If you buy SOL for its future, you are probably not thinking of memecoins but of tokenized funds from BlackRock, networks of radio hotspots and dashcams, AI programs that pay for things themselves. And there is evidence for that future. Solana's share of tokenized securities has risen clearly since early 2025. BlackRock now keeps 43 percent of its tokenized money market fund BUIDL on Solana.
Look only at the fund side, and you see a chain where the future is already running.
But in the third quarter of 2026, 65.7 percent of what the apps on Solana took in came from memecoin trading. Tokenized securities, hardware networks, payments and AI together brought in 1.2 percent.
If you hold SOL for the future, one question is worth asking: is that future already paying for the chain, or is gambling still paying for it?
What Solana does: a chain built for speed
Solana is its own blockchain with its own currency, SOL. SOL has traded on the exchange Binance since August 2020. The network is secured by proof of stake: validators deposit SOL and take turns building blocks.
Speed was always the goal. Since 9 October 2026, each block slot lasts only 200 milliseconds. Measured, it is 215 to 218 milliseconds. A transaction is final today after about 12.8 seconds.
The network currently runs a good 4,500 transactions per second. Of these, 68 percent are votes among validators. Around 1,400 to 2,000 per second come from users. Mert Mumtaz of the infrastructure provider Helius did report 107,540 transactions per second in August 2025. That was a single block, though, filled mostly with calls that did nothing.
Solana used to be known for outages. According to a list kept by Helius, block production stopped six times between December 2020 and February 2024, once for 17 hours. In February 2023 the network also ran in emergency mode for about 19 hours. It has not happened since 6 February 2024. On 12 August 2026, 28.83 percent of the stake went offline at the hosting provider TeraSwitch, and the chain kept running.
Solana is fast, and it has not stopped for more than two and a half years.
What else has the team built on top of that?
What makes Solana special: it delivers, just later than promised
| Project | What it brings | Status on 13 Oct 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Firedancer | a second, independently written validator program from Jump | announced 2022; first release labeled "Mainnet" on 4 Aug 2026; runs on 15.55 % of stake |
| 200 ms slots | shorter block time | live since 9 Oct 2026 |
| Alpenglow | finality in about 150 instead of 12,800 milliseconds | approved with 98.27 % on 2 Sep 2025; on the Devnet test network since 25 Sep 2026; 28 Sep 2026 date missed; mainnet activation set for 21 Oct 2026, not yet active |
| SGP-0002 | reduce new SOL faster | approved on 28 Aug 2026, not yet active |
Much of it is late, but it gets delivered. Firedancer took almost four years from its appearance at the Breakpoint 2022 conference to its first "Mainnet" release.
The base has narrowed, though. At the end of 2023 there were 1,943 active validators; today there are 665. 18 vote accounts are enough to bring together more than a third of the stake, enough to halt the network. In 2023 it took 34. And 82.47 percent of the stake runs on the same software version, Agave 4.3.0.
Solana delivers technology. Fewer and fewer hands carry it.
So the network is fast. Who uses that speed?
Who uses Solana: record transactions, collapsing revenue
By transactions, Solana has never been more active than today. By the money that sticks, the picture is different:
| January 2025 | September 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| User transactions per day | 102.3m | 157.3m |
| Network revenue per day | about 74,600 SOL | about 9,100 SOL |
| of which tips (Jito tips) | 39,205 SOL | 1,537 SOL |
| Revenue per user transaction | 16.1 US cents | 0.63 US cents |
Revenue = fees plus the tips traders pay validators to get their transaction in first. Source: Trillium, own calculation.
Transactions rose by more than half; revenue in SOL fell 88 percent. In January 2025 the memecoin wave was at its peak, and traders paid a lot to be faster. Today an average of 0.63 cents sticks per transaction.
On top of that: in a sample of 15 blocks, a quarter of user transactions failed. Many come from trading programs that simply keep trying. How much of it is arbitrage is covered in a separate piece: 50% of Solana DEX volume isn't real trading.
