Author: Lucas Tcheyan, Vice President of Research, Galaxy Digital; Source: Galaxy Digital; Compiled by: Shaw, Jinse Finance
Solana's core indicators weakened across the board in Q1 2026: market risk appetite cooled, Meme coin trading activity declined from previous highs, decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume decreased, and application fees fell for the third consecutive quarter.
However, beneath the surface of weakening data, Solana's overall industry position remained unshaken.
It maintained its top position in DEX trading volume, and its market share in multiple fee-related sectors remained stable or increased. On-chain continuous stable operation time reached a new high, and its ecosystem continued to expand across multiple areas, including stablecoins, Real-World Asset Tokenization (RWA), lending, mobile applications, payments, and institutional infrastructure. The overall business foundation has significantly improved compared to previous cycles. The root cause of the market weakness is consistent with the logic disclosed in previous quarters: compared to other mainstream public chains, the Solana ecosystem is highly tied to speculative trading, especially reliant on Meme coin. Once speculative funds recede, DEX trading volume, application fees, and block priority fees all come under pressure. While emerging sectors that can smooth out cyclical fluctuations are being implemented, their development progress is uneven. RWA was the biggest highlight this quarter, achieving growth against the trend; the stablecoin landscape continued to expand, and the coin structure gradually moved away from USDC's dominance; the institutionalization of lending services accelerated, and the types of collateral became increasingly diversified. However, the development of perpetual contracts and prediction markets has fallen short of expectations, and Hyperliquid's leading advantage in these two tracks has actually increased. The key focus for the remainder of 2026: Whether perpetual contracts, prediction markets, and lending—areas where Solana still lags behind—can replicate the strong revenue contribution of DEXs. The project roadmap has accurately identified existing weaknesses, but improving the underlying infrastructure is only the first step. Solana still needs to cultivate liquidity, high-quality products, and user habits to transform its technological advantages into sector dominance. Key Points: Solana has achieved eight consecutive quarters of zero downtime, shifting market discussion from "network stability" to transaction execution quality, on-chain transaction certainty, block order consistency, and on-chain market architecture optimization. In the first quarter, the mainnet completed the deployment of the Agave 3.1 validator client version, and the details of the upgrade roadmap for Alpenglow and Multi-Parallel Block Production (MCP) were further clarified. Solana's next phase of expansion will focus on providing a predictable transaction execution environment for high-value financial applications. Validator Node Architecture: The diversification of validator clients and block production solutions continues, but advantages and disadvantages coexist. Multi-client, multi-block construction paths reduce the systemic risk of a single program, but increase the uncontrollability of cross-node transaction execution and sequencing, which is detrimental to financial businesses that are highly sensitive to latency, such as perpetual contracts, CLOBs, and clearing. DEX Spot Trading: Solana DEX trading volume declined by 31% quarter-on-quarter, marking the second largest quarterly drop since 2022, with the total quarterly trading volume falling to a new low since the fourth quarter of 2024. Even so, Solana maintained its position as the top DEX in terms of trading volume for the fifth consecutive quarter, with its market share slightly increasing to 31%. Its self-developed Automated Market Maker (AMM) continued to improve the spot trading ecosystem, with its trading volume share steadily rising. Furthermore, real-world testing showed that on the SOL/stablecoin trading pair, the trading experience of Solana's self-developed AMM was comparable to or even superior to leading centralized exchanges, proving that Solana's spot trading advantage was not solely driven by Meme coin. Transaction Fee Data: On-chain native transaction fees decreased slightly by 1% quarter-on-quarter, remaining essentially flat, with its share of transaction fees across all Layer 1 public chains rising to 25%. Application transaction fees declined for the third consecutive quarter, falling 10% quarter-on-quarter to $795 million, but with application transaction fees weakening across the industry, Solana's transaction fee market share actually rose to 26%. Solana's ecosystem fee revenue is highly dependent on retail speculative trading; five of the top ten revenue-generating applications on the blockchain are directly linked to Meme coin. Pump.fun's contribution to application fees increased from 22% to 32%, resulting in extremely cyclical fluctuations in Solana's revenue. Derivatives Sector: Solana's perpetual contract trading volume declined by 34% month-on-month. As of the end of March, its perpetual contract open interest and trading volume accounted for only about 3% and 2% of the industry total, respectively, indicating that high-value derivatives funds continued to be diverted to Hyperliquid. The market is expected to officially launch in the first quarter, but its scale is relatively small: in early February, the peak weekly trading volume exceeded $10 million, with approximately 10,000 weekly active users, but its share of the entire industry's trading volume was still less than 0.2%.
