The dump and the buy are obvious, I’m talking about the bots and their strategies.
And if they usually spend more money on setup than what they actually profit

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

There's been significant improvement and innovations in recent times, such as low fee and faster transactions. And even the massive ecosystem of projects.

But if you wanted to change something particular about SOL, what would you? Maybe something like tokenomics, developer experience, network reliability, or something else?

I'd like to hear particularly from people who have been using Solana for a while and not just holding SOL.

Source: https://x.com/solana/status/2111463304027947493

Read

• CoinDesk: Solana sets Oct. 21 for Alpenglow upgrade targeting 150-millisecond finality
• TheStreet: GENIUS Act factored into Samsung stablecoin move, Solana Foundation exec says
• Decrypt: Solana Sets a Date for Its Next Major Upgrade
• Cointelegraph: Most tokenized stock trading on Solana, BNB Chain occurs outside US market hours
• Blockworks: Solana Quarterly Report
• Crypto.news : USDU expands to Solana with UAE-regulated issuance and 1:1 backing
• CryptoBriefing: OSL tokenizes 2WA USDGO Plus SP fund on Solana, handling custody
• Yahoo Finance: Solana Mobile brings its Seeker app to Ledger’s new Atom device
• The Block: Ledger unveils Atom Android device with Solana Mobile integration and new tamper protections
• CryptoBriefing: Solana hits 1.88M unique active addresses, its highest level in 13 months
• crypto.news : Pando Finance to launch Hong Kong's second spot Solana ETF on October 13
• SolanaFloor: Phoenix Launches 6X Anthropic Pre-IPO Perps as AI Giant Eyes a $100B IPO

Watch

• CoinDesk Public Keys: Samsung Puts Stablecoins on 82M Galaxy Devices; BTC Slides on Hot CPI
• Coinage: Why Grayscale Thinks Investors Are Sleeping on Ethereum and Solana
• Thinking Crypto: From Private to Public Blockchains! R3 Corda & Solana Team Up | Todd McDonald
• SolanaFloor: Why Jito's CEO Is Betting on Tokenized Stocks
• Discover Crypto: Samsung Chose Solana (Crypto Going Mainstream )

Listen

• Pirates Parley: Solana's Events Sensei Ellie: 24 Hacker Houses, a Bomb Threat, and Breakpoint London
• The Stack with Ilan Gitter: Quantum Computing, AI, and the Future of Crypto Security
• Pirates Parley: $4B in Two Months: Raydium on Tokenized Stocks and Solana as the Onchain NASDAQ
• Talking Tokens: Why Fomo Thinks Social Trading Is the Next Big Investing Shift
• Solana is Global with Alex Scott: From Meme Coins to Equities — The Future of Leverage on Chain

Someone posted a bounty on Pumpfun’s GO asking people to film themselves washing dishes and say “Pumployed.” The listing shows a 0.5 SOL reward and had 12 submissions when checked. I’d watch a compilation of those. Especially if someone takes the brief way too seriously and makes a cinematic dishwashing trailer.

What’s the funniest task you’ve seen someone put a bounty on?

1. App revenue rose 48% QoQ to $299.1M, the highest since Q3 2025.

2. Tokenized equities hit a record $7.1B for the quarter, with September reaching a $4.4B all-time high.

3. Solana did $197.2B in spot DEX volume, 36% of all cross-chain spot and its ninth straight quarter above 30%.

4. Solana processed a record 14.2B transactions, around 1,790 every second.

Source: Blockworks

Works on original hardware, shot on chromatic because original hardware is hard to film.

All you need is a game boy color and a flash cartridge and you can air gap your bag.

Source: https://x.com/solana/status/2111127103114825820

JUST IN: @tryramp now supports @global_dollar on @solana.
Enjoy no-fee on/off ramps for USDG and use it for vendor payments, deposits, and reimbursements in Ramp.

Source: https://x.com/0xDaedalus/status/2111124514012909922

@tryramp now supports @global_dollar on @solana.
As with all stablecoins we support, we're proud to offer 1:1 onramps & offramps for USDG across our suite of products.

USD → USDG: $0 in fees

USDG → USD: $0 in fees

What makes this release extra special is that it's brought to you by the newest member of our digital asset team,

u/carterappleton

, and was shipped in just his first two weeks at Ramp.

Stay tuned, much more to come from him in the future.

