Solana Q1 2026 Update: Defending Market Share in the Doldrums

Introduction

Solana’s Q1 headline metrics softened across the board. Risk appetite cooled, memecoin trading faded from prior highs, decentralized exchange (DEX) volumes fell, and application fees declined for the third straight quarter.

Underneath the headline declines though, Solana’s overall position in the market did not change. It maintained DEX volume leadership, held or grew share across key fee categories, extended its uptime streak, and continued broadening activity across stablecoins, real-world assets (RWAs), lending, mobile, payments, and institutional infrastructure. The floor is much higher than it was in prior cycles.

The persistent weakness is the same one we have flagged in prior quarters. Solana's activity remains tied to speculative trading cycles, and memecoins in particular, more than any other major chain. When that flow cools, the ecosystem feels it across DEX volumes, application fees, and priority fees at the same time. The growth categories that would smooth out that cyclicality are progressing, just unevenly. RWAs grew during the first quarter and were the clearest bright spot. Stablecoins kept expanding and diversifying away from USDC dominance. Lending is becoming more institutional and diversifying its collateral. Perpetual futures and prediction markets are not yet where Solana needs them to be, and Hyperliquid’s lead in these categories widened rather than narrowed.

The question heading into the rest of 2026 is whether the categories where Solana is still behind — perpetuals, prediction markets, lending — can start contributing the way its DEX volume dominance already does. The roadmap attacks the right problems, but infrastructure is only the opening move. Solana still needs the liquidity, products, and user habits that turn technical capacity into dominant markets.

Key Takeaways

• Solana extended its uptime streak to eight consecutive outage-free quarters, with Q1 shifting the network conversation further away from basic reliability and toward execution quality, transaction landing, ordering consistency, and market structure.

• Version 3.1 of the Agave validator client moved through mainnet rollout during the quarter, while the forward-looking roadmap became more concrete around the Alpenglow and Multiple Concurrent Proposers (MCP) upgrades. The next phase of Solana scaling is focused on more predictable execution for high-value financial applications.

• Validator and scheduler diversity continued to improve, but with a tradeoff. More clients and block-building paths reduce single-client risk, but it also makes transaction landing and ordering harder to forecast across validators. This is a problem for perps, central limit order books (CLOBs), liquidations, and other latency-sensitive markets.

• Solana DEX volumes declined 31% QoQ, their second-largest quarterly decline since 2022 and the lowest absolute quarterly volume since Q4 2024. Despite the drawdown, Solana maintained its position as the leading chain for DEX volume for the fifth consecutive quarter, with market share rising modestly to 31%.

• Proprietary automated market makers (AMMs) continued to deepen Solana’s spot market structure. Their growing share of volume, combined with evidence that Solana prop AMMs can offer execution competitive with or superior to major centralized exchanges on SOL/stablecoin pairs, strengthens the case that Solana’s spot trading lead is not only a memecoin story.

• Network fees were roughly flat quarter-over-quarter, declining 1%, while Solana’s share of layer-1 network fees increased to 25%. Application fees declined for the third consecutive quarter, falling 10% to $795m, but Solana’s application fee share rose to 26%, underscoring that the entire crypto fee environment weakened alongside Solana.

• Solana’s fee base remains highly dependent on speculative retail trading. Five of the network’s top 10 fee-generating applications were still directly tied to memecoins, and Pump.fun’s contribution to Solana application fees rose from 22% to 32% QoQ. This makes Solana’s revenue base highly cyclical.

• Solana perpetuals futures volumes declined 34% QoQ, while Solana’s perpetuals open interest and volume market share ended March around 3% and 2%, respectively. Hyperliquid continues to pull the highest-value derivatives activity away from Solana.

• Prediction markets became real on Solana in Q1 but remain tiny relative to the broader category. Weekly Solana prediction market volume peaked above $10m in early February, with weekly users peaking around 10k, but Solana’s share of total prediction market volume remained below 0.2%.

• TVL declined 22% QoQ to $15.0b, but Solana maintained roughly 7% of total crypto TVL and remains far above prior-cycle levels. The stronger story was composition: RWAs grew 58% to more than $2.5b, reaching 17% of Solana TVL, while stablecoin supply grew 2.7% to $15.45b and became less dependent on USDC.

• Yield-bearing stablecoins and tokenized cash products became a more meaningful part of decentralized finance (DeFi) activity on Solana. BlackRock’s BUIDL money market fund and Figure’s YLDS stablecoin scaled from effectively zero to roughly $900m of combined supply, while non-USDC and non-USDT stablecoin supply increased nearly 10x from January 2025. This is one of the clearest signs that Solana’s capital base is diversifying beyond pure crypto beta.

Network Metrics

Network Performance and Health

Solana is no longer primarily fighting the reliability questions that defined earlier parts of its history. The network is faster, more stable, and more battle-tested than it was even a year ago. Q1 marked its eighth consecutive quarter with no downtime. Median slot duration has settled into a much tighter range around 400 milliseconds throughout progressive upgrades, including the most recent one, Agave 3.1 in Q1.

Throughput also remained strong despite the broader decline in risk appetite. Transactions per second (TPS) percentiles rose sharply into late Q1, with high-percentile throughput reaching some of the highest levels seen over the past year. Solana still has bursts of massive demand when retail activity returns, especially around trading and memecoin-driven activity, and the chain is handling that demand without any issues. That matters because the rest of Solana’s financial stack depends on the base layer being stable. Spot trading, stablecoin payments, lending, RWAs, perps, and prediction markets all need the fast, cheap, and consistent execution.

Validation and Staking

In Q4, the big milestone was Firedancer reaching meaningful share and reducing single-client risk. Firedancer’s overall share of validator client market share moderated in Q1 as validator version diversity expanded. Agave still dominates, but the validator landscape is now meaningfully more complex across Agave, Jito, Frankendancer, BAM, Harmonic, and other variants.

Diversification is healthy in one sense. More clients and more implementations reduce the risk that a single bug or client issue can impair the network. But there is a tradeoff. Different validators can run different schedulers, different block-building infrastructure, and different sequencing logic. For many applications, that does not matter much, but for high-value trading applications, especially perps and CLOB-style markets, it matters a lot (discussed further below in the Perpetuals section).

Validator economics weakened during the quarter as staking APY drifted lower. As priority fees and maximum extractable value (MEV) continued to cool, inflation rewards continued to account for a larger share of staking rewards. This is the same pattern that began in Q4, when lower speculative activity reduced fee-derived rewards and put more pressure on validator economics.

Overall, running a validator is becoming more competitive. Lower staking APYs, lower fee and MEV opportunities, and a more sophisticated validator stack all raise the bar. Some consolidation is a natural result of the network maturing from subsidized growth toward more economically sustainable operators. But a smaller validator set increases the importance of stake distribution, client diversity, geographic distribution, and data center concentration.

Beginning May 1, the Solana Foundation Delegator Program (SFDP) instituted stricter requirements around data center concentration, ASN concentration, software versions, metric reporting, vote credits, commission, skip rate, and transaction processing. SFDP participants must also use either first in, first out (FIFO) or priority-fee-ordered scheduling within a 50 milliseconds (ms)-or-less window, release shreds regularly, avoid transaction processing unit (TPU) censorship, and avoid delaying TPU transactions beyond the allowed batch window. These changes will not solve every market-structure problem, but they are a direct attempt to make validator behavior more consistent without waiting for every fix to be enshrined at the protocol level.

Upcoming Technical Updates

Solana’s forward-looking technical roadmap remains constructive and is anchored by two major protocol upgrades, Alpenglow and Multiple Concurrent Proposers. Alpenglow will replace Solana’s consensus machinery with a simpler, lower-latency design, removing legacy components such as Proof of History and onchain vote transactions, and targeting roughly 150ms confirmation times (see prior Galaxy Research coverage here). The Solana Foundation lists Alpenglow as under development and targets Alpenglow deployment to mainnet in Q3. As always with core protocol upgrades, timing remains subject to change.

MCP, now formalized through Anza’s Constellation proposal, is the more important upgrade for Solana’s market structure. Today, the leader has temporary control over transaction inclusion and ordering. Constellation is designed to break that single-leader monopoly by allowing multiple proposers to collect and submit transactions concurrently, while the leader assembles the final block under protocol-enforced rules. The proposal introduces a 50ms cycle and is aimed at censorship resistance, predictable ordering, and a more neutral execution environment for Internet Capital Markets. The initial design was released at the end of March, but the exact spec will likely change before implementation and timing remains uncertain.

