Author: 137Labs
Chapter One: What Signal Does Grayscale's Renewed Research on Solana Release?
Over the past few years, whenever the market mentioned Solana, the first thoughts were often two keywords—high performance and Meme.
As a representative project in the last round of public blockchain competition, Solana rapidly rose to prominence with its advantages of high throughput, low fees, and fast confirmations. It also became one of the most active ecosystems in the last Meme boom due to phenomena like BONK, dogwifhat (WIF), and Pump.fun. However, this label also somewhat obscured deeper changes within the Solana ecosystem.
Recently, the global digital asset management firm Grayscale released its latest research report, "Solana: Crypto's Financial Bazaar," re-evaluating Solana's value proposition. The most noteworthy aspect of this report is not its re-emphasis on Solana's technical performance, but rather a new judgment it proposes: Solana is evolving from a high-performance public blockchain into an application platform supporting large-scale economic activities.
Grayscale didn't even define Solana as the "fastest blockchain," but instead used the symbolically rich concept of Crypto's Financial Bazaar.
"Bazaar" isn't a traditional financial market, but more like a 24/7 digital city: developers continuously build applications, users constantly trade, pay, lend, and invest, with capital, information, and value flowing freely across the network, ultimately forming continuously growing economic activity.
This statement signifies a fundamental shift in Grayscale's focus regarding Solana.
If, during the last bull market, institutional discussions centered on whether Solana's TPS could surpass other chains; today, institutions are more concerned with whether Solana can continuously attract developers, retain users, and form genuine network effects.
This is not only a value re-assessment for Solana but also a shift in the valuation logic for the entire public blockchain sector.
Chapter Two: Public Blockchain Competition Enters the Second Half: It's No Longer About TPS, But Economic Activity
Looking back at the development of Layer1 public blockchains over the past few years, one can see the competitive logic has clearly shifted.
In 2021, the market cared most about performance.
Ethereum emphasized security and decentralization, Solana rose rapidly relying on high throughput, and BNB Chain attracted a large user base with low costs. Subsequently, new public chains like Aptos, Sui, and Base entered the market, with TPS, Gas Fee, and block time almost becoming the core metrics for evaluating a blockchain's competitiveness.
However, as infrastructure matured, these technical metrics began to converge.
More and more blockchains could achieve second-level confirmations and extremely low transaction costs, making it difficult to build long-term competitive barriers based solely on performance.
Grayscale's report suggests that what truly determines a public blockchain's long-term value today is no longer performance, but the real economic activity occurring on-chain. In other words, the evaluation standard has shifted from "infrastructure capability" to "business operation capability."
The questions institutional investors focus on have also changed from "how many transactions can be processed per second" to:
· How many real users are there daily?
· How many real transactions occur?
· How much real revenue is generated?
· Can a continuously growing application ecosystem be formed?
This line of thinking is highly similar to the internet's development path.
In the early days of the internet, capital markets competed on server performance, bandwidth, and access speed; upon entering maturity, what mattered more was how many users, merchants, transactions, and cash flow a platform had.
The development of public blockchains follows the same pattern.
TPS determines the theoretical upper limit of a chain, but what truly determines its value is how much economic activity occurs on that chain daily.
From this perspective, Solana's advantages are beginning to change.
According to Grayscale statistics, Solana currently boasts over 1,000 decentralized applications (dApps), with network daily transaction volume exceeding 100 million, and approximately 4.3 million daily unique active users, with on-chain applications continuously contributing fee revenue and transaction volume.
These figures indicate that Solana's competitive edge is gradually shifting from "performance leadership" to "application prosperity."
For institutions, a network that can continuously generate revenue and attract developers and users clearly holds more long-term appeal than one that simply has high TPS.
Therefore, Grayscale did not continue discussing the underlying protocol but instead focused the entire report on the application layer.
Chapter Three: Three Representative Applications Outline Solana's New Growth Flywheel
Instead of simply listing popular projects, Grayscale this time chose three representative applications as case studies: Jupiter, Pump.fun, and Helium (extending the discussion to the DePIN direction). These three projects correspond to three different sectors: DeFi, consumer-facing applications, and real-world infrastructure. Seemingly unrelated, they collectively depict Solana's most important current growth path.
Jupiter: The Core Gateway for Financial Liquidity
Many users first encountered Jupiter as a DEX aggregator.
But in Grayscale's view, Jupiter's true value lies in it becoming the liquidity hub for the entire Solana DeFi ecosystem.
