Solana out-Earns Every Layer 1 and Layer 2
Solana booked $91 million for the month, placing it ahead of the Hyperliquid L1 at $53 million, Ethereum at $52 million, Polygon at $26 million, and Base at $23 million. Application revenue measures the fees that decentralized applications, such as trading platforms and token launchpads, retain from their users.
It is a narrower gauge than total network fees, and analysts often treat it as a proxy for how much real economic activity a chain is hosting rather than how much speculative throughput it processes.
The May figure was not a one-off as just a month prior, Solana has posted the highest weekly application revenue of any chain for five weeks running, a stretch in which it recorded $16.94 million in a single week against Ethereum’s $13.55 million.
Much of the activity has been concentrated in Solana’s trading and token-creation venues, where memecoin speculation and high-frequency swaps drive fee generation. That said, those same venues can cool quickly when markets turn.
Revenue Strength Meets a Weak SOL Price
The fee dominance stands in sharp contrast to SOL’s ongoing price performance as the token has recently been trading near $81 after posting eight consecutive red monthly candles, the first such streak in its history, and has shed tens of billions of dollars in market value from its 2025 peak.
That split between strong fundamentals and a soft chart is a recurring theme for Solana this year, despite the network’s ecosystem revenue reaching a record $2.39 billion in 2025. Not only that, its tokenized real-world assets climbed past $2 billion earlier this year, yet SOL struggled to hold support (as broader crypto markets retreated).
Institutional channels have remained more constructive. U.S. spot Solana exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have absorbed roughly $1.13 billion in cumulative net inflows since launch, and Solana products have continued to attract money even on days when bitcoin funds bled, suggesting some investors are treating the weakness as an entry point rather than an exit.
Still, revenue leadership and ETF demand have not been enough to break the monthly losing streak. Network usage stayed elevated through the downturn, with Solana processing tens of millions of transactions a day, but fees alone have not reversed the price trend.
Looking ahead, if trading volumes hold and the fee lead extends into a sixth and seventh week, the case that Solana is the most-used settlement layer in crypto becomes harder to dismiss, and that argument could feed the next round of ETF marketing and treasury allocations. However, if the memecoin churn that underpins much of the revenue fades, the figures could compress as quickly as they rose.
