Galaxy in-depth report: Is Solana still worth paying attention to?

Author: Lucas Tcheyan, Vice President of Galaxy Research

Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

Introduction

Solana's core metrics have slowed down comprehensively in the first quarter. Risk appetite has cooled, meme coin trading has retreated from previous highs, DEX trading volume has decreased, and application fees have declined for the third consecutive quarter.

Despite the decline in key data, Solana's overall position in the market has not changed.

It not only maintains its leading position in DEX trading volume but also sustains or even expands its share in key fee categories, extends its record of stable network operation, and continues to expand its business in areas such as stablecoins, RWA, lending, mobile, payments, and institutional infrastructure. Its fundamentals are far stronger than in previous cycles.

The persistent weaknesses are similar to those we pointed out in previous quarters. Compared to other mainstream public chains, Solana's activity remains highly tied to speculative trading cycles (especially meme coins). When capital flows cool down, DEX trading volume, application fees, and priority fees are all dragged down simultaneously.

The growth areas that can smooth out these cyclical fluctuations are moving forward, albeit at different paces. RWA achieved growth in the first quarter, becoming the most notable highlight. Stablecoins continue to expand and gradually reduce their reliance on USDC.

The lending business is becoming more institutionalized, with increasingly diversified collateral. In contrast, perpetual contracts and prediction markets are still far from being established, while Hyperliquid's leading advantage in these two areas is not diminishing but rather increasing.

As we move into the remainder of 2026, the core question is whether the areas where Solana currently lags (such as perpetual contracts, prediction markets, and lending) can begin to make significant contributions like DEX trading volume.

The development roadmap is addressing the right issues, but the improvement of infrastructure is just the beginning. Solana still needs sufficient liquidity, quality products, and user habits to convert its technological advantages into a dominant market share.

Key Points

• Solana's zero downtime record has been extended to eight consecutive quarters. The network's focus in the first quarter has shifted further from basic reliability to execution quality, transaction confirmation, ordering consistency, and market structure.
• The 3.1 version of the Agave validator client has advanced mainnet deployment this quarter, while the forward-looking roadmap around Alpenglow and multi-concurrent proposers (MCP) upgrades has become more concrete. The next phase of Solana's scalability focuses on providing a more predictable execution environment for high-value financial applications.
• The diversity of validators and schedulers continues to improve, but it comes with trade-offs. More clients and block building paths reduce the risk of a single client, but also make transaction confirmation and ordering across validators harder to predict. This is a pain point for perpetual contracts, centralized limit order books (CLOBs), clearing, and other delay-sensitive markets.
• Solana's DEX trading volume decreased by 31% quarter-over-quarter, marking the second-largest single-quarter decline since 2022 and the lowest absolute quarterly trading volume since Q4 2024. Despite the pullback, Solana has maintained its position as the leading public chain in DEX trading volume for the fifth consecutive quarter, with a slight increase in market share to 31%.
• Proprietary automated market makers (AMMs) continue to deepen Solana's spot market structure. Their trading volume share is steadily increasing, and there is evidence that Solana's proprietary AMM execution efficiency on SOL/stablecoin trading pairs can rival or even surpass that of major centralized exchanges, further confirming that Solana's leadership in spot trading is not solely reliant on meme coins.
• Network fees remained basically flat quarter-over-quarter (down 1%), while Solana's share of Layer-1 network fees increased to 25%. Application fees have declined for the third consecutive quarter, dropping 10% to $795 million, but Solana's application fee share rose to 26%, highlighting that the fee environment across the entire cryptocurrency space is weakening in sync with Solana.
• Solana's fee base remains highly dependent on retail speculative trading. Among the top ten applications generating fees on the network, five are still directly related to meme coins, with Pump.fun's contribution to Solana's application fees increasing from 22% to 32% quarter-over-quarter. This makes Solana's revenue base highly cyclical.
• Solana's perpetual contract trading volume decreased by 34% quarter-over-quarter, and by the end of March, its perpetual contract open interest and trading volume market shares had dropped to about 3% and 2%, respectively. Hyperliquid continues to siphon off the highest-value derivative trading activity from Solana.
• Prediction markets began to emerge on Solana in the first quarter, but their scale remains insignificant compared to the overall sector. In early February, the weekly trading volume of Solana's prediction markets exceeded $10 million, with weekly active users peaking at around 10,000, but their share of the total prediction market trading volume remains below 0.2%.
• Total locked value (TVL) decreased by 22% to $15 billion, but Solana still holds about 7% of the total cryptocurrency TVL, significantly higher than the levels of the previous cycle. A stronger positive is the structural shift: RWA surged by 58%, breaking through $2.5 billion, accounting for 17% of Solana's TVL; stablecoin supply grew by 2.7% to $15.45 billion, with reduced reliance on USDC.
• Yield-bearing stablecoins and tokenized cash products are gradually becoming a more substantive part of decentralized finance (DeFi) activity on Solana. BlackRock's BUIDL money market fund and Figure's YLDS stablecoin have surged from zero to a combined supply of about $900 million, while the supply of stablecoins excluding USDC and USDT has increased nearly tenfold since January 2025. This is one of the clearest signals that Solana's capital base is moving beyond pure crypto beta towards diversification.

