Solana Q2 Report: Tokenized asset trading volume doubles, with a significant rise in non-speculative demand

Author: Blockworks

Translated by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Briefing: Solana has just delivered the strongest evidence so far that persistent, non-speculative demand is taking root on-chain. In Q2, tokenized asset trading volume doubled to a new high of $5.8 billion, with tokenized equities alone at $4.8 billion—$3.3 billion contributed by just June. Meanwhile, meme coins withdrawing have dragged down network REV: it plunged 43% to $51 million, while application revenue fell 31%. Seemingly contradictory data pairs are actually telling the same story: Solana’s demand base is shifting from speculation to settlement, from a casino to a bank. And Alpenglow upgrades, the SIMD-553 burn proposal, and the SIMD-550 inflation reform are laying the economic groundwork for this narrative shift.

Overview

Q2 2026 produced the strongest evidence to date that durable, non-speculative demand is taking root on Solana—and that its spot trading dominance has already surpassed any single asset class.

Tokenized asset trading volume hit a new high of $5.8 billion, up 114% quarter-over-quarter. The growth was mainly driven by tokenized equities—$4.8 billion—over four times the Q1 record. Equity trading volume, which contributed $3.3 billion in just June, means Solana is currently processing roughly 97% of all tokenized equity transactions across the full chain.

This growth happened amid industry-wide slowdown and ongoing reset of meme coin revenues: REV fell 43% quarter-over-quarter to $51 million, and application revenue declined 31% quarter-over-quarter to $228.4 million. Even so, Q2 shows that Solana’s demand base has already moved beyond pure speculation.

Although BTC and ETH spot ETPs recorded net outflows of $3.7 billion and $500 million respectively, SOL spot ETP still recorded $120 million in net inflows, exceeding Q1’s $113 million. Staked SOL hit a new quarterly-end high of 427 million coins (about two-thirds of supply). Stablecoin supply was basically flat at $16.3 billion. DEX trading volume fell 44% quarter-over-quarter to $160.8 billion, but bounced 26% in June quarter-over-quarter—suggesting the activity trough may have passed by mid-quarter.

At the network layer, Solana handled 9.8 billion non-vote transactions—second-highest quarterly volume only behind Q1. Median transaction fees held steady at $0.0004. The story ahead now centers on Alpenglow—Solana’s largest protocol upgrade so far—bringing 150-millisecond confirmation times, paired with staged slot time reductions, larger blocks, and a standard mechanism to share block income with stakers.

Financial Metrics

Realized Economic Value (REV)

Solana’s realized economic value (REV) totaled $51 million in Q2 2026, down 43% quarter-over-quarter. After being stable at around $90 million for two consecutive quarters, REV fell further because the meme coin activity that drove the 2025 peak kept fading: monthly REV dropped from $18.6 million in April to $18.1 million in May and $14.3 million in June. The decline is broadly distributed across components: priority fees fell 45% quarter-over-quarter to $30.8 million, Jito tip fees fell 50% to $9.9 million, and vote plus base fees together contributed $10.3 million.

Q2 introduced SIMD-553, a proposal put forward by Solana’s R&D company Temporal, which substantially strengthens SOL’s value accumulation framework. The proposal would reintroduce a meaningful transaction fee burning mechanism—replacing part of Solana’s existing fixed fee with a new resource-based fee that will be permanently removed from supply. Unlike the current burn mechanism, which has become trivial relative to issuance, the new mechanism scales with network usage and capacity.

At current activity levels, SIMD-553 is expected to burn 7,500 to 9,000 SOL per day (about $0.6 million to $0.72 million at $80/SOL)—roughly ten times the current rate—equivalent to about 12% to 15% of daily issuance.

For SOL holders, the implication is straightforward: as network usage and block space demand grow, a larger quantity of SOL will be removed from circulation. This provides REV with a second value-accumulation channel—beyond the income allocated to validators and stakers—ensuring that increased network activity benefits all token holders, not only block producers.

