Author: Ma He, Foresight News
Original Title: Meme Recedes, Narrative Cools: Falling Below $80, Solana's Cycle Dividend Ends
Even one of the most successful public blockchains, Solana, has entered a winter moment.
During the market crash on February 5th, Solana's token SOL once fell to $67, hitting a new low since December 2023. As of now, SOL's latest quoted price is $80, with a 24-hour drop of 3.57%. Looking at the monthly chart, SOL has been declining for 5 consecutive months since the high in October 2025, with a maximum drop of over 71% during this period. The floor price of its ecosystem's most famous NFT representative, Mad Lads, once fell to 22 SOL, approximately $1,760, while at its peak, this NFT was once worth over $40,000.
Looking back during this bull market, SOL rose from a low of $8 all the way to $295, performing quite impressively among public blockchains. Coupled with the explosion of the Meme track, even US President Trump chose to launch his token first on the Solana network, during which countless wealth stories emerged.
However, as the market turns bearish, coin prices fall, TVL is halved, on-chain transaction volume plummets, and the growth flywheel stalls, Solana also faces its own various problems.
Meme Craze Ends
This cycle, the Meme craze began on Solana. From late 2024 to early 2025, Solana launched the "Meme Summer" through the Pump.fun platform, with the number of new tokens issued daily once breaking ten thousand, and the transaction volume peak exceeding $6 billion. Meme coins like Dogwifhat and Bonk saw their market capitalization soar, pushing Solana's overall activity to its peak. This reached its zenith when Trump issued TRUMP, creating a historic high of $295. However, as various frauds emerged and the wealth effect dissipated, starting from mid-2025, the Meme craze began to cool, with many projects having a graduation rate of less than 2%, and capital began to outflow.
Defilama data shows that around the first few months of 2025, the transaction volume of the Meme platform pump.fun reached a historical high. The weekly transaction volume exceeded $3 billion twice, followed by a continuous decline. In early 2026, its transaction volume hovered around $500 million, one-sixth of its peak.
At the same time, some Meme traffic shifted to BNB Chain. BNB Chain rapidly rose through the Four.Meme platform. In the second half of 2025, Chinese-themed Memes like "Binance Life" and "I'm F*cking Coming" sparked FOMO sentiment. BNB Chain's Meme market capitalization grew from almost zero to hundreds of millions of dollars, with a 24-hour transaction volume reaching $460 million. In comparison, although Solana's Meme market capitalization still amounts to billions of dollars, growth has stagnated, with many projects falling over 95% from their peaks.
In October 2025, BNB Chain once replaced Solana on the trending Meme list, with obvious capital rotation: when BNB Chain Memes surged, Solana's capital contracted; after BNB Chain receded, capital partially flowed back, but the momentum had weakened. Furthermore, under the influence of influential figures CZ/He Yi, BNB Chain saw short-term growth stimulation, while Solana's Pump.fun, despite its first-mover advantage, weakened due to narrative exhaustion and a lack of incremental funds.
The end of the Meme wave means that the demand for its public chain token has also decreased simultaneously.
Public Chain Narrative Cools
Additionally, the overall cooling of the public chain narrative has further weakened Solana's ecosystem expansion plans. Between 2025-2026, the crypto market retreated from early high leverage and excessive narrative expansion. Many weak narratives, such as celebrity tokens and the Meme craze, quickly faded, shifting focus to areas with more practicality and institutional support. Solana's narrative as a "high-speed public chain" once attracted developers, but as the market entered the "deep water of value," investors tended to prefer mainstream assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum for their "digital gold" or "settlement layer" positioning, leading to a continued overall bear market and intensified capital outflow from Solana.
This narrative fatigue reflects that public chain competition has shifted from pure TPS competition to ecological maturity and regulatory adaptability. Solana's previous TPS and ecological advantages have been diluted. Whether in terms of Memes or airdrop incentives, Solana's appeal to new users has weakened.
Meanwhile, the significant speed improvement of the Ethereum mainnet has also weakened Solana's core advantage. Through the Fusaka upgrade in 2025, Ethereum increased data blob capacity from 3 to 6-9 and introduced the PeerDAS mechanism, significantly reducing transaction fees and increasing throughput. Transaction volume and active addresses subsequently rebounded.
Data shows that DEX trading volume on Ethereum saw an overall upward trend in late 2025. Entering 2026, the Glamsterdam upgrade will achieve near-perfect parallel processing, further accelerating block verification and reducing fees, bringing the mainnet closer to an "operating system" level. These improvements bring Ethereum mainnet's TPS and cost close to Solana's levels, while retaining higher security and decentralization, reducing the necessity for users to switch to Solana.
Another rising competitor, Base, is also growing rapidly, particularly with AI tokens attracting many users. According to DefiLlama data, its TVL is still maintained at a high level of $4 billion.
Under the tokenization boom, RWA occurs more on Ethereum, further marginalizing Solana's ecosystem. As of February 12, 2026, data from rwa.xyz shows that RWA assets on the Ethereum mainnet are $14.9 billion, while Solana is only $1.7 billion, still a significant gap. The tokenization trend of RWA emphasizes stability and compliance, with Ethereum's leading position making it difficult for Solana to get a share.
Digital Asset Treasury Buyers Fail to Offset Overall Bear Market Selling Pressure
From the perspective of Digital Asset Treasuries (DAT), in 2025, the DAT model was once all the rage. Many publicly traded companies such as Forward Industries, Upexi, and Sharps Technology purchased large amounts of SOL as treasury assets through private financing or debt issuance.
Entering 2026, as the SOL price fell from the 2025 peak of around $200 to about $80, the market capitalization of these DAT companies shrank significantly. For example, Forward Industries spent $1.58 billion to purchase SOL, now worth only $555 million, shaking some investors' confidence.
Furthermore, the DAT buying frenzy has weakened, with fewer new joiners. Although the early purchased locked SOL reduces circulating supply, it has failed to offset the overall market bearish pressure.
Bitcoin and Ethereum prices have also been hit hard in the bear market of recent months. BTC fell from $126,000 to the current $67,000, and ETH fell from $4,900 to the current $2,000.
In January 2026, Solana founder toly asked on X in Chinese: What do you think is Solana's biggest challenge now? The comments section received a variety of feedback and answers, including: no direct exchange, users have less perception of other product ecosystems besides Meme, etc.
Perhaps Solana will find its own solutions.
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