Compared with other chains in September 2026: Solana took in $25.0m in fees, Tron $23.9m, BNB Chain $21.8m, Ethereum $15.9m. Tron earns almost as much as Solana, from transfers of the stablecoin USDT, with a fraction of the trading volume.
On Solana, more transactions do not mean more money.
So where is Solana really growing?
Where Solana is gaining: funds, hardware networks, agent payments
Four fields count as the long-term growth markets for blockchains: tokenized securities, stablecoins, networks of real hardware, and AI agents. In three of them, Solana is gaining share.
Tokenized securities: Solana is catching up
Tokenized securities, also called RWA (real-world assets), are fund shares, bonds or stocks held as tokens on a blockchain.
Here the rise is clear. According to a CoinGecko report, Solana's share of this market rose from 2.4 percent in early 2025 to 5.7 percent at the end of March 2026. The platform rwa.xyz, which draws the line slightly differently, puts it at 11.2 percent or $4.39bn today. That makes Solana number 3, behind Ethereum ($16.97bn) and BNB Chain ($5.85bn). Of BlackRock's BUIDL fund, none sat on Solana until January 2026; in September it was $964m of $2.25bn.
The holdings are thinly spread, though. BUIDL ($917m across 13 holder addresses) and Ctrl Alt's fund token ($725m across 3 holders) together make up 36 percent of Solana's value, spread over 16 addresses. Conversely, 88 percent of the roughly 894,000 RWA holders on Solana hold tokenized stocks, which account for 11 percent of the value. In those stocks, Solana's share fell from 17.7 to 15.2 percent in 30 days. BNB Chain holds 37.3 percent.
And earnings? Fund fees go to the issuers; the chain keeps the transaction fee. Apps on Solana took in about $0.7m from RWA in the third quarter of 2026.
In tokenized funds, Solana is gaining share. The issuers are the ones earning from it.
Stablecoins: Solana holds its place and loses the most important dollar
Stablecoins are tokens that track a dollar, such as Circle's USDC or Tether's USDT.
Solana's share of the stablecoin supply across all chains jumped from under 2 to 5.4 percent in 2024/25. Since early 2025 it has been flat at around 5 percent, 5.3 today. Over twelve months, supply on Solana grew 9.5 percent once fund tokens such as BUIDL are removed; the database DefiLlama counts those as stablecoins. The total market grew 4.3 percent, Tron 23 percent.
Of all things, Solana is losing the payment dollar USDC. Supply fell from $10.0bn to $7.2bn in twelve months, down 28 percent. Solana's share of the USDC market dropped from 16.0 percent in early 2025 to 9.7 percent. Hyperliquid now holds about as much USDC as Solana. Shopify launched its USDC checkout on Base in June 2025, and Stripe is building its own chain, Tempo. Western Union's stablecoin USDPT comes to $18m on Solana.
By number of transfers, Solana leads: 31.8 percent of all USDC transfers in one week ran over it, according to Visa and the data provider Allium. By adjusted dollar volume, however, Base, Ethereum and Tron together accounted for about 80 percent in June 2026.
And the money in this field? Issuers earn about $2.15bn a quarter from interest on their reserves. No chain gets any of it.
Solana holds its place in stablecoins. But it is losing the dollar that payments are supposed to run on.
Hardware networks: Solana is home, the field is small
DePIN stands for networks of real hardware paid for with tokens: mobile hotspots at Helium, dashcams at Hivemapper, GPS correction stations at GEODNET, computing power at Render or io.net. Almost all the big projects run on Solana.
Accordingly, Solana's share of the measured revenue of these networks is rising. Among the protocols DefiLlama tracks, it was 5.2 percent in the third quarter of 2025 and 18.7 percent a year later. Without the largest provider, Aethir, which runs on Arbitrum, it is around 60 percent. Part of that is a move, however: since late 2025, GEODNET settles mostly on Solana instead of Polygon.
