Solana’s DeFi activity keeps expanding
Plus, Imran Khan’s intriguing experiment on the speeds of crypto onramps
Furkan Cubuk/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
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Howdy!
My bike got stolen from in front of my apartment last night, which — and I promise this isn’t just me coping — I had kind of been hoping would happen, because the bike literally doesn’t have brakes and its seat was stuck at the lowest height.
So, your ill-gotten new bike sucks. Get pranked, thief. Anyways:
Raydium leads the way as Solana DeFi volumes grow
Solana DeFi is ascending to new heights — and it’s still memecoins all the way down.
For the first time in its history, Solana appears poised to surpass Ethereum in trailing 30-day volume for decentralized exchange trading. In other words, Solana appears close to outpacing the Ethereum blockchain in DeFi trading for an entire month — rather than the occasional 24-hour window that Solana boosters are wont to post about.
(Also, notably: the Ethereum figure cited above does not account for layer-2s.)
The story of Solana’s recent DeFi growth seems to heavily involve the decentralized exchange Raydium, which has made itself the sector’s trading giant.
A year ago, Raydium accounted for roughly 25% of Solana DeFi volume. Today, Raydium accounts for more than 60% of Solana DEX volume, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard.
This has largely come at the expense of Orca, which has seen its share fall from over 60% last August to around 20% today. A different dashboard shows that Raydium has also recently surpassed the popular DEX aggregator Jupiter in trading volume share.
Much of Raydium’s volume comes from memecoins. CoinGecko data shows the Popcat token accounted for over 10% of Raydium spot volume in the past 24 hours. Michi and dogwifhat were second and third, respectively.
Marginfi co-founder MacBrennan Peet told me that he, too, has been seeing “a ton of long-tail tokens grab a ton of attention recently.” (Long-tail tokens refer to lesser-known cryptos.) It appears that Solana’s DeFi summer is broadly still being driven by memecoins.
Interestingly, Raydium’s use was partly helped along by its partnership with memecoin launch pad Pump.fun, which would send sufficiently-liquid tokens to trade on Raydium. But Pump.fun’s fee income has somewhat stagnated in recent weeks while Raydium’s income has grown.
If you wanted to pull a story out of this, it could be that Pump.fun’s splattering of longshot memecoins didn’t prove to be very fun compared to betting on more-established memecoins — where your chances might still be low, but at least there are a lot of other investors in it with you.
But I’d take heed before making too much of these figures, because they are notoriously gameable and subject to change.
The memecoin regime may not last forever though. Jito’s Andrew Thurman pointed out that there are “a lot of interesting products that don’t have a super dominant equivalent yet” on Solana, pointing to Ethereum’s “synthetic dollar” Ethena and yield tokenization platform Pendle as a couple examples.
Thurman also pointed out Solana’s healthy level of stablecoin movement relative to the amount of stables onchain, or the total value locked (TVL). Solana’s stablecoin supply is in between that of Arbitrum and Base, but Solana saw more than triple the stablecoin transfer volume of either layer-2 over the past 24 hours, according to Artemis.
“Whole lot more velocity, and eventually the TVL sums will follow,” Thurman wrote.
— Jack Kubinec
Zero In
20%
That’s how much of the total PYUSD supply has been deposited into Kamino Finance, according to data from Artemis and Kamino — an eye-popping proportion enabled by incentives spending.
PayPal deployed its stablecoin on Solana in late May. On July 1, Kamino announced an incentivized PYUSD launch where users would receive boosted rewards for depositing the stablecoin on Kamino.
Those supplying PYUSD on the platform are currently earning 16.43% APY, according to Kamino’s website.
We’ve reported that PYUSD on Solana is meant for payments use cases, but for now, it seems to be finding product-market fit among degens.
— Jack Kubinec
The Pulse
AllianceDAO’s Imran Khan conducted an intriguing experiment this week: timing the speed of different crypto onramps.
To set the scene: Crypto has never been exactly easy to get into (that is, to put one’s money in), but crypto finance platforms have made strides over the years.
Khan’s self-described 10-minute experiment put some of those onramps to the test.
Specifically, the test involved downloading a Phantom wallet client, creating a new wallet, storing the associated seed phrase, creating a password and biometrics, and confirming recovery.
From there, he tried to buy $50 worth of SOL. He chose three onramps: Coinbase, MoonPay and Meso.
Who came out on top? Coinbase, after a total of 2:18 minutes. It took a total of six procedural steps and in the end, he received $48.48 out of the $50 sought.
In last place came MoonPay. After 5 minutes and 45 seconds and 13 steps, Khan wrote that he wasn’t able to add his debit card.
The overall verdict? “The current state of onramps suggests that we’re still far from solving the challenges of pure fiat-to-crypto onboarding for mainstream users. To win in this space, it should be as simple as Apple/Google Pay,” Khan wrote.
If you’re someone who cares about the nitty-gritty of consumer crypto app progress, I suggest Khan’s post — let’s call it a bellwether for where the space sits in its long quest to drive consumer adoption.
— Michael McSweeney
One Good DM
A message from Soju, anonymous contributor to Jupiter:
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