In the week of July 20 to July 26, memecoin activity on Solana’s spot DEXs reached its highest level since August 2025. Data from Blockworks shows memecoins accounted for 29% of the network’s spot DEX volume, up sharply from just a few weeks earlier, when the share ranged between 10% and 15%.

Source: Blockworks

The broader mix does not support the idea that Solana is primarily a memecoin network. SOL-stablecoin pairs represented 37% of volume over the same week, while stablecoin swaps made up another 22%. Foreign tokens accounted for 5%, and project tokens and tokenized assets each represented 3%. Memecoins ranked second, not first.

ANSEM Drew Dormant Traders Back

The recent memecoin rebound on Solana can be traced to a single token: ANSEM, also known as The Black Bull. The token launched on Pump.fun in late June and has no product, no team and no roadmap. Its main association is with Ansem, one of Solana’s most prominent traders, after an anonymous developer airdropped a large share of the supply to his wallet and he chose to embrace the token rather than ignore it. He then pledged to redistribute his Pump.fun creator fees to holders through weekly airdrops. Traders were buying into that pledge, not into any protocol mechanism.

ANSEM surged about 18,000% in just three days. The rally continued and eventually peaked at a market capitalization of roughly $449 million on July 7. That move helped revive Solana’s memecoin activity, which matters because these bursts can quickly reshape which parts of the network dominate trading volume without changing the chain’s underlying mix of users and liquidity. Volumes on Pump.fun have gradually begun to rise again and, according to DefiLlama, the launchpad now routes about $614 million of Solana’s roughly $1.65 billion in daily DEX volume.

The rebound has come while crypto sentiment remains in fear territory at 29.

Stablecoin Supply Remained Above $15 Billion

A memecoin rebound does not mean Solana has returned to its old memecoin-dominated identity. That label has stopped accurately describing the network, and the volume mix is only part of the reason.

Solana’s stablecoin supply crossed $15 billion in July. Stablecoins other than USDC and USDT account for about $4.81 billion of that total. The more important point is persistence: that liquidity did not leave during the 2026 downturn, which is typically when speculative capital exits first.

Two companies have already relied on that liquidity. Western Union deployed USDPT on Solana as a settlement layer, while B2C2 named the chain its primary stablecoin settlement network. B2C2 is an institutional market maker, so the designation reflects where trades actually clear. It is not a partnership announcement.

Solana Quietly Took the Lead in RWAs

Solana now hosts 2,582 tokenized real-world assets, more than any other chain by asset count, according to rwa.xyz. The network’s distributed asset value has surpassed $3.5 billion. Only Robinhood Chain has more asset holders, though Robinhood’s base comes through a single brokerage pushing its own users onchain, while Solana’s comes from a broader set of issuers.

Stablecoins and RWAs are the less visible part of the network, but they are also the segment that expanded while prices fell. That makes the current memecoin rebound easier to read as a trading-cycle development rather than a full change in what the chain is used for.

Memecoin volume is cyclical by nature. It moved from 29% to single digits and back again within twelve months, and it will likely do so again the next time a token runs 300% in a week. Over the same period, stablecoin supply and RWA counts moved in one direction, including through the parts of the market that were not easy to endure.