 160,000+ contributors.
• Baxus reports an 11,500% increase in crypto payments and a 50x growth in overseas buyers for tokenized luxury spirits.

Infrastructure and Compliance

• Token Extensions enabled permissioned tokens on a permissionless network, including confidential transfers and custom compliance logic at the protocol level.
• The Solana Policy Institute was established to formalize policy engagement, with Project Open submitted to the SEC for compliant blockchain-based securities trading.
• Multiple independent validator clients are in development, in addition to Agave, namely Firedancer, which holds approximately 7% of the stake on mainnet, and Mithril.
• The Alpenglow consensus rewrite is set to reduce transaction finality to 100-150ms and validator profitability requirements from ~$800,000 USD to ~$75,000 USD.

Introduction

Blockchains have reached an inflection point. After years of experimentation, speculation, and whitepapers, the focus has shifted from theoretical promises to tangible results. Networks are measured by their ability to handle real-world usage at scale while maintaining accessibility for everyday users. Solana has emerged as the clear leader of this new era.

Solana has proven to be built for scale, as it regularly handles volumes that surpass those of all other ecosystems combined. While competitors struggle with congestion and prohibitive fees during peak usage, Solana consistently processes over 162 million transactions a day with median fees under a penny and zero downtime in the last fifteen months. 

Since October 2024, Solana has consistently outperformed every other blockchain in Real Economic Value (REV), generating over $550 million USD in January 2025 alone. Solana accounted for 81% of all decentralized exchange (DEX) transactions across the cryptocurrency industry in 2024. Solana surpassed Ethereum as the number one ecosystem for new developers in 2024, with over 7,600 new developers joining, achieving 83% developer growth. Institutional interest in Solana is undeniable, with it being hailed as “one of the first institutionally focused chains,” and prominent asset managers scrambling to get their Solana ETFs in order under a more favourable regulatory climate. Solana’s dApps, whether a decentralized wireless infrastructure company that is vastly outpacing major US carriers in subscriber growth or a millionaire autonomous agent managing assets, represent fundamental disruptions of trillion-dollar industries.

The convergence of regulatory clarity, institutional adoption, and proven technical capabilities positions Solana at the center of the most significant transformation in financial infrastructure since the dawn of the Internet itself. Bringing traditional capital markets into the digital world will define the next decade. Solana is the only blockchain currently poised to do this successfully. 

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of Solana’s current state as of mid-2025. We examine its technical foundations, economic dynamics, and key ecosystem developments that have established Solana as the leading platform for real-world applications. The findings demonstrate Solana’s current dominance, in addition to its structural advantages for capturing the multi-trillion-dollar opportunity in tokenizing financial instruments and real-world assets.

Methodology

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of Solana’s current state as of mid-2025. It examines key verticals that define the ecosystem’s growth trajectory and current market position. Quantitative network metrics and qualitative ecosystem developments are analyzed to deliver actionable insights for users, developers, investors, and all other stakeholders.

Since this is our first comprehensive analysis of Solana’s current state of affairs, we will provide background information in several key areas (e.g., what constitutes a “failed” transaction, what Superteam is, and how Solana’s governance works).

Data Sources

Primary data sources include:

• Blockworks Research
• Dune
• Messari
• Orb
• Solana Beach
• Validators.app

All data sets used for analysis are provided in the accompanying Google Sheet, except for some first-party data that was shared by projects directly (e.g., off-chain adoption metrics in the Shaga case study). Secondary sources encompass a wide range of materials, including posts on social media platforms and official documentation. These external sources are hyperlinked throughout the report whenever possible. The code used to analyze developer decentralization is open-source and available on GitHub.

Analytical Framework

This report evaluates Solana’s technical foundation through a network health and activity assessment, examining its uptime, reliability, transaction throughput, and fee structures. The following section on decentralization explores censorship resistance, Solana’s validator set, client diversity, ecosystem developers, and governance process.

Remaining sections cover the top verticals on Solana, ranging from developments in DePIN to AI. Each vertical is analyzed through multiple lenses, including, but not limited to, adoption metrics, innovation indicators, competitive positioning, and regulatory climate. These sections may also include case studies, which analyze prominent or new, up-and-coming projects within their respective verticals. These case studies are selected based on market impact, technical innovation, real-world utility, and strategic importance. 

Limitations

This report acknowledges several methodological and analytical limitations that readers should be aware of. These limitations include:

• Temporal Constraints: This report captures Solana’s state as of mid-2025, representing a snapshot of a rapidly evolving ecosystem. Given this fast-paced nature, some data points, partnerships, metrics, and technological advancements may have changed by the time of, or since, publication.
• Data Availability and Quality: Although we use multiple authoritative sources and link extensively throughout, limitations exist in data completeness and accuracy. Some first-party data was shared directly by projects, which cannot be independently verified. On-chain metrics, while transparent, don’t necessarily paint the full picture of off-chain activity or provide complete context for user behavior patterns.
• Cross-Chain Comparisons: Comparisons with other blockchains rely on publicly available data that may be measured or reported differently across ecosystems. Context is provided whenever necessary, along with the sources used to make these comparisons.
• Selection Bias: Case studies and project examples were selected based on market impact, technical innovation, real-world utility, strategic importance, and availability of technical resources. This may introduce bias toward more visible, well-funded, or publicly active projects, while potentially underrepresenting smaller or less public initiatives.

Despite these limitations, we believe this report offers valuable insights into Solana’s current position and trajectory, based on the best publicly available data.

Disclaimer

The information provided in the present publication, including but not limited to research, analysis, data, or other content, is offered solely for informational purposes and is not an offer, solicitation, or recommendation to buy or sell any cryptocurrencies, securities, or other commodities. It does not constitute the provision of investment advice. Helius Blockchain Technologies, Inc. does not provide any advice of any kind through this report, its website, or social media posts. Information in this report or any posts may not be used or relied upon in evaluating the merits of any investment.

Readers should seek independent advice from an appropriate professional for business, financial, legal, or other related matters concerning any investment.

Network Health and Activity

Network Security and Monetary Policy

Solana is a Delegated Proof of Stake network secured by stakers and validators. Stakers delegate their SOL to validators who secure the network in exchange for yield. Staking rewards are derived from a combination of newly issued SOL (i.e., inflation rewards) and transaction fees, typically yielding annual returns of 6-8%. Validators are responsible for proposing and voting on blocks. They hold control over the tokens locked up by delegators, which form their stake in the network. 

According to the official Solana Explorer, at the time of writing, Solana’s native token (SOL) has a total supply of 602,704,761, with 524,924,686 SOL (i.e., 87.1%) in circulation. ~394.4 million SOL is considered active (i.e., the amount of SOL participating in consensus), with only ~0.1% delinquent. Approximately 65% of SOL’s total supply is staked, representing roughly $60.34 billion USD. This offers robust security guarantees and is higher than other blockchains, such as Celestia (~55%) and Ethereum (~29%). Halting or censoring Solana would require controlling approximately 130 million SOL (~$20.1 billion USD at $155 SOL). We cover this in more detail in our section on Censorship Resistance.

Solana uses a disinflationary monetary policy designed to balance network security incentives with the long-term value preservation of SOL. It uses an inflation schedule to achieve this, which was activated at slot 64800004 during epoch 150. The inflation schedule has an initial rate of 8%, which reduces at a rate of 15% per year (182.5 epochs), trending down to a long-term inflation rate of 1.5%. At the time of writing, Solana’s inflation rate is ~4.48%.

Solana’s inflation has been a frequent target of criticism and misinformation, with concerns raised about it being too high. SIMD-228 was a Solana Improvement Document (SIMD) that proposed to introduce a market-based inflation mechanism. This mechanism would replace the current fixed disinflation schedule with a dynamic model that is more responsive to network participation. SIMD-228 failed to pass its governance vote, with many concerned that its implementation would adversely affect Solana’s validator set and their profitability. We cover this in more detail in our section on Solana’s Governance.

Uptime and General Performance

Solana has now achieved over 15 months of continuous uptime since February 2024—its longest streak since launch, and a dramatic departure from the network’s earlier years. Solana’s status page shows all systems are operational, with 100% uptime over the past 90 days.

This record stands in stark contrast to Solana’s early days, when the network experienced multiple outages, with the longest lasting around 19 hours. This transformation didn’t happen by accident. In the past, key improvements such as QUIC and Stake-Weighted Quality of Service (SWQoS) were implemented to handle high-traffic scenarios that would have previously caused network stress. 

More recently, Anza’s performance team has been ruthlessly stripping away inefficiencies to make Solana more performant than ever. For example: 

• The memory usage of the TPU QUIC networking stack in Agave was reduced from 2.6 GB to 124 MB. 
• Gossip traffic on mainnet has seen a 61% reduction over the last few months. 
• Slot times are now consistently under the 400 ms mark, averaging around 390 ms with Agave’s 2.1 release.
• With the most recent improvements, including the last few latency changes that hopefully made it into Agave 2.3, Agave can now replay all current mainnet traffic on a single thread.

The numbers speak for themselves. With active addresses ranging from 2.7 million to 5.2 million over the last year, and Solana processing anywhere from 162.9 to 416.9 million total transactions per day, Solana has handled traffic that would have crippled earlier versions of the network and regularly dwarfs that of the entire Ethereum ecosystem and Bitcoin.

Failed Transactions

Failed transactions continue to be a common point of criticism. They currently comprise 35-40% of transactions on Solana. A failed transaction is not necessarily indicative of a network malfunction. Instead, it should be considered part of the network’s design to ensure proper functionality and user protection. 

This is primarily an issue of semantics. 

For example, Blockworks refers to these kinds of transactions as reverted.

With this understanding, transactions can be grouped into executed and dropped transactions:

Executed Transactions

• Executed Successfully: Transactions that are successfully included in a block without any errors. Its execution enacts state changes.
• Executed but Failed (Reverted): Transactions that are processed but fail to enact state changes due to unmet conditions (e.g., a token swap that did not execute due to its slippage being exceeded).

Dropped Transactions

• Non-Inclusion: Transactions that are not included in a block due to issues such as leader unavailability.

Dropped transactions are problematic because they result in complete non-inclusion, whereas all cases of executed transactions result in inclusion. Failed transactions refer to this “executed but failed” category. Think of failed transactions like making an API call and having something other than a 200 status code be returned. The call was still made successfully and used network resources, but it failed to post or return the desired data.

“Failed” transactions are executed successfully by the runtime and are executed exactly as the sender intended. Most contain conditional statements that amount to “do X, and if X is too unprofitable, then fail the transaction.” 

However, that is not to say we should ignore failed transactions as a metric, even if they occur on-chain, incur fees, and use network resources—they can be indicative of systemic issues caused by network events. 

For example, analyzing the rise of failed transactions between March 9th and 23rd in 2024 would show that most of these errors occur with Raydium’s AMM program corresponding to InvalidParamsSet (i.e., the AMM is trying to adjust its parameters in response to high volume but is failing to do so because of rapidly changing market conditions) and ExceededSlippage errors. This all coincides with the highly anticipated launch of Dogwifhat (WIF).

Spikes in failed transactions often correlate with periods of intense network activity. Recently, failed transactions have stabilized as both the network and programs deployed onto it have matured in response to scalability concerns. From a user perspective, most applications implement sophisticated retry logic and dynamic slippage adjustments to minimize user-facing failures. The 35-40% figure, while seemingly high, exists within the context of Solana processing at least 162 million transactions daily, meaning Solana executes more successful transactions per day than most other blockchains process in total. 

Ultimately, failed transactions are a transparency tax that Solana pays for its speed and openness. Solana’s approach provides complete visibility into all network activity, recording an accurate account of user activity and network utilization, unlike other chains that filter out failed transactions before on-chain inclusion.

Decentralization

Decentralization is a loaded term filled with nuance that resists a simple definition. To a computer scientist, it might mean the absence of single points of failure in a distributed system. To an investor, it might signify resistance to regulatory capture or censorship. To a political scientist, it might mean the diffusion of power away from a centralized entity. Each perspective carries weight, yet none alone captures what it truly means for a blockchain to be decentralized.

For the purposes of this report, rather than attempting a singular definition, this analysis examines decentralization through various complementary lenses to paint a comprehensive picture of Solana’s current state of decentralization. The network is evaluated across several dimensions, including:

• Censorship resistance
• Solana’s current validator set
• Client diversity
• Governance

This multi-faceted approach acknowledges that decentralization exists on a spectrum rather than as a binary. Understanding where Solana stands on this spectrum is crucial for all ecosystem participants, given the network’s current trajectory. 

Censorship Resistance

Censorship refers to the prevention of an application or user from accessing or modifying a blockchain’s ledger. A censorship-resistant network is one in which it becomes increasingly challenging to censor applications or users, whether due to incompetence, technical failures, or malicious activity. This is often quantified as a blockchain’s Nakamoto Coefficient (i.e., the minimum number of entities required to collude to compromise the network).

On Solana, we refer to the minimum number of nodes needed to compromise the network as the superminority. Together, the superminority controls more than 33% of total stake and can halt the network. Solana’s superminority currently hovers at 21, as reported by Orb.

Halting or censoring Solana would require controlling approximately 130 million SOL (~$20.1 billion USD at $155 SOL). This economic threshold creates a significant financial disincentive for censorship attacks, given how easily they can be identified and punished. Acquiring this much SOL would also drive the price higher, making such an attack prohibitively expensive.

Solana’s Nakamoto Coefficient is comparable to other blockchains, ranking Solana near the middle compared to industry peers. Note that Polkadot was removed as a notable outlier, boasting a Nakamoto Coefficient of 177. This is significantly higher than other blockchains primarily due to its technical and economic design choices (e.g., nominated Proof of Stake, sharding, stake distribution incentives).

While some operators run multiple validators publicly (e.g., Coinbase has two validators in Solana’s superminority, and has recently published their validator performance report), this data fails to account for a single entity operating multiple validators anonymously. So, the true Nakamoto Coefficient for each chain is likely lower.

Validators

A validator set demonstrates healthy decentralization when three conditions are met: economic accessibility, geographic distribution, and network diversity. That is, its voting and hardware requirements should not make running a validator prohibitively expensive, validators should be spread across multiple countries to resist regional interference, and validators should be distributed across various hosting providers to prevent infrastructure concentration.

Solana’s current total validator set hovers around 1,276 total validators, at the time of writing. These are validators running a valid client with a non-zero stake in the current epoch. Solana’s current active validator set consists of approximately 1,083 validators. By active validators, we refer to validators running a valid client with a non-zero stake in the current epoch and that have voted within the last 100,000 slots.

Helius currently operates the top validator on Solana, with approximately 13.2 million SOL staked, which accounts for around 3.35% of the total stake weight. Helius is followed by Binance at ~12.6 million SOL, Galaxy at ~9.3 million SOL, and Ledger by Figment at ~8.7 million SOL. Helius, Jupiter, and a private validator at address 8Pep3…14pW are the only validators within the superminority operating with a zero percent commission rate. 

For those interested in the technical aspects of running a validator, we offer a comprehensive guide: How to Set Up a Solana Validator. This article goes through the entire process, from setting up a vote account to publishing a validator’s information. We also have Solana Validator Economics: A Primer, which covers how validators earn revenue, distribute rewards, and incur operating costs.

Voting Requirements

No strict minimum amount of SOL is required to run a validator on Solana. However, a vote account is required to participate in consensus. Sending vote transactions (i.e., voting to participate in consensus) incurs a daily cost of up to 1.1 SOL.

However, this is likely to change in the future with the announcement of Alpenglow, a new consensus protocol that would eliminate voting fees entirely. 

