ETHEUR
Ethereum / Euro
cryptoComposite

You can talk shit about the Solana Foundation (which I do), but it doesn't undo that the technology runs laps around Ethereum, and it can do so many things ETH can't. The rest are shitcoins, so we're in agreeance there.

Fair point, BTC/ETH are probably the most arbitraged assets in crypto. But "use other assets" alone doesn't give me something I can test. Could you be specific? * **Which assets?** Top 20–100 by market cap, or smaller? * **Which rule?** E.g. long-only cross-sectional momentum (buy the top X by N-day return, rebalance weekly)? * **What round-trip cost did you assume?** On mid-caps I see much wider spreads than on BTC/ETH. * **Did it hold out-of-sample**, including delisted coins (survivorship bias)? One constraint on my side: spot only, long only. No shorting, leverage or borrowing. So long-short factor results don't transfer directly. If you have a concrete setup that survived realistic costs, I'll pre-register it and run it through my pipeline, including the placebo test and a held-out vault. I'll post the result here, pass or fail.

Hi… we do thousands of trades a day and this never happens to our users, so what you’re saying is a super rare case. Is the ETH address a fresh wallet? Also can you provide us with the trade IDs so we can check with your providers on what is going on?

Notice how you conspicuously danced around any real metric like marketcap which Bitcoin obliterates ETH in? The unfortunate reality about ETH is that it's not OG to beat Bitcoin, and it's not new enough to beat newer products by better fundamental metrics like transaction costs, bandwidth, or latency. But right, stablecoin and de-fi value are the *right* ways to gauge the techology. I'm talking to an investor who's never made anything in Crypto, doesn't understand the tech, but is excited about other people making products that you could hypothetically use (but don't), to justify their investment.

Fair. Here they are (all on Bitvavo EUR data, Apr 2019 to Sep 2026): 4: hourly candles. If the 14:00-15:00 UTC return is positive, go long from 15:00 to 21:00 UTC, otherwise flat. Sized by vol targeting, weight = min(1, 0.30 / realized vol). Costs tested at 0.20/0.35/0.55% per round trip (0.35% main). To pass it needed a higher sharpe than an always-long vol-scaled benchmark, permutation placebo p < 0.01, deflated sharpe, and positive excess return in 6 of 8 years, on both BTC and ETH. 8: the 168h momentum rule, but with the weight multiplied by min(1, 30d vol / Garman-Klass vol of the last 24h), so it cuts exposure when short term vol spikes. It had to beat plain 168h on sharpe and max drawdown. It was worse on both. 9 and 10: 5 min candles, intraday only, everything closed at 23:55 UTC. * 9 enters when the close is above the highest price of the previous 48 candles (4h). * 10 enters when the last hour's return is below -2 sigma, with sigma = std of 5 min log returns over the past 24h × √12. Both buy at the next candle's open + 0.03% slippage, 0.25% fee per side. Take profit is set at +1.0% net, stop at entry × (1 - 2 sigma). If both are hit in the same candle, the stop counts. To pass: mean net return per trade > 0 with the lower 99% bound > 0 (stationary block bootstrap over days, Bonferroni for the number of attempts), better than a placebo entry at p < 0.01, positive in 6 of 8 years, and beating buy and hold with a smaller drawdown. Both came out around -0.55% per trade.

> the utility of bitcoin can be nullified if banks decide to close your account for sending or receiving bitcoin payments Banks can debank you for any variety of arbitrary reasons. The whole purpose of crypto is that you *don't need* to rely on centralized, traditional financial rails/platforms. This is exactly *why* BTC and ETH have value. > there's things which are scarce, that have no value, eg, kidney stones are rare, but they have no value You're comparing baseball cards to a decentralized financial platform settling more value than Visa and Mastercard?

I am a 21-year-old male, currently in my third year at a tier-1business college. My plan is to work in traditional finance like in consulting or IB roles for the next one to two years. During this time, I intend to focus on studying advanced maths and programming languages.I am open to enrolling in distance learning programs offered by accredited top-tier Unis to improve my knowledge. Subsequently, I intend to MFE or a Master's degree in Quantitative Finance/Computational Finance from institutions such as Baruch, ETH Zurich, NUS, NTU. I have a few questions: 1.Considering my business and traditional finance background, is it practical for me? While I am not unfamiliar with programming or pure maths, it would require an effort on my part to prepare. 2. Would my age be a disadvantage? I'd be at least 26 when I graduate from my masters, but I've heard that firms tend to favor younger grads for QT. 3. Considering the current peak of AI, the job market being terrible, and increasing competition in this field, do you think pursuing this path is practical for me? Thank you for helping me out.

Hello, As you probably would have been informed by now the issue is you are sending the ETH to a wallet which has a poor rating by the surveillance companies these central exchanges have to fund to remain complicit. They cannot knowingly pay out to an address which has known links to sanctioned countries, dark markets and in some cases gambling sites. The great thing is you can just create a new Ethereum wallet to receive the payout too. I have NEVER seen a monero > Ethereum swap fail to a clean wallet address. The claim that the exchanges are withholding your money isn’t accurate either. They are just notoriously slow at refunding.

There's a new Octant round active right now focused on funding teams advancing privacy on Ethereum and the open internet. There aren't a lot of programs like these anymore, so please check it out and help support your favorite projects. Min. contribution 0.07 ETH / $20

>I run a small site that scores coins against their own price history, so I'm biased, but ETH looks fairly cheap on that right now. It's at \~$2,420, about 5% under its 200-week average. Your 4.5k would be roughly +86% from here. It was at 4,800 last August and 1,470 that April, so "definitely" is doing a lot of work over a 1–2 year window. Honestly the model's been a so-so guide for ETH specifically, so I wouldn't size 25k off any single number, mine included.

Have USDC on solana, want some of it on base to try a thing. bridged a test amount this morning and it's sitting on base doing nothing, no ETH there to pay for anything. is there a way to know ahead of time how much ETH a chain is going to want from you for gas? i guessed a number for the second go, a slice of the USDC on SimpleSwap, picked ETH on the base network, not mainnet, checked that twice. in flight as i type this. if the guess is way off i'll know soon enough.

This is definitely positive news for Ethereum, but the post seems a bit more optimistic than the actual data supports. What’s particularly interesting is that Ethereum’s application revenue is showing strong growth while ETH’s price remains under pressure. If this revenue growth continues and demand for ETH picks up, it could set the stage for a strong recovery in the coming months. However, while the fundamentals look promising, there’s still not enough evidence to suggest that a new all-time high is just around the corner.

ETH Bullish Divergence

In terms of ETH price, I am more excited about a dovish fed. You can already open a brokerage account and borrow against stocks just like rich people do, if you want to. The minimum account value by statute to enable margin borrowing is $2000, if I remember.

The mechanism is supply and demand at the margin. As institutions accumulate ETH, they compete with other buyers for coins available at current prices, potentially bidding prices higher. If they then hold those coins long-term, that reduces the supply available for sale. The higher price can persist without continued buying because the market doesn't need constant inflows to maintain an equilibrium. But if other holders sell enough to offset institutional demand, prices won't necessarily rise. That may be exactly what we're seeing now. Hard to say for sure.