Total Value Locked (TVL): Overall TVL fell 22% month-over-month to $15 billion, but still accounts for 7% of the total TVL of the entire crypto market, significantly higher than historical bear market levels. Internal structural optimization is key: RWA's size surged 58% to over $2.5 billion, accounting for 17% of Solana's total TVL; stablecoin holdings increased by 2.7% to $15.45 billion, and the token structure has broken free from dependence on USDC. Interest-bearing stablecoins and tokenized cash products have become new growth drivers for DeFi. BlackRock's BUIDL money market fund and Figure's YLDS stablecoin, starting from zero, have a combined outstanding amount approaching $900 million. The outstanding amount of non-USDC and non-USDT stablecoins has surged nearly tenfold since January 2025, indicating that Solana's funding sources have moved beyond purely crypto market volatility. On-chain metrics and network performance have long since shed its history of frequent outages. After multiple iterations, network speed, stability, and operational capacity have significantly improved compared to a year ago, achieving eight consecutive quarters of no downtime in the first quarter. With multiple upgrades including Agave 3.1, the median block time has stabilized around 400 milliseconds, significantly narrowing the fluctuation range. Despite the overall decline in market risk appetite, Solana's on-chain processing throughput remains strong. At the end of Q1, the transactions per second (TPS) percentile surged, with peak throughput reaching a near one-year high. Whenever retail trading activity picks up (especially during the Meme coin trading boom), Solana experiences a surge in instantaneous transaction demand, which the mainnet handles smoothly and without disruption. This is crucial: the entire Solana on-chain financial ecosystem relies on a stable underlying public blockchain. Spot trading, stablecoin payments, lending, Real-World Asset Tokenization (RWA), perpetual contracts, and prediction markets all depend on a high-speed, low-cost, and stable underlying network. A key milestone in the fourth quarter of last year was the Firedancer client gaining a considerable market share, effectively reducing the systemic risk posed by a single client. Entering the first quarter, as validator client versions became more diversified, Firedancer's overall node share declined. Currently, Agave still dominates, but the node client ecosystem has formed a multi-polar structure: multiple clients such as Agave, Jito, Frankendancer, BAM, and Harmonic are running in parallel, significantly increasing the richness of the ecosystem. This diversification has positive aspects to some extent: More types of clients and implementation solutions can mitigate the risk of a single program vulnerability or client failure dragging down the entire public chain. However, every advantage has its disadvantages. Different validator nodes can be equipped with different schedulers, block building layers, and transaction ordering logics. For most applications, this difference has a limited impact, but for high-value trading products (especially perpetual contracts and the Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) market), the impact is significant (detailed in the perpetual contract section below). The node validator revenue weakened this quarter due to declining annualized staking yields. As priority fees and maximum withdrawable value (MEV) yields continue to shrink, the proportion of inflation-based rewards in total staking revenue is constantly increasing. This trend has been evident since the fourth quarter of last year: the cooling of speculative activity has led to a reduction in fee revenue, putting pressure on the validator node's profitability ecosystem. Overall, competition in the operation and verification node industry is becoming increasingly fierce. Declining annualized staking yields, narrowing transaction fees and MEV profit margins, coupled with increasingly sophisticated validator node architectures, have collectively raised the entry barrier. As public blockchains move away from subsidy-driven, extensive growth and rely on node operators to achieve profitability, a certain degree of consolidation in the number of nodes is a natural phenomenon as the industry matures. However, the shrinking total number of validator nodes will further highlight the importance of four risk control indicators: staking token distribution, client diversification, geographical distribution, and data center concentration. Starting May 1st, the Solana Foundation's Delegated Staking Program (SFDP) introduced new rules, tightening entry requirements