cryptopolitan.com
Solana is showing peak activity, though not only meme tokens are responsible for the increased growth. Stablecoins have been flowing into Solana at peak levels.
Solana reached a record for daily stablecoin inflows. In the past few weeks, Solana has been increasing its value locked, to over $8.39B, of which around $4.5B are in the form of bridged stablecoins. The supply of stablecoins on Solana increased to levels not seen since the crash of FTX at the end of 2022. The bulk of the growth came from USDC, which added another 1B tokens from October 20 to date.
The additional growth of stablecoins arrives at a time when Solana is close to its price record, stabilizing around $232.51. SOL also traded on the highest volumes since its peak in March 2024. Open interest for SOL was also near a three-year high at $3.69B.
The latest inflow coincided with the launch of USDS on Solana. The stablecoin by Sky Ecosystem, formerly Maker, is still a limited addition to the total balance. The bulk of stablecoin flows come from bridged USDT and USDC. Stablecoin usage remains one of the key features of top blockchains, especially Ethereum and TRON. Solana is also turning into a more liquid hub for trades, payments, DeFi, or other use cases.
The other factor for Solana is the renewal of crypto invoicing and payments through Stripe. Solana is one of the networks to carry USDC, leading to some of the increased traffic. DeFi usage, DEX, and token transactions are also adding to the need for more stablecoins.
Solana’s network marks increased stablecoin usage
Solana sees not only bulk inflows but also increased usage and turnover of the bridged assets. The transaction value doubled to $446B in the past 30 days, while the number of transactions is up by 50% in the past month. The average transaction size on Solana is more than $17K, barring days of trading anomalies.
While SOL tokens are mostly used for decentralized trading, stablecoins offer additional utility in DeFi, lending protocols, or as a tool for low-cost payments. The increased usage coincides with peak Solana transaction activity for all assets.
In addition to stablecoins, Solana also brings in more than $1.4B in bridged tokens. Some of the Ethereum memes can find more active turnover on Solana, in addition to cheaper swaps. Multiple top Ethereum tokens have bridged supply to Solana, to tap active Raydium trading.
Jupiter is the biggest user of stablecoins, both through its aggregator and its native DEX. The app holds $437.5M in USD value in various stablecoins. In total, the DEX has $2.24B in value locked, growing exponentially in the past few months.
Another $1.43B in tokens, bridged assets, and stablecoins is locked on the Aerodrome DEX. Aerodrome uses USDC for its targeted liquidity pairs, becoming one of the causes of stablecoin inflows.
Solana ecosystem keeps posting record fees
The Solana ecosystem continues posting extremely high daily fees, often out-competing other top apps. After a series of daily records, the Raydium DEX flipped Tether as the biggest daily fee producer. The DEX posted more than $15M in fees from users, as meme token activity accelerated.
Raydium hosts around 1.43% of all tokens launched on Pump.fun. During the latest meme token boom, Pump.fun produced up to 51K launches daily. This was enough to boost Raydium with newly trending pairs. Raydium uses mostly SOL for its base pair but has a highly active SOL/USDC pair for cashing out into intuitive dollar-denominated positions.
Jito, the MEV and validator service, produced $11.95M in daily fees, while the Solana main chain reached $11.26M in fees. All three services surpassed Ethereum, which produces a fixed amount of incentives for its validators. Additionally, Ethereum has seen an outflow to L2 chains, while Solana continues to handle the traffic without outages or problems.
Solana is not free and still requires significant priority fees and bribes to make sure transactions go through. Despite this, Solana manages to carry the biggest meme token traffic, surpassing BNB Chain and Base. Solana carries more than 68% of overall meme token activity, based on Cryptorank data.
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