Solana is approaching its all-time largest DeFi total value locked (TVL) of 11.7 billion, according to DeFiLlama. But day to day network charges are stagnant at about 1.6 million. Solana has not been capturing its fees proportionate to its trading volume, despite 65 million transactions per day, and a DEX volume of more than $4.6 billion.
Trading Surges, But Monetization Lags
Perpetual volumes near $2.1 billion reflect Solana’s strong derivatives market. Nevertheless, the DEX volume declined by 45 percent in the average following the hype of memecoin volume, according to Q2 by Messari. The effect: more liquidity and less revenue growth in proportion. In this on-chain flows increase, SOL appreciated against a price of $198.
Deep Liquidity, Low Marginal Costs
CoinGlass statistics indicates that there is a balanced leverage due to healthy funding. On chain routing is low cost, and arbitrageurs and market makers maintain low costs. However, this microstructure is another constraint on fee potential to validators and app developers who are dependent on usage-based income.
Stablecoins Anchor Activity
Solana maintains a stablecoins volume of more than 12 billion, which supports inventory and settlement flows. The monetization capacity of this liquidity by the protocol is however constrained. Aggregators and LPs control market share and efficient routing captures less app-level fee across the board.
Efficiency Over Revenue, For Now
Solana continues to be a liquidity magnet yet unless there is a shift towards high-fee activities, revenue will not increase as rapidly as TVL. The dilemma of the network is how to convert the scale into the rewards of the validators and long-term profitable DeFi applications. So far the capital efficiency of Solana makes it faster than its fee engine.
