Solana 2026: An Ecosystem and Market Strategy Study

As of October 24, 2026, Solana ranks first among all public blockchains in both on-chain transaction volume and application revenue, and also leads in the x402 AI agent payments space.

On nearly every other metric, Solana also ranks in the top three, including RWA value and holder count, stablecoin supply, and total value locked (TVL).

Tokenized stock holders on Solana have reached 1.57 million, up 56.5% over the past month. Stablecoin supply peaked at $17.4 billion in late September, nearly 5x what it was two years ago; RWA value also hit a new high of $4.6 billion.

This report was written by Y Strategy. It is a market firm focused on where the crypto market is heading. We study Solana as a go-to-market system: where demand comes from, how products reach users, which metrics Solana has taught the market to watch, and why builders keep choosing to launch here.

The core question we focus on is: how these elements reinforce one another, and which parts of Solana's approach other ecosystems can realistically learn from. Throughout the report, we distinguish its existing activity from our interpretation of the strategy behind it.

On Solana, a transaction costs far less than 1 cent, and confirmation time is far under 1 second. This combination makes Solana the main venue for on-chain trading, with assets traded gradually expanding from memecoins and stablecoins to tokenized stocks. On October 24, Solana processed about 145 million non-vote transactions; the chain carries about $15.8 billion in stablecoins, as well as some of the most well-known applications in crypto, including Phantom, Jupiter, Pump, and Raydium.

Data sources: DefiLlama, RWA.xyz, Artemis, Solscan, and Blockworks, as of October 24, 2026.

Key moments over the past few years

• 2019 — Solana completed a $20 million funding round led by Multicoin Capital.
• 2020 — Mainnet beta launched. $SOL was priced at $0.22 in the CoinList public auction and traded below $1 for months after the TGE.
• 2021 — Solana Labs completed a funding round of about $314 million led by a16z and Polychain Capital. $SOL reached $259.
• 2022 — The Wormhole bridge was attacked, losing $320 million. FTX and Alameda collapsed and entered bankruptcy proceedings, and their large holdings of SOL dragged the price down to about $10.
• 2023 — A year of rebuilding. Solana continued funding builders through the bear market and rolled out core upgrades.
• 2024 — Pump launched, and the memecoin era began. Solana began to become the public blockchain with the largest on-chain trading volume.
• January 2025 — The $TRUMP memecoin launched on Solana. SOL hit an all-time high of $293.
• October 2025 — $BSOL listed, becoming the first U.S. spot Solana ETF.
• 2026 — In March, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) jointly classified SOL as a digital commodity. BlackRock applied to issue tokenized fund shares on Solana, Western Union launched a dollar token on-chain, and wrapped XRP officially went live.

Already familiar with Solana? Skip straight to Part Two.

Part One: Where Solana stands today

In the 30 days ending October 24, 2026, Solana's decentralized exchange (DEX) average daily trading volume was about $2.2 billion, and users paid about $14.4 million per day in fees to use Solana and its applications, of which network fees accounted for only about 6% (DefiLlama).

Solana leads all public blockchains in application revenue

In application revenue, that is, the share of fees received by apps, Solana leads all public blockchains. Over the past 30 days, its application revenue was about $158 million: 2.1x that of Hyperliquid, 2.9x that of Ethereum, 6.1x that of BNB Chain, and 7.5x that of Robinhood Chain (DefiLlama, 30 days ending October 24, 2026). Transaction fees on Solana are low, so more of the value shows up at the application layer.

Architecture: How Solana works today

Solana processes about 167 million non-vote transactions per day, equivalent to about 1,930 per second (Solscan, 30 days ending October 24, 2026). This scale of processing, combined with base fees fixed by the protocol, keeps transaction fees low.

Recent upgrades:

• Faster block times — from 0.4 seconds to 0.25 seconds, then to 0.2 seconds; 200-millisecond block times took effect on mainnet on October 9, 2026.
• Greater transaction capacity — the amount of data a single transaction can hold expanded to 3.3x (September 2026).
• Firedancer — a new validator client developed by Jump (May 2026).

All of these upgrades serve the markets Solana wants to host. Whether it is AI agents paying amounts far below 1 cent or tokenized assets requiring millisecond settlement, both require a blockchain capable of serving as financial infrastructure, and that is exactly Solana's goal.