The field itself is shrinking. All tracked protocols together took in $18.5m in the third quarter of 2026, against $45.0m a year earlier, down 59 percent. The research firm Messari puts the on-chain revenue of the entire sector in 2025 at $72m. The memecoin apps on Solana took in more than three times that in the third quarter of 2026 alone.
Solana is home to the hardware networks. The field is not big enough to carry a chain.
AI agents: a growing share of a shrunken market
AI agents are programs that buy things themselves, such as data or computing time. They can pay via x402, an open payment method from Coinbase.
According to the tracker x402scan, Solana's share of x402 volume rose from 14.8 percent in late 2025 to 28.9 percent in the third quarter of 2026. At the same time, volume across all chains fell from $41.2m to $3.2m a quarter, down 92 percent. In the last 30 days, 1,446 buyers paid via x402 on Solana, 34,798 on Base. In July, CoinDesk reported much higher x402 figures for 30 days. The two counts do not match, but on x402scan the direction is clearly down.
On AI agent platforms, Solana lags. At the largest provider, Virtuals, Solana never exceeded 1.5 percent of fees in any quarter. Measurable revenue from AI apps on Solana: zero.
In agent payments, Solana's share is growing in a market that has just shrunk by nine tenths.
If the future fields bring in so little, what does Solana live on?
What Solana lives on: memecoins, and others are catching up there
Memecoins are tokens without a function that live on hype. On Solana, they are created on launchpads such as pump.fun and traded via trading apps and Telegram bots. Together, these apps are Solana's largest source of revenue.
| Field | Solana's share of all chains | Direction | Share of Solana's app revenue Q3/2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tokenized securities (holdings) | 11.2 % | rising | 0.2 % |
| Stablecoins (holdings) | 5.3 %, USDC 9.7 % | flat, USDC falling | not separable |
| Hardware networks (revenue) | 18.7 % | rising, partly a move | 0.7 % |
| AI agents / x402 (volume) | 28.9 % | rising, market −92 % | 0.0 % |
| Memecoin trading (revenue) | 57.0 % | falling from 93.1 % | 65.7 % |
| Perps (revenue) | 3.5 % | falling from 36.8 % | 2.2 % |
| Prediction markets (revenue) | 0 % | not present | 0.0 % |
DefiLlama, rwa.xyz, x402scan; Q3/2026 against Q3/2025 or Q3/2024. Own grouping of app categories.
A year ago, 65.3 percent of app revenue on Solana came from the memecoin economy; today it is 65.7 percent. Over two years, the share has always been between 54 and 73 percent. Solana has not moved away from gambling.
Something else has changed: Solana is losing market share in gambling. Memecoin apps across all chains took in almost exactly as much in the third quarter of 2026 as a year earlier (−1.1 percent). On Solana it was 39.5 percent less. Solana's share fell from 93.1 to 57.0 percent. The winners were BNB Chain (from $10m to $60m a quarter) and the new Robinhood Chain with $107m. DefiLlama has only tracked Robinhood Chain since June 2026.
In the two speculative fields growing fastest, Solana is barely present. Perps are futures without an expiry date, used to bet on prices with leverage. Here Solana's share of revenue fell from 36.8 to 3.5 percent in two years. The exchange Hyperliquid took in $169m of $230m in the third quarter. Prediction markets, where people bet on events, grew 970 percent in twelve months to $72m a quarter, mostly Polymarket on Polygon. Solana's measurable share: zero.
Geoff Kendrick of the bank Standard Chartered wrote on 3 February 2026 that trading flows on Solana had shifted "from memecoin trading towards SOL-stablecoin pairs". The data since then runs the other way. Volume in the professional trading pools, where mainly SOL is swapped against stablecoins, has fallen 62 percent since late 2025. Volume directly on the memecoin launchpads rose 20 percent.
Solana is gaining where the future is supposed to be, but it still lives on gambling. And in gambling, others are catching up.
More holdings do not mean more revenue
"Tokenized funds and hardware networks take time. The revenue will come later."
