Is it time to buy Solana at its lowest price?

Author: blocmates Source: X, @blocmates Translation: Shan Ouba, Jinse Finance

Summary

Solana presented a dual picture in the third quarter of 2025. On the surface, the meme coin crash led to a market cooling, a decline in daily active addresses, and user attention being eroded by competitors.

But beneath the surface, the fundamentals of this public chain are becoming increasingly strong. The Solana core team continues to advance the most ambitious technology roadmap in the crypto industry, with total value locked increasing by over 26% in the third quarter and stablecoin supply nearly doubling since the beginning of the year.

This report will comprehensively cover the technological upgrades that define Solana's future (such as Alpenglow and Agave), deeply analyze on-chain data and the health of the dApp ecosystem, and extract core insights—why Solana is consolidating its position as the default high-performance public chain.

Multi-dimensional Technological Innovation

While most users are engrossed in speculating on the latest meme coins, the Solana core team is pushing forward with the most ambitious technology roadmap in the crypto industry.

This upgrade is not a minor tweak to a single metric, but a comprehensive overhaul of the network infrastructure, directly addressing four core pain points: performance, security, decentralization, and user experience.

These initiatives are mainly divided into three categories:

Category 1: Core Engine (Consensus and Client)

This is a fundamental overhaul of the Solana engine. The core objective is to improve raw performance, speed, and security at the most fundamental level.

If you are interested, you can view a visualization of the current staking ecosystem.

Category 2: Network Channels (Throughput and Efficiency)

This category focuses on widening network channels and managing traffic more efficiently to match new speed levels and prevent congestion.

To attract institutional investors, they will not tolerate poor latency performance.

Category 3: Application Scenarios (New Features: Ecosystem and Decentralized Applications)

These are new features that developers and users will directly encounter, which can support the implementation of new applications and further enhance the degree of decentralization.

The third category: Application Scenarios (New Features: Ecosystem and Decentralized Applications)

These are new features that developers and users will directly encounter, which can support the implementation of new applications and further enhance the degree of decentralization.

Impact on Practical Applications

Specifically:

• Alpenglow: Final confirmation time of less than 150 milliseconds, supporting retail decentralized applications (dApps), such as decentralized finance (DeFi) high-frequency trading, games, or micro-payments, with performance comparable to Binance (100 milliseconds) and Aptos (200 milliseconds). Fireracer: Transaction processing per second (TPS) exceeds 1 million, significantly outperforming Ethereum and its Layer 2 networks (Optimism at 2000 TPS), SUI (300,000 TPS), and centralized exchanges (Coinbase peaking at 500,000 TPS). This also enriches the types of validator clients and reduces the risk of single points of failure (Ethereum's Geth clients account for 60% of nodes). Block space and congestion optimization / transaction size limits: Improves the on-chain user experience, supports more granular small transactions and initial coin offerings (ICOs) (such as PUMP), and speeds up transactions (avoiding transaction failures). Decentralization and reduced validator costs: Allows users with lower technical barriers to run validator nodes, improving on-chain security and decentralization. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) and privacy protection: Supports real-world assets (RWA) and institutional participation while ensuring compliance, privacy, and security. BAM: Ensures transaction fairness, prevents maximum extractable value (MEV) loss, matches the efficiency of the Central Limit Order Book (CLOB), and achieves predictable low-cost transactions. ACE: Provides multi-collateral liquidity, further improves the decentralized finance (DeFi) capital market, better competes with platforms such as Aave, and supports the implementation of complex financial instruments through decentralized finance (DeFi). Empirical Case: PUMP Initial Token Offering Stress Test In July 2025, Pump.fun's initial coin offering (ICO) served as a real-world test against Solana. Pump.fun raised $500 million through on-chain decentralized exchanges and $100 million through centralized exchanges in just 12 minutes, achieving a fully diluted valuation of $4 billion.

  3878 investors transparently placed orders through decentralized exchanges like Raydium and Jupiter, while centralized exchanges like Bybit experienced multiple outages (unexpected API delays), resulting in approximately 2500 buyers being unable to complete their transactions despite confirming payment, ultimately being forced to request refunds.

  Have we glimpsed the future—decentralized blockchains beginning to surpass centralized exchanges?

  Solana's Current Status: Data Interpretation

  The shift of meme traders to the perpetual contract market has impacted Solana's core metrics. On-chain fees as a percentage of Solana's market capitalization have decreased by over 60% from their July high.

  Despite stablecoins being a hot topic on Capitol Hill and Wall Street, Ethereum and Tron remain dominant. Solana, along with platforms like Base, BSC, and Arbitrum, occupies a third tier.

  

  In terms of the proportion of total value locked (TVL) in stablecoins, Ethereum and Tron have been fiercely competing in the past few quarters, while new application-specific stablecoin projects such as Plasma have also begun to emerge. Even so, Solana still provides a fast, low-cost, and highly liquid platform for USDC-related activities—which may be why Western Union chose this chain to build its stablecoin business. Innovative experimentation will be a core theme of this report, a characteristic that extends to Solana's stablecoin ecosystem, with several new projects gradually eroding USDC's dominance.

