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

Original Title: Time to Call the SOL Bottom?

Original author: blocmates Original compilation: Dingdang, Odaily Planet Daily

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

This report will systematically sort out the core technological upgrades that are defining the future of Solana (such as Alpenglow and Agave), deeply analyze the on-chain data performance and the health of ecological applications, and summarize our key insights on how Solana can consolidate its position as the “default high-performance public chain.”

Technological Innovations in Multiple Lines of Progress

While most users on the platform are busy chasing the latest meme emojis, the @solana core team has been advancing a highly ambitious system-level upgrade roadmap. This is not just a patchwork on a single metric, but a comprehensive engineering project aimed at enhancing network performance, security, decentralization, and user experience. These upgrades can be broadly categorized into three main types.

Category 1: Core Engine (Consensus and Client)

This is a fundamental overhaul of Solana “Engine”, aiming to enhance performance, speed, and security from the most basic level. Here is a great visualization chart that you can check out if you're curious about the current staking ecosystem.

Type II: High-Speed Networks (Throughput and Efficiency)

The focus of this part of the work is to widen the network “lanes” after enhancing the underlying performance, optimizing traffic scheduling so that it can handle higher loads in the future without congestion. If we hope for institutional users to truly go on-chain in the future, then low latency and a stable experience are foundational, not optional.

Category Three: Destination (New Capabilities in Ecology and Application Layer)

This type of upgrade is aimed directly at developers and end users, intending to provide more new features, support new types of application forms, and further enhance the decentralization level of the chain. In other words, this is a module that enables the “chain to do more things.”

The Practical Impact of Technical Improvements

From a practical usage perspective:

· Alpenglow: final confirmation speed below 150ms allows retail users to use high-frequency DeFi, gaming, or micropayment applications on-chain, with performance approaching Binance's 100ms and Aptos's 200ms standards.

· Firedancer: With a potential capability of over 1 million TPS, it far exceeds Ethereum and its L2s (such as OP's approximately 2k TPS), Sui's 300,000 TPS, and centralized exchanges (Coinbase peaks at around 500,000 TPS). It also significantly reduces the systemic risk of single client failures (Ethereum's Geth still accounts for 60% of nodes).

· Blockchain space improvement, congestion mitigation, and transaction size limit optimization: Enhance the overall experience when using the chain, enabling finer-grained microtransactions, ICOs (such as $PUMP), and fast transactions, while reducing failures caused by congestion.

· Decentralization and Node Cost Reduction: Lowering the technical barriers so that more users can run nodes, thereby enhancing the overall security and degree of decentralization of the network.

· ZK and Privacy Support: Provide a compliant, private, and secure foundation for the entry of RWA and institutional users.

· BAM (Fair Trading, MEV Protection): Ensures fairness in trading and protects users from MEV losses, making the on-chain experience closer to a CLOB's predictable low-cost environment.

· ACE (Multi-Collateral Liquidity): Further promotes the deepening of DeFi capital markets, enabling competition with platforms like Aave, and supports more complex financial instruments.

PUMP ICO: Verification of On-Chain Stress Testing

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

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

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

Data shows that as traders shift from Meme speculation to perpetual contracts, Solana's on-chain revenue metrics have been significantly impacted: the on-chain fees as a percentage of SOL's market cap have declined by more than 60% since the peak in July.

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

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

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

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

Which ecosystem participants are driving the growth of the chain?

From the perspective of TVL growth, staking products are the absolute highlight of Solana applications in the third quarter, with staking SOL provided by Binance and Bybit, as well as products from @Sanctumso, all recording over 50% growth in the third quarter.

In contrast, while the TVL of DEX, DeFi, and infrastructure products has also increased, it has not surpassed the 28% rise of SOL itself—this means that in SOL terms, these categories have actually experienced a net outflow over the past quarter.

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

In the DEX space, @Orca_so has consistently maintained a leading position in TVL efficiency (i.e., “trading speed”). At a given liquidity scale, the trading frequency per dollar on Orca is the highest.