$ZEC is available on Solana through Sunrise, powered by NEAR Intents.

This follows the earlier $NEAR rollout in the partnership to build liquid markets for NEAR Intents assets in Solana DeFi.

Contract address: A7bdiYdS5GjqGFtxf17ppRHtDKPkkRqbKtR27dxvQXaS

https://x.com/sunrise/status/2111125195838591424

Mainnet-beta validators should switch to Agave v4.3.2 now.

The release adds performance and stability fixes for Alpenglow.

Alpenglow arrives in epoch 1064 on October 21.

https://x.com/anza_xyz/status/2111124479908970527

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Looking for a Solana dev who’d be down to build a new launchpad together. Got a lot of ideas for features that could make trading way more fun and enjoyable for traders.

Not looking to make profits at the start, just want to build something good and see where it goes.

DM me if you're interested (you can give me your telegram username in priv msg, I will contact you ASAP).

DefiLlama lists $10.969B in monthly trading volume for PumpSwap, with current TVL at $343.62M.

Monthly volume divided by that liquidity snpshot comes to roughly 32. Using average TVL over the month would give a more representative turnover figure.

There’s enough activity here for an interesting pool-level breakdown: how much volume comes from established markets, and how much comes from recently created pools.

Sunrise is partnering with NEAR Intents to establish liquid markets for NEAR Intents assets on Solana.

The rollout begins with $NEAR, now trading via Sunrise. Solana contract: 3ZLekZYq2qkZiSpnSvabjit34tUkjSwD1JFuW9as9wBG.

Plans include direct NEAR Intents integration to open more asset and liquidity pathways.

https://x.com/sunrise/status/2110734266346676713

Project 0 now lets users connect Claude, Cursor, Codex or x402 agents to its platform.

The agents act as portfolio co-pilots, reading markets, monitoring health, finding strategies and preparing unsigned transactions across 98% of the Solana credit market.

https://x.com/project0/status/2110731964911366153

A friend told me he can't find anyone in crypto like him. So I went looking for every Solana group chat I could find, and put them all in one spreadsheet.

What's in it:

- Superteams + Regional Communities: every chapter's chats (65)

- Calendars: the Luma calendars where people meet (91)

- Companies: Solana projects and their Discords / Telegrams (300)

- Developers: where builders talk: dev, education, hackathons (39)

- Memecoins: the official chats of the biggest memecoins (43)

- Communities: Solana's own groups, NFT collections, community-run (21)

Every row has the chat name, members, how many are online right now, active % (online ÷ members, a very low number can mean bots) and the invite link.

How it's built: the counts are what Telegram and Discord show publicly, refreshed weekly. If a chat doesn't show a public count, the cell is blank. Nothing is guessed. Links come from each project's own site or Linktree whichever invite link is available.

It's a view-only Google Sheet, no login:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N3NI2XmyaC5F3cOhMRlssvSiUhAI1Ahe

Spot a missing chat, a dead link or a fake group? Tell me in the comments or in the form inside of the Tutorial tab inside the sheets.

Link to X profile:

https://x.com/BalticsCook

Would appreciate any help turning Solana Baltics into Superteam Baltics!

https://x.com/solanabaltics

Pls dm me need some advice

We run a latency-sensitive bot from Frankfurt and Amsterdam (bare-metal-class VDS, ~0.1 ms to Helius Sender FRA, to the TeraSwitch TPU/BAM front-ends and to the Jito FRA block engine). It reacts to a specific on-chain event and sends a pump.fun buy.

What we measured (thousands of txs, chain + our own kernel timestamps):

• Detection: we see the trigger tx ~1.6 ms after it executes (Helius preprocessed + our own shred feed). Our first write goes out ~2 ms later.
• The gap: in 84 of 87 same-slot races, our tx left our box before the competitor's tx even executed. Yet his lands 14-24 ms earlier, often 8-9 ms after the trigger, while ours lands at ~20-25 ms.
• His tx looks like ours: legacy, ~1,070 bytes, durable nonce, ~85k CU, same public relays (Sender, Nozomi, Astralane tip accounts), similar tips and priority. On own-TPU JitoLabs leaders both txs arrive outside bundles.
• Already tested, none faster: cloning his exact tx shape and sending it from our box; Sender FRA/AMS/LON ingress; swqos_only; Triton Jet; unstaked direct TPU (warm); Jito BE direct; tip rank; a staked identity (from the Agave QUIC code, stake seems to help with admission but doesn't change ordering).
• Ruled out on chain: pre-execution visibility of the trigger; a validator link.

