Howdy!

It’s a slow news day so we’re doing a quick roundup of the Solana ecosystem. Let’s dig into the numbers from ETF flows and launchpad competition to perps volumes: 

The state of Solana in 6 charts

Here’s a weekly snapshot of the Solana ecosystem.

SOL’s price briefly flirted with the $200 mark before it dipped to $193 amid a broader market dip this morning.

Unlike BTC and ETH, SOL does not enjoy an institutional bid (yet) from treasury companies. SOL DATs, mainly Upexi (UPXI) and DeFi Development Corp (DFDV), have accumulated about $596 billion in SOL, compared to $11 billion in ETH and $86 billion in BTC.

Looking at daily REV (all fees paid to transact onchain), Solana’s REV has stayed relatively stagnant at the $2.5 million to $3.5 million mark for months.

Net inflows into SOL’s sole institutional ETF — the REX-Osprey SOL Staking ETF (SSK) — have slowed. The fund drew $3.7 million for the week of Aug. 4-10, compared to $58.3 million in its launch week. Daily net flows were $5.2 million on Tuesday.

Over on the memecoin side of the world, Pump lost its dominance to Letsbonk through July, but recently reclaimed its spot in the last week. Yesterday, Pump saw 30,550 tokens launched compared to 1,499 on Letsbonk.

The PUMP token has traded down to $0.0036, after it briefly touched its ICO price of $0.004 last night.

The Axiom trading bot continues to dominate the trading bot market, regardless of which launchpad is winning. Axiom has grown to 60% market share since its inception in February.

Over on the perps market, Drift has been having a good month, hitting $500 million in open interest yesterday. Its zero-fee trading for BTC and ETH introduced in mid-July has sparked a growth of volumes, as seen in the below chart.

Despite its growth, though, the perps crown in Solana is still held by Jupiter. 

Based on trading volumes, Drift has about $17.1 billion in the last 30 days, compared to Jupiter perp volumes of $23.1 billion. Both are of course still eclipsed by Hyperliquid’s trading volumes of ~$371 billion within the same time period.

— Donovan Choy

P.S. Fill out our short audience survey and help us build a better Lightspeed. Thank you!

It’s the summer of DATs and Solana has arrived at the party. 

But when October rolls around, everyone will be looking to DAS: London to hear from leaders of the DAT space about where things stand and where they’re headed.

Get your ticket today with promo code: LIGHT100 for £100 off

📅 October 13-15 | London

BitPay supports Solana

BitPay announced full support for the Solana network yesterday.

This opens up the door to spending SOL, SPL tokens or Solana-native stablecoins (USDC, USDT) at 130K+ BitPay-enabled merchants globally from the BitPay app or most Solana wallets like Phantom, Solflare and Backpack.

That makes it the eighth chain integrated by BitPay after Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dogecoin and XRP Ledger.

BitPay is one of the largest and oldest crypto payment processors, self-reporting at least 213K of transactions processed in the last six months.

— Donovan Choy

A message from Anna Yuan, co-founder of Perena: