SOL fell 33% in the first quarter of 2026 to close at around $83, but Messari’s Q1 State of Solana report tells a story that’s harder to dismiss than the price chart would suggest.
While dollar-denominated numbers dropped across the board, the network set new records for daily transaction volume, grew its real-world asset market cap to over $2 billion, and barely budged on validator revenue.
Record Activity, Shrinking Prices
The headline figure from the report was the new all-time high for average daily non-vote transactions: 112.6 million, up 50% from the previous quarter and 15% above the previous record set in Q2 2025.
It means that more transactions happened on Solana every day in Q1 than at any point in the network’s history, which clearly sits at odds with the price decline. Meanwhile, Chain GDP, which is Messari’s term for total application revenue, stayed almost flat at $342.2 million, fractionally above Q4 2025’s $341.8 million.
Per the report, Pump.fun is still the largest single revenue source at $124.7 million, an improvement of 17% quarter-over-quarter. In second place was Axiom, a trading app, which recorded a 36% jump, raking in $42.4 million.
However, the most dramatic mover was a launchpad that lets users share trading fees with social media accounts, called Bags. Its revenue went up 1,347% to $11.5 million after meme coins tied to open-source AI projects generated intense trading activity in January.
That momentum didn’t hold, with Bags’ revenue dropping 85% month-over-month into February, making the episode another example of how quickly new activity cycles through Solana’s application layer.
On the other hand, DeFi TVL fell 22% quarter-over-quarter to $6.16 billion, a drop that tracks almost directly with SOL’s price dip rather than with any meaningful outflow of users. Solana’s share of total DeFi TVL moved barely at all, going from 6.9% to 6.7%, while Kamino reclaimed the top protocol spot with $1.72 billion, edging Jupiter at $1.69 billion.
Drift’s performance was affected by a $285 million exploit attributed to a sophisticated social engineering operation linked to North Korean state-affiliated threat actors.
Looking at Real Economic Value, which is basically the fees and MEV tips paid to validators, the report shows it fell just 1% to $89.5 million. That figure placed Solana second among all networks, only behind Hyperliquid’s $156 million.
RWAs Take the Lead
If one story defined Q1 beyond the bear market backdrop, it was real-world assets. On Solana, the market saw its value grow 43% quarter-over-quarter to $2.01 billion.
BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized money market fund doubled to $525.4 million after Anchorage Digital added custody support, with the latter holding around 81% of the total supply on-network by quarter’s end.
Meanwhile, Ondo Finance launched 200-plus tokenized US stocks and ETFs on Solana, including a same-day tokenization of BitGo stock on the date of the company’s NYSE IPO.
Finally, while the stablecoin market cap on the platform remained at just under $15 billion, the composition changed. USDC fell 21% to $7.83 billion but remains the largest at 53% of the total, while USDT rose 34% to $2.89 billion.
At the same time, World Liberty Financial’s USD1 climbed 473% to $883.5 million, largely on the back of Binance reallocating customer holdings to Solana.
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Source: https://cryptopotato.com/report-solana-activity-hits-record-high-despite-sols-33-q1-drop/