**Source:** [https://x.com/Blockworks/status/2110732492671942964](https://x.com/Blockworks/status/2110732492671942964) https://preview.redd.it/v7g5580t1ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=d63a430457a84ee01da00fce04dd2cb1815a3d1d # Executive Summary Solana's core financial metrics turned higher in Q3 2026. REV rose 48% QoQ to $75.7M, its first quarterly increase since Q4 2024, and application revenue rose 48% to $299.1M, the highest since Q3 2025. September was the strongest month for both REV ($30.1M) and app revenue ($117.1M) since January, and tokenized equities set a new all-time high of $4.4B in September alone, taking the category to a record $7.1B for the quarter, up 40% QoQ. DEX volume rose 23% to $197.2B, and Solana's share of spot DEX volume across chains climbed to 36%, the ninth consecutive quarter above 30%, cementing its positioning as the king of spot trading. Institutional demand accelerated alongside the rally. SOL spot ETPs recorded $492.3M in net inflows, more than four times Q2's $113.7M and the strongest quarter since Q3 2025, with US spot SOL ETFs posting their largest single day on record ($71.5M on September 25th) late in the quarter. Spot ETP AUM nearly doubled to $3.7B, with Bitwise’s BSOL crossing the $1B AUM mark. Staked SOL reached a record 441M and DATCO holdings grew 8% to 18.8M SOL, the strongest quarterly growth since Q4 2025. Solana's first binding onchain votes concluded on August 28th on Solana’s governance platform, with SIMD 550 (SGP 002) passing, doubling the disinflation rate and pulling the 1.5% terminal inflation rate forward from 2032 to 2029. SIMD 553 (SGP 003), which proposed a resource and inclusion fee, fell short of the two-thirds threshold. At the protocol level, slot times stepped down from 400ms to 250ms across three activations, blocks grew to 100M compute units, and the network processed a record 14.2B non-vote transactions. Alpenglow, which brings 150ms finality, went live on public testnet on September 22nd and now moves toward mainnet scheduling. https://preview.redd.it/b9d1zhhv1ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=a052e2152b6f383fce5d2be7a247289845bcd84c # Financials # Real Economic Value (REV) Solana's Real Economic Value (REV) totaled $75.7M in Q3 2026, up 48% from Q2's $51.0M and the first quarterly increase since Q4 2024. The recovery strengthened every month, with REV rising from $19.1M in July to $26.5M in August and $30.1M in September, the highest monthly figure since January. The rebound was broad-based across components: priority fees rose 58% QoQ to $48.7M and contributed roughly 64% of REV, Jito tips rose 30% to $12.9M, and base and vote fees together contributed $14.0M on record transaction counts. [Solana: Network REV. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/n354tqyw1ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=e9b9ee1161fd1ac54a50c80d16fa5b76f086e2c1) Token holder net income, which measures REV less operator payments, came in at -$0.6M for the quarter, a notable improvement from -$3.6M in Q2. More importantly, it turned positive in August (+$0.1M) for the first time since February and stayed positive in September (+$0.1M), meaning fee revenue once again exceeded the network's operator cost base for two consecutive months. The distribution of REV across network stakeholders remained consistent with recent quarters: roughly 76% accrued to validators, 23% to token holders, and about 1% was captured by Jito. [Solana: Distribution of Network REV. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/rd6hj6cy1ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=6fa4b6c5ef9b23f5a59f08933bb5e0a5fc9aa222) When looking at revenue by chain, Solana ranked fourth with an 11% share ($75.7M), up from fifth and 8% in Q2. Hyperliquid (24%, $158.1M) and Canton (24%, $157.6M) led, with Tron third at 12% ($77.8M). Solana moved ahead of Ethereum ($41.1M) during the quarter, stayed ahead of BNB Chain ($54.2M), and briefly ranked third in August with a 12% share. It is important to note that on Canton, fees are burned by applications rather than end users, with those applications and validators receiving newly minted CC as activity rewards. As such, activity on the network is highly incentivized. [Network Revenue. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/chain-comparison](https://preview.redd.it/l7csq7mz1ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=bb4d1987ca582a1c7eb8d8f59fdb8338e91c2a20) # Staker Revenue SOL's nominal staking yield ended Q3 at approximately 4.8%, down from 5.4% at the end of Q2, as the emission schedule continued to decay. With inflation now sitting near 3.6%, real staking yield (nominal yield less inflation) ended the quarter at approximately 1.3%. [Solana: Staking Yields. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/uuqn2vr02ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=456e22593b4b21f4622ee004f190904ed83def70) Solana stakers earned $495.0M in Q3 2026, up 4% from Q2, as SOL’s price recovery outweighed the lower issuance rate. Issuance accounted for roughly 98% of staker revenue, with Jito tip yield contributing $10.6M, up 32% QoQ. Staked SOL reached a record 441.3M at quarter end, up 3.3% QoQ, and the dollar value of staked SOL rose 64% to $52.6B. [Solana: Staker Revenue. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/q888gj022ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=3d6cec32560e5a03683f94250b3c007629d3186f) Q3 saw the issuance debate turn into policy with the passing of SGP 002. SGP 002, which reflects Helius' SIMD 550, passed its voting phase on August 28th and doubles Solana's disinflation rate from 15% to 30% a year, leaving the 1.5% terminal rate unchanged while reaching it in 2029 rather than 2032 and removing roughly 18.9M SOL of emissions over the period. The vote itself took place on Solana’s new governance platform. Passage requires a one-third quorum and two-thirds approval of participating stake, with SGP 002 clearing both with little room to spare. Delegator overrides, which allow stakers to override their validator’s votes, proved decisive. 