How meme coins and innovations in DeFi elevated Solana to a new level
By several metrics, Solana has already surpassed the leading cryptocurrency, Ethereum, in both network activity and ecosystem growth rate.
Meme tokens drive the ecosystem
One of the key reasons for Solana's success is the hype surrounding meme coins, which started back in 2023. This trend began with the meme token Bonk (BONK), which was distributed for free during an airdrop to owners of Solana Saga smartphones.
The success of the Bonk meme token drew attention to the Solana ecosystem, increasing the capitalization and trading volumes of the network's native cryptocurrency, SOL. While the daily trading volume of Solana cryptocurrency was under $1 billion at the beginning of 2023, by the end of the year, it sometimes reached $4-$6 billion. Over the same period, Solana's market capitalization grew more than eightfold — from $5 billion to $43 billion.
These metrics grew alongside the emergence of new meme tokens as many developers transitioned to Solana from other ecosystems, such as Ethereum, which had previously dominated the meme coin sector. From 2023 to 2024, notable meme tokens in the Solana ecosystem included:
In February 2025, the 47th President of the United States himself chose the Solana network to issue his meme token, The Official Trump (TRUMP), citing the network's high transaction speed and low costs. The Solana blockchain is one of the fastest in the industry, with a throughput of over 1000 transactions per second (TPS).
TRUMP became the sixth-largest token in the Solana ecosystem by market capitalization, which, as of June 2025, stood at $1.78 billion. Based on this metric, TRUMP also ranks in the top 50 leading cryptocurrencies.
In 2024, the Solana ecosystem experienced a new surge: in June, the well-known token issuance platform Pump.fun was launched.
The platform gained popularity among users not only because of the fast and inexpensive transactions on the Solana network but also due to its ease of use. According to analytics from the Dune dashboard, since the launch of Pump.fun, users have created over 11 million meme tokens on the platform.
According to the monitoring service CoinMarketCap for June 2025, the total market capitalization of all Solana network tokens exceeded $185 billion. This occurred as many crypto projects added support for the Solana network for their tokens. Among such projects are:
- Chainlink (LINK);
- Uniswap (UNI);
- Aave (AAVE);
- Render (RNDR);
- PAX Gold (PAXG);
- The Graph (GRT).
Solana becomes one of the fastest-growing ecosystems
In 2024, the Solana network experienced rapid growth across various metrics, including the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi protocols and the number of active users. With growth rates exceeding 1000%, the Solana ecosystem was only second to TON.
These records were fueled not only by the meme coin trend but also by the increased activity of developers. The trend is clear: the more development within the ecosystem, the more users it attracts.
For example, in 2024, over 7000 new developers joined the Solana ecosystem. This marked the first time that Solana surpassed Ethereum in terms of the growth in the number of Web3 developers. In the same year, amid the surge in interest in meme coins, Solana outpaced Ethereum in network activity.
In the last two years, the Solana ecosystem has seen the addition of 7 new DeFi protocols, whose TVL almost reached or exceeded $1 billion:
- Jito liquid staking protocol ($2.6 billion);
- Kamino lending platform ($2.3 billion);
- Jupiter decentralized aggregator and derivatives exchange ($2.2 billion);
- Sanctum liquid staking protocol ($1.77 billion);
- Raydium decentralized exchange and AMM protocol ($1.7 billion);
- Marinade liquid staking protocol ($1.6 billion);
- Drift decentralized derivatives exchange ($915 million).
As of June 2025, Solana's total TVL surpassed $8.3 billion, placing the network second among DeFi ecosystems after Ethereum. According to the DeFi Llama monitoring service, Solana leads the DeFi sector in terms of the number of active addresses, with over 3.2 million. For comparison, the same metric for the Tron network is 2.5 million, and for the BNB Smart Chain (BSC), it is 2.1 million.