In traditional financial markets, exchanges, market makers, brokerages, and clearing institutions collectively build a capital flow network; in the on-chain world, DEX aggregators play a similar role, connecting different liquidity pools to find the best prices for users while improving the overall market's capital efficiency.
As more and more DeFi protocols deploy on Solana, Jupiter is no longer just a trading tool but a crucial piece of financial infrastructure for the entire ecosystem.
More notably, Jupiter's business boundaries are continuously expanding. From aggregated trading to perpetual contracts, Launchpad, cross-chain swaps, and other functions, its positioning increasingly resembles a comprehensive on-chain financial platform, not just a DEX product.
This means Solana already possesses the capability to host complex financial activities, and the maturity of financial infrastructure will further enhance the network effects of the entire ecosystem.
Pump.fun: The Value of Consumer-Facing Applications Extends Beyond Meme
Compared to Jupiter, Pump.fun is obviously more controversial.
Over the past year, it has almost become synonymous with Solana's Meme ecosystem and is seen by many as a microcosm of the speculative market.
However, Grayscale did not ignore it due to its Meme nature; instead, it listed it as a representative ecosystem application.
The reason is that Pump.fun validates something many blockchain projects have consistently failed to do—continuously attract ordinary users and establish a real business model.
According to data disclosed by Grayscale, Pump.fun has approximately 2 million monthly active users and can generate about $1.2 million in daily revenue, making it one of the highest-earning on-chain applications currently.
For institutions, these figures are far more important than the "Meme" label.
The development experience of internet platforms shows that a product's true value lies in its ability to continuously attract users, form network effects, and establish a stable revenue stream. From this perspective, Pump.fun resembles an experiment in consumer internet, proving that Solana can not only host financial applications but also incubate consumer-facing products for the masses.
Of course, this does not mean Meme will become Solana's long-term main theme.
The greater significance of Pump.fun lies in helping Solana complete a high-intensity market validation: when millions of users concentrate on trading, issuing, and circulating assets within a short time, the network can still maintain stable operation, providing a real-world sample for more high-frequency applications in the future.
Helium and DePIN: A New Growth Axis Connecting to the Real World
The third direction Grayscale focuses on is DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks).
Compared to DeFi or Meme, DePIN's core is not on-chain transactions but leveraging blockchain to coordinate real-world resources, including infrastructure such as wireless communication, location services, computing networks, and sensors.
Helium is one of the most representative projects in this sector, building a distributed communication network through community-deployed wireless hotspots and gradually collaborating with traditional telecom operators; meanwhile, projects like Geodnet focus on high-precision positioning services, providing foundational capabilities for emerging industries like autonomous driving, drones, and robotics.
Although these projects don't possess the massive market hype of Memes, they represent another growth curve Solana is exploring—extending blockchain from the digital asset world into the real economy.
In Grayscale's view, the significance of such projects lies in their continuous expansion of Solana's application boundaries, gradually extending from a financial network to real-world infrastructure, laying the groundwork for future AI, IoT, and more real-world economic scenarios.
From Jupiter to Pump.fun to Helium, Grayscale essentially outlines a clear development path: financial liquidity brings capital, consumer-facing applications bring users, and real-world infrastructure brings long-term growth potential. When all three act together, Solana's value proposition will gradually shift from a single performance advantage to a more sustainable network economy.
Chapter Four: From Meme to AI: Solana is Crafting a New Growth Narrative
If the Grayscale report answers "what Solana is today," then the signals released by the Solana Foundation over the past few months answer another question: where is Solana preparing to go next.
Observing the Solana Foundation's recent monthly ecosystem reports, developer activities, and public speeches, one can see a clear shift in the official communication focus.
In the past, discussions around Solana mainly centered on keywords like high performance, blockchain scaling, NFTs, and Meme; now, the official line repeatedly mentions directions such as AI Agent, stablecoins, payments, Real World Assets (RWA), asset tokenization, and DePIN.
This change isn't merely a market communication strategy; it's a repositioning of Solana's future growth directions.
In recent years, as U.S. digital asset regulations have gradually clarified, sectors like stablecoins and RWA have become focal points for traditional financial institutions. For Solana, hoping to enter a broader institutional market means relying solely on high TPS is no longer sufficient to build long-term competitive advantage. It's more crucial to become an infrastructure capable of hosting real business activities.
At several industry conferences this year, Solana Foundation President Lily Liu raised a noteworthy point: one of the biggest future opportunities for blockchain is not just serving human users, but facilitating value exchange between AI Agents.
