Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Latin America’s biggest stock exchange just made its boldest crypto move yet. B3, the São Paulo-based exchange that dominates trading across the region, launched options on Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana futures on July 6, completing a derivatives trifecta that took roughly two years to build.

The new contracts trade under the tickers BIT, ETR, and SOL. At expiration, they automatically exercise into the underlying futures positions, meaning traders never have to fumble with spot token custody. Settlement happens either in cash or through the futures contract itself.

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What B3 actually built The options trade independently from 9:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. São Paulo time. B3 has enlisted designated market makers to keep bid-ask spreads tight and ensure adequate liquidity.

This launch didn’t happen overnight. B3 introduced Bitcoin futures back in April 2024 with a contract size of 0.1 BTC. Ether and Solana futures followed on June 16, 2025. The options layer is the natural next step, giving traders the ability to construct limited-risk strategies around positions they already understand.

Rafael Tsopanoglou Teodoro, B3’s Product Manager for Currencies, framed the expansion as a way to connect Brazilian investors with global market trends while maintaining robust risk management. The entire operation runs under the oversight of Brazil’s securities regulator, CVM.

What this means for investors For retail traders in Brazil, the immediate impact is access. Options allow for strategies like protective puts and covered calls that were previously only available through unregulated venues. The automatic exercise into futures removes a layer of complexity that often trips up less experienced traders.

For institutional investors, B3’s regulated framework is the main draw. Asset managers, hedge funds, and family offices that are mandated to trade on regulated venues now have a compliant way to gain crypto options exposure across three major assets. The CVM oversight means these products come with standardized clearing, counterparty risk mitigation, and the kind of audit trail that compliance departments demand.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

Wall Street giant Wells Fargo revealed massive crypto holdings via exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and stocks. The banks revealed exposure to Bitcoin, Ethereum (ETH), Solana, Strategy (MSTR), Bitmine (BMNR) and other crypto stocks.

Wells Fargo Reveals Bitcoin, ETH, Solana ETFs Exposure In its latest SEC filing, $2.5 trillion AUM Wells Fargo disclosed 6.5 million shares in BlackRock Bitcoin ETF (IBIT). It also revealed a new call position and an increase in put position in IBIT amid growing uncertainty during the US-Iran war.

IBIT holdings dropped by 75,102 shares compared to the Q4 quarter. Moreover, the Wall Street giant cut its exposure to the Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF (BTCO), Ark 21Shares Bitcoin ETF, and the Fidelity Bitcoin ETF (FBTC).

While Wells Fargo decreased holdings in IBIT, Bitcoin exposure increased in Grayscale Bitcoin Mini ETF, Bitwise’s BITB, and GBTC. Notably, BITB holdings climbed 24% quarter-on-quarter.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo boosts Ethereum ETF holdings with a 65% rise in BlackRock Ethereum ETF (ETHA) shares. The bank now holds more than 1.10 million ETHA shares worth $17.56 million.

In addition, the banking firm holds 257,157 Bitwise Ethereum ETF, 4,637 Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF, and 623 VanEck’s ETHV shares.

Also, Wells Fargo disclosed new exposure to Solana ETFs. It scooped 13,280 in Grayscale’s GSOL and 1,638 in Fidelity Solana Fund (FSOL).

Holding in Strategy’s MSTR, Bitmine, and other Crypto Stocks On the crypto stocks side, Wells Fargo significantly ramped up its position in Michael Saylor’s Strategy (MSTR). The bank boosted its MSTR shares by 125% to almost 726,000 shares, adding an estimated $41.5 million in exposure. Notably, Strategy plans sell Bitcoin, but Grayscale claims Strategy’s Bitcoin sales are good for markets.

It also revealed new holdings in the Trump family’s American Bitcoin Corp (ABTC) and Strive (ASST). This move highlights a preference for established Bitcoin treasury companies over direct mining or trading firms.

The bank significantly increased its holdings in Bitmine Immersion’s BMNR from 2,323 to 21,547 stocks. This makes an 828% rise in Ethereum treasury exposure to $426K.

Robinhood (HOOD) shareholdings jumped from 65% to 2.56 million shares. Wells Fargo also opened put option positions for almost $116K. As CoinGape reported earlier, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev sold HOOD shares earlier this week.

In contrast, the bank sharply reduced its stake in Galaxy Digital by about 97% and 25% in Coinbase (COIN). This signals a strategic shift away from certain crypto stocks.

Also Read: 11 Best Crypto Copy Trading Platforms in July 2026

Solana is about to get significantly faster. The network’s upcoming Alpenglow upgrade, targeting a mainnet launch in the third quarter of 2026, promises to reduce transaction finality times from roughly 12.8 seconds down to 100-150 milliseconds.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko confirmed in May 2026 that mainnet deployment is on track for Q3 2026, following successful testing on a community test cluster. The upgrade has been in the works since at least September 2025, when governance proposal SIMD-0326 passed with 98.27% approval from stakeholders, with roughly 52% of all staked tokens participating in the vote.

What Alpenglow actually changes The upgrade, led by Anza, an engineering team focused on Solana’s core infrastructure, replaces two of Solana’s most fundamental consensus mechanisms. Out go Proof of History and Tower Byzantine Fault Tolerance, the original technical pillars of the network. In their place come two new systems called Votor and Rotor.

One of the most consequential changes is the removal of on-chain vote transactions. Under the current system, validators continuously broadcast votes to the network as a form of consensus signaling. Those votes consume meaningful network resources. Eliminating them simplifies the network’s processing load and frees up capacity for actual user transactions.

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Alpenglow is currently live on a community test cluster and is expected to roll out under the Agave 4.1 client.

Why 150 milliseconds matters more than it sounds Human reaction time is roughly 200-250 milliseconds. A transaction settling in 100-150 milliseconds means Solana finalizes trades faster than a person can physically react to pressing a button.

High-frequency trading desks that operate on Solana currently have to build latency into their strategies to account for finality windows. Shrinking that window by roughly 100 times gives those operations far more room to work with, and makes Solana substantially more competitive with centralized exchanges that already operate at sub-second speeds.

DeFi protocols face a similar calculus. Liquidation engines, automated market makers, and oracle-dependent applications all perform better when the chain underneath them settles faster. Slower finality means wider safety margins have to be built into protocol design, which in turn means less capital efficiency for users. Faster finality allows protocols to tighten those margins without increasing risk.

Tokenized assets, whether they represent Treasury bills, equities, or real estate, require settlement reliability that mirrors or exceeds traditional finance infrastructure. A 150-millisecond finality window is a credible answer to institutional settlement requirements in a way that a 12.8-second window simply is not.

What investors should watch The governance vote passing with 98.27% approval is about as close to unanimous as blockchain governance gets. Contentious upgrades typically see significant dissent, lengthy forum debates, and sometimes competing forks. Alpenglow had none of that.

The removal of on-chain vote transactions is particularly worth monitoring. It streamlines validator operations and could reduce the cost of running a validator, which may affect the distribution and composition of the validator set over time. Staking mechanisms are preserved under the upgrade’s design, but the economics of validation shift when a major cost center is removed.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

Stablecoins keep inching closer to the part of crypto that matters most in the long run: actual usage. Stripe’s move to support merchant settlement using USDC on Solana is another reminder that the payments story is starting to carry more weight than the pure trading story.

That is important because payments have always been one of crypto’s most promising ideas, but for years the real-world user experience lagged behind the pitch.

For more details, visit the official Stripe platform.

TL;DR Stripe introduced stablecoin payment settlement for US merchants using Solana.The rollout centres on USDC and aims to make on-chain settlement practical inside merchant flows.It is another sign that stablecoins are moving from trading tools to real payment infrastructure. Why Solana Fits This Use Case Solana’s low-cost and relatively fast settlement profile makes it an obvious network for this kind of rollout. For merchants, cost and speed matter more than crypto ideology. If a network can help settle transactions cleanly and cheaply, that is what counts.

Stripe’s presence also changes the conversation. This is not a niche wallet project trying to prove a concept. It is a major payments company plugging stablecoins into a merchant-facing workflow.

The Bigger Stablecoin Shift For the wider market, the story is not just about Solana or Stripe. It is about the continued normalization of stablecoins as a payment rail. That can support demand for infrastructure, liquidity, and settlement tools far beyond trading desks.

If these integrations continue, stablecoins will look less like a crypto side product and more like one of the sector’s clearest practical wins.

This article is based on information from Stripe.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

Michael Coates has joined the Solana Foundation as its Chief Information Security Officer after a career spanning leadership roles at Mozilla, Twitter and enterprise security startup Altitude Networks.

Summary

Michael Coates has joined the Solana Foundation as Chief Information Security Officer after previously leading security at Mozilla, Twitter and Altitude Networks. Coates said Solana’s transaction scale and multi billion dollar daily stablecoin activity influenced his decision to join the foundation. His work will focus on strengthening crypto security, improving application security practices and working with policymakers on cybersecurity standards. According to a post shared by Michael Coates on X, he has taken over as CISO of the Solana Foundation, where he will lead security efforts across the network as blockchain adoption and institutional activity continue to grow.

Coates cites Solana’s scale as a key factor Explaining his decision, Coates said Solana now handles tens of billions of dollars in daily stablecoin volume while processing more transactions each day than most of the cryptocurrency industry combined. He also pointed to recent tokenization activity on the network, including the launch of SpaceX tokenized shares on the same day the asset debuted on Nasdaq.

Big Update for me – a new chapter and I'm now CISO of @SolanaFndn .

I've always been drawn to fast moving new frontiers. Head of Security of Mozilla during the height of the browser wars, the first CISO of Twitter as they burst onto the world's stage, and even as a startup… pic.twitter.com/nrxtpxIKqZ

— Michael Coates (@_mwc) July 7, 2026 Coates enters the role after serving as Head of Security at Mozilla during the browser competition era and becoming Twitter’s first Chief Information Security Officer as the social media platform expanded globally. He later founded enterprise SaaS security company Altitude Networks, which entered the crypto sector after its acquisition by CoinList.