That is true for holdings: Solana's RWA value grew 35 percent in 90 days. For the chain's revenue, little points that way. In tokenized funds the issuer earns, in stablecoins the issuer earns; the chain gets only the transaction fee. The hardware field shrank 59 percent in twelve months, agent payments 92 percent from their peak. And even the value sitting on Solana says less in dollars than it seems: money in Solana's DeFi protocols fell 43 percent in dollars but, counted in SOL, stayed exactly the same at 54.9m SOL.
The future fields can grow. They still have to start paying for the chain.
Tokenomics: 66 new SOL for every one burned
There are 635.7m SOL today, 589.2m of them in circulation. New SOL are created every day as rewards for validators. The inflation rate is 3.6 percent a year. That is 62,787 new SOL a day, about $6.7m.
Only about 956 SOL a day are burned, meaning removed from supply. For every SOL burned, 66 new ones are created. Until February 2025, half of the priority fees were burned. Since the SIMD-0096 upgrade, they go entirely to validators. In January 2025 the burn was still around 16,800 SOL a day; since then it has fallen about 94 percent. A proposal to burn more again (SGP-0003) failed on 28 August 2026 with 53.9 percent approval.
On the same day, a faster inflation cut passed narrowly (SGP-0002, 67.001 percent against a threshold of 66.667 percent). It is not active yet. The chain keeps lowering the rate by 15 percent a year.
What does that mean for you? 69 percent of all SOL is staked, meaning deposited with validators. Stakers get about 5.2 percent a year nominally, about 1.6 percent in real terms after dilution. Anyone who does not stake loses about 3.4 percent of their share every year. Part of the stake runs via liquid staking, where you get a tradable token for your staked SOL: 11 to 15 percent.
If you hold SOL and do not stake it, you help pay for the network's security.
Which leaves the question of who holds SOL, and who is buying or selling right now.
Who holds SOL and who sells
At launch, according to Binance Research, 37.85 percent went to investors and 62.15 percent to the team, the foundation and a community reserve managed by the foundation.
A large block sat with FTX and Alameda. In April 2024, the bankruptcy estate sold about 25 to 30 million SOL at $64, among others to Galaxy and Pantera, with lock-ups until 2028. Until January 2028, about 195,000 to 200,000 SOL are released every month, roughly a tenth of daily new issuance.
Then, in 2025, came the companies buying SOL as a reserve, and the spot ETFs:
- Forward Industries, the largest of these companies, bought 6.82m SOL on 15 September 2025 at an average of $232. Today SOL stands at $107.
- Most of these companies trade on the stock market well below the value of their SOL, at between 0.26 and 0.63 times.
- SkyAI (formerly Sharps) announced on 11 October 2026 that it had sold about half of its SOL. Upexi sold 237,729 SOL in its fiscal year, Solana Company sold SOL worth $13.3m in the first half of 2026.
- The US spot ETFs have taken in a net $1.58bn since launching on 28 October 2025 and hold about 15.9m SOL. The strongest inflow month, November 2025 with $419m, was the weakest SOL month of the ETF era: minus 28.7 percent. Since 5 October 2026, money has flowed out on seven trading days in a row (as of 13 Oct).
ETFs and reserve companies together hold about 5.3 percent of all SOL.
The big buyers came at the top. Some of them are selling now.
What did all this do to the price?
The price against bitcoin: one surge, then two and a half years back
| Year | SOL | Bitcoin | SOL against bitcoin |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 (from 11 Aug) | −47.1 % | +155.2 % | −79.3 % |
| 2021 | +11,178 % | +59.8 % | +6,958 % |
| 2022 | −94.1 % | −64.2 % | −83.6 % |
| 2023 | +920.3 % | +155.6 % | +299.2 % |
| 2024 | +86.1 % | +121.3 % | −15.9 % |
| 2025 | −34.2 % | −6.3 % | −29.7 % |
| 2026 (to 13 Oct) | −14.0 % | −4.8 % | −9.6 % |
Binance month-end closes; SOL against bitcoin from SOLUSDT and BTCUSDT.