Question: what path gets a transaction into a JitoLabs/BAM leader in Frankfurt ~10 ms faster than Sender/Jito/direct TPU from a box that's already 0.1 ms away? Non-public relay tiers, private peering with validator operators, something in the leader's intake we don't see? Would love to hear from anyone who has actually dealt with this. No DMs/vendor pitches, please.

NEAR Protocol has introduced private vaults for earning yield in SOL. The vaults were developed in collaboration with Kamino and are powered by Gauntlet.

The product’s key feature is that users can earn yield without revealing their wallet address to the vault itself.

https://x.com/NEARProtocol/status/2110750258959471074

Source: https://x.com/openroboto/status/2110731220103618645

We’re bringing @peaq’s machine identity infrastructure to OpenRoboto Shift.

Our first 30 OR-S1 data collectors now use peaqOS Pro, each with its own decentralized identity (DID) on @solana.

https://reddit.com/link/1x6rakb/video/fd0xcrn5xnvh1/player

@peaq builds blockchain infrastructure for robots and connected devices.
Its peaqOS platform combines machine identities with payments and access to financial services. A peaqID gives each device an identity record that buyers and other platforms can check.

Next, we’re working with @peaq to connect the fleet to its machine money markets for access to financing and other financial services.

Explore Shift → https://shift.openroboto.ai
View the peaqOS integration → https://machines.peaq.xyz/machine/100827718501712298872248813047166656883201830160778346374378959421610460367607

Source: https://x.com/SolanaFndn/status/2110777232746791024

@/brij_fi is now live on https://pay.sh
Flight-search endpoints your agent can call with zero signup, just pay-as-you-need.
Search live fares across global airlines, then lock them in via onchain USDC escrow.
Point your agent at it: https://pay.sh/services/brij/travel

Source: https://x.com/Blockworks/status/2110732492671942964

Executive Summary

Solana's core financial metrics turned higher in Q3 2026. REV rose 48% QoQ to $75.7M, its first quarterly increase since Q4 2024, and application revenue rose 48% to $299.1M, the highest since Q3 2025. September was the strongest month for both REV ($30.1M) and app revenue ($117.1M) since January, and tokenized equities set a new all-time high of $4.4B in September alone, taking the category to a record $7.1B for the quarter, up 40% QoQ. DEX volume rose 23% to $197.2B, and Solana's share of spot DEX volume across chains climbed to 36%, the ninth consecutive quarter above 30%, cementing its positioning as the king of spot trading.

Institutional demand accelerated alongside the rally. SOL spot ETPs recorded $492.3M in net inflows, more than four times Q2's $113.7M and the strongest quarter since Q3 2025, with US spot SOL ETFs posting their largest single day on record ($71.5M on September 25th) late in the quarter. Spot ETP AUM nearly doubled to $3.7B, with Bitwise’s BSOL crossing the $1B AUM mark. Staked SOL reached a record 441M and DATCO holdings grew 8% to 18.8M SOL, the strongest quarterly growth since Q4 2025.

Solana's first binding onchain votes concluded on August 28th on Solana’s governance platform, with SIMD 550 (SGP 002) passing, doubling the disinflation rate and pulling the 1.5% terminal inflation rate forward from 2032 to 2029. SIMD 553 (SGP 003), which proposed a resource and inclusion fee, fell short of the two-thirds threshold. At the protocol level, slot times stepped down from 400ms to 250ms across three activations, blocks grew to 100M compute units, and the network processed a record 14.2B non-vote transactions. Alpenglow, which brings 150ms finality, went live on public testnet on September 22nd and now moves toward mainnet scheduling.

Financials

Real Economic Value (REV)

Solana's Real Economic Value (REV) totaled $75.7M in Q3 2026, up 48% from Q2's $51.0M and the first quarterly increase since Q4 2024. The recovery strengthened every month, with REV rising from $19.1M in July to $26.5M in August and $30.1M in September, the highest monthly figure since January. The rebound was broad-based across components: priority fees rose 58% QoQ to $48.7M and contributed roughly 64% of REV, Jito tips rose 30% to $12.9M, and base and vote fees together contributed $14.0M on record transaction counts.