in areas such as data center concentration, Autonomous System (ASN) concentration, client software version, data indicator reporting, voting points, node commissions, block production and empty block rate, and transaction processing. Node operators participating in SFDP must also adopt First-In-First-Out (FIFO) or priority fee-based scheduling rules, with a transaction sorting window not exceeding 50 milliseconds; they must distribute sharded data on time, and are prohibited from intercepting transactions through Transaction Processing Units (TPUs), while strictly prohibiting the delay of TPU transactions beyond the specified batch processing window. These reforms cannot eradicate all on-chain market architectural flaws, but they aim to directly regulate verifier behavior and improve network-wide consistency without waiting for the protocol layer code to be finalized. Solana's medium- to long-term technical roadmap is progressing steadily, relying on two major protocol upgrades: Alpenglow and Multi-Parallel Block Production (MCP). Alpenglow will replace the original consensus architecture, adopting a more streamlined and lower-latency design, eliminating legacy components (such as historical Proof-of-Hero (PoH) and on-chain voting transactions), aiming to reduce transaction confirmation time to approximately 150 milliseconds. The Solana Foundation disclosed that Alpenglow is under development and plans to launch its mainnet in the third quarter; however, consistent with all underlying protocol upgrades, the launch date remains uncertain. The implementation of standardized MCPs based on the Anza team's "Constellation Proposal" is a key upgrade for optimizing the Solana on-chain market structure. Currently, in a single block production cycle, only one block proposer has full authority to decide the selection and ordering of transactions; the Constellation Proposal aims to break this monopoly: allowing multiple proposers to collect and submit transactions in parallel, and then the current block producer assembles the final block according to the protocol's hard rules. The proposal sets a 50-millisecond processing cycle, with the core objective of improving censorship resistance, achieving predictable transaction ordering, and creating a neutral execution environment for the on-chain internet capital market. The initial draft of the plan was released at the end of March, and the details still have room for adjustment before formal implementation; the launch date is yet to be determined. The scaling and optimization efforts continue to be implemented: Agave 4.x upgrades, including the Fast Data Path (XDP), increasing the single-block computing power limit to 100 million compute units (CUs), expanding the single-transaction volume, and increasing the cross-application call (CPI) limit, will further increase the transaction volume and business complexity that Solana can handle. The Anza roadmap also plans to reduce the block interval (Slot Time) to below 400 milliseconds, with one key optimization direction being to compress the block generation interval to 200 milliseconds and shorten the single-node block generation cycle (from 4 consecutive blocks to 2 blocks). The economic model update is currently in a quiet period. In previous quarters, inflation reduction has been a hot topic of debate in the Solana governance community: first the SIP-228 proposal, and then the SIMD-411 proposal proposing to double the inflation decay rate to 30%, reducing the issuance of approximately 22.3 million SOL over six years. Following the proposal's implementation, no similar large-scale inflation reduction proposals or discussions have been held on the official governance forum. The current governance focus has shifted from reducing token issuance to improving node revenue transparency through upgrades such as voting account V4 and SIMD-123 block revenue distribution. As mentioned in previous research reports, Solana's technological iterations are no longer limited to "speeding up and reducing fees." The next stage aims to balance high speed, low cost, predictable execution, and economic sustainability. While scaling up throughput is important, the real value lies in high-quality transaction execution, higher on-chain transaction success rates, clear transaction sorting rules, shorter single-node block control time, and node revenue models that are easy for delegated stakers and institutions to understand. On-chain activity
Solana DEX trading volume declined by 31% compared to the fourth quarter of last year, marking the second largest quarterly drop since 2022, with total trading volume falling to a new low since the fourth quarter of 2024.
