Author: Lucas Tcheyan, Vice President of Research at Galaxy Digital; Source: Galaxy Digital; Compiler: Shaw, Golden Finance

Introduction

Solana's core indicators have weakened across the board in the first quarter of 2026: market risk appetite has cooled, Meme currency trading popularity has dropped from its previous highs, decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume has declined, and application fees have fallen for the third consecutive quarter.

However, under the surface of weakening data, Solana's overall industry position has not been shaken. It maintains its top position in DEX transaction volume, and maintains or achieves growth in the share of many fee tracks; the continuous stable operation time on the chain has reached a new high, and the ecosystem in multiple fields such as stablecoins, real-world asset tokenization (RWA), lending, mobile terminals, payments and institutional-level infrastructure continues to expand, and the full-link business chassis has significantly improved compared with previous cycles.

The root cause of the market weakness is consistent with the logic disclosed in previous quarters: compared with other mainstream public chains, the Solana ecosystem is highly bound to the speculative trading market, especially relying on Meme coins. Once speculative funds ebb, DEX trading volume, application fees, and block priority fees will all come under pressure. Although emerging sectors that can smooth cyclical fluctuations are being implemented, their development progress is uneven. RWA is the biggest highlight of this quarter, with its scale rising against the trend; the stablecoin territory continues to expand, and the currency structure is gradually getting rid of the dominance of USDC; the institutionalization of the lending business is accelerating, and the types of collateral are becoming more diverse. However, the development of perpetual contracts and prediction markets did not meet expectations, and Hyperliquid’s lead in these two tracks increased instead of falling.

The core focus for the rest of 2026: Perpetual contracts, prediction markets, lending and other sectors where Solana is still lagging behind will be able to replicate the strong revenue contribution of DEX. The project roadmap has accurately anchored the existing shortcomings, but improving the underlying infrastructure is only the first step. Solana still needs to accumulate liquidity, high-quality products and user habits, and transform technological advantages into track dominance.

Core points

• On-chain stability: Solana has achieved eight consecutive quarters of zero-downtime operation. The focus of market discussion has shifted from "whether the network is stable" to the quality of transaction execution, the certainty of transaction on-chain, the consistency of block sequence and the optimization of the on-chain market structure. In the first quarter, the mainnet completed the implementation of the Agave 3.1 verification client version, and the implementation details of upgrade roadmaps such as Alpenglow and Multi-Parallel Block Producing (MCP) were further clarified. The focus of Solana's next phase of expansion is to provide a predictable transaction execution environment for high-value financial applications.

• Verification node architecture: The diversification of verification clients and block generation solutions continues to advance, but pros and cons coexist. The multi-client and multi-block construction path reduces the systemic risk of a single program, but increases the uncontrollability of cross-node transaction landing and sorting, which is not conducive to financial services that are highly sensitive to delays, such as perpetual contracts, order books (CLOB), and liquidation.

• DEX spot trading: Solana DEX trading volume fell 31% month-on-month, the second largest quarterly decline since 2022, and the total single-quarter trading volume fell back to a new low since the fourth quarter of 2024. Even so, Solana ranked first in DEX trading volume in the entire industry for the fifth consecutive quarter, with its market share rising slightly to 31%. The self-developed automated market maker (AMM) continues to improve the spot ecosystem, and its transaction proportion has steadily increased; and actual measurements show that on the SOL/stablecoin trading pair, Solana’s self-developed AMM’s transaction experience is comparable to or even better than the leading centralized exchanges, proving that Solana’s spot advantage is not solely driven by Meme coins.

• Handling fee data: The native handling fee on the chain dropped slightly by 1% month-on-month and was basically the same, and the share of handling fees in the entire Layer1 public chain rose to 25%; application handling fees have declined for three consecutive quarters, falling 10% month-on-month to US$795 million. However, industry-wide application handling fees have simultaneously weakened, and Solana's handling fee market share has increased to 26%. Ecological fee income is highly dependent on retail speculative transactions. Five of the top ten revenue-generating applications on the chain are directly related to Meme coins; the proportion of application fees contributed by Pump.fun increased from 22% to 32%, causing Solana's income to fluctuate strongly cyclically.