Token holder net income, which measures REV less operator payments, came in at -$0.6M for the quarter, a notable improvement from -$3.6M in Q2. More importantly, it turned positive in August (+$0.1M) for the first time since February and stayed positive in September (+$0.1M), meaning fee revenue once again exceeded the network's operator cost base for two consecutive months.

The distribution of REV across network stakeholders remained consistent with recent quarters: roughly 76% accrued to validators, 23% to token holders, and about 1% was captured by Jito.

When looking at revenue by chain, Solana ranked fourth with an 11% share ($75.7M), up from fifth and 8% in Q2. Hyperliquid (24%, $158.1M) and Canton (24%, $157.6M) led, with Tron third at 12% ($77.8M). Solana moved ahead of Ethereum ($41.1M) during the quarter, stayed ahead of BNB Chain ($54.2M), and briefly ranked third in August with a 12% share. It is important to note that on Canton, fees are burned by applications rather than end users, with those applications and validators receiving newly minted CC as activity rewards. As such, activity on the network is highly incentivized.

Staker Revenue

SOL's nominal staking yield ended Q3 at approximately 4.8%, down from 5.4% at the end of Q2, as the emission schedule continued to decay. With inflation now sitting near 3.6%, real staking yield (nominal yield less inflation) ended the quarter at approximately 1.3%.

Solana stakers earned $495.0M in Q3 2026, up 4% from Q2, as SOL’s price recovery outweighed the lower issuance rate. Issuance accounted for roughly 98% of staker revenue, with Jito tip yield contributing $10.6M, up 32% QoQ. Staked SOL reached a record 441.3M at quarter end, up 3.3% QoQ, and the dollar value of staked SOL rose 64% to $52.6B.

Q3 saw the issuance debate turn into policy with the passing of SGP 002. SGP 002, which reflects Helius' SIMD 550, passed its voting phase on August 28th and doubles Solana's disinflation rate from 15% to 30% a year, leaving the 1.5% terminal rate unchanged while reaching it in 2029 rather than 2032 and removing roughly 18.9M SOL of emissions over the period.

The vote itself took place on Solana’s new governance platform. Passage requires a one-third quorum and two-thirds approval of participating stake, with SGP 002 clearing both with little room to spare. Delegator overrides, which allow stakers to override their validator’s votes, proved decisive. 901 stakers overrode their validator’s votes to move 11.2M SOL of stake at more than 99% in favor.

The staker-economics story remains tied to SIMD 123, which would introduce a standardized in-protocol mechanism for validators to share priority fees with stakers. With priority fees at nearly two-thirds of REV, in-protocol fee sharing remains the single largest pending improvement to staker value accrual, and it is expected to ship alongside Alpenglow.

Application Revenue

Application revenue serves as an indicator of success for businesses within an ecosystem. While REV is an important metric to track, the true metric of an ecosystem's product market fit is the revenue generated by user-focused applications.

Solana applications generated $299.1M in revenue in Q3 2026, up 48% from Q2's $201.5M and the highest quarterly total since Q3 2025. Monthly revenue climbed from $75.4M in July to $106.5M in August and $117.1M in September, the strongest month since January.

The leading apps by revenue in Q3 were Pump ($121.5M, 41%), Collector Crypt ($35.0M, 12%), Fomo ($24.9M, 8%), Pacifica ($18.0M, 6%), and Axiom ($16.2M, 5%). The breadth behind the leader improved meaningfully, with trading terminal Fomo quadrupling its revenue QoQ and Axiom growing 65%. Phantom ($15.6M) and Jupiter ($11.6M) also grew revenues through each month of the quarter.

Institutional Flows

The institutional adoption seen through Q2 continued into Q3. As highlighted last quarter, seven of the 29 global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) have live Solana capabilities, led by JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, the two most systemically important names on the list by capital-surcharge tier. The deployments span the full service stack rather than a single use case: tokenization and delivery-versus-payment settlement at JP Morgan, SOL and SPL custody alongside USDC mint/burn and fund administration at BNY Mellon, custody, spot trading, ETFs, and lending at Morgan Stanley, stablecoin issuance at Société Générale, and a money-market fund at State Street.