Assuming it is implemented in its current proposed form, Alpenglow would reduce the minimum amount of SOL needed for validators to be profitable from ~4850 SOL (~$800k USD) to ~450 SOL (~$75k USD), as estimated using Cogent Crypto’s Validator Profit Calculator. This change would have profound implications for the economic viability of Solana’s long-tail validators.

Hardware Requirements

Solana has faced criticism for its historically high hardware requirements in comparison to other chains. However, these requirements are now significantly lower than what they once were and will continue to decrease over time, as Solana scales with hardware (i.e., parallelism, software efficiency gains, Moore’s Law price curve, and client diversity). Nevertheless, running a home validator is possible today.

Anza lists the following recommended specifications for running an Agave validator:

• CPU
• • 12 cores / 24 threads, or more. 16 cores / 32 threads, or more, is recommended for running an RPC node
  • 2.8GHz base clock speed (minimum). Higher clock speed is preferable over more cores
  • SHA extensions instruction support
  • AMD Gen 3 (or newer)
  • Intel Ice Lake (or newer)
  • AVX2 instruction support to use official binaries—self-compile otherwise
  • Support for AVX512f is helpful
• RAM
• • 256GB. 512GB or more is recommended for all account indexes on an RPC node
  • Error Correction Code (ECC)
• Disk
• • 4 PCIe Gen3 NVME SSD, or better, for each of:
  • • Accounts: 500GB or larger (high total bytes written)
    • Ledger: 1TB or larger (high total bytes written)
    • Snapshots: 250GB or larger (high total bytes written)
    • OS (optional): 500GB or larger. SATA is also acceptable
  • The OS may be installed on the ledger desk, although performance improves with the ledger on its own disk
  • It is not recommended, although possible, for the accounts and ledger to be stored on the same disk
  • The Samsung 970 and 980 Pro series SSDs are popular within the validator community
• GPU
• • Not necessary at this time

Internet service should be at least 1 GBit/s symmetric, commercial. 10 GBit/s is preferred.

A diligent enthusiast with approximately $4,000 USD and a 1 GBit/s fibre line could run a validator today. However, running on a bare-metal server in a data center is currently the preferred option of most validator operators.

Geographical Distribution

A blockchain’s validator set should be distributed across multiple countries in different continents to resist coordinated attacks, regulatory interference, or infrastructure failures that would adversely affect validators in a single region.

Solana’s validator set spans 41 countries, demonstrating reasonable geographic distribution. Germany leads with 23% of total stake, followed by the USA and the Netherlands, both at 17%. These three countries alone control around 57% of stake, indicating moderate geographic concentration. The remaining 43% is distributed across the UK (12%), Lithuania (6%), Japan (4%), Canada (4%), and with smaller percentages across Scandinavia, Southern Europe, and Asia.

This distribution provides resilience against country-specific regulatory actions or infrastructure disruptions. However, the concentration in Western Europe and North America amounts to roughly 70%. This could present systemic risks if coordinated regulatory action were taken across these regions. The relatively small distribution of stake in places such as Japan, which has a nascent Solana community, suggests room for improvement. 

Examining distribution at the city level reveals even greater concentration patterns. The top three cities—Frankfurt (19%), Amsterdam (16%), and London (12%)—collectively host 47% of total stake. Combined with Vilnius (6%), Tokyo (4%), and Ashburn (4%), the top six cities control roughly 61% of all staked SOL. This concentration reflects the validator community’s preference for established data centers and co-locating with high-staked validators.

The current geographic concentration partly stems from Solana’s technical architecture, which economically incentivizes colocation. For example, Jito operates six block engines globally that searchers can send to—three in Europe (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London), two in the USA (New York, Salt Lake City), and only one in Asia (Japan). To minimize latency and maximize MEV, validators are incentivized to colocate as they can receive bundle submissions faster, process them more efficiently, and have a higher probability of including high-tip bundles in their blocks. Since Jito tips comprise a substantial portion of Solana’s Real Economic Value (REV), validators are economically incentivized to optimize their geographic positioning.

Combined with the properties of Stake-Weighted Quality of Service (SWQoS), which prioritizes transactions from higher-staked validators, there’s a self-reinforcing cycle where new validators benefit from clustering near established operators, rather than diversifying geographically. The eventual release of Multiple Concurrent Leaders could reduce the current incentives for clustering and promote a more distributed validator set over time.

ASN Distribution

A blockchain’s validator set should be distributed across multiple Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) to prevent single points of infrastructure failure. An Autonomous System (AS) consists of a server network identified by a unique routing number, known as an ASN. A single ASN can cover multiple physical locations, depending on the internal networking configuration and router configuration. Concentrating stake in a few ASNs could create systemic risks if those providers experience outages, faulty networking, hardware issues, or regulatory pressure.

Solana’s validator set is moderately distributed across hosting providers. Teraswitch (20%) and Latitude.sh (19%) collectively hold 39% of total stake. Including UAB Cherry Servers (9%), the top three hosting providers control nearly half of all staked SOL. However, the remaining stake is nicely distributed across a healthy mix of dedicated blockchain infrastructure companies, traditional hosting providers, cloud platforms, and specialized bare-metal providers. 

Long-tail validators have successfully diversified beyond major cloud platforms with dozens of ASNs hosting 1-3% of stake each. This distribution strikes a balance between operational efficiency and infrastructure resilience, given Solana’s stake concentration and the reputable providers available in those regions. 

Looking ahead, infrastructure improvements continue to evolve. DoubleZero is a neutral, base-layer network that leverages dedicated fiber-optic subsea cables to deliver a faster, more predictable way to route transactions, RPC requests, and network packets. In other words, DoubleZero is a faster, newer Internet purpose-built for blockchains. They currently have 1.5% of all stake running on their testnet. This early adoption demonstrates the validator community’s interest in infrastructure innovations that could reduce latency, ASN clustering, and colocation incentives, potentially leading to a more distributed validator set as node operators migrate to DoubleZero’s network. 

Client Diversity

A blockchain network is said to be sufficiently decentralized if it has multiple clients developed by various teams. Within these teams, developer decentralization is crucial—reliance on individual contributors and key person risk (i.e., the potential loss of value, performance, or reputation if a critical individual leaves the project) should be minimized. 

At the time of writing, according to Orb, which surfaces data from Stakewiz for client distribution, 83% of active validators are running a Jito-Agave client, 9% are running an Agave client, and 8% are running a Firedancer client in epoch 807. Of that, 82.7% are running Jito 2.2.16, 7.4% are running Agave 2.2.16, 6.2% are running Firedancer 0.505.20216, and the remaining 3.7% are running a combination of other client versions. 

The use of Firedancer here refers to the use of Frankendancer—a hybrid client which uses Firedancer’s networking stack and Agave for consensus and execution.  

A breakdown of all current client implementations can be found below:

Agave

Agave is a fork of the original Solana Labs client written in Rust and actively developed by Anza, the leading Solana-focused software development firm. Anza was created by former executives and core engineers from Solana Labs. Anza’s creation represents a strategic move to bolster Solana’s ecosystem by having a dedicated team focused on Solana’s validator client and tooling, while Solana Labs shifts its attention towards mobile, product innovation, and distribution.

While Agave only accounts for roughly 9% of direct usage, its importance extends far beyond that. Both Jito and components of Frankendancer are built on top of Agave’s codebase, which serves as the reference implementation for handling consensus, execution, and networking on Solana. 

Anza’s stewardship of Agave ensures continued protocol development, bug fixes, feature implementations, and performance improvements that benefit the entire ecosystem, regardless of what client validators choose to run. 

Agave has 637 contributors and 28,853 total commits. Filtering for bots (i.e., Dependabot, an automated dependency bot built directly into GitHub), Agave has 633 contributors and 25,171 commits. A relatively small group of developers—comprising senior engineers and co-founders of Solana—has authored the vast majority of these commits. However, significant contributions also come from the broader developer community, including independent contributors, ecosystem teams, and developers from organizations beyond Anza, reflecting a healthy open-source development model.

While Anza has stewardship over Agave, this broad contributor base ensures that Agave’s development isn’t dependent on a select few contributors. Interestingly, Michael Vines and Greg Fitzgerald make up 23% of Agave’s commits. However, they no longer actively work on the protocol, demonstrating Agave’s resilience to key-person risk. Of course, this is notwithstanding the other top contributors listed who no longer work on Agave (e.g., Tyera Eulberg and Jack May). This is sufficiently decentralized when compared to other ecosystems’ clients, such as Ethereum’s Nethermind client, where two developers account for over 50% of the total commits, or Geth, where three developers account for over 50% of the total commits. 

Jito

Jito is a modified version of the Agave client developed by Jito Labs that implements Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) functionality directly at the validator level. The Jito client allows validators to participate in MEV extraction through an integrated block engine that auctions off blockspace to searchers and arbitrageurs. Users may bundle up to five transactions and submit them to Jito’s block engine with a tip. Block builders are incentivized to “win” these bundles because of the included tip, and the winning bundles are guaranteed to execute in the next block, in order, all-or-nothing. This creates an additional revenue stream for validators beyond traditional staking rewards. 

The client’s dominance, with ~83% adoption, reflects both the economic incentives it provides to validators and the maturity of its MEV infrastructure. Since Jito bundles are the primary method searchers use to ensure profitable transaction ordering, validators run Jito to earn higher yields through MEV tips.

Jito has a similar commit distribution to Agave, which is expected given that Jito is a fork of the Agave codebase. Solana co-founder Michael Vines remains the top contributor at 16% despite no longer working on the protocol, with Jeff Washington (8%) and other core developers maintaining significant representation in the codebase. The “Other” category (34%) is slightly larger, representing contributions from Jito Labs and community contributors focused on MEV infrastructure.  

Jito’s widespread adoption has effectively standardized MEV as part of Solana’s validator economics. This, along with the fact that Jito’s client is a fork of Agave, raises questions about the potential centralizing risks of having one client completely dominate the validator set.  

Firedancer

Firedancer is a new, fully independent validator client developed by Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team in the C programming language. Unlike other clients, this is the first complete reimplementation of Solana.

A hybrid version known as Frankendancer currently accounts for roughly 8% of active validators. Frankendancer uses Firedancer’s optimized networking stack combined with Agave code for consensus and execution. The Firedancer team has been gradually replacing Frankendancer’s Agave components, ensuring a seamless transition between Frankendancer and Firedancer.  

Firedancer has 99 contributors and 5,565 total commits, with a more concentrated contributor model compared to both Agave and Jito. Richard Patel leads development, authoring 26% of all commits, followed by Kevin Bowers at 11%. The remaining contributors represent smaller individual percentages. The “Other” category is just 18%, which is significantly lower than Agave (31%) and Jito (34%). Moreover, almost all contributors had an email associated with Jump Trading. Firedancer is an inherently greenfield project built by Jump Crypto, where deep domain expertise and architectural consistency from a specific team take precedence over broad community contributions. Firedancer’s commit distribution shows the focused development approach typical of performance-critical financial infrastructure projects.

Drawing on their background in high-frequency trading, the Firedancer team is committed to developing the most performant validator client on any blockchain. With the ability to process one million transactions per second per tile (i.e., an individual process with a defined role) on the network inbound side, many await the transition to the full Firedancer client on mainnet. 

Mithril

Mithril is a full Solana node implemented in Go. It serves as a “verifying full node” with lower hardware requirements compared to validators and RPC nodes. Mithril is built on the foundations of Radiance and is actively being developed by the Overclock Validator team, with the majority of commits contributed by Shaun Colley.

Mithril is currently in active development and has surpassed its first milestone of reimplementing the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) in Go. Significant progress was announced recently at the Accelerate conference, with news that users will soon be able to fully verify Solana using commodity hardware. In the month leading up to this announcement, Mithril was able to process multiple epochs’ worth of blocks without any bankhash mismatches. Mithril verified blocks from epoch 781 at approximately 450 ms per block, peaking at around 8 GB RAM usage during the snapshot to AccountsDB to build the process, and maintained a steady-state RAM usage of approximately 3 GB during block replay. To put it simply, anyone will be able to verify Solana blocks near the tip of the chain with commodity hardware in the near future. To quote Anatoly, CEO of Solana Labs and co-founder of Solana, “Anyone have a raspberry pi with 8gb of ram?” The future of verification on Solana is bright.

The diverse client landscape demonstrates Solana’s maturing infrastructure, with each implementation addressing different optimization priorities from MEV extraction to running a full verifying node on consumer hardware. While Jito’s dominance raises some concerns, the continued development of multiple independent client implementations strengthens the network and gives validator operators the option to choose the client that best aligns with their needs and wants for the future of Solana.

Governance

Solana’s governance can be described as a stake-weighted, on-chain voting system wherein validators vote for, against, or abstain from voting on given proposals. These proposals are known as Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs). 

SIMDs can be divided into two types: Standard SIMDs and Meta SIMDs. Standard SIMDs affect most or all implementations of Solana, such as changes made to the core code, networking, or interfaces. Meta SIMDs affect a process surrounding Solana or a change to a given process. SIMDs typically go through a discussion stage in the ideas section of the SIMD GitHub repository before a pull request is opened. Anyone can author a SIMD. Accepted SIMDs are merged into the repository once the relevant reviewers from the Anza and the Firedancer teams have approved them. Note that the only thing binding a merged SIMD to its eventual implementation is Solana’s social layer.

If a merged SIMD affects stake-sensitive economics, it is scheduled for an on-chain vote. Validators receive SPL “vote” tokens in proportion to their active stake. These vote tokens must be sent to YES, NO, or ABSTAIN addresses within two weeks. Proposals are passed once the following conditions are met:

• A ≥33% quorum of all vote tokens must be sent to one of the provided addresses.
• A weight of ≥66.7% must be in favor of adoption.

Note that these are the conditions for the most recent votes, as several earlier votes had no quorum.

Solana’s governance model has evolved through several key votes:

• October 2023: The initial advisory ballot established Solana’s validator-only, stake-weighted governance model with a modest 14.3% participation, as most cited legal and regulatory concerns as blockers.
• April 2024: SIMD-33 (Timely Vote Credits) saw 53% stake participation.
• May 2024: SIMD-96 (rewarding validators with the full priority fee) achieved 51% of stake participation.
• March 2025: SIMD-123 (allowing validators to share block revenue with their delegators) reached 57% of stake participation.
• March 2025: SIMD-228 (market-based emission mechanism) achieved a record-setting 74% of stake participation amid contentious debates.

These votes have revealed that participation scales with perceived economic impact. Only 14% of stake voted to confirm the validator-only model in October 2023. However, proposals that visibly shift revenue, such as SIMD-96 and SIMD-123, each cleared 50% of total stake participation. SIMD-228 saw a record-setting 74% turnout with contentious debates and heated X spaces, as many were concerned about the proposal’s potential to adversely affect long-tail validator profitability. The trend is that the more a SIMD affects validator or delegator income, the more voters show up.

This surge in turnout also revealed evolving dynamics within Solana’s stake-weighted governance model. Large validators, such as Coinbase, Kraken, and Bybit, voted for the first time, opening up a regulatory Pandora’s Box. The common institutional argument against governance participation from larger validators often centered on regulatory uncertainty and American general partnership law. Now, with more clarity and a relaxed regulatory climate, large custodians are entering the governance arena. While SIMD-228’s failure arguably demonstrated that smaller validators can still mobilize effectively to defeat proposals they oppose, it marks a potential shift that Solana’s validator community must monitor going forward, as now and in the future, entities with billions in client assets could vote in concentrated blocks that would significantly influence governance outcomes and dwarf solo operators. 