• Derivatives track: Solana’s perpetual contract trading volume fell by 34% month-on-month. As of the end of March, the industry’s proportion of perpetual contract positions and trading volume were only about 3% and 2% respectively. High-value derivatives funds continued to be diverted by Hyperliquid. The prediction market was officially launched in the first quarter, but its volume is relatively small: in early February, the peak weekly trading volume exceeded 10 million US dollars, with approximately 10,000 weekly active users, and the industry-wide transaction ratio was still less than 0.2%.

• Total lock-up on the chain (TVL): The overall lock-up volume dropped 22% month-on-month to US$15 billion, but still accounts for 7% of the total TVL in the entire crypto market, which is significantly higher than the historical bear market level. Optimizing the internal structure is the key: the scale of RWA increased by 58% to exceed US$2.5 billion, accounting for 17% of Solana's total locked positions; the stablecoin stock increased by 2.7% to US$15.45 billion, and the currency structure got rid of dependence on USDC.

• Interest-earning stablecoins and tokenized cash products have become new additions to DeFi: BlackRock’s BUIDL Monetary Fund and Figure’s YLDS stablecoin started from 0, with a total stock of close to US$900 million; the stock of non-USDC and non-USDT stablecoins has surged nearly 10 times compared with January 2025, marking Solana’s source of funds to escape the fluctuations of the pure crypto market.

On-chain indicators

Network performance and operating status

Solana has long since gotten rid of the historical label of frequent downtime in its early years. After multiple rounds of iterations, network speed, stability and actual carrying capacity have been significantly improved compared to a year ago. In the first quarter, it achieved eight consecutive quarters without downtime. With multiple rounds of upgrades such as Agave 3.1, the median block output has stabilized at around 400 milliseconds, and the fluctuation range has narrowed significantly.

Despite lower overall market risk appetite, Solana’s on-chain processing throughput remains strong. At the end of the first quarter, the transaction per second (TPS) quantile value increased significantly, and the high throughput reached a peak in the past year. Whenever the retail trading market picks up (especially during the outbreak of Meme currency trading), Solana will encounter instantaneous massive transaction demand, and the main network can handle it smoothly and operate without any hindrance. This point is crucial: the operation of Solana’s entire on-chain financial ecosystem relies on the stable underlying public chain. Spot trading, stablecoin payments, lending, real-world asset tokenization (RWA), perpetual contracts, and prediction markets are all inseparable from an underlying network with high speed, low cost, and stable execution.

Verification and pledge

The key milestone in the fourth quarter of last year was that the Firedancer client occupied a considerable market share, effectively reducing the systemic risks brought by a single client. Entering the first quarter, with the diversification of verification node client versions, Firedancer's overall node share has declined. Currently, Agave still dominates, but the node client ecosystem has formed a multi-polar pattern: Agave, Jito, Frankendancer, BAM, Harmonic and other clients run in parallel, and the ecological richness has been significantly improved.

Diversification has positive significance in some aspects: More types of clients and implementation solutions can avoid the risk of a single program vulnerability or client failure dragging down the entire public chain, but there are advantages and disadvantages to everything. Different verification nodes can be equipped with different schedulers, block construction underlying layers and transaction ordering logic. For most applications, this difference has a limited impact, but for high-value trading products (especially perpetual contracts and the central limit order book CLOB market), the impact is crucial (detailed in the perpetual contract section below).

Affected by the decline in annualized staking yield, node verification income weakened this quarter. As priority fees and Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) income continue to shrink, the proportion of inflationary issuance rewards in the total staking income continues to increase. This trend has been evident since the fourth quarter of last year: the cooling of the speculative market has caused the fee income to shrink, and the profit ecology of verification nodes has been under pressure.

