Solana’s Milestone Year
2024 was indeed a milestone year for Solana. Solana’s continued infrastructure upgrades throughout the depths of the 2022-2023 bear market now make it significantly more resilient during congestion periods. Talented and committed builders continued to expand an ecosystem of feature-rich dApps, wallets, and new crypto native tools, only possible on Solana. From all-in-one dexes like Jupiter Exchange, trusted lending/liquidity/leverage protocols like Kamino Finance, pump.fun’s bonding curve innovations, to easy-to use and intuitive wallets in Phantom/Magic Eden.
Per Defillama.com as of Nov 14th, 2024, Solana’s TVL sits at ~$7.85B USD, with 24H volumes of ~$7B USD.
(Defillama Solana Chain, November 14th)
Solana solidified itself as a reliable blockchain. Enhanced network stability, year-over-year growth in user active addresses and total volume, and groundbreaking strides in Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) rewards. Solana is a clear “major” by marketcap, alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum ($100B marketcap per Coingecko). As we look to 2025. Solana continues to attract an ever-growing user base of institutional and retail users, and support the rise of high-value applications on its platform.
In this post, we will explore Solana’s journey through 2024, its anticipated growth in 2025, Figment’s role as a key player in driving innovation, and reliability and rewards for delegators. Solana’s current trajectory presents exciting opportunities as the premier, robust, high-performance blockchain.
2024: A Year of Uninterrupted Growth and Stability
After a challenging period in 2022, Solana emerged with renewed strength in 2024, maintaining continuous stability throughout the year. In 2022, Solana experienced 14 major or partial outages, halting mainnet block production and requiring social coordination between a majority of validators to resume. Notably in 2024, Solana had a single major network outage, in February 2024. Thanks to a series of technical upgrades, Solana’s resilience and efficiency with respect to stability are at their best ever. Solana built trust among its users by continuously executing infrastructure improvements to increase mainnet stability. Users from developers to institutional investors can rely on Solana for stable, reliable infrastructure for decentralized applications (dApps) and staking digital assets.
Key updates, such as QUIC-based Transaction Processing Units (TPUs), stake-weighted Quality of Service (QoS), and localized fee markets have strengthened Solana’s resilience during periods of high blockspace demand volumes. These changes have played a crucial role in transforming Solana from a network previously marred by outages to one celebrated for its stability. With reliability as its foundation, Solana has been able to attract more projects and encourage greater adoption of decentralized solutions in the industry.
A Big Comeback: High On-Chain Activity Driving Solana’s Growth
One of the most remarkable aspects of Solana’s 2024 resurgence has been the exponential increase in on-chain activity. By mid-2024, Solana reached record-breaking levels in both active addresses and transaction volumes. In July alone, Solana recorded 54.33 million active addresses, a 151% increase from early 2024. Similarly, non-voting transactions spiked to 1.3 billion, underscoring the high demand for the network’s services.
This surge in activity is indicative of Solana’s unique positioning within the blockchain ecosystem. Solana found product-market-fit in their focus on high-speed (<2 second confirmation time), low-cost transactions (<$0.01), making it an appealing choice for developers and users alike. Solana’s dedicated ecosystem of teams and developers built a rich ecosystem of dApps with excellent UI/UX.
Solana Decentralized Exchanges
Jupiter Exchange is Solana’s all-in-one dex for swaps, limit orders, perpetual futures, dollar-cost-averaging (DCA) and more. Their DCA is particularly interesting with customizable options to buy/sell a token over any amount of time with any amount of orders, is only possible due to Solana’s architecture. The cost of these DCA micropurchases would be profitable on most EVM dexes or aggregators.
Raydium hosts most new liquidity pools launched on Solana. Per defillama.com, Raydium 7-day spot volume as of Nov 13th, 2024 is $16.5B
Bonding Curve Liquidity Pool (LP) Innovation
Love or hate memecoins, Pump.fun innovated with their bonding curve/mechanism. Once a pump.fun token passes the 69K marketcap, Pump.fun provides the initial LP of 12k to Raydium and burns it. Previously, users needed to provide their own funds to LP in Uniswap-V2. The rise of so many new tokens on pump.fun drives heavy trading transactions volumes on Solana and heavily contributes to MEV opportunities. Per defillama.com, pump.fun is on pace for $370MM annualized fees.
