Solana's decentralized exchanges handled about 15% as many trades as five major US stock exchanges in 2026, according to Fidelity Digital Assets. The research note, published on 6 November 2026, counts trades rather than dollars, and says Solana briefly executed more trades in a week than the New York Stock Exchange.
The note, "Solana's Competitive Advantage in On-Chain Trading" by senior research analyst Max Wadington, argues that Solana SOL$89.60-0.5% works as a trading venue and that the network's revenue rises and falls with that trading. Its conclusion is hedged: "The network's scale alone does not guarantee long-term success, but it warrants serious consideration as an emerging piece of financial market infrastructure." Fidelity's own revenue table also shows how far Solana's fee income has fallen since 2025.
How Fidelity compared Solana DEX trades with the NYSE and Nasdaq
Fidelity counted trades on Solana's spot decentralized exchanges (DEXs, apps where tokens swap directly on the blockchain) and set them against the number of trades on five US equity exchanges. "Through 2026, Solana averaged roughly 15% of all exchange trades, briefly eclipsing the New York Stock Exchange in weekly trades executed," the note says.
A table in the report shows how the ratio is built. Solana averaged 95,918,412 trades a week in 2026 up to 23 September, against 656,811,793 a week across Nasdaq, NYSE, NYSE Arca, BATS and NYSE American combined. In 2022 Solana averaged 944,032 trades a week, 0.30% of the exchanges' count. Solana's weekly trades grew about 100 times over that period while the exchanges' grew about 1.76 times, according to the table, which uses Blockworks data.
The table's footnote states the limit plainly: the values are "number of trades per week irrespective of volume or trade size." A $5 swap of one memecoin for another counts the same as a block trade in a large-cap stock. The note adds that "the composition of activity on Solana differs substantially from traditional exchanges, with much of the volume concentrated in crypto-native assets." So the 15% measures how often people trade on Solana; the dollar value of those trades sits outside the ratio. A crypto.news report on 8 November also described the figure as a count of trades.
Tokenized stocks and perpetual futures on Solana in the Fidelity report
The note's case for Solana as a venue for more than crypto rests on two newer markets. The first is tokenized assets, on-chain versions of stocks, credit funds, Treasury products and commodities. Fidelity's tokenized asset chart, built on Blockworks data, shows monthly trading in these tokens on Solana rising from about $0.1 billion in June 2025 to nearly $5 billion in September 2026. Credit products made up most of the volume in 2025; equities made up most of it from spring 2026. We have tracked the equity side through milestones such as June's tokenized-stock volume record, which used a different measure.
Fidelity calls the market early. "While adoption remains in its early stages, tokenization has the potential to bring a broader range of financial assets into the same settlement and trading environment as digital assets," the note says, adding that "regulatory requirements, transfer restrictions, and privacy considerations continue to constrain adoption across many asset classes."
The second market is perpetual futures, contracts that track an asset's price with no expiry date. Citing Blockworks Research, the note says Solana-based perpetual futures exchanges "processed over $590 billion in notional volume over the past 12 months." The report charts that volume against Hyperliquid's and says "competition remains intense." Its takeaway is that tokenized assets and perpetual futures "may provide Solana users the opportunity to express their full range of market views within a single shared ecosystem."
Fidelity also credits proprietary AMMs, trading pools run by a single market maker that updates its own prices, with capturing a growing share of Solana DEX activity. Our explainer on prop AMMs covers how they work.
Solana fee revenue: priority fees and Jito tips drive Fidelity's thesis
The note argues that Solana earns most when traders compete over the order of transactions, while block space stays plentiful. Base fees, the fixed charge on every transaction, stay low. Revenue grows through priority fees, which users pay for faster inclusion, and tips paid through Jito JTO$0.327-2.8%, which traders pay to land arbitrage and liquidation transactions first. In the note's words, the design keeps "basic transactions inexpensive while charging a premium only to time-sensitive market participants."
Fidelity's network revenue table, also built on Blockworks data, shows both sides of that design. Solana's network revenue was $1,430.7 million in 2024 and $1,404.8 million in 2025, with priority fees and Jito tips together making up about 92% of the 2025 total by our arithmetic. For 2026 the table shows $215.2 million up to 22 September, or $288.7 million annualized, about 79% below 2025. Base fees moved far less: $31.9 million in 2025 against $23.2 million annualized for 2026.
Our own fee data, which runs past Fidelity's cut-off, shows the same split. From 8 October to 7 November 2026, users paid about 220,000 SOL in fees and Jito tips on Solana. Priority fees came to about 144,000 SOL and Jito tips to about 50,000 SOL, together about 88% of the total by our arithmetic. Base fees stayed between about 660 and 960 SOL a day.
Priority fees and Jito tips made up about 88% of the roughly 220,000 SOL Solana users paid from 8 October to 7 November 2026, while base fees held near 660 to 960 SOL a day.
View on Solana Compass →Fidelity's caveats: cyclical trading, competition and off-exchange equity volume
The note names its own risks. "Solana's future revenue is subject to two core risks: the cyclicality of on-chain trading and competitive dynamics," it says, and "during the latest bear market, competition for profitable trading opportunities declined significantly relative to the prior bull market." It describes decentralized trading as "one of the most competitive sectors across all of digital assets" and notes that the pace of protocol development "introduces a degree of technical execution risk."
Fidelity also limits how far the exchange comparison reaches. Citing Nasdaq, Fidelity says "roughly 50% of all equities volume occurred through off-exchange venues in 2025," such as private trading venues where large orders are filled away from public screens. The privacy and information-leakage concerns that push trades to those venues "may limit the degree to which public blockchains can capture all trading activity without further advances in market structure and privacy."
Fidelity has a commercial interest in Solana. Fidelity runs the FSOL spot Solana fund, and Fidelity's FCAT unit published a separate study of Solana's network reliability in October. The note is labelled educational and says it is not investment advice.
Solana slot times and block limits since Fidelity's data cut-off
Most of the report's data runs to late September 2026, and Solana's network has changed since. The note describes slot times, the interval at which Solana produces blocks, as stable near 400 milliseconds and "trending toward the network's long-term goal of approximately 200 milliseconds," and block capacity as raised from 60 million to 100 million compute units (CUs, the measure of processing a block can hold).
Solana reached that 200ms target on 9 October 2026, as we reported when it went live. The per-block limit came down with it. Anza CEO Brennan Watt wrote in a GitHub discussion on 10 October that "200ms is live on mainnet" with blocks at 50 million CUs, and proposed raising the limit back to 100 million in steps. Blocks are now half the size they were at 400ms but come twice as often, so compute capacity per second is unchanged by our arithmetic.
What to watch after the Fidelity Solana report
- Solana's weekly trade count against the five exchanges in Fidelity's comparison for the rest of 2026.
- Solana network fee revenue against its 2024 and 2025 levels, which Fidelity's table puts above $1.4 billion a year.
- Monthly tokenized asset trading after September's high, and whether equities keep their share.
- Progress on raising the block compute limit from 50 million back to 100 million CUs at 200ms slots.
- Whether Fidelity updates the comparison with dollar volume or adds trade size to it.
