Solana Wrapped: The 10 Biggest Stories of 2025

2025 was the year Solana took over, stepping out of the trenches to become a Wall Street darling and the poster child of crypto-excellence. 

Despite the best attempts of dubious players (and their enablers) in Q1’s memecoin circus, Solana has risen above the scandals to waltz its way to the most successful ETF launch of the year.

Beyond ETFs, Solana is rapidly becoming the home of RWAs, with tokenized stocks exploding across the network all year. We’ve witnessed crypto’s biggest onchain ICO, historic governance debacles, and the shipping of one of the industry’s most eagerly-awaited hardware devices: the Solana Seeker.

Firedancer is finally live, after demos in 2022 theorized 1 million transactions per second, and Alpenglow, the next great network update, got a unanimous nod of approval for the Solana faithful.

With 2025 drawing to an end, cast your eyes back to the moments that will be immortalized on the Solana calendar forever.

1. Solana ETFs Hit Wall Street

2025 will forever be remembered as the year that $SOL ETFs were finally approved. After Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs first got the green light in 2024, a Solana-equivalent seemed like an inevitability. 

But that didn’t necessarily mean that the journey towards $SOL ETF approval was smooth sailing. Despite a progressive change of administration in the White House and renewed efforts to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the world”, $SOL ETFs were hardly expedited to Wall Street.

The inception of Solana ETFs in 2025 was punctuated by issuer creativity. First, REX-Shares became the first firm to establish a semblance of a TradFi Solana investment vehicle, finding a clever loophole that allowed them to list a hybrid ETF composed of $SOL-based ETPs and pure $SOL, thereby gaining a head start on the competition.

REX-Shares $SSK enjoyed a total monopoly over the Solana ETF scene for around 3 months, netting over $400M in inflows as it remained relatively unchallenged by rival issuers. That all changed in October, when Bitwise took advantage of another loophole to get $BSOL across the line and onto Wall Street in the midst of the longest government shutdown in history.

Since $BSOL’s impressive debut (the most successful ETF launch of the year, in terms of volume and inflows), seven other issuers have listed $SOL ETFs. Solana ETFs collectively witnessed a historic 21-day streak of inflows following launch, currently boasting over $747M in AUM.

2. The Great Memecoin Extraction

Despite the excitement and optimism instilled by ETF approvals, 2025 was hardly a year of perfect sunshine for Solana. Q1’s memecoin circus put the chain’s degenerate side on display for all to see at a Presidential scale.

The Donald Trump memecoin launch shook the crypto world to its very foundation. Granted, Trump had already launched a fair few non-commital crypto products in the past (looking at you, NFT Trump Cards), but never had a President-Elect done something quite so ridiculous in the days before his inauguration. 

$TRUMP divided the Solana community. On one hand, the launch created an onchain liquidity event the likes of which no one had ever seen before. Solana’s 24-hour DEX volume cracked $23B, onboarding over 400,000 users to crypto in the process. Solana handled the activity surge brilliantly, maintaining steady performance in the face of the true onchain price discovery at unprecedented scale.

On the other hand, the $TRUMP seemed like a mockery of everything crypto stood for. What began as a cypherpunk movement based on decentralization, privacy, and self-custody had transformed into a political playground, with insiders and government figures orchestrating billion-dollar pump-and-dumps.

The Trump memecoin launch naturally kick-started a plague of extractive, copycat launches involving other public figures. First Lady Melania launched her coin just days after, with the Central African Republic also trying its hand as a memecoin ‘dev’.

Absolute chaos ensued in February, with Argentinian President Javier Milei publicly endorsing the $LIBRA memecoin, only to delete tweets supporting the token minutes after posting them. Over 82% of $LIBRA’s supply was linked to one cluster, with many high-profile KOLs being exposed as having involvement in one of the largest coordinated launches of all time.

Onchain investigations connected the wallets responsible for the $LIBRA launch to the very same perpetrators of $MELANIA, who were revealed to be controlled by none other than Hayden Davis and Kelsier Ventures.

Further investigations unveiled deeper connections between Kelsier Ventures and Meteora, a popular Solana-based DEX. It was revealed that Kelsier Ventures CEO Hayden Davis had frequently used Meteora’s M3M3 launchpad to run several extractive token launches plagued with insiders and snipers. 

Video evidence provided to SolanaFloor suggested that Ben Chow may have been implicit in the insider trading scandal. While Chow has not officially been charged or found guilty of any wrongdoing, the Meteora co-founder stepped down from his position as CEO.

3. The DAT Bid

In an attempt to frontrun ETF listings, Solana-based Digital Asset Treasury companies purchased a dizzying amount of $SOL throughout the course of the year. 