Network Metrics

Network Performance and Health

The reliability issues that were once heavily criticized in Solana's early days are no longer a focal point. The network is faster and more stable than it was a year ago and has undergone more real-world testing. The first quarter marks its eighth consecutive quarter of zero downtime.

In a series of incremental upgrades, including the latest Agave 3.1 in the first quarter, the median block time has stabilized in a tighter range of around 400 milliseconds.

Despite an overall decline in risk appetite, throughput remains strong. By the end of the first quarter, the percentile of transactions per second (TPS) has significantly increased, with high percentile throughput reaching the highest level in the past year.

When retail activity returns (especially around trading and meme coin-driven activities), Solana will still experience a massive demand surge, and the network is handling these demands without pressure.

This is crucial because the rest of Solana's financial ecosystem relies on the stability of the underlying infrastructure. Spot trading, stablecoin payments, lending, RWA, perpetual contracts, and prediction markets all require fast, low-cost, and reliably stable execution.

Validation and Staking

In the fourth quarter, a significant milestone was that Firedancer captured a considerable market share, reducing single-client risk. With the expansion of validator version diversity, Firedancer's overall market share of validator clients decreased in the first quarter.

Agave remains dominant, but the validator landscape has become more complex and substantive among Agave, Jito, Frankendancer, BAM, Harmonic, and other variants.

In a sense, diversification is healthy. More clients and more diverse implementations reduce the risk of network paralysis due to a single vulnerability or client issue. However, there are trade-offs.

Different validators may run different schedulers, block building infrastructure, and ordering logic. This is inconsequential for many applications, but for high-value trading applications (especially perpetual contracts and CLOB-style markets), the impact is profound (as discussed in the perpetual contracts section below).

This quarter, validator economic benefits have weakened, and staking annual percentage yields (APY) continue to decline. As priority fees and maximum extractable value (MEV) cool down, the proportion of inflation rewards in total staking returns is increasing. This continues the pattern from the fourth quarter, when reduced speculative activity lowered rewards from fees, further squeezing validator earnings.

Overall, competition among operating nodes is intensifying. Declining staking APY, shrinking fees and MEV opportunities, and a more complex validator tech stack have raised the barriers to entry.

This reshuffling is a natural result of the network transitioning from subsidy-driven maturation to self-sustainability. However, the reduction in the number of validators makes the distribution of staking, client diversity, geographic distribution, and data center concentration more important.

Since May 1, the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP) has implemented stricter requirements regarding data center concentration, ASN concentration, software versions, metric reporting, voting credits, commissions, skip rates, and transaction processing.