Overall, competition in the industry for operating verification nodes is becoming increasingly fierce. The annualized rate of return on staking has dropped, the profit margin for handling fees and MEV has narrowed, and the supporting structure of overlay verification nodes has become increasingly sophisticated, all of which have raised the threshold for entry. As the public chain bids farewell to the extensive growth driven by subsidies and turns to relying on node operators themselves to achieve a closed-loop profit, certain consolidation in the number of nodes is a natural phenomenon after the industry matures. However, the shrinkage of the total number of verification nodes will further highlight the importance of the four risk control indicators: distribution of pledged chips, client diversification, geographical layout, and computer room concentration.

Since May 1, the Solana Foundation Delegated Pledge Plan (SFDP) has introduced new regulations, tightening access requirements in terms of computer room concentration, autonomous domain (ASN) concentration, client software version, data indicator reporting, voting points, node commissions, empty block rate, transaction processing, etc. Node operators participating in SFDP must also adopt first-in-first-out (FIFO) or priority fee sorting scheduling rules, and the transaction sorting window period does not exceed 50 milliseconds; they must distribute sharded data on time, and must not intercept transactions through transaction processing unit (TPU) review. At the same time, it is strictly prohibited to delay TPU transactions beyond the specified batch processing window. The above-mentioned reforms cannot eradicate all the shortcomings of the on-chain market structure, but they are intended to directly standardize the behavior of verification nodes and improve the consistency of execution across the entire network without waiting for the protocol layer code to be finalized.

Technology update to be implemented

Solana’s mid- to long-term technical roadmap is steadily advancing, and its core relies on two major protocol upgrades: Alpenglow and Multi-Parallel Block Producing (MCP). Alpenglow will replace the original consensus architecture and adopt a new design with a more streamlined architecture and lower latency, eliminating historical legacy components (such as historical proof of PoH and on-chain voting transactions), with the goal of compressing transaction confirmation time to about 150 milliseconds. The Solana Foundation disclosed that Alpenglow is under development and plans to launch the mainnet in the third quarter; consistent with the upgrade of all underlying protocols, there are still variables in the launch time.

Relying on the Anza team's "Constellation Proposal" to implement the standardized MCP is a key upgrade to optimize the market structure on the Solana chain. In the current single block generation cycle, only one block proposer has full authority to decide on the selection and ordering of transactions; the Constellation Proposal aims to break this monopoly: multiple proposers are allowed to collect and submit transactions in parallel, and then the current block producer assembles the final block according to the rigid rules of the agreement. The proposal sets a 50 millisecond processing cycle. The core goal is to improve censorship resistance, achieve predictable transaction ordering, and create a neutral execution environment for the on-chain Internet capital market. The first draft of the plan was released at the end of March. There is still room for adjustment in the details before official implementation, and the launch time is yet to be determined.

Expansion and optimization are still being implemented: the fast data channel (XDP), the upper limit of single block computing power to 100 million computing units (CU), the expansion of single transaction volume, the increase in cross-program call (CPI) limits, etc. The Agave4.x series upgrades will further increase the transaction volume and business complexity that Solana can carry. The Anza route also plans to reduce the block interval (Slot Time) to less than 400 milliseconds. One of the key optimization directions is to compress the block interval to 200 milliseconds and shorten the single-node block period (from 4 consecutive blocks to 2 blocks).

Economic model updates are temporarily in a silent period. In the past few quarters, inflation reduction has been a hot topic of controversy in Solana governance circles: first the SIP-228 proposal, and the subsequent SIMD-411 proposal proposed doubling the inflation decay rate to 30% and reducing the issuance of approximately 22.3 million SOLs within six years. After the proposal was implemented, there were no similar proposals and discussions on large-scale inflation reduction in official governance forums. At this stage, the focus of governance has shifted from reducing token issuance to improving node revenue transparency through upgrades such as voting account V4 and SIMD-123 block revenue distribution.

As mentioned in previous research reports, Solana technology iteration is no longer limited to "increasing speed and reducing handling fees." The next stage goal is to take into account high speed, low cost, predictable execution and economic sustainability. Expanding capacity and improving throughput is important, but the real value comes from high-quality transaction execution, higher transaction on-chain success rate, clear transaction ordering, shortening the block control time of a single node, and a node revenue model that is easy to understand for entrusted pledgers and institutions.