Trading Clients
Bonkbot, the renowned Telegram trading client on Solana. Built by the Bonk community, they charge a 1% fee on all swaps with 10% of fees going to buyback and burning Bonk. Per defillama.com, they are on-track for $240MM annualized fees.
Photon, the new, go-to trading client. Per defillama.com,, on-track for ~$470MM annualized revenue
All these ecosystem dApps significantly increased on-chain activity. Fuelling demand for Solana, its ecosystem tokens, and strengthening the ecosystem’s value proposition to potential investors and participants.
The Rise of MEV in Solana Staking
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is a contentious topic. Efficient markets will always discover and capture profit opportunities. Democratizing and open-sourcing MEV to share value with all stakeholders (searchers, relayers, validator clients, validators, stakers) in an ecosystem is better than rewarding closed-source, extractive actors. Solana’s implementation has shown particular promise for its validators. MEV refers to the coordination of searchers, solana validator clients, relayers, validators and stakers to capture profit opportunities on the blockchain. These include: arbitrage between centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges, dex-to-dex arbitrage, liquidations on lending markets, and more. For Solana, this development has led to significant execution rewards for validators and stakers, using the Jito-Solana validator client and the integration of the Jito MEV marketplace.
In 2024, MEV execution rewards in the form of validator tips contributed a substantial portion of validator rewards in addition to protocol inflation rewards. At Figment, we saw MEV make up 12.4% of total rewards in Q2 2024 alone. This increase in rewards reflects the effectiveness of the Jito client in extracting value, which has transformed MEV from a theoretical concept into a practical, revenue-enhancing tool for Solana validators. As MEV mechanisms become more sophisticated and transaction volumes increase on Solana, profit opportunities become more frequent and lucrative for all stakeholders. It is likely that MEV execution rewards will continue to grow, offering validators and stakers an additional incentive to participate in economically securing the Solana network.
Increased Rewards for Validators: A Key Incentive
For validators, the financial incentives provided by Solana are becoming more attractive than ever. Solana’s staking rewards framework, bolstered by MEV, offers a competitive edge over other Layer 1 protocols. Figment’s validator, for example, achieved an average Staking Reward Rate (SRR) of 7.12% in Q3 2024, which was ~13% above the network average. With MEV contributing to 8.22% of Figment’s total rewards in Q3, it’s clear that these additional incentives are reshaping the financial dynamics of Solana staking.
Higher validator rewards have far-reaching effects on Solana’s ecosystem. As rewards increase, more validators are encouraged to participate in Solana’s proof-of-stake network, enhancing its decentralization and security. This, in turn, attracts more delegators who see Solana as a platform where they can earn more rewards on their staked tokens. This positive feedback loop strengthens the network, making it more resilient and appealing to stakeholders at every level.
Implications for Stakers
For those who stake their tokens to validators, the increase in MEV rewards presents an exciting opportunity for increased rewards. As validators earn more, stakers also receive a share of these increased rewards, making Solana staking a more attractive option compared to other networks. For delegators looking for strong rewards, Solana’s staking system provides compelling incentives, particularly as MEV continues to play an increasingly important role in the overall reward structure. This trend could attract more stakers to the network in 2025, further boosting liquidity and reinforcing Solana’s staking economy.
Looking Ahead: 2025 Predictions and Growth Areas for Solana
As we look ahead to 2025, Solana is poised for continued growth and innovation. The network’s track record of stability, combined with its high on-chain activity and growing MEV rewards, sets the stage for a promising year. Here are some predictions and growth areas that could define Solana’s next chapter:
Continued Network Stability
Solana’s commitment to reliability will likely drive further technical improvements, reducing latency and optimizing throughput. With this foundation, we can expect Solana to remain resilient under high demand, supporting even more decentralized applications (dApps) and scaling solutions.
Evolution of MEV
MEV on Solana is still in its early stages, and 2025 could see new developments in how MEV is extracted, distributed, and maximized. As MEV mechanisms become more refined, validators may see even greater rewards, creating stronger incentives for network participation.