SFDP participants must also regularly publish shards within a 50-millisecond or shorter window using first-in-first-out (FIFO) or priority fee-based scheduling mechanisms, avoid transaction processing unit (TPU) scrutiny, and prevent TPU transaction delays from exceeding the allowed batch window.

These changes do not completely resolve all market structure issues, but they are a direct attempt to make validator behavior more consistent without waiting for every fix to be solidified at the protocol level.

Upcoming Technical Updates

Solana's forward-looking technical roadmap remains highly constructive, anchored by two major protocol upgrades: Alpenglow and multi-concurrent proposers (MCP). Alpenglow will replace Solana's current consensus mechanism with a simpler, lower-latency design, removing traditional components like proof of history (PoH) and on-chain voting transactions, aiming for a confirmation time of around 150 milliseconds.

The Solana Foundation lists Alpenglow as "in development," with plans to deploy it to the mainnet in the third quarter. As with all core protocol upgrades, the timeline may still change.

MCP has now been formally established through Anza's Constellation proposal, which is a more significant upgrade to Solana's market structure. Currently, the leader temporarily controls the packaging and ordering of transactions.

Constellation aims to break this single-leader monopoly, allowing multiple proposers to concurrently collect and submit transactions, while the leader assembles the final block under protocol-enforced rules.

This proposal introduces a 50-millisecond cycle, aiming for censorship resistance, predictable ordering, and a more neutral execution environment for internet capital markets. Preliminary designs were released at the end of March, but the exact specifications may be adjusted before implementation, and the timeline remains uncertain.

Capacity expansion remains part of the story. The ultra-fast data path (XDP), 100 million compute unit (CU) blocks, larger transaction sizes, deeper cross-program invocation (CPI) limits, and other upgrades from the Agave 4.x era are expected to enhance the number and complexity of activities Solana can support.

Anza's roadmap also calls for reducing block times to below 400 milliseconds, with a noteworthy configuration direction being a shift to around 200 milliseconds per block and shortening the leader span, possibly from 4 blocks to 2.

The economic roadmap is relatively calm. Inflation reduction was one of the most controversial governance topics for Solana in previous quarters, initially proposed through Solana Improvement Document 228, followed by SIMD-411 (which proposed doubling the inflation decay rate to 30% and reducing the expected total issuance of 22.3 million SOL over six years).

Since then, there has been no similar follow-up governance advancement or significant new discussions on inflation reduction in the official governance forum.

Currently, the focus has shifted from reducing issuance to upgrades like Vote Account V4 and SIMD-123 block revenue distribution, making validator economic benefits more transparent.

As we noted in our previous report, Solana's technical focus continues to move beyond simply "making the protocol faster and cheaper." The next phase's focus is on making it fast, cheap, predictable, and economically sustainable.

Higher throughput is important, but the bigger breakthrough lies in higher quality execution, better transaction confirmation, clearer ordering, shorter leader control windows, and a validator economic model that is easier for delegators and institutions to understand.

Network Activity

DEX Trading Volume

Solana's DEX trading volume decreased by 31% from Q4, marking the second-largest single-quarter decline since 2022, with absolute trading volume dropping to its lowest point since Q4 2024.

Although January saw a strong rebound in trading volume due to a broader risk appetite environment and a resurgence in meme coin trading, February's trading volume fell by 25%, and March saw a further decline of 32%.

The composition of trading volume remained largely consistent with the previous quarter, with SOL/stablecoin trading pairs dominating, followed by stablecoin swaps, meme coins, and spot trading pairs of non-SOL crypto tokens.

Sunrise, a new asset issuance protocol focused on tokenizing non-Solana crypto assets for spot trading on Solana, continued to eat into DEX activity's share this quarter.

In recent months, this protocol's contribution to total DEX trading volume peaked at 1.5%. While this remains a small factor driving overall network activity, Sunrise's rise confirms that Solana is working to expand its sources of trading activity beyond SOL trading pairs, stablecoins, and meme coins.