On-chain activity

Decentralized Exchange (DEX) Trading Volume

Solana DEX trading volume fell 31% from the fourth quarter of last year, the second largest quarterly decline since 2022, and the total trading volume fell to a new low since the fourth quarter of 2024. Driven by the rebound in risk appetite across the market and the increase in Meme currency trading, trading volume rebounded strongly in January, but fell back in February and March, falling by 25% and 32% month-on-month respectively. The transaction structure is basically the same as that of the previous quarter: the SOL/stablecoin trading pair ranks first, followed by stablecoin exchange, Meme currency trading, and spot transactions of other non-SOL currencies.

Sunrise is a new asset issuance protocol that focuses on tokenizing non-Solana crypto assets and completing spot transactions on the Solana chain. This quarter, the protocol’s share of DEX trading volume continued to rise, accounting for up to 1.5% of the total DEX transactions across the chain in recent months. Although the current contribution to the overall activity of the entire network is limited, Sunrise represents the continued efforts of the ecosystem to break the single structure of transactions that only rely on SOL trading pairs, stable coins and Meme coins, and broaden Solana's transaction sources.

While the DEX trading volume in the entire market is generally declining, the trading volume on the Solana chain has also fallen simultaneously. However, Solana has topped the industry's quarterly DEX trading volume list for five consecutive quarters, with its market share stable at around 30%.

The proportion of self-developed market makers (Prop AMM) in the total trading volume of DEX across the chain continues to rise. On the one hand, the proportion of Meme currency transactions in overall transactions is basically the same. On the other hand, the market has gradually recognized that self-developed market makers can replicate the trading experience on the chain that is comparable to that of centralized exchanges.

Jump data shows that in March, the total trading volume of Solana’s self-developed AMM on the SOL/USDC and SOL/USDT trading pairs was comparable to the sum of the four CEXs of Binance, Coinbase, Ethereum, and Bitget.

Jump, a leading proprietary trader, recently released an in-depth research report: Solana’s self-developed AMM’s matching transaction costs are better than those of centralized platforms, and 91.9% of the transaction prices are lower than the optimal rate range of the leading exchange institutions. This data confirms that on SOL-related mainstream trading pairs, the transaction volume of Solana’s self-developed AMM is equal to that of the four leading centralized exchanges, proving that Solana has the strength to compete with centralized trading venues in terms of transaction efficiency and transaction scale.

On-chain native handling fees were basically the same as in the fourth quarter, with only a slight decrease of 1%. Most of the handling fees in this quarter were contributed by the surge in on-chain market prices in January, while handling fee income shrank significantly in February and March.

However, as the scale of public chain handling fees such as BSC has shrunk, Solana's handling fee market share increased from 22% in the fourth quarter to 25%, bucking the trend. Core conclusion: Handling fees on the entire industry chain have declined in tandem with overall transaction activity, and the share of most public chains has remained stable; while the Meme currency economy is still a key pillar of Solana, and the transaction demand generated by this track has supported priority handling fee income.

Affected by the sluggish overall activity on the chain, application fees fell for the third consecutive quarter, falling 10% quarter-on-quarter to $795 million. The key to weakening the cyclical fluctuations in Solana's performance is to get rid of the current situation where application fees are highly dependent on Meme currency transactions; but for now, Meme currency transactions are still the core driving force that supports Solana's position as the top public chain in terms of transaction fees.

Among the top ten Solana applications for fee income, five businesses directly rely on Meme coins; the proportion of full-chain fees contributed by Pump.Fun, the leading Meme currency issuance platform, climbed from 22% to 32% month-on-month. Although some projects such as the tokenized collection application Collector Crypt have gradually achieved product market fit (PMF), their fee contribution is still very small. At the same time, the share of handling fees in core DeFi infrastructure such as lending protocols has sluggishly grown, and industry leader Kamino has steadily occupied 2% of the entire chain’s handling fees for six consecutive quarters.