Moreover, ordinary SOL holders, now more familiar with Solana’s governance process due to the contentious debates surrounding SIMD-228, had no reliable way to signal dissent or support. The crux of Solana’s staking system is that users signal their support by choosing which validator to stake with—an operator that acts according to their beliefs and best interests. This prompted a renewed discussion of a future “delegator override” model where stakers can claim their own vote tokens proportional to their stake and vote accordingly. Some validators, including Helius, allowed stakers with opposing views to cast votes separate from their validator’s “default” vote.

Solana’s governance has officially progressed from an “experimental” stage to that of “battle-tested,” with a transparent GitHub workflow and substantial voter turnout. Looking ahead, the eventual Alpenglow proposal is likely to trigger another super-majority ballot in terms of participation. How large entities, solo operators, and everyday delegators respond to that ballot and future ballots will serve as further stress tests for the system’s legitimacy. Only time will tell how everything unfolds. For now, changes to Solana live or die by open code, on-chain voting, and an increasingly informed electorate. 

Ecosystem Developer Growth

Developer activity serves as a leading indicator for ecosystem health and long-term viability. Solana has emerged as a standout performer in global developer growth for 2024. According to Electric Capital’s 2024 Developer Report, Solana is the number two blockchain ecosystem on every continent, trailing only Ethereum. In India, one of the world’s largest developer markets, Solana has become the number one ecosystem.

More significantly, Solana is the number one blockchain ecosystem for new developers, with 7,625 new developers exploring the ecosystem. This is the first year since 2016 that any other ecosystem has displaced Ethereum for the number one spot. 

This growth trajectory is even more impressive when compared to broader market conditions. For example, while most ecosystems lost an average of 9% of their total developers between Q3 2023 and Q4 2024, Solana gained 83% year-over-year.

Beyond attracting new developers, Solana’s developer ecosystem demonstrates considerable depth through its multifaceted approach to developer success. Hackathons, community-led initiatives like Superteam, comprehensive educational programs, and events have all contributed to creating sustainable pathways for developers to learn, build, and scale businesses on Solana.

Solana Hackathons

Solana’s hackathons have reached unprecedented scale. Much of this success can be attributed to Colosseum, the organizer behind Solana’s largest bi-annual hackathons. These hackathons are increasingly global—over 94% of Radar hackathon project submissions came from non-US-based teams. Their recent Breakout hackathon set a new standard for the entire crypto industry with 1,412 submissions. Not only does this make Breakout the largest crypto hackathon in history, but it’s also one of the largest tech hackathons ever held. 

Colosseum is an organization focused on three integrated pillars: hackathons, accelerators, and venture capital. It’s a holistic approach that creates a complete pathway from an initial idea to a funded startup. Hackathons serve as a talent discovery mechanism, held twice per year, spanning five weeks each, providing teams with “a level playing field to showcase their potential to build crypto startups that will substantially increase on-chain activity.” 

Hackathon winners can advance to Colosseum’s eight-week online accelerator, which embeds winners in the Solana ecosystem through elite founder communities and one-on-one mentorship. Accepted teams receive an upfront investment of $250,000 USD, with the program culminating in a private demo day where they pitch their startup to top VCs. This accelerator program also features a two-week, in-person working opportunity in San Francisco.

Colosseum recently re-introduced their Eternal challenge—a perpetual competition allowing builders to compete in four-week sprints and submit their projects for $250,000 USD in pre-seed funding and accelerator admission. It requires weekly progress updates, which help ensure sustained engagement and rapid iteration cycles. Slant, an AI data scientist assistant platform with research-grade Solana analytics, and Tempo, a high-speed trading bot platform with zero-slot transaction landing, were recently announced as the first winners of the Eternal challenge.  

The progression from hackathons to Colosseum’s integrated platform demonstrates Solana’s evolution from simply attracting new developer talent to systematically building startup pipelines. A comprehensive incubation infrastructure is being built on Solana that transforms ideas into venture-backed companies.

Beyond Colosseum’s flagship hackathons, Solana has cultivated a robust calendar of domain-specific hackathons. The [READACTED] Hackathon took place over the entire month of April, with a focus on Solana’s research, forensics, and security ecosystems. The hackathon aimed to strengthen Solana’s social layer by uncovering and reporting fake activity and fraud, accelerating data-backed research, and improving the ecosystem’s ability to read and interpret on-chain data. Participants submitted over 926 entries, competing for over $175,000 USD across 38 bounties, with sponsors including Arkham, Dune, Messari, and more.

Additionally, the 1000x ZK Compression Hackathon saw 112 project submissions competing for $35,000 USD in prizes. Earlier this year, the Solana AI Hackathon had over 400 project submissions, with 21 winners and over $275,000 USD in prizes. MagicBlock’s Real-Time Hackathon ran from April 1st to May 16th, with developers going from zero to one, building out a real-time dApp (e.g., retail options trading, on-chain CLOB, fully on-chain gaming) with $10,000 USD in funding. dev.fun hosted a Vibe Jam from April 4th to 7th, urging all builders, degens, idea guys, and meme engineers to use their platform to build the most fun, unhinged, or addictive game imaginable, with $10,000 USD up for grabs. DreamNet and SendAI are also hosting a Character Agent Hackathon, running from June 26th to July 3rd, with over $50,000 USD in prizes centered around multimodal story worlds, agency and memory, and interactive economies. In true memecoin fashion, the letsBONK BCM Hackathon will run for the next month for those looking to launch tokens. $200,000 USD in prizes will be distributed to the top three coins, with winners determined by market cap at the end of the contest. 

The breadth and scale of Solana’s hackathon ecosystem form a comprehensive talent acquisition and startup incubation system. This fundamentally transforms how Solana attracts and retains developer talent. By providing multiple points of entry and different pathways to funding, Solana has a sustainable pipeline that converts developer interest into tangible ecosystem growth and venture-backed companies. This system explains why Solana continues to be a leader in blockchain developer adoption across multiple verticals and will likely serve as a model for other blockchain networks seeking to build sustainable developer communities.

Superteam

Superteam is a vision of the future, where Solana is led by talented, like-minded individuals worldwide. It manifests as a community of creators, developers, investors, and contributors from various countries, dedicated to making it easier for people to build on and use Solana. 

Superteam is present in the following areas: Balkans, Brasil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Nigeria, Poland, Singapore, UAE, UK, and Vietnam.

Superteams around the world hold regular events throughout the year. One common event is Startup Village—a co-working and networking event where builders are encouraged to connect with their peers, attend workshops, socialize, and work collaboratively on projects. Startup Village Toronto boasted over 1,210 total check-ins, 22 workshops, and 6 side events, with 47 people building together for 8+ days in a row. Sponsors included Solflare, Zeus, Vybe, Titan, Skyrise, and the Solana Foundation. Superteam Nigeria also held a Startup Village earlier this year in March with 832 sign-ups. Startup Villages also took place this summer in Warsaw, Split, Paris, Berlin, and London.

Superteam Japan is hosting Super Tokyo 2025 this year on August 24th at the Dragon Gate conference hall in Shibuya to promote the growth of the Solana ecosystem in the region. Last year, Super Tokyo 2024 saw over 1,000 visitors and 20 talks. Superteam Japan will also host a Startup Village from August 18th to the 29th, one week before and one week after Super Tokyo 2025. The focus this year is on stablecoins and the impending payment revolution.

Bootcamps, Platforms, and Educational Resources

Solana’s developer education landscape exemplifies a mature ecosystem that balances official Solana Foundation-led resources with vibrant community-led initiatives. This dual approach ensures that comprehensive learning pathways are accessible to all developers, regardless of their skill level, while fostering organic knowledge sharing across the community.

The Solana Foundation is a Swiss-based nonprofit dedicated to the adoption, growth, and decentralization of Solana. They aim to cultivate a scalable and sustainable network with a specific focus on education, research, and ecosystem development initiatives. They maintain Solana’s official documentation and provide a wealth of developer resources, including both Foundation-led and community-led content, on Solana’s official website. 

Solana Foundation also holds more intensive educational programs (i.e., bootcamps) both in-person and online. Earlier this year, the Solana Foundation announced the opening of Skyline, a Solana hub in the heart of New York City featuring regular co-working opportunities, events, networking, and educational workshops. For example, the Solana Foundation held a two-day, in-person developer bootcamp at Skyline, and successful developers were given access to Scale or Die, a developer-only conference part of Accelerate. They have also released the Solana Developer Bootcamp 2024 on YouTube, a comprehensive, beginner-friendly bootcamp that serves as a complete introduction to blockchains, smart contracts, and full-stack development on Solana. 

Beyond these Foundation-led initiatives, the community has cultivated numerous resources, educational platforms, and programs to help decentralize knowledge and encourage the growth of developers on Solana. For example, the Solana Stack Exchange is the primary community Q&A platform where developers can access peer support and expert guidance, posting and answering questions like how Stack Overflow operates.

Aside from general knowledge sharing, there are also more structured, community-led bootcamps and platforms for new developers. Blueshift is a free, on-chain learning platform with 24/7 mentor support. This structured learning path is available online in multiple languages. Each course features a series of challenges designed to test the user’s knowledge, and users can demonstrate their understanding by minting NFTs upon completing each course. 

Ackee Blockchain Security posted their Solana Auditors Bootcamp to YouTube, allowing anyone to learn how to audit Solana programs. This course covers everything from the fundamentals of Anchor to fuzzing programs. 

Rektoff is hosting a 6-week Rust and Solana security bootcamp sponsored by the Solana Foundation, designed for developers with Rust experience to learn the fundamentals of Solana and ship resilient products. 

Harkirat Singh, a popular coding YouTuber, is launching a free, fully remote eight-week fellowship called Superdev. This intensive development program is designed for experienced developers looking to break through in Solana. The top 20 fellows will receive a $2,500 USD stipend. The fellowship is sponsored by the Solana Foundation and Superteam.

Another notable community initiative is Turbin3, Solana’s leading talent engine. With over 400 builders and 10 winners and honorable mentions in the latest Colosseum hackathons, Turbin3 upskills developers through different cohorts targeting various topics and skill levels. They also offer a research-focused track to proliferate research on Solana, a historical weak point in the ecosystem when compared to the academic rigor of other ecosystems, which has now been reconciled.

This distributed educational ecosystem creates multiple entry points for developers with varying skill levels, time commitments, geographical locations, and learning preferences. The interplay of Foundation-led and community-led resources creates continuous improvement cycles that help explain Solana’s impressive developer growth metrics.

Events

Solana has a vibrant event ecosystem that spans from grassroots community gatherings to major conferences. There’s an event for anyone and everyone, creating continuous learning, networking, and collaboration opportunities across the entire ecosystem.

mtnDAO represents one of the most innovative community-driven event formats. These month-long sessions in Salt Lake City, Utah, are packed with workshops, networking, startup, and co-working opportunities broken down into sponsored weeks. 

For example, Coinbase Developer Platform’s sponsored week at mtnDAO v7 saw an average of 200 daily attendees, peaking at 290 attendees on a single day. That week also saw Anatoly walking around and asking builders how he could help. Due to the startup experience at mtnDAO, mtnCapital was created as a Solana ecosystem fund governed through futarchy. mtnDAO will be hosting their v8 summit from August 1st to 28th.

The growing popularity and success of mtnDAO has spawned several other event-type DAOs, including islandDAO and onionDAO. Taking a similar month-long approach, islandDAO differentiates itself by also acting as a Service DAO offering feedback sessions and consultations to projects. They describe themselves as a network state with regional states in both Nigeria and Brasil. islandDAO 3.0 is scheduled to take place from September 17th to October 17th in Mykonos, Greece. 

onionDAO preserves the essential elements of mtnDAO’s approach while bringing the concept to Chicago. This month-long developer-focused event takes place in a fully equipped coworking space featuring 100 desks and monitors. onionDAO leverages Chicago’s summer season to create unique networking opportunities, organizing diverse activities ranging from jet skis and boat days to kayaking, paintballing, go-karting, and skydiving.

While these community-driven initiatives demonstrate the organic growth of Solana’s event ecosystem, the Solana Foundation also hosts major conferences and summits that serve broader strategic purposes. These large-scale events complement grassroots gatherings by providing platforms for ecosystem-wide announcements, technical deep dives, and networking opportunities. For these events, their focus has shifted from hacker houses and traditional conference formats to more product-driven outcomes. As outlined in their Gather to Build initiative, the focus is on side events and actionable outcomes for attendees.

Solana Foundation has doubled down on the American Crypto Renaissance, recognizing 2025 as a banner year for crypto in America following favorable US election results. New York City hosted two flagship events: Scale or Die, an application-only, developer-focused technical conference, followed by Ship or Die, a larger, more product-driven conference. Together, these events form the basis of Accelerate. 

The Solana Foundation’s global strategy includes APEX conferences—focused, dynamic, and immersive mega-regional one-day events packed with speakers, sponsors, panels, and interactive workshops. APEX conferences have already been held this year in Mexico, Cape Town, and Budapest, with more planned in Singapore and Mumbai.

Breakpoint, Solana’s flagship event, returns this year in Abu Dhabi at the Etihad Arena from December 11th to 13th. Breakpoint 2024, held in Singapore, was a massive success, with over 6,000 tickets sold and attendees from 114 different countries. Breakpoint unites founders, developers, and creators from around the world for three days of strategic announcements, debates, product showcases, and a plethora of side events.

Together, this multi-tiered event strategy, spanning intimate month-long community gatherings to flagship international conferences, demonstrates Solana’s commitment to, and overwhelming success in, fostering growth and engagement across multiple formats and regions. Solana’s event ecosystem is a powerhouse, ultimately contributing to the network’s position as the leading destination for new developers.

Economic Growth

Real Economic Value (REV)

Real Economic Value (REV) is a measure of the value that users place on using a blockchain. It comprises transaction fees and out-of-protocol tips, which capture users’ willingness to pay for on-chain activity. To put it simply, revenue is to a business as REV is to a blockchain. 

Regardless of whether L1 assets are considered monetary or equity-like, as Matt Huang, investment partner at Paradigm, correctly points out, blockchains should strive to maximize REV as a measure of economic activity and user demand. However, blindly maximizing REV without consideration for network accessibility and user experiences, such as prohibitively increasing fees, is counterproductive. REV’s true value lies in serving as a measurable proxy for a blockchain’s equivalent of real GDP, demonstrating genuine economic activity rather than speculative trading.

Since October 2024, Solana has consistently outperformed every other blockchain in terms of REV. Solana’s REV peaked this year at $551,656,194 USD for the entire month of January—3.31x larger than Ethereum’s REV ($166,492,827 USD) during the same period. Solana’s REV reached a daily all-time high on January 19th at $56,820,959 USD. Jito tips also reached a record-breaking ~$25.16 million USD on January 20th. This success was made possible by Solana’s approach to its fee structure, which implicitly balances revenue generation with network accessibility.

Transactions incur two types of fees:

• Base Fee: a fixed fee of 5,000 lamports (i.e., 0.000005 SOL) per signature. Note that most transactions only have a single signature.
• Priority Fee: an optional fee that users can include to prioritize their transactions.

The base fee compensates validators for processing transactions and introduces a real-time cost. In contrast, priority fees allow users to boost the priority of their transactions, which is particularly helpful for time-sensitive or high-value transactions.

Jito tips are also an important component of Solana’s REV, which operates outside the standard fee structure. Jito hosts out-of-protocol blockspace auctions for partial blocks, rather than having users compete directly on-chain.