The overall decline in trading volume aligns with the general downward trend in DEX trading volume across the entire crypto ecosystem. Nevertheless, Solana has maintained its position as the leading chain in DEX trading volume for the fifth consecutive quarter, with market share remaining around 30%.

Proprietary AMMs continue to grow their share of total on-chain DEX trading volume. This is partly because the proportion of meme coin trading in total trading volume remains relatively stable, and partly because the market increasingly recognizes that proprietary AMMs bring a trading experience similar to centralized exchanges on-chain.

Jump, one of the largest proprietary trading firms globally, recently released an in-depth analysis finding that Solana's proprietary AMMs provide execution quality comparable to centralized exchanges, with 91.9% of order execution costs lower than the best institutional fee tiers on major CEXs.

Jump's analysis indicates that in March, proprietary AMMs matched the total trading volume of Binance, Coinbase, OKX, and Bybit on SOL/USDC and SOL/USDT trading pairs, showcasing Solana's competitive strength in execution quality and scale against centralized trading platforms.

Image Source: Jump, "PropAMMs and the Next Chapter of Permissionless Market Structure"

Network fees remained stable compared to Q4, with a slight decline of 1%. Similarly, the surge in on-chain activity in January contributed to most of the fees for this quarter, followed by significant contractions in February and March.

However, as the activity on chains like BNB Smart Chain (BSC) has decreased, Solana has maintained and expanded its market share, rising from 22% in Q4 to 25%.

The core conclusion is that network fees across the entire crypto space are decreasing with declining activity, but most public chains have maintained their original market shares. In this regard, Solana's meme economy remains crucial as it drives demand for priority fees.

Application fees have declined for the third consecutive quarter, dropping 10% to $795 million, reflecting stagnation in on-chain activity. While shifting the drivers of application fees from meme coins to diversified development is crucial for Solana to mitigate cyclical fluctuations, for now, such transactions still keep Solana in a leading position in fee generation.

Among the top ten applications ranked by fees on Solana, five are directly related to meme coins. The iconic meme launch platform Pump.Fun's contribution to total fees increased from 22% to 32% quarter-over-quarter.

While projects like the tokenized collectibles application Collector Crypt are beginning to find product-market fit, their share of total fees remains very small.

Additionally, core DeFi infrastructure like lending protocols is struggling to expand fee market share, with the leading market Kamino maintaining a fee activity share of 2% for six consecutive quarters.

After leading from Q4 2024 to Q3 2025, Solana's application fees have ranked second for two consecutive quarters. However, its market share has increased to 26%, indicating that while the chain heavily relies on meme-driven trading volume, it still maintains a healthy and active user and developer base.

Perpetual Contracts

Given the appeal of these products across the cryptocurrency space, expanding activity into perpetual contracts and prediction markets is clearly a priority for the Solana Foundation and the entire ecosystem.

However, the landscape for perpetual contracts on the Solana chain has not seen substantial changes in recent quarters. In the first quarter, this sector was still dominated by Jupiter and Drift; however, the latter encountered a $285 million vulnerability attack on April 1, and its market share is expected to decline. With the overall industry's cryptocurrency trading volume decreasing, perpetual contract trading volume has also shrunk by 34%, marking the second consecutive quarter of contraction.

Since the peak in November 2024, Solana's perpetual contract open interest and trading volume market shares have significantly declined, dropping to 3% and 2% respectively by the end of March. This notable decline has multiple causes.

The primary reason is Hyperliquid's breakthrough success, along with the emergence of numerous competitors, which has made the perpetual contract market exceptionally competitive. While Solana led the meme coin craze, the ecosystem failed to capitalize on the subsequent transformation of perpetual contract trading, lacking true competitors that can match Hyperliquid in user experience or liquidity.

Hyperliquid continues to consolidate this advantage, especially with the launch of the HIP-3 market, which opens the door for perpetual trading of non-crypto assets like stocks and commodities, while the Solana platform remains primarily limited to cryptocurrency trading.