After the FTX crash, SOL came back, but against bitcoin only in a single surge. From the low on 28 June 2023 to 17 March 2024, SOL rose 5.6-fold against bitcoin. Since then it has been 56 percent below that. Since April 2024, 12 months ended up against bitcoin and 18 down. The all-time high in dollars came on 18 January 2025 at $261.97, at the peak of the memecoin wave. Against bitcoin, that was no longer a high. Today SOL stands 59 percent below it.
Fees do not run ahead of the price; they follow it. Fees in dollars and price move closely together (rank correlation 0.67, where 1 would be lockstep and 0 no relation at all). Take out the price and measure fees in SOL, and nothing is left (−0.02). That more fees in one month lift the price against bitcoin the next does not show up (−0.03).
And the big news? Ten dates can be evaluated, including the launch of the first SOL ETF, Forward's big purchase, the Alpenglow decision and the Firedancer launch:
| Date | Event | SOL against bitcoin after 90 days |
|---|---|---|
| 25 Apr 2024 | second FTX auction | +21.3 % |
| 2 Sep 2025 | Alpenglow approved | −22.1 % |
| 15 Sep 2025 | Forward buys 6.82m SOL | −27.8 % |
| 28 Oct 2025 | first US spot ETF (BSOL) | −18.2 % |
| 12 Dec 2025 | Firedancer on mainnet | −16.0 % |
Selection from n = 10 dates, all in belege-solana.md. The 2025 dates overlap; no cause is claimed.
After 9 of 10 dates, SOL was down against bitcoin 90 days later. And since March 2024 there has been no month with a gain of more than 50 percent. The two isolated big rises before that, January 2023 and March 2024, were down against bitcoin three and six months later.
Neither deliveries nor big buyers have carried SOL against bitcoin.
That leaves the big names Solana likes to advertise. What of them can be found on-chain?
What was announced and what can be checked
In its July 2025 roadmap, the developer firm Anza wrote: "Solana should host the world's most liquid markets, not the markets with the highest volume." That is a yardstick for what was announced:
| Announcement | Who, when | What can be shown today | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stablecoin settlement over Solana | Visa, 2023 and 16 Dec 2025 | program across several chains, $3.5bn annualized; Solana's share not disclosed | partly |
| Solana Pay in Shopify stores | Shopify, 08/2023 | no volume published; USDC checkout launched on Base in 2025 | not verifiable |
| PYUSD on Solana | PayPal/Paxos, 05/2024 | $708m on Solana | verified |
| USDC payments for merchants | Stripe, 10/2024 | feature exists, no volume; own chain Tempo since 09/2025 | partly |
| USDPT on Solana | Western Union, launch 05/2026 | $18m | verified, small |
| USDCV and EURCV | Société Générale, 06/2025 | $2.0m and $1.8m on Solana | verified, small |
| BENJI fund on Solana | Franklin Templeton, 02/2025 | about $0.41m of $708m in fund assets | verified, small |
| BUIDL on Solana | BlackRock/Securitize, 03/2025 | about $0.93bn, 105 holders across all chains | verified, large |
| SWEEP liquidity fund | State Street/Galaxy, 05/2026 | $158.5m, 5 holders | verified, small |
| Commercial paper on Solana | J.P. Morgan/Galaxy, 12/2025 | volume not disclosed | partly |
| Seeker smartphone | Solana Mobile | over 175,000 units sold per the company, no independent count | not verifiable |
| Firedancer | Jump, from 2022 | mainnet release 08/2026, 15.55 % of stake | verified, late |
| Alpenglow | Anza, approved 09/2025 | live on Devnet, not active on mainnet, one date missed | partly |
| over 1 million transactions per second in the lab | Anza, Breakpoint 12/2025 | lab figure; on the network about 1,400 to 2,000 user transactions per second | not verifiable |
Almost every big partnership can be found on-chain. Most sit in the single- or double-digit millions. BUIDL is the big exception, with few institutional holders.