At a high level:

• Users, called searchers, bundle up to five transactions and send them to Jito’s block engine with a minimum tip of 1,000 lamports to help prevent spam
• Block builders compete to win these bundles
• The winning bundles are guaranteed to execute in the next block, in order, all-or-nothing

Jito tips enable guaranteed execution for time-sensitive or high-value transactions while opening up MEV opportunities through secured transaction ordering. Importantly, these tips bypass the traditional fee structure, going directly to block builders, creating additional revenue streams that contribute to the network’s REV without increasing costs for regular users.

Normalizing Solana’s REV composition since the start of the year shows Jito tips comprise the majority, ranging from lows of 41.6% to highs of 66%. The dominance of Jito tips reveals sophisticated user behavior and the maturation of MEV infrastructure, as a significant portion of Solana’s economic activity involves users willing to pay a premium for guaranteed transaction execution. For the average user, this creates an environment where basic transactions remain affordable and accessible. At the same time, more sophisticated applications and traders absorb the majority of costs through premium, out-of-protocol service usage.

The surge in priority fees during January coincides with Trump-mania, highlighting how fees are responsive to demand, as users compete for faster execution to secure high-value opportunities. This REV composition demonstrates a sustainable economic model that scales with network activity rather than requiring global fee increases. That is, Solana’s REV can grow through premium out-of-protocol services, like Jito, while keeping basic access affordable.

Importantly, this dynamic pricing occurs within Solana’s local fee market structure, which enables Solana to maintain remarkably low fees while generating substantial REV. Most blockchains, like Ethereum, employ a gas-based, global fee market that applies a universal cost to access network state. This means that all transactions compete equally for inclusion, regardless of the state with which they wish to interact. On the other hand, Solana uses local fee markets so transactions pay fees based on the specific accounts they wish to interact with, preventing hotspots from raising fees across the entire chain. 

For example, users paid upwards of $150 million USD collectively on failed Ethereum transactions during the Otherside NFT mint. With local fee markets, a popular NFT mint will cause users minting those NFTs to pay higher priority fees, but it will not increase the fees for someone looking to send a simple token transfer to a friend. This localization prevents the fee-contagion seen on other blockchains, like Ethereum during the Otherside mint, where any popular application can drive up costs network-wide. The benefits of this become even more evident when examining metrics such as the average transaction fee for a given blockchain. 

In the past few months, Solana’s average transaction fee has hovered between sub-one cent and roughly three cents during periods of increased traffic. The average transaction fee spiked to 41 cents, or 0.001531 SOL, during the launch of $TRUMP, a historic weekend that saw Donald Trump launch a memecoin three days before his presidential inauguration. However, the more interesting statistic to analyze is Solana’s median fee, as it demonstrates the power of localizing fees.

The median fee for a blockchain represents the typical cost of a user to transact. This is an important metric because lower fees reduce friction and unblock broader usage patterns. During the Trump memecoin period (i.e., January 19th, 2025), Ethereum’s median fee was $4.84 USD. Base’s median fee was lower at $0.011289 USD. Comparatively, Solana’s median fee was only $0.003178 USD—1523x smaller than Ethereum’s and 3.6x smaller than popular Ethereum L2s such as Base, notwithstanding the fact that $TRUMP’s launch occurred on Solana. Solana’s architecture maintains accessibility for everyday transactions, even during peak demand periods. 

Solana’s pricing accessibility allows for the network to maximize REV through volume rather than extracting maximum value per transaction. This is a much more sustainable model that attracts users, rather than driving them off the Layer 1 and fragmenting the user experience. 

Looking ahead, continued technical improvements position Solana to maintain its REV dominance. The eventual deployment of Firedancer’s full client on mainnet, Agave 2.3 making the scheduler “greedy” by default, the planned doubling of blockspace, and the potential for Alpenglow’s consensus optimizations could further increase transaction processing capacity, thereby enabling even higher volumes while maintaining the low-fee accessibility that drives Solana’s volume-based REV model. 

Institutional Interest

The institutional adoption of Solana is driven by a convergence of regulatory clarity, market infrastructure development, and proven network performance. Unlike previous cycles dominated by retail speculation and tarnished by the reputational damage caused by the multiple centralized exchanges that collapsed in 2021 and 2022, institutional interest in Solana is characterized by systematic integration across corporate treasuries, payment infrastructure, and regulated financial products. This shift validates Solana’s technical capabilities and signals Solana’s growth into institutional-grade financial infrastructure. 

Solana’s regulatory engagement, market access vehicles, compliant staking solutions, and tokenized capital markets, combined with its high-throughput, low-fee architecture, position it as the primary blockchain for institutional adoption. 

Regulatory Environment and Policy Leadership

The 2024 American Presidential election was a watershed moment for the cryptocurrency industry’s regulatory environment. Based on public statements and political activity, as defined by the advocacy group Stand With Crypto, both the Senate and House saw more pro- than anti-crypto politicians elected. Roughly 59% of the Senate is pro-Bitcoin, whereas ~66% of the House is pro-Bitcoin. A $160 million USD political spending spree by cryptocurrency firms and executives delivered what POLITICO described as “the most pro-crypto Congress ever.”

The regulatory landscape has shifted dramatically in favor of digital assets. In May, the Senate voted 66-32 to advance the GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins), the first comprehensive bill on stablecoins. This would require a one-to-one reserve backing, prohibit rehypothecation, and establish a clear federal charter for issuers. As of June 17th, the US Senate officially passed the GENIUS Act.

Moreover, the SEC, under the new leadership of Chairman Paul Atkins, is going from a regulation-by-enforcement approach to a comprehensive rules-based framework. He ordered staff to draft formal rules covering the issuance, custody, and trading of digital assets. In line with the GENIUS Act, the SEC issued a statement explaining how to avoid treating reserve-backed dollar stablecoins as securities. There is now consensus in Washington that stablecoins can strengthen the role of the US dollar, with their widespread use expected to drive demand for US debt instruments and dollar-denominated infrastructure.

Chairman Paul Atkins also announced that DeFi platforms will be exempt from regulatory restrictions and that “[t]he right to have self custody of one’s private property is a foundational American value that should not disappear when one logs on to the Internet.” 

Recognizing this regulatory momentum, the Solana Policy Institute (SPI) was established in March 2025 as a non-partisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to educating policymakers on decentralized networks and formalizing Solana’s policy engagement with governments worldwide. The SPI, led by CEO Miller Whitehouse-Levine and President Kristin Smith, is a focused approach to policy engagement. It signals Solana’s commitment to regulatory compliance, long-term institutional adoption, and, ultimately, the acceleration of Internet capital markets.

In partnership with Superstate, Orca, and Lowenstein Sandler LLP, the SPI submitted Project Open to the SEC—a comprehensive regulatory framework to enable compliant blockchain-based issuance and trading of securities. The proposal outlines an 18-month pilot program that allows registered issuers to trade equity securities as digital tokens on public blockchains, while maintaining full SEC registration and investor protection requirements.

This approach extends beyond Washington to regulatory authorities worldwide. In the next section on Solana Economic Zones (SEZs), we outline how the Solana Foundation has formed partnerships in the UAE and Kazakhstan to streamline compliant traditional capital markets.

Market Infrastructure Development

Institutional investment vehicles are rapidly materializing with multiple SOL ETF applications from major asset managers, including Grayscale, Canary, VanEck, Fidelity, and Franklin Templeton, as well as ETPs already live for 21shares, Bitwise, and Valour. Moreover, on March 17th, CME Group launched Solana futures, offering standard contracts representing 500 SOL and micro-contracts representing 25 SOL each. 

This is a huge improvement compared to last year, when all SOL ETFs that applied before the election were denied. On February 11th, the SEC officially acknowledged 21shares, Canary, VanEck, and Bitwise’s spot ETFs. In April, the SEC also acknowledged Fidelity’s spot ETF. The SEC has also acknowledged Grayscale’s application to convert its Solana Trust into a spot ETF. 

More recently, the SEC has requested that potential Solana ETF issuers update their S-1 forms to include their approach to staking (e.g., Fidelity submitted their S-1 recently), potentially setting the stage for approvals in the coming months. The SEC is expected to announce approval decisions for most of these applications by October 2025. However, according to Bloomberg, the SEC could act early on spot Solana ETF filings as Rex Shares and Osprey attempt regulatory workarounds to launch Solana products. Moreover, Invesco, a global investment firm with $1.8 trillion USD AUM, recently registered a Galaxy Solana ETF in Delaware. 

At the time of writing, the odds for a spot Solana ETF approved in 2025 on Polymarket are at 91%.

Note that these are not just American developments—these are global market developments. North America’s first spot Solana ETF started trading in Canada in April. 3iQ Corp., Evolve Funds Group Inc., CI Global Asset Management (CI GAM), and Purpose Investments all have listed products on the Toronto Stock Exchange after the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) gave the regulatory green light for the funds to provide exposure to SOL. Additionally, note that the Bitwise and Valour ETPs are European. 

Corporate Treasury Integration and Staking Infrastructure

Institutional adoption is also accelerating through corporate treasury strategies that leverage staking on Solana. SOL Strategies, the new rebrand of Canadian-traded company Cypherpunk Holdings, is pioneering a Micro-Strategy-esque approach but with yield generation via staked SOL. As of May 31st, they hold over 395,000 SOL. 3,036,462 SOL is staked to company validators. This model has gained momentum, with other companies, such as DeFi Development Company, Upexi, GSR, and Galaxy Digital, adopting similar strategies.

Part of this model is offering Validators-as-a-Service (Vaas), a whitelabel validator solution for exchanges, wallets, apps, and asset managers that seek to operate their own branded Solana validator, but without the complexities of setting up and maintaining the validator itself. As institutional interest grows, so does the need for validator solutions that meet regulatory, compliance, and operational requirements. Companies like Helius have responded by achieving SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, demonstrating how staking infrastructure providers are professionalizing their operations to meet institutional standards. Being compliant is crucial as traditional financial institutions and regulated entities require audited assurance that their staking partners maintain enterprise-grade operational controls and data protection standards.  

Internet Capital Markets

Solana increasingly supports tokenized traditional financial products through partnerships with established asset managers. Major TradFi players have launched tokenized versions of their flagship money market funds on Solana, including:

• Blackrock’s BUIDL fund ($2.9 billion USD, expanded to Solana in March 2025)
• Franklin Templeton’s FOBXX (over $700 million USD AUM with over $23 million USD worth minted on Solana)
• VanEck’s VBILL ($8 million USD issued since May 2025 on Solana)

Beyond money market funds, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund and Apollo’s tokenized credit fund (ACRED) provide accredited investors access to institutional-grade yield products that leverage Solana’s programmable compliance via Token Extensions, and DeFi integrations facilitated by Kamino Finance and Drift Institutional. 

Furthermore, the development of permissionless trading infrastructure for tokenized US equities and ETFs through platforms such as Kraken, Superstate (with a memorandum of understanding with SOL Strategies), and Backed enables equity markets to trade beyond traditional market hours, allowing global participants to trade US securities wherever and whenever they choose.

Republic recently announced the launch of pre-IPO “Mirror Tokens” on Solana, starting with rSpaceX—a Reg-CF security token minted on Solana that automatically converts into common stock when the company goes public. Republic also plans to host future offerings that include Mirror Tokens for xAI, Ramp, Cursor, and Perplexity, among others. This gives everyday investors earlier, round-the-clock exposure to future US equities, underscoring Solana’s emergence as the rails of choice for tokenized US private equity. 

Solana Economic Zones (SEZs)

A special economic zone, commonly abbreviated as SEZ, refers to an area where the laws governing business and trade differ from those of the host country. There's no simple definition of a SEZ, as it’s determined by each country. However, all SEZs refer to a designated area within a country’s national borders, designed to encourage the formation of businesses due to its favorable financial policies, typically targeting investing, taxation, customs, labor regulations, and quotas. 

The most famous SEZ example is Shenzhen, which China established in 1980 to allow for free market capitalism to flourish. Shenzhen, previously a fishing village, is now a global technology hub. There has been discussion recently on whether Starbase should be converted into an SEZ to allow for the proliferation of space travel and its development as an interplanetary hub, rather than have its success be mired in bureaucracy. 

Similar developments are occurring on Solana.

Solana Economic Zones (also abbreviated to SEZs) is a Forma-led initiative to bring pop-up villages and policy roundtables to techno-optimist countries, matching builders with local governments and businesspeople to further accelerate a new culture of finance. 

This model draws from the Special Economic Zones of China, wherein designated areas had economic policies and market-oriented regulations designed to attract foreign business. Within the context of Forma, SEZs aim to create a sandbox where regulation, infrastructure, and venture capital are aligned, and then seeded with founders who can develop innovative and tangible on-chain products. SEZs in Buenos Aires and Dubai, as well as popups in Sri Lanka, demonstrated the concept’s pull.  

SEZ Kazakhstan was the first SEZ hosted in Central Asia, with an event held on May 28th, 2025, in Astana. It was an invite-only event capped at 150 people who sought to advance blockchain adoption and innovation across Eurasia. Speakers included Minister Zhaslan Madiyev (Minister of Digital Development Innovation and Aerospace Industry), Renat Bekturov (Governor of Astana International Finance Centre), Binur Zhalenov (Chief Digital Officer and Advisor at the National Bank of Kazakhstan), Lily Liu (President of the Solana Foundation), Akshay BD (nCMO at the Solana Foundation), and Talgat Dossanov (CEO of Intebix). Aidyn Aimbetov, cosmonaut at the National Space Agency of Kazakhstan, was also an honored guest. The event was livestreamed on Forma’s X account. 

SEZs borrow the special economic zone logic that powered Shenzhen and layer Solana’s on-chain rails on top, creating a successful endeavor in growing Solana economically. Early zones have demonstrated their ability to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), kickstart policy pilots for payments and RWA tokenization, and seed local developer communities that persist beyond the pop-up phase. For example, Forma noted the following metrics in their SEZ Argentina Impact Report:

• They hosted 249 residents (65% local, 35% international)
• Over 500 locals attended events
• They created upwards of $500,000 USDC FDI that month across tourism, food and business, and venture capital
• They enabled 80+ B2B partnerships

Sustained government follow-through on visas, tax terms, sandbox licenses, and regulatory clarity is needed to sustain SEZs as a policy engine, rather than a conference. The early signs of this follow-through are already materializing as the Solana Foundation, Jupiter, Astana International Exchange (AIX), and Intebix signed a memorandum of understanding for dual IPO listings, creating a direct bridge between Solana and Kazakhstan’s traditional capital markets. 

More recently, the Solana Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding with VARA, Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, establishing a framework for collaboration on talent development programs, regulatory workshops, data sharing initiatives, and SEZ support. The current trend is clear—SEZs create real economic activity, and not just buzz.

Stablecoins

Stablecoins have become the fastest-growing sector on Solana in the last year, with their supply, volume, and real-world integrations accelerating at a stunning pace. 

For example, Circle minted $1.75 billion USDC on Solana in the month of May alone. Fortune 500 firm Fiserv plans to launch its stablecoin, FIUSD, as well as a platform that can be used by its clients (i.e., over 3,000 regional and community banks, over 10,000 financial institutions, and millions of merchants), on Solana by the end of 2025, utilizing Paxos and Circle’s infrastructure. 

As regulatory clarity improves and payments giants like Stripe and PayPal enter the arena, Solana’s low-fee, high-throughput blockchain emerges as the preferred stablecoin rail for fintechs and financial institutions. 