REV distribution among network stakeholders has stayed consistent with recent quarters: about 72% to validators, 26% to token holders, and roughly 2% captured by Jito.

By on-chain revenue share, Solana ranks fourth with a 12% share ($51 million), behind Hyperliquid (33%, $141.4 million), Tron (21%, $89.8 million), and Ethereum (15%, $63.3 million). Solana’s 12% share of network revenue fell 33% quarter-over-quarter from Q1’s 18%.

Staker Returns

Nominal staking APY for SOL at the end of Q2 was about 5.5%, down from 5.8% at the end of Q1, as the fixed issuance schedule continues to decay: the inflation rate is currently near 3.8%, and a 1.5% terminal rate will be reached under the current plan in about six years. Real staking APY (nominal yield minus inflation) is about 1.7% at quarter-end.

Solana stakers earned $487 million in Q2 2026, down from $630 million in Q1—a 23% decline. Issuance accounted for over 98% of staker revenue, while Jito tip fee yield contributed $8.2 million.

During Q2, issuance became the centerpiece of governance discussions. Solana infrastructure provider Helius proposed SIMD-550 during the quarter, targeting the supply side of staker economics. This is an update to a proposal the company made in November 2025. SIMD-550 would double Solana’s anti-inflation rate from 15% to 30% per year, doubling the decay speed while keeping the 1.5% terminal rate unchanged. It would shorten the time to reach terminal inflation from 5.8 years (first half of 2032) to 2.9 years (first half of 2029), cutting issuance by about 18.9 million SOL during the period. The cost to stakers is a faster decline in nominal yield: assuming a 68% staking rate, nominal staking APY would drop to 4.34%, 3.00%, and 2.25% in the first three years, respectively. For token holders, the same math reduces dilution and narrows the gap between nominal and real yield.

SIMD-550 and SIMD-553 tackle the same problem from both sides: the former reduces supply growth, while the latter increases usage-linked burning.

The staker economics story is also tightly linked with SIMD-123, a proposal that would introduce standardized in-protocol mechanisms to share priority fees between validators and stakers. After SIMD-96 redirected 100% of priority fees to block producers for eighteen months, this allocation mechanism still hasn’t been activated on mainnet, but is now expected to go live alongside Alpenglow. Priority fees account for 60% of REV, and on-chain fee sharing is the biggest value-accumulation improvement for stakers that still needs to be implemented.

Application Revenue

Application revenue is a metric for whether businesses in the ecosystem are succeeding. While REV is an important tracking metric, the real measure of product-market fit for ecosystem offerings is the revenue generated by user-facing applications.

Solana applications generated $228.4 million in revenue in Q2 2026, down from $329.3 million in Q1—down 31%—the lowest quarterly total since Q1 2024. The decline tracks cooling retail trading activity, rather than market share being lost to other chains.

The leading apps by revenue in Q2 were: Pumpfun ($90.1 million, 39%), Collector Crypt ($32.2 million, 14%), Pacifica ($20.0 million, 9%), Jupiter ($15.3 million, 7%), and Phantom ($11.9 million, 5%).

Institutional Capital Flows

Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs)

Q2 marked the beginning of Solana’s institutional adoption reaching into the traditional banking system. Of 29 G-SIBs worldwide, 7 have onboarded Solana capabilities, led by JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup—two of the most important names in the system ranked by capital surcharge tiers.

Deployments cover the full service stack rather than a single use case: JPMorgan’s tokenization and delivery-versus-payment settlement, BNY Mellon’s SOL and SPL custody with USDC minting/burning and fund management, Morgan Stanley’s custody, spot trading, ETFs, and lending, Sumitomo Mitsui’s stablecoin issuance, and State Street’s money market funds. The breadth of these deployments across custody, issuance, settlement, and distribution is one of the clearest external validations of Solana as an institutional settlement infrastructure.