Capacity is still part of the story. Express data path (XDP), 100m compute unit (CU) blocks, larger transaction sizes, deeper Cross Program Invocation (CPI) limits, and other Agave 4.x-era upgrades are expected to increase the amount and complexity of activity Solana can support. Anza’s roadmap also calls for reducing slot times below 400ms, and one configuration to watch is a move toward roughly 200ms slots and shorter leader spans, potentially from four slots to two.

The economic roadmap is quieter. Inflation reduction was one of the more controversial Solana governance topics in prior quarters, first through Solana Improvement Document 228 and later through SIMD-411, which proposed doubling the disinflation rate to 30% and reducing total emissions by an estimated 22.3m SOL over six years. Since then, there has been no comparable follow-on governance push or major new inflation-reduction discussion on the official Solana governance forum. For now, the focus has shifted away from reducing issuance and toward making validator economics more transparent through upgrades like Vote Account V4 and SIMD-123 block revenue distribution.

As covered in our prior report, Solana’s technical focus continues to move beyond simply making the protocol fast and cheap. The next phase is making it fast, cheap, predictable, and economically sustainable. More throughput matters, but the bigger unlock is higher-quality execution, better transaction landing, clearer ordering, shorter leader control windows, and validator economics that are easier for delegators and institutions to understand.

Network Activity

DEX Volumes

Solana DEX volumes declined 31% from the fourth quarter, their second largest quarterly decline since 2022 and their lowest volume in absolute terms since Q4 2024. While January saw a strong rebound in volumes with a broader risk-on environment and upticks in memecoin trading, volumes declined by 25% in February and 32% in March. Volume composition remained consistent relative to the prior quarter, with SOL/stablecoin pairs dominating followed by stablecoin swaps, memes and spot pairs for non-SOL crypto tokens.

Sunrise, a new asset issuance protocol focused on tokenizing non-Solana crypto assets for spot trading on Solana, continued gaining share of DEX activity during the quarter. The protocol’s contribution to total DEX volumes reached as high as 1.5% in recent months. While still a relatively small driver of overall network activity, Sunrise exemplifies ongoing efforts to diversify Solana’s sources of trading activity beyond SOL pairs, stablecoins, and memecoins.

The overall decline in volumes coincided with a broader drop in DEX volumes across all ecosystems. Solana maintained its status as the No. 1 chain by quarterly DEX volumes for the fifth quarter in a row, maintaining market share at roughly 30%.

Prop AMMs’ percentage of total onchain DEX volumes continued to grow, a result of both memecoin trading’s percentage of total trading remaining relatively flat and growing recognition that prop AMMs bring centralized trading-like experiences onchain.

PropAMMs matched the aggregate volume of Binance, Coinbase, OKX, and Bybit on SOL/USDC and SOL/USDT pairs in March, according to Jump.

Jump, one of the world’s largest proprietary trading firms, recently released an in-depth analysis that found Prop AMMs on Solana delivered execution that compared favorably to centralized exchanges, with 91.9% of fills executing cheaper than the most favorable institutional tiers on major CEXs. Jump's analysis showed that PropAMMs matched the aggregate volume of Binance, Coinbase, OKX, and Bybit on SOL/USDC and SOL/USDT pairs in March, demonstrating Solana’s ability to outcompete centralized venues on execution quality and scale.

Network fees held fairly steady from the fourth quarter, slipping 1%. Again, the January surge in onchain activity drove a majority of the quarter’s fees, which contracted substantially in February and March.

However, Solana maintained its market share, increasing from 22% to 25% from the fourth quarter as chains like BNB Smart Chain (BSC) saw a decline. The biggest takeaway is that network fees across the crypto landscape are declining in line with a broader drop in activity, but most chains are maintaining market share. Here, Solana’s meme economy remains critical because it drives demand for priority fees.

Application fees declined for the third straight quarter, dropping by 10% to $795 million, as onchain activity remained stagnant. While diversifying the driver of application fees away from memecoin-driven activity is critical to Solana experiencing less cyclical activity, for now such trading keeps Solana a leading chain in terms of fees.

Five of Solana’s top 10 applications by fees are directly related to memecoins, and Pump.Fun, the iconic meme launchpad, saw its contributions to overall fees grow from 22% to 32% quarter over quarter. While some projects, such as tokenized collectibles application Collector Crypt, are starting to achieve product-market fit, they still represent a tiny portion of overall fees. Additionally, core DeFi infrastructure such as lending protocols have struggled to grow fee market share, with the leading market, Kamino, maintaining 2% of fee activity for six consecutive quarters.