In Q3, Charles Schwab, with nearly 40 million active accounts and more than $13 trillion in client assets, announced spot SOL access through Schwab Crypto, and Morgan Stanley rolled out SOL trading on E*Trade. On the asset management side, BlackRock launched BRSRV, a money market fund for stablecoin reserves on Solana, and filed with the SEC to issue tokenized fund shares on the network. Visa's new Stablecoin Platform, built to let banks and fintechs mint, hold, and transfer stablecoins, launched with Solana among its initial supported networks. Investors and institutions can now reach SOL and Solana-based assets through the brokerages, funds, and payment networks they already use.

Exchange-Traded Products (ETPs)

SOL spot ETPs recorded $492.3M in net inflows in Q3 2026, more than four times Q2's $113.7M and the strongest quarter since Q3 2025. Flows accelerated each month: $30.6M in July, $197.6M in August, and $264.2M in September, the strongest month in a year. US spot SOL ETFs set a YTD inflow record of $56.1M on August 27th, then surpassed it twice in September, culminating in $71.5M on September 25th. That day capped a $184.5M week, with Bitwise's BSOL contributing $54.3M on September 25th, its best day of 2026. BSOL now holds $1.36B in AUM, having crossed the $1B AUM mark in early September.

Regionally, North America remained the engine with $450.8M in net spot inflows, while Europe turned positive at $41.4M after three consecutive quarters of outflows. Spot ETP AUM ended the quarter at $3.7B, up 94% QoQ, as inflows and SOL’s 62% price rally compounded.

Digital Asset Treasury Companies (DATCOs)

SOL DATCO holdings saw their strongest growth since Q4 2025, rising 7.7% QoQ to 18.8M SOL from 17.4M at the end of Q2, with aggregate NAV up 71% to $2.2B. Most of the growth came in August, when SOL's rally let treasury companies issue equity accretively again after months of mNAV discounts and thin secondary liquidity. Forward Industries led the accumulation, adding 254K SOL between July 1st and August 3rd to reach roughly 7.8M SOL and SOL equivalents, nearly all of it staked through its own validator.

Sector Analysis

Retail traders returned to Solana at speed in Q3, driving record transaction counts, a 69% jump in trade count, and resurgent launchpads. Newer categories kept growing alongside them: tokenized equities set a record in a market that grew roughly ninefold, and Solana's share of spot DEX volume across chains rose to 36%. The Solana Foundation debuted their Frontier Traders program in Q3, a community and rewards program for high-volume trades, which saw promising early traction.

Spot Trading

Solana DEX spot volumes totaled $197.2B in Q3 2026, up 23% from Q2's $160.8B. Solana handled the most spot volume across networks for yet another quarter, representing 36% of volume, ahead of Ethereum (17%), BNB Chain (14%), and Robinhood Chain (12%). This marks the ninth consecutive quarter in which Solana accounted for over 30% of spot DEX volume, and its share rose from 34% in Q2.

Volumes rose from $50.5B in July to $67.2B in August and $79.5B in September, the strongest month since February. Trade count grew even faster, rising 69% QoQ to 1.74B trades, with September alone reaching 771M trades. Pump's integrated AMM was the largest single venue at roughly 21% of Q3 volume, followed by BisonFi (13%) and Raydium (10%). Aggregators routed 55% of volumes to spot DEXs in Q3 2026, down from 65% in Q2 as more flow went directly to venues.

The Frontier Traders program drew strong early adoption. In the first 30 days after launch, more than 90,000 retail traders signed up, and Frontier Traders activations drove over $3.6 billion in combined perpetuals and spot trading volume. These results point to strong retail demand and show that the program can turn user acquisition into meaningful on-chain trading activity.

SOL-stablecoin pairs remained the anchor at roughly 40% of volume, while memecoins rose to 29% from 16% in Q2, their strongest showing since mid-2025. Stablecoin swaps represented 15% of volume, foreign tokens 7%, and project tokens and tokenized assets roughly 4% each.

Prop AMMs remained the largest exchange type on Solana. Prop AMMs are spot exchanges with actively managed liquidity via oracle updates, each operated by an individual market maker who updates quotes multiple times per second. Their share of spot DEX volume was 40% in Q3, down from 51% in Q2, as memecoin flow concentrated on constant-product pools, whose share rose to 18% from 10%. The shift tracks the asset mix: prop AMMs specialize in the major pairs, and memecoins trade almost entirely on pools.

Tokenized Assets

Tokenized assets set another record in Q3 2026. DEX volume in tokenized assets reached $8.1B, up 26% QoQ and a new all-time high for a seventh consecutive quarter.

