Solana’s 2025 Surge: 6 Charts That Tell the Whole Story

Solana isn't just surviving—it's thriving. While legacy chains choke on congestion fees, SOL keeps scaling like a DeFi freight train. Here's the proof, stripped down to six make-or-break metrics.

Adoption doesn't lie. Daily active wallets smashed previous ATHs last quarter—no 'up only' hopium, just cold hard blockchain data. Meanwhile, NFT traders quietly migrated from Ethereum, chasing sub-penny transaction costs.

Developers aren't waiting around either. GitHub commits tell the real story: builders vote with code. And unlike certain 'enterprise-grade' chains, Solana's validator count keeps growing—decentralization in action.

Of course, the usual suspects still whisper about 'centralization.' Funny how those critiques get quieter with each institutional custody solution launched. Wall Street's playing catch-up, as usual.

Bottom line? The charts don't care about your narrative. SOL's infrastructure is eating the competition—one gas-guzzling chain at a time.

Looking at daily REV (all fees paid to transact onchain), Solana’s REV has stayed relatively stagnant at the $2.5 million to $3.5 million mark for months.

Net inflows into SOL’s sole institutional ETF — the REX-Osprey SOL Staking ETF (SSK) — have slowed. The fund drew $3.7 million for the week of Aug. 4-10, compared to $58.3 million in its launch week. Daily net flows were $5.2 million on Tuesday.

Over on the memecoin side of the world, Pump lost its dominance to Letsbonk through July, but recently reclaimed its spot in the last week. Yesterday, Pump saw 30,550 tokens launched compared to 1,499 on Letsbonk.

The PUMP token has traded down to $0.0036, after it briefly touched its ICO price of $0.004 last night.

The Axiom trading bot continues to dominate the trading bot market, regardless of which launchpad is winning. Axiom has grown to 60% market share since its inception in February.

Over on the perps market, Drift has been having a good month, hitting $500 million in open interest yesterday. Its zero-fee trading for BTC and ETH introduced in mid-July has sparked a growth of volumes, as seen in the below chart.

Despite its growth, though, the perps crown in Solana is still held by Jupiter. 

Based on trading volumes, Drift has about $17.1 billion in the last 30 days, compared to Jupiter perp volumes of $23.1 billion. Both are of course still eclipsed by Hyperliquid’s trading volumes of ~$371 billion within the same time period.

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