For two consecutive quarters, Solana has held second place for application fees after leading consistently from Q4 2024 to Q3 2025. However, its market share increased to 26%, as the chain maintained healthy and active user and developer bases despite a heavy dependence on meme-driven volumes.

Perpetual Futures

Diversifying activity into perpetuals and prediction markets is a clear priority for the Solana Foundation and the ecosystem broadly given these products’ traction across the crypto landscape.

Solana’s onchain perpetuals landscape, however, has not shifted materially in recent quarters. In Q1 this sector remained dominated by Jupiter and Drift, although the latter suffered a $285 million exploit on April 1 (see prior Galaxy coverage here) and is expected to lose share. Perpetuals volumes declined by 34%, their second consecutive quarter of shrinkage, as crypto trading volumes across the industry declined.

Solana’s perpetuals open interest and volume market shares have fallen mightily from their November 2024 peaks to 3% and 2%, respectively at the end of March. There are several reasons for this significant decline. Foremost is the breakout success of Hyperliquid, and the multitude of competitors that have launched since, which have made the perpetuals market highly competitive. While Solana led the memecoin boom, the ecosystem failed to capitalize on the shift to perpetuals trading that ensued, lacking any real competitor to Hyperliquid in terms of UX or liquidity. Hyperliquid has continued to build on this advantage, especially with the launch of its HIP-3 markets that opened the door for perpetuals trading on non-crypto assets such as stocks and commodities while Solana venues continued to primarily offer crypto-only trading. As we previously covered, this advantage compounded quickly as wallet providers like Phantom (whose smooth UX enabled easy onboarding and trading for non-crypto natives on Solana) integrated Hyperliquid perps as their default option.

Beyond distribution and liquidity, Solana's general-purpose execution layer is a less hospitable environment for perpetuals. Serious market makers need to cancel orders and requote prices in milliseconds and know where in a block their transactions will land. Solana mainnet does not yet offer those guarantees: transaction ordering varies across validators and schedulers; the fee stack is split across base fees, priority fees, Jito tips, and external landing services; and maker cancellations compete with unrelated transactions for blockspace. That uncertainty shows up in wider bid-ask spreads and capital migrating to venues with tighter execution. Solana's perpetuals gap reflects an execution problem, not lack of demand. Chase Barker, the former head of ecosystem growth at the Solana Foundation, wrote an excellent overview of these problems for readers interested in a more in-depth analysis.

But the ecosystem is not resting on its laurels. Anza's roadmap points to Alpenglow, an initial Multiple Concurrent Proposers (MCP) implementation under the Constellation design, and scheduler changes, all of which should make execution more predictable for latency-sensitive applications. Jito's BAM Maker Priority plugin is already testing deterministic top-of-batch execution for makers on the same cadence. And at the application layer, new exchanges like Phoenix, Archer, Bulk, and Fermi are experimenting across fully composable mainnet, validator-integrated, and sidecar-style execution. None of these alone solves the problem, but together they represent the first coordinated attempt to fix Solana perpetuals from the maker and retail sides.

Prediction Markets

Q1 was the first quarter where prediction markets on Solana started to matter at all, but they remain tiny in the scheme of things.

DFlow, a trading infrastructure platform, brought tokenized Kalshi markets to Solana, and the Jupiter DEX began aggregating prediction market liquidity from Kalshi and Polymarket through its Prediction API. This means users can trade from Solana apps, positions can be represented on Solana rails, and builders can add prediction markets without building a full exchange, oracle, matching, and settlement system from scratch. DFlow’s model goes furthest by tokenizing Kalshi YES/NO positions as SPL tokens (Solana’s equivalent of ERC-20 on Ethereum), while Jupiter abstracts away the market source and handles the trading, position, and settlement flow inside a Solana-native app experience.

Weekly Solana prediction market volume went from basically zero in late October to a peak of more than $10m in early February, with weekly users peaking around 10k. Volume peaked in Q1 and then faded. By April, weekly volume had fallen back toward the $3m to $4m range, with the ranks of users down meaningfully from the February highs.