901 stakers overrode their validator’s votes to move 11.2M SOL of stake at more than 99% in favor. The staker-economics story remains tied to SIMD 123, which would introduce a standardized in-protocol mechanism for validators to share priority fees with stakers. With priority fees at nearly two-thirds of REV, in-protocol fee sharing remains the single largest pending improvement to staker value accrual, and it is expected to ship alongside Alpenglow. # Application Revenue Application revenue serves as an indicator of success for businesses within an ecosystem. While REV is an important metric to track, the true metric of an ecosystem's product market fit is the revenue generated by user-focused applications. Solana applications generated $299.1M in revenue in Q3 2026, up 48% from Q2's $201.5M and the highest quarterly total since Q3 2025. Monthly revenue climbed from $75.4M in July to $106.5M in August and $117.1M in September, the strongest month since January. [Solana: Application Revenue. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/yl2pd2242ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=61e00bc5f7a1a48bf10b8c874e67f07586f9b5ae) The leading apps by revenue in Q3 were Pump ($121.5M, 41%), Collector Crypt ($35.0M, 12%), Fomo ($24.9M, 8%), Pacifica ($18.0M, 6%), and Axiom ($16.2M, 5%). The breadth behind the leader improved meaningfully, with trading terminal Fomo quadrupling its revenue QoQ and Axiom growing 65%. Phantom ($15.6M) and Jupiter ($11.6M) also grew revenues through each month of the quarter. # Institutional Flows The institutional adoption seen through Q2 continued into Q3. As highlighted last quarter, seven of the 29 global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) have live Solana capabilities, led by JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, the two most systemically important names on the list by capital-surcharge tier. The deployments span the full service stack rather than a single use case: tokenization and delivery-versus-payment settlement at JP Morgan, SOL and SPL custody alongside USDC mint/burn and fund administration at BNY Mellon, custody, spot trading, ETFs, and lending at Morgan Stanley, stablecoin issuance at Société Générale, and a money-market fund at State Street. In Q3, Charles Schwab, with nearly 40 million active accounts and more than $13 trillion in client assets, announced spot SOL access through Schwab Crypto, and Morgan Stanley rolled out SOL trading on E\*Trade. On the asset management side, BlackRock launched BRSRV, a money market fund for stablecoin reserves on Solana, and filed with the SEC to issue tokenized fund shares on the network. Visa's new Stablecoin Platform, built to let banks and fintechs mint, hold, and transfer stablecoins, launched with Solana among its initial supported networks. Investors and institutions can now reach SOL and Solana-based assets through the brokerages, funds, and payment networks they already use. # Exchange-Traded Products (ETPs) SOL spot ETPs recorded $492.3M in net inflows in Q3 2026, more than four times Q2's $113.7M and the strongest quarter since Q3 2025. Flows accelerated each month: $30.6M in July, $197.6M in August, and $264.2M in September, the strongest month in a year. US spot SOL ETFs set a YTD inflow record of $56.1M on August 27th, then surpassed it twice in September, culminating in $71.5M on September 25th. That day capped a $184.5M week, with Bitwise's BSOL contributing $54.3M on September 25th, its best day of 2026. BSOL now holds $1.36B in AUM, having crossed the $1B AUM mark in early September. [Solana: Spot ETP Net Flows. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/dnvnyc662ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=e85c4b4db821ac2a2ca49e36a49d3440856d6d46) Regionally, North America remained the engine with $450.8M in net spot inflows, while Europe turned positive at $41.4M after three consecutive quarters of outflows. Spot ETP AUM ended the quarter at $3.7B, up 94% QoQ, as inflows and SOL’s 62% price rally compounded. [Solana: Spot ETP Net Flows by Region. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/8ul995f72ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=75b66b8e96e7d73c14f9b3781b05251d71721233) # Digital Asset Treasury Companies (DATCOs) SOL DATCO holdings saw their strongest growth since Q4 2025, rising 7.7% QoQ to 18.8M SOL from 17.4M at the end of Q2, with aggregate NAV up 71% to $2.2B. Most of the growth came in August, when SOL's rally let treasury companies issue equity accretively again after months of mNAV discounts and thin secondary liquidity. Forward Industries led the accumulation, adding 254K SOL between July 1st and August 3rd to reach roughly 7.8M SOL and SOL equivalents, nearly all of it staked through its own validator. [Solana: SOL Holdings by DATCOs. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/sxte40092ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=2c99ccbd11b645757c58690476f875436c00877f) # Sector Analysis Retail traders returned to Solana at speed in Q3, driving record transaction counts, a 69% jump in trade count, and resurgent launchpads. Newer categories kept growing alongside them: tokenized equities set a record in a market that grew roughly ninefold, and Solana's share of spot DEX volume across chains rose to 36%. The Solana Foundation debuted their Frontier Traders program in Q3, a community and rewards program for high-volume trades, which saw promising early traction. # Spot Trading Solana DEX spot volumes totaled $197.2B in Q3 2026, up 23% from Q2's $160.8B. Solana handled the most spot volume across networks for yet another quarter, representing 36% of volume, ahead of Ethereum (17%), BNB Chain (14%), and Robinhood Chain (12%). This marks the ninth consecutive quarter in which Solana accounted for over 30% of spot DEX volume, and its share rose from 34% in Q2. [Solana: DEX Spot Volume. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/w57c2zma2ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=ef7612bea8f739c662bd9ee377d4a518e862dd19) Volumes rose from $50.5B in July to $67.2B in August and $79.5B in September, the strongest month since February. Trade count grew even faster, rising 69% QoQ to 1.74B trades, with September alone reaching 771M trades. Pump's integrated AMM was the largest single venue at roughly 21% of Q3 volume, followed by BisonFi (13%) and Raydium (10%). Aggregators routed 55% of volumes to spot DEXs in Q3 2026, down from 65% in Q2 as more flow went directly to venues. The Frontier Traders program drew strong early adoption. In the first 30 days after launch, more than 90,000 retail traders signed up, and Frontier Traders activations drove over $3.6 billion in combined perpetuals and spot trading volume. These results point to strong retail demand and show that the program can turn user acquisition into meaningful on-chain trading activity. SOL-stablecoin pairs remained the anchor at roughly 40% of volume, while memecoins rose to 29% from 16% in Q2, their strongest showing since mid-2025. Stablecoin swaps represented 15% of volume, foreign tokens 7%, and project tokens and tokenized assets roughly 4% each. [Solana: Spot Volume by Pair Category. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/2wofrf1c2ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=e6f97ca1e2d6318ea86904b8ac73afeb927bfdc6) Prop AMMs remained the largest exchange type on Solana. Prop AMMs are spot exchanges with actively managed liquidity via oracle updates, each operated by an individual market maker who updates quotes multiple times per second. Their share of spot DEX volume was 40% in Q3, down from 51% in Q2, as memecoin flow concentrated on constant-product pools, whose share rose to 18% from 10%. The shift tracks the asset mix: prop AMMs specialize in the major pairs, and memecoins trade almost entirely on pools. [Solana: Spot Volume by Exchange Type. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/e65bmdjd2ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=c11419d92214e673bd473b8ae576da59c3eac27b) # Tokenized Assets Tokenized assets set another record in Q3 2026. DEX volume in tokenized assets reached $8.1B, up 26% QoQ and a new all-time high for a seventh consecutive quarter. [Solana: Tokenized Asset Volume by Sector. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/mle9r3te2ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=3ee84eec344ace102d0f58ace0e1fcc223344c7a) Tokenized equities accounted for 88% of that activity at $7.1B, up 40% from $5.1B in Q2 and a record for the category. After a quieter July ($1.5B) and August ($1.3B), September reached an all-time monthly high of $4.4B, surpassing June's SpaceX-driven $3.5B. The September surge coincided with a rapid expansion of supply and access: tokenized-equity holders on Solana rose 88% in the first twelve days of the month to more than 800K as StonkFun and Pump introduced trading pairs backed by tokenized stocks. [Solana: Tokenized Equities Volume. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/kyj39plg2ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=e839f6f7dcb413d42ca16c9d8a9a516915e0abf3) The category also became far larger and more competitive. Cross-chain tokenized-equity volume reached $49.7B in Q3, roughly nine times Q2. Solana's share of cross-chain volume moved from 95% in Q2 to 14% for the quarter, with BNB Chain at 55%, Robinhood Chain at 28%, and Base at 3%. The monthly trend is more encouraging, with Solana's share nearly doubling from 10% in August to 19% in September, as its own volume more than tripled MoM. [Tokenized Equities Volume Share. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/spot-dex](https://preview.redd.it/gphwd3yh2ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=a699635ff417a020493c9a05e7d9f9a26f5cf280) Beyond equities, tokenized private credit contributed $539M (7% of volume), commodities nearly tripled to $363M, and collectibles, led by Collector Crypt's trading-card market, grew 78% to $36M. # Foreign L1 Tokens Foreign L1 tokens traded $⁠12.8B on Solana in Q3, 6.5% of DEX volume, down 5% from Q2's $⁠13.5B as memecoin volume expanded around them. BTC pairs grew 4% to $⁠5.7B, followed by ETH ($⁠2.4B, up 7%), HYPE ($⁠2.2B, down 39%), and ZEC ($⁠2.0B, up 30%), which nearly drew level with HYPE. [Solana: Foreign L1 Spot Volume by Asset. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/bo2kgx9j2ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=be438c317257ef190332fb897fc98f27763f4338) # Perpetual Futures Solana-based perpetual futures platforms processed $146.2B in notional volume in Q3 2026, down 20% from Q2's record $183.2B but still the second-highest quarter on record. Monthly volume was steady at $47.1B in July and $46.1B in August before rising 15% to $53.0B in September. Pacifica overtook GMTrade for the top spot with 44% of volume ($64.3B) against GMTrade's 42% ($62.1B), and Jupiter at 11% ($16.7B). [Solana: Perps Volume by Venue. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/bckzg5vk2ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=20ebb4137eaeb39cfb6f6a41f5baf9da35c9333a) Phoenix, built by Ellipsis Labs, remains the most credible attempt to close the perps gap on Solana in a fully onchain form, and it grew rapidly in Q3. Volume more than tripled QoQ to $2.7B. Drift, meanwhile, completed its rebuild after the April exploit and relaunched as Velocity, a USDT-settled perps venue, and opened claims for exploit losses shortly after quarter end. # Lending Lending recovered with the market. Total deposits across Solana money markets ended Q3 at $5.0B, up 18% from $4.2B at the end of Q2, while outstanding loans rose 10% to $2.0B. The increase retraced most of the first half's decline as demand for onchain leverage returned with the rally. USDe supply on Solana, which scaled from near zero to over $500M in Q2 through the Jupiter Lend and Kamino markets, held near $450M at quarter end. [Solana: Lending Deposits vs Loans. Source: https:\/\/app.blockworks.com\/analytics\/solana](https://preview.redd.it/6xu5s0gm2ovh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=5dbe652e7a1bcba2da8f5c683ba6ebe7ebf3ea74) # Consumer Token Launchpads Launchpads had their strongest quarter in a year. Launchpad volume totaled $50.8B in Q3 2026, up 95% from Q2's $26.0B and the highest since Q3 2025, while token creation rose 27% to 3.5M tokens