Tokenized equities accounted for 88% of that activity at $7.1B, up 40% from $5.1B in Q2 and a record for the category. After a quieter July ($1.5B) and August ($1.3B), September reached an all-time monthly high of $4.4B, surpassing June's SpaceX-driven $3.5B. The September surge coincided with a rapid expansion of supply and access: tokenized-equity holders on Solana rose 88% in the first twelve days of the month to more than 800K as StonkFun and Pump introduced trading pairs backed by tokenized stocks.

The category also became far larger and more competitive. Cross-chain tokenized-equity volume reached $49.7B in Q3, roughly nine times Q2. Solana's share of cross-chain volume moved from 95% in Q2 to 14% for the quarter, with BNB Chain at 55%, Robinhood Chain at 28%, and Base at 3%. The monthly trend is more encouraging, with Solana's share nearly doubling from 10% in August to 19% in September, as its own volume more than tripled MoM.

Beyond equities, tokenized private credit contributed $539M (7% of volume), commodities nearly tripled to $363M, and collectibles, led by Collector Crypt's trading-card market, grew 78% to $36M.

Foreign L1 Tokens

Foreign L1 tokens traded $⁠12.8B on Solana in Q3, 6.5% of DEX volume, down 5% from Q2's $⁠13.5B as memecoin volume expanded around them. BTC pairs grew 4% to $⁠5.7B, followed by ETH ($⁠2.4B, up 7%), HYPE ($⁠2.2B, down 39%), and ZEC ($⁠2.0B, up 30%), which nearly drew level with HYPE.

Perpetual Futures

Solana-based perpetual futures platforms processed $146.2B in notional volume in Q3 2026, down 20% from Q2's record $183.2B but still the second-highest quarter on record. Monthly volume was steady at $47.1B in July and $46.1B in August before rising 15% to $53.0B in September. Pacifica overtook GMTrade for the top spot with 44% of volume ($64.3B) against GMTrade's 42% ($62.1B), and Jupiter at 11% ($16.7B).

Phoenix, built by Ellipsis Labs, remains the most credible attempt to close the perps gap on Solana in a fully onchain form, and it grew rapidly in Q3. Volume more than tripled QoQ to $2.7B. Drift, meanwhile, completed its rebuild after the April exploit and relaunched as Velocity, a USDT-settled perps venue, and opened claims for exploit losses shortly after quarter end.

Lending

Lending recovered with the market. Total deposits across Solana money markets ended Q3 at $5.0B, up 18% from $4.2B at the end of Q2, while outstanding loans rose 10% to $2.0B. The increase retraced most of the first half's decline as demand for onchain leverage returned with the rally. USDe supply on Solana, which scaled from near zero to over $500M in Q2 through the Jupiter Lend and Kamino markets, held near $450M at quarter end.

Consumer

Token Launchpads

Launchpads had their strongest quarter in a year. Launchpad volume totaled $50.8B in Q3 2026, up 95% from Q2's $26.0B and the highest since Q3 2025, while token creation rose 27% to 3.5M tokens launched, the most since Q1 2025. Launchpads on Solana generated $96.1M in revenue, up 50% from $63.9M in Q2, with monthly revenue rising from $21.9M in July to $36.4M in August and $37.8M in September.

[Screenshot]
Solana: Launchpad Revenue. Source: https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana

Pump accounted for 92% of launchpad revenue. The notable new entrant was StonkFun, which captured roughly 7% of Q3 revenue, the first launchpad to hold a visible share against Pump in 2026. Q3's gains came from a broader return of retail activity, and new entrants found room to compete.

Stablecoins

Total stablecoin supply on Solana ended Q3 2026 at $16.8B, up 3% QoQ and the second consecutive quarter of growth, and climbed further to $17.4B in the first days of October. USDC held 47% of supply and USDT 23%, while USD1 (8%), USDGO (7%), PYUSD (5%), and USDG (4%) together accounted for nearly a quarter, a sign of how many issuers now treat Solana as a primary deployment venue.

[Screenshot]
Solana: Stablecoin Supply. Source: https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana

Payments

Solana has processed more than $5T in stablecoin volume so far in 2026, and Q3 extended that momentum. The quarter closed with the September 30th launch of Open USD (OUSD), a stablecoin from Open Standard issued natively on Solana by Bridge, with reserves held at BlackRock, Lead Bank, and BNY. Its five founding partners, Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe, and Visa, have committed more than $⁠1B to OUSD liquidity, and more than 200 companies, including UBS and SBI Holdings, plan to integrate it.