Liquid Staking and Liquid Restaking Opportunities on Solana
Liquid staking tokens (LSTs) allows stakers to maintain liquidity and capital efficiency. Users deposit stackable assets such as Solana, and receive LSTs representing a “receipt” for their staked assets. The LSTs continue to accrue staking rewards from protocol inflation and execution rewards. In addition, it can be used within Solana’s DeFi ecosystem as collateral in lending programs, as liquidity in liquidity pools or to secure Node Consensus Networks through Restaking.
Jito Staking
JitoSOL is Jito Lab’s LST. With a current supply of ~12.2MM JitoSOL, representing ~14.1MM SOL staked to Jito’s validator or validator partners. JitoSOL is one of the most popular Solana LSTs, with deep liquidity across decentralized exchanges and many integrations for composability across the Solana ecosystem.
Marinade Finance
As one of the first and largest liquid staking providers on Solana, Marinade’s ~4.8MM mSOL tokens represent ~5.35M staked Solana.
Sanctum
Sanctum is a unique, new primitive on Solana. Sanctum essentially allows any community, dApp, project or team to launch their own LST. Sanctum’s Infinity multi-LST liquid pools support swaps of any size, across any two Sanctum whitelisted LSTs. Infinity enables deep liquidity for any new LST launched on Sanctum. According to Sanctum’s Defillama.com page, 7.43MM SOL are staked through Sanctum LSTs.
Restaking allows stakers to utilize their staked assets to economically secure additional networks and earn additional rewards. Per Jito Restaking: Users can deposit a diverse range of staked assets into vaults, and receive “Vault Receipt Tokens” (VRT). VRTs accrue additional rewards over time, are liquid, and compostable.
Stakeholders in Restaking include:
- Node Consensus Networks (NCN): These are decentralized networks that leverage staked assets to secure and validate various on-chain activities.
- Node Operators: Operators such as Figment run and maintain the infrastructure necessary to support NCNs. Delegators/stakers further enhance their rewards, stay liquid for capital efficiency, and contribute to multiple networks economic security.
- Liquid Staking/Restaking: This can increase capital efficiency for assets across Solana’s ecosystem. Stakers receive liquid, composable, and multiple streams of rewards for the staked assets. Solana is an increasingly attractive platform for both individual and institutional participants, As more diverse streams of rewards for stakers expand into 2025.
The Rise of Institutional Interest on Solana
With Solana’s resilience, reliability and high transaction volumes fueling greater execution rewards for validators and stakers, it makes it more compelling proposition to institutional entities. Solana is an attractive platform for institutions seeking high network resilience, strong staking rewards increasing user activity and demand for blockspace.
Expansion of Use Cases
In 2024, Solana’s ecosystem expanded significantly with the integration of PayPal USD (PYUSD), a stablecoin that bridges traditional finance and blockchain technology. This development has enhanced Solana’s appeal for DeFi, gaming, NFTs, and institutional investment
Looking ahead to 2025, the anticipated introduction of synthetic Bitcoin (sBTC) to Solana is poised to further diversify its use cases. sBTC aims to bring Bitcoin liquidity into Solana’s DeFi landscape, enabling BTC holders to participate in a fast, cost-effective environment. This addition could fuel new DeFi solutions, attract traditional finance users, and stimulate cross-chain liquidity, positioning Solana as a versatile, high-growth ecosystem that appeals to a much wider audience than ever before.
Figment’s Role in the Solana Ecosystem
Figment’s SSR of 7.5% relative to our validator operator peers means we are delivering additional value to our stakers. Execution rewards account for ~7-15% of total rewards (protocol inflation rewards + execution rewards = total rewards). Figment played an instrumental role in supporting the network’s stability and reward distribution. A focus on reliability means consistent uptime for its validator nodes, low skip rate in a leader slot, and a high SRR. Figment’s use of the Jito-Solana validator client continues to show additional rewards to our stakers through increased execution rewards.
Figment is committed to sharing transparent and valuable data on staking rewards, network performance, and MEV extraction. Our valued delegators and community deserve to know, understand and leverage the latest trends in staking. With quarterly insights which you can view here.
As we look to 2025, Figment’s role in Solana is only expected to grow, with a focus on providing even more robust infrastructure and staking solutions. By maintaining zero outages and delivering above-average rewards through MEV integration, Figment is well-positioned to continue supporting Solana’s growth and attracting new participants to the network.
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