Is SOL at the bottom? Multi-dimensional data reveals the true situation of Solana.

In the third quarter of 2025, Solana presents a two-sided story: on the surface, Meme ebb brings cooling, but the fundamentals are becoming more and more solid, TVL is growing by 26%, 稳定币供应增长三fold, 技术升级持续advance. This article is from blocmates Time to Call the SOL Bottom?, compiled and written by Dingdang, Odaily. (Synopsis: Token launch guide for Solana builders: I found the only platform that doesn't cut leeks) (Background supplement: Western Union announced the adoption of Solana as a stablecoin chain and the issuance of USDPT as the main circulating token) The third quarter of 2025 is a “two-sided story on the same chain” for Solana. On the surface, the “Meme ebb tide” has brought a wave of obvious cooling effects: daily active addresses have declined, and user dominance has gradually been eroded by competitors. Beneath the surface, however, the fundamentals of this chain are becoming more solid. The Solana core team has maintained a high frequency of iterations to continue to advance one of the crypto industry's most ambitious technology roadmaps; At the same time, its TVL grew by more than 26% in the third quarter, and the stablecoin supply has almost tripled since the beginning of the year. This report will systematically sort out the core technology upgrades that are defining Solana's future (such as Alpenglow, Agave), deeply analyze the on-chain data performance, the health of ecological applications, and summarize our key views on how Solana can consolidate its position as the “default high-performance public chain”. Multi-line technological innovation While most users of the platform are busy chasing the latest meme memes, the @solana core team has been pushing an ambitious system-level upgrade route. This is not a tinkering with a single metric, but a set of system engineering to comprehensively improve network performance, security, decentralization and user experience. These upgrades can be broadly divided into three broad categories. Category 1: Core Engines (Consensus and Client) This is a fundamental overhaul of the Solana “engine” with the goal of improving performance, speed, and security at the most basic level. Here's a great visualization to learn about the current staking ecosystem if you're curious. Category 2: Network highways (throughput and efficiency) The focus of this part is to widen the network “lane” after improving the underlying performance, and optimize traffic scheduling so that it can withstand higher loads in the future without congestion. If you want institutional users to really go on the chain in the future, then low latency and stable experience are the foundation, not the option. The third category: destinations (new capabilities of the ecosystem and application layer) This type of upgrade is aimed at the most direct developers and end users, aiming to provide more new functions, support new types of application forms, and further improve the level of decentralization of the chain. In other words, it's the module that enables “chains to do more.” The actual impact of technological improvements From the practical level of use: · Alpenglow: Below the 150ms final confirmation speed, retail users can use high-frequency DeFi, gaming, or micropayment applications on-chain, with performance approaching Binance's 100ms and Aptos 200ms. Firedancer: The potential power of more than 1 million TPS is much higher than Ethereum and its L2 (such as OP's about 2k TPS), Sui's 300,000 TPS, and centralized exchanges (Coinbase peaks at about 500,000 TPS). It also significantly reduces the systemic risk of a single client failure (Ethereum's Geth still accounts for 60% of nodes). Block space improvements, congestion mitigation and transaction size limit optimizations: Improve the overall experience when using chains, enabling more granular microtransactions, ICOs (such as $PUMP) and fast transactions, while reducing failures due to congestion. Decentralization and node cost reduction: Users with lower technical thresholds can also run nodes, thereby improving the security and decentralization of the entire network. ZK and Privacy Support: Provides a compliant, private, and secure foundation for RWA and institutional user access. BAM (Fair Trade, MEV-Resistant): Ensures transaction fairness and protects users from MEV losses, bringing the on-chain experience closer to CLOB's predictable, low-cost environment. ACE (Multi-Collateral Liquidity): Further deepening the DeFi capital market, enabling it to compete with platforms such as Aave and host more complex financial instruments. PUMP ICO: Verification of on-chain stress testing In July 2025, Pump.fun's ICO became a real “stress test” to test Solana's performance. @pumpfun completed $500 million and $100 million respectively through on-chain and centralized exchanges in just 12 minutes, corresponding to valuations of up to $4 billion. During this period, 3,878 investors transparently completed subscriptions on Solana's DEXs such as Raydium and Jupiter, while some EXEXs (such as Bybit) were stuck due to multiple API failures, and about 2,500 users who confirmed their contributions were unable to place orders in time due to API delays and were forced to refund them. Does this mean that we are seeing a possibility in the future where the performance of decentralized blockchains begins to reverse decentralized exchanges? So where is Solana currently located? The truth revealed by the data From the data, as traders move from meme speculation to perpetual contracts, Solana's on-chain earnings metric has a clear impact: on-chain fees as a percentage of SOL's market cap have slipped more than 60% since the July high. At the same time, although stablecoins are constantly discussed with Wall Street on Capitol Hill, the dominant players are still Ethereum and Tron, and Solana is in the “second echelon” with chains such as Base, BSC, and Arbitrum. Further dismantling of the stablecoin TVL share reveals that Ethereum and Tron have almost dominated over the past few quarters, while some emerging application chains such as @Plasma have begun to squeeze into this landscape. Nevertheless, Solana still provides a fast, low-cost and liquid environment for USDC, which may be why Western Union chose to build a stablecoin business on Solana. “Experimental” will be one of the central themes of this report, and this spirit is also reflected in the stablecoin ecosystem: new projects are gradually eroding USDC's dominance, bringing more competition to the Solana stablecoin landscape. Which ecological players are driving the growth of the chain? From the perspective of TVL growth, staking products were an absolute bright spot in Solana applications in the third quarter, with staking SOL and @Sanctumso products provided by Binance and Bybit recording growth of more than 50% in the third quarter. In contrast, DEX, DeFi and infrastructure products, while TVL also rose, but all failed to surpass SOL's own 28% increase – meaning that in SOL terms, these categories have been in the past.