Remittances were the clearest live use case. Western Union rolled out its Solana-based USDPT stablecoin alongside its Digital Asset Network and Stablecard with Rain, using Crossmint's wallet and payment infrastructure to link digital dollars to cash access across more than 360,000 collection points. Zepz, the company behind WorldRemit and Sendwave, launched the Sendwave Wallet for recipients in more than 100 countries, and MoneyGram brought its Ramps service to Solana, giving builders a single API for cash deposits in more than 25 countries and withdrawals in more than 170. The Solana Foundation formalized the push with the appointment of Jamal Raees as General Manager of Payments.

Agentic payments continued to build on the same rails. x402, the open payment standard for AI agents now hosted by the Linux Foundation, has processed roughly 200M transactions and $⁠50B in volume across about 150,000 merchant endpoints, and is referenced in the documentation of Cloudflare, Stripe, and AWS. In September, Solana added payment channels as a native primitive, letting an agent authorize a spending limit once, meter usage offchain, and settle in a single transaction, a design built to support up to one million payments per second. Looking ahead, Solana’s high throughput and low transaction costs make it well suited to payments at scale. These deployments position the network as the settlement layer for a growing share of real-world stablecoin payments.

Network Analysis

Transaction Count and TPS

Solana processed a record 14.2B non-vote transactions in Q3 2026, up 45% from Q2's 9.8B. August set the all-time monthly record at 5.2B transactions, and successful transactions reached a record 3.2B in September, the third consecutive monthly high. Of Q3's transactions, 63% were successful and 37% were reverted. Reverted transactions are most often associated with automated strategies such as arbitrage bots, and their share rises when bot-heavy retail flow returns, as it did this quarter. Most are trades that hit their slippage limits and reverted as designed.

[Screenshot]
Solana: Non-Vote Transaction Count. Source: https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana

Non-vote transactions per second (TPS) averaged roughly 1,790 in Q3, up from 1,250 in Q2. Daily active addresses averaged 2.3M, up 16% QoQ, as the retail return showed up in users as well as activity. Put simply, Solana is now processing more activity, faster than at any point in its history.

[Screenshot]
Solana: Non-Vote TPS. Source: https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana

Median Transaction Fees

Median transaction fees averaged $0.0005 in Q3 2026 and never exceeded $0.0007 on any day of the quarter. Fees held stable through record transaction counts, a 69% jump in trade count, and three slot-time reductions. Solana is increasing its bandwidth, meaning how much activity fits in each block (block capacity rose 66% with 100M CU blocks), while reducing latency, meaning how quickly new blocks are produced (slot times fell from 400ms to 250ms). Fee stability at this level is what makes high-frequency market making, prop AMM quote updates, and consumer applications economically viable on shared infrastructure. Among chains generating over $10K in daily fees, Solana's median fee was less than half the second cheapest chain's and roughly one-hundredth of the most expensive.

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Solana: Median Transaction Fees vs Other Chains. Source: https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana

Validators and Decentralization

Solana's first binding governance votes tested who controls the network. Delegator overrides decided the disinflation vote, with stakers outvoting some of the largest validators and showing that stakers hold final authority over operators. Measured on stake control, self-directed delegation and geographic distribution, Solana remains comparable to Ethereum.

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Solana vs Ethereum: Decentralization. Source: https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana

The resilience record continued to support the same conclusion. On August 12th, a routing incident at a network provider in Frankfurt did not disrupt consensus, which the Solana Foundation attributed to the diversity of validator stake. Through the outage, 597 of 699 validators kept voting and affected validators recovered within 40 minutes of the incident. Alpenglow will raise the network's tolerance for offline stake to 40%, further hardening consensus against concentration risk.

Product & Ecosystem Updates

The Q3 roadmap moved from prerequisites to activations: live onchain governance, larger blocks, faster slots, larger transactions, and Alpenglow running on public testnet.

Onchain Governance

On July 1st, the Solana Foundation activated Solana Governance Proposals (SGPs), the network's first binding onchain voting mechanism, with stake-weighted votes and delegator overrides. SGP 001 ratified the process itself, and SGP 002 and SGP 003 delivered the first network-level proposals. Any validator with 100K SOL delegated can submit a proposal, which advances to a binding vote after collecting support from 15% of active stake.

