Solana Shines Amid Blockchain Slump: A Beacon of Growth in a Contracting Market

Though driven by lower funding, total blockchain network income fell by 83% from $4.9 billion in Q4 2021 to $655 million in Q3 2025. Among the top performers, Solana stood out with flows and cheaper transaction fees across networks. Along with $365 billion in DEX volume—a 10x surge from early 2024—the network processed 93.5 million daily transactions in Q3, a 18% rise from Q2. With 0.74% daily growth and a current TVL of $11.36 billion supported by 22.44 million, Solana's Total Value Locked (TVL) increased 30%. 7,600 new developers joining the ecosystem help active addresses and 2,100 decentralised apps.

Solana's great performance depended on technical developments: a 20% increase in block capacity to 60 million compute units per block in July and the From 13 seconds to 0.1–0.15 seconds, Alpenglow upgraded slicing action finality. With peaks at 10,000 TPS, the network averaged 500,000 transactions per second (TPS), therefore supporting its efficiency and scalability. With daily revenue of $1.1 million, these enhancements have helped Solana to be a leader in real economic activity; Gauntlet, among others, contributed significantly. Jupiter, which has the highest TVL, charges fees of $12.71 million.

Through deliberate investments including $162 million in Solana-related projects via BREA shares in September 2025 and a cooperation with SOL Strategies for institutional staking and the SOLQ ETF released in April 2025, making ARKW and ARKF the first US-listed ETFs to feature Solana. Solana's strong statistics and infrastructure enhancements emphasize its dominance even with competition from networks such as Tron, which processed 821 million transactions in Q3. The shrinking of the larger blockchain environment, however, highlights continuing problems, with Solana's success providing a counterpoint to sector-wide revenue drops.