Who backs Solana

Solana has raised more than $330 million cumulatively across multiple disclosed funding rounds, with investors including a16z, Polychain, and Multicoin; this also includes a $1.7 million public token sale on CoinList in March 2020.

Its institutional backers have long gone beyond venture capital firms. Spot SOL ETFs now trade in the U.S., including BSOL, GSOL, FSOL, VSOL, and TSOL; DAT companies such as Forward Industries and Upexi also hold SOL on their balance sheets.

Part Two: Where activity is concentrated

The Solana ecosystem map in 2026

Trading is at the core of the Solana ecosystem, but the ecosystem covers far more than trading. The main categories include:

• Token launchpads — Pump, StonkFun
• Decentralized exchanges (DEX) — Raydium, Meteora, PumpSwap, Orca
• Aggregators and trading terminals — Jupiter, Axiom
• Perpetuals — Phoenix, Jupiter Perps, GMTrade, Pacifica
• Lending — Kamino, Jupiter Lend
• Wallets — Phantom, Solflare, and wallets built directly into applications
• Real-world assets (RWA) and tokenized stocks — xStocks, Backpack Securities, Ondo, PreStocks
• Stablecoins/payments/digital banking — USDC, USDT, PYUSD, Solana Pay, KAST, Avici
• Others — collectibles (Collector Crypt), DePIN (Helium), staking (Jito, Sanctum)

The most popular project type is trading infrastructure, including launchpads, exchanges, and trading terminals. Ranked by revenue, the top five applications are Pump, Collector Crypt, Axiom, StonkFun, and fomo. Four of them are token trading applications, while Collector Crypt is a tokenized trading card TCG marketplace (DefiLlama, past 30 days ending October 24, 2026).

The diversity of what is traded goes beyond the impression that Solana is known for memecoins. In Q3 2026, SOL – stablecoin pairs accounted for the largest share of DEX trading volume, at about 40%; memecoins accounted for about 30%; the rest was split among stablecoin swaps, external tokens, project tokens, and tokenized assets. Tokenized assets are still small in scale, but their trading volume has hit a new high for seven consecutive quarters, reaching $8.1 billion in Q3; September alone reached $4.9 billion, about three times that of August and the highest-volume month to date (Blockworks).

Share of Solana spot trading volume by trading pair type, January–September 2026

Solana's Heavyweight Applications

All data in this section comes from DefiLlama, covering the past 30 days as of October 24, 2026.

1. Pump — one-click token issuance via bonding curves: no code required, no liquidity configuration needed, and a token has a trading market the moment it is issued. Tokens that gain enough attention "graduate" from the issuance phase into Pump's own exchange.

By revenue, Pump is the number one application on Solana: over the past 30 days, pump.fun and PumpSwap generated a combined revenue of approximately $62 million, close to 40% of all-chain application revenue. Across all blockchains, it is also the third-highest revenue application, behind only stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle.

2. Phantom — the most widely used Solana wallet, whose onboarding flow lets users outside the crypto world truly get started. Swaps, staking, perpetual contracts, prediction markets, and buy buttons are all built in. It takes a small fee from swap transactions within the wallet and has not issued a token.

Phantom's revenue is higher than any other wallet on any blockchain: $7.1 million over the past 30 days, roughly twice MetaMask's $3.6 million.

3. Jupiter — the default trading entry point on Solana, routing orders across Solana's various exchanges to obtain the best prices; it now also offers perpetual contracts, lending, and liquid staking.

Over the past 30 days, Jupiter routed about 47% of Solana aggregator trading volume and about 19% of all-chain aggregator trading volume ($13.1 billion). This makes it the world's largest aggregator, and it operates only on Solana.

4. Raydium — after tokens "graduate" from token issuance platforms, they enter real liquidity pools on this exchange. Its LaunchLab product also supports other issuance platforms, including StonkFun.

Over the past 30 days, Raydium processed $6.5 billion in trading volume and retained $3.7 million in revenue, because most fees went to liquidity providers and token issuance platforms. About 60% of this revenue ($2.24 million) was used to buy back RAY.

Together, these four applications cover the mainstream path from discovering projects to forming liquidity. Phantom is the entry point, Pump handles the creation and trading of new tokens, Jupiter handles order routing, and Raydium turns attention into tradable liquidity pools.

