Solana news

2025 saw the US shift crypto from fringe hobby to regulated infrastructure. Trump’s GENIUS Act defined stablecoins and the Bitcoin reserve order removed enforcement fog. Vanguard spot ETFs and BlackRock’s BUIDL fund entered Binance collateral. Key protocols secured futures: Solana moved from beta to liquidity layer; Coinbase’s Base leveraged its user base for mainstream adoption. Ripple won its court battle, clearing the way for Spot XRP ETFs, and stablecoins hit a $300 bn market cap, becoming the fintech settlement rail. Perpetual DEXs and prediction markets attracted institutional volume; Hong Kong’s regulatory clarity made it a regional liquidity hub. Early believers, who held through 2022‑24 turmoil, now dominate liquidity pools and will fund the next wave of crypto innovation.

Solana’s 2025 was a mixed year, marked by early all‑time highs for the native SOL token and the launch of President Donald Trump’s meme coin, TRUMP, on the network. The meme coin and SOL surged to new peaks in January but both fell sharply as the year progressed, with SOL down roughly 56% from its peak and TRUMP nearly 93% off its high. In May developers rolled out the Alpenglow consensus upgrade, projected to quintuple transaction finality and slated for a Q1 2026 mainnet release. Traditional finance began to embrace Solana, with publicly traded digital‑asset treasuries accumulating millions of SOL and several spot and staking ETFs receiving approval in October. The first Solana ETFs—such as Bitwise’s BSOL and Grayscale’s GSOL—generated over $600 million in net inflows by mid‑December, yet the anticipated end‑of‑year rally has not materialized, and many treasuries have seen their share prices collapse as crypto prices fell.

Solana slipped from last week’s consolidation, trading near $124 and below the $126 resistance while awaiting stronger confirmation. On‑chain data shows investors quietly accumulating 2.65 million SOL (≈$345 million) in self‑custody, indicating confidence in a near‑term rebound. New on‑chain “Creator ETFs” launched via Bands.fun could boost network usage and demand for SOL. Institutional inflows of $48.5 million this week and $117.6 million month‑to‑date support a recovery, with targets around $136, though a dip below $123 would undermine the bullish case.

Solana Mobile will stop software updates and security patches for its Saga smartphone, offering only general support. Seeker devices will keep receiving updates. The decision marks a shift from device to platform lifecycle, expanding beyond a single handset into apps, identity and token incentives, but exposes users to security risk. Solana plans to launch SKR token incentives and Guardians governance in 2026, turning the phone into a dApp distribution channel, yet the short support window heightens key exposure concerns.

The article lists the five largest publicly traded firms that have built Solana treasuries, totalling nearly $3 billion in SOL. Forward Industries leads with 6.9 million SOL, followed by Solana Company (formerly Helius Technologies) and DeFi Development Corp. each holding about 2.2 million SOL, then Upexi with 2.1 million and Sharps Technology with 2 million. These firms, ranging from medical device makers to fintech, raised funds via PIPEs and equity to purchase SOL, often staking holdings for yield. While some saw share price swings, staking revenues (e.g., Forward’s $4.6 M in Q4) and network partnerships illustrate their strategy to use Solana as an institutional treasury asset.

Solana endured a reported 6 Tbps traffic surge, yet block production stayed steady with no noticeable fee spikes, showing the network’s resilience to a DDoS‑style flood. Pipe’s data marked a brief peak, and CryptoSlate noted the chain kept running without coordinated restarts. The defense relies on recent protocol changes: QUIC networking, stake‑weighted quality of service, local fee markets and priority fees. These limits throttle traffic per stakeholder, price compute units, and push spam into low‑priority lanes, making large‑scale flooding expensive and ineffective. While the system still favors well‑capitalized validators, the attack’s absence of disruption illustrates Solana’s evolved traffic‑shaping protocol, turning potential downtime into an exercise of automated throttling rather than manual restarts.

In 2025, Solana’s ecosystem was defined by a wave of memecoin hype, starting with the BONK craze and expanding to the TRUMP token that flooded X and trading apps. The memecoin mania peaked before a February scandal involving the LIBRA token’s co‑creator and Argentine politics forced a cooling period, pushing Solana back into mainstream attention. Behind the hype, developers pushed tangible progress: the Solana Mobile team launched the Seeker crypto‑phone with integrated wallet and dApp store, while the highly‑anticipated Alpenglow upgrade promises sub‑second transaction finality and lower validator costs, solidifying Solana as a performance‑centric, developer‑driven platform.

Blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps identified a cluster of 23 wallets linked to the deployer of Solana AI token Ava that accumulated roughly 40 % of the supply at launch, indicating coordinated sniping via bots funded through Bitget and Binance. The coordinated buys surfaced more than a year after Ava’s Nov. 13, 2024 debut, when the token peaked at $0.33 and later fell 96 % from its all‑time high. The concentration of tokens in few wallets raises concerns about potential rug pulls and undermines the project’s community‑driven debut on Pump.fun.

Solana Foundation, in partnership with post‑quantum security firm Project Eleven, deployed a testnet that employs quantum‑resistant digital signatures after a threat assessment. The initiative follows earlier optional protections such as the Solana Winternitz Vault, which uses hash‑based signatures on a per‑transaction basis. Aptos is evaluating a governance proposal, AIP‑137, to add SLH‑DSA—a stateless, hash‑based signature scheme approved by NIST—as an optional post‑quantum option. The change would preserve Ed25519 as the default and avoid a full network migration. Both blockchains are part of a wider industry effort to prepare for future quantum computers that could break current cryptography. Although experts say quantum attacks are still decades away, proactive testing aims to keep networks secure well into the future.

SOL has lagged the wider altcoin market as declining on‑chain activity, weekly fees and DApp revenue suggest weaker demand for the Solana network. Staking remains high, with nearly 68 % of the circulating supply delegated and 418 million tokens staked, while weekly network fees fell to $4.5 million and DApp revenue dropped 30 % from August. Growth has shifted to Ethereum layer‑2 platforms—Base, Arbitrum and Polygon—and BNB Chain, reducing the likelihood of an immediate SOL rebound. The Solana ETF has attracted $636 million in assets and several firms have added over $2.5 billion of SOL to their books, but without a clear reversal in on‑chain activity the prospects for sustained bullish momentum remain limited.