Within the Solana Foundation, Coates said his work will include strengthening operational security, improving application security practices and addressing risks unique to digital assets. He added that he also plans to work with policymakers and standards bodies on cybersecurity regulation affecting the crypto industry.

Describing the current threat environment, Coates said attackers remain heavily motivated to steal digital assets and noted that malicious uses of artificial intelligence are becoming an increasing security concern. He added that AI can also strengthen defensive capabilities when used effectively and referenced his congressional testimony on the subject earlier this year.

The appointment comes as digital asset firms continue bringing experienced leaders from technology, cybersecurity and regulatory backgrounds into senior positions while institutional participation expands across the sector.

A similar trend emerged last year when former U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Christopher Giancarlo joined Swiss digital asset bank Sygnum as a senior policy advisor. Sygnum said at the time that Giancarlo would advise on global regulation, strategic partnerships and international growth, underscoring the industry’s continued recruitment of experienced executives as crypto infrastructure develops.

According to monitoring by OnchainLens, Circle has issued an additional 250 million USDC on the Solana blockchain. So far in 2026, Circle’s total USDC issuance on the Solana chain stands at $65.03 billion.

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The Solana ETF race is no longer a one-issuer experiment. 21Shares has filed an S-1 registration statement for a Solana trust, adding another major name to the push for regulated SOL exposure in the United States.

For more details, visit the official SEC platform.

TL;DR 21Shares has filed a Solana S-1 registration statement with the SEC.The filing adds momentum to the race for the first U.S. Solana spot ETF.The proposed trust would deepen the institutional conversation around SOL. The filing matters because ETF markets are partly about timing and partly about signalling. When multiple issuers pursue the same asset, it tells advisers and institutions that the asset is no longer being treated as a niche trade by fund sponsors.

Solana Moves Into The Fund Pipeline Bitcoin opened the door. Ethereum pushed the conversation wider. Solana is now testing whether the SEC is willing to consider a broader set of crypto assets for spot fund products. That is a difficult jump, but the filing gives the market a concrete document to evaluate rather than just speculation.

For SOL, an ETF would not simply add a new trading wrapper. It would change who can access the asset and how. Financial advisers, managed portfolios, and brokerage platforms often prefer regulated fund structures over direct token custody. That is the opportunity issuers are chasing.

Approval Is Still The Hard Part The SEC will still have to weigh market surveillance, custody, liquidity, and the long-running question of how Solana should be classified. None of that disappears because more issuers are interested.

Still, the direction is clear. Solana is being treated as the next serious candidate in the crypto ETF pipeline. Whether approval comes quickly or not, the filing itself pushes SOL further into institutional asset-allocation discussions.

This report is based on the 21Shares S-1 registration statement filed with the SEC.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

In a recent article, Chase Barker, Founder Ecosystem Growth at the Solana Foundation, declared revenue to be “the new meta.” Solana manlets took those words to heart because, for the first time in 4 months, Solana has reclaimed the top position among all blockchains by daily Network Real Economic Value (REV), highlighting renewed demand for blockspace across the network.

Network REV measures the fees and tips users pay for general-purpose blockspace. Unlike transaction fees alone, the metric combines both in-protocol fees and out-of-protocol tips to provide a broader picture of the economic value generated by blockchain activity. The latest data placed Solana ahead of every competing blockchain in daily REV, reflecting stronger onchain demand.

The milestone comes as several of Solana's key network metrics continue to reach new highs.

Trading and Transaction Records Continue Solana processed more than 1 billion non-vote transactions during the past week, setting a new all-time high for weekly transaction activity.

The network also ranked No. 2 globally in combined DEX and CEX spot crypto trading volume for the second consecutive week. Solana recorded $12.25 billion in weekly trading volume, ahead of Bybit's $10.57 billion and trailing only Binance.

Price action also improved. According to CoinGecko data, $SOL gained more than 27% over the past month and now trades roughly 33% above its recent low of $60, making it the strongest performer among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization during the latest rally.

Q2 Showed Broad Growth Solana's return to the top of the Network REV rankings follows a record-breaking Q2 2026. The network processed $4.84 billion in tokenized equity spot trading volume, capturing more than 96% of the market for the 4th consecutive quarter.

Solana dApps generated $257 million in revenue, extending their lead for a 9th straight quarter, while quarterly non-vote transactions reached roughly 9.8 billion, representing 59% of all blockchain transactions. Perpetual futures volume climbed to a record $183 billion, and the Foundation's delegated stake declined to 4.92% of the total network stake as decentralization efforts continued.

These milestones came despite bear market conditions, suggesting the network could be well-positioned for further growth if Q2 marked the cycle's bottom.

Revenue Reflects Real Usage In the aforementioned article, Chase Barker argued that revenue has become one of the clearest indicators of blockchain health. He noted that fee generation reflects real user activity rather than speculation, and that protocols creating value directly onchain strengthen Solana's long-term economic network effects.

Solana's return to the top of the Network REV rankings aligns with that view, suggesting that increasing user activity, higher transaction demand, and growing protocol usage continue to translate into measurable economic value across the network.

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Solana is now formally in the U.S. spot ETF conversation after a VanEck-linked proposal reached the SEC through a Cboe BZX rule filing.

For more details, visit the official SEC platform.

TL;DR A Solana spot ETF proposal has entered the SEC process through a Form 19b-4 filing.The filing argues that SOL should be treated as a commodity-style crypto asset rather than a security.Approval is not guaranteed, but the filing expands the ETF race beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum. The filing is important because spot crypto ETFs in the U.S. have so far been dominated by Bitcoin, with Ethereum products forming the next major battleground. Solana entering the process gives investors a clearer view of which altcoins institutions think can support a regulated fund wrapper.

Solana Gets Its ETF Test VanEck has been one of the more aggressive asset managers in digital assets, and the Solana filing fits that pattern. The central question is whether the SEC will accept the argument that SOL has enough market structure, liquidity, and regulatory clarity to sit inside a spot ETF product.

That is not a small hurdle. Bitcoin and Ethereum already had deep futures markets, years of institutional coverage, and extensive regulatory discussion before their fund structures advanced. Solana has strong network usage and a large market, but it also comes with a different history around outages, token distribution, and how regulators classify major altcoins.

Why The Filing Still Matters Even if approval takes time, the filing changes the conversation. It shows that major issuers are no longer waiting for the SEC to define the next wave of crypto ETF assets. They are forcing the question directly through the rule-change process.

For Solana, that matters beyond the immediate price reaction. ETF filings can reshape how advisers, institutions, and trading desks talk about an asset. SOL is no longer only being pitched as a high-speed chain for DeFi and memecoins. It is now being positioned as the next serious candidate for regulated U.S. fund exposure.

This report is based on the SEC filing for the proposed Solana ETF rule change.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

Key Takeaways Blockchain security company Coinspect has identified a critical security weakness dubbed “Ill Bloom” that impacts cryptocurrency wallets on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Tron, Solana, and additional networks The security issue originates from inadequate random number generation used when creating wallet recovery phrases in specific mobile wallet applications Hackers have successfully stolen a minimum of $5 million starting May 27, including one coordinated assault that emptied 431 wallets totaling $3.1 million The vulnerability has existed since 2018, meaning wallets created years ago could still be compromised Users can verify their wallet’s safety using a complimentary verification tool provided by Coinspect Coinspect, a prominent blockchain security organization, has revealed a critical security flaw named “Ill Bloom” that threatens thousands of cryptocurrency wallets worldwide.

The security weakness is rooted in insufficient randomness during the seed phrase generation process used by certain software wallets. When wallet applications employ inadequate random number generators during the creation phase, the resulting mnemonic phrases become susceptible to prediction and exploitation by malicious actors.

Multiple blockchain networks are impacted, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Rootstock, Tron, and Solana.

According to Coinspect’s investigation, this security flaw has existed for at least six years, dating back to 2018. Alarmingly, vulnerable wallets were still being created as recently as several weeks ago, putting both longtime users and newcomers at serious risk.

Timeline of the Exploitation Campaign The first major coordinated attack occurred on May 27, when cybercriminals targeted 431 wallets from a pool of 2,114 identified vulnerable addresses, successfully draining $3.1 million worth of digital assets.

A second wave of attacks struck over the weekend, with approximately $2 million extracted from compromised wallets. Current estimates place total losses at a minimum of $5 million, though Coinspect suggests the actual figure may be considerably higher when accounting for losses across all affected blockchain networks.

To prevent further exploitation, Coinspect has deliberately withheld complete technical specifications of the vulnerability, limiting the information available to potential attackers.

According to the security firm, hardware wallet owners remain unaffected by this particular vulnerability. Most popular software wallet providers are also considered secure. The primary risk group consists of individuals who generated their recovery phrases using obscure or lesser-known mobile wallet applications.

Historical Precedents of Seed Generation Vulnerabilities The Ill Bloom vulnerability is not an isolated incident in the cryptocurrency security landscape.

During 2023, Ledger’s cybersecurity division discovered that the browser extension version of Trust Wallet contained a seed generation weakness that significantly reduced randomness. This flaw reduced potential phrase combinations to approximately four billion possibilities, making it feasible for attackers to crack wallets within 24 hours using modest GPU computing power. Trust Wallet addressed the vulnerability before any user funds were compromised.

Similarly in 2023, a security weakness in the Libbitcoin Explorer wallet software resulted in $900,000 being stolen through systematic private key brute-force attacks.

What makes the Ill Bloom vulnerability particularly concerning is that it doesn’t originate from a single wallet provider, making remediation efforts more complex and widespread.

SlowMist, a respected security monitoring organization, has confirmed it is actively tracking the ongoing situation. Coinspect is calling on wallet developers to implement weak mnemonic detection capabilities directly into their applications.