Exchange-Traded Products (ETPs)

Institutional demand has again decoupled from price for the third consecutive quarter. SOL spot ETPs posted $120 million in net inflows in Q2 2026, surpassing Q1’s $113 million. In the same period, BTC spot ETPs recorded net outflows of $3.7 billion, and ETH ETPs recorded net outflows of $500 million. Looking at all SOL ETPs, quarterly inflows were $148 million. While distribution across the quarter wasn’t uniform, the whole-quarter pattern continued the institutional SOL buying behavior defined since U.S. spot ETFs began trading in October 2025—staying net-positive inflows during declines.

By region, the U.S. is still the engine—SOL ETP net inflows of $185 million, Europe net outflows of $38 million, and Asia-Pacific flat. Spot ETP AUM at quarter-end was $1.9 billion, down 5% quarter-over-quarter because price depreciation exceeded inflows.

Digital Asset Treasury Companies (DATCO)

SOL DATCO holdings remained basically unchanged for the ninth consecutive month, at 16.8 million SOL at Q2 end, down 0.9% quarter-over-quarter. Between April and May, they reduced holdings by about 150k SOL because limited secondary liquidity and ongoing mNAV discount constraints continue to weigh on this asset category. DATCOs remain a base of stable passive holders rather than a source of incremental demand.

Sector Analysis

Solana’s Q2 confirmed an argument: the network’s trading infrastructure outperforms any single asset class. As meme coin activity cooled, the same infrastructure (Prop AMM, aggregators, low fees, sub-second confirmation) absorbed tokenized equities at a record scale. “A marketplace for everything” is no longer a forward-looking statement—it is the network’s main growth engine in Q2.

Spot Trading

Solana DEX spot trading volume totaled $160.8 billion in Q2 2026, down 44% from Q1’s $288.5 billion. Even so, Solana processed the most spot trading volume in Q2, accounting for 32%, leading Ethereum (25%), Base (16%), and BNB Chain (12%). This marks the eighth consecutive quarter that Solana’s share of spot DEX trading volume exceeded 30%.

The monthly trend tells a more constructive story than the quarterly totals: trading volume fell from $52.3 billion in April to $48.0 billion in May, then rebounded 26% to $60.5 billion in June—the strongest month within the quarter—because tokenized asset activity accelerated sharply.

SOL-stablecoin trading pairs are still anchored at about 46%. The fastest growth comes from the newest category: stablecoin swaps rose from about 17% in Q1 to 21% in Q2, while external token share nearly doubled to 8%, and tokenized asset share quadrupled to nearly 4%. Meme coins stayed around 17%—a steady contributor in a market where trades are diversifying across more assets.

Venue structure is also evolving: BisonFi leads Prop AMM with about 17% of Q2 trading volume, while Pumpfun’s integrated AMM keeps gaining share, accounting for 13% of trading volume in Q2.

DEXs on Solana are still a Prop AMM story. Prop AMM is a spot exchange that actively manages liquidity through oracle updates. Each Prop AMM is operated by a single market maker (no external LPs), using highly optimized oracle price updates so quotes can be adjusted multiple times per second. There are nearly twenty Prop AMMs running on Solana, and their spot DEX trading volume share in Q2 2026 was 53%, higher than 30% in Q2 2025.

Tokenized Assets

Tokenized assets were the highlight of Q2 2026—and Solana’s highlight so far this year. DEX trading volume for tokenized assets reached $5.8 billion, up 114% quarter-over-quarter, marking a sixth consecutive quarter of record highs.

Most of the activity came from tokenized equities, accounting for 84% of trading volume. Solana currently processes about 97% of all tokenized equity trades across the full chain, making this vertical the clearest expression of durable, non-speculative demand on the network.

Tokenized equities logged $4.8 billion in trading volume in Q2, about four times the $1.1 billion in Q1. The growth was even more pronounced within the quarter: April brought $670 million, May $871 million, and in June alone contributed $3.3 billion.

