The Solana community outpaced Ethereum in month-to-month decentralized alternate (DEX) quantity in July, in accordance with DefiLlama knowledge.
Solana’s DEX transactions reached $55.8 billion, surpassing Ethereum’s $53.8 billion for a similar interval. This represents Solana’s second-highest month-to-month quantity, following March 2024’s peak of $60.7 billion.
Solana’s quantity spike is principally on account of exercise on platforms like Raydium, Orca, and Phoenix. In distinction, Ethereum’s quantity is predominantly pushed by the Uniswap alternate.
Regardless of these figures, Ethereum stays the main DeFi platform, holding roughly 61% of the market and locking $67 billion in belongings. As compared, Solana instructions solely 4.64% of the market, with a complete worth locked (TVL) of $5.16 billion.
What’s driving Solana’s development?
Analysts level to an increase in memecoin exercise as a key driver behind Solana’s elevated DEX quantity.
Over the previous 12 months, the blockchain has skilled important development in varied memecoins, from cat-themed to politically impressed tokens. This has led to elevated liquidity as merchants look to capitalize on these belongings.
Institutional endorsements have additionally fueled curiosity in Solana, and hypothesis a couple of potential Solana exchange-traded fund (ETF) could have contributed to its development. In June, distinguished asset administration corporations VanEck and 21Shares utilized with the US Securities and Trade Fee (SEC) to create a spot-based Solana ETF.
Additional, market analysts have famous elevated utilization of stablecoins on Solana. Knowledge from Allium on Visa’s stablecoin dashboard reveals that the transaction quantity for the USDC stablecoin on Solana has exceeded $8 trillion because the starting of final 12 months, with USDT on the Tron blockchain following at $6.5 trillion.
Wash-trading issues
In the meantime, Solana’s latest surge in DEX buying and selling has raised issues about potential wash buying and selling. A latest report by the pseudonymous crypto analyst Flip Analysis claims that 93% of transactions on the blockchain are inorganic.
The report signifies that Solana’s every day transactions are closely influenced by wash buying and selling, MEV bots, and scams, which provide minimal worth to retail merchants. Flip Analysis famous:
“Trying on the wallets concerned, the overwhelming majority appear to be bots in the identical community with tens of hundreds of transactions. They generate faux volumes independently, with random quantities of SOL and a random no. of transactions till the venture rugs, earlier than transferring onto the following one.”