From Sign-Up to First Trade in Under a Minute

In the past, going on-chain meant first registering an exchange account, completing identity verification (KYC), setting up a separate wallet, saving the seed phrase, and then making a transfer. Today, new users can log in with a social account, pay with Apple Pay inside apps like Moonshot, or top up directly in Phantom via Phantom Cash, and start trading in under a minute. The wallet is automatically created in the background at sign-up, with no separate setup required.

Tokenization and Beyond: Solana's Direction in 2026

In the field of tokenized stocks, Solana has consistently been the primary trading venue. Until mid-2026, it handled the settlement of the vast majority of on-chain spot trading volume. Since then, competition in this field has become more intense: Robinhood Chain and BNB Chain both launched stock trading venues this year, and trading volume is now spread across multiple chains. Solana still has one of the largest holder bases, with 1.57 million tokenized stock holders, second only to BNB Chain (Blockworks, October 2026).

Major protocols include Backpack Securities, which uses the Sunrise protocol, as well as Ondo Global Markets, PreStocks, and xStocks.

Part of the reason lies in economics. Solana's low fees make small positions, frequent trading, and retail holding genuinely feasible, so people can trade tokenized stocks around the clock just like crypto assets.

One piece of evidence: after tokenized $GRND (Grindr) launched on Solana on September 10, it generated $31 million in trading volume in less than 24 hours. The previous day, Grindr's trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange was about $16.6 million, while its average daily trading volume is close to $25 million.

Why StonkFun Broke Through

StonkFun best embodies Solana in 2026, because it combines the two most important things on this chain: token issuance and tokenized stocks.

It is a token issuance platform where new coins can choose any asset designated by the creator as the quote asset, including tokenized stocks and ETFs, rather than being limited to SOL or USDC. Its own token, $STONK, was issued with SPYx — a tokenized S&P 500 product — as its quote asset. In just two months, StonkFun became the second-highest revenue token issuance platform across all chains, behind only Pump, with revenue reaching $16.7 million over the past 30 days (DefiLlama, as of October 19, 2026).

In September, it had nine days when its revenue simultaneously exceeded Pump's issuance platform and Pons on Robinhood Chain, peaking at $2.3 million on the 11th. On a full-month basis, Pump still leads (DefiLlama).

We studied why it was able to spread so quickly (data from StonkFun, as of October 21, 2026):

• A one-sentence differentiator — issuing a meme coin quoted in the S&P 500.
• A positive flywheel anyone can verify — platform revenue is used to buy back and burn $STONK, and the revenue, buyback, and burn data can all be viewed on a public dashboard. Cumulative revenue is $35.5 million, of which about 60% is used for buybacks: $21.2 million has been bought back to date, and the burned $STONK is worth $26.4 million at current prices.
• Reward mechanisms built into the product — each token can distribute yield to its own holders in its quote asset through transfer taxes or liquidity pool fees. Nearly $90 million has been distributed cumulatively to date, with reward funds coming from each token's own transfer taxes or liquidity pool fees, not from StonkFun's revenue.
• Ecosystem integration and support — in early September, after StonkFun launched its integration on Raydium's LaunchLab, $STONK rose about 250%, reaching a market cap of $140 million; Solana also publicly supported StonkFun by replying to its post.

StonkFun combined a simple, easy-to-understand product differentiator, transparent and verifiable revenue, a token tied to revenue, and distribution channels from the broader ecosystem.

Part Three: Where Solana Is Headed

The Token Supercycle

Meme coins once brought Solana a large number of retail users, trading activity, and network adoption, and they still do today. What has changed is everything surrounding the entire system. Solana calls it the "Internet Capital Markets": from stocks and funds to dollars and agent payments, anything can be issued and traded on-chain, running around the clock without being limited by transaction size.

In 2026, Solana is moving further toward a "token supercycle": stablecoins, tokenized assets, payments, and AI-driven activity are all migrating on-chain together, while AI is accelerating demand for capital, collaboration, and real-time settlement.

Solana's core judgment is that compared with the scale of global assets, the RWA market is still tiny, so there is enormous room for growth. The foundation is also allocating resources accordingly, recruiting talent in stablecoins, AI, and institutional business, and centering flagship events such as Breakpoint London around this narrative.

