Galaxy Research: Solana Held Its DEX Lead in Q1 While RWAs Grew 58% and Stablecoins Diversified

Galaxy Digital's research team has published its Q1 2026 Solana state-of-the-chain analysis, written by Vice President of Research Lucas Tcheyan. The report spans eight sections (network health, validation, DEX volumes, perpetuals, prediction markets, TVL, stablecoins, and lending) and amounts to the most detailed institutional accounting of where Solana's financial stack stands heading into the rest of 2026.

The headline numbers reflect a quarter in which aggregate crypto activity pulled back sharply. SOL DEX volumes on Solana fell 31% quarter-over-quarter, total TVL declined 22% to $15 billion, and application fees dropped 10% to $795 million. But Solana's market share figures held or improved across most of those categories: 31% of all DEX volumes (a fifth consecutive quarter of leadership), 26% of application fees (ranked second, behind Ethereum), and 25% of L1 network fees. The volume declined; the position did not.

PropAMMs and the Changing Structure of Solana's DEX Ecosystem

The DEX market share figure obscures a structural shift the report examines in detail. Proprietary AMMs (off-pool liquidity systems built by firms such as Jump Crypto) took a growing share of total onchain DEX volumes throughout Q1. A Jump Crypto analysis found that 91.9% of PropAMM fills executed at prices better than the most favorable institutional tiers on major centralized exchanges. In March, PropAMMs matched the combined volume of Binance, Coinbase, OKX, and Bybit on USDC-denominated SOL pairs.

That parity with the top four global CEXs on Solana's primary trading pair is notable. It suggests that the network's public DEX volumes, already the largest on-chain, are now supplemented by a parallel professional-market layer that the headline figures do not fully capture.

RWAs Cross $2.5 Billion, Now 17% of Total TVL

Kamino Finance KMNO$0.018-5.1% and other protocols anchored a 58% quarterly gain in real-world asset TVL on Solana, which crossed $2.5 billion and reached 17% of the network's total locked value. BlackRock's BUIDL money market fund and Figure Technologies' YLDS stablecoin together accounted for roughly $900 million of that figure.

The lending layer around those assets has also grown substantially. Kamino's PRIME market carried $600 million or more in TVL during the quarter, while its RWA-collateral lending market exceeded $1 billion in size. Gauntlet launched a curated USDC vault on Kamino during the quarter.

In early Q2, Jupiter JUP$0.190+1.2% Lend reported 83,000 users and zero bad debt, and added an isolated institutional [[TOKEN:DEkqHyPN7GMRJ5cArtQFAWefqbZb33Hyf6s5iCwjEonT]] market in partnership with Bitwise and Fluid. Coinbase and Morpho also launched SOL-backed USDC loans available directly through the Coinbase interface. The lending stack is building out.

Stablecoin Supply Grew Modestly, Composition Changed Substantially

Total stablecoin supply on Solana increased 2.7% to $15.45 billion, a smaller headline figure than the RWA growth, but the composition shift matters more than the aggregate. USDT supply grew 34% during the quarter. USD1, the stablecoin from World Liberty Financial, rose 473% and became the third-largest stablecoin on Solana by supply. Non-USDC/USDT stablecoins have grown nearly tenfold since January 2025.

USDC's relative share declined. That diversification, the report notes, reduces single-issuer concentration risk and adds depth to the collateral base available for DeFi. Stablecoin transaction volume hit $650 billion in February, double the prior record. SoFi launched what it describes as the first U.S. bank-issued stablecoin on Solana during the quarter, and Western Union and Gusto were cited among new payments use cases in production.

Perpetuals: A Structural Gap the Report Attributes to Execution, Not Demand

The most candid section of the report addresses perpetuals. Solana's share of crypto perpetuals open interest sits at approximately 3%, down from a peak in November 2024. Volume market share is roughly 2%. Hyperliquid dominates the category.

Galaxy's diagnosis is specific: validator scheduler inconsistency makes millisecond-level transaction ordering unpredictable, and market makers require that certainty to operate. The current multi-client validator environment is a decentralization gain, but it creates scheduling edge cases that professional market makers cannot reliably price around. The report frames this as a solvable infrastructure problem rather than a fundamental limitation.

Drift Protocol DRIFT$0.020+1.0% and other Solana-native perp venues built out features during Q1, but the execution-certainty gap kept the headline market share figures subdued.

Prediction markets showed a similar pattern. Weekly Solana prediction market volume peaked above $10 million in early February and around 10,000 weekly users, but fell to the $3–4 million range by April. Hyperliquid's HIP-4 Outcome Markets generated six times Solana prediction market volume within two weeks of launch.

Pump.fun Rose to 32% of Application Fees as Memecoin Dependency Persists

Pump.fun rose from 22% to 32% of total Solana application fees during the quarter, an increase of ten percentage points. Five of the top ten fee-generating applications on Solana were memecoin-adjacent. Galaxy states plainly that "Solana's activity remains tied to speculative trading cycles, and memecoins in particular, more than any other major chain."

That concentration is the honest counterweight to the RWA and stablecoin growth figures. Raydium RAY$0.711-1.1%-routed memecoin volume is real revenue, but it is also the category most exposed to speculative cycle drawdowns.

Eight Consecutive Outage-Free Quarters, Validator Client Diversity Widens

The report documents eight consecutive outage-free quarters. Median slot duration is approximately 400 milliseconds. The active validator client set includes Agave, Jito, Frankendancer, BAM, and Harmonic. That diversity reduces single-client risk, representing a meaningful improvement over prior cycles, and is also the underlying reason the perpetuals execution-certainty problem exists.

The Seeker mobile device had 118,000 activations during Q1, with nearly 2 billion SKR tokens allocated (20% of supply). AI agent integrations and payment rails were cited under notable Q1 developments but were not the report's analytical focus.

Galaxy's Verdict: Structural Breadth Is There, Durability Still Needs Proof

The report closes with a structural challenge that doubles as a reasonable framing for the rest of 2026. "Solana does not need to prove it can host another speculative boom," Tcheyan writes. "It already has. It needs to prove that the next boom will leave behind deeper markets, better collateral, more dependable users, and more sustainable validator economics."

The underlying argument is about durability: "The chains that matter in the long term will not be the ones with the most activity on the best days. They will be the ones where capital stays when the easy activity disappears."

Where Solana leads (DEX volume, stablecoin throughput, RWA TVL) those positions showed resilience through a down quarter. Where it trails (perpetuals open interest, prediction market depth, institutional lending scale), the gaps remain active. Galaxy concludes that "few ecosystems have as many strengths in one place," while noting that the strengths need to be built into durable infrastructure before the next cycle arrives to test them.