Tracking Solana's top protocols by fees

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Here at Lightspeed, we’re not fans of measuring protocol success by the popular metrics of active addresses or total value locked.

Instead, fees can be a helpful measure for demand for different apps and services. Blockchain addresses and TVL are gameable, but fees are real funds that change hands to do something onchain, at least in theory. So, here are the top 10 Solana protocols this year by fees, based on DeFiLlama data as of Dec. 27.

1. Raydium — $648 million

It was a banner year for the Solana decentralized exchange, which tapped into the memecoin fever that infected the crypto world for much of 2024. Some accused the app of being a venue where memecoins could create fake volume to appear more legitimate, but the numbers tell a clear story. Raydium brought in quite a bit in fees.

2. Jito — $633 million

Jito’s Jito-Solana client made MEV modifications and became a go-to for many validators running Solana’s software. Jito takes 5% of the MEV “tips” that users pay to transact on Solana — which grew to be a huge amount this year as memecoins raised demand to pay MEV tips and land transactions on the blockchain.

3. Pump.fun — $308 million

In less than a year of existence, the memecoin launchpad pump.fun brought in more than $300 million in fees. Read that sentence again. If we learned anything this year, it’s that crypto users really really like to speculate on tokens.

4. Photon — $248 million

The Solana trading platform Photon also rode the memecoin wave to the tune of a quarter billion dollars. Photon offers memecoin feeds that users can peruse, but its real calling card is speed. Photon claims its data comes in 15 times faster than DEX Screener’s, and it offers a “quick buy” function to reduce friction when trading.

5. bloXroute — $136 million

This one was initially a bit of a head-scratcher for me, as I hadn’t heard bloXroute mentioned much in the context of Solana. The infrastructure company offers a blockchain distribution network and trader APIs that are largely marketed as a way for traders to land Solana transactions more quickly.

6. Trojan — $121 million

Trojan offers a popular Telegram bot that lets users create a Solana wallet and buy and sell crypto all within the messaging app.

7. BONKbot — $118 million

The team behind the popular Solana memecoin released BONKbot as a Telegram trading bot that indicated the bear market memecoin’s creators might have some technical chops too.

8. Marinade — $88 million

Marinade offers the third-largest Solana liquid staking token behind offerings from Jito and Binance. This year, it debuted “Marinade v2” which brought an auction mechanism to its stake pool in hopes of raising yields and wooing institutions. Some accused Marinade of enabling sandwich attackers in the process.

9. BullX — $85 million

BullX is another memecoin trading platform. It markets itself as offering the “fastest indexing,” which is the process of making blockchain data readable — and something Coinbase has struggled with in recent weeks.

10. Kamino — $81 million

Kamino is a DeFi protocol that ballooned to over $2 billion in TVL in 2024. The app is popular for its borrow-lend feature, causing some to liken it to the Aave of Solana. Notably, Kamino was the home of most of the liquidity incentives doled out to try driving adoption for PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin on Solana.

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