SOL climbed back above $72 on Friday, bouncing from $64 lows a day earlier. The rally looks decent on the surface. Don’t let it fool you entirely.
Tokenized stock trading on Solana is the headline driver. Volumes hit $113 million in 24 hours via Jupiter Aggregator. AI sector hype fueled the surge. But here’s the problem: liquidity in those automated market-making pools is thin, and multiple issuers are competing for the same products. Most of these tokens just launched, which explains the low holder counts.
Underneath the price action, the numbers tell a different story.
Total Value Locked on Solana dropped 11% over the past month. Ethereum’s layer-2 Base is closing the gap. Kamino fell 19%. Binance Staked SOL trimmed 20%. Raydium shed 17%. Only the tokenization platform xStocks posted growth, up 31%.
Weekly DEX volumes collapsed from $30 billion in early February to around $10 billion now. DApp revenues are trending down right alongside them. Successful tokenized stock launches haven’t been enough to prop up actual demand for SOL in blockchain processing.
Then there’s the Pump.fun problem. Roughly 30% of DApp revenue on Solana comes from the memecoin launch platform. A CoinGecko report found 80% of the 18.7 million tokens launched there died within 48 hours. More than half the addresses involved lost up to $1,000. That’s not a healthy foundation.
Bullish leverage is ticking up on SOL futures — funding rates hit their highest level in June at 10%. That sits in the neutral 6-12% range, though. Not exactly a confidence signal.
Airdrop anticipation is keeping some optimism alive. OnRe ($200M TVL), Bulk ($325M open interest), and Loopscale ($79M TVL) are all in the pipeline, but timing remains uncertain.
Calling a return to $80 right now feels premature, especially with Hyperliquid and centralized exchanges on rival chains muscling into tokenized stock trading. OKX just partnered with NYSE’s parent company using Ethereum-based systems. The competition is real.