Key actionable takeaways from our analysis of stablecoins on Solana include:

• Liquidity Trending Upward: Solana’s total stablecoin supply grew over 7x in the last 18 months (~$1.5B USD to ~$11.7B USD), trailing only Ethereum and Tron. 
• Usage Trending Upward: Daily active stablecoin addresses routinely exceed three million, and peer-to-peer volume averages around $50 to $60 billion USD per month.
• USDC is the Liquidity Anchor: USDC commands ~70% of stablecoin market share. PayPal’s PYUSD is the first big tech stablecoin using Token Extensions.
• Compliance via Token Extensions: The ability to transfer funds confidentially, assign delegates, and enable specific program logic on certain transfers —such as those involving specific program logic— gives Solana a clear moat compared to other blockchains’ compliance tooling.
• Institutional Rails Are Here: Stripe-Bridge, Spherenet, and debit-card stacks (e.g., KAST, Fuse, Solflare) are converting on-chain balances into spendable fiat currency in over 100 countries.
• Cross-Border Stablecoin Flows are the Killer B2B Use Case: Converting from a local fiat currency to a stablecoin like USDC and then to another local fiat currency eliminates FX pre-funding.
• Regulatory Momentum: The GENIUS Act and MiCAR offer clarity, removing the largest go-to-market blocker for corporations and stipulating that reserve-backed coins will be treated as money, not securities. While this momentum is positive, it is still in its early stages.

DeFi

Solana’s DeFi ecosystem continues to evolve into a sophisticated financial ecosystem that bridges the gap between traditional and decentralized finance, catering to both the average trader and quants. Solana continues to prove itself as a credible and growing alternative to Ethereum’s DeFi. This maturation is evident across multiple dimensions. For example, Solana settled $574 billion USD in 2024, with Ethereum close behind at $568 billion USD. 

Solana’s DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL) continues to hover around 8 to 9 billion USD, second only to Ethereum. Despite price volatility, DeFi TVL has grown 18% quarter-on-quarter to 53 million SOL. 

The quality of financial products has also improved drastically, with platforms like Kamino, Jupiter, and Drift having institutional-grade offerings. A prime example of this is Kamino Lend’s integration with crypto.com, allowing users to lend out their USDC and SOL directly through the exchange to earn interest on their idle assets. 

According to Messari for Q1 2025, Kamino currently leads the DeFi TVL with $1.6 billion USD and ~24% of the market share, despite a 13% quarter-on-quarter decline. Close behind is Jupiter, at $1.4 billion USD in DeFi TVL, with a market share of 21%. Raydium fell 46% quarter-on-quarter to third place, with $1.1 billion USD and a market share of 17%.

Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs)

Solana’s DeFi growth is evident when analyzing its decentralized exchange (DEX) activity. In 2024, 81% of DEX transactions came from Solana compared to all other ecosystems combined. 1.7 million unique wallets transacted on Solana by the end of 2024, which is seven times more than the next biggest chain. 

While these statistics are impressive in their own right, they pale in comparison to Solana’s current growth. Solana has generated over $890 billion USD in DEX trading volume in the first five months of 2025, comprising 90.7% of last year’s total volume of $981 billion USD. This acceleration peaked during Trump-mania on January 19th when Solana’s total DEX volume hit a record-breaking $42,839,245,230 USD. Average daily spot DEX volume has grown 41% quarter-on-quarter to $4.6 billion USD in Q1 2025.

Raydium dominated DEX volume at the start of the year, reaching $68.6 billion USD in volume for the week of January 20th. This was mainly due to the launch of TRUMP, MELANIA, and LIBRA on Meteora. However, the landscape shifted dramatically on March 20th, 2025, when PumpFun launched PumpSwap, replacing Raydium as the sole trading venue for tokens that graduated past Pump’s bonding curve. This proved to be highly successful with PumpSwap becoming the top DEX by weekly volume, recording $6.9 billion USD in the week of June 16th.

The DEX landscape is set to change with the entrance of newer, larger players with industry-leading distribution, execution, and resources. For example, on June 14th, Bybit announced the launch of Byreal, a new on-chain liquidity network that seeks to combine CEX-grade liquidity with DeFi-native transparency. They’re bringing Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker (CLMM) and Request for Quote (RFQ) hybrid routing, a fair launchpad model with equitable token distribution during initial offerings, as well as curated yield vaults. Testnet is set to launch on June 30th, with mainnet coming in Q3 2025.

Innovation and New Entrants

The sophistication of Solana’s DEX ecosystem extends beyond volume metrics and the launch of new platforms, as DeFi innovation is ripe on Solana. In December 2024, Kamino announced the launch of Kamino Swap, an intents-based exchange with zero slippage, zero fees, and zero MEV. An intents-based exchange is a new type of DEX where users submit high-level declarations of desired outcomes (e.g., “I want to swap X amount of token A for Y amount of token B”), which is referred to as intents. Third parties, known as solvers, look at these intents and compete to fulfill them in the most optimal way. Therefore, instead of requiring users to submit explicit transaction steps, they can submit desired outcomes, thereby abstracting away any market-related complexity.

In May, Ellipsis Labs launched Gavel, a token distribution and liquidity platform. Gavel offers fair, transparent, and efficient methods for raising capital and distributing tokens on-chain, ensuring both sniper-resistance and sandwich-resistance via its unique AMM design. On May 22nd, the day after Gavel’s sandwich-resistant AMM launched, they reported users lost $0 to sandwich attacks compared to the $80,000 USD lost on other Solana AMMs during their initial token launch. Gavel’s sandwich-resistant AMM, Plasma, has been audited three times, is source-available, and is verifiably built. 

The aggregation landscape has evolved from single-platform routing to meta-aggregation strategies. Jupiter remains the leading aggregator, with over 1.7 billion swaps and 48 million traders, dominating the market share with its comprehensive liquidity sourcing and routing. Jupiter has acquired SonarWatch, Moonshot, and DRiP as they shape up to become a “Super App.” 

However, Jupiter’s position is set to be challenged with the emergence of Titan, Solana’s first meta DEX aggregator, which allows users to access quotes from multiple aggregators while taking price impact into account. While still in private beta, Titan has surpassed $500 million USD in volume, thanks to its proprietary routing algorithm, Talos, which reportedly outperforms competitors 81% of the time by identifying market inefficiencies across all liquidity sources, all without charging any fees. 

Traders have been vocal on X reporting better-than-expected execution through Titan. For example, instead of a one-to-one stable swap, a user reported swapping 434 USDC for 510 USDT. Another user reported swapping 1948 USDC for 2048 USDT. These are not isolated incidents. Rather, they’re systematic improvements that demonstrate how meta-aggregation can capture value from market inefficiencies that would otherwise be missed by traditional, single-aggregator approaches.

Perpetual Futures

Solana’s perpetual futures market has emerged as a growth driver, with Jupiter Perps leading the charge. According to Messari, Jupiter averaged $1 billion in daily perpetual trading volume in Q1 2025, representing a 14% quarter-on-quarter increase and commanding a 79.2% market share. In total, Jupiter Perps has seen:

• Over 656 thousand positions changed
• $274.78 billion in volume
• $1.65 billion AUM
• Over 330 thousand traders

Drift, despite a 17.3% quarter-on-quarter decline in volume, maintains 10.9% market share with $138.2 million in average daily volume. In March, Drift announced the launch of the Swift Protocol, which aggregates liquidity to give traders the best on-chain execution while enabling gasless trading.

The remaining market share is spread across established players and newer entrants. GMX launched on Solana in February and quickly captured a 4.6% market share with $58.4 million in daily trading volume. Raydium Perps, Adrena, and FlashTrade round out the ecosystem. 

Notably, Zeta Markets’ average daily volume fell 35.4% quarter-on-quarter, resulting in a 0.4% market share. However, in March, the team launched their network extension, Bullet, on testnet. Bullet is a specialized execution layer (i.e., an L2) that posts ZK proofs on Solana, allowing traders to harness the power and security of Solana in a high-performance trading environment. It boasts 2 ms of latency and 150 transactions per second (TPS), as reported on their site.

Ranger is a notable addition to Solana’s perpetual futures ecosystem as a Perps DEX aggregator designed to optimize trading efficiency across multiple venues. Ranger’s Smart Order Router (SOR) seeks to address key pain points in trading perpetuals by systematically evaluating liquidity across their integrated platforms to minimize price impact, slippage, and trading fees. Essentially, Ranger acts as a meta-aggregator for perpetuals, sourcing liquidity from multiple aggregators and individual DEXs. Ranger charges a competitive one basis point (0.01%) execution fee on perpetual trades, with additional venue-specific fees applied depending on the selected routing destination. Recently, Ranger Spot was announced—the platform’s foray into spot trading. Ranger also provides comprehensive data tooling, including liquidation mapping, open interest tracking, and funding rate analysis. 

Despite pioneering on-chain CLOBs and capturing the most DeFi inflow of any blockchain, Solana has historically struggled to retain liquidity in its perpetual futures market. Bulk Trade aims to address this by building a blockless, leaderless, and geographically distributed exchange that achieves sub-150ms global trade clearing with cryptographically provable on-chain finality and sub-25ms matching speeds. The idea is that validators are incentivized to run an optimized trading client, similar to Jito, which would net them an extra 1-2% yield due to a share in orderbook fees. Complementing their exchange infrastructure, Bulk Vaults is a high-performance liquidity layer transforming idle capital into an active, yield-generating force—staked, traded, and routed across DeFi in real-time. Bulk Trade is still in active development and currently hiring.

The growth in Solana’s perpetual futures trading reflects Solana’s maturation as a derivatives platform, with the network’s high throughput and low latency serving as increasingly attractive drivers for on-chain trading.

Trading Bots

The proliferation of trading bots and automated trading strategies has become a defining characteristic of Solana’s maturation. Trading bots now account for a significant portion of on-chain activity, with roughly half of all swaps originating from them. This trend mirrors the evolution of traditional finance, where algorithmic trading has become increasingly dominant. For example, algorithmic trading accounts for ~60-70% of overall trading volume in US equities, as well as in European and major Asian markets. Just as algorithmic trading brought capital efficiency, liquidity, and price discovery improvements to legacy trading markets, the proliferation of trading bots signals Solana’s transition toward more mature market infrastructure.

The technical advantages of Solana’s architecture make it particularly attractive for algorithmic trading, as sub-second optimistic confirmations and the ability to ingest shreds (i.e., the smallest unit of a block) in ~20 milliseconds, combined with local fee markets, create a more predictable execution environment. Here, bots can operate with tighter risk parameters and sophisticated timing strategies that would otherwise be impossible on networks with higher latency or global fee markets.

Axiom currently dominates the trading bot landscape, holding a 55.2% market share and achieving over $9.6 billion in total volume over the last two months. Backed by Y Combinator, Axiom is the fastest trading bot to cross nine figures in fees, taking only 117 days, and 129 days to cross $100 million in app revenue. 

Photon holds second place with a 12.7% market share, boasting over $407 million in lifetime fees. Photon also holds the most SOL in user wallets, at 453,577 SOL, with Axiom trailing at 453,305 SOL, as of the time of writing. 

The rest of the ecosystem is rounded out by BullX, GMGN, and Trojan, all with around a 6% market share, followed by Bloom at 3.3% and BONKBot at 2.7%.

Liquid Staking

With 64% of SOL’s circulating supply staked, Solana maintains one of the highest staking rates among major blockchains. Solana’s liquid staking rate has increased 15% quarter-on-quarter from 9.1% to 10.4% in Q1 2025. Solana currently maintains an 11.32% liquid staking ratio, amounting to a market cap of $6.97 billion USD. 

JitoSOL is the leading liquid staking token (LST), holding approximately a 39% market share. Jito’s liquid staking success originates from its unique value proposition of combining traditional staking rewards with MEV rewards (i.e., Jito tips that are distributed proportionally to holders). This has made JitoSOL particularly attractive to DeFi protocols and yield-conscious investors who want the highest possible yields on Solana. 

Moreover, Binance’s bnSOL has demonstrated impressive growth momentum since its launch in September 2024, increasing its market share to 18.9%. Marinade, one of Solana’s original liquid staking providers, saw its market share decline to 10.64% as Jupiter surpassed them for the number three spot with a market share of 11.23%. The rest of the ecosystem is rounded out by Bybit (4.57%), Drift (3.59%), The Vault (3.48%), and SolBlaze (2.51%), among others.

Solana’s liquid staking ratio has been trending upwards since November 2023. These assets are increasingly used as collateral in lending protocols like Kamino, integrated into automated yield strategies, and serve as foundational assets for a more capital-efficient ecosystem. The inherent composability of LSTs helps create a flywheel effect, where, as more liquidity and lending opportunities emerge, the demand for LSTs increases, which, in turn, drives more DeFi opportunities, and the cycle continues.

RWAs

Real World Assets (RWAs) are one of the most transformative applications in the entire blockchain industry, as they bridge the gap between the physical and the digital—traditional finance and decentralized systems—through the tokenization of assets, which range from treasuries and securities to real estate and intellectual property. 

RWAs are a critical vertical for bringing trillions of dollars worth of assets on-chain, offering enhanced liquidity, efficiency, programmability, and accessibility that legacy systems cannot match. HSBC Hong Kong is pushing blockchains for custody, tokenization, and bond issuance as they expect RWA tokenization on public chains to surge in the next 2 to 5 years. 

Solana’s RWA adoption is accelerating and is uniquely positioned to dominate the next generation of RWA adoption, despite being ranked fourth among blockchains in traditional institutional asset classes, including stablecoins and legacy asset classes (e.g., US treasuries, institutional funds, and non-US government debt). 

Solana currently has over $351 million USD worth of RWAs on-chain with 7,255 holders across 16 separate assets. Stablecoins aside, the largest RWA currently on Solana is Ondo’s US Dollar Yield (USDY) with a total value of over $174 million USD, providing investors with the utility of stablecoins with safe daily yield secured by US Treasuries. 

Solana’s fourth-place ranking reflects the current concentration of first-generation tokenization on older networks like Ethereum, but fails to capture two critical dynamics that position Solana for greater RWA adoption: (1) accelerating institutional migration and (2) the emergence of innovative asset categories.

Solana’s Institutional RWA Momentum

The institutional momentum toward Solana is undeniable. Cantor Fitzgerald has initiated coverage on Solana (SOL) Treasury companies, including Sol Strategies, DeFi Dev Corp, and UPXI, with Outperform ratings. They stated Solana-oriented balance sheets deserve higher premiums than BTC peers due to yield, volatility upside, and alignment with the future of on-chain finance. 

Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund and Apollo’s tokenized credit fund (ACRED) demonstrate that sophisticated asset managers are choosing Solana for next-generation financial products that require advanced programmability and cost efficiency. Kamino’s recent launch of sACRED exemplifies this. By tokenizing Apollo’s ACRED fund into a liquid staking token, users can now earn yield from institutional-grade credit while maintaining liquidity for DeFi strategies. This represents a fundamental evolution beyond simple asset tokenization, toward composable financial products that leverage the inherent programmability of Solana, creating yield opportunities that are impossible in traditional finance. 

Emerging RWA Asset Categories on Solana

Simultaneously, Solana’s RWA ecosystem is pioneering entirely new categories of tokenized assets. While other networks have focused solely on digitizing existing financial instruments, Solana enables the tokenization of more complex assets.

For example, Uranium Digital is tokenizing yellowcake Uranium, Collector Crypt is tokenizing luxury collectibles, Metawealth is tokenizing residential and rental properties, and platforms like AgriDex are tokenizing the global agricultural industry. The emerging RWA categories on Solana require sophisticated compliance infrastructure, high-frequency interactions, and cost efficiency that only Solana can provide at scale. This is made possible by Solana’s compliance tooling and tokenization options.