This advantage is also snowballing, as wallet providers like Phantom (whose smooth user experience allows non-crypto natives to easily enter Solana and trade) integrate Hyperliquid perpetual contracts as a default option.

Beyond distribution and liquidity, Solana's general execution layer is not friendly to perpetual contracts. Rigorous market makers need to cancel orders and re-quote within milliseconds, and they need to clearly define where their trades will settle in the block.

Currently, Solana's mainnet cannot provide these guarantees: transaction ordering across validators and schedulers is variable; the fee stack is split into base fees, priority fees, Jito tips, and external confirmation services; and market makers' canceled orders must compete for block space with other unrelated transactions.

This uncertainty manifests as wider bid-ask spreads and capital migrating to platforms with tighter execution. The gap for Solana in perpetual contracts reflects execution-level issues rather than a lack of demand.

For readers seeking a deeper understanding, Chase Barker, former head of ecosystem growth at the Solana Foundation, has written a detailed overview on these issues.

However, the ecosystem is not stagnant. Anza's roadmap points to Alpenglow, the initial MCP implementation based on Constellation design, and changes to the scheduler, all of which should provide more predictable execution for delay-sensitive applications.

Jito's BAM Maker Priority plugin has already begun testing deterministic batch top execution for market makers at the same rhythm.

At the application layer, new exchanges like Phoenix, Archer, Bulk, and Fermi are experimenting with fully composable mainnet, validator integration, and sidecar execution.

None of these initiatives can solve the problem alone, but together they represent a collaborative effort to repair Solana's perpetual contract ecosystem from both the market maker and retail ends.

Prediction Markets

The first quarter marked the first quarter that prediction markets began to show presence on Solana, but from a broader perspective, their scale remains small.

The trading infrastructure platform DFlow introduced tokenized Kalshi markets to Solana, and Jupiter DEX also began aggregating prediction market liquidity from Kalshi and Polymarket through its prediction API.

This means users can trade from Solana applications, positions can be presented through Solana's infrastructure, and developers can add prediction market functionality without building a complete exchange, oracle, matching, and settlement system from scratch.

DFlow's model has gone the furthest, tokenizing Kalshi's YES/NO position into SPL tokens (equivalent to ERC-20 on Ethereum), while Jupiter masks the differences in market sources, processing trades, positions, and settlement processes within the native Solana application experience.

The weekly trading volume of Solana's prediction markets rose from nearly zero in late October to over $10 million in early February, with weekly users peaking at around 10,000. After peaking in the first quarter, trading volume began to decline. By April, weekly trading volume had dropped to the range of $3 million to $4 million, and the user base had significantly decreased from the February peak.

Compared to the broader industry landscape, the situation is clearer. Solana's prediction market trading volume share briefly reached about 0.19% in December, hovered between 0.10% and 0.16% for most of January and February, and then fell back to the range of 0.04% to 0.06% in April.

There is significant room for growth, but the competitive landscape will only become more challenging. Hyperliquid launched HIP-4 outcome markets in May, directly integrating fully collateralized binary contracts into its flagship trading system HyperCore, achieving six times the trading volume of Solana's prediction markets in the same period in just about two weeks.

For Solana, the opportunity lies not in becoming a vertically integrated trading venue but in making outcome positions composable with the rest of on-chain finance.

This way, they can serve as collateral in lending markets, be routed through aggregators, and be paired with native crypto event markets that Kalshi or Polymarket will never list. The first quarter proved that Solana can tap into prediction markets. The next few quarters will determine whether it can build its own product loop, including launching a native and competitive prediction market platform.

TVL, RWA, Stablecoins, and Lending

Solana's TVL has declined for the second consecutive quarter, down 22% from Q4, but the network still maintains about 7% of the total cryptocurrency TVL. Despite the pullback, the $15 billion TVL in Q1 2026 is still significantly higher than the levels of the previous cycle, approximately 40 times higher than the post-FTX event low, and three times the level before Solana began to recover in Q4 2023. In other words, while activity has weakened with the broader market, Solana's capital base is structurally larger than in previous downturns.