Concerned users can access Coinspect’s specialized verification tool to determine whether their wallet addresses are vulnerable. If unauthorized transactions have occurred from your wallet, the Ill Bloom vulnerability may be responsible.

A decentralized blockchain is now handling more spot trading volume than some of the biggest centralized exchanges on the planet. Solana has climbed to the No. 2 spot in global spot crypto trading volume, processing roughly $12.25 billion and sitting behind only Binance in the rankings.

The numbers behind Solana’s trading surge Solana’s decentralized exchange ecosystem has been on a tear. Weekly spot trading volume exceeded $7 billion in mid-June 2026, comfortably surpassing Coinbase at roughly $6.4 billion and Kraken at approximately $4.4 billion.

The cumulative spot trading volume across Solana’s DEX platforms hit $1.6 trillion in 2025, capturing approximately 11.92% of the global market share.

Daily on-chain activity has peaked at over 100 million transactions in mid-2026. Solana’s low transaction fees and high processing capacity have made it the default venue for traders who want speed without the gas fee headache that has historically plagued Ethereum.

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Perhaps the most striking data point is in tokenized equities. Solana now accounts for roughly 97% of on-chain tokenized equities spot volume as of early June 2026.

What’s driving the volume explosion Three forces are converging to push Solana’s numbers higher: memecoins, DeFi protocols, and tokenized real-world assets.

Memecoins continue to generate enormous trading volume on Solana-native DEXs. The blockchain’s cheap fees make it the natural home for the kind of rapid-fire speculative trading that defines the memecoin market.

Tokenized equities and real-world assets represent a fundamentally different kind of volume than memecoin speculation, reflecting institutional interest in the network’s reliability and settlement guarantees.

Solana has frequently ranked either first or second in DEX volume metrics across both 7-day and 30-day periods, outperforming Ethereum in several of those windows.

What this means for investors For SOL token holders, higher network activity generally translates to more fees burned and more economic value accruing to the network. Trading volume is one of the clearest demand-side indicators for a layer-1 blockchain’s long-term viability.

Scalability under sustained load is an open question. Solana has improved dramatically since its outage era, but 100 million daily transactions puts enormous stress on validators and infrastructure.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

The wallet associated with the Step Finance attack has become active again after approximately five months of inactivity.

According to on-chain data, the attacker sold all of their 261,933 SOL, generating approximately $21.4 million. They then bridged these funds to the Ethereum network, purchased 12,128 ETH, and deposited the assets into the privacy protocol Tornado Cash.

This transaction is considered a classic money laundering tactic aimed at covering up the trail of funds obtained from the attack. On the SOL side, it is stated that the $21.4 million in selling pressure was absorbed by the market and the potential risk of a sell-off for Solana investors has been eliminated.

However, the most noteworthy point was the transfer of funds to the Ethereum network and their conversion to Tornado Cash. This move is expected to make tracking the assets more difficult.

In late January 2026, Step Finance suffered a devastating security breach when hackers gained access to the platform’s treasury and fee wallets by taking over administrative devices. The attackers withdrew approximately 261,854 SOL, initially worth between $27 and $30 million, causing the value of the STEP token to drop by over 80%.

*This is not investment advice.

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Sat 04 Jul 2026 ▪ 4 min read ▪ by Fenelon L.

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Solana has lost 68% of its validators in three years, dropping from around 2,500 to about 800 after a purge launched in 2025. Joseph Chalom, co-CEO of Sharplink and former BlackRock executive, contrasts this decline with Ethereum’s over 900,000 validators. This battle of figures reignites the debate on the true decentralization of major blockchains. Will institutional investors decide in favor of robustness over speed?

In brief Joseph Chalom, co-CEO of Sharplink and former BlackRock executive, states that Ethereum’s 900,000 validators outperform Solana’s 800. Electric Capital counts 1,012,824 developers who have contributed to Ethereum, including 232,000 active over the past twelve months. Sharplink held 886,725 ETH at the end of June 2026, one of the largest corporate ether reserves. Why does Chalom oppose Ethereum and Solana validators? Joseph Chalom, co-CEO of Sharplink and former Head of Digital Asset Strategy at BlackRock, challenges the persistent idea of a cultural problem at Ethereum, a criticism circulating for several months in the crypto community.

He also contrasts the network’s more than 900,000 active validators with the roughly 800 still counted on Solana, a gap he considers decisive for the future of smart contracts.

This confrontation comes as Solana has just reinforced its on-chain governance with the Solana Governance Proposals, a mechanism that redistributes voting power between validators and token holders. However, Chalom believes this effort does not compensate for the erosion in the number of validators.

Electric Capital indeed counts more than one million cumulative contributors to Ethereum’s code since its creation, including about 232,000 who remained active over the past twelve months. On Solana, however, 92% of applications still run on a single software client, a concentration Chalom considers risky for network resilience in the event of a major bug.

What are the stakes for decentralization after Solana’s validator purge? Solana had about 2,500 validators three years ago before introducing a pruning process in 2025 aimed at removing inactive or poorly performing nodes. This choice thus reduced their number to about 800, a purge its supporters describe as a qualitative improvement.

Chalom recalls that his years at BlackRock showed him the large institutions’ constant preference for network neutrality and resistance to capture by a single actor. Sharplink also illustrates this conviction through its ether treasury strategy, raised to 886,725 ETH at the end of June, and its financial support to Ethlabs, a research center founded by former Ethereum Foundation members.

Yet a historical figure of the Ethereum Foundation acknowledged that the network still lacks a clear value proposition to convince new investors. Meanwhile, the Solana team defends a lighter and faster network, better suited, according to them, for high-frequency trading and applications aimed at the general public.

This numbers duel illustrates two opposing visions of decentralization, between robustness of numbers and operational lightness. Three factors will influence what follows: institutional appetite for Ethereum ETFs, the trajectory of Solana validators after its purge, and the growing role of tokenization. The standards battle is just beginning.

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Fenelon L.

Passionné par le Bitcoin, j'aime explorer les méandres de la blockchain et des cryptos et je partage mes découvertes avec la communauté. Mon rêve est de vivre dans un monde où la vie privée et la liberté financière sont garanties pour tous, et je crois fermement que Bitcoin est l'outil qui peut rendre cela possible.

DISCLAIMER

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and should not be taken as investment advice. Do your own research before taking any investment decisions.

11h35 ▪ 6 min read ▪ by Luc Jose A.

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While most altcoins plunge and see their market capitalization fall to its lowest level since December 2023, Solana follows a radically different trajectory. Unlike a pressured market, the network attracts capital at a sustained pace and fuels renewed interest around its SOL token. This decoupling, rare in the crypto ecosystem, intrigues both investors and analysts alike. Behind this resistance are two distinct drivers: a fundamental dynamic supported by the network and a speculative momentum that further strengthens its attractiveness.

In brief Solana stands out from the altcoin slump thanks to strong growth in its on-chain activity and a continuous inflow of capital. The tokenization of assets and DeFi accelerate network adoption, with record volumes and a number of active addresses now exceeding Ethereum’s in this segment. Memecoins and Pump.fun revive speculation, generating a new wave of liquidity that supports demand for the SOL token. Prediction markets enrich the ecosystem, while signals from derivative markets suggest caution regarding SOL’s ability to extend its rally. The Explosion of Tokenized Assets and DeFi on Solana Solana’s bullish momentum found its initial anchor point on June 23, a key date marking a historic milestone for the blockchain. On-chain data reveal the following financial milestones :

The cumulative volume of tokenized stock transfers on the network officially exceeded $10 billion, driven by the introduction of SpaceX company stock trading by the Backpack platform ; The total value of tokenized assets on Solana, excluding stablecoins, reached an all-time high of $3.5 billion, up from just $2.7 billion a month earlier ; The network now has 294,274 active addresses dedicated to the tokenization industry (S&P 500 stock indices, Nasdaq-100, and corporate credits), significantly ahead of its main competitor Ethereum, which records 204,955 on its side. While the rest of the crypto market sank into a prolonged bearish trend, Solana thus began an upward trajectory completely disconnected from the traditional altcoin sector indices. This technical and operational leadership, supported by the integration of corporate credit tokens and leading stock indices, enabled SOL to break major resistance levels.

By capturing the majority of active addresses in the sector compared to the Ethereum ecosystem, the blockchain transformed its infrastructure into an unmissable liquidity hub, propelling the price of SOL to its highest level in 30 days, settling at 83 dollars.

The Fervor of Memecoins and the Return of Pump.fun to the Forefront Beyond the fundamentals of tokenization, the retail market injected a second wave of liquidity through a surge of intense activity on the memecoin segment. The trigger was the launch of the The Black Bull (ANSEM) token via the Pump.fun platform, which immediately rekindled speculators’ interest. This asset reached a market capitalization of $60 million within two days, before continuing its run to hit an all-time high of $112 million.

The project’s deployment remained opaque, the anonymous developer having chosen to allocate about 65% of the total supply directly to the public wallet of crypto influencer Ansem, a distribution that nonetheless mobilized 74,000 unique addresses during its first three days of existence.

This sectoral effervescence directly benefited the network’s native infrastructures, foremost among them the PUMP token of the Pump.fun platform, whose weekly gains of 27% allowed it to re-enter the top 100 largest global crypto capitalizations with a valuation of $630 million.

Such enthusiasm demonstrates the return of strong liquidity. Retail investors massively choose Solana for its speed of execution. This speculative frenzy, although volatile, fuels a daily transaction volume that mechanically supports demand for the SOL token, essential for paying gas fees, reinforcing buying pressure on the spot market against exhausted sellers.

The Conquest of Prediction Markets and Derivative Arbitrage Meanwhile, the ecosystem diversifies in a more strategic way with the launch of the “World” prediction markets integrated directly into the Phantom wallet, aiming to capture the enthusiasm of bettors with the World Cup frenzy, in direct competition with Polymarket.