  

  Which ecosystem participants are driving on-chain growth?

  Among the growth in Total Value Locked (TVL) of leading Solana applications, staking products have performed exceptionally well. Binance, Bybit's staking services, and Sanctumso all saw their TVL increase by over 50% in the third quarter.

  Which ecosystem participants are driving on-chain growth?

  

  The total value locked (TVL) of DEX, DeFi, and infrastructure applications all saw slight increases, but none exceeded Solana's own 28% increase—meaning that, at least in Solana terms, these categories experienced net outflows of funds over the past quarter.

  

  However, the weakness of staking products lies in their profit margins: on average, a staking protocol needs 21.7 times the total value locked (TVL) of a decentralized exchange (DEX) to generate the same revenue. This data indicates that businesses targeting speculators are more profitable than those targeting savers.

  When it comes to decentralized exchanges (DEXs), Orca_so holds a significant advantage in terms of Total Value Locked (TVL) efficiency (i.e., turnover rate). At the same DEX liquidity level, each $1 of tokens changes hands the most frequently on Orca. While Solana is known for its speed and low cost, there are exceptions. For example, heavy users on trading platforms like TradeWithPhoton and AxiomExchange spend significantly more on daily gas fees than expected. However, for most users, using mainstream applications on Solana costs only a few cents per day.

  

  Solana vs. Major Competitors

  Global on-chain total value locked (TVL) nearly surpassed the historical high of nearly $180 billion in 2021, but compared to Solana and some of its competitors, its quarter-on-quarter change was negligible.

  The global on-chain total value locked (TVL) almost broke through the historical high of nearly $180 billion in 2021, but compared to Solana and some of its competitors, its quarter-on-quarter change was negligible.

  The global on-chain total value locked (TVL) nearly ...>

  The chart below shows that the total value locked (TVL) of these competing public blockchains changes highly synchronously each week. As Isaac Newton said, still capital tends to remain still. In terms of user scale, Binance Smart Chain (BSC) stood out in the third quarter with the launch of Aster, a perpetual contract decentralized exchange (DEX) associated with Changpeng Zhao (CZ). Users either left the market in early summer or migrated from Base and Solana to the BSC ecosystem.

  

  Despite strong user growth in the second quarter, attention to Solana declined in the third quarter, coinciding with a cooling of market enthusiasm for meme trading.

  

  However, there is something to be optimistic about. Solana benefited from the surge in attention to stablecoins, with its stablecoin supply nearly doubling from the beginning of the year to the end of the third quarter. It has proven that speed and low cost are major selling points for stablecoin promotion, especially when combined with Solana's mature DeFi ecosystem.

  However, the positive aspect is that Solana benefited from the surge in attention to stablecoins, with its stablecoin supply nearly doubling from the beginning of the year to the end of the third quarter. This demonstrates that speed and low cost are major selling points for stablecoin promotion, especially when combined with Solana's mature DeFi ecosystem.

  These charts illustrate the current market landscape, but fail to capture the full picture. Solana has always positioned itself as an innovation experiment chain. To predict future application scenarios and narrative directions, we need to pay attention to which experimental projects have received funding. Where is VC funding going? The following are some projects that received investment from well-known funds in the third quarter: raikucom: Completed a $13.5 million seed round in September. It is a DeFi infrastructure protocol on Solana, focusing on providing real-time liquidity coordination and cross-chain bridging services for high-frequency trading applications, achieving sub-second settlement and no Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) risk. This round was led by PanteraCapital and will accelerate mainnet upgrades and integration with decentralized exchanges (DEXs) such as JupiterExchange. bulktrade: Completed a $5 million seed round in August. It is building a perpetual contract DEX, providing institutional-grade order books and supporting large-scale transactions of up to $10 million with zero gas fees. This round was led by robotventures and 6thManVentures, with aeyakovenko participating as an angel investor. Its testnet was launched in the third quarter.

• meleemarkets: Completed a $3.5 million pre-seed round of funding in July. It's a gamified prediction market protocol on Solana, integrating DeFi and social betting features to reward accurate predictors with yield-generating tokens. This round was led by variantfund and dba_crypto, and will be used for oracle integration and mobile app launch. The project placed second in the Solana Breakout Hackathon.

• hylo_so: Completed a $1.5 million seed round of funding in September. It's a decentralized stablecoin protocol on Solana, supporting permissionless issuance of yield-generating stablecoins like sUSD through an overcollateralized vault and automatic rebalancing mechanism to achieve optimal annualized yield (APY). This round was led by robotventures, with participation from SolanaVentures. The funds will be used for mainnet deployment and integration with lending platforms like Kamino.