Solana has consistently ranked first in application fees from the fourth quarter of 2024 to the third quarter of 2025, and has now fallen to second place in the industry for two consecutive quarters. However, even though the ecological transaction volume is highly dependent on Meme currency, relying on a stable and active user and developer base, its handling fee market share still increased to 26%.

Perpetual Contract

In view of the continued popularity of perpetual contracts and prediction markets in the full encryption industry, expanding these two types of businesses and diversifying ecological income are the clear main directions of the Solana Foundation and the entire ecosystem.

However, there have been no substantial changes in the perpetual contract track pattern on the Solana chain in recent quarters. In the first quarter, the track was still dominated by Jupiter and Drift. However, Drift suffered a $285 million hacker theft incident on April 1, and its share is likely to shrink in the future. Affected by the decline in total crypto trading volume across the industry, perpetual contract trading volume fell 34% month-on-month, shrinking for the second consecutive quarter.

The open positions and trading volume market shares of Solana’s perpetual contracts have fallen sharply since their peak in November 2024, with only 3% and 2% remaining respectively as of the end of March. The sharp decline in share is caused by multiple factors. The primary reason is the sudden emergence of Hyperliquid, coupled with the subsequent launch of a large number of similar competing products, the competition in the perpetual contract track is intensifying. Although Solana has seized the market dividend of Meme currency, it has not been able to take on the trend of subsequent fund migration to perpetual contracts: in terms of product experience and liquidity, there is no competing product in the ecosystem that can benchmark Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid continues to expand its advantages, especially relying on the HIP-3 proposal to launch a new trading market, opening up perpetual contracts for non-crypto assets such as stocks and commodities. On the other hand, the Solana trading platform's products are still limited to cryptocurrency transactions. Previous research reports mentioned that wallets such as Phantom further amplify this gap: This wallet helps newcomers outside the circle easily access the Solana ecosystem with a smooth entry experience, but it sets the Hyperliquid perpetual contract as the default transaction entrance, and its advantages continue to snowball.

Except for traffic distribution and liquidity shortcomings, Solana’s universal underlying execution architecture itself is not suitable for perpetual contract business. Professional market makers need to cancel orders and re-list prices at the millisecond level, and can accurately predict the packaging position of their own transactions in the block. However, the current Solana main network cannot provide deterministic guarantees: the transaction sorting rules of different verification nodes and schedulers are different; the handling fee is composed of basic handling fees, priority handling fees, Jito tips, and third-party on-chain service fees; market makers' order cancellation instructions also have to compete with unrelated transactions for block resources. This uncertainty is directly reflected in the widening of bid-ask spreads, and funds continue to flow to trading platforms with greater execution certainty. The lag behind Solana’s perpetual contract is essentially a flaw in the underlying execution mechanism, not a lack of market demand. Chase Buck, former head of ecology at the Solana Foundation, once wrote an in-depth breakdown of the above pain points for reference.

However, the Solana ecosystem does not stand still. The three improvements of Anza's route planning, the implementation of the Alpenglow upgrade, the implementation of the first phase of multi-parallel block production (MCP) based on the constellation solution, and the optimization of scheduler rules will improve the execution certainty of low-latency services. The BAM market maker priority plug-in launched by Jito is also simultaneously piloting the deterministic execution of batch head orders. In terms of the application layer, emerging exchanges such as Phoenix, Archer, Bulk, and Fermi have implemented pilot projects in three execution modes: fully composable main network, node embedded, and side auxiliary chain. It is difficult to cure the problem with a single solution, but the entire set of measures is the first time that the ecosystem has worked together to repair the shortcomings of the perpetual contract from the market-making side and the retail side.

Prediction Market

The first quarter is the first quarter that the Solana prediction market has gone from blank to implementation, but the overall volume is still insignificant.