Compliance Tooling

Solana’s compliance infrastructure is the most sophisticated regulatory framework available for tokenized assets, enabling projects to meet institutional requirements without sacrificing decentralization or performance. This compliance-first architecture is built upon three foundations that work seamlessly together. 

Token Extensions

Token Extensions offer native compliance capabilities directly at the protocol level, enabling permissioned tokens on a permissionless network. Token Extensions represent a new iteration of the Solana Program Library (SPL) standard, which extends normal token functionality to include confidential transfers, custom transfer logic, and extended metadata, among others. 

For example, Confidential Transfers allow for transfer amounts to be obfuscated via cryptographic primitives, while still being verifiable to third parties through a Global Auditor System (i.e., a built-in, read-only compliance channel that doesn’t expose on-chain amounts to the public). We can have private transfers on a public blockchain, all without sacrificing compliance.

Transfer Hooks

Transfer hooks allow projects to implement custom logic that executes during every token transfer. This allows for sophisticated compliance workflows. These hooks can be integrated with external KYC/AML providers, implement cooling-off periods for certain asset classes, or trigger reporting requirements for regulatory authorities. The programmable nature of transfer hooks allows for compliance rules to be upgraded dynamically as regulations evolve, without relying on any sort of complex token migrations or protocol changes.

Franklin Templeton’s BENJI token uses multiple extensions, including transfer hooks for custom compliance logic, a metadata pointer for enriched asset information, and a permanent delegate function that allows Franklin Templeton to be a global owner of all token accounts associated with BENJI, allowing them to burn, mint, or transfer tokens at will. 

It is possible today for asset managers to tokenize institutional products while maintaining the operational controls required by regulators and institutional investors. 

Solana Permissioned Environments

The most extreme on the compliance spectrum of Solana’s compliance toolkit is Solana Permissioned Environments (SPEs). An SPE is a fully sovereign blockchain built using Solana’s tech stack, the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), which offers high throughput, parallel execution, low fees, fast finality, and a minimal environmental footprint. 

SPEs differ from rollups or appchains as they don’t rely on the underlying blockchain for settlement or data availability. This is an entirely controllable, configurable Solana-based blockchain where anything from the gas token to blockspace, to the validator set, and validator clients can be modified. 

Numerous SPEs exist today. For example, Spherenet is a purpose-built SPE designed as a credibly neutral, privacy-preserving, natively compliant shared account ledger aimed at conducting international payments with speed, transparency, and trust minimization. 

Tokenization

Solana’s tokenized infrastructure enables efficient, scalable, and cost-effective asset representation across diverse use cases. This tech stack provides the foundation for tokenizing everything from unique collectibles to large-scale commodity inventories.

Securitize is the leader in tokenized real-world assets, bringing the world on-chain through tokenized funds in partnership with top-tier asset managers. Securitize announced full Solana support in January, using Wormhole as the messaging layer for cross-chain interoperability. Securitize is the predominant mechanism through which tokenized RWAs are coming to Solana (e.g., BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, Apollo’s ACRED).

At the developer level, Metaplex serves as a foundation for unique asset tokenization, providing various standardized frameworks for representing real-world items with rich metadata, ownership verification, and programmable transfer capabilities in the form of both fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). With over 881 million total assets created, 10.2 million unique signers, and $9.7 billion USD in total transaction value, according to their site at the time of writing, Metaplex offers a rich, industry-trusted toolset for building on Solana. 

For example, with Core, developers can create soulbound (i.e., non-transferrable) or immutable tokens with relative ease, which is particularly valuable for representing credentials, certifications, or unique asset ownership that shouldn’t be transferable.

Compressed NFTs revolutionize large-scale tokenization through concurrent Merkle trees and state compression, which reduces storage costs by over 99% while maintaining full on-chain verifiability. At a high level, compressed NFTs use state compression to store metadata on Solana’s ledger rather than in individual accounts, enabling projects to tokenize millions of assets at a fraction of the cost. 

For example, according to the Compressed NFT Calculator, it would cost ~7.6646 SOL to create a concurrent Merkle tree that could store 10 million compressed NFTs. Without Compressed NFTs, this would cost roughly 240,000 SOL.

ZK Compression is the successor to state compression, allowing developers to compress on-chain state, reducing state costs by orders of magnitude while preserving security, performance, and composability. It leverages zero-knowledge proofs to validate state transitions without exposing the underlying data by grouping multiple accounts into a single, verifiable Merkle root stored on-chain, with the underlying data stored on Solana’s ledger. It would typically cost ~0.2 SOL to create 100 token accounts, whereas with ZK Compression, the cost is reduced 5000x to ~0.00004 SOL.

Together, these innovations create a comprehensive RWA infrastructure stack that enables applications that are only possible on Solana. The combination of institutional-grade compliance via Token Extensions and SPEs, cost-effective large-scale tokenization, and Solana’s underlying performance characteristics positions the ecosystem to handle everything from simple asset certificates to complex multi-party financial instruments.

This technical foundation explains why Solana attracts a wealth of projects, including traditional asset classes, luxury collectibles, and carbon credits. Solana’s RWA ecosystem is tangible, with real-world applications that seek to redefine their respective industries through Solana-native approaches to asset ownership, trading, and compliance.

Case Studies

R3

R3 is the leading enterprise blockchain software firm, powering Corda, a private and permissioned blockchain—the world’s largest collection of permissioned RWA networks, with over $10 billion USD across its platforms, which is nearly the size of the current RWA market across all of crypto. R3 has established themselves as a dominant force in bridging traditional markets with blockchain networks, powering over 60 live solutions. Notable deployments include SIX Digital Exchange, which includes the Swiss National Bank’s wholesale CBDC, and Italy’s national payments system. 

On May 22nd, R3 announced a strategic collaboration with Solana Foundation to bring regulated financial institutions and their RWAs on Solana, marking one of the most significant institutional validations in blockchain history.

R3’s Chief Technology and Product Officer, Richard G. Brown, identified fragmentation as the primary challenge facing enterprise blockchain adoption. While Corda powers numerous successful implementations across separate networks, its limited interoperability and composability hinder growth and trap liquidity, as each project operates in isolation. Brown’s analysis noted that Layer 2s, rollups, and sidechains are not the solution to this fragmentation problem. Instead, a single shared network that everyone can use, which can scale to meet demand while keeping costs and latency low, is what is needed. 

This technical requirement led R3 to Solana, whose permissionless, scalable architecture, combined with a vibrant developer ecosystem and a ruthless focus on making the network faster and cheaper, made it the ideal solution for bridging the gap between private permissioned networks and public blockchains. R3’s move to Solana creates a direct pathway for traditional financial institutions to access decentralized finance, validating Solana as the institutional blockchain of choice.

With Standard Chartered expecting a $30.1 trillion USD demand for tokenized RWAs by 2034, RWAs present a new era of opportunity as institutional interest in tokenized assets continues to accelerate. R3’s strategic alignment with Solana signals that Solana is the network most capable of supporting the future of financial infrastructure. R3’s client base paired with Solana’s performance will position the two networks at the center of the TradFi-to-DeFi convergence that will define the next decade of financial innovation.

Uranium Digital

Uranium Digital describes itself as “[t]he first 24/7, institutional-grade uranium trading platform that offers physical settlement.” Currently, uranium has no open exchange—price discovery occurs primarily through private bilateral deals, creating deleterious opacity that impacts the entire nuclear fuel cycle. With typical procurements relying on long-term contracts that span nearly a decade, Uranium Digital aims to redefine how uranium is traded through enhanced liquidity, improved price transparency, and expanded access, ultimately bringing uranium into the digital age. 

Uranium Digital closed a $6.1 million USD seed round in March 2025, led by Framework Ventures with participation from Portal, Mirana, and Karatage. They recently announced that Christian Angermayer, founder of Apeiron Investment Group, has joined the team as a strategic investor and advisor. 

By tokenizing warehoused uranium, Uranium Digital seamlessly fits within a greater proliferation of RWAs on Solana:

• Commodities Beachhead: Uranium now joins tokenized treasuries, carbon credits, and luxury collectibles, which already all live on Solana.
• Proof of Reserves Showcase: On-chain verification of a 1:1 backing addresses non-proliferation and storage security concerns unique to nuclear primitives.
• Upside Potential of a Liquidity Flywheel: Uranium Digital has the potential to seed cross-protocol collateral markets as derivative layers come online.

Naturally, regulatory compliance is non-negotiable for a commodity such as uranium. Uranium Digital will need to comply with various nuclear-materials transport laws, KYC/AML requirements, and relevant sanctions across multiple jurisdictions. Moreover, launching a spot market will require sustained liquidity, credible oracles, and market-making incentives. Nevertheless, Uranium Digital is a striking example of how startups are embracing the transparency, accessibility, and financialization latent in blockchain networks, such as Solana. Dragging a multi-billion-dollar-a-year fuel market from spreadsheets and phone calls to sub-second settlements distributed across a transparent international market is a noble pursuit.

Baxus

Baxus is a ground-breaking fusion of blockchain technology and traditional luxury spirits trading. It is a vertically integrated ecosystem that combines secure physical storage, tokenization, and trading under a single platform. Baxus aims to bring the luxury spirits market, a traditionally opaque and inefficient market, on-chain in a transparent, accessible, and efficient manner. The company raised $5 million USD in seed funding led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Solana Ventures, Narwhal Ventures, FJ Labs, and various angel investors. Baxus seeks to address the fundamental inefficiencies in the luxury spirits market, which is projected to grow from $250 billion USD to $470 billion by 2032.

Unlike traditional auction houses that require collectors to wait weeks for settlement, Baxus enables global trading at any time with transparent pricing data via Solana. Each bottle is tokenized as an individual NFT, complete with 360-degree scans, provenance data, and authentication certificates. Users leverage the benefits of transacting on Solana, without actually having to go through traditional crypto user experience flows. Baxus’ wallet abstraction allows users to log in using their email address, while wallets are automatically generated in the background. Users can buy, sell, or trade spirits on their marketplace, with the option to store their bottles in Baxus’ temperature- and humidity-controlled, fire-resistant vaults across the US. Users can pay via crypto or credit card, so the entire experience abstracts away crypto complexity while maintaining all the benefits of building on Solana. 

Not only is Baxus standing at the forefront of innovation with respect to RWAs, but they’re also at the forefront of innovating for luxury commodities. Whisky fraud is a notorious issue, with counterfeiters finding a lucrative niche refilling authentic empty bottles that are impossible to detect without breaking the seal. Developed by Bond, in partnership with Baxus and Iridia, a new anti-counterfeit system was developed to verify a whisky’s content without breaking the seal. It works by embedding a verifiable molecular marker, something akin to a biological fingerprint, into the seals that cannot be replicated. Verification can be done with a simple swab test, thereby leaving the bottle intact to maintain its integrity while confirming authenticity.

Baxus is also leveraging Helium’s IoT network to revolutionize barrel tracking and supply chain monitoring in the spirits industry. LoRaWAN-compatible sensors continuously monitor critical parameters, including temperature, humidity, location, movement, and volume for individual barrels throughout the aging process, as well as bottles vaulted with Baxus. This system enables real-time tracking of spirits, fundamentally addressing the issue with traditional spirits and proper storage conditions, as these storage conditions are now verifiable without the hassle of opening barrels or bottles to check if they were stored correctly. According to first-party data from CEO and co-founder Tzvi Wiesel, over 500,000 barrels will be individually tracked and measured by the end of 2025.  

Baxus exemplifies the transformative potential of Solana’s RWA infrastructure by solving real-world problems that have plagued luxury spirits trading for decades. The platform’s success in attracting both crypto-native users and traditional collectors demonstrates how effective abstraction can bridge traditional and digital markets. This is evidenced by the fact that the pay with crypto feature on their site has increased by 11,500% this year, and the number of overseas buyers has increased 50x, according to first-party data reported by Tzvi Wiesel.

Baxus has created a blueprint for tokenizing physical luxury goods, such as rare spirits and wine, in a way that maintains the prestige and authenticity demands of high-value collectibles while unlocking global liquidity, more efficient markets, and more transparent price discovery. The combination of IoT infrastructure with advanced authentication technology, all leveraging the guarantees, efficiencies, and advantages of Solana, creates a perfect storm for Baxus to pioneer new standards for authenticated, trackable, liquid luxury asset trading. 

Baxus’ integration across multiple ecosystem components, from Helium's IoT network to a Web2-like user experience in their marketplace, showcases the composable nature of Solana’s infrastructure and its ability to enable complex, real-world applications that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive or technically impossible on other blockchains. Rare whisky and wine, a new asset class, is here to stay—only possible on Solana.

DePIN

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) represent one of the most tangible applications of blockchain technology. Rather than relying on corporations to build and maintain critical infrastructure, DePIN protocols enable individuals to contribute computing power, wireless connectivity, environmental sensors, location data, and other physical resources in exchange for rewards, empowering people to improve the public infrastructure around them.

Messari’s State of DePIN 2024 states that DePIN is in its “earliest innings” with <0.1% market share of $1 trillion USD+ end-markets, including wireless, compute, energy, and identity. DePIN flywheels combine the economies of scale of traditional infrastructure with the network effects of a tech platform and the liquidity moats of a currency to create the first triple-point business model.

Solana has emerged as the leading blockchain for DePIN applications, again, due to its predictable low fees, high throughput, and sub-second transaction guarantees. These characteristics are essential for networks that require frequent micropayments, real-time data verification, and coordination amongst thousands of distributed nodes. The validation of Solana’s DePIN advantages is evident in its past migrations: Helium migrated from its own blockchain to Solana in April 2023, while Render Network migrated from Ethereum to Solana in November 2023. Both projects cited scalability and cost benefits as primary motivators. 

The sector has demonstrated remarkable growth, collectively attracting hundreds of thousands of participants worldwide. Networks like Helium Mobile have onboarded over 100,000 subscribers monthly, while mapping protocols like Hivemapper have mapped one-third of the global road network through crowdsourced contributions. This scale of participation validates the economic model of token-incentivized physical infrastructure deployment.

Solana’s DePIN ecosystem encompasses diverse infrastructure categories, including:

• WiFi connectivity from Andrena
• Bandwidth markets like Grass Network
• GPU computing from IO.net and Gradient Network 
• Machine learning model networks like CrunchDAO
• AI inference networks like Kuzco
• Decentralized content delivery networks like Pipe
• Energy storage DePINs like Powerledger
• Live flight tracking data from Wingbits
• Cloud gaming infrastructure networks like Shaga
• Real-time positioning networks like GEODNET 

These protocols are creating new economic opportunities while challenging traditional centralized models. PC owners can monetize idle hardware, drivers can earn passive income while driving, and property owners can generate passive income by installing simple devices on their roofs.

Recognizing DePIN’s explosive potential, the Solana Foundation has actively supported the ecosystem’s growth through comprehensive developer resources. This includes open-source code examples, detailed getting-started and migration guides, and practical tutorials demonstrating real-world implementations—from basic sensor integration to building crypto-enabled drink dispensers. 

Real-world data is the new oil, and DePIN is the pipeline. Solana-based DePIN projects are already delivering tangible results across multiple industries.

Case Studies

Helium

Helium is a decentralized, Solana-based wireless infrastructure project that allows individuals and organizations to deploy and operate networks through token incentivization. More aptly, it can be described as a global LoRaWAN network for IoT devices, as well as a cellular offload and Wi-Fi network for mobile connectivity. This is achieved through wireless gateways called hotspots (i.e., small, low-powered devices akin to miniature cell towers that connect to other hotspots over long distances) to provide coverage. 