Wall Street Enters

• Tokenized funds and credit — industry giants have already launched related products: BlackRock's BUIDL, Franklin Templeton's BENJI, and a $50 million commercial paper issued by JPMorgan and settled on Solana. In addition, through a new partnership with Allfunds, one of the world's largest fund distribution platforms, starting from Q4 2026, funds issued on Solana will be able to reach more than 3,300 institutions in the Allfunds network.
• More stocks, faster listing — covering Pre-IPO companies, supporting round-the-clock minting and redemption, and able to list corresponding assets on the same day stocks land on Nasdaq.
• Payments — Visa conducts USDC settlement with U.S. banks on Solana; Western Union has launched its own dollar token on Solana; Solana Pay is being piloted at more than 330,000 merchants in South Korea; Samsung Wallet is also adding the ability to transfer USDC via Solana, targeting up to 82 million Galaxy devices in the U.S.
• Institutional participation — including spot ETFs and DAT companies. It also includes connecting the custody and tokenized issuance of traditional assets through Securitize, Ondo, and xStocks, providing institutions with participation channels. In March 2026, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) jointly classified SOL as a digital commodity.

The total value of Solana's RWA ecosystem peaked at $4.6 billion in late September and stood at $4.38 billion on October 20 (RWA.xyz).

Speed alone is not enough to satisfy institutional issuers. They also need controllability, settlement certainty, and compatibility with custodians. Solana DvP launched in October, with JPMorgan participating and providing input. It provides institutions with a reusable delivery-versus-payment standard, so that each transaction no longer requires a separately written settlement contract.

AI and Agent Payments

Solana is betting on becoming the place where AI agents make payments, mainly relying on x402. This open standard allows software to pay for APIs directly within ordinary web requests.

• Agent payments — the Foundation and Google Cloud jointly developed pay.sh, adopting the open x402 and MPP standards, supporting various mainstream stablecoins, and able to settle single calls as low as $0.001. The Foundation also operates a dedicated @x402 account to promote the standard's adoption on Solana.
• Payment channels — now connected to Alibaba Cloud's inference API, built specifically for micropayments at machine speed.
• Setting industry standards — the Solana Foundation, together with Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, Coinbase, and Google, became Premier members of the Linux Foundation's x402 working group.
• Agent identity and wallets — providing agents with on-chain identity and wallets that can spend within preset limits.

According to Solana, in the four weeks ending in late September 2026, it processed 76% of all x402 transactions.

Solana's role in AI is settlement. Models run elsewhere, and agents settle small payments for APIs, data, compute, and services on Solana at machine speed.

The Foundation believes that within the next few years, agents may account for the majority of on-chain activity. If this judgment comes true, the chain with the lowest settlement cost and fastest speed will be best positioned to capture this activity.

Trading, Perpetuals, and Prediction Markets

These markets already have mature players on Solana and other chains, but new products continue to emerge, and Solana is fighting for market share in every sector.

Solana's leading prediction market @world_xyz accumulated more than 1 million waitlist users before its website opened. Its marketing was both clever and had a rare sense of authenticity.

Before launch, World never explained what it actually was, instead using curiosity to attract users. As a new project on Solana, it naturally drew attention. Its first tweet on June 23 simply asked what World was, and it received 3.6 million views. Over the following week, the team continued posting short, witty, meme-filled content, keeping everyone guessing. Whenever a major creator followed, it posted; whenever someone discussed it, it reposted; almost every creator, project, and news account received a reply from it, spurring everyone to search everywhere for clues and answers.

On July 1, World revealed its identity: a Solana prediction market built into Phantom. As a result, the reveal could reach Phantom's massive existing user base from day one. Integrations with Chainlink and Hyperliquid further enhanced credibility. Driven by its own social channels, community spread, partners, and product integrations, the hype continued until the website launched in early September.

In perpetuals, protocols such as @PhoenixTrade are rapidly expanding market share.

Solana's latest launch is @joinfrontier — a community for traders, offering trading activities, prize pools, leaderboards, a VIP program, and exclusive gatherings.

The Underlying Upgrade Supporting All of This

Alpenglow is Solana's largest consensus upgrade since launch and went live on mainnet on October 21, 2026. It shortened the target final confirmation time for transactions from about 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds, directly helping Solana build the market it most wants.

Tokenized stocks, professional traders, and AI agents all need exchange-like settlement capabilities, so Alpenglow is the foundation for everything else.