This project collected nearly $890,000 in total value locked (TVL) in just forty-eight hours, while the Jupiter aggregator deployed its own version of prediction markets in beta testing phase. Thus, this extension of use cases towards prediction markets brings a new utility dimension to the network, attracting a betting audience that generates constant financial flows decoupled from the classic cycles of decentralized finance.

All these factors outline a complex outlook for Solana, dependent on the long-term viability of these capital flows. While on-chain activity proves particularly vibrant, examining derivative markets invites a much more nuanced analysis of the forces at play. Indeed, the appetite for leverage has cooled sharply, with the annualized funding rate for SOL perpetual futures contracts falling to 3% after peaking at 11% when the price broke through 75 dollars.

Knowing that a healthy bull market generally requires a funding rate between 6% and 12% to offset capital costs, this marked decline indicates strong hesitation among traders to bet on an immediate rise to 90 dollars. The short-term future will thus depend on the network’s ability to convert speculative enthusiasm into sustainable commitment, under the risk of seeing this decoupling fade amid the persistent gloom of the overall crypto market.

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Luc Jose A.

Diplômé de Sciences Po Toulouse et titulaire d'une certification consultant blockchain délivrée par Alyra, j'ai rejoint l'aventure Cointribune en 2019. Convaincu du potentiel de la blockchain pour transformer de nombreux secteurs de l'économie, j'ai pris l'engagement de sensibiliser et d'informer le grand public sur cet écosystème en constante évolution. Mon objectif est de permettre à chacun de mieux comprendre la blockchain et de saisir les opportunités qu'elle offre. Je m'efforce chaque jour de fournir une analyse objective de l'actualité, de décrypter les tendances du marché, de relayer les dernières innovations technologiques et de mettre en perspective les enjeux économiques et sociétaux de cette révolution en marche.

DISCLAIMER

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and should not be taken as investment advice. Do your own research before taking any investment decisions.

Key takeaways:

Solana’s tokenized assets and memecoin revival drove SOL to a 30-day high at $83.Bullish leveraged appetite cooled sharply, suggesting traders are hesitant to bet on further gains to $90.Solana’s SOL token jumped to its highest mark in over 30 days on Friday at $83, marking a decoupling from the altcoin market. SOL’s rally gained steam from a surge in tokenized trading volume on Solana, inflows of stablecoin liquidity, and an unexpected comeback in memecoin activity. Can SOL reclaim the $90 level?

Total altcoin market capitalization, USD (left) vs. SOL/USD (right). Source: TradingView

SOL’s bullish momentum ignited on June 23, coinciding with cumulative tokenized stock transfers on Solana surpassing $10 billion. The launch of SpaceX shares trading by Backpack propelled Solana’s decentralized finance (DeFi) utilization. In contrast, the broader altcoin market extended its downtrend, hitting the lowest level since December 2023.

30-day tokenized assets net flows ex-stablecoins, USD. Source: RWA.xyz

Tokenized assets on the Solana network surged to a record-high $3.5 billion on Wednesday, up from $2.7 billion one month prior. The recent boost came from corporate credit tokens and stock market indexes, such as the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100. According to RWA.xyz data, Solana leads with 294,274 active addresses in the tokenized industry, followed by Ethereum with 204,955.

Memecoins, prediction markets surge may push SOL toward $90The airdrop of The Black Bull (ANSEM) memecoin on Sunday re-ignited interest in the sector. The token, launched on Pump.fun, reached a $60 million market capitalization on Tuesday. The anonymous developer directed some 65% of the supply to the crypto influencer Ansem’s public wallet. The distribution lacked transparency, but involved 74,000 addresses over the initial 3 days.

Top 7-day performances of Solana tokens. Source: CoinRanking

Multiple memecoins on Solana surged on the back of the memecoin airdrop, but the biggest winner was the Pump.fun platform token (PUMP). The 27% weekly gains were enough to send PUMP back into the top-100 crypto rankings, with a $630 million market capitalization. ANSEM memecoin extended its gains on Friday, reaching an all-time high market capitalization of $112 million.

The launch of World prediction markets integrated on Phantom wallet has created expectations for increased Solana activity. The project gathered nearly $890,000 in total value locked in two days and aims to compete with the extremely successful Polymarket amid the World Cup betting frenzy. Jupiter has also unveiled its prediction markets under beta test on June 29.

SOL perpetual futures annualized funding rate. Source: Laevitas

The appetite for bullish leveraged positions has vastly declined since Wednesday, when SOL’s price crossed above $75 for the first time in 30 days. SOL futures annualized funding rate dropped to 3% on Friday from an 11% peak two days prior. Under neutral conditions, the indicator should range from 6% to 12% to offset the capital cost.

Investors are not comfortable betting on a SOL rally to $90 merely on the back of a temporary memecoin demand surge. Unless there is sustainable demand for blockchain activity, there are no apparent drivers for SOL to further widen its performance gap relative to the remaining altcoins.

This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph's Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research.

Solana now beats Ethereum on trading volume, active users, and fee revenue. Ethereum still holds the money. Halfway through 2026, the question is no longer who is faster. It is whether the two chains are even running the same race.

Summary

Solana has overtaken Ethereum in Layer 1 activity with higher transaction volume, more active users, stronger DEX trading, and greater fee revenue. Ethereum continues to dominate in total value locked, stablecoin liquidity, institutional adoption, and developer activity despite losing ground in onchain usage. The rivalry has shifted from a direct competition into two distinct models, with Ethereum focused on settlement and custody while Solana leads in trading and execution. There was a time when the Ethereum versus Solana debate could be settled with a smirk and an outage screenshot. Solana was the chain that went down. Ethereum was the chain that mattered. Then Solana stopped going down, its trading volume flipped Ethereum’s, its ETF launched to institutional inflows while Ethereum funds bled for seventeen straight days, and the smirk changed sides.

Halfway through 2026, both tokens are deep in a bear market. ETH trades near $1,714 after a brutal second quarter that included a 29.5% thirty-day drawdown at the June lows, its worst quarterly stretch in years. SOL trades near $81, down roughly 78% from its cycle high, hit even harder in raw percentage terms. Price settles nothing here. The interesting story is underneath, in the on-chain data, where the two networks have diverged so completely that comparing them now requires deciding which metrics count.

So: is Ethereum losing the L1 race to Solana? The honest answer is that Solana has already won several of the events, Ethereum still owns the ones with the most prize money, and the race itself has split into two different sports.

How we got here: a short history of a long feud The rivalry has run through three distinct acts, and the current one makes no sense without the first two.

Act one, 2021 through 2022, was Solana as the venture-backed challenger: a chain built for speed, championed by Sam Bankman-Fried, and dismissed by Ethereum partisans as a centralized science project. The dismissal briefly looked like prophecy. Solana suffered repeated full-network outages, including the infamous February 2024 halt that lasted nearly five hours after a legacy loader bug forced a coordinated validator restart, and when FTX collapsed in November 2022, SOL crashed toward single digits as the market priced in guilt by association. Obituaries were published. Several were smug.

Act two, 2023 through 2024, was the resurrection nobody ordered. Solana’s developer community kept shipping through the winter, the Jupiter and Jito ecosystems matured, memecoin mania found its natural home on the only chain where a thousand trades cost less than a sandwich, and DEX volume began the climb that ended with the flip of Ethereum in late 2024. Ethereum spent the same period executing its own plan flawlessly and discovering the plan had a hole in it: the Dencun upgrade in March 2024 introduced blob space and cut L2 costs by an order of magnitude, which supercharged rollup adoption while gutting the fee burn that had underwritten the ultrasound money narrative. Activity exploded across the Ethereum stack, and ETH the asset captured almost none of it.

Act three is now: both chains institutionally legitimate, both tokens deep underwater, and the argument relocated from architecture threads to fund flow tables. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams warned back in 2025 that Ethereum’s confused scaling identity could hand DeFi leadership to Solana; in 2026 that warning reads less like a hot take and more like a memo the market already acted on.

The scoreboard, metric by metric Start with what Solana has flatly won: activity.

On a representative day in late June, Solana processed 127 million transactions from more than 2 million active addresses. Ethereum mainnet processed 2.8 million transactions from roughly 512,000 active addresses. That is not a gap. That is a different order of magnitude. Solana sustains 600 to 700 real transactions per second on average against Ethereum L1’s 15 to 20, at a cost of roughly $0.00025 per transaction against Ethereum’s dollars-per-swap mainnet pricing.

Trading volume tells the same story. Solana’s weekly DEX volume hit $11.49 billion in April against Ethereum’s $7.62 billion, a 51% lead. In February the monthly gap was wider still: $117 billion on Solana against $52 billion on Ethereum, more than double. Jupiter, the aggregator that routes the overwhelming majority of Solana order flow across Raydium, Orca, Phoenix, and Meteora, alone processes $2 billion to $4 billion in daily volume. Solana flipped Ethereum on DEX volume in late 2024 and has held the lead through every market condition since.

Then comes the metric that should worry Ethereum researchers most: revenue.

Solana generates over $1 million in chain fees per day. The major Ethereum L2s, where most Ethereum user activity now lives, generate under $200,000 combined, because blob-based data posting after the Dencun upgrade pushed L2 costs, and therefore L2 fee revenue, toward zero. Ethereum deliberately commoditized its own execution layer to win the rollup war. The result is a settlement layer with shrinking direct income and a rival that monetizes every swap on a single unified ledger.

Now flip the card, because Ethereum’s wins are just as lopsided.

Total value locked Ethereum L1 holds roughly $55.6 billion in DeFi deposits, around 68% of the entire global DeFi market, and the combined L1 plus L2 figure exceeds $80 billion. Solana holds between $8 billion and $12 billion depending on the week and the methodology, a figure that took a $270 million hit in April when the Drift Protocol exploit tore through its perps ecosystem. The deepest protocols in the industry, Lido at $27.5 billion, Aave at $27 billion, EigenLayer at $13 billion, all live on Ethereum, and Aave V4 launched on Ethereum mainnet in April to reinforce the point.