HNT is the primary token powering Helium, with IOT and MOBILE used to facilitate the LoRaWAN and 5G networks, respectively. The Helium Network uses Proof-of-Coverage (PoC) to verify that hotspots accurately represent their location, configuration, and the wireless coverage they create, while incentivizing hotspot operators to deploy in underserved areas.

Originally, Helium was built on its own custom Layer 1 blockchain. However, the Helium developer team proposed a move to Solana with HIP 70, as part of their governance model, citing higher uptime, greater composability, and a better user experience, all while maintaining a higher level of security and low cost of use. The community voted overwhelmingly in favor of the proposal, and the team migrated to Solana in April 2023. Helium’s COO, Scott Sigel, described the migration as largely boring—they migrated successfully without any hiccups. It was an engineer's dream.

Total network traffic (i.e., data credit usage) since Helium’s migration to Solana is over $2.8 million USD. Mobile usage vastly outpaces IoT, as evident in the data credits burned over the past month. 

The true validation of Helium’s model came through Helium Mobile, their mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that leverages Helium’s 5G networks, and seamlessly switches users over to T-Mobile’s network when Hotspot coverage isn’t sufficient. 

In Q1, while AT&T lost 20,000 subscribers, T-Mobile gained 45,000, and Verizon added 137,000. However, Helium Mobile surged with approximately 300,000 new subscribers, averaging around 100,000 per month. The network reached an all-time high of over 5,400 daily signups on June 2nd, demonstrating sustained growth.

The primary growth driver for Helium Mobile is its Carrier Offload Program, which launched in 2024. With this program, Helium started partnering with legacy telecom companies (e.g., T-Mobile, Movistar, AT&T, Google Orion, Wefi) to use Helium Mobile Hotspots when their users are in areas with insufficient coverage. 

In April 2025, Helium announced its partnership with AT&T, stating AT&T customers will automatically connect to Helium Hotspots and pay $HNT to hosts for every gigabyte transferred. Messari’s State of Helium Q1 2025 report noted that offloaded data has reached 1,140.9 TB, representing a 138.6% quarter-on-quarter increase. Through this program, legacy telecom providers save money and offer better coverage, while Helium receives more traffic routed through its network. In turn, this leads to more rewards for Hotspot owners and more HNT burned. 

According to Helium World, a global coverage map for Helium Mobile and IoT, at the time of writing, Helium Mobile boasts an impressive:

• $2.67 million USD in monthly revenue 
• Over 956 thousand daily users
• 32.31 TB daily data transfers
• Over 97,000 mobile hotspots

This is even more impressive when considering that, as of February 2025, Helium Mobile offers a free mobile plan with 3GB of data. Its Air plan is $15 per month with 10GB of data, and its Infinity plan is $30 per month with unlimited data. 

While Helium Mobile captures most of the headlines, the network’s IoT infrastructure demonstrates the transformative potential of decentralized wireless infrastructure for real-world applications beyond consumer mobile service. 

With over 279,000 active hotspots, Helium’s LoRaWAN network enables innovative use cases that traditional centralized infrastructure would fail to support economically. For example, Greenmetrics.ai is using Helium’s Hotspot operators in Porto, Portugal, to detect floods early, mitigate flood damage, and enhance alerting and evacuation processes through data-driven decision-making. Although it is a more dated example, when the Rua da Prata flood occurred in May 2023, Greenmetrics sensors detected a 10-fold increase in underground water levels, alerting the Civil Protection Agency 15 minutes before downtown flooding began.

This also extends to cultural institutions. Museums and libraries are leveraging Helium’s LoRaWAN hotspots through Heliotics to track temperature and humidity, thereby preserving exhibits and enhancing visitor experiences through smart ambient monitoring. In Slovakia, hospitals are using Heliotics’ Vastum IoT’s smart waste management containers to streamline operations and promote sustainability through optimized collection routing.

BrDot’s partnership with Centro Universitário Católica do Tocantins (UniCatólica) demonstrates how Helium’s network can be used for streamlining agricultural applications. BrDot is enabling early detection and treatment of livestock illnesses in Brasil via UniCatólica’s biocapsules for monitoring dairy cows and preventing disease spread. This would be prohibitively expensive using traditional cellular networks. However, it becomes economically viable through Helium.

Helium’s success, with its diverse range of IoT applications combined with Helium Mobile’s explosive growth, validates DePIN’s core principle: token incentives can coordinate massive physical infrastructure deployment while creating sustainable economic models that challenge traditional, centralized monopolies. Over 1,140 TB of carrier offload data, partnerships spanning from AT&T to Telefonica, deployments across six continents addressing everything from flood detection to livestock health, all made possible because of the predictable low fees, high throughput, and reliability of Solana.

Hivemapper

Hivemapper is revolutionizing global mapping with a decentralized approach that incentivizes drivers worldwide to contribute real-time mapping data through dashcam footage. They aim to create the most comprehensive and up-to-date street-level imagery database, while also generating new economic opportunities for drivers. The project has attracted significant investor attention, having raised $18 million USD in Series A funding led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Solana Ventures, Craft, Spark Capital, Shine Capital, and Founder Collective. 

As of May 28th, Hivemapper has mapped one-third of the global road network, amounting to over 540 million kilometers. This milestone surpasses many traditional mapping efforts in both speed and geographic coverage. Hivemapper’s raison d’être is that billions of people around the world use mapping apps daily, millions of businesses pay for and use mapping APIs, and we have ~1.5 billion vehicles that are adding automated driving features that require mapping data—so, why should they rely on uneven, out-of-date data?

Traditional mapping companies often rely on outdated satellite imagery and street-level updates. Hivemapper’s network of contributors ensures continuous data collection, with some areas receiving multiple updates per week compared to the annual or bi-annual updates typical of legacy providers. While other providers cover millions of miles of roads globally, Hivemapper’s decentralized model enables continuous mapping of underserved regions where traditional mapping companies have little to no economic incentive to operate. By leveraging existing driver routes rather than deploying mapping vehicles globally, Hivemapper has significantly lower operational costs while maintaining high-quality data.

Users can contribute to Hivemapper in two distinct ways: mapping and training the map API. To map, contributors must have a certified device that follows the Hivemapper Network’s Open Dashcam (OCD) specification. This device will collect and upload valuable street-level imagery as they go about their normal daily driving. The first 500 and last 500 meters of a given trip are automatically discarded for privacy reasons. Moreover, contributors can define specific geographic zones as personal privacy zones where their device will stop recording. This also extends to network privacy zones, such as military bases, nuclear power plants, or private industrial facilities. 

Alternatively, contributors can go through tasks on Map AI Trainers to audit map data. For example, a contributor will be asked to identify the speed limit for a given sign, confirm whether there is evidence of roadwork in a given image, or determine whether two or more objects are the same. Contributors are assigned a reputation score, ensuring that skilled tasks are completed by skilled reviewers. Hivemapper has no tolerance for contributors acting in bad faith and aggressively protects the network against them.

Both drivers and trainers receive HONEY rewards for their contributions. HONEY is also burned whenever enterprises and developers consume map data to support their products and services. This tokenized incentive model has proven remarkably effective in scaling global infrastructure, with the network supporting over 160,000 contributors who have helped map more than 540 million kilometers across six continents. This economic model extends to enterprise revenue streams as delivery companies, insurance firms, and government agencies can now rely on Hivemapper’s frequently updated mapping data for route optimization, risk assessment, and infrastructure planning. 

Bee Maps, the company behind Hivemapper’s enterprise and business-related endeavors, is trusted by leaders in mapping, automotive, logistics, autonomous driving, media, and beyond. These leaders include Lyft, Mapbox, Trimble, NBC Universal, and Fortex, to name a few.

Hivemapper’s success demonstrates that token incentives can coordinate the deployment of massive physical infrastructure, that distributed networks can outpace centralized alternatives in both speed and coverage, and that blockchain coordination can create sustainable economic models. As Hivemapper continues to expand into specialized data collection with AI Trainers, it continues to demonstrate how Solana-based DePIN protocols are challenging entrenched monopolies while creating new economic opportunities for everyday participants worldwide.

Shaga

Shaga integrates decentralized physical infrastructure with cloud gaming to provide a peer-to-peer gaming platform that offers ultra-low latency performance for gamers while creating new economic opportunities for high-end PC owners. Game on any device, with your friends in public or private lobbies, and earn while you play—an innovative model that fundamentally challenges centralized cloud gaming models.

Shaga completed a $5 million USD funding round across two raises, including a $4 million USD seed round led by IOSG Ventures in February 2025. Notable angel investors include Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Helium co-founder Amir Haleem, providing strategic validation within Solana’s DePIN ecosystem. Shaga also won first place in the physical infrastructure networks track in the 2023 Hyperdrive Hackathon, giving them early technical validation.

Shaga’s peer-to-peer architecture originally leveraged a modified Sunshine/Moonlight protocol stack wherein PCs become Sunshine hosts providing computational resources as nodes in Shaga’s network, while any device can connect as a Moonlight client to stream games. 

Since their hackathon MVP, Shaga built out an entirely different networking stack on top of QUIC with GPU buffering for frames and controls landing on the PC. This enables consumer PCs to function as miniature data centers, utilizing geographic proximity matching to minimize data transmission distance. This architecture gives Shaga an edge over traditional cloud gaming platforms. 

Shaga takes a dual approach to cloud gaming, whereby L2 state channels handle real-time gameplay, while Solana provides global settlement. According to Shaga’s whitepaper, they’ve identified 59.5 million potential PCs globally that, added as nodes, could support 214.5 million concurrent gaming sessions. Anyone looking to share resources with the community can run the Shaga Node app, so long as their PC has idle capacity and has an Nvidia 1080 graphics card or higher. 

Shaga doesn’t host its own gaming library. Instead, game titles are offered by streamers from their nodes, with game studios also incentivized to participate. 

From March to June 4th, Shaga accumulated a total of 116,877.58 streaming hours across 9,549 gaming sessions, peaking in May, which was almost a threefold increase from April. This coincides with their SoLANa party at Solana Spaces as well as TwitchCon. According to first-party data, Shaga currently has 549 nodes and 181 RTX GPU models with 1224 GB of RAM and 34.94 TB of storage, which supports 15.44 Gbps of throughput. 

Within the $5.68 billion cloud gaming market, which is projected to reach $36.3 billion by 2030, Shaga’s decentralized model offers significant cost advantages compared to centralized competitors like GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Shaga’s model eliminates data center capital expenditures while leveraging geographic proximity to achieve superior performance. Combined with strategic partnerships with Star Atlas, the development of the Odyssey controller, and demonstrated growth, Shaga is positioned in a specialized niche to catalyze the broader adoption of decentralized infrastructure models across gaming. 

AI

The Solana Foundation has identified three core focus areas driving the ecosystem’s AI development: 

1. Facilitating a vibrant agent-driven economy
2. Making LLMs excellent at writing Solana code
3. Supporting an open and decentralized AI toolkit

This strategic approach has already yielded impressive results, with over 400 submissions to the Solana AI hackathon and the rapid expansion of AI toolkit frameworks.

The Solana Developer MCP (Model Context Protocol) server was recently launched, bringing Solana expertise directly into popular IDEs like Cursor and Windsurf. This allows developers to access real-time Solana documentation, ask detailed contextual questions about what they’re working on, and receive expert guidance all without ever leaving their development environment. Specialized Anchor support allows developers to ask more complex questions like “How are CPI events implemented in Anchor 0.31?” and receive contextually aware, up-to-date responses directly in their IDE. This development represents the Solana Foundation’s commitment to making LLMs excellent at writing Solana code.

The democratization of AI development on Solana extends beyond traditional coding assistance. For example, platforms like dev.fun now enable users to build on-chain applications with a single natural language prompt. That is, users can create sophisticated on-chain applications complete with wallet integrations, token management, and complex transaction logic simply by describing their vision. The platform’s devbase engine automatically handles persistent data storage, transaction logic, and program deployment. Now, anyone, anywhere, regardless of skill level, can deploy fully functional Solana applications without requiring any backend or program work. So far, over 20,000 applications have been built.

Solana’s AI ecosystem spans from autonomous agents managing multi-million dollar positions and creating viral memecoins to sophisticated agent frameworks that simplify blockchain interactions via natural language commands. Projects like Truth Terminal (i.e., the first AI agent millionaire) and Goatseus Maximus (GOAT) have demonstrated the explosive potential for virality when AI agents engage on-chain and interact with others, like Marc Andreessen, on social media. The contributions, open-source code, and initiatives led by the likes of SendAI and ElizaOS further help the proliferation of AI agents on Solana. Due to its predictable low fees, high throughput, and parallel processing, Solana provides the ideal platform for AI workloads that require frequent on-chain interactions and real-time responsiveness. 

Building atop this infrastructure, Solana has become home to a flourishing ecosystem of agentic frameworks. These tools enable developers to create autonomous agents capable of complex on-chain interactions, from simple token transfers to actively managing DeFi strategies.

AI Agents

Several AI development frameworks are currently available on Solana. For the purposes of this report, we will focus on the frameworks listed on the official Solana site: Solana Agent Kit, Eliza, Rig, GOAT, and Zerepy.

Solana Agent Kit is a toolkit developed by SendAI to connect any AI agent to 30+ Solana protocols and perform 60+ Solana-specific interactions (e.g., NFT management, lending assets, executing blinks, swapping tokens, sending Jito bundles, cross-chain bridging, etc.), all while being compatible with Eliza, Langchain, Perplexity, and Vercel’s AI SDK. The kit’s modular design allows developers to selectively install components based on their needs: token operations, NFT management, DeFi integrations, and other miscellaneous operations, including airdrops, price feeds, and domain registrations.

ElizaOS has emerged as a powerful multi-agent simulation framework designed to create, deploy, and manage autonomous AI agents. It provides a flexible framework that combines multiple applications into a unified system with persistent memory, all built in TypeScript. 

What differentiates Eliza is its character-driven approach to agent development. Agents are defined through JSON configuration files that specify personalities, behaviors, available actions, and interaction patterns. This allows developers to create distinct “characters” with their own traits, knowledge bases, and capabilities without needing to modify any core code. The framework’s success is evident in its high-profile deployments, like a16z’s AI VC fund deployment on daos.fun. 

Rig is a Rust-native agent development framework designed specifically for high-performance applications that require maximum efficiency and reliability across multiple LLMs and vector stores. Rig is focused on portable, modular, lightweight, full-stack AI agents that can handle intensive computational workloads without the performance overhead typically associated with Python- and JavaScript-based agents. While requiring more technical expertise than its alternatives, Rig’s performance characteristics make it the preferred choice for agents where computational efficiency and system reliability are paramount.  

GOAT (Great Onchain Agent Toolkit) is an agentic framework sponsored by Crossmint, offering 200+ integrations across multiple blockchains, platforms, and use cases. The toolkit’s strength lies in its comprehensive cross-chain support and practical financial capabilities. Agents can use major protocols like Uniswap and Balancer on Ethereum, Polymarket on Polygon, Jupiter, and Meteora on Solana, and even purchase physical goods from Amazon. The framework supports both TypeScript and Python, and is modular, meaning that developers only need to install the specific tools they need. 

ZerePy is an open-source Python framework built from a modularized version of the Zerebro backend, allowing developers to deploy autonomous agents across multiple social media platforms while maintaining on-chain capabilities on both the SVM and EVM. ZerePy supports a wide range of social media platforms (e.g., Twitter/X, Discord, Farcaster) and LLM providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, EternalAI, and xAI, with a GOAT toolkit integration. While ZerePy offers a familiar Python development environment for developers, the framework does not appear to be in active development, making it more suitable for experimentation or side projects rather than production deployments.