How Solana Supports Builders

Solana funds builders through multiple channels: Solana Foundation Grants, which provide funding by stage, including convertible grants; Superteam, which has local chapters around the world, offers small grants of up to $10,000, and provides paid bounty tasks through Superteam Earn; Colosseum hosts hackathons and provides seed funding to winners; and there are Hacker Houses around the world. When the Foundation wants someone to build a specific product, it issues an open call for proposals.

Solana's latest hackathon, Stocklana, is themed around developing innovative products related to stocks on Solana, with a prize pool of more than $125,000.

One Settlement Layer, Serving All Markets

Looking ahead, Solana is clearly focused on trading, AI, payments, RWA, and institutional business, with prediction markets and perpetuals close behind. But it appears to be competing for market share in every category at the same time.

Trading remains the main source of revenue. Tokenized assets and payments extend the same settlement layer to institutions and consumers, while agent payments bring machine-generated transactions. They all require low-cost, fast, round-the-clock settlement, but each also requires different market entry approaches. How Solana addresses these differences will determine its next phase.

The organization is adjusting accordingly as well. In September, the Foundation appointed former Binance Global Chief Marketing Officer Rachel Conlan as Chief Strategy Officer, responsible for institutional partnerships, ecosystem growth, and market entry strategy. Jamal Raees joined as General Manager of Payments. Distribution capabilities and enterprise adoption are gradually becoming the core of Solana's strategy.

Part Four: How Solana Does Marketing

The Strategy Behind It

In the view of Y Strategy, Solana's most important marketing asset is its communication and reach system. Builders launch products, the ecosystem concentrates attention on product launches, wallets and trading platforms convert attention into transactions, public data turns usage into evidence, and that evidence in turn attracts the next batch of builders.

A good application gives the network something concrete to promote. Distribution channels can help applications find users, while visible commercial progress gives the next founder a reason to build here. When this process works repeatedly, every successful launch feeds back into the ecosystem's attractiveness and its ability to support the next project.

This is the mechanism we observed in the cases below. How much it can accomplish depends on whether attention can be converted into sustained usage, and into businesses that can survive.

Solana also chooses the metrics it highlights. It has changed the way people measure a chain: from TVL to application revenue and transaction volume. TVL measures the funds deposited into applications, while revenue and transaction volume reflect the extent to which those funds are actually used and how much users pay for it.

Solana's application revenue and on-chain transaction volume have consistently led all other chains; even without focusing on TVL, it still ranks third on this metric, on par with BNB Chain (DefiLlama, October 24, 2026).

Two Audiences, One Voice

Solana advances two narratives at the same time. Institutions hear "internet capital markets," a concept that has now expanded into the "token supercycle," covering stablecoins, tokenized assets, payments, and AI. The community hears memes and the trading battlefield. Solana speaks to both groups at once: its expression has both a corporate institutional style and a speculative trader temperament, engaging with its existing audience while paving the way for the new audiences it hopes to attract. In its description of itself, memes still stand alongside stocks and AI agents.

How Information Spreads

Solana's reach capability is built in layers. The main account conveys the core message → affiliated accounts separately cover specific verticals, products, news, and regions → top opinion leaders (teams, builders, and independent creators) deliver new product launches to traders in real time.

Its reach is not limited to X either; it also includes Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and newsletters. Solana Media sets separate content directions for institutions, developers, payments, and the community, and produces its own podcast.

Affiliated Accounts

Behind the main account @solana are 13 affiliated accounts, each with its own focus. These include a separate account for the developer community, regional accounts such as @Solana_zh, @x402 for AI payments work, and @perps covering Solana's perpetual contracts space. One of the more interesting is @luminaries: an account entirely centered on memes and aimed at speculative traders.

Top Opinion Leaders

Solana's top opinion leaders fall into three categories.

• Team-led — Toly, Raj, and the core team post continuously, bringing considerable reach.
• Builder voices — ecosystem founders, as well as well-known figures such as @mert, @armaniferrante, @SOLBigBrain, and @SolanaLegend.
• Independent Solana opinion leaders — accounts that primarily cover Solana, as well as staunch Solana advocates such as @SolanaSensei, @FabianoSolana, and @blknoiz06.

Ecosystem Marketing Support

Solana also puts its full force behind ecosystem projects. When a launch is important enough, the main account will publicly support it, affiliated accounts will bring it to their respective audiences, and top opinion leaders will then carry it forward.