The trading infrastructure platform DFlow connects Kalshi prediction market tokenized products to Solana, and DEX leader Jupiter aggregates the liquidity of Kalshi and Polymarket through the prediction market API. Users can complete transactions within the Solana ecological application, and the ownership of held assets relies on the Solana on-chain system; developers do not need to build an entire exchange, oracle, matching, and clearing system from scratch to quickly access the prediction market business. The DFlow solution has the deepest implementation, encapsulating Kalshi’s long and short position shares into SPL tokens (Solana’s token standard against Ethereum’s ERC20); Jupiter blocks the underlying market sources and completes the entire process of transactions, positions, and liquidation in one stop within the native application.

The weekly trading volume of Solana prediction market has been rising from almost zero trading at the end of October last year, reaching a peak of over 10 million US dollars in early February, with the highest number of weekly active users being about 10,000. After peaking in the first quarter, the transaction volume began to fall; as of April, the weekly transaction volume fell back to the range of US$3 million to US$4 million, and the number of users shrank significantly from the February high.

Compared with the overall industry market, the situation is clear at a glance: Solana’s forecast market trading volume briefly surged to about 0.19% in December, hovered in the range of 0.10% to 0.16% for most of January to February, and fell back to 0.04% to 0.06% in April. There is vast room for growth on the track, but competition in the industry will only become more intense. Hyperliquid has relied on HIP-4 to implement the outcome prediction market in May, and launched fully margined binary options contracts in its flagship trading core HyperCore. In just two weeks after going online, the transaction volume reached 6 times the total transaction volume of Solana prediction market in the same period.

For Solana, there is no need to build a full-stack self-developed closed trading platform. The real opportunity lies in realizing the combinability and interoperability of predicted position assets and the entire financial ecosystem on the chain: position certificates can be pledged as collateral in the lending market and circulated through aggregators. It can also list native crypto event prediction varieties that will never be launched by Kalshi and Polymarket. In the first quarter, it has been verified that Solana has the ability to access the prediction market. The key in the next few quarters is whether it can run through the closed loop of its own products and build a competitive native prediction trading platform.

Total lockup, RWA, stablecoin and lending section

Solana’s total lock-in value (TVL) fell for the second consecutive quarter, down 22% from the previous quarter, but the industry-wide share remained stable at around 7%. Despite the shrinkage of stocks, the total locked-up size of US$15 billion in the first quarter of 2026 is still significantly higher than in previous bear market cycles: about 40 times higher than the historical low after the FTX thunderstorm, and 3 times higher than the value on the eve of the market launch in the fourth quarter of 2023. In short, although on-chain activity has cooled along with the broader market, Solana’s capital base has achieved structural expansion compared to the previous down cycle.

The sector with the brightest growth momentum among the total locked-in scale is undoubtedly Real Asset Tokenization (RWA): the scale surged 58% in the first quarter, exceeding US$2.5 billion, accounting for 17% of Solana’s overall locked-up amount. This round of growth is not concentrated in a single category of products. BlackRock BUIDL funds, xStocks tokenized stocks, Hastra PRIME home equity loans, and OnRe tokenized reinsurance products all contributed to the increase. The implementation of such assets continues to improve the financial landscape of Solana's on-chain, making it no longer limited to native cryptocurrency transactions. It also provides feasible investment channels for investors who want to allocate income on the chain that is independent of the crypto market. Among them, the growth of OnRe is particularly prominent: without the traffic support of Solana ecosystem, it would be difficult for the project to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in liquidity on the chain.

The Solana stablecoin market continues to expand, but the book growth rate masks the structural rotation of internal currencies. The total market value of stablecoins increased by 2.7% compared with the fourth quarter of last year, reaching $15.45 billion, achieving three consecutive quarters of growth, accounting for approximately 5% of the industry-wide stablecoin market. At the same time, the dominance of USDC has significantly loosened: USDT stocks have increased by 34% month-on-month, and USD1 stocks issued by World Liberty Financial have soared by 473%. By the end of this quarter, USD1 has become the third largest stable currency in Solana.