Stablecoins Ethereum hosts roughly 70% of all on-chain stablecoin supply, around $32 billion in USDC and $60 billion in USDT, and remains the venue where BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and JPMorgan build tokenized products first. Solana carries about $14 billion in stablecoins, though each of those dollars turns over roughly six times faster than its Ethereum counterpart.

Developers Ethereum counted 31,869 active developers against Solana’s 17,708 at the latest Electric Capital reading, and added more new developers over the trailing year than any other ecosystem. Solana ranked second.

One chain has the users, the volume, and the revenue. The other has the money, the institutions, and the builders. Losing, it turns out, depends entirely on where you point the camera.

How the race split in two The reason the comparison keeps producing contradictory answers is that the two chains stopped competing on the same terms years ago, a divergence we chronicled when the ecosystems first collided in early 2025.

Ethereum abandoned the monolithic race on purpose. Its roadmap treats the base layer as settlement infrastructure while execution migrates to rollups: Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, and a long tail of zk systems that post proofs and data back to mainnet. Base alone captures nearly half of all L2 DeFi value, Arbitrum another 31%, and the top three rollups process close to 90% of all L2 transactions. Measured as a stack, the Ethereum ecosystem still dwarfs Solana on almost every capital metric. Measured as an L1, Ethereum mainnet is a slow, expensive chain that its own designers no longer intend retail users to touch.

Solana made the opposite bet: one ledger, one global state, sub-second finality at 400 milliseconds, and a relentless engineering campaign to make the single chain fast enough that nothing else is needed. The Firedancer validator client built by Jump Crypto, rolling toward full deployment late this year, is the endgame of that bet, with a theoretical ceiling measured in the hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. The network reliability problem that defined Solana’s reputation in 2022 and 2023 has largely disappeared; outages went from routine to rare, and the chain has traded its crash-prone image for something closer to an execution monopoly on retail flow.

The philosophical split produces the statistical one. Capital sits and compounds on Ethereum because that is what the architecture rewards: deep pools, long-duration lending, staking layered on restaking. Capital churns on Solana because sub-cent fees make churning free: high-frequency trading, memecoin rotation, dollar-cost-average bots, payments. Ethereum became the deposit ledger. Solana became the trading floor.

Follow the fees: two broken business models, one working one The revenue gap deserves its own examination, because it is the metric where architecture decisions turn into economics, and where both chains have problems they rarely advertise.

Ethereum’s fee engine used to be the envy of the industry. EIP-1559 burned base fees, high demand made ETH deflationary, and the ultrasound money framing wrote itself. The rollup migration dismantled the machine step by step. Execution moved to L2s, whose sequencers keep the margin between what users pay and what blob posting costs, and Dencun made blob posting cost next to nothing. The result in 2026: mainnet burns a fraction of its former fee load, L2s pay Ethereum pennies for security worth billions, and the value accrual question, what does ETH earn when Base wins, has replaced scaling as the ecosystem’s defining unsolved problem. Ethereum built a settlement business and priced its product like a public good.

Solana’s engine is simpler and currently stronger: one chain captures every fee at every layer. The base fee is fixed at 5,000 lamports per signature, roughly a hundredth of a cent, while priority fees let users bid during congestion, and stake-weighted quality of service plus local fee markets keep hot accounts from clogging the scheduler. On top of the protocol fees sits the Jito MEV economy, where searcher tips flow to validators and stakers, turning order-flow chaos into staking yield. Over $1 million in daily chain revenue against sub-$200,000 for the entire major L2 basket is the visible output.

The caveat is concentration of source. A large share of Solana’s fee revenue traces to speculative trading, memecoins above all, which makes the revenue line high-beta to the exact market segment least likely to survive a deep winter. Ethereum’s fee problem is structural but its demand is diversified; Solana’s fee machine works beautifully and runs on the most flammable fuel in crypto. Neither model is finished.

Fusaka and the second-half Ethereum upgrade path aim at scaling data further without answering value capture, while Solana’s validator economics, where thin margins already pushed the validator count down 68% from its 2023 peak, depend on fee and MEV income holding up.

The other front: stablecoins, payments, and tokenized everything DEX volume gets the headlines, but the war’s second front may matter more by 2027, because it is the one institutions actually fund: who carries the tokenized economy.

Ethereum’s position is incumbency at scale. Roughly 70% of stablecoin supply, the deep USDC and USDT float that institutional desks require, and essentially the entire first generation of tokenized funds. When Ondo debuted its SEC-aligned tokenized stock model with BlackRock ETF shares this week, the underlying rails were Ethereum-ecosystem by default. Stablecoin legislation cleared the path for bank issuance and for the consortium models now emerging among major institutions, and banks build where the auditors already have coverage, which is one more network effect compounding for the incumbent.

Solana’s position is velocity and consumer reach. Its $14 billion stablecoin float turns over roughly six times faster than Ethereum’s, because sub-cent fees make stablecoins usable as money instead of just collateral. USDC settles on Solana in under a second for a fraction of a cent, which is why Visa chose it for settlement pilots, why payment processors keep adding it, and why the Solana Developer Platform launched with Mastercard, Worldpay, and Western Union rather than with hedge funds. Solana is also mounting a genuine RWA challenge through Token-2022, whose compliance extensions target exactly the issuer requirements Ethereum handles with bespoke contracts, and both chains now face a third competitor for the same institutional flow in the compliance-native stack being assembled on the XRP Ledger.

The stakes here dwarf the DEX war. Stablecoins are a $320 billion asset class growing through legislation, and tokenized funds are the institutional product with the steepest adoption curve. If Ethereum keeps the float while Solana takes the flow, the split-decision structure of this whole rivalry repeats at a much larger scale, with Ethereum as the vault and Solana as the checkout lane of tokenized finance.

The institutional tiebreaker For most of crypto history, the institutional column belonged to Ethereum without argument. That is the column where 2026 has produced genuine movement.

The regulatory sequence mattered first. The SEC’s March 2025 classification of sixteen digital assets including SOL as commodities dissolved the securities overhang that had kept allocators away, and spot Solana ETFs began trading on October 28, 2025, making SOL the third asset after BTC and ETH with U.S. spot fund access. The flows since then have been small next to Bitcoin’s but directionally embarrassing for Ethereum: through the spring drawdown, Solana ETFs crossed $1 billion in cumulative inflows while Ethereum funds posted a seventeen-day outflow streak that stripped hundreds of millions, and July has opened with ETF flow reports showing ETH and SOL products gaining together while Bitcoin funds bleed. Goldman Sachs disclosures showed over $100 million in SOL exposure, and CalPERS entered the asset class the same quarter.

Solana’s institutional push went beyond funds. The Solana Foundation launched its Developer Platform in March with Mastercard, Worldpay, and Western Union among early adopters, shipped a quantum-readiness plan built on the NIST-standardized Falcon signature scheme in April, and rolled out on-chain, stake-weighted validator governance this week. Token-2022 extensions gave the chain the compliance hooks, confidential transfers, transfer restrictions, interest-bearing instruments, that enterprise issuers require. The pitch that Solana is a casino chain unsuitable for serious money has aged badly.

Ethereum’s institutional position remains the stronger one on stock rather than flow. It custodies the tokenized funds, hosts the deep stablecoin float, and runs the staking infrastructure through which more than 35 million ETH, nearly 29% of supply, secures the network across a million-plus validators. When a treasury desk needs to move nine figures with minimal slippage, Ethereum’s depth is still the only game available. BitMine Immersion bought its way past 5 million ETH this spring precisely on that thesis. But stock is what you accumulated yesterday. Flow is what you are winning today, and the flow has been tilting one direction for over a year.

The uncomfortable items on both ledgers Neither chain gets to run its highlight reel without the blooper file.

Solana’s validator count has collapsed to roughly 795 active validators from more than 2,500 in 2023, a 68% decline that concentrates block production and hands critics a decentralization argument with real teeth. Its DeFi remains thin and concentrated: one aggregator with 95% market share is a single point of failure wearing a market structure costume, and the $270 million Drift exploit showed what happens when a load-bearing protocol breaks. Its volume mix still leans on memecoin speculation, the most cyclical demand source in the industry, and February’s $117 billion month can become a $40 billion month without a single thing going wrong technically.

Ethereum’s problems are quieter and arguably deeper. Lido alone controls roughly 24% of staked ETH, a concentration risk of its own. The rollup roadmap solved scaling and created a value-capture puzzle nobody has answered: if execution fees accrue to Base and Arbitrum while blobs cost pennies, what exactly does ETH the asset earn from Ethereum the ecosystem’s growth? Retail has already voted, migrating to L2s so completely that mainnet active addresses look like a ghost town next to Solana’s. And the fragmentation tax is real: liquidity split across a dozen rollups with seven-day optimistic exits is a worse user experience than one chain with 400-millisecond finality, no matter how elegant the settlement theory. The KelpDAO exploit this spring, which erased $13 billion of TVL in 48 hours of contagion, showed that composability depth cuts in both directions.

Both assets, meanwhile, have been terrible investments this year, a market-wide condition tied to the macro regime we examined in the context of Bitcoin’s liquidity dependence. Fee revenue and active addresses have not protected SOL holders from a 78% peak drawdown, and settlement supremacy has not protected ETH holders from underperforming Bitcoin for most of the cycle. Whatever race is being run, neither token’s chart looks like a victory lap, and on-chain fundamentals have been decoupled from price across the majors for much of 2026.

So who is actually winning? Frame the question three ways and you get three defensible answers.

If the L1 race means base-layer usage, Solana won it, and the margin is no longer close. Two hundred times Ethereum’s L1 throughput, forty times its transaction count, five times its daily fee revenue, and a lead in DEX volume that has survived every market regime since late 2024. By the definition of Layer 1 that existed when the rivalry started, the contest is over.