Solana DEX trading volume declined by 31% compared to the fourth quarter of last year, marking the second largest quarterly decline since 2022, with total trading volume falling to a new low since the fourth quarter of 2024.
On-chain native transaction fees remained largely flat compared to the fourth quarter, with only a slight decrease of 1%.
The majority of transaction fees this quarter were contributed by the surge in on-chain market activity in January, while fee revenue shrank significantly in February and March. However, as the transaction fee volume of public chains such as BSC shrank, Solana's market share of transaction fees increased from 22% in the fourth quarter to 25%, bucking the trend. Key conclusions: On-chain transaction fees across the industry declined in tandem with overall transaction activity, while the market share of most public chains remained stable; however, the Meme coin economy remains a key pillar for Solana, with the transaction demand generated by this sector supporting primary transaction fee revenue.
Affected by the overall low activity on the blockchain, application fees declined for the third consecutive quarter, falling 10% quarter-on-quarter to $795 million. To mitigate the cyclical fluctuations in Solana's performance, the key lies in reducing its heavy reliance on Meme token transactions for application fees; however, for now, Meme token transactions remain the core driving force supporting Solana's position among the top public chains in terms of transaction fees.
Given the continued popularity of perpetual contracts and prediction markets across the entire crypto space, expanding these two types of businesses and diversifying ecosystem revenue is a clear focus for the Solana Foundation and the entire ecosystem.
However, the landscape of the perpetual contract sector on the Solana chain has not changed substantially in recent quarters.
In the first quarter, Jupiter and Drift still dominated the market. However, Drift suffered a $285 million hack on April 1st, and its market share is likely to shrink afterward. Dragged down by the overall decline in cryptocurrency trading volume across the industry, perpetual contract trading volume plummeted by 34% quarter-on-quarter, marking the second consecutive quarter of contraction. Solana's open interest and trading volume market share in perpetual contracts have fallen sharply from their peak in November 2024, reaching only 3% and 2% respectively by the end of March. The significant decline in market share was caused by multiple factors, primarily the meteoric rise of Hyperliquid, coupled with the subsequent launch of numerous similar competing products, intensifying competition in the perpetual contract market. While Solana capitalized on the Meme coin's market rally, it failed to capitalize on the subsequent migration of funds to perpetual contracts: in terms of product experience and liquidity, there were no competitors within its ecosystem that could rival Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid continued to amplify its advantages, especially by launching a new trading market based on the HIP-3 proposal, enabling perpetual contracts for non-crypto assets such as stocks and commodities; in contrast, Solana's trading platforms remained limited to cryptocurrency trading. Previous research reports mentioned that wallets like Phantom further widened this gap: this wallet, with its smooth onboarding experience, facilitated easy access to the Solana ecosystem for newcomers, while setting Hyperliquid perpetual contracts as the default trading entry point, allowing its advantage to snowball. Aside from its shortcomings in traffic distribution and liquidity, Solana's general-purpose underlying execution architecture is inherently unsuitable for perpetual contract business. Professional market makers need to cancel orders and relist prices within milliseconds and accurately predict the position of their transactions within the block. However, the current Solana mainnet cannot provide this certainty: different validator nodes and schedulers have different transaction sorting rules; transaction fees consist of multiple parts, including base fees, priority fees, Jito tips, and third-party on-chain service fees; market maker order cancellation instructions also compete with unrelated transactions for block resources. This uncertainty directly manifests as a widening bid-ask spread, with funds continuously flowing to trading platforms with stronger execution certainty. The lagging behind of Solana perpetual contracts is essentially due to defects in the underlying execution mechanism, not insufficient market demand. Chase Barker, former head of the Solana Foundation's ecosystem, has written an in-depth analysis of these pain points, which can be consulted. However, the Solana ecosystem has not