Castle Labs said in a new deep-dive report that Solana’s application revenue cannot be explained solely by short bursts of meme coin attention. The firm argued that consumer-facing applications on the network have already built a durable revenue floor, and that the momentum is now spreading into lending, perpetuals, stablecoins, and real-world assets.
Over the trailing 30 days, Solana generated $193.1 million in application-layer protocol revenue, according to the report. That put it far ahead of Hyperliquid at $86.5 million, Ethereum at $53.8 million, and Robinhood at $34.6 million.
Castle Labs said roughly 80% of Solana’s application revenue came from consumer applications, including launchpads, trading terminals, collectibles marketplaces, and wallet products. The remaining 20% came from decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, and other core DeFi applications.
The report framed the central criticism directly: if this revenue is largely a fee take on speculative meme coin volume driven by narrative, then volume and fees should disappear once attention fades. Castle Labs structured its analysis around that question, first testing the durability of consumer-app revenue and then looking at the expansion of the broader infrastructure stack on Solana, including lending, DEXs, and RWAs.
Consumer applications remain the main revenue engine
Castle Labs said Solana’s appeal to consumer apps starts with throughput, low transaction costs, and a fast onchain user experience. Products that depend on frequent user actions need low latency, and teams also want to launch where liquidity and real demand are already concentrated.
The report grouped Solana’s consumer applications into three main buckets: launchpads, professional trading terminals, and mobile wallets.
Launchpads make up the largest share of application revenue. PumpFun remains the dominant player. Castle Labs said PumpFun alone generated about $39 million from launch activity over the past 30 days, equal to 20% of Solana’s overall application revenue.
The report said Solana had long possessed the technical ingredients needed to incubate breakout consumer apps, but a major wave of new users did not arrive until PumpFun launched in January 2024. Castle Labs described the product as more than an asset generator. It also acts as a native distribution layer that enables newly launched assets to find immediate matching and trading activity. Powered by Solana’s high-throughput architecture, more than 20 million meme coins have now been created on the network, according to the report.
Professional terminals and wallet products including Axiom, Fomo, GMGN, and Phantom form the next major cluster. Castle Labs said their moat lies in controlling distribution and user traffic. By combining social trading, onchain perpetuals, and prediction markets in a single interface, these products capture fees from core trading tools while also extending into some of crypto’s more profitable business areas.
The report said this activity creates strong spillover effects across the ecosystem rather than existing in isolation. It cited Fomo as an example, saying its adapter automatically routes user buy orders to Solana venues with deeper liquidity, including DEXs such as Raydium and Meteora, along with aggregators such as Jupiter.
Vertical integration has become more visible as these applications expand in both directions. Early in PumpFun’s growth cycle, tokens that reached a required market-cap curve would graduate and establish regular liquidity pools on Raydium. In March 2025, PumpFun launched its own PumpSwap to broaden revenue sources. Castle Labs said PumpSwap generated $15 million in revenue over the past 30 days, showing that swap fees and slippage capture remain highly attractive profit centers.
That move, the report said, reflects a wider ambition among launch platforms to control the full lifecycle of an asset, from issuance through secondary-market trading, and to monetize that lifecycle as market value rises. DEXs, in turn, want exposure to the issuance layer because a constant flow of new tokens helps sustain long-term fee generation.
Raydium’s own strategy fits that pattern. Castle Labs said Raydium launched LaunchLab in April 2025, a bonding-curve issuance engine that lets third-party developers build differentiated launchpads on top of it and route mature tokens into Raydium liquidity pools.
In September 2026, StonkFun moved its issuance architecture to LaunchLab, according to the report. Castle Labs said StonkFun gained traction by introducing a more flexible asset-backing model tied to real assets, including U.S. equities, while allowing token creators to define custom tax rates on each trade. Those taxes are used onchain to buy real stocks and distribute them to meme token holders. The firm said this model gave users dividend-like exposure to real assets while speculating on meme coins, lifting both the holder base and the scale of RWA activity on Solana.
Castle Labs also cited Collector Crypt, a trading card game marketplace, as another sign of diversification. The report said the platform has averaged $8 million in monthly fee revenue this year, suggesting Solana’s consumer economy is no longer limited to meme speculation alone.