If the race means where value lives, Ethereum is not losing and may never lose within this cycle. A 68% share of global DeFi TVL, 70% of stablecoin supply, the institutional tokenization pipeline, and the largest developer base in the industry constitute a network-effect fortress that Solana’s growth has dented but nowhere near breached. Capital has inertia, and inertia compounds.

If the race means trajectory, the tape favors Solana with an asterisk. It is winning new users, new listed products, new enterprise integrations, and the ETF flow battle. The asterisk is that trajectory arguments assume the current regime persists, and Solana’s flow-heavy economy is more exposed than Ethereum’s stock-heavy one to the next collapse in speculative appetite. Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade cycle and the second-half protocol roadmap that all major chains have queued for late 2026 could reshuffle the technical comparison again.

The most likely outcome is also the least satisfying for partisans: permanent coexistence with divided territory. Ethereum settles and custodies. Solana executes and trades. Builders already behave as if this is settled, deploying on both by default. The 2025 framing of an L1 war with a single survivor has quietly died, not with a bang but with two chains discovering they are optimized for markets the other cannot serve.

What could flip the board before December Split decisions invite the obvious follow-up: what would actually change the standings? Four live catalysts carry enough weight to move the argument rather than the noise.

Ethereum’s upgrade cycle is the first. The Fusaka window and the broader second-half protocol roadmap target another step-change in data capacity, and the ecosystem’s real prize sits next to it: any credible mechanism that routes L2 economic success back into ETH, whether through based sequencing, native rollup designs, or fee-market reform, would repair the value-capture hole that has haunted the asset since Dencun. Markets have front-run Ethereum upgrades before; a roadmap that finally answers the accrual question would be the first fundamental ETH catalyst in two years.

Firedancer completion is the second. Solana’s independent validator client moving to full deployment removes the single-client risk that institutions cite most, and its throughput headroom opens application categories, full order-book markets, high-frequency payment networks, that no chain currently serves. If even one breakout consumer or enterprise application lands on that capacity, Solana’s volume base diversifies away from memecoins, which neutralizes the strongest bear argument against its fee economy.

ETF mechanics are the third. Staking-enabled fund structures, under active regulatory discussion for both assets, would transform the flow picture: a spot product yielding 3% to 7% natively changes the allocator pitch entirely, and the asset that gets staking approval first inherits a durable flow advantage. Watch the filings, not the influencers.

Treasury companies are the fourth and strangest. BitMine’s multimillion-ETH accumulation and the emerging class of SOL treasury vehicles mean corporate balance sheets now sit inside both ecosystems as permanent, price-insensitive holders. The Strategy playbook applied to ETH and SOL is small today; its growth rate through a recovering market could make treasuries the marginal buyer that decides which token outperforms, independent of every on-chain metric in this article.

The verdict for the second half Ethereum is losing the L1 race as originally defined, and it forfeited that race by choice when it went all-in on rollups. Solana is winning everything measurable at the base layer while still trailing badly where the institutional money actually sits. Watch three numbers through December: whether Ethereum ETF flows recover once its next upgrade lands, whether Firedancer’s full rollout converts Solana’s throughput ceiling into new categories of application, and whether Solana DeFi TVL can hold above $12 billion without memecoin volume subsidizing it. The chain that answers its own weakness first will own the 2027 narrative. Until then, the war everyone expected has settled into something stranger: two winners, two different games, and one increasingly obsolete question.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Digital asset markets are volatile, and you can lose your entire investment. Always do your own research. Information current as of July 3, 2026.

Upbit will add Metaplex (MPLX) for BTC and USDT pairs and Nexus (NEX) for a USDT pair on July 3. Metaplex assists in creating infrastructure for digital assets based on the Solana blockchain, and Nexus builds a Layer 1 blockchain. Upbit, South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange platform, announced the listing of Metaplex (MPLX) and Nexus (NEX). MPLX will be available to trade with BTC and USDT trading pairs on the Solana blockchain platform. NEX will be listed in the USDT market on the Ethereum network. Deposits and withdrawals will start two hours from the time of the announcement.

Scheduled Launch of MPLX and NEX Upbit has announced that MPLX will begin trading at 3:00 PM local time on July 3. Trading for NEX will be launched by the exchange at 6:00 PM local time on July 3. The users have been asked to ensure that deposits happen only through the supported blockchain networks, as deposits made via unsupported networks will not be credited. Upbit has also mentioned that insufficient liquidity may lead to delayed trading due to unfavorable market conditions.

The platform implemented temporary trading restrictions to ensure smooth market operations after listing these two cryptocurrencies. Upbit has put a restriction on buying orders in the first five minutes after trading. All orders, except limit orders, will not be available for 2 hours after listing. Upbit has put a restriction on selling orders that are at least 10% below the previous close price.

Metaplex and Nexus Extend Their Infrastructure Services Metaplex is an infrastructure protocol for digital assets with NFT support, token minting, metadata handling, and mass asset creation in the Solana and Solana Virtual Machine blockchain networks. This protocol allows the standardization of metadata of the assets along with NFT collections, compressed NFTs, and token drops using various ecosystem services. Metaplex also unveiled Agent Registry and Agent Tokens, extending the infrastructure of Metaplex in the direction of on-chain identity registration and token creation. MPLX tokens allow participating in governance, managing treasuries, and certain ecosystem services in the Metaplex DAO.

Nexus builds a Layer 1 blockchain by incorporating verifiable computation capabilities with finance use cases. This network leverages Cosmos SDK, CometBFT, and Ethereum-based smart contracts together with Nexus zkVM for the verification of computing resources from outside the chain. Nexus is also going to extend its ecosystem via Nexus Exchange and the USDX settlement ecosystem. The NEX tokens act as the native gas tokens of the network while staking and compensating computation providers. Upbit also advised users that their deposits should be in compliance with the Travel Rule.

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I specialize in Web3 and crypto writing, producing clear, research-driven content on blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and market trends.

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The fresh $8 million raise for predictive behavioral AI network THEA puts Solana at the center of a quiet but consequential race. Instead of forcing inference computation on-chain—an expensive and slow proposition—the project is building a coordination layer that settles accounts and routes requests while the heavy math stays off-chain. The approach addresses a friction that has kept machine learning outputs from being reliably used in DeFi and on-chain automation. The funding round, led by Maven11 Capital, Spartan Group, ManifoldTrading, HackVC and Fisher8 Capital, arrived as institutional interest in crypto-AI convergence keeps climbing.

Solana has consistently ranked among the top chains by developer activity, as seen in recent weekly developer rankings, and the network’s low-latency architecture makes it an attractive settlement layer for AI coordination. THEA plans to use Solana to manage inference requests, accounting, and settlement, treating the blockchain as a verifiable ledger rather than a compute engine. It is a division of labor that mirrors how certain high-frequency trading systems operate: speed-sensitive logic stays close to the hardware, while finality and dispute resolution happen on-chain.

The Case for Keeping Computation Off-Chain On-chain inference remains a bottleneck. Running neural networks directly on Ethereum or Solana is not only cost-prohibitive but also introduces latency that breaks real-time use cases. THEA’s design acknowledges that machine learning models will run where they perform best—on GPUs, TPUs, or future specialized hardware—while Solana provides an immutable record of who requested what, which model was used, and who should be paid. This separation could unlock a market where AI services are paid for on a per-inference basis, with settlement flowing through SOL or SPL tokens.

The structure also lowers the trust barrier. Rather than requiring every user to audit a model’s output, the network coordinates what answers were delivered and provides a settlement trail. The round included trading firm ManifoldTrading, which suggests institutional interest not just in the technology but in how AI outputs could be plugged into execution environments. A transparent ledger of AI interactions is something that quant funds and automated strategy builders might find particularly useful.

What Solana’s Ecosystem Gains From an AI Settlement Layer THEA’s launch could give Solana-based DeFi protocols a native way to integrate predictive models without building their own infrastructure. If a lending protocol wants to use AI to score borrower risk or a DEX wants to reroute orders based on model-driven slippage forecasts, the coordination layer would handle the invoicing and settlement. These kinds of partnerships mirror other AI-driven Web3 integrations, such as UXLINK and Origins Network, where off-chain compute is paired with on-chain coordination. Teams building on Solana get a middleware that reduces the time from model output to on-chain action.

The timing matters. A string of recent infrastructure deals has pushed the total value of tokenized real-world assets past $20 billion, and on-chain settlement for non-speculative data—such as AI predictions—could be next. If THEA’s model gains traction, Solana might see a new category of transaction volume that does not originate from token swaps or NFT mints but from machine-to-machine invoicing. That would add a different kind of fee base and broaden the network’s utility beyond its current DeFi and memecoin identity.

Open Questions and What to Watch Despite the raise, several things are not yet settled. THEA’s tokenomics have not been disclosed, and it is unclear whether the network will introduce a native token, use SOL as the primary gas and settlement unit, or structure fees in stablecoins. The decision will shape how value accrues and whether the protocol is perceived as a Solana-native asset or an external service that uses Solana as a utility.

Adoption also hinges on how many AI model providers plug into the network. THEA’s coordination layer only works if there is enough supply of predictive behavioral models willing to accept payment through on-chain rails. For now, the networks that dominate AI inference—mostly centralized providers—have shown little interest in crypto settlement. If THEA cannot bridge that gap, the network may struggle to attract volume from serious machine learning teams.

Another variable is Solana’s reliability. While the chain’s uptime has improved, a coordination layer that handles real-time inference requests demands near-perfect block production and minimal state bloat. Even short delays in settlement could create discrepancies between off-chain model results and their on-chain record, opening arbitrage or dispute scenarios. Traders watching THEA should track the ratio of inference requests settled versus failed, if that data becomes public.

Still, the raise signals that venture capital sees value in the plumbing between AI and blockchains, not just in yet another layer-one token or decentralized compute marketplace. If THEA executes, Solana could become the de facto settlement environment for an emerging class of machine intelligence services. The next test is a mainnet launch that shows real usage, not just a well-funded idea.

