Solana experienced a broad decline in key network activity metrics during the second quarter of 2026, even as tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) expanded significantly on the blockchain. According to a report by Galaxy Research, the network saw lower decentralized exchange (DEX) volumes alongside reduced network and application fees, while tokenized equities and other real-world assets demonstrated strong onchain growth. Over the quarter, Solana also integrated regulated equity trading, lending, prediction markets, and new infrastructure. The divergence between shrinking speculative trading activity and growing institutional-grade tokenization infrastructure reflects a broader industry trend: major blockchains are increasingly positioning themselves as rails for traditional financial instruments rather than relying primarily on retail-driven DeFi and memecoin trading.

Trading Activity Shifts Beyond Memecoins

Solana processed $111 billion in perpetuals volume during Q2, representing more than double the previous quarter's figures. However, GMTrade accounted for approximately $90 billion of this volume, while open interest remained largely flat. Excluding GMTrade, perpetuals volume actually fell by 43%.

Additionally, Drift remained offline following an April 1 exploit that resulted in a $285 million loss, removing one of Solana's largest perpetuals venues from the market for the entire quarter. In contrast, Phoenix saw its volume increase fourteen-fold to nearly $700 million. Despite these figures, Galaxy Research noted that Solana maintained only about 1% of the total perpetuals volume and open interest, underscoring the gap between Solana and established perps venues on other chains.

Spot DEX volume dropped 45% during Q2, marking its lowest quarterly level since Q3 2024. The pullback coincided with a cooldown in memecoin trading, which had been a primary driver of Solana's spot DEX activity in prior quarters. Nevertheless, Solana maintained its first-place ranking for DEX volume for the seventh consecutive quarter, though its market share declined by six percentage points to 30%.

Tokenized Assets Enter DeFi

In June, Solana's real-world asset value crossed the $3 billion threshold. Public equities emerged as the largest RWA category, surpassing private credit, a shift that aligns with accelerating efforts by traditional financial institutions to bring equities and other regulated assets onchain across multiple blockchains. However, only about 9% of tokenized RWA value was actively utilized within DeFi as trading liquidity or loan collateral, highlighting that the vast majority of tokenized assets on Solana remain held rather than integrated into decentralized markets.

Jupiter Lend and Kamino held approximately 83% of all tokenized-stock collateral. Furthermore, Galaxy's GLXY became eligible as collateral on Kamino after Superstate tokenized the Nasdaq-listed shares. May saw the launch of an onchain regulated equity trading stack by Securitize, Jump Trading, and Jupiter. In June, Backpack Securities and Sunrise introduced broker-dealer ownership and tokenization services. The concentration of participation among a small number of platforms and the low DeFi utilization rate of RWAs suggest that integration between tokenized traditional assets and decentralized financial applications is still in early stages.

Network Fees and Infrastructure

Solana's network fees fell by roughly 44% quarter-over-quarter. Application fees also declined by 31% to $552 million, of which Pump generated $212 million. Despite the decrease, Solana maintained its lead among all blockchains in application fee share for the tenth consecutive quarter.

Development on network infrastructure continued with Agave upgrades ahead of the Alpenglow update. The Agave 4.2 upgrade implements a phased reduction in slot times from 400 milliseconds to a target of 200 milliseconds. On July 30, SIMD-0286 increased block capacity from 60 million to 100 million compute units. Together, these changes are aimed at improving transaction throughput and latency, capabilities that become more relevant as tokenized equities and other high-frequency trading use cases expand onchain.

Solana's stablecoin supply saw a slight increase of 1.9% to $15.6 billion during Q2. During this period, USDC's market share dropped below 47%, while USDT, USD1, USDG, and PYUSD all gained share. The diversification of stablecoin issuers on Solana tracks a competitive trend across the broader stablecoin market, where multiple issuers are vying for settlement and payment flows on high-throughput blockchains.