The clearest area of TVL growth is RWA. It surged by 58% in the first quarter, breaking through $2.5 billion, accounting for 17% of total TVL. This growth is not concentrated in a single product category. BlackRock's BUIDL, xStocks' tokenized stocks, Hastra PRIME's home equity loans, and OnRe's tokenized reinsurance have collectively driven this expansion.

These integrations expand Solana's financial stack beyond crypto-native trading, making the network a viable option for users seeking on-chain yield sources (without directly relying on crypto market beta). OnRe's growth is particularly noteworthy: without Solana's distribution channels, the resistance it faced in raising hundreds of millions in on-chain liquidity could have been much greater.

Solana's stablecoin market continues to expand, although overall growth data masks profound structural rotations underneath. The stablecoin market cap grew by 2.7% to $15.45 billion from Q4, marking the network's third consecutive quarter of growth while maintaining about 5% of the broader stablecoin market.

However, USDC's dominance has been significantly weakened, with USDT's supply increasing by 34%, and World Liberty Financial's USD1 skyrocketing by 473%, making it the third-largest stablecoin on Solana by the end of the quarter.

The first quarter also marked the formation of a substantial scale for yield-bearing stablecoins and tokenized cash products on Solana. BlackRock's BUIDL and Figure's YLDS surged from nearly zero to a combined supply of about $900 million, reflecting strong market demand for institutional-grade and yield-bearing stable asset alternatives.

As a result, stablecoin liquidity on Solana is becoming increasingly diversified, no longer limited to a single settlement market dominated by USDC, but spreading into payment stable assets, market maker settlement assets, yield products, and assets designed specifically for integrating lending markets.

In February, Solana processed up to $650 billion in stablecoin trading volume, more than double the previous record, while the supply of stablecoins excluding USDC and USDT has soared nearly tenfold since January 2025.

Lending remains the trickiest part of the story. Unlike Solana's consistently leading market share in DEX trading volume, on-chain lending is still absolutely dominated by Ethereum.

Solana's lending share has improved from the lows following the FTX collapse, but it still pales in comparison to its DEX activity, stablecoin settlement scale, and broader DeFi user base. Infrastructure and products are improving, but these advances have yet to translate into substantial leaps in cross-chain lending market share.

This context makes recent progress in the lending space particularly important, even if its impact on overall market share has yet to manifest. In the first quarter, Kamino's PRIME market TVL surpassed $600 million, while Kamino's RWA market total scale crossed the $1 billion mark, and Gauntlet also launched a USDC treasury on the platform.

Jupiter Lend concluded its beta testing, attracting 83,000 users with zero bad debt, and subsequently allowed native staked SOL to be used as collateral without interrupting staking rewards.

Kamino and Jupiter are working together to push Solana lending beyond standard variable-rate DeFi markets, moving towards isolated markets, institutional collateral, RWA-backed lending, and more structured yield products.

The early development trend in the second quarter indicates that this trend is continuing. Jupiter Lend has partnered with Bitwise and Fluid to launch an isolated USDe lending market for institutions, while Coinbase and Morpho have introduced USDC loans collateralized by SOL through the Coinbase interface.

These releases reinforce the direction of development: Solana lending is becoming increasingly institutionalized, with more diversified collateral, closely linked to the growth of stablecoins and RWA. The pending question is whether these products can convert Solana's strong trading and stable ecosystem into a larger, more sustainable lending base.

Other Notable Developments in Q1

Solana Mobile goes beyond first-party hardware boundaries. SKR token claims opened in January, with nearly 2 billion tokens (20% of total supply) allocated to the Solana Mobile ecosystem. Since its launch, over 118,000 Seeker phones have been activated.

Although still relatively small compared to Solana's overall user base, Seeker has become an effective distribution channel for early teams launching applications on Solana.