What are the opportunities and risks?

Third Quarter Highlights

Among the many emerging decentralized applications (dApps), the following launched projects stood out in the third quarter:

• Titan_Exchange: A new DEX aggregator launched in the third quarter, employing an improved algorithm to extract liquidity from different liquidity pools with machine-level precision to obtain the best quotes, outperforming existing aggregators in 80% of cases.

• DefiTuna: A new DeFi AMM launched in the third quarter, with real on-chain capped orders built into its Automated Market Maker (AMM) mechanism to avoid off-chain hacking attacks, achieving true transparency, while allowing liquidity providers (LPs) to use up to 5x leverage (leverage yield).

xStocksFi: Tokenizes stocks held in custody by licensed brokers, allowing cryptocurrency holders easy access to the economic rights of the underlying stocks. Launched early in Q3, the project achieved over $800 million in quarterly trading volume, capturing approximately 60% of the market share. Pump.fun (Streaming + Mobile App): After experiencing significant selling pressure, Pump.fun initiated a token buyback in Q3 and relaunched its live streaming service, having repurchased $100 million worth of tokens by the end of the quarter. MetaDAOProject: Gained attention due to oversubscription of projects like Umbra. Projects issued through MetaDAO (see our special report for details) have tokens with legal, economic, and governance rights, known as ownership tokens. Furthermore, governance proposals do not require voting; instead, they allow participants to express their opinions with funds through predictive market trading.

DAT Momentum

In the third quarter, the Solana digital asset repository raised approximately $4.25 billion through private placements, pre-IPO financing, and equity offerings. The largest single purchase was by Forward Industries (FORD), which spent approximately $3.5 billion to acquire 14.5 million Solana tokens, representing 2.3% of its total circulating supply.

Despite this, the Solana digital asset repository was not immune to the net asset value (mNAV) compression issue commonly faced by the cryptocurrency digital asset repository ecosystem in the third quarter.

DAT Momentum

In the third quarter, the Solana digital asset repository did not escape the net asset value (mNAV) compression problem commonly experienced by the cryptocurrency digital asset repository ecosystem.

DAT Momentum

During the third quarter, the Solana digital asset repository raised approximately $4.25 billion through private placements, pre-IPO financing, and equity offerings. The largest single purchase was by Forward Industries (FORD), which spent approximately $3.5 billion to acquire 14.5 million Solana tokens, representing 2.3% of its total circulating supply.

Responding to Common Criticisms

Like almost all crypto projects, Solana is still evolving and far from perfect. But in our view, the following criticisms are simply part of its growth process.

Core Risks — Brand Positioning

Solana's positioning as an innovation testing ground has always been its core advantage. Trading bots, initial coin offerings, consumer-grade applications, and AI agents — these were all first implemented on Solana.

But in this cycle, Solana faces difficulties. It lacks attention, and its product-market fit seems limited to a few applications in a few areas. This stagnation creates opportunities for competitors to seize the narrative:

• Trading open interest contracts are migrating from general-purpose public chain applications to application-specific public chains like Hyperliquid.

  Base, through its Base app and Zora, is heavily focusing on consumer applications, seizing the core narrative that once belonged to Solana. Stablecoin public chains like Tempo, Plasma, Stable, and Arc are continuously challenging the dominance of Ethereum and Tron. This raises a core risk: While Pump.fun is undeniably a money-making machine, successfully fending off competition from both external (Base/BSC) and internal (BonkFun) sources, this success has come at a price—potentially permanently branding Solana as a casino chain. To change this, Solana must champion new ideas. Perhaps the answer lies with Pump.fun, but through its streaming platform; perhaps with MetaDAO's risk-free initial coin offering and new governance model; or perhaps with Toly's product that surpasses Hyperliquid. The ecosystem needs a breakthrough to shed its stigma as a haven for short-term speculators.

  Our Outlook for Solana

  Despite the cooling market following the meme craze, the importance of short-term price fluctuations is diminishing. Solana has established itself and will remain a long-term player.

  Newly launched high-performance public chains (such as Sui, Aptos, and Sei) do not pose the same threat as Solana did to Ethereum in the previous round of competition. While some competitors theoretically possess more advanced technology, Solana's speed and cost are sufficient to provide a good user experience and support a large dApp ecosystem.

  Technological capabilities and a smooth user experience are the cornerstones of application adoption. Solana is not content with its current leading position but is actively pursuing the upgrades detailed in this report to consolidate its advantages and expand its service scope. This is why developers still default to Solana as their first choice for high-performance public chains—a trend unlikely to reverse in the short term.

  Solana embodies the resilience, innovation, and extreme capitalism of the crypto industry, serving as a top-tier arena for validating product-market fit.

  Regardless of where this cycle leads, Solana will remain strong and thrive. While it may lose some transaction volume to specialized application chains, we firmly believe that Solana will continue to maintain its leading position in the general-purpose public blockchain space.