launched, the most since Q1 2025. Launchpads on Solana generated $96.1M in revenue, up 50% from $63.9M in Q2, with monthly revenue rising from $21.9M in July to $36.4M in August and $37.8M in September. \[Screenshot\] Solana: Launchpad Revenue. Source: [https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana](https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana) Pump accounted for 92% of launchpad revenue. The notable new entrant was StonkFun, which captured roughly 7% of Q3 revenue, the first launchpad to hold a visible share against Pump in 2026. Q3's gains came from a broader return of retail activity, and new entrants found room to compete. # Stablecoins Total stablecoin supply on Solana ended Q3 2026 at $16.8B, up 3% QoQ and the second consecutive quarter of growth, and climbed further to $17.4B in the first days of October. USDC held 47% of supply and USDT 23%, while USD1 (8%), USDGO (7%), PYUSD (5%), and USDG (4%) together accounted for nearly a quarter, a sign of how many issuers now treat Solana as a primary deployment venue. \[Screenshot\] Solana: Stablecoin Supply. Source: [https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana](https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana) # Payments Solana has processed more than $5T in stablecoin volume so far in 2026, and Q3 extended that momentum. The quarter closed with the September 30th launch of Open USD (OUSD), a stablecoin from Open Standard issued natively on Solana by Bridge, with reserves held at BlackRock, Lead Bank, and BNY. Its five founding partners, Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe, and Visa, have committed more than $⁠1B to OUSD liquidity, and more than 200 companies, including UBS and SBI Holdings, plan to integrate it. Remittances were the clearest live use case. Western Union rolled out its Solana-based USDPT stablecoin alongside its Digital Asset Network and Stablecard with Rain, using Crossmint's wallet and payment infrastructure to link digital dollars to cash access across more than 360,000 collection points. Zepz, the company behind WorldRemit and Sendwave, launched the Sendwave Wallet for recipients in more than 100 countries, and MoneyGram brought its Ramps service to Solana, giving builders a single API for cash deposits in more than 25 countries and withdrawals in more than 170. The Solana Foundation formalized the push with the appointment of Jamal Raees as General Manager of Payments. Agentic payments continued to build on the same rails. x402, the open payment standard for AI agents now hosted by the Linux Foundation, has processed roughly 200M transactions and $⁠50B in volume across about 150,000 merchant endpoints, and is referenced in the documentation of Cloudflare, Stripe, and AWS. In September, Solana added payment channels as a native primitive, letting an agent authorize a spending limit once, meter usage offchain, and settle in a single transaction, a design built to support up to one million payments per second. Looking ahead, Solana’s high throughput and low transaction costs make it well suited to payments at scale. These deployments position the network as the settlement layer for a growing share of real-world stablecoin payments. # Network Analysis # Transaction Count and TPS Solana processed a record 14.2B non-vote transactions in Q3 2026, up 45% from Q2's 9.8B. August set the all-time monthly record at 5.2B transactions, and successful transactions reached a record 3.2B in September, the third consecutive monthly high. Of Q3's transactions, 63% were successful and 37% were reverted. Reverted transactions are most often associated with automated strategies such as arbitrage bots, and their share rises when bot-heavy retail flow returns, as it did this quarter. Most are trades that hit their slippage limits and reverted as designed. \[Screenshot\] Solana: Non-Vote Transaction Count. Source: [https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana](https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana) Non-vote transactions per second (TPS) averaged roughly 1,790 in Q3, up from 1,250 in Q2. Daily active addresses averaged 2.3M, up 16% QoQ, as the retail return showed up in users as well as activity. Put simply, Solana is now processing more activity, faster than at any point in its history. \[Screenshot\] Solana: Non-Vote TPS. Source: [https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana](https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana) # Median Transaction Fees Median transaction fees averaged $0.0005 in Q3 2026 and never exceeded $0.0007 on any day of the quarter. Fees held stable through record transaction counts, a 69% jump in trade count, and three slot-time reductions. Solana is increasing its bandwidth, meaning how much activity fits in each block (block capacity rose 66% with 100M CU blocks), while reducing latency, meaning how quickly new blocks are produced (slot times fell from 400ms to 250ms). Fee stability at this level is what makes high-frequency market making, prop AMM quote updates, and consumer applications economically viable on shared infrastructure. Among chains generating over $10K in daily fees, Solana's median fee was less than half the second cheapest chain's and roughly one-hundredth of the most expensive. \[Screenshot\] Solana: Median Transaction Fees vs Other Chains. Source: [https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana](https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana) # Validators and Decentralization Solana's first binding governance votes tested who controls the network. Delegator overrides decided the disinflation vote, with stakers outvoting some of the largest validators and showing that stakers hold final authority over operators. Measured on stake control, self-directed delegation and geographic distribution, Solana remains comparable to Ethereum. \[Screenshot\] Solana vs Ethereum: Decentralization. Source: [https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana](https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana) The resilience record continued to support the same conclusion. On August 12th, a routing incident at