Relative to the broader category, the picture is even clearer. Solana’s prediction market volume share briefly touched roughly 0.19% in December, hovered between 0.10% and 0.16% through much of January and February, and then fell back toward the 0.04%-0.06% range in April. There is tremendous room for growth, but the competitive landscape will only get worse. Hyperliquid launched HIP-4 Outcome Markets in May, bringing fully collateralized binary contracts directly into HyperCore, its flagship trading system, and in roughly two weeks generated 6x the volume Solana prediction markets produced over the same period.

For Solana, rather than becoming a vertically integrated venue, the opportunity is making outcome positions composable with the rest of onchain finance, so they can be pledged as collateral in lending markets, routed through aggregators, and paired with native crypto event markets that Kalshi or Polymarket will never list. Q1 proved Solana can plug into prediction markets. The next several quarters will determine whether it can build a product loop of its own, including launching its own native and competitive prediction market venues.

TVL, RWAs, Stablecoins, and Lending

Solana TVL declined for the second consecutive quarter, falling 22% from the fourth quarter, though the network maintained roughly 7% share of total crypto TVL. Despite the drawdown, Q1 2026 TVL of $15 billion remains meaningfully above prior cycle levels, standing roughly 40x higher than the post-FTX trough and 3x the level immediately before Solana’s recovery began in Q4 2023. In other words, while activity cooled alongside the broader market, Solana’s capital base remains structurally larger than in prior downturns.

The clearest area of TVL growth was RWAs, which grew 58% during Q1 to more than $2.5 billion and accounted for 17% of total TVL. Growth was not concentrated in a single product category. BlackRock’s BUIDL, xStocks’ tokenized equities, Hastra PRIME’s home-equity loans, and OnRe’s tokenized reinsurance all contributed to the expansion. These integrations broaden Solana’s financial stack beyond crypto-native trading and make the network a more viable venue for users seeking onchain exposure to yield sources that are not directly dependent on crypto-market beta. OnRe’s growth is particularly notable: without Solana’s distribution, the project likely would have faced a much harder path raising hundreds of millions in onchain liquidity.

Solana’s stablecoin market also continued to expand, though headline growth understated the extent of the rotation underneath. Stablecoin market cap grew 2.7% from the fourth quarter to $15.45 billion, marking the network’s third consecutive quarter of growth while maintaining roughly 5% share of the broader stablecoin market. However, USDC’s dominance weakened materially, as the supply of USDT increased 34% and World Liberty Financial’s USD1 increased 473%, making the latter Solana’s third-largest stablecoin by quarter-end.

The first quarter also marked the arrival in meaningful size of yield-bearing stablecoins and tokenized cash products on Solana. BlackRock’s BUIDL and Figure’s YLDS scaled from effectively zero to roughly $900 million of combined supply, reflecting growing demand for institutional and yield-oriented stablecoin alternatives. Stablecoin liquidity on Solana is therefore becoming less concentrated around a single USDC-dominated settlement market and increasingly fragmented across payment stablecoins, market-maker settlement assets, yield-bearing products, and assets designed for lending-market integration. Solana processed $650 billion in stablecoin transaction volume in February, more than doubling its prior record, while non-USDC and non-USDT stablecoin supply increased nearly 10x since January 2025.

Lending remains the more complicated part of the story. Unlike DEX volumes, where Solana has consistently held leading market share, onchain borrowing remains overwhelmingly Ethereum-dominated. Solana’s borrow share has improved from its post-FTX lows, but it remains modest relative to the scale of the network’s DEX activity, stablecoin settlement, and broader DeFi user base. The infrastructure and products are improving, but that progress has not yet translated into a meaningful shift in cross-chain borrow-market share.

That context makes the recent lending developments important, even if the aggregate market-share impact is still modest. Kamino’s PRIME market surpassed $600 million in TVL during Q1, while Kamino crossed $1 billion in total RWA market size and Gauntlet launched a USDC vault on the platform. Jupiter Lend also exited beta testing with 83,000 users and zero bad debt and later enabled native staked SOL to be used as collateral without interrupting staking rewards. Together, Kamino and Jupiter are pushing Solana lending beyond standard variable-rate DeFi markets toward isolated markets, institutional collateral, RWA-backed lending, and more structured stablecoin yield products.

Early Q2 developments suggest that this trend is continuing. Jupiter Lend launched an isolated institutional USDe lending market with Bitwise and Fluid, while Coinbase and Morpho introduced SOL-backed USDC loans through Coinbase’s interface. These launches reinforce the direction of travel: Solana lending is becoming more institutional, more collateral-diverse, and more tightly connected to stablecoin and RWA growth. The open question is whether these products can convert Solana’s strong trading and stablecoin activity into a larger, more durable borrowing base.