stood still. The Anza roadmap implementation, the Alpenglow upgrade, the first phase of Multi-Parallel Block Production (MCP) based on the constellation solution, and the optimization of scheduler rules—these three improvements will all enhance the execution certainty of low-latency services. Jito's BAM market maker priority plugin is also being piloted for the deterministic execution of large-volume orders. At the application layer, emerging exchanges such as Phoenix, Archer, Bulk, and Fermi are piloting three execution modes: fully composable mainnet, node embedding, and sidechain. While a single solution cannot completely solve the problem, this comprehensive approach represents the first time the ecosystem has collaboratively addressed the shortcomings of perpetual contracts from both the market maker and retail investor perspectives. Prediction Markets: The first quarter marked the beginning of Solana's prediction market's transition from obscurity to widespread adoption, but its overall scale remains negligible. Trading infrastructure platform DFlow integrated Kalshi's prediction market tokenized product into Solana, while leading DEX Jupiter aggregated liquidity from Kalshi and Polymarket through its prediction market API. Users can complete transactions within the Solana ecosystem, with their holdings secured through the Solana on-chain system. Developers can quickly integrate prediction market businesses without having to build an entire system from scratch, including exchanges, oracles, matching, and clearing. The DFlow solution has the most advanced implementation, encapsulating Kalshi long/short positions into SPL tokens (Solana's ERC20 token standard). Jupiter, on the other hand, shields the underlying market source, completing the entire process of trading, holding, and clearing within the native application in one stop. Solana's weekly trading volume in the market forecasting sector rose steadily from near zero at the end of October last year, peaking at over $10 million in early February, with a peak of approximately 10,000 weekly active users. After peaking in the first quarter, trading volume began to decline; by April, weekly trading volume had fallen to the $3-4 million range, and the user base had shrunk significantly from its February peak.
Compared to the overall industry, the situation is clear: Solana predicts that the market's trading volume share briefly surged to approximately 0.19% in December, hovered between 0.10% and 0.16% for most of January and February, and then fell back to 0.04% to 0.06% in April. The sector has ample room for growth, but industry competition will only intensify.
Solana's total value locked (TVL) declined for the second consecutive quarter, falling 22% from the previous quarter, but its share of the overall industry remained stable at around 7%. Despite the shrinking stock, the total TVL of $15 billion in Q1 2026 is still significantly higher than in previous bear market cycles: approximately 40 times higher than the historical low after the FTX collapse, and 3 times higher than the figure before the market rally in Q4 2023. In short, although on-chain activity cooled down along with the overall market, Solana's funding base has structurally expanded compared to previous downturns.
Solana's total value locked (TVL) declined for the second consecutive quarter, falling 22% from the previous quarter, but its share of the overall industry remained stable at around 7%.
The most impressive growth in total value locked (TVL) is in Reality Asset Tokenization (RWA): it surged 58% in the first quarter, exceeding $2.5 billion, accounting for 17% of Solana's total TVL. This growth wasn't concentrated in a single product category; BlackRock's BUIDL Fund, xStocks tokenized stocks, Hastra PRIME home equity loans, and OnRe tokenized reinsurance products all contributed to the increase. The deployment of these assets is continuously enriching Solana's on-chain financial landscape, expanding it beyond native cryptocurrency trading and providing investors seeking on-chain returns independent of the broader crypto market with a viable investment channel. OnRe's growth is particularly noteworthy: without the support of the Solana ecosystem, the project would struggle to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in liquidity on-chain. The Solana stablecoin market continues to expand, but the apparent growth rate masks a structural rotation among its constituent currencies. The total market capitalization of stablecoins increased by 2.7% compared to the fourth quarter of last year, reaching $15.45 billion, marking three consecutive quarters of growth and accounting for approximately 5% of the overall stablecoin market share. Meanwhile, the dominance of USDC has significantly loosened: USDT's outstanding amount surged 34% quarter-on-quarter, and