SGP 002, carrying SIMD 550's disinflation doubling, passed on August 28th. The result came down to the final hours, with large validators voting against the proposal and Kraken's late reversal of its initial vote lifting support just above the threshold. Validator-cast stake alone totaled 165.1M SOL in favor and would have fallen short of two-thirds, while 901 delegator overrides moved 11.2M SOL at more than 99% in favor. Overrides still amounted to only about 4% of participating stake.

SGP 003, carrying SIMD 553's resource-based fee burn, failed the same day under the same requirements, reaching 63% support against the two-thirds bar. Active opposition came from the application layer, led by Jupiter (11.8M SOL) and Bitwise (8.4M SOL), who argued the fee would raise costs most for compute-intensive applications such as trading venues and make Solana's cost structure less predictable. Delegators again broke heavily in favor, with 739 overrides moving 10.9M SOL at 97% in favor. As the proposal was rejected at the authorization stage rather than on implementation grounds, a revised version can return to the process.

100M CU Blocks (SIMD 286)

On July 29th, Solana raised its block compute limit from 60M to 100M compute units, a 66% increase. The change was designed as headroom for demand spikes rather than a new baseline. In the days after activation, median block size grew modestly while the largest blocks expanded sharply, and slot times were unaffected.

Slot-Time Reduction (SIMD 525)

Q3 brought the first slot-time reductions in Solana's history. SIMD 525 steps slot times from 400ms to 200ms in four 50ms increments, each gated by its own feature activation. The first two steps activated in August, taking slot times to 350ms and then 300ms, and the third took them to 250ms on September 18th, lifting block production to four slots per second. The final step to 200ms is live on devnet and testnet and will be scheduled for mainnet once block-skip rates remain stable at the current cadence.

Transaction v1 (SIMD 385)

On September 15th, Solana activated its new v1 transaction format on mainnet, raising the maximum transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes. Operations that previously required several transactions, including zero-knowledge proofs and confidential transfers, now fit in a single atomic transaction, giving tokenized-stock and DeFi applications more room for complex routes and execution. Wallets began adding support shortly after activation.

Alpenglow

Alpenglow, Solana's largest protocol upgrade to date, made concrete progress in Q3. Its prerequisites went live on mainnet, with BLS key registration activating July 8th and the Validator Admission Ticket on July 22nd. Agave v4.3, the release carrying Alpenglow, was recommended for all mainnet validators on September 21st. On September 22nd, Alpenglow began activation on public testnet, the same migration path devnet and mainnet will follow, after more than four months of rehearsals on a community cluster.

The upgrade replaces Tower BFT and Proof of History with a new consensus design targeting 150ms finality, roughly a 100x improvement, removes onchain vote transactions (the dominant recurring validator cost), and raises tolerance for offline stake to 40%. For applications, sub-second finality closes most of the remaining user-experience gap with centralized venues.

Closing Summary & Outlook

Demand returned to Solana in Q3 2026, and nearly every financial line improved. REV rose 48% and token holder net income turned positive for two consecutive months, application revenue grew 48% with breadth improving beneath the leader, and tokenized equities set a record quarter capped by a $4.4B all-time high in September. Institutions leaned in as well: spot ETPs absorbed $492.3M, more than four times Q2, staked SOL reached a record 441M, and treasury companies resumed accumulating. Momentum strengthened into quarter end, with September the strongest month of the quarter for REV, app revenue, ETP inflows, DEX volume, and tokenized equities.

Token holders directly ratified a supply cut that pulls terminal inflation forward three years. The competitive landscape also evolved: tokenized equities are now a multi-chain market roughly nine times larger than in Q2, and Solana's share recovery to 19% in September will be a key line to watch. Retail activity drove much of the quarter's growth, and sustaining it alongside the newer settlement-driven categories will shape the next several quarters.

Solana's upcoming catalysts are concrete. Alpenglow is live on testnet and moving toward mainnet, bringing 150ms finality, the removal of vote costs, and higher offline-stake tolerance; slot times are one step from their 200ms target; SIMD 550's faster disinflation is now ratified policy; and SIMD 123 would give stakers an in-protocol claim on the priority fees that make up nearly two-thirds of REV.

Full report available here for download.
All data from this report was powered by the Blockworks Solana dashboard.