a network provider in Frankfurt did not disrupt consensus, which the Solana Foundation attributed to the diversity of validator stake. Through the outage, 597 of 699 validators kept voting and affected validators recovered within 40 minutes of the incident. Alpenglow will raise the network's tolerance for offline stake to 40%, further hardening consensus against concentration risk. # Product & Ecosystem Updates The Q3 roadmap moved from prerequisites to activations: live onchain governance, larger blocks, faster slots, larger transactions, and Alpenglow running on public testnet. # Onchain Governance On July 1st, the Solana Foundation activated Solana Governance Proposals (SGPs), the network's first binding onchain voting mechanism, with stake-weighted votes and delegator overrides. SGP 001 ratified the process itself, and SGP 002 and SGP 003 delivered the first network-level proposals. Any validator with 100K SOL delegated can submit a proposal, which advances to a binding vote after collecting support from 15% of active stake. SGP 002, carrying SIMD 550's disinflation doubling, passed on August 28th. The result came down to the final hours, with large validators voting against the proposal and Kraken's late reversal of its initial vote lifting support just above the threshold. Validator-cast stake alone totaled 165.1M SOL in favor and would have fallen short of two-thirds, while 901 delegator overrides moved 11.2M SOL at more than 99% in favor. Overrides still amounted to only about 4% of participating stake. SGP 003, carrying SIMD 553's resource-based fee burn, failed the same day under the same requirements, reaching 63% support against the two-thirds bar. Active opposition came from the application layer, led by Jupiter (11.8M SOL) and Bitwise (8.4M SOL), who argued the fee would raise costs most for compute-intensive applications such as trading venues and make Solana's cost structure less predictable. Delegators again broke heavily in favor, with 739 overrides moving 10.9M SOL at 97% in favor. As the proposal was rejected at the authorization stage rather than on implementation grounds, a revised version can return to the process. # 100M CU Blocks (SIMD 286) On July 29th, Solana raised its block compute limit from 60M to 100M compute units, a 66% increase. The change was designed as headroom for demand spikes rather than a new baseline. In the days after activation, median block size grew modestly while the largest blocks expanded sharply, and slot times were unaffected. # Slot-Time Reduction (SIMD 525) Q3 brought the first slot-time reductions in Solana's history. SIMD 525 steps slot times from 400ms to 200ms in four 50ms increments, each gated by its own feature activation. The first two steps activated in August, taking slot times to 350ms and then 300ms, and the third took them to 250ms on September 18th, lifting block production to four slots per second. The final step to 200ms is live on devnet and testnet and will be scheduled for mainnet once block-skip rates remain stable at the current cadence. # Transaction v1 (SIMD 385) On September 15th, Solana activated its new v1 transaction format on mainnet, raising the maximum transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes. Operations that previously required several transactions, including zero-knowledge proofs and confidential transfers, now fit in a single atomic transaction, giving tokenized-stock and DeFi applications more room for complex routes and execution. Wallets began adding support shortly after activation. # Alpenglow Alpenglow, Solana's largest protocol upgrade to date, made concrete progress in Q3. Its prerequisites went live on mainnet, with BLS key registration activating July 8th and the Validator Admission Ticket on July 22nd. Agave v4.3, the release carrying Alpenglow, was recommended for all mainnet validators on September 21st. On September 22nd, Alpenglow began activation on public testnet, the same migration path devnet and mainnet will follow, after more than four months of rehearsals on a community cluster. The upgrade replaces Tower BFT and Proof of History with a new consensus design targeting 150ms finality, roughly a 100x improvement, removes onchain vote transactions (the dominant recurring validator cost), and raises tolerance for offline stake to 40%. For applications, sub-second finality closes most of the remaining user-experience gap with centralized venues. # Closing Summary & Outlook Demand returned to Solana in Q3 2026, and nearly every financial line improved. REV rose 48% and token holder net income turned positive for two consecutive months, application revenue grew 48% with breadth improving beneath the leader, and tokenized equities set a record quarter capped by a $4.4B all-time high in September. Institutions leaned in as well: spot ETPs absorbed $492.3M, more than four times Q2, staked SOL reached a record 441M, and treasury companies resumed accumulating. Momentum strengthened into quarter end, with September the strongest month of the quarter for REV, app revenue, ETP inflows, DEX volume, and tokenized equities. Token holders directly ratified a supply cut that pulls terminal inflation forward three years. The competitive landscape also evolved: tokenized equities are now a multi-chain market roughly nine times larger than in Q2, and Solana's share recovery to 19% in September will be a key line to watch. Retail activity drove much of the quarter's growth, and sustaining it alongside the newer settlement-driven categories will shape the next several quarters. Solana's upcoming catalysts are concrete. Alpenglow is live on testnet and moving toward mainnet, bringing 150ms finality, the removal of vote costs, and higher offline-stake tolerance; slot times are one step from their 200ms target; SIMD 550's faster disinflation is now ratified policy; and SIMD 123 would give stakers an in-protocol claim on the priority fees that make up nearly two-thirds of REV. Full report available [here](https://blockworks.com/quarterly-reports) for download. All data from this report was powered by the Blockworks Solana [dashboard](https://app.blockworks.com/analytics/solana).

