Has SOL hit the bottom? On-chain data reveals the truth.

To talk about the story of Solana in the third quarter, it is a contradiction of “surface cooling, core warming.”

It looks very cold on the surface: The meme token craze has receded, daily active address counts are declining, and user share is being eroded by competitors. But if you look at the off-chain data, you'll find another Solana is quietly getting stronger.

Engine is upgrading

The SOL ecosystem makes technological breakthroughs in three dimensions:

Underlying Engine (Alpenglow, Firedancer): Alpenglow reduces the final confirmation time to within 150ms, allowing retail investors to engage in high-frequency DeFi; Firedancer has a potential of over 1 million TPS, far surpassing Ethereum and L2. From a system security perspective, this also mitigates the risk of single client failures (currently, Geth accounts for 60% of Ethereum nodes).

Network Pipeline: Expanding bandwidth, optimizing routing, and reducing transaction failure rates—all to ensure that institutional users won't have issues when they come.

Ecological Capability: ZK privacy, BAM anti-MEV, ACE multi-collateral liquidity - these elements are not empty; they are what truly provide competitive advantages in DeFi.

Data doesn't lie

Look at a few indicators:

• TVL increased by 26% month-on-month, the scale of stablecoins nearly tripled in the third quarter.
• Transaction fee income as a percentage of market value has dropped by more than 60% from the July peak (the cost of the Meme craze)
• Stablecoin Landscape: Ethereum and TRON remain the dominant players, with SOL in the second tier, but its advantages of “speed and low cost” have led Western Union to choose it for its stablecoin business.

Staking products are booming: The staking of SOL on Binance, Bybit, and protocols like Sanctum has grown by over 50% compared to the previous period, surpassing traditional applications like DEX and DeFi. The cost is low returns—average staking protocols need a TVL 21.7 times that of DEX to achieve the same income. In other words, making quick money in the crypto world will always earn more than saving money.

The competitive landscape has not changed

Sui, Aptos, and Sei look impressive as new L1s, but they do not pose a substantial threat to SOL. SOL used to be compared to Ethereum, but these new chains are basically not competitive enough - because SOL is already “fast enough and cheap enough,” and has a mature ecosystem.

BSC has attracted quite a few users due to CZ's event and Aster DEX, while Base relies on the Base App and Zora to bet on consumer applications. However, SOL is holding onto Pump, a traffic black hole, and the stablecoin ecosystem is also gaining momentum.

What are Financing and New Projects Discussing

In the third quarter, the SOL ecosystem financing amount reached nearly $5 billion, with several interesting directions:

• High-Frequency Trading Infrastructure: Raiku raised 13.5 million USD to provide real-time liquidity management and lossless MEV.
• Games and Predictions: Melee Markets combines DeFi and social predictions, raising 3.5 million.
• Decentralized Stablecoin: Hylo raised 1.5 million, creating an over-collateralized yield stablecoin
• Stock Tokenization: xStocksFi's trading volume exceeded 800 million USD in the first quarter, capturing 60% of the market share.

These projects have a common point: they are all trying to break through the “casino chain” label.

Maximum Risk: Brand Narrative

This is the most heart-wrenching point. Solana was once the “paradise for experimenters”—trading bots, ICOs, consumer applications, AI Agents, the latest things all appeared first on SOL. But in this round, new things have started to disperse:

• Perpetual contracts have run to application chains like Hyperliquid.
• Base is seizing the story of consumer applications
• The stablecoin public chains Tempo and Plasma are threatening the position of USDC.

The most feared thing is: Pump indeed makes money, but firmly ties SOL to the label of “gambling.” Once this perception becomes established, it is very difficult to wash it away.

How to view the future of SOL

Short-term price fluctuations are no longer that important; SOL has already established its stronghold. Those new L1s have not posed a threat to it; instead, they have proven one thing: the real competition is at the application layer, not L1 itself.

As long as the iteration speed is maintained (the technology roadmap is indeed very ambitious), developers will continue to choose SOL. Even if some traffic flows to application chains, SOL's position as a general-purpose high-performance public chain will remain unaffected.

The core logic is: SOL is already good enough and continues to get better. This is enough for it to last a long time.