AUTHOR

Max delves deep into the cryptocurrency realm, with a passion for altcoins and NFTs. Convinced of crypto's transformative potential, he envisions a decentralized financial future. Max's background in the financial sector grants him unique insights into global monetary systems. In his leisure, Max embraces the thrill of adventures and is an avid sports enthusiast, finding balance and rejuvenation away from work.

Securitize began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SECZ on Thursday and launched a tokenized version of its common stock through its regulated platform.

Securitize is now officially a public company, listed on the @NYSE under the ticker SECZ.

Our focus is unchanged: building the regulated infrastructure for the next generation of capital markets.

To everyone who helped us get here, thank you.

Tokenize the World. pic.twitter.com/XVhjA5udA9

— Securitize (@Securitize) July 2, 2026

The listing follows the completion of Securitize’s business combination with Cantor Equity Partners II. The company has brought more than $4 billion in assets onchain through its tokenization infrastructure.

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Eligible investors in the United States will be able to access tokenized SECZ on Avalanche and Solana after completing onboarding, identity verification and jurisdictional eligibility checks.

The tokens are intended to represent the same common stock trading on the NYSE rather than a synthetic product, offshore wrapper or separate share class. Tokenization changes how ownership is recorded and transferred but does not alter the legal nature of the underlying shares or remove applicable transfer restrictions.

Securitize said the rollout makes it the first newly public company to bring its own stock onchain from the start of its life as a listed business. Based on expected shareholder participation, the company also expects SECZ to become the world’s largest tokenized stock.

The launch builds on Securitize’s broader effort to bring public equities onto blockchain infrastructure while preserving direct ownership and shareholder rights. Its platform has previously worked with asset managers including BlackRock, Apollo, KKR and VanEck on tokenized investment products.

Securitize plans to expand the functionality and market infrastructure surrounding tokenized SECZ as its onchain shareholder base develops.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

Umbra Privacy has launched a private payroll system on Solana, giving businesses a way to pay employees in $USDC without exposing transaction details on the public blockchain. The product is the latest feature to emerge from the protocol's broader push to make on-chain finance safe for corporate use.

How It Works The payroll system is built on top of Umbra's existing privacy infrastructure. Operating as the first live consumer application deployed on Arcium's Mainnet Alpha, Umbra's environment is engineered on top of Arcium's multi-party computation (MPC) encrypted execution engine and zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs, hiding the identities of the sender and recipient, alongside total transaction values, from public scrutiny by default.

The platform supports multichain funding and offers instant withdrawals to either a crypto wallet or a traditional bank account. The integration introduces native, private fiat onramping and offramping alongside a corporate payroll engine directly inside the Umbra application, enabling users to fund digital asset wallets and accept corporate compensation without exposing their physical identity or bank routing details to public blockchain trackers. This is handled through a partnership with Onramper. "It's about giving people genuine control over their financial lives," said Krutarth Shah, CEO of Umbra. "Integrating Onramper means our users can fund their wallets and receive payroll with the same level of discretion they expect from every other part of the Umbra experience."

Under the newly activated framework, Umbra users can natively purchase digital assets utilizing 24 major fiat currencies without departing the application's secure perimeter. The financial transaction layer relies on Onramper's algorithmic aggregation engine, which dynamically routes each localized payment flow to the most competitive fiat-to-crypto onramp provider worldwide.

Compliance Built In A recurring concern with privacy protocols is regulatory risk. Umbra has addressed this by embedding compliance tooling directly into the product. This structural privacy does not compromise regulatory compliance. Umbra preserves critical enterprise oversight utilities, natively retaining institutional compliance tools such as developer viewing keys and automated transaction risk screening. The payroll product also includes payroll history tracking for internal record-keeping.

Umbra includes a voluntary audit feature allowing transaction history disclosure to regulators. The Solana Foundation's framing of "confidentiality, not anonymity" is deliberate regulatory positioning. Confidentiality around hidden amounts with visible addresses is defensible for business, payroll, and institutional use.

The launch addresses a structural problem that has long made on-chain payroll impractical for businesses. Solana is one of the most transparent blockchains ever built, with every transaction, including sender, recipient, and amount, publicly readable by anyone with a block explorer and a wallet address. DAOs and businesses risk exposing operational data, payroll, or treasury activity on a public ledger. Umbra's payroll feature is designed to close that gap, giving crypto-native companies a viable path to paying staff in digital assets without broadcasting compensation details to competitors or the wider market.

Sources
The Fintech Times: Umbra Integrates Onramper for Private Fiat Ramps and Crypto Payroll
Onramper: Umbra Integration Announcement
Crypto Economy: Umbra Launches Privacy Wallet on Arcium

June 2026 marked another milestone month for tokenization across the Solana ecosystem. Trading activity accelerated to record levels as tokenized equities attracted growing participation from both institutional and retail investors. Financial institutions continued launching regulated investment products on Solana, while tokenized funds, commodities, and real-world assets expanded into new markets.

The month also highlighted the increasing integration between traditional finance and blockchain infrastructure. From tokenized stocks and funds to museum-grade dinosaur fossils, June demonstrated the widening range of assets finding their way onchain.

Here is everything you might have missed:

June 10: Jupiter Adds Leveraged Tokenized Equities Jupiter Exchange integrated SHIFT's leveraged tokenized equities, bringing Series Tokens to Solana.

The products track leveraged stock ETFs, while Jupiter introduced a dedicated screener displaying price, trading volume, holder count, and discount to mark value, making these products easier for users to monitor.

June 12: SpaceX Trading Arrives Onchain Backpack Securities launched tokenized SpaceX stock under the ticker $SPCX on Solana on the same day SpaceX became available in traditional financial markets.

The tokenized asset generated $51 million in trading volume during its first 24 hours, making it one of the strongest launches for a tokenized equity on the network.

The same day, Securitize launched STAC, its tokenized AAA CLO fund, on Solana. The fund is backed by Bank of New York Mellon as custodian and sub-adviser, while Ethena Labs announced plans to allocate $250 million to the product.

June 16: SpaceX Volume Surpasses $100 Million Demand for tokenized SpaceX shares continued to accelerate. 24-hour trading volume for $SPCX exceeded $100 million for the first time, underscoring growing investor interest in tokenized equity exposure.

June 17: Institutional Listings Continue to Expand Ondo Finance announced the addition of 173 new tokenized stocks and ETFs, expanding its catalog to more than 430 traditional financial assets.

On the same day, Onpharma launched a security token offering on Solana with First Block and Crito Capital.

Trading activity also remained strong. Solana recorded $116 million in tokenized equities volume, accounting for approximately 94% of all tokenized stock trading volume across blockchain networks.

$SPCX led activity with nearly $90 million in trading volume, while Backpack accounted for approximately 95% of that trading.

June 21: Collector Crypt Reaches Revenue Milestone Collector Crypt generated more than $5 million in weekly revenue for the first time.

The milestone pushed the platform's cumulative lifetime revenue beyond $68 million, highlighting continued demand for tokenized collectibles within Solana's growing real-world asset ecosystem.

June 22: UK Regulated Fund Launches Onchain $BAGEY, the first publicly available fully native UK-regulated tokenized fund built with BNY, launched on Solana.

The launch represents another example of regulated investment products adopting blockchain infrastructure for fund administration.

June 23: Tokenized Funds and Stocks Reach New Milestones Allfunds, one of the world's largest fund distribution networks, expanded its tokenized funds to Solana. The integration connects more than 3,300 financial firms and nearly €1.8 trillion in administered assets to onchain markets, broadening institutional access to tokenized investment products.

The same day, total tokenized stock transfer volume on Solana surpassed $10 billion, underscoring the rapid growth of tokenized securities activity across the network.

June 24: Tokenized Assets Reach New Highs June 24 produced one of the busiest days of the month for tokenization on Solana. Tokenized assets accounted for approximately 19% of all daily DEX volume on Solana, representing a new all-time high of roughly $569.19 million in trading activity. For the day, tokenized assets generated more trading volume than memecoins.

Tokenized stock trading volume also reached a record $683 million in 24-hour trading volume. Trading activity centered on tokenized shares of SpaceX and Micron, which ranked among the most actively traded assets. Backpack Securities and Sunrise continued to expand the market by listing tokenized SanDisk shares under the ticker $SNDK that same day.

Outside traditional financial assets, JurassicFi announced plans to tokenize Deaton, a museum-grade Triceratops prorsus skull with approximately 60-65% bone completeness and all 3 original horns intact.

June 25: Institutional Adoption Expands Internationally Paxos launched its tokenized gold asset, PAXG, on Solana through Sunrise. The launch marks the first expansion of PAXG beyond Ethereum.

The same day, the Solana ETF SOLZ_KZ began trading on the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange, providing qualified investors in Kazakhstan with regulated exposure to Solana.

Kazakhstan Exchange also outlined plans to enable domestic companies to issue ETFs and tokenize assets using Solana infrastructure, reflecting growing international interest in blockchain-based financial products.

June 28: Raydium Surpasses $3 Billion Tokenized Equities Volume Raydium surpassed $3 billion in cumulative tokenized equities trading volume after crossing the $2 billion milestone earlier in the month, on June 6.

June 29: Tokenized Equities on Solana Records Its Largest Week Ever Solana achieved its largest week on record for tokenized equities. Weekly trading volume reached approximately $1.36 billion while the network captured 96% of all tokenized stock trading volume across blockchain ecosystems.

The achievement also extended Solana's lead over all Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains to 56 consecutive weeks, reinforcing its position as the leading network for tokenized equities.

Internet Capital Markets Continue Rapid Expansion Last week, SolanaFloor's The Big Picture podcast went live on X, with Seraphim from the Solana Foundation discussing stocks on Solana, how to solve liquidity issues, what comes next for digital asset tokens, and whether Solana perps can compete. He noted that tokenized equity trading volumes could consistently outpace memecoin trading volumes, driven by growing demand for stocks on Solana. “We have to enable stuff that allows you to trade assets people want to trade, and that's stocks at the moment,” he added.

