Solana users launched 11 million tokens in 2025, but a single stat reveals the brutal reality

Solana’s ecosystem recorded its strongest financial year to date in 2025, posting all-time highs in revenue, active users, and trading volume even as the network’s native token finished the year nearly 50% below its early peak.

According to CryptoSlate data, SOL rallied to more than $250 in the first quarter of 2025 before broader market headwinds dragged the asset to a low of $105, and it closed the year around $123.

Despite the volatile price action, the network's underlying economy expanded at an unprecedented rate.

Applications and trading venues built on the blockchain reported a year defined by high-frequency activity, massive asset issuance, and surging revenue. This painted a picture of a flourishing ecosystem decoupled from the speculative value of its base asset.

Record revenue

The Solana Foundation revealed that applications built on Solana generated $2.39 billion in revenue in 2025, a 46% year-over-year increase and a new all-time high.

This surge was not limited to a single sector but was distributed across a diverse array of platforms. Seven distinct applications, including Pump.fun, AxiomExchange, MeteoraAG, Raydium, JupiterExchange, tradewithPhoton, and bullx_io, each surpassed $100 million in annual revenue.

Beyond these market leaders, the “long tail” of smaller applications generated a combined revenue exceeding $500 million, signaling a deepening developer ecosystem.

At the network level, revenue accelerated dramatically. REV, a metric tracking total network revenue, reached $1.4 billion, marking a 48-fold increase over two years.

Meanwhile, the blockchain network's usage metrics mirrored this financial growth. The network processed 33 billion non-vote transactions, a 28% increase from the previous year.

When including vote transactions, the total throughput reached 116 billion, with the chain averaging 1,054 non-vote transactions per second.

A rapidly expanding user base drove this activity as unique active wallets averaged 3.2 million per day, a 50% increase and a new record. Furthermore, 725 million new wallets recorded at least one transaction during the year.

While wallet addresses do not correspond one-to-one with individual users, analysts suggest the figure highlights the immense breadth of participation flowing through Solana’s programs and trading venues.

Trading activities grow

The most robust growth vector in 2025 was the trading activity occurring on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and the specialized infrastructure supporting them.

Solana DEX volume reached $1.5 trillion in 2025, a 57% year-over-year increase and a historical peak for the network. The liquidity for these trades also deepened, with SOL-stablecoin pair volume hitting $782 billion, more than doubling from the previous year.

Market dominance was concentrated among a dozen major exchanges, each processing more than $10 billion in volume. Raydium led the sector with $347 billion in volume, followed by orca_so at $241 billion, humidifi at $184.7 billion, SolFiAMM at $184.2 billion, and MeteoraAG at $182 billion.

Notably, the mechanics of how trades were routed underwent a significant shift in 2025. “Prop AMMs” (Proprietary Automated Market Makers) grew their share of aggregator volume from 19% to 54%, suggesting a move toward more specialized, efficient trading algorithms.

At the same time, the composition of trading pairs also evolved, with SOL serving as the pair token in 42% of all trades, while the dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC accounted for 30%.

Emerging categories also contributed to the volume expansion. Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents, automated software programs conducting on-chain transactions, accounted for $31 billion in volume.

Meanwhile, volume for tokenized real-world assets reached $598 million, and project-specific token volume, such as JUP and RAY, totaled $86 billion.

On the aggregation front, platforms that route trades across multiple exchanges to find the best price handled $922 billion in volume, doubling their throughput from 2024. JupiterExchange dominated this vertical, accounting for $812 billion of that volume.

Professional-grade trading platforms also saw a surge, generating $940 million in revenue, a 44% increase, while processing $108 billion in volume. AxiomExchange captured nearly a third of this professional market share.

The speculative boom

While Solana blockchain infrastructure matured, retail speculation remained a primary engine of network activity. Memecoins, cryptocurrencies often based on internet jokes or viral trends, have driven significant turnover, despite questions about their long-term sustainability.

Memecoin volume reached $482 billion. Although this represented a 10% decrease year-over-year, it marked an 80-fold increase over a two-year horizon, highlighting the sector's explosive growth since 2023.

Notably, launchpads, platforms designed to simplify the creation of new tokens, became central to this pipeline.

Six launchpads, including Pump.fun, bonkfun, believeapp, MeteoraAG via DBC, moonit, and Raydium via LaunchLab, each facilitated over $1 billion in trading volume. Revenues for these launchpads doubled year over year to $762 million.

Pump.fun emerged as the defining retail application of the year. The platform was credited with drastically lowering the technical barriers to token creation, allowing users to launch new assets in seconds.

However, the ease of creation led to market saturation. Users created 11.6 million new tokens through launchpads in 2025, more than doubling the previous year's count.

Yet, the success rate for these assets was minuscule. Only 105,000 tokens “graduated” from their bonding curves, a mechanism that moves a token to a standard exchange once enough capital is raised.

This represents a graduation rate of just 0.89%, reinforcing the high-risk, casino-like nature of this market segment, where the vast majority of launches quickly lose traction.

Meanwhile, political events also influenced the speculative fervor.

The return of Donald Trump to political office triggered a wave of “PolitiFi” memecoins. Tokens such as TRUMP and MELANIA, along with countless copycats, contributed significantly to DEX volume spikes throughout the year.

Cheap transactions

A key factor enabling Solana’s ability to handle this diverse mix of high-frequency trading and massive token issuance was its fee structure.

Despite daily wallet activity and transaction counts reaching record highs, the cost to use the network declined.

The average transaction fee fell to $0.017 from $0.025 the previous year. More notably, the median fee dropped to $0.0011 from $0.0014.

This economic environment sustained high-frequency trading behaviors that are cost-prohibitive on more expensive blockchain networks.

It facilitated the creation of 725 million new wallets and allowed bots and automated agents to operate with high velocity without eroding profit margins.

Institutional maturation: ETFs and Stablecoins

Beyond the retail frenzy, 2025 marked a turning point for Solana’s integration into traditional financial markets.

A significant milestone was the late-2025 rollout of US-listed spot Solana Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

These products opened the door for traditional equity investors to gain exposure to SOL without managing private keys. The ETFs recorded $1.02 billion in net inflows shortly after launch, signaling strong institutional appetite.

At the same time, some public companies like Forward Industries had also embraced cryptocurrency as their treasury asset and acquired more than 18 million SOL tokens.

Simultaneously, the usage of stablecoins, cryptocurrencies pegged to fiat currency, exploded.

Stablecoin supply on Solana ended 2025 at $14.8 billion, a new all-time high that more than doubled the previous year's figure.

USDC dominated this market, accounting for 66% of the supply. Total stablecoin transfer volume reached an astronomical $11.7 trillion, a seven-fold increase over two years, indicating that Solana is increasingly being used for global settlement and payments.

Notably, the network also saw growth in tokenized assets.

Equities debuted on-chain with $1 billion in supply and $651 million in trading volume. Bitcoin supply on Solana doubled to $770 million, while Bitcoin trading volume on the network grew fivefold to $33 billion.

Additionally, assets from other chains, including Zcash, Monad, and NEAR, debuted on Solana with a combined supply of $32 million.

As a result, token Terminal data estimates that applications on Solana now hold approximately $35 billion in user assets.

Furthermore, the ecosystem's Total Value Locked (TVL) has risen by roughly $30 billion since January 2024, representing nearly 10-fold growth in just two years.

This accumulation of value suggests that users are not merely transacting and leaving, but are increasingly parking capital within the Solana economy.

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