What one year of data says about revenue durability
To test whether consumer-app revenue is a temporary attention trade, Castle Labs used three benchmarks: the weekly revenue floor over the past year, the retention of leading applications, and whether market share losses by former leaders stayed inside the Solana ecosystem or moved to other chains.
The analysis covered a full year of onchain data from October 2025 through October 2026.
Castle Labs said weekly revenue from Solana consumer apps ranged from $13.5 million to $42.6 million, with a median of $18.2 million. PumpFun remained the biggest contributor to that floor. The report added that in the third quarter of 2026, aggregate consumer-app revenue accelerated again with support from newer products such as StonkFun.
That led Castle Labs to conclude that Solana’s consumer-application revenue has already moved beyond a purely cyclical pattern and established a recognizable cash-flow base.
On retention, the firm tracked the top 10 consumer applications from the fourth quarter of 2025. Those 10 apps generated $211.7 million during that quarter. By the third quarter of 2026, their combined revenue had increased to $261.3 million, and eight of them still ranked in the top 10, including PumpFun and Axiom.
The report also pointed to a decline in concentration. The top three applications accounted for 64% of revenue at the end of 2025, but that figure had fallen to 50.2% at the time of the report. Castle Labs said that shift suggests newer protocols still have room to gain share. StonkFun stood out most clearly, producing $27 million in revenue in September, compared with $46 million for PumpFun in the same month.
Castle Labs also noted that StonkFun’s momentum has cooled. Its average daily revenue over seven days was about $490,000, equal to 21% of its $2.3 million peak. Even so, the report said the pattern supports a broader conclusion: new products can scale quickly on Solana, and while activity later normalizes, it tends to settle at a higher baseline than before.
DeFi is not the biggest contributor yet, but the stack is broadening
Castle Labs said traditional DeFi is not yet Solana’s largest source of application-layer revenue, though the sector is evolving quickly, especially where it intersects with RWAs. Looking at the past 30 days, the report compared growth rates across major DeFi segments on Solana and Ethereum and said Solana outpaced Ethereum in most categories.
There were pockets of weakness. Synthetic dollars and yield-tokenization activity on Solana pulled back in some areas, which the report linked to the still-early scale of those verticals. It cited short-term fluctuations in total value locked for Exponent, a yield-tokenization protocol.
Castle Labs described lending as one of the clearest tests of financial maturity because it depends on hard collateral and demands stronger system stability and user retention. On Solana, Jupiter Lend and Kamino are the two main players, though the report said they are taking different approaches.
To explain the mechanics, Castle Labs pointed to Ethereum’s more mature model. It said Ethereum lending TVL is 11 times larger than Solana’s and is driven mainly by three categories of base assets: liquid staking tokens, yield-bearing stablecoins, and Pendle PT principal tokens. The first two categories carry native yield, while PT assets lock in fixed returns until maturity. Users can post these yield-bearing assets as collateral, borrow base assets, buy more yield-bearing exposure, and repeat the loop. As long as the underlying yield remains above the borrowing cost, the strategy creates arbitrage room and helps drive borrowing demand and protocol revenue.
Solana has an established liquid staking ecosystem, the report said, but it has lagged in scaled yield-bearing stablecoins and PT-like assets. Castle Labs argued that Kamino and Jupiter are now trying to close that gap.
At present, the main yield-bearing stablecoin liquidity on Solana comes from USDe and USDY, with combined supply above $635 million, according to the report. Of that, $313 million in USDe sits in Jupiter Lend and $190 million in Kamino. Castle Labs said incentives tied to sUSDe have helped activate the first major leverage loop in Solana lending.
For PT assets, the report said Kamino has used Chainlink CCIP to bring in cross-chain principal tokens and support leveraged looping. Solana-native protocol Exponent, which Castle Labs compared to Pendle, has also contributed more than $7 million in deposits. The firm said lending depth on Solana could expand materially if yield-bearing and principal-token markets reach larger scale.
The report also highlighted a macro change inside Solana’s own economy. A recently approved double-disinflation proposal will gradually reduce SOL’s net inflation rate, which in turn implies lower native staking yields for LSTs. If lending protocols want to stay attractive, borrowing rates may need to fall as well, and that could compress deposit yields.