As AI Agents become capable of autonomously calling APIs, leasing computing power, purchasing data, and even completing payments, transactions between machines (Machine-to-Machine) will grow rapidly. Traditional payment networks aren't well-suited for handling massive volumes of high-frequency, small-value, real-time settlements, whereas blockchain inherently possesses this capability.
Therefore, Solana aims to take on not just the role of a public blockchain, but also the payment infrastructure for the AI-driven economic era.
Payments are also a key area of current focus for Solana.
Over the past few years, competition between public chains was more about DeFi TVL; today, Solana hopes to enter a much larger market—global digital payments.
More and more stablecoin projects, payment service providers, and fintech companies are beginning to notice Solana's settlement capabilities. Its high throughput, low cost, and fast confirmation characteristics give it inherent advantages in payment scenarios. Simultaneously, the development of Real World Assets (RWA) also brings new growth space for Solana.
Judging from official communications, Solana is attempting to build a comprehensive development path: attracting enterprises through payments, accumulating capital through stablecoins, connecting with traditional finance through RWA, and then leveraging AI and DePIN to open up new future application scenarios.
Compared to the last cycle's reliance on traffic driven by Meme and NFT, this cycle Solana hopes to establish a long-term, sustainable growth model.
Chapter Five: Why Are Institutions Re-Focusing on Solana?
Grayscale isn't the only institution re-examining Solana.
Over the past year, multiple overseas institutions, including asset management firms, investment banks, and research organizations, have begun re-evaluating Solana's development potential in payments, asset tokenization, and its application ecosystem.
Behind this change are three important reasons.
First, the business models at the application layer are gradually maturing.
Whether it's Jupiter's advantage in DeFi liquidity, the user growth capabilities demonstrated by Pump.fun, or the exploration of connecting to the real world by DePIN projects like Helium, they all indicate that Solana no longer relies on a single trend but has formed a more diversified application ecosystem.
For institutions, sustained transaction volume, fee revenue, and developer activity better reflect a public blockchain's long-term value than short-term price volatility.
Second, the stablecoin and payments ecosystem is continuously improving.
Stablecoins have become a crucial bridge connecting traditional finance and the digital asset market, and payments are a major application scenario driving stablecoin scale expansion. As more companies explore on-chain payments, cross-border settlements, and digital asset issuance, Solana's advantages in high-frequency trading and low-cost settlement are garnering more attention.
Third, the developer ecosystem remains active.
Ultimately, any public blockchain needs developers continuously building applications to form genuine network effects. Over the past few years, Solana has experienced market cycles, but its developer community has maintained relatively high activity, with new projects continuously joining the ecosystem across infrastructure, wallets, DeFi, AI, and DePIN.
Of course, this doesn't mean Solana faces no challenges.
First, value capture remains an issue the entire Layer1 sector needs to address. How much of the substantial revenue generated at the application layer ultimately flows back to SOL itself still requires ongoing validation through mechanisms like network fees, staking demand, and ecosystem prosperity.
Second, the ecosystem's sustainability still needs observation. Over the past few years, Solana has experienced multiple hype cycles like NFT and Meme. What will truly determine its long-term value in the future is whether new business areas like payments, RWA, and AI can form stable demand, rather than relying on any single trending sector.
Furthermore, public chains like Ethereum, BNB Chain, Base, and Sui are also continuously refining their positioning.
Ethereum still possesses the most mature developer ecosystem and institutional recognition; Base leverages Coinbase's channel advantages for rapid development in consumer-facing applications; BNB Chain still holds broad influence in the global retail user market; emerging public chains continue exploring high performance and new development frameworks.
The future of public blockchain competition likely won't have a single winner; different networks will serve different types of users and application scenarios based on their own strengths.
Chapter Six: Conclusion
From this Grayscale report, a clear change is evident: market discussions about Solana mention TPS less and less, while increasingly discussing applications, revenue, payments, RWA, and institutional adoption.
For a public blockchain, this signifies the competition has entered a new phase.
What will determine SOL's long-term value in the future is no longer just how fast the network can run, but whether this chain can continuously attract developers, retain real users, and incubate more applications with network effects and commercial value, like Jupiter, Pump.fun, and Helium.
If, during the last bull market, Solana relied on performance advantages; then in this round, what it truly hopes to prove is—that it can become the most prosperous "financial bazaar" in the crypto world.