Public companies like Sol Strategies and DeFi Development Corporation were some of the first entities to appropriate Michael Saylor’s playbook, issuing convertible bonds to raise fresh capital and drive $SOL accumulation.

The DAT race reached a fever pitch in September, with the launch of Forward Industries, a firm backed by Solana OGs Jump Crypto, Multicoin Capital, and Galaxy Digital. Forward Industries raised over $1.6B in capital, before clipping their entire cash balance into $SOL in a matter of days.

Despite the excitement around public companies acquiring billions of dollars worth of $SOL, the DAT bid caught a lot of skepticism from the crypto community. Commentators expressed cynicism towards certain aspects of the DAT strategy, such as the acquisition of discounted, locked $SOL from the Solana Foundation.

Just a few months later, the outlook for DATs is starting to look more grim. Declining $SOL prices have placed most DATs firmly underwater on their cost basis, with contracting mNAVs making it difficult to attract fresh capital to fund continued $SOL accumulation.

At press time, Solana DATs collectively hold over 20.3M $SOL, valued at $2.5B.

4. Solana Seeker Gets Shipped with Further Promise of $SKR Token

After over a year of eager anticipation and thousands of “wen seeker” demands, Solana Mobile finally started putting Seekers into letterboxes across the world. As if that wasn’t exciting enough, Seeker users will also be invited to take part in one of crypto’s most ambitious experiments: Solana Mobile’s TEEPIN stack and the wider $SKR economy.

Reception to the phone has been largely positive. The Seeker looks and feels great, while providing a secure and intuitive mobile-first crypto experience. The Seeker community now powers one of crypto’s most active and valuable user bases, with tens of thousands of verifiably authentic users exploring new applications every day.

One of the most exciting aspects of the Seeker experience is undoubtedly the prospect of the upcoming $SKR airdrop. Expected sometime in January 2026, over 30% of the $SKR supply will be distributed to active users in what will likely be one of the largest drops in Solana history.

More recent announcements from Solana Breakpoint suggest that the Solana Mobile stack will be integrated in a wider range of third-party phones, including MediaTek, FXTech, and Trustonic.

5. Network Updates

The wait is finally over, Firedancer is live. Initially demoed in 2022, Jump Crypto’s validator client, Firedancer, has been pushed to the Solana Mainnet, bringing greater client diversity and security to crypto’s most performant network. 

While we might still be a way off the prophesied 1M TPS, Firedancer’s launch is a landmark moment for the network. As promised, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has confirmed it's now time to “pour one out for mainnet beta”, removing the ‘beta’ tag from Solana operations.

With one technological achievement reached, all eyes now turn to the next great milestone. Alpenglow, an upgrade to Solana’s network consensus, was passed in a near-unanimous governance vote in September, promising to eliminate validator voting costs and bring network latency down to as low as 100ms.

6. The Pump ICO

Pump.fun, the viral token launchpad sensation that has polarized the Solana community since January 2024, finally launched its native token. Raising $1.3B in one of the biggest ICOs in crypto history, the $PUMP sale continued a trend that would come to mark Solana’s 2025.

While the $PUMP ICO was hosted across a multitude of platforms, including popular centralized exchanges like Kraken and ByBit, the vast majority of volume happened directly on Solana. Around 74% of all available $PUMP was sold onchain, with exchanges scrambling to keep up.

Since launch, pump.fun has shifted its tokenomic structure, allocating ~100% of protocol revenue towards $PUMP buybacks. Over $216M has been spent on $PUMP buybacks, acquired around 15% of the circulating supply. 

Despite this commitment, traders are still disappointed with pump.fun for not delivering the token airdrop that was originally teased during the announcement of the ICO.

7. Solana’s RWA Scene Expands

If late 2024 and Q1 2025 were all about memecoins, RWAs have since stolen the spotlight. Solana’s RWA scene exploded in 2025, with everything from U.S. Treasury Funds and tokenized stocks to Pokémon cards finding a home in the onchain world.

In March, BlackRock’s $1.7B BUIDL fund was deployed on Solana, while Securitize helped to bring funds like Apollo’s ACRED and VanEck’s Treasury Fund ($VBILL) to the network.

Tokenized stocks became the retail user’s RWA of choice, with Remora Markets and xStocks commanding over 95% of onchain stock trading volume across all chains.

Even exotic RWAs like Pokémon cards enjoyed tremendous growth on Solana, with grail-hunters spending millions of dollars on randomized gacha machines in the hope of finding rare cards.

8. $19B Wiped Out in 10/10 Market Crash

Unfortunately, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows in crypto markets this year. Between Donald Trump’s erratic trade wars, geopolitical conflicts, and rumors of China’s quantum supremacy, markets have suffered more than their fair share of volatility in 2025.