\>A lasting increase in the amount of ETH institutions and investors want to hold can establish a higher equilibrium price, even without continuous inflows I guess I don't understand this part. Why would that be? We've had a lasting increase in institutional buying already and it hasn't happened.

Another milestone reached - over 4 million ETH is now locked in Ethereum 2.0

What’s your reason for choosing ETH, Monero, and QNT specifically? They’re quite different bets. Also, is two years a firm deadline or could you hold longer if things don’t go your way?

You're conflating continuous buying pressure with sustained demand for an asset. ETH doesn't need institutions buying indefinitely to appreciate. A lasting increase in the amount of ETH institutions and investors want to hold can establish a higher equilibrium price, even without continuous inflows. Fee burning adds another mechanism for value accrual. The real question is whether growing network adoption translates into greater demand for ETH itself. Time will tell.

There's now over 1.5 million ETH sent to the Ethereum 2.0 contract

but the network is already secure so its just hard to buy that these institutions would feel the need to buy reserves to play a part in it. and even if they do, thats not really the continuous demand we need to find. Tom Lee has just about finished his 5% stack and that did basically nothing for the price (if anything kept it afloat from an even deeper goblintown.) These other places would just buy a certain amount of ETH for their reserves, then stop. And we're back to where we are now. ETH, in my opinion, needs a continuous demand that we don't currently have or its not going to go anywhere. And I understand why people think thats just incessant whining and they dont wanna hear it but thats a cold hard truth I dont see any way around. Not if you have any interest in ETH going past this 1k-5k band.

The tradeoff is less “regulated means safe” and more which risks you’d rather manage. With an exchange, you avoid running contracts or tracking onchain rewards, but add custody, withdrawal, and platform counterparty risk; Genesis/Earn is a reminder that products under the same brand can have very different risks. Splitting can make sense if you’re comfortable with that tradeoff—just check whether the exchange is actually staking your ETH and what happens if withdrawals are paused.

my hangup is while you're correct we're in the early stages, we're still seeing it happen right now and theres nothing that puts ETH on a scalable value trajectory. RWAs and tokenization can continue to happen to the tunes of billions and billions and while that is an excellent use case of Ethereum, ETH doesnt need to be any more expensive than it is today. I continue to see Ethereum have these big wins but it is almost totally decoupled from ETH.

FWIW, I never downvote people for facts, you are right, we haven't. But we have come pretty close, that's why I'd say ~$1500 would be oversold. But $2400 oversold? This is the heart of the range ETH has been for the majority of the last decade. It's not oversold.