As more and more reports signal for Solana (SOL) finally exceeding all EVM blockchains by on-chain trading volume, pseudonymous DeFi expert @jpn_memelord decided to study this phenomena. According to his data, the picture looks way more sophisticated, and Ethereum (ETH) might still be “the king.”
Solana’s (SOL) trading volume comes from illiquid pools and meme coins, data says
In the last 30 days, Solana (SOL) managed to surpass EVM chains by trading volume only thanks to low-liquidity pools and meme coins launched on Pump.Fun. Should we only track sustainable liquidity pools with large stable volume, Solana (SOL) could not be even close to this “flippening.” Such calculations were shared by DeFi researcher who goes by @jpn_memelord on X.
There has been a lot of talk about Solana flipping all EVM chains when it comes to volume.
I decided to dig in to the quality of pools across top chains to see if this is a passing trend or a flippening of the incumbent.
Join me down the rabbit hole 🧵👇
— jpn memelord🛡️ (@jpn_memelord) October 25, 2024
To “filter out the noise,” the author reduced the ranking of new and low-liquid pools in the report. That’s how he managed to study the pools with “established history,” he says. As a result, out of 20 largest “established” pools, only one, Whirlpool’s USDC-SOL, was running on Solana (SOL).
Ethereum (ETH) onboarded 10 pools from the top 20, Base is the platform for five pools, while Arbitrum and BSC are hosting two pools each. Aerodrome Finance’s USDC-WETH pool stands out with $7.2 billion in monthly trading volume, while Uniswap’s USDC-WETH pool dwarfed all competitors by TVL.
The review of 150 biggest DeFi pools by TVL looks slightly better for Solana (SOL), but still very far from what its supporters might be expecting:
By just volume of the top 150 pools before accounting for TVL, there is significant volume on Solana, but it does not come close to flipping all EVM chains, it does not even flip Ethereum (although it is close)
The expert admitted that this combination of trading volume and sustainability is what made BlackRock asset management heavyweight start exploring Ethereum (ETH).
Solana’s Pump.fun is back, its Tron-based clone is out
However, Solana (SOL) truly managed to hit a new on-chain trading activity record amid the comeback of its no-code meme coin launcher Pump.fun.
After a dramatic decline in mid-September, Pump.fun surprisingly recovered and eclipsed its August records with ease, Dune’s data says.
In less than six weeks, Pump.fun activity jumped by 700%. Oct. 24, 2024, was a record-breaking session for the protocol with over 36,000 tokens launched.
To provide context, its once-competitor SunPump on TRON (TRX) saw less than 50 tokens created per day in the last weeks.