Castle Labs said that makes the growth of yield-bearing stablecoins and a broader set of RWA assets more urgent. Higher-yield real asset pools would give lending markets more ways to preserve borrowing demand and maintain balance between depositors and borrowers.
In perpetual futures, Solana recorded $42 billion in trading volume over the past 30 days, equal to 20.6% of Hyperliquid’s total network volume, according to the report. Castle Labs ranked Solana fourth among onchain perps venues globally. Key protocols named in the report were GMTrade, Pacifica, and Jupiter Perps.
GMTrade is built around the GMX V2 architecture and is focused on RWA perpetual matching, while Pacifica has gained traction with yield on resting orders, touch trading, and AI-assisted tools, the report said.
Stablecoin infrastructure has also expanded. Castle Labs said total stablecoin issuance on Solana has exceeded $16.3 billion, up about 6% to 7% from a year earlier. Ethereum, by contrast, saw total stablecoin supply fall 9% over the same period to $146 billion.
USDC’s dominance on Solana has slipped from 72% to 42%, but Castle Labs said new issues including USDGO, USD1, and BlackRock’s BUIDL added a combined $3.5 billion in fresh liquidity. Even so, only about $5.6 million of those newer stablecoins is currently deployed inside DeFi protocols, leaving what the report described as significant dormant capital.
In terms of actual utilization, USDC remains the leading stablecoin on Solana, with $544 million in staked deployment and $930 million in borrowed volume. Backed by Ethena’s integration with Jupiter and Kamino, USDe has become the second most actively used stablecoin asset, according to the report.
RWA becomes one of Solana’s fastest-growing sectors
Castle Labs presented RWAs as one of the strongest growth areas on Solana. Over the past year, the report said, onchain RWA market value on Solana climbed from $700 million to $4.3 billion, an increase of more than 600%. Ethereum’s RWA value rose from $15.5 billion to $16.6 billion over the same period, or 7%. A year ago, Solana’s RWA footprint was equal to 4.5% of Ethereum’s. That ratio has now reached 26%, according to the report.
Castle Labs said users on Solana can now access U.S. Treasuries, asset-backed credit, tokenized equities, selected quantitative strategies, and commodities.
Among the sub-sectors, tokenized stocks stood out most sharply. The report said the category grew from $63 million to $455 million, led mainly by issuers such as xStocks and Backpack. Ethereum’s tokenized-stock market is now about $750 million, which Castle Labs said puts Solana close to parity in that segment.
The report argued that the main value of bringing real assets onchain is not just increasing headline asset figures but making those assets productive. On Solana, more than $65 million in tokenized U.S. stocks is already generating onchain yield, according to Castle Labs. xStocks was highlighted as the main example, and the report said those assets have been added to the official collateral lists at both Kamino and Jupiter Lend.
Castle Labs also named other active RWA products. OnRe has launched ONyc, backed by reinsurance premium income. Hastra has issued PRIME and AUTO, supported by home equity and auto consumer loans. Maple has brought syrupUSDC to Solana, opening access for onchain users to spreads generated in institutional lending and private credit.
The report said these yield-bearing assets combine credibility with competitive returns and are supplying lending markets with higher-quality collateral, helping leverage loops develop into a more self-sustaining cash-flow system.
Castle Labs’ conclusion
Castle Labs concluded that Solana now hosts one of Web3’s strongest revenue-generating consumer application clusters. In absolute protocol revenue, the report said, it stands at the front of the sector. More importantly, those applications have established a revenue base that has held through attention cycles rather than vanishing with them.
The report said that growth is now spilling into deeper parts of the financial stack. Liquid staking, DEXs, lending, derivatives, and RWAs are all expanding. It added that active RWA TVL deposited in DeFi protocols has surpassed $500 million, equal to about 8% of Solana’s net total value locked. Because those assets come with native yield, Castle Labs said they are becoming a new engine for lending loops and credit growth on the network.
Its overall view was that Solana has moved beyond the stage where a single app category defines the chain. The network is now developing into a self-reinforcing, full-stack onchain economy. If that coordination continues and the ecosystem keeps extending into basis trading and yield-bearing derivatives, the report said, borrowing demand across the chain could deepen further.