Attention is only part of it. Solana also brings real users and transaction volume to ecosystem applications. Its latest trading initiative @joinfrontier is currently running trading campaigns jointly with @PhoenixTrade and @solflare, channeling real transaction volume to them. An entire vertical can receive the same support: when stocks became a key focus, it was made the theme of the Stocklana hackathon.

This complete information dissemination path is the hardest part to replicate. Solana's marketing support shortens the distance between a usable product and potential users. A small team launching a product on Solana can, within a single day, receive dissemination support in sequence from the main account, affiliated accounts, and top opinion leaders. Elsewhere, obtaining such coverage might require weeks of paid promotion, or might never be achievable at all. For founders choosing a launch platform, this gap matters as much as cost or speed.

Everyone Can Be Solana's CMO

The Foundation leaves a great deal of room for the community to shape how the brand is expressed, and community language and activities are often amplified by official accounts.

Solana places great emphasis on inviting the community to market on its behalf. Anyone who promotes Solana can call themselves Solana's nCMO and put that identity in their bio.

This mechanism works in reverse as well. Asking which Solana applications need more marketing received more than 800 replies—essentially a continuously updated project list telling the Foundation where to direct its communication channels.

This approach works because the audience already holds $SOL, or holds application tokens built on Solana. The motivation already exists; Solana simply gave it a name and a direction to channel effort into. This also constitutes its limitation: if a company's audience does not hold any relevant assets, even running an identical campaign may yield little return.

Finally, content is produced by an in-house team. Over the past two years, the Foundation has built its own media operations system, producing and distributing content through its own channels.

Marketing Through Product Launches

Solana continuously launches products, and each launch generates its own news cycle: World for prediction markets, Frontier for traders, @tokens providing token data and pricing and APIs for developers, and pay.sh for agent payments.

Each launch has its own marketing campaign, and a steady, consistent rhythm matters more than any single launch. There is always a new product or initiative to discuss, so Solana rarely fades from people's attention between announcements.

Only Possible on Solana

"Only possible on Solana" is one of the most impressive and widely used slogans on the chain today. It was initially proposed spontaneously by @mert, spread through the community, and was subsequently used by Solana's official channels for its own campaigns, including the title of the Foundation's Breakpoint 2023 retrospective article.

The campaign also launched a landing page designed to support developers and builders on Solana. The page showcases what the technology can achieve, such as high throughput and native scalability, and directs builders straight to resources and the community to help them start building.

Because the phrase originated in the community, it has stayed, and is now woven into the way people talk about the chain. Anyone can spontaneously use it to describe anything that could only happen here.

X Account Operating Playbook

Language style. The Solana account writes like a member of the community, and it reacts quickly to pop culture. Short posts that don't mention the product often perform better than formal announcements; whenever a new trend emerges in fashion or gaming, this account usually follows up the same day.

Build attention first, then make announcements. Solana builds attention before news is officially announced. For example, when teasing its partnership with Starknet, it posted a blunt comment on Starknet data, and that content was discussed all day and brought in 4.2 million views. The next day, the mystery was revealed: STRK would launch on Solana.

Spend more at key moments. At truly important moments, production quality rises noticeably, with formal commercials rather than just static images. When the U.S. spot SOL ETF made its debut, Solana released a well-produced ad that combined Wall Street imagery with crypto meme culture, gaining about 2 million views.

Unique campaigns. Solana often runs this kind of campaign, such as auctioning ad space on its own avatar for charity. It sold nine ad slots on its logo and used the $166,000 in proceeds for Nepal flood relief.

Moving fast also means occasionally slipping up. In early 2025, a marketing video from the main account drew fierce criticism and was deleted within hours; a few days later, Anatoly Yakovenko publicly apologized.

Superteam: The Offline Grassroots Network

Superteam is Solana's community layer and one of the largest initiatives in the crypto industry. It discovers, funds, and supports builders in the ecosystem, connecting creative talent, developers, operations people, and ordinary Solana supporters.

It operates in most major countries, including talent matching, local workshops, grants, and the most interesting part—bounties. Superteam Earn posts paid tasks, design and programming work, so anyone anywhere can earn crypto assets and build an on-chain work history. Most of the funding comes from companies and decentralized applications (dApps) doing business on Solana.

Teams and contributors can also organize their own online or offline events with the support of local chapters; Superteam actively encourages members to organize these events.