In the first quarter, interest-bearing stablecoins and tokenized cash products began to form a considerable amount of stock in Solana. The combined stock of YLDS products owned by BlackRock BUIDL and Figure has grown from almost zero to approximately US$900 million, reflecting the continued increase in market demand for institutional and fixed-income alternative stablecoins. The liquidity structure of Solana's stablecoin has subsequently changed: it is no longer highly concentrated in the settlement market dominated by USDC, but has gradually differentiated into four major tracks: payment stablecoins, market-making settlement assets, interest-earning financial products, and lending supporting assets. In February, Solana stablecoin settlement transaction volume reached US$650 billion, doubling the historical peak; since January 2025, the total issuance of niche stablecoins other than USDC and USDT has surged nearly 10 times.

The development situation of the lending sector is more complicated. Solana is firmly the industry leader in DEX transactions, but the on-chain lending market is still firmly dominated by Ethereum. Although Solana's lending share has recovered from the trough after the FTX thunderstorm, compared with its own DEX trading volume, stablecoin settlement volume and DeFi user base, the lending scale is still small. Although the relevant underlying infrastructure and products continue to be iteratively optimized, it has not yet translated into a substantial increase in cross-chain lending market share.

In the above-mentioned industry background, even if it is temporarily difficult to significantly increase the overall market share, the recent progress of the lending track is still of great significance. In the first quarter, Kamino’s PRIME lending market lockup exceeded US$600 million, and the platform’s overall RWA business volume passed the US$1 billion mark. Gauntlet also launched a USDC financial vault on the platform. Jupiter Lending has officially ended its public beta, with a total of 83,000 users and no bad debts throughout the process. Later, the native pledge SOL mortgage function was launched. The SOL used as collateral by users can still continue to receive pledge income. Relying on the advancement of the two major projects Kamino and Jupiter, Solana Lending is jumping out of the traditional floating rate DeFi lending framework and gradually evolving into diversified forms such as isolated lending pools, institutional asset mortgages, RWA pledged lending, and structured stablecoin financial management.

The launch of new projects at the beginning of the second quarter confirms the continuation of this development trend: Jupiter Lend joined forces with Bitwise and Fluid to launch an isolated USDe lending market for institutions; Coinbase cooperated with Morpho to launch SOL pledged USDC lending products, which users can operate directly on the Coinbase page. The successively launched products anchor the same development direction: Solana lending is becoming more institutionalized, the types of collateral continue to expand, and the linkage with stablecoins and the RWA ecosystem continues to deepen. The follow-up suspense is whether this new product can transform Solana's strong transaction flow and stable currency stock into a larger and more sustainable lending fund pool.

Other key developments in the first quarter

The Solana Mobile ecosystem has moved from self-developed hardware to industry-wide empowerment. The application for SKR tokens opened in January, with a total of nearly 2 billion (accounting for 20% of the total token issuance) allocated to the Solana mobile ecosystem. The cumulative activation volume of the flagship Seeker mobile phone has exceeded 118,000 units since its launch. Compared with the overall user base of Solana, the inventory of this machine is still small, but it has become a high-quality traffic distribution channel for start-up projects to launch Solana applications. The bigger growth point of the ecosystem is not limited to self-developed mobile phone hardware: at the Mobile World Congress in March, Solana Mobile released the Solana mobile development kit for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and hardware manufacturers, opening up the technology authorization path. Third-party smart devices can be pre-installed with public chain supporting wallets, application stores and security key management underlying components. Once Solana Mobile cooperates with major hardware manufacturers and relies on terminal distribution capabilities that are much higher than Seeker's, the business will transform from "selling encrypted exclusive mobile phones" to the bottom layer of Solana mobile traffic covering mass smart hardware. This year’s Solana Breakpoint Developer Conference is expected to have more official announcements of cooperation with manufacturers.