However, the bigger opportunity lies beyond Solana Mobile's self-developed hardware. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in March, Solana Mobile launched the Solana Mobile Stack for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and hardware manufacturers, paving the way for the integration of the blockchain's wallet, app store, and secure key management infrastructure into third-party devices.

If Solana Mobile can sign a mainstream OEM partner with distribution capabilities far exceeding Seeker's, this plan could shift from simply selling crypto-native phones to becoming a Solana mobile distribution layer across mainstream hardware. More partnership announcements are expected later this year at the Solana Breakpoint conference.

AI agents and agent-driven payments become the foundation's true focus. The Solana Foundation hosted an AI Agent hackathon with Colosseum in February, featuring a $100,000 prize pool and receiving 454 submissions. March saw the release of the Agent Registry, providing on-chain identity, reputation, and verification infrastructure for AI agents.

Meanwhile, x402 and machine-native payment tools are continuously expanding on Solana, and Solana has added support for the Machine Payments Protocol (developed by Stripe and Tempo for stablecoin-based API payments). Solana aims to position itself as the core track for agents to hold wallets, pay API fees, access data, trade, participate in governance, and ultimately become meaningful economic entities on-chain.

This goal is not unique to Solana; nearly every major public chain is striving to become the default layer for agent economic activities. Base has been leading in the on-chain AI-related token space, while Tempo, with its large non-crypto user base, is a strong competitor in this area.

The Solana Accelerate conference in May made this strategy clearer, as the Solana Foundation partnered with Google Cloud to launch Pay.sh. This gateway allows agents to access and pay for Google Cloud API and over 50 community APIs using stablecoins on Solana.

Payment infrastructure continues to expand. Payments are unlikely to become the category that directly brings the highest fees to Solana. By design, payments should be cheap, fast, and almost invisible to users. In the first quarter, Solana's payment reach extended through several significant integrations, such as the lending platform SoFi supporting native deposits and the payroll and HR system Gusto supporting same-day payments to contractors using USDC.

By May, this logic became even more pronounced. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, began rolling out USDC creator payout features on Solana and Polygon with support from Stripe, initially targeting select creators in Colombia and the Philippines.

Western Union launched USDPT on Solana, issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, as a settlement asset operating around the clock within this remittance giant's network. Planned use cases include global exchange support, agent settlements, fund operations, and the consumer-facing "Stable by Western Union" product, expected to launch in over 40 countries by 2026.

Payments are one of the clearest paths to cultivate regular on-chain transaction habits among users, merchants, contractors, creators, and businesses. They create repeated wallet interactions, asset balances, and user familiarity, which over time will feed back into the entire ecosystem. A user earning USDC rewards on Solana is more likely to save, exchange, lend, spend, stake, or trade on Solana.

Conclusion

Solana's question is no longer whether people will use this chain. They are already using it. The current question is whether this usage can mature and evolve into a lasting financial economy. The first quarter indicates that Solana can weather a sluggish market without losing its position, but it also exposes the ecosystem's revenue base as overly reliant on the ebb and flow of speculative activity.

Encouragingly, the elements of the solution are finally becoming clear.

Solana has spot liquidity. It has users. It has a wallet ecosystem. It has a stablecoin settlement network. Its RWA supply is continuously growing. It has mobile distribution channels, deep payment integrations, and a technical roadmap aimed at achieving predictable execution (not just higher throughput).

In our view, few ecosystems can combine so many advantages. But the most critical markets remain absent or lagging: perpetual contracts, prediction markets, and lending.

This is why the next stage is more important than the previous one. Solana does not need to prove again that it can support a speculative frenzy; it has already proven that.

What it needs to prove is that after the next wave of excitement fades, it can leave behind a deeper market, higher quality collateral, stickier users, and a more sustainable validator economic model.

In the long run, the truly important public chain will not be the one with the most activity on the best days but the one where capital is still willing to stay when easily obtainable activity disappears.

The first quarter proved that Solana's foundation is thicker. Next, we will see how high it can soar.