Although Solana has always been known for being “fast and cheap,” this does not mean there are no exceptions. For example, some high-frequency deep users have average daily fee expenditures on trading platforms like @tradewithPhoton or @AxiomExchange that far exceed expectations.

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

Horizontal Comparison of Solana and Its Core Competitors

The total TVL across the entire chain was slightly below the historical high of nearly 180 billion dollars at the end of the third quarter of 2021. However, a horizontal comparison of various competing public chains shows that the quarterly changes in their TVL are actually quite limited.

The market share chart below clearly shows how the TVL of these competitors fluctuates synchronously on a weekly basis. As Newton said, “Idle capital tends to remain idle”; once capital is settled, it is often difficult to undergo large-scale migration.

In terms of user scale, Binance Smart Chain captured the most attention in the third quarter with the perpetual DEX associated with CZ—Aster. A large number of users either chose to exit in early summer or migrated from Base and Solana to BSC.

Although Solana experienced significant user growth in the second quarter, its share has declined in the third quarter, which is almost in sync with the declining market interest in Meme trading.

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

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

VC Funding Flow: Which Projects Are Securing Financing?

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

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

· @bulktrade: Completed a $5 million seed round in August 2025, aimed at institutional users with a perpetual DEX, featuring zero gas for batch execution, with single transactions reaching up to $10 million. This round was led by @robotventures and @6thManVentures, and Solana co-founder @aeyakovenko also participated as an angel investor. Its alphanet testnet will be launched in the third quarter.

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

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

Where are the opportunities and risks?

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

Projects that stood out in Q3

Among the numerous dApps that emerged this quarter, the following projects that have gone live are particularly noteworthy:

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

· @DefiTuna is a new DeFi AMM launched in the third quarter, which integrates a true on-chain limit order mechanism directly into the AMM design, avoiding security risks associated with off-chain matching, while allowing LPs to use up to 5x leverage for liquidity position allocation (leveraged returns).

· @xStocksFi tokenizes stocks held by licensed brokers, allowing crypto users to easily access the economic rights of their underlying stocks; it launched in early Q3, with a quarterly trading volume exceeding $800 million and a market share of approximately 60%.

· Pump.fun (streaming + mobile) started a token buyback in the third quarter after enduring significant selling pressure previously, and the live streaming feature was relaunched, with a total buyback scale reaching 100 million dollars by the end of the quarter.

· @MetaDAOProject made headlines due to large-scale oversubscription projects including Umbra. Projects launched through MetaDAO will bind legal, economic, and governance rights in their tokens, which are referred to as “ownership coins.” Additionally, governance proposals are not decided through voting but are priced through trading in “futarchic markets,” allowing participants to express their views with real money.

DAT Development Status

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

Nevertheless, Solana DAT still struggles to escape the mNAV contraction pressure that generally appeared in the crypto DAT ecosystem in the third quarter.

Addressing Common Criticisms

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

Biggest Risk: Brand Narrative

Solana has long been labeled as “the best place for experimentation.” Trading bots, ICM, consumer applications, AI agents—where did these innovations first appear? Solana.

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

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

· Base leverages the Base app and Zora to deeply bet on the narrative of consumer applications, which was once Solana's area of advantage;

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

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

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

Our Judgment on the Prospects of Solana

Although the market appears slightly sluggish after the end of the Meme season, the significance of short-term price fluctuations is diminishing. Solana has established a solid position and is determined to exist in the long term.

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

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

Solana represents the spirit of “daring to try and compete, open competition, and extreme marketization” in the cryptocurrency field, and is the best arena for validating product-market fit. Regardless of where this cycle leads, Solana has the conditions to survive and continue to thrive. Even if some trading volume flows to application-specific chains, we still believe Solana will maintain its leading position in the general-purpose chain domain.

Source: Odaily Planet Daily