Never was this more apparent than on October 10, when President Trump’s post threatening to impose a 100% tariff on China sparked a vicious selloff. Things went from bad to worse, with the initial dump causing a liquidation cascade that reportedly wiped out over $40B in open positions across the wider crypto market.

Dozens of altcoins were completely wiped out, with all bids cleared from the order books of certain coins on centralized exchanges, briefly sending some alts to 0. 

Two months on from the carnage, traders and investors widely believe that there may still be unseen structural damage left over from the 10/10 crash, with lingering contagion inhibiting market growth ever since.

9. Regulators Go Pro-Crypto

Policymakers and regulators in the U.S. have done a full 180 on crypto, with the harsh legacy of Gary Gensler’s reign of terror nothing but a bitter memory. In July, SEC Chair Paul Atkins committed to turning the United States into the “crypto capital of the world”, launching a commission-wide initiative the SEC has called “Project Crypto”. 

Project Crypto’s central themes focus on providing legal clarity and support for crypto businesses in the U.S., and laying the necessary groundwork to facilitate mass tokenization and ultimately bring all financial markets onchain in a matter of years.

Crypto’s other landmark regulatory win in 2025 was none other than the passing of the GENIUS Act, which clearly defined the federal laws dictating how stablecoins will be governed in the United States.

Outside Project Crypto and the GENIUS Act, the SEC also issued DoubleZero a historic Letter-of-No-Action, a first-of-its-kind document setting an optimistic precedent for DePIN projects across Solana. The Letter assures DoubleZero contributors that network activities will not be classified as ‘Securities Transactions’. 

Additionally, the Letter asserts that the SEC’s Division of Corporate Finance “will not recommend enforcement action” against DoubleZero on account of its economic distribution model. Beyond giving DoubleZero greater peace of mind, the Letter has given other DePIN operators a show of good faith that they also will not be sued on account of DePIN-based economic flows.

10. A Failed Attempt to Bring Down Inflation

Rounding out our list of Solana’s Top 10 stories of  2025, who could forget the fiery debates of what Tushar Jain called the “biggest crypto governance vote ever”. 

SIMD-0228, for those who don’t remember, was a governance proposal floated by Multicoin Capital. Arguing that Solana is overpaying for security, 228 aimed to establish a market-driven emissions curve that would effectively reduce $SOL emissions and slow inflation.

Despite earning the support of ecosystem thought leaders like Mert Mumtaz and Max Resnik, SIMD-0228 was rejected by the voting public.

A record 74% of network stake voted on the proposal, representing a higher voter turnout than every U.S. Presidential election in the past 100 years.

While 228 was rejected, the Solana community hasn’t completely forgotten about $SOL inflation. A new proposal, SIMD-0441, seeks to finish what 228 started, suggesting doubling Solana’s disinflationary rate, reaching a terminal emission rate of 1.5% APY by 2029.

Where to Next in 2026?

Crypto is unpredictable and erratic. As the degenerate savants of CT love to tell you, the most entertaining outcome is often the most likely. Prediction Markets have hit Solana in full force, and whether you consider it gambling or “information trading”, it seems likely that this meta will drive much of crypto’s growth in 2026.

If the recent Solana Breakpoint event tells us anything, it’s that institutions are eyeing up Solana like never before. Trillion-dollar asset managers like State Street and Franklin Templeton are actively exploring tokenization opportunities, and ETF Issuers like Bitwise see incredible opportunity in $SOL’s future. 

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan still considers $SOL a 10x opportunity, and the consistent inflows on Solana ETFs suggest that other TradFi players are thinking the same thing.

Beyond Solana’s institutional success, the network remains crypto’s central hub of onchain trading, the leading blockchain for revenue generation, and the most fertile ground for developers.

Throughout 2025, Solana has cemented its position as the most performant and most liquid venue for trading. Alongside one-off events like the $TRUMP launch and the $PUMP ICO, the rise of Prop AMMs like HumidiFi has meant that DeFi attracts higher trading volume and tighter spreads on $SOL-USD than centralized exchanges can provide. There’s no reason for this trend not to continue in 2026, with Solana remaining the crossroads of all onchain spot trading.

Perps are still something of a blind spot on Solana, with the network struggling to compete with rival chains in this field. A declining validator count is asking questions about ongoing decentralization and the role of independent operators in what is quickly becoming an institutional chain.

However, between network upgrades, emerging applications, and community-led initiatives to support independent valistors, one could argue that these constraints are being resolved. While that certainly doesn’t mean Solana will be a perfect chain afterwards, this cat-and-mouse game of solving problems as they arise is one of the purest expressions of progress there is.

While the headlines that will dominate 2026 are yet to be written, one can imagine that Solana, as the industry’s leading blockchain by most conceivable metrics, will be front and center of crypto’s stories in 2026. 

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