The big names can be found on Solana, mostly at shop-window size.
How to tell whether the future is paying
- Measure the future by revenue, not headlines. Today, 1.2 percent of app revenue on Solana comes from tokenized securities, hardware networks, payments and AI combined. If that share rises, the story holds. If it stays at one percent, Solana keeps living on gambling.
- Watch the USDC share. 9.7 percent today, after 16.0 percent in early 2025. For a chain that presents itself as a payment network, that is the most important holdings figure.
- If you hold SOL, stake it. Otherwise you lose about 3.4 percent of your share a year.
- Do not take big news as a buy signal. After 9 of 10 major dates, SOL trailed bitcoin 90 days later.
None of this makes Solana technically weak, and it does not mean the price has to fall. The technology delivers, and in tokenized funds Solana is number three today. Whether the future fields will ever bring in as much as gambling is not decided yet. Their share of app revenue will show it every quarter.
FAQ
Why does Solana count so many transactions? 68 percent of all transactions are validator votes. Of user transactions, a quarter failed in a sample, mostly from trading programs that try several times. The transaction count therefore mainly measures software.
Why do the stablecoin figures differ? DefiLlama counts fund tokens such as BUIDL and USDY as stablecoins and arrives at $16.2bn for Solana. rwa.xyz arrives at $14.8bn. In this piece, growth rates are calculated without fund tokens where stated.
What is Robinhood Chain? A new chain from the broker Robinhood. DefiLlama has only tracked it since June 2026. Whether its high trading figures reflect real demand was not checked here.
Why do the x402 figures not match? CoinDesk reported $24.24m for 30 days on 16 July 2026; x402scan shows about $1.7m for June and July combined. The two probably count different payment processors. Only the x402scan series and Solana's share of it are used here.
How it was measured
All values retrieved on 13 October 2026 between 09:25 and 11:20 UTC. Transactions, tips and validators from Trillium (per epoch since late 2023) and the Solana RPC; supply, inflation and stake via RPC. Fees, app revenue, DEX volume, stablecoins and TVL from DefiLlama, fields by own grouping of app categories, quarter against the same quarter a year earlier. Tokenized securities from rwa.xyz and CoinGecko's 2026 RWA report, x402 from x402scan, reserve companies from SEC filings, ETFs from Farside, SoSoValue and the issuers. Prices from Binance; monthly return = month-end close over previous month-end close. Price against fees via Spearman rank correlation over 67 months.
All SOL monthly returns in US dollars
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | – | – | – | – | – | – | – | +66.4 | −38.9 | −46.5 | +26.9 | −23.4 |
| 2021 | +182.1 | +207.8 | +48.1 | +120.7 | −23.5 | +8.4 | +3.5 | +194.7 | +30.6 | +43.2 | +3.0 | −18.5 |
| 2022 | −41.5 | +0.2 | +23.2 | −31.1 | −45.9 | −26.2 | +25.4 | −25.6 | +5.6 | −2.1 | −56.5 | −29.6 |
| 2023 | +139.9 | −8.5 | −3.3 | +7.5 | −8.5 | −9.4 | +25.8 | −16.8 | +8.3 | +79.7 | +54.4 | +71.5 |
| 2024 | −4.7 | +29.6 | +61.1 | −37.4 | +30.7 | −11.5 | +17.1 | −21.2 | +12.7 | +10.6 | +40.9 | −20.3 |
| 2025 | +22.4 | −36.1 | −16.0 | +18.5 | +6.0 | −1.0 | +11.2 | +16.5 | +4.0 | −10.3 | −28.7 | −6.6 |
| 2026 | −15.3 | −20.1 | −1.4 | −0.1 | −0.8 | −10.6 | −1.1 | +41.4 | +14.6 | – | – | – |
Binance SOLUSDT, month-end close over previous month-end close in percent; August 2020 from the open on 11 Aug 2020.
Not investment advice, not a recommendation, not a forecast — historical patterns are no promise.
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