The Solana chain has gone through a roller coaster ride. It has been one of the main stars of the bull run since 2021, reaching the top 5 in token valuation and close to 100 billons market cap. Then it went through a massive depression phase with the price going down more than 95%, and in the last bull market has emerged strong again. Once again a drop in the recent months, but a bit smoother this time.
Let’s see how the network activities are doing under the current market conditions.
Solana has some unique tech. It is a sort of hybrid between Proof of Stake (PoS) and a novel concept that they call Proof of History. There is a lot to say about the proof of history concept, but in short here we will just mention that it is a concept that checks all the transactions in the right order/sequence. The Solana blockchain works with slots for periods of time, in which the chosen validators confirm the transactions.
Solana has a reputation for being one of the fastest blockchains, with a theoretical possible 65k transactions per second. Solana also has a controversial reputation over its decentralization since it has been put under maintenance and stopped operating a few times in the past.
We will be looking at:
- Total Value Locked TVL
- Active addresses
- Daily transactions
- Fees
- Staking and voting Rewards
- Inflation and supply
- Market cap
The period that we are looking into is 2021 to 2026.
The data for the analysis are taken from Defi Lama and Dune Analytics.
Total Value Locked
This is one of the most used metric for chains and apps representing the amount of value that is stored and handled by the chain. At the moment the chart for Solana looks like this.
Quite the ride.
Going from zero to 10B in the previous bull run, a drop to 300M in 2023. A growth in 2024 reaching a new ATH of 13B and a drop again since then to 6B where we are now.
Active Addresses
One of the key metrics for a blockchain is the number of active wallets. Here is the chart.
A massive spike at the end of 2024 with a new ATH for the number of daily active wallets, reaching 8M DAUs. The Solana chain far outpaced the previous numbers in 2021 when there was around 500k DAUs at the top.
IN 2025 there has been a drop in the DAUs, especially towards the end of the year to around 2M DAUS.
In the recent month, the activity has slightly increased to 3M DAUs.
The one thing that has been driving massive activity on the Solana chain has been the hyperproduction of meme coins on platforms like Pump.fun, with millions of meme tokens launched there. Even Trump launched a meme coin on Solana back in November 2024.
For comparison the number of active wallets on ETH is somewhere around 500k, so the 3M on Solana is quite a lot. I’m still not sure how many of these are unique users and how many bots, my guess is that there are a lot of bots, but still the activity is high.
On a monthly basis the chart for active wallets looks like this:
Here again we can notice the spike in the last month with an amazing130 MAUs in November 2024! Again not sure how many of these are bots. In the last months this number has been in the range of 40M to 50M. Still a huge number.
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Daily Transactions
The activity on the networks is mostly represented by the number of daily transactions. Here is the chart.
This is interesting. The number of transactions has actually increased on the Solana chain even during these bad market conditions.
In the last period the number of transactions has increased furthermore and reached a new ATH above to 100M transactions per day.
Compared to ETH where there are just above 1M transactions per day, Solana is leading by a lot.
Fees
Fees are quite the unpopular topic and one of the main reasons for the new EVM chains, as users are trying to find a way to escape ETH high fees.
A massive spike in the beginning of 2024 and later in the year again, when fees reached more than 0.1 USD, or 10 cents. This is still quite a low number compared to the ETH fees, when cheap fees are usually around five dollars but can go more than 50 USD in some periods.
For most of the time transactions fees on Solana are around one cent, or just a few cents.
Solana is one of the cheapest blockchain to transact on. Because of the very cheap fees we have seen a lot of botting on the chain, but it still manages the traffic. The thing is the validators need a lot of resources to maintain the speed and the numbers of transactions. Half of the fees are burned and half goes to validators.
Staking and Voting Rewards
Fees are just one aspect that the Solana validator receives as rewards. There are also staking rewards and voting rewards.
Here are the charts.
The staking rewards are at the bottom of the chart, while the voting is at the top. Cumulative these two types of rewards account for around 45k SOL daily now and continue to go down.
The staking and voting rewards have been quite constant in the period, with a slow downtrend.
The daily SOL for staking rewards is around 32k, while the voting rewards are at 13k.
Inflation and Supply
Inflation and supply are on of the most important metrics for a blockchain. Here are the charts from the official Solana docs.
The inflation rate for Solana starts at 8% per year and drops each year, reaching 1.5% after 10 years and stays at that level for the future years.
The supply looks like this.
The current supply of Solana is close to 567M. From the inflation schedule it is projected to reach more than 700M in 10 years’ time. After that the inflation should slow down to 1.5% per year, and the supply should increase more slowly.
Market Cap
At the end the chart for the market cap.
Solana has reached an ATH in terms of market cap in 2025 of 130B!
But in the last quarter of 2025 the prices have fallen a lot and at the moment the Solana market cap is around 50B with a price of around 80 USD, down from the top of 250 USD.