the outstanding amount of USD1 issued by World Liberty Financial skyrocketed by 473%, making USD1 the third largest stablecoin on Solana by the end of the quarter. In the first quarter, interest-bearing stablecoins and tokenized cash products began to form a considerable outstanding amount on Solana. BlackRock's BUIDL and Figure's YLDS products have seen their combined outstanding balance grow from almost zero to approximately $900 million, reflecting the continued rise in market demand from institutions and fixed-income alternative stablecoins. The liquidity landscape of the Solana stablecoin has consequently shifted: it is no longer highly concentrated in the USDC-dominated settlement market, but has gradually diversified into four major tracks: payment stablecoins, market-making settlement assets, interest-bearing wealth management products, and lending-related assets. In February, Solana's stablecoin settlement transaction volume reached $650 billion, more than doubling its historical peak; since January 2025, the total issuance of niche stablecoins other than USDC and USDT has surged nearly tenfold. The development of the lending sector is more complex. While Solana remains the industry leader in DEX trading, the on-chain lending market is still firmly controlled by Ethereum. While Solana's lending share has recovered somewhat from the trough following the FTX collapse, its lending scale remains relatively small compared to its own DEX trading volume, stablecoin settlement volume, and DeFi user base. Despite continuous iterations and optimizations of the underlying infrastructure and products, this has not yet translated into a substantial increase in cross-chain lending market share. Given this industry context, even if it's difficult to significantly boost overall market share in the short term, the recent progress in the lending sector remains significant. In the first quarter, Kamino's PRIME lending market saw its total value locked (TVL) surpass $600 million, and the platform's overall RWA business volume exceeded $1 billion. Gauntlet also launched its USDC wealth management vault on the platform. Jupiter lending officially ended its public beta, accumulating 83,000 users with zero bad debts. It subsequently launched a native SOL staking feature, allowing users to continue earning staking rewards on the SOL they use as collateral. Leveraging the progress of Kamino and Jupiter, Solana lending is moving beyond the traditional floating-rate DeFi lending framework, gradually evolving towards diversified models such as segregated lending pools, institutional asset collateral, RWA staking lending, and structured stablecoin wealth management. The launch of new projects at the beginning of the second quarter confirms this trend: Jupiter Lend, in partnership with Bitwise and Fluid, launched a segregated USDe lending market for institutions; Coinbase partnered with Morpho to launch a product allowing users to borrow USDC using SOL as collateral, which can be done directly on the Coinbase page. These successive product launches all point to the same development direction: Solana lending is becoming increasingly institutionalized, the types of collateral are continuously expanding, and the synergy with stablecoins and the RWA ecosystem is deepening. The next question is whether these new products can transform Solana's substantial trading volume and stablecoin reserves into a larger and more sustainable lending pool. Other key developments in the first quarter: The Solana Mobile ecosystem is moving from self-developed hardware to empowering the entire industry. In January, the Solana Mobile ecosystem launched its SKR token giveaway, allocating nearly 2 billion tokens (20% of the total token supply) to the Solana Mobile ecosystem. The flagship Seeker phone has seen over 118,000 activations since its launch. While this number is relatively small compared to Solana's overall user base, it has become a valuable traffic distribution channel for startups launching Solana applications. However, the ecosystem's growth potential extends beyond self-developed phone hardware: at the Mobile World Congress in March, Solana Mobile released the Solana Mobile Development Kit for OEMs and hardware manufacturers, streamlining the technology licensing process. Third-party smart devices can pre-install the blockchain's wallet, app store, and security key management components. Once Solana Mobile secures partnerships with leading hardware manufacturers, leveraging its significantly wider distribution capabilities than Seeker, the business will transform from "selling encrypted phones" to providing a comprehensive Solana mobile traffic platform for mainstream smart hardware. This year's Solana Breakpoint Developer Conference is expected to see more official announcements of manufacturer partnerships.