The June data marks a new high for the category. The catalyst was the SpaceX listing on June 12—the largest IPO in history. For the broader tokenized assets segment (including instruments beyond listed equities), monthly trading volume reached about $3.6 billion, up 222% quarter-over-quarter. Tokenized SPCX issued via Sunrise and distributed by Backpack accounted for about $770 million. The issuer has since expanded tokenized equity coverage to more underlying assets, including Micron, SanDisk, and the Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM). Along with SPCX, these four instruments contributed over $1 billion of trading volume in June.

Prop AMMs started quoting tokenized assets during the quarter and now account for about 50% of tokenized asset trading volume. Because these tokenized equities can be exchanged one-to-one for underlying stocks, venue integration may encounter lower operational friction when providing liquidity—potentially supporting tighter arbitrage and higher quoting confidence.

Besides equities, tokenized private credit contributed $803 million (14%), commodities contributed $111 million, and collectibles—a new category led by Collector Crypt’s trading cards marketplace—contributed $20 million.

External L1 Tokens

External L1 tokens as a category continued to expand, reaching a record 8% share of DEX trading volume in Q2, or $12.2 billion. BTC and HYPE alone contributed over $9 billion. May also marked the first time HYPE trading volume surpassed ETH’s trading volume on Solana—an indication that what determines network trading content is not the legacy asset hierarchy, but the speed at which tokens go live.

Perpetual Contracts

Perpetual contracts remain Solana’s most challenging vertical in Q2. Drift suffered a vulnerability attack on April 1—an influence on roughly half of the protocol’s TVL caused by a social engineering attack targeting its multisig—setting the tone for the quarter. The recovery response was substantive: Drift announced a relaunch supported by about $150 million in collaboration with Tether and others, with recovery pools and token mechanisms redirecting protocol income toward compensation, with USDT becoming the new quoting asset.

Perpetual contract platforms on Solana processed about $183 billion in nominal trading volume in Q2, up 60% quarter-over-quarter. GMTrade accounted for 50% of Q2 perpetual volume, Pacifica for 39%, and Jupiter fell to 10%.

Phoenix (built by Ellipsis Labs) remains the most powerful attempt on Solana to narrow the perpetual contract gap in a fully on-chain form. Its design addresses toxic flow at the computation layer, allowing market makers to quote more cheaply than they would when eating order flow. While still early, Phoenix processed $777 million in nominal trading volume in Q2.

Forward-looking progress comes from Jito: JTX, announced on May 5, is a trading frontend for Phoenix spot and finalized perpetual contracts, with 80% of JTX fees directed toward JTO value accumulation. Between Phoenix’s computation-layer solution for toxic flow and JitoBAM’s continuously growing staked share, infrastructure investments aimed at narrowing the perpetual gap are accumulating—but closing the gap is still an execution story for 2026 rather than a delivered result.

Lending

As of the end of Q2, the total deposits and outstanding loans for Solana’s two money markets—Kamino and Jup Lend—were $4.1 billion and $1.6 billion, respectively. Deposits fell 8.3% quarter-over-quarter, and outstanding loans fell 7.9%, reflecting the persistent weakness in the crypto market’s on-chain leverage demand.

While RWA lending became a key growth area in Q1 2026 (led by Kamino’s Figure PRIME HELOC lending and OnRe’s reinsurance market), Q2 saw a sharp pullback. RWA lending deposits on Solana fell from $1.23 billion in Q1 to $640 million in Q2, down 48% quarter-over-quarter.

The structural bright spot in lending is in the stablecoin-adjacent space: in mid-May, Jupiter Lend integrated Ethena’s USDe, and with the launch of a Bitwise-managed vault, it ramped USDe supply on Solana from nearly zero to over $500 million within a month. Kamino launched its own Ethena market, now grown to over $500 million deposits and currently the second-largest market on that platform. In the quarter where lending balances declined, yield-stablecoin markets became the clearest source of new capital—brought into the network rather than recovered from existing crypto collateral.