Case Studies

SendAI

SendAI is a development lab and community dedicated to scaling AI on Solana. They hosted the Solana AI hackathon, created the Solana Agent Kit and Solana MCP, and are part of the SEND Ecosystem, which is a collective of sovereign startups unified with a singular marketing engine and token.  

The Solana AI Hackathon had over 400 project submissions, with 21 winners and over $275,000 USD in prizes. Hosted over 15 days from December 10th to 23rd, 2024, developers competed to build the best AI agents across different tracks, including autonomous chat agents, meme agents, social and influencer agents, agent infrastructure, agent token tooling, DeFi agents, and trading agents. 

The Hive, a modular network of interoperable DeFi agents, won the main track for the best overall agent. Second and third place belong to FXN, a platform where intelligent agents compete, collaborate, and execute in real-time, and JailbreakMe, the first open-source AI security platform that allows users to earn bounties for breaking AI agents, respectively. SendAI announced the full list of winners in a thread on X.

SendAI’s flagship Solana Agent Kit enables agents to perform over 60 autonomous blockchain operations across 40+ Solana protocols, including Jupiter, Raydium, Orca, Meteora, Sanctum, PumpFun, and Drift. Their Solana-native approach to AI development differentiates it from multi-chain competitors like GOAT and Eliza. SendAI provides the deepest Solana protocol integration, leveraging its vertical expertise. Additionally, their security-first approach includes embedded wallet support via Turnkey and Privy, which eliminates direct private key exposure when crafting and confirming transactions. At the time of writing, the toolkit has over 1,500 stars on GitHub, has been forked 771 times, and has been officially endorsed by Solana leadership.  

SendAI also developed a Solana agent kit MCP server, referred to as Solana MCP. For context, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a server that provides on-chain tools for AI to interact with Solana through a standardized interface. This implementation is based on the Solana Agent Kit to streamline these interactions. The MCP server extends Claude’s capabilities, enabling it to interact with Solana, execute transactions, query account information, and manage multiple wallets directly within development environments like Cursor and Windsurf.

More recently, SendAI launched the Solana AppKit, an open-source React Native toolkit designed to simplify mobile app development on Solana. AppKit provides prebuilt modules, integrated protocols, and a single command that enables developers to quickly scaffold their app, allowing them to build battle-tested apps in minutes rather than weeks. 

Similar to the Solana Agent Kit, AppKit features a modular architecture, allowing developers to select and integrate only the components their application requires, thereby keeping everything lightweight. It provides over 19 protocol integrations out of the box, including but not limited to wallet management through Privy, Turnkey, Dynamic, and Solana Mobile’s Wallet Adapter, trading capabilities via Jupiter and Raydium, fiat on-ramps via MoonPay, and AI integration through SendAI’s own Solana Agent Kit. Upcoming modules currently in development include built-in DAO tooling, ZK Compression, ephemeral rollups, live streaming, and advanced DeFi interactions, such as lending and borrowing strategies. 

As Solana’s AI ecosystem continues to grow, SendAI has positioned itself as the premier development lab, capturing value from the increasing demand for AI-blockchain integrations. With SendAI planning to offer grants soon, providing comprehensive AI resources to help accelerate agentic development, the future of AI on Solana is in safe hands. 

Nosana

Nosana is a decentralized GPU marketplace built on Solana that aims to democratize access to AI computing power by connecting GPU owners with AI developers through a peer-to-peer network. By tapping into underutilized devices, Nosana allows users to monetize idle GPU resources while distributing AI inference (i.e., a model uses its learned knowledge to generate predictions, conclusions, or outputs based on new data) over a massive, decentralized scale. This model reduces e-waste and distributes computation into the hands of the community, independent of the centralized tech giants that currently dominate the AI landscape.

Founded in 2021 by Jesse Eisses and Sjoerd Dijkstra, Nosana has evolved from a CI/CD-focused platform to become a leading decentralized inference provider, as the platform launched to the public on January 13th, 2025. Nosana boasts savings of up to 6x on compute costs compared to traditional providers without compromising performance. They employ a dynamic pricing model to reflect market conditions, keeping GPU costs competitive while providing consistent income for GPU hosts. Note that every GPU host that joins must complete performance benchmarks before entering a Community Market, and only proven hosts are upgraded to Premium Markets, where they serve workloads at higher returns. Ongoing performance tests developed by Nosana’s research and development lab ensure reliable results, maintain high standards, and facilitate the network’s growth. 

NOS is the native token of the Nosana Network, which is used for node reward payments, staking emissions, and securing Nosana’s network. Nosana also functions as a completely decentralized organization—all aspects of the network are governed by NOS token holders. At the time of writing, there are currently 16,505 stakers with $18,244,840 USD worth of NOS staked. GPU hosts are required to stake NOS, ensuring only trusted participants contribute to the network and are rewarded for their reliable service. 

Nosana has seen considerable traction, with 1,761,873 completed deployments, 914 running deployments, and 143 queued deployments, totaling 1,771,630 hours of work, according to Nosana’s explorer at the time of writing. 

The network’s growth is partly due to its strategic partnerships. For example, in September 2024, before launching publicly, Nosana had partnered with Sogni, a creative platform powered by a purpose-built DePIN protocol that uses Nosana to power their next-gen art tools. With Nosana, Sogni has generated 95,441,825 images across 1,448,115 compute hours. Nosana has also formed strategic partnerships with other projects, such as Rivalz for AI oracles, Ocada for AI agent optimization, and PiKNiK for integrating high-performance GPUs into its DePIN network.

Nosana’s Solana-native architecture enables sub-second transaction times and predictable low fees, which are essential for pay-per-use GPU computing. Nosana’s singular focus on AI inference allows for deeper optimizations regarding latency and resource allocation specific to serving trained AI models like LLaMA 2 and Stable Diffusion. Looking ahead, with AI compute demands growing exponentially and the continued lack of GPUs on the market, Nosana is positioning itself as a critical infrastructure provider for the next generation of AI applications—applications that require cost-effective, scalable, and censorship-resistant computing.

Nous Research

Nous Research democratizes the development of open-source, human-centered AI. Their mission is to create and democratize access to the world’s best intelligence.

Nous recently launched Psyche, a decentralized training network that distributes AI development across underutilized hardware. This is achieved through their custom peer-to-peer networking stack, which coordinates globally distributed GPUs running DisTrO, or a family of optimizers that leverage properties of machine learning training to massively compress the information passed among accelerators. Psyche uses Solana to decentralize parts of its infrastructure for coordination and storing attestations. Their testnet marked the largest pre-training run conducted over the internet to date, with the pre-training of a 40B parameter LLM. Psyche’s decentralized architecture is divided into its authorizer, client, coordinator, mining pool, treasurer, and Solana-specific tooling.

Nous recently held the Nous RL Environments Hackathon in San Francisco. The hackathon was held on May 18th, with 386 registrants working with Atropos, Nous’ reinforcement learning environments framework that reliably coordinates tasks across potentially thousands of distributed workers, to compete for a prize pool of $50,000 USD. Partners included xAI, Nvidia, Neblisau, SHACK15, Akash Network, Lambda, TensorStax, and RunPod. 

Winning submissions included a Pokémon showdown environment, an environment created to generate cybersecurity rule sets from threats, a model trained to predict the punchline of a joke based on its setup, as well as agentic doctors. Nous tweeted the complete list of winners, and all submissions can be found as pull requests made to the Atropos GitHub repository.

Nous Research represents a critical piece of Solana’s vision for facilitating a vibrant agent-driven economy and supporting an open and decentralized AI landscape. By enabling the distributed training of massive language models across consumer hardware paired with their proven success in conducting the largest internet-based pre-training run, Nous Research is pioneering the future of accessible AI. As AI becomes increasingly central to global innovation, Nous Research’s approach ensures that the infrastructure powering the next generation of artificial intelligence remains open, decentralized, and accessible to all, positioning Solana at the center of one of the most important technological transformations of our time. 

Mobile

The future of crypto is mobile. Solana Labs recognizes this and, using their expertise in telecommunications, has a renowned focus on developing mobile-first architecture. While other blockchains have struggled to create meaningful mobile experiences, Solana’s technical architecture, combined with purpose-built hardware and developer tooling, positions it at the forefront of the mobile crypto renaissance.

Solana’s mobile strategy consists of the Solana Mobile Stack (SMS), purpose-built hardware like smartphones, and decentralized app distribution. This integrated approach addresses the fundamental challenges that have prevented other blockchains and apps from achieving mobile-first adoption. That is, poor user experience, security concerns, and traditional app stores.

Solana Mobile Stack (SMS)

The Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) provides key technologies for building Android applications that interface with Solana. Essentially, it’s a continuously evolving SDK with libraries for mobile wallets, seed vaults, a dApp store, and Solana Pay. 

Mobile Wallet Adapter

The Mobile Wallet Adapter (MWA) provides a generic protocol specification for connecting mobile wallets to dApps, removing one of the biggest pain points in mobile development. It offers a unified wallet integration with one of its various client SDKs, including React Native, Kotlin, and Flutter, allowing users to connect using a familiar wallet without requiring any additional sign-up steps.

Seed Vault

The Seed Vault represents a breakthrough in mobile crypto security by leveraging a trusted execution environment (TEE) built into modern smartphones. Rather than storing private keys in software, the Seed Vault isolates operations within the device’s most privileged security layer, meaning private keys, seed phrases, and secrets are stored in a secure element (SE) separate from the application, yet still capable of interacting with applications running on the device. 

Solana dApp Store

The Solana dApp Store provides an alternative to the restrictive and extractive policies of traditional app stores. While Apple and Google charge developers a 30% revenue share and frequently ban or restrict crypto applications, the Solana dApp store operates as a crypto-friendly, fee-free app store for Solana Mobile devices. The Seeker comes with both the Solana dApp Store and Google Play Store available, offering a choice to users without locking them into a Solana-only phone.

Solana Pay

Solana Pay enables transactions through native QR codes or NFC support built directly into the mobile stack. This integration handles payment request parsing, transaction building, and confirmation flows, making crypto payments as seamless as traditional mobile payment systems. Thus, merchants can accept SOL and other SPL tokens, including stablecoins, with the same ease as existing payment methods. Solana Pay has proven to be a popular option for crypto-forward offerings. For example, the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, is selling watches that can be bought with the $TRUMP token using Solana Pay. 

The open-source nature of the Solana Mobile Stack has attracted projects across gaming, DeFi, social platforms, and creator tools to create a vibrant ecosystem of mobile-first applications. Combined with the upcoming Solana Mobile Builder Grants Program and Solana Mobile Hackathon, Solana’s mobile developer ecosystem is expanding rapidly. As mobile represents the primary device for billions of people around the world, SMS provides the technical foundation for mainstream adoption through the devices people use every day.

Smartphones

Solana Mobile, a subsidiary of Solana Labs, had its first foray into mobile development with Saga, a flagship mobile phone with features and functionality that make interacting with Solana seamless. Saga was revealed on June 22, 2022, at an event in New York, where the Solana Mobile Stack was also unveiled. At a $1,000 USD price point and mid-range Android specifications, only ~2,500 units were sold in the first several months, and the price was subsequently reduced to $600 USD. Tech reviewers, including prominent YouTuber Marques Brownlee, criticized the phone as unnecessary and overpriced, awarding it “Bust of the Year” in his Mobile Awards.

However, Saga’s fortune changed in December 2023 with the rising value of BONK, as 30 million was airdropped to each phone. The transformation was swift and unprecedented, with sales increasing tenfold within 48 hours of BONK’s surge. All 20,000 units were sold out by December 16, 2023, with secondary market prices on eBay ranging from $3,000 to $5,000. 

Saga’s success catalyzed a renewed mobile effort, featuring a broad range of airdrops and rewards for Saga owners. Building on this success, Solana Mobile announced the Seeker smartphone in January 2024. This new phone will address the lessons learned from the Saga while dramatically expanding market reach. The Seeker was priced at $500 USD, half of the Saga’s original price point, but with improved specifications: a 6.36-inch AMOLED display with increased brightness and reduced bezels, 8 GB RAM, 128 GB storage, a 4500 mAh battery capable of wireless charging, and a significantly improved 108+32MP camera. 

The Seed vault wallet offers a natively integrated hardware seed vault and mobile wallet with fingerprint entry built exclusively for the Seeker. The Seeker ID combines a user’s wallet address, username, and Genesis Token into a single, easy-to-use ID, serving as a digital passport to the Solana Mobile ecosystem. Users can transact on-chain with their unique .skr username, which also acts as proof of authenticity. Also, to maintain trust and security as the platform expands, TEEPIN (Trusted Execution Environment Platform Infrastructure Network) connects secure hardware, platform verification, and a network of Guardians to create an open, decentralized mobile platform.     

The Seeker has already surpassed 140,000 pre-orders from 57 countries, generating over $60 million USD in revenue. This success has validated an entirely new business model that aims to capture the next wave of mainstream crypto adoption through mobile-first experiences. Solana’s integrated approach, combining hardware, software, and economic incentives, represents the most comprehensive mobile crypto strategy in the industry.

Conclusion

The evidence is clear: Solana has evolved from an ambitious technical experiment wrought with fear, uncertainty, and doubt into the foundational infrastructure for the next generation of digital finance. This report has demonstrated that across key dimensions, including technical performance, economic activity, developer adoption, institutional validation, and real-world utility through RWAs, DePIN, AI, and mobile, Solana stands alone as the blockchain built for mainstream adoption.

Solana’s fifteen months of continuous uptime, consistent processing of over 162 million transactions daily, and median fees under a penny during peak demand periods have definitively resolved early criticisms about the network’s reliability. Moreover, Solana is sufficiently decentralized across its validator set, ecosystem developers, hosting providers, and geographical locations such that no single entity can censor the network.

With over $550 million in Real Economic Value generated in January 2025 alone, Solana has proven that sustainable economic activity comes from volume and utility, rather than artificial scarcity due to poor design choices. The network’s 81% dominance of DEX transactions, the explosive growth of stablecoins, the development of Solana Economic Zones, and its flourishing DeFi ecosystem demonstrate a mature financial ecosystem that rivals traditional markets in sophistication, while surpassing them in accessibility and efficiency.

Solana’s rise as the number one destination for new developers is emblematic of a generational shift in blockchain development. World-record hackathon participation, comprehensive educational infrastructure, Superteam, and the myriad of Foundation-led and community-led events have created a self-reinforcing flywheel of curiosity, connection, and innovation.

Recent regulatory clarity, combined with pending ETF approvals and corporate treasury adoption, marks Solana’s transition from a speculative asset into institutional infrastructure. Franklin Templeton’s characterization of Solana as “one of the first institutionally focused chains” reflects a broader recognition that traditional finance requires blockchain infrastructure capable of handling institutional-grade volume, compliance requirements, and user expectations—capabilities that currently are only possible on Solana. 

From luxury spirits and decentralized wireless networks to cloud gaming and human-centered AI, Solana isn’t merely participating in the digitization of global financial markets—they’re leading it. The convergence documented in this report—technical maturity, economic dominance, developer adoption, and institutional validation—uniquely positions Solana for the challenges ahead. Solana’s advantages will only compound as the full Firedancer client approaches mainnet adoption, as Alpenglow rewrites Solana’s consensus bringing it on par with traditional Web2 user experiences, as traditional institutions accelerate their digital asset strategies, as regulatory frameworks solidify globally, and as the myriad of other developments evolve within the crypto landscape.

The future of internet capital markets is here, and it’s being built on Solana.