AI intelligent agents and agent-driven payments have officially become a key focus of the foundation. The Solana Foundation, in conjunction with Colosseum, hosted an AI intelligent agent hackathon in February, with a prize pool of $100,000 USDC, receiving 454 entries; in March, the intelligent agent registry center was launched, providing on-chain AI agents with underlying infrastructure for identity verification, reputation systems, and qualification verification. Meanwhile, the x402 protocol and native machine payment tools continue to be implemented and popularized within the Solana ecosystem. The public chain has added a new connection to the Machine Payments Protocol, jointly developed by Stripe and Tempo. This protocol relies on stablecoins to achieve programmatic API settlement. Solana is focusing on building an underlying clearing channel to support AI agents in autonomously holding wallets, paying API call fees, retrieving data, conducting transactions, and participating in on-chain governance, ultimately growing into on-chain entities with real economic value. Solana isn't alone in targeting this sector; almost all leading public chains are striving to become the preferred underlying layer for intelligent agent economic activities: Base leads the pack with its on-chain AI-related tokens, while Tempo, with its massive traditional domain traffic, is Solana's main competitor in this field. At the Solana Accelerate Developer Conference in May, this development strategy was further implemented: the foundation, in conjunction with Google Cloud, launched the Pay.sh payment gateway, allowing AI agents to access Google Cloud and over 50 community API services on a pay-per-call basis through Solana's on-chain stablecoins. The payment infrastructure landscape continues to expand. From a design perspective, payment services are unlikely to become the core source of Solana's transaction fees—the product positioning of payments is inherently low-cost, high-speed, and seamless for users. In the first quarter, Solana secured several significant partnerships in the payment sector: lending platform SoFi opened a channel for depositing Solana native assets, and the payroll system Gusto supports same-day settlement of employee compensation via USDC. May's industry case studies further validated the ecosystem's direction: Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, with Stripe's technical support, launched USDC creator settlement services on the Solana and Polygon chains in phases, initially opening to creators in Colombia and the Philippines; Western Union launched USDPT, a stablecoin issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, as its global remittance network's 24/7 settlement asset, with planned applications including cross-border remittances, smart agent clearing, and corporate fund management. The "Stable by Western Union" stablecoin product, aimed at ordinary users, plans to launch in over 40 countries and regions by 2026. Payment is the clearest path to guiding individual users, merchants, freelancers, content creators, and enterprises towards regular on-chain transactions, leading to sustained wallet activity, stablecoin accumulation, and user habits, ultimately benefiting the entire ecosystem. A user receiving salary through Solana USDC will find it easier to conduct savings, cryptocurrency exchange, deposits and loans, consumption, staking, and contract trading on the blockchain. In summary, Solana's current challenge is no longer attracting users to its public chain; its user base is already substantial. The real issue is whether its existing user ecosystem can be transformed into a robust and sustainable on-chain financial economy. The first quarter's market performance confirms that even with a weaker overall market, Solana's industry position remains solid. However, its ecosystem revenue's heavy reliance on cyclical speculative trading remains a significant weakness. The positive aspect lies in the gradual formation of various supporting elements for a complete ecosystem: ample spot liquidity, a solid user base, a comprehensive wallet ecosystem, a mature stablecoin settlement system, and steadily increasing RWA asset size. This is coupled with mobile traffic channels, multi-party payment partnerships, and a technology iteration path focused on improving transaction certainty rather than simply increasing throughput. Looking across the industry, very few public chains possess all of these advantages. However, the three core financial tracks—perpetual contracts, prediction markets, and lending—remain either absent or underdeveloped. This also determines that the next phase of development will be a higher priority than the past: Solana no longer needs to prove that it can withstand another speculative bull market; historical data has already provided the answer. It needs to verify that after the next bull market, the ecosystem can cultivate a deeper financial market, diversified collateral assets, a high-retention user base, and a healthy and sustainable node economic model. A public chain with long-term competitiveness does not rely on short-term bull market data, but rather on retaining existing funds after the speculative frenzy subsides. The first-quarter data shows that Solana's fundamentals have bottomed out, and the next focus of the ecosystem is to continuously raise its development ceiling.
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