Superteam fills the one part of the loop that cannot be completed online. Social accounts can reach people already in crypto, but they cannot get a developer in Lagos or Istanbul to take the first step and complete their first paid task. Local chapters do that through workshops, local events, and bounties: organized by people living locally, in local languages. For markets where the core team cannot station people one by one, this is also the lowest-cost way to enter; the return it brings is not only reach but also loyalty—people who earn their first crypto assets through Superteam bounties often continue building on that chain.

Aligned with the foundation's direction, Superteam lets local operators execute according to local conditions. A core team cannot staff every market, every language environment, and every builder community, but local chapters can. It is this combination of centralized coordination and local execution that allows Solana to be active in so many places at once.

Part Five: What Other Teams Can Learn From This

Why Solana Won

1. Solana embraced the trading boom

Solana aimed for high speed and low fees from the start, so when meme coin trading heated up quickly after Pump launched in 2024, the chain could absorb the resulting demand. Solana's DEX trading volume rose from $54.5 billion in 2023 to $694.6 billion in 2024, about 13 times the previous level (DefiLlama). This is also part of why $TRUMP chose to issue on Solana in January 2025, and Solana withstood the trading peak at that time.

Crypto markets run on both technology and attention, and Solana embraced the speculative element within them. After trading volume poured in, Solana pushed ecosystem applications to the forefront and shifted the metric from TVL to the trading volume and application revenue where it leads.

2. One chain, no fragmentation

L2BEAT lists 95 layer-2 network projects on Ethereum, each with its own users, liquidity, and brand. On Solana, everything is on the same chain, so projects do not need to leave the chain or wait for exchange listings to launch, gain liquidity, reach traders, and earn revenue.

Tokens that gain market recognition on Pump "graduate" directly into the trading pool, and funding support is equally in place: in the first half of 2026, 2,857 teams submitted products to the Solana Frontier hackathon. Colosseum, the accelerator behind the event, then selected 21 startups from hackathon winning teams and the continuously run Eternal sprint program for investment (Colosseum, June 29, 2026). Because every launch can reach the entire ecosystem at once, this is one of Solana's most underrated marketing advantages, and it also makes building products here exciting.

3. Everyone has a way to make money

Solana gives almost every participant a way to make money. Most of what users spend is retained by applications: over the past 30 days, applications retained $158 million in revenue, while the chain itself retained only $3.3 million (DefiLlama, as of October 24, 2026). This is exactly how Phantom, Jupiter, and Pump grew into well-known brands and promoted Solana while promoting themselves.

Beyond trading, community members can also earn through content creation, design, development, and other means. To date, Superteam Earn alone has distributed more than $16 million through 3,253 bounties, short-term jobs, and grants, open to more than 240,000 people (Superteam Earn). This also rewards holders who survived the bear market, and when so many people can make money from the ecosystem, naturally many are willing to promote it.

4. Reborn from the ruins

After the collapse of FTX and Alameda, SOL fell below $10 in December 2022, down 94% for the year (Decrypt). A few months later, as the SEC took action against exchanges, Robinhood delisted SOL from its app (The Block, June 2023). Even so, Solana continued to fund developers, hold hackathons, and ship products through the bear market, and many bet it would come back. It did: in January 2025, SOL hit an all-time high of $293, about 30 times the low (CoinGecko). Those who held on were rewarded, and this recovery also made many of them Solana's loudest supporters.

5. A sense of belonging turns into marketing power

Crypto is a social market, and people want to find belonging. Ethereum built its identity around decentralization and research, while Solana shaped its identity around speed, risk-taking, and continuous experimentation: the team keeps shipping products, and the official account talks with the community like family.

This sense of belonging makes the community itself a marketing force. Solana-native creators cover every product launch, members spontaneously create content, and anyone can call themselves nCMO, promoting the chain and defending it. Offline, Superteam has chapters in 25 regions (Superteam); Breakpoint 2023 attracted more than 3,000 people, including developers and traders as well as artists and people interested in crypto (Solana Foundation). With so many groups working together, Solana can reach audiences that no single official account could cover alone.

Where Solana Falls Short

1. Revenue is highly sensitive to speculative heat

Launchpad alone contributed more than one-third of Solana's application revenue; together with trading apps and DEXs, they account for roughly two-thirds (DefiLlama, 30 days as of October 24, 2026). This ties Solana's revenue closely to market heat. When the market cooled after January 2025, Solana's application revenue fell the most among major public chains: by March it had dropped 79%, compared with a 57% decline for Base and 30% for Ethereum (DefiLlama).

