Solana’s Record-Breaking August Activity

Solana activity set a series of records in August, while retaining its peak app revenues. For the past month, Solana locked in $148M from app revenues, mostly linked to DEX trading.

Solana saw a month of robust activity in August, as its major apps locked in over $148M, of which trading platforms contributed around $85M. The chain followed the overall crypto success, breaking numerous records throughout the month. While Ethereum was trending, Solana also expanded in several metrics and new markets. In August, Solana maintained above 3.3M daily active users on most days, with around 20M daily active users across all other chains.

Over the past month, Solana increased its value locked from $8.5B to $9.5B, continuing into September. The value locked grew to $11.51B, with over $12.26B in stablecoin liquidity.

SOL rallied in August, starting from lows around $160 and climbing to above $200. Source: Coingecko.

For the past month, SOL regained its previous positions, moving from $163 to a peak above $215. SOL open interest expanded by over 30%, remaining above $6B. The bulk of derivative settlements occurred on its own chain, as opposed to centralized exchanges.

Solana Grows on BTC Inflows, LST, and RWA Tokenization

Solana regularly produced between $1M and $2M in daily fees. App revenues reached over $7.4M in 24 hours, surpassing the base Solana fee structure. Solana has outperformed other networks for over eight months in a row, partly due to a mix of trends and use cases.

Last month, Solana achieved an all-time high perpetual futures volume of over $43.8B, thanks to Drift Protocol. The perpetual futures trading was boosted by SOL token swaps, as the price rallied above $200. Solana aims to capture a share of the perpetual futures market, recently outperforming Ethereum.

August on Solana, by the numbers:

• $148 million in app revenue, up 92% from 2024 and surpassing all other networks
• All-time high perps volume of $43.8 billion
• 2.9 billion transactions, up 46% y/y and more than 4x all other networks combined
• $144 billion in DEX

The other growth vector was RWA tokenization, with more tokenized stocks moving to Solana. This sector is constantly breaking new records, with over $500M in value.

Another trend in August was liquid staking tokens, which expanded their influence on DeFi protocols. Marinade Finance showed the biggest growth in the past month, especially with its token burn.

Solana also welcomed BTC inflows, offering a bridged tokenized version utilized mainly in DeFi.

Solana Token Launches Expand by Over 30%

In August, token launches on Solana accelerated again. Following July’s approximately 1M tokens, Solana produced 1.34M new tokens in August.

Most of the newly launched tokens followed the recent meme token trend, although many did not graduate to DEX. Trench trading showed a recovery in August. Pump.fun remained the main venue for token launches, regaining its status as a top fee producer.