Solana made waves in the cryptocurrency and web3 space when it launched on CoinList in 2020, reportedly selling 8 million SOL tokens at a clearing price of $0.22.
Before that, CoinList claims that it had spent a year working closely with the Solana team on their “incentivized” testnet, Tour de Sol.
As noted in the latest update from CoinList, the SOL token is up “nearly 820x,” and Solana has transformed from a “promising” newcomer into the most “popular” blockchain ecosystem of 2024, attracting “retail, institutional, and builder interest.”
To explain how dominant Solana has been this year, CoinList breaks down their recent growth:
User Growth
Solana’s on-chain activity is up almost “1,900% in 2024, with 100 million monthly active addresses.”
For comparison, the report pointed out that Base currently has “22 million monthly active addresses, while all EVM chains have 52 million combined.”
TVL & DEX Volume Surge
Solana’s total value locked (TVL) reached a “multi-month high of almost $7 billion in October 2024.”
Top 5 dApps by TVL include:
- Jito ($2.47B TVL): liquid staking
- Kamino Finance ($1.72B TVL): liquidity provider
- Jupiter Exchange ($1.57B TVL): DEX
- Raydium ($1.53B TVL): DEX and AMM
- Marinade Finance ($964.08M TVL): liquid staking
Daily DEX trading volume, has reportedly seen “consistent growth since August 2023, with a clear acceleration beginning in early 2024.”
It has occasionally matched or even “surpassed Ethereum’s DEX volume (green) during peak periods.”
Rising Transaction Fees
Prior to December of last year, CoinList pointed out in its update that Solana’s monthly market “share of transaction fees never exceeded 1.5%.”
Since April of this year, however, Solana’s (SOL) market share of transaction fees “has consistently stayed above 10%, peaking at 25% in July.”
Transaction fees directly reflect users’ “engagement in valuable economic activities, their willingness to pay for execution, and the ability for validators to turn a profit.”
Memecoin Boom
Solana has become “the” chain for memecoins, with tokens like “Popcat (POPCAT) and dogwifhat (WIF) rising 12882% and 1108%, respectively, between January and September 2024.”
Memecoin devs are choosing Solana for its “high throughput, the ability to process transactions at a fraction of Ethereum’s cost, and a thriving community of memecoin traders.”
This proliferation of memecoin launches has “fueled Solana’s 151% increase in network activity this year.”
In addition to these stats, meme coins account for “77.8% of recent Solana-based trading volume on decentralized exchanges.”
Ecosystem Funding
According to the update from CoinList, $173M was reportedly raised by projects “primarily built” on Solana in Q3 of 2024 alone, and Colosseum’s second hackathon has seen “36% more registrations than its first.”
Accelerating Institutional Interest
Franklin Templeton, Securitize (BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenization partner), and Société Générale all announced Solana launches coming soon.
At the same time, firms like Jump Crypto and Multicoin Capital have increased their participation in the Solana ecosystem, “adding liquidity and bolstering long-term confidence.”
Mobile dApps
To reach a much wider audience / addressable market, dApps or decentralized applications need to meet users where they are — on mobile. Jupiter, DRiP, and PhotoFinish LIVE announced mobile apps, while Solana Mobile’s Seeker and Jambo’s JamboPhone 2 are “bringing crypto-native mobile devices to market.”
DePIN Growth
Projects like Helium (1M+ hotspots), Hivemapper (7.5M+ km mapped), and Render Network are leveraging Solana’s infrastructure, “showcasing real-world applications outside the EVM ecosystem and emphasizing Solana’s role in decentralized physical infrastructure.”
Solana’s rise against Ethereum (ETH), which remains the dominant smart contract platform in terms of market cap at least, has ignited discussions about its potential to flip Ethereum’s market capitalization in the not-too-distant future.