2. Value stayed at the application layer

Low fees brought users but left little revenue for the chain itself. Over the past 30 days, applications on Solana retained $158 million in revenue, while the chain itself retained only $3.3 million (DefiLlama, as of October 24, 2026). Stakers face the same gap: in Q3 2026, about 98% of staker revenue came from newly issued SOL (Blockworks), so increased activity on Solana does little to directly boost returns for holders.

Holders voted in August to accelerate the reduction of the inflation rate, and the proposal to share priority fees with stakers (SIMD 123) has also been approved. For institutions, the question that remains is: how much of the value generated by this on-chain activity will actually flow back to $SOL.

3. Areas where competitors still lead

Solana leads in on-chain trading, but other markets are still dominated by other ecosystems. Ethereum's DeFi TVL is $49.2 billion, compared with $5.8 billion for Solana (DefiLlama, as of October 24, 2026). Base can import users directly from the Coinbase app, and Robinhood Chain can import users from Robinhood, while Solana's main gateway, Phantom, is an independent company. External channels are only just beginning to open, for example Samsung Wallet is adding Solana-based USDC transfer functionality for up to 82 million Galaxy devices in the U.S. (The Block, October 7, 2026).

In derivatives, the Hyperliquid exchange alone generated $66.5 million in revenue over the past 30 days, equivalent to about 40% of Solana's total application revenue (DefiLlama). Solana leads in spot trading and consumer-facing crypto applications, but still faces strong competition and currently lags in DeFi, perpetual contract DEXs, and attracting mainstream users into crypto.

4. The tokenized stocks race is rapidly becoming crowded

Until early June 2026, Solana carried almost all tokenized stock DEX trading volume, with a share as high as 99.8% in January. But the market was still small at the time, with weekly trading volume of about $45.8 million at the start of the year, and other chains did not yet have truly formed trading venues. On June 11, bStocks launched on BNB Chain, changing the situation.

Solana's trading volume continued to grow, but competitors grew faster: BNB Chain led in July and August, and Robinhood Chain captured 74% of the share in the week of August 31. By mid-October, Solana's share was 31%, Robinhood Chain 26%, BNB Chain 25%, and Base 18% (DWF Labs, using Blockworks data). Issuers such as xStocks and Ondo all adopt multi-chain arrangements, so liquidity can move freely, and Robinhood also has advantages such as its own user base and stock brokerage licenses.

Lessons other teams can learn from

• Make your ecosystem worth builders' investment. Teams choose places where they can launch products, find liquidity, and earn revenue without waiting for listings. Provide support through grants, hackathons, and activities that promote product usage, and measure results by active projects and users.
• Understand your audience and speak their language. While communicating with existing users, incorporate expressions that attract the new users you are targeting. When projects compete for attention, they face the most influential creators in the space, so short posts that do not mention the product are often more effective than formal announcements.
• Promote your ecosystem, not just yourself. Give applications and founders more exposure than the public chain itself, because promoting products that are already being used is more convincing. But the cost is that you must be patient: you first need to have applications worth recommending.
• Let the community own the brand. Adopt the language the community has created itself rather than replacing it with expressions designed for marketing, while accepting the fact that you cannot control the direction in which it spreads.
• Choose the metrics you can win on. Highlight the data where you have the strongest advantage, but also be prepared for the possibility that these metrics may turn against you when the cycle shifts.
• Keep funding builders. Keep investing even when the market is cold: both Tensor and Crossmint were born at Solana's Riptide hackathon in 2022. Such investment buys goodwill and recognition that no marketing campaign can purchase.

Conclusion

Solana's technology, community, incentive mechanisms, and applications together form an ecosystem. The technology makes massive trading volume possible, the community plays an important role in attracting users and keeping them, and the applications cover the full lifecycle of liquidity, keeping the capital people bring in within the ecosystem and continuously driving its economic growth. Creators, developers, traders, and enterprises can all complete their own full business cycles on Solana, and each group's activity in turn powers the others.

The same cycle also carries risks. Most revenue still depends on trading and token issuance, only a small amount of value flows to SOL itself, and competitors still lead in DeFi, derivatives, and onboarding mainstream users. The key to Solana's next step is whether it can convert its lead in trading into lasting demand and momentum for entering other markets.