5 Game-Changing Solana Moments That Rocked 2025 (So Far)
Solana didn't just break records in 2025—it rewrote the rulebook. Here's how the blockchain heavyweight delivered knockout punches before summer even hit.
1. The Speed Demon Goes Supersonic
Solana's TPS shattered its own ATH—again—leaving Ethereum gasps in its dust. Traders cheered while Visa quietly updated its 'threat assessment' slides.
2. Institutional Floodgates Blow Open
When BlackRock's SOL ETF got the greenlight, the resulting buying frenzy made Bitcoin maximalists reach for their stress balls.
3. The Phantom Wallet Heist (That Wasn't)
A $200M 'hack' turned out to be a dev's fat-finger error. White hats saved the day while crypto Twitter burned itself out on conspiracy theories.
4. Meme Coin Mania 3.0
SOL-based dog tokens went parabolic—until they didn't. At least three 'to the moon' tattoos are already being lasered off.
5. The Cross-Chain Killer Strikes
Solana's Firedancer upgrade ate Ethereum's lunch on interoperability—proving you can be fast AND play well with others.
Not bad for seven months' work. Though let's be real—half these 'breakthroughs' only matter if you ignore that 90% of DeFi still runs on pure hopium.
5. Raydium spins up its own launchpad
In February, news slowly trickled out that the Solana memecoin cash cow pump.fun was going to be ending its unofficial partnership with Raydium and launching an AMM of its own.
This closed what had been a very lucrative pairing for Raydium, which had made tens of millions of dollars from pump.fun tokens to that point.
So, Raydium swung back and created a memecoin launchpad of its own. After a slow start, the gambit seems to be working: Raydium-supported letsbonk.fun raced to over 50% of launchpad market share two weeks ago.
4. Pump.fun announces a token
When I started hearing pump.fun wanted to raise $1 billion by selling a token, first I went “What?”, and then I went, “Huh?”
Sure enough, we first reported that the ICO WOULD be carried out at a $4 billion valuation. Many complained that the action was extractive from a business that has already generated nearly a billion dollars in trading fees.
But the market didn’t mind too much: pump.fun exceeded $1 billion in private and public sales for PUMP when all was said and done.
3. SIMD-228 defeated
In January, Multicoin Capital’s Tushar Jain came on Lightspeed to pitch SIMD-0228, a proposal to cut Solana’s token inflation rate and introduce a market-based inflation mechanism.
This was the most voted-on Solana proposal ever, and a number of smaller validators were concerned about tighter margins stemming from fewer inflation rewards. Others expressed worries about uncertain outcomes the proposal may have created.
In the end, somewhat surprisingly, the proposal — which had support from several key figures in Solana — failed to pass.
2. Trump launches a memecoin
It’s tough to top this one. On Friday night before his inauguration, the incoming POTUS launched a memecoin on Solana.
Solana experienced severe congestion as traders raced to buy the coin, and SOL climbed to an all-time high. The token had interesting downstream effects, like suddenly spiking Solana’s USDC supply.
Solana folks generally take pride in the fact that although many of us wish he had not launched a memecoin at all, at least Donald TRUMP launched his memecoin on Solana.
1. Alpenglow
At the Solana Accelerate conference in May, Anza announced Solana’s biggest upgrade ever: Alpenglow.
Interestingly, this project got started when researchers wrote a paper exploring some problems with Solana consensus, and Anza hired them to come fix it.
The end result claims to be a 100x reduction in block finality and the end of proof-of-history as we know it. It could be live as soon as December, making Solana run ever faster.
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