Consumer Side

Token Issuance Platforms

Token issuance platforms generated total trading volume of $25.8 billion in Q2 2026, down 33% from Q1’s $38.3 billion. Token creation performed better: 2.6 million tokens were listed, down 7% quarter-over-quarter. In Q2, token issuance platforms on Solana generated $63.9 million in revenue, down from $95.2 million in Q1. Pumpfun accounted for 97% of the total.

While this category’s product-market fit with retail users is unquestionable, its cyclicality and concentration are the issue. Pumpfun’s share of issuance platform revenue and total application revenue reached a new high this quarter—precisely because the rest of the market shrank faster.

Stablecoins

Solana’s total stablecoin supply ended Q2 2026 at $16.3 billion, up 2% quarter-over-quarter. Supply stayed basically flat across consecutive quarters of declining activity. Stablecoin composition continued to diversify: USDC’s share fell from 55% in Q1 to 47% in Q2, while USDT rose slightly from 22% to 24%.

Stablecoin transfer volume on Solana reached $1.5 trillion in Q2 2026, down 29% quarter-over-quarter. Notably, this number has been filtered to exclude flash loans and other forms of non-natural transaction volume.

Payments

Q2 2026 was a breakout quarter for Solana’s payments vertical, marked by a wave of traditional finance and enterprise adoption. Major banks and fintech firms poured into Solana: SoFi announced its “Big Business Banking” product and issued stablecoins on-chain. B2C2 (supported by SBI), Singapore’s Gulf Bank, Shinhan Card, and Korea’s Toss Bank all migrated institutional stablecoin or settlement infrastructure to Solana.

Payment giants followed closely: Mastercard added stablecoin settlement based on Solana to its global card network and published a protocol for AI agents to conduct micropayments. Western Union issued the USDPT stablecoin on Solana, while Moneygram entered the validator space with its own validators. On cross-border and payroll, Deel launched stablecoin salary payments, and Y Combinator completed the first fully stablecoin-funded round on Solana using USDC.

The biggest new frontier this quarter is agentic commerce: Google Cloud and the Solana Foundation launched Pay.sh—a service providing an on-demand pay stablecoin payment track for AI agents; AWS launched a stablecoin system for monetizing AI traffic; Meta began testing stablecoin payments for creators; Open Standard launched OUSD—a new stablecoin for the internet economy backed by BlackRock and Google, with Solana included as part of its rollout. Finally, the World Poker Series added Solana-based tournament registration payments, highlighting the breadth of use cases Solana stablecoin rails can cover.

Network Analysis

Volume and TPS

In Q2 2026, Solana processed 9.8 billion non-vote transactions, down 3% from Q1’s all-time high of 10.1 billion—only the second-highest quarterly transaction volume in history. Of the 9.8 billion transactions, 73% succeeded and 27% were rolled back. Rollback transactions are typically associated with automated strategies such as arbitrage bots—they’re often a feature rather than a bug, naturally rolling back when slippage conditions worsen or exceed set limits.

Average non-vote TPS in Q2 was about 1,250. Daily active addresses averaged 2 million, down from 2.4 million in Q1, consistent with the cooling retail seen in application revenue. The network is processing nearly the same amount of transactions with a smaller, more mature user base.

Median Transaction Fee

Median transaction fees averaged $0.0004 in Q2 2026, never exceeding $0.0005 on any day in the quarter, ensuring stability. This level of fee stability is not only a cost advantage; it is an attribute that makes high-frequency market making, Prop AMM quote updates, and consumption applications economically viable on shared infrastructure.

Validators and Decentralization

Solana’s number of validators declined this quarter because the foundation gradually ended delegation subsidies, but node count is a measure with the least information about decentralization. Who controls the network depends on who holds staking, who routes delegations, what software validators run, and where they operate. Along these dimensions, Solana is comparable to Ethereum and, in several ways, stronger: there are clearly more independent entities that must coordinate than on Ethereum to finalize shutting down finality; about 80% of SOL is directed by holders rather than through intermediary routing; staking geography is well distributed; and validators run truly diverse clients.