Open Standard also launched $OUSD, a new stablecoin backed by over 140 partners including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, Coinbase and BlackRock. The protocol promises to distribute earnings from reserves among partners alongside fee-free redemption and minting.

Throughout the month, Solana maintained its leadership in tokenized securities. Record trading volumes, expanding institutional participation, and continued product launches highlighted the network's growing role within global tokenized markets.

“Head of Taking Risk” at Solana Foundation on The Big Picture

Solana price is trading near $77, roughly flat over the past 24 hours, with the broader crypto market holding a cautious equilibrium as Q2 2026 closes. The session’s most consequential data point is not a price move, it is a revenue figure: Solana’s decentralized application ecosystem generated $257 million in Q2 2026, topping every Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchain on the market for the ninth consecutive quarter.

Among notable altcoin moves, Ethereum is up roughly 1.2% over 24 hours while Base-native tokens show mixed performance. Total market 24-hour volume is tracking near $98 billion, marginally above the prior session, suggesting participation is steady rather than surging.

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Nine Quarters, One Network: What Solana’s Revenue Streak Actually Means The central question this data raises: is Solana’s dominance a cyclical accident or a structural reality? Nine consecutive quarters of leading all blockchains in dApp revenue, a streak running since early 2024, argues strongly for the latter. Ethereum, Tron, Base, and Hyperliquid have each had moments at the top. None has dislodged Solana.

The $257 million Q2 2026 figure represents a slight year-over-year dip from Q2 2025’s $271 million, but the competitive gap remains wide. According to Syndica’s January 2026 deep dive, Solana held 41% of total Web3 dApp revenue at the start of the year, up from 33% in December 2025, with global Web3 dApp revenue totalling $385 million that month and Solana’s $158 million slice representing a 72% month-over-month jump.

That is not a plurality. That is a near-majority of an industry-wide metric held by a single network.

📊DATA: In Q2 2026, @Solana dApps generated $257M in revenue, leading all L1 and L2 blockchains for the 9th consecutive quarter. pic.twitter.com/syrtL3LFjY

— SolanaFloor (@SolanaFloor) July 1, 2026

Protocol-level data from TheStreet adds granularity. In Q1 2026, Solana posted $292 million in dApp revenue, with two applications accounting for the bulk of it: Pump.fun generated $123 million (42% of the network total) and Axiom contributed $58 million (20%).

Those two platforms alone, a memecoin launchpad and a trading terminal, captured nearly two-thirds of Solana’s entire quarterly haul. The concentration is notable: Syndica’s data found the top eight Solana dApps accounting for 78% of the network’s own revenue.

Weekly competitive data reinforces the trend’s durability. In the week ending April 20, 2026, Solana posted $16.94 million in weekly dApp revenue, its fifth consecutive week at number one, ahead of Hyperliquid at $14.18 million and Ethereum at $13.55 million.

In May 2026, Solana generated $91 million in monthly application revenue versus Hyperliquid’s $53 million and Ethereum’s $52 million, according to DefiLlama data cited by Bitcoin.com.

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The Memecoin Risk Embedded in Solana’s Revenue Model Blockchain revenue figures matter precisely because they are harder to game than alternative metrics. Total value locked, TVL, the sum of assets deposited into DeFi protocols – can be inflated through recursive deposits, where the same capital is counted multiple times across lending and liquidity pools. Daily active addresses can be manufactured. Revenue cannot: it reflects users paying fees for something they chose to use.

That said, Solana’s revenue mix carries a concentration risk that investors in SOL should price honestly. Memecoins and memecoin-adjacent trading infrastructure, Pump.fun being the clearest example, have driven a disproportionate share of the network’s fee income. If speculative appetite in that category cools materially, the quarterly totals will register it.

The $200 million-plus threshold is the number to watch for Q3 2026: can Solana hold it without a memecoin trading supercycle providing the floor? Solana memecoin DEX volume trends heading into July 2026 suggest the category remains active, though below its early-2026 peak.

Solana's revenue is twofold. People only talk about half of it, but retail will trade both

Memes: Pumpfun is the memecoin casino, which brings attention and volumes to the chain

Then you have productive assets like MetaDAO, perps onchain , etchttps://t.co/ypVkyFVE4g pic.twitter.com/vdtSfDLQQQ

— Ansem 🐂🀄️ (@blknoiz06) June 25, 2026

The more constructive read is that DeFi and consumer applications are maturing as a second revenue pillar. Axiom’s sustained presence in the top two earners, $58 million in Q1 2026 after a breakout $126.6 million in Q2 2025, according to The Currency Analytics, shows that trading infrastructure beyond pure memecoin issuance is generating durable fees.

For a fuller picture of how institutional capital is positioning around Solana’s structural lead despite recent price softness, the SOL institutional adoption and price divergence analysis lays out the tension clearly.

Meanwhile, Ethereum’s path back to dApp revenue leadership runs through its Layer 2 ecosystem, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, but that revenue remains fragmented across multiple chains. Aggregated, it still does not consistently match what Solana generates as a single unified network.

Ethereum’s own challenges at the base layer, detailed in the current Ethereum price and key levels outlook, compound the difficulty of closing that gap in the near term.

Nine quarters of leading all blockchains in dApp revenue is no longer a streak. It is a structural baseline, and the Q3 2026 data will show whether Solana’s non-memecoin revenue base has grown enough to defend it independently.

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Solana Foundation says onchain governance is now live, letting validators with at least 100,000 SOL delegated open proposals that go to a stake-weighted vote once they clear 15% cluster support.

Solana Foundation announced Wednesday that onchain governance is live on the network, letting validators propose and vote on protocol-level decisions through a system called Solana Governance Proposals, or SGPs.

The mechanism is fully onchain, stake-weighted and verified by Merkle proof, according to the Foundation's announcement thread. Any validator with at least 100,000 SOL delegated can open a proposal, and a proposal only opens for a vote once it clears 15% of cluster stake support. Delegators who disagree with how their validator voted, or whose validator did not vote at all, can override that vote using their own stake weight.

Merkle-Verified VotesThe system runs on two onchain programs described in the project's technical documentation: an NCN, or Node Consensus Network, snapshot program that establishes verifiable stake weights, and a voting program called svmgov. Whitelisted operators independently build Merkle trees of validator stake from the Solana ledger and vote on a canonical snapshot. Once they agree, a consensus result publishes onchain, and validators prove their stake weight against it with a Merkle proof when they vote.

The two onchain programs are deployed as `ncn-snapshot` and `svmgov`, according to the governance documentation, with the snapshot program building the canonical stake tree that the voting program checks against for every ballot cast.

SGPs Versus SIMDsSGPs sit apart from Solana Improvement Documents, or SIMDs, the process core developers already use for technical protocol changes. Per the solana-governance-proposals repository, a SIMD answers "how exactly do we do this," decided by technical review from core developers, while an SGP answers "should we do this," decided by a stake-weighted onchain vote. By default, decision-making stays with core developers and the SIMD process; an SGP interrupts that path only when the 15% stake-support threshold is met, and does not block a SIMD from moving forward on its own.

The Foundation pointed validators and delegators to the governance dashboard, documentation and the svmgov codebase to start participating.

The launch follows a run of Solana Foundation initiatives aimed at institutional and validator participation, including a native payments rail for subscriptions and allowances and MoneyGram joining the network as a validator.

https://tenor.com/search/chain-link-gif-gifs

World XYZ, a prominent prediction market on the Solana blockchain, has announced its adoption of Chainlink as its primary oracle infrastructure. This integration aims to enhance the speed and accuracy of market resolutions, particularly in categories such as cryptocurrency, sports, elections, and macroeconomic events. Chainlink serves as a critical link, connecting Solana’s smart contracts to real-world data through verified data aggregation from independent node operators. This move is expected to provide immediate resolution and payout capabilities, bypassing traditional banking delays through stablecoin rails.

The integration of Chainlink is seen as a significant enhancement for World XYZ, addressing the “oracle problem” by ensuring data accuracy and reliability. With Chainlink’s established network, which has facilitated over $6.9 trillion in transaction value since 2022, the partnership is anticipated to bolster confidence in prediction markets on Solana. Market participants may interpret this development as supportive of higher trust and efficiency, potentially influencing market dynamics across various sectors.

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Market reactions have been observed in related prediction markets, specifically in the pricing of Bitcoin. Current data suggests a notable increase in confidence for Bitcoin to reach certain price ranges by July 1, with an 84% likelihood of Bitcoin being priced between $58,000 and $60,000, up from 38% just 24 hours ago. This shift appears consistent with enhanced market confidence stemming from World XYZ’s integration of Chainlink.

Key Takeaways World XYZ’s integration of Chainlink appears consistent with efforts to enhance prediction market efficiency and reliability. Market pricing suggests increased confidence in Bitcoin price predictions, with significant movements in sub-market odds. Chainlink’s established infrastructure is expected to provide immediate payout capabilities, enhancing user experience on World XYZ. What to Watch Market participants may look for further developments in World XYZ’s performance metrics following the integration. Any additional partnerships or technological advancements could further influence market dynamics. The impact on Bitcoin’s market pricing will be crucial to observe, especially as additional data from Chainlink is utilized. Watch for statements from key financial regulators or announcements from World XYZ that could further shape market perceptions.

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Bitcoin Price On July 1 2026

Contract Odds Δ since publish Volume 24h July 1 0.5% — — View market → July 1 9% — — View market → July 1 3.6% — — View market → July 1 0.1% — — View market → July 1 87.5% — — View market → July 1 2026 0.1% — — View market → July 1 2026 0.2% — — View market → What Price Will Hyperliquid Hit Before 2027

Contract Odds Δ since publish Volume 24h December 31 35% — — View market → January 1 2027 5.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 4.6% — — View market → January 1 2027 63.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 11.1% — — View market → January 1 2027 5.5% — — View market →