AI intelligent agents and agent-driven payment have officially become the foundation’s key advancement directions. Solana Foundation and Colosseum jointly held an AI Intelligent Agent Hackathon event in February, with a prize pool of US$100,000 USDC, and a total of 454 entries received. In March, the Intelligent Agent Registration Center was launched to provide identity confirmation, credibility system and qualification verification underlying facilities for AI agents on the chain. At the same time, the x402 protocol and machine-oriented native payment tools continue to be popularized in the Solana ecosystem, and the public chain has been newly integrated with the Machine Payments Protocol jointly developed by Stripe and Tempo, which relies on stablecoins to achieve API programmatic settlement. Solana is working hard to build an underlying clearing channel to support AI agents to independently hold wallets, pay API call fees, retrieve data, conduct transactions, participate in on-chain governance, and eventually grow into on-chain entities with actual economic value. Not only is Solana targeting this track, almost all leading public chains are committed to becoming the first choice for smart agent economic activities: Base leads the track with on-chain AI-related tokens, and Tempo, which has massive traffic in traditional fields, is Solana's main competitor in this field. At the Solana Accelerate Developer Conference in May, this development strategy was further implemented: the foundation jointly launched the Pay.sh payment gateway with Google Cloud. AI agents can access Google Cloud and more than 50 community API services through the stable currency on the Solana chain and pay based on the number of calls.

The payment infrastructure landscape continues to expand. From the perspective of design logic, it is difficult for the payment business to become the core source of Solana's handling fees - the product positioning of payment is low-cost, high-speed, and user-free. In the first quarter, Solana's payment scenario saw a number of major cooperations: lending platform SoFi opened a deposit channel for Solana's native assets, and Gusto, the personnel compensation system, supports the same-day settlement of corporate employee compensation through USDC. Industry implementation cases in May further confirmed the direction of the ecosystem: Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, with the technical support of Stripe, launched USDC creator settlement services on the Solana and Polygon chains in stages, and was initially open to some creators in Colombia and the Philippines; Western Union launched USDPT issued by Anchorage Digital Bank Stablecoin, as an all-weather settlement asset of its global remittance network, is planned to be implemented in scenarios including cross-border exchange, intelligent agent clearing, and corporate fund management. The "Stable by Western Union" stablecoin product for ordinary users plans to be launched in more than 40 countries and regions in 2026. Payment is the clearest path to guide individual users, merchants, freelancers, content creators and enterprises to normalize on-chain transactions. It can bring about continued wallet activity, stablecoin stock accumulation and user usage habits, and feed back the entire ecological business in the long term. A user who receives his salary through Solana USDC can more easily carry out savings, currency exchanges, deposits and loans, consumption, pledges and contract transactions on the chain.

Summary

The problem for Solana at this stage is no longer whether it can attract users to use the public chain. The number of users has already been established. The real issue is: whether the existing user ecosystem can be transformed into a stable and sustainable on-chain financial economy. The market situation in the first quarter confirms that even if the market weakens, Solana's industry position remains stable, but ecological revenue is highly dependent on the cyclical ups and downs of the speculative market, which is still a significant shortcoming.

The good thing is that various supporting elements for improving the ecology have gradually taken shape: sufficient spot liquidity, a solid user base, a complete wallet ecosystem, a mature stablecoin settlement system, a steady increase in RWA asset size, superimposed mobile traffic channels, multi-party payment cooperation, and a technology iteration route that aims to improve transaction certainty rather than simply expand throughput. Looking at the entire industry, there are only a handful of public chains that combine the above advantages at the same time. However, the three core financial tracks of perpetual contracts, prediction markets, and lending are still absent or underdeveloped.

This also determines that the priority of the next phase of construction is higher than in the past: Solana no longer needs to prove that it can undertake a speculative bull market, the historical market has already given the answer; it needs to verify that after the next round of market, the ecosystem can precipitate a deeper financial market, diversified mortgage assets, high retention user groups and a benign and sustainable node economic model. Public chains that are competitive in the long term do not rely on short-term hot data in the bull market, but can still retain existing funds after the speculative craze subsides.

The first quarter data shows that the bottom of Solana’s fundamentals has risen, and the next step of the ecosystem’s focus is to continue to raise the upper limit of development.