Other Notable Q1 Developments

• Solana Mobile expands beyond first-party hardware. SKR token claims opened in January, with nearly 2b units, or 20% of supply, allocated across the Solana Mobile ecosystem. More than 118k Seeker phones have been activated since their debut. While still small relative to Solana’s overall user base, Seeker has become an effective distribution channel for early-stage teams launching applications on Solana. The bigger opportunity, however, is not limited to Solana Mobile’s hardware. At Mobile World Congress in March, Solana Mobile introduced the Solana Mobile Stack for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and hardware makers, opening a path for the blockchain’s wallet, app store, and secure key-management infrastructure to be embedded into third-party devices. If Solana Mobile can sign a major OEM partner with materially broader distribution than Seeker, the initiative could shift from selling crypto-native phones to becoming a mobile distribution layer for Solana across mainstream hardware. Watch for further partner announcements around Solana’s Breakpoint conference later this year.

• AI agents and agentic payments became a real Foundation priority. The Solana Foundation and Colosseum ran the AI Agent Hackathon in February, with a $100k USDC prize pool and 454 submissions, while March brought the launch of Agent Registry, giving AI agents onchain identity, reputation, and verification infrastructure. At the same time, x402 and machine-native payment tooling expanded across Solana, and Solana added support for Machine Payments Protocol, the system developed by Stripe and Tempo for stablecoin-based API payments. Solana is trying to position itself as the rails for agents to hold wallets, pay for APIs, access data, trade, participate in governance, and eventually become meaningful economic actors onchain. This goal is not unique to Solana; nearly every single major chain is focused on becoming the default layer for agentic economic activity. Base, which has managed to lead in onchain AI-related tokens, and Tempo, with its large non-crypto distribution, are the chains to beat in this field. This strategy became more explicit in May at the Solana Accelerate conference, where the Solana Foundation and Google Cloud introduced Pay.sh, a gateway that lets agents access and pay-per-request for Google Cloud APIs and for 50+ community APIs using stablecoins on Solana.

• Payments infrastructure continues to broaden. Payments are unlikely to be the category that drives the most direct fees to Solana. By design, payments should be cheap, fast, and mostly invisible. In Q1, Solana’s payments surface expanded through major integrations like native Solana deposits at lending platform SoFi and same-day USDC contractor payments on payroll and HR system Gusto. In May, that thesis became more obvious. Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, began rolling out USDC creator payouts on Solana and Polygon, supported by Stripe, initially for select creators in Colombia and the Philippines. Western Union launched USDPT on Solana, issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, as an always-on settlement asset for the remittance giant’s network. Planned use cases include global exchange support, agent settlement, treasury operations, and a consumer-facing “Stable by Western Union” product expected in 40+ countries in 2026. Payments are one of the clearest ways to get users, merchants, contractors, creators, and enterprises transacting onchain regularly. They create recurring wallet activity, stablecoin balances, and user familiarity that can feed into the rest of the ecosystem over time. A user who gets paid in USDC on Solana is more likely to save, swap, lend, spend, stake, or trade on Solana.

Conclusion

Solana’s problem is no longer whether people will use the chain. They already do. The problem is whether that usage can mature into a durable financial economy. Q1 showed that Solana can endure a weaker market without losing its position, but it also showed that the ecosystem’s revenue base relies too much on speculation that comes and goes in waves.

The encouraging part is that the pieces of the solution are finally visible. Solana has the spot liquidity. It has the users. It has the wallets. It has stablecoin settlement. It has growing RWA supply. It has mobile distribution, payment integrations, and a technical roadmap aimed at predictable execution rather than just higher throughput. In our view, few ecosystems have as many strengths in one place. But the most important markets are still either missing or underdeveloped: perps, prediction markets, and lending.

That is why the next phase matters more than the last one. Solana does not need to prove it can host another speculative boom. It already has. It needs to prove that the next boom will leave behind deeper markets, better collateral, more dependable users, and more sustainable validator economics. The chains that matter in the long term will not be the ones with the most activity on the best days. They will be the ones where capital stays when the easy activity disappears.

Q1 suggests Solana’s floor has risen. Now the focus shifts to raising the ceiling.