The resilience record supports the same conclusion—Solana previously absorbed the shock without interruption after suddenly losing about one-fifth of its stake. Alpenglow will raise the network’s tolerance for offline stakers to 40%, further hardening consensus against concentration risk.

Product and Ecosystem Updates

Q2’s roadmap converged on a single destination: Alpenglow. Core development during the quarter mainly focused on pushing its prerequisite conditions, while the economic layer moved to the center of governance debates.

Agave v4.0

Agave v4.0—the first major version since v3.1—was recommended to mainnet validators in May, with feature activation starting from the end of the month. This version carries multiple prerequisite conditions for Alpenglow features and redesigned block replay, cutting the replay thread usage per block by roughly 3x—from about 130 ms to about 50 ms.

P-Token (SIMD-266)

P-Token standards went live in mid-May, replacing the SPL Token program with a compute-optimized implementation. It reduces CU consumption for standard transfers by about 95%, compressing the token program’s share of block-wide global computation from about 25% down to low single digits. The launch also showcased increasingly mature security processes: Asymmetric Research disclosed a key bug in the implementation before it could impact mainnet, and Anza patched it in time via dedicated ownership checks.

Shorter Slot Times (SIMD-525)

SIMD-525—a proposal to halve slot time from 400 ms to 200 ms—was merged at the end of May. The reduction was staged (400ms→350ms→300ms→250ms→200ms, with an epoch delay between each increment), targeting Agave v4.2 around August and bundled with Alpenglow and rent reductions.

Alpenglow

Alpenglow—Solana’s largest protocol upgrade to date—targets Agave v4.2 around August. The upgrade replaces Tower BFT and Proof of History with a new consensus design, bringing 150-millisecond confirmation times (about a 100x improvement in finality), removes on-chain vote transactions (eliminating the validators’ main recurring costs), introduces an entry ticket of 1.6 SOL per epoch for validators, and increases tolerance for offline staking to 40%. For applications, sub-second finality narrows the remaining user-experience gap with centralized venues; for validators, removing voting costs rebuilds the economics model for operating smaller operations.

Post-quantum readiness

On April 27, Anza and the Firedancer team each published independent reports on Solana’s post-quantum migration path. The impetus was research indicating that the estimated resources required to break 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography had dropped significantly. Anza believes the probability of quantum computing hardware related to cryptography appearing within five years is 3% to 5%, and both teams have released preliminary implementations of compact post-quantum signatures.

Summary and Outlook

Solana’s most important Q2 2026 result was delivered under market pressure. When asset prices fell across the board, tokenized asset trading volume doubled to a new high of $5.8 billion, tokenized equities quadrupled to $4.8 billion, and June alone contributed $3.3 billion. Spot ETPs absorbed $120 million in new net capital—exceeding Q1 totals during the downturn. DEX trading volume rebounded 26% in June, driven by tokenized assets rather than meme coins. The demand that grows in a falling market is the kind that lasts—Q2 generated more evidence than any previous quarter.

The story’s cyclical half continues to reset: REV fell 43%, application revenue fell 31%, and quarterly DEX trading volume fell 44%—the ongoing excess of the meme coin era keeps draining out of the system. The difference between the two halves determines how the next few quarters should be interpreted. Revenues tied to speculative speed are being repriced; demand tied to settlement (stablecoins, tokenized equities, institutional packaging) is growing under the same conditions, and June’s tokenized-led rebound is early evidence that the “lasting leg” can become the growth leg.

The catalyst path ahead is unusually specific, setting the stage for growth to continue. Alpenglow is expected as early as Q3, bringing 150-millisecond confirmations, removal of voting costs, and higher offline staking tolerance—paired with staged slot time reductions and larger blocks. SIMD-123 will give stakers an on-protocol right to claim priority fees—priority fees currently account for 60% of REV. The burn and issuance proposals under debate will tighten the link between network usage and token-holder value.

Solana is no longer just the fastest on-chain casino. It is becoming the infrastructure for on-chain finance—and Q2 data is the hardest anchor for this narrative shift.