Jack Kubinec


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<p>Here at Lightspeed, we’re not fans of measuring protocol success by the popular metrics of active addresses or total value locked.&nbsp;</p>



<p>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 <a href="https://defillama.com/fees/chains/Solana">data</a> as of Dec. 27.&nbsp;</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">1. Raydium — $648 million</h2>



<p>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. <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-raydium-volume-growth">Some accused</a> 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.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">2. Jito — $633 million</h2>



<p>Jito’s <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/jito-bundler-breaks">Jito-Solana client</a> made MEV modifications and became a go-to for many validators running Solana’s software. Jito <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics/sol?dashboard=sol-financial">takes</a> 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.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">3. Pump.fun — $308 million</h2>



<p>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 <em>really</em> <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-pump-dot-fun-memecoin">like to speculate on tokens</a>.&nbsp;</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">4. Photon — $248 million&nbsp;</h2>



<p>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 <a href="https://x.com/tradewithPhoton/status/1749461331223499228">claims</a> its data comes in 15 times faster than DEX Screener’s, and it offers a “quick buy” function to reduce friction when trading.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">5. bloXroute — $136 million</h2>



<p>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.&nbsp;</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">6. Trojan — $121 million</h2>



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



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">7. BONKbot — $118 million</h2>



<p>The team behind the popular Solana memecoin released BONKbot as a Telegram trading bot that indicated the bear market memecoin’s creators <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/bonkbot-volumes-rise">might have some technical chops</a> too.&nbsp;</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">8. Marinade — $88 million</h2>



<p>Marinade offers the third-largest Solana liquid staking token behind offerings from Jito and Binance. This year, it <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-stake-auction-marketplace">debuted “Marinade v2”</a> which brought an auction mechanism to its stake pool in hopes of raising yields and wooing institutions. Some <a href="https://solanafloor.com/news/solana-validators-concerned-marinades-stake-auction-marketplace">accused</a> Marinade of enabling sandwich attackers in the process.&nbsp;</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">9. BullX — $85 million</h2>



<p>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 <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sol-demand-cripples-coinbase-indexers">Coinbase has struggled with</a> in recent weeks.&nbsp;</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">10. Kamino — $81 million</h2>



<p>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 <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/kamino-seeing-benefits-from-liquidity-incentives-on-pyusd">doled out</a> to try driving adoption for PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin on Solana.</p>



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<p><strong>Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">Subscribe to the Empire newsletter</a>.</strong></p>



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Tracking Solana’s top protocols by fees


<p><em style="font-size: 16px; white-space: normal; border: 0px solid rgb(229, 231, 235); box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(55, 65, 81); color: rgb(55, 65, 81); font-family: Soehne, ui-sans-serif, system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, </em><a node="[object Object]" style="font-size: 16px; white-space: normal; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; border-style: none; border-color: rgb(229, 231, 235) rgb(229, 231, 235) rgb(220, 220, 220); border-image: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(86, 55, 205); font-family: Soehne, ui-sans-serif, system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: justify;" href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener"><em style="border: 0px solid rgb(229, 231, 235); box-sizing: border-box;">subscribe</em></a><em style="font-size: 16px; white-space: normal; border: 0px solid rgb(229, 231, 235); box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(55, 65, 81); color: rgb(55, 65, 81); font-family: Soehne, ui-sans-serif, system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">.</em></p>



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<p>Jito, the Solana outfit whose software currently drives a majority of the blockchain’s income, experienced a “system-wide outage” this morning.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The outage affected Jito bundles which process multiple transactions in one go and are popular with traders looking to do things like arbitrage. Jito’s standstill came one day after it processed a record 15 million bundles in one day, shattering its previous high of 13.9 million.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Roughly 90% of Solana validators responsible for running the blockchain make use of Jito’s software, so one immediate concern was whether the Solana network itself would experience an outage. However, bundles are just one piece of the Jito-Solana client. Transactions continued to be processed throughout the outage, Jito co-founder Lucas Bruder <a href="https://x.com/buffalu__/status/1856722608697250112">told</a> me on X.</p>



<p>During what has now been a month of consecutive record-breaking demand for access to the Solana blockchain, Jito and <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/solana-wallets-grass-airdrop">other key pieces of Solana infrastructure</a> have strained to process the load.&nbsp;</p>



<p>Alongside the all-time high in bundles, Jito MEV tips, which are extra fees paid by traders hoping to get their transaction prioritized, are currently roughly double what they were even during the memecoin craze of this summer. Yesterday, users paid some $6.2 million in extra MEV tips to validators.</p>



<p>Jito validators started complaining of performance issues at around 4:00 Wednesday morning, but the outage was declared at 9:30 am, and bundles started working again by 11 am. Solana DeFi protocols Jupiter and Save both had features break during the Jito outage.</p>



<p>Jito made a Telegram <a href="https://t.me/+Kg-WnMfiQJAwZjQx">channel</a> in late October to update customers on its block engine, the piece of software that reorders transactions to order Jito blocks as lucratively as possible. The chat shows Jito has had two other system issues since Saturday.&nbsp;</p>



<p>For some Solana watchers, the incident was an interesting experiment in what the blockchain’s fee markets would do without Jito’s infrastructure. Blockworks Research analyst Dan Smith posted a <a href="https://x.com/smyyguy/status/1856736831917732258">chart</a> showing that during Jito’s outage, the blockchain’s median priority fee briefly jumped. That means that while Jito was down, it essentially became more expensive to land transactions on the blockchain. The median fee went back down when Jito started working again.</p>



<p>“Pretty cool … the theory actually works in practice,” Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko wrote in response. Jito is a bit slower and more reliable than run of the mill transaction fees, Yakovenko added. Some transaction senders pay a premium for this reliability, and this serves to “actually lower the median fees for everyone else,” Yakovenko said.</p>



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<p><strong>Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">Subscribe to the Empire newsletter</a>.</strong></p>



<p><strong>Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/onthemargin">Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter</a>.</strong></p>



<p><strong>Get alpha directly in your inbox with the <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/research">0xResearch newsletter</a> — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.</strong></p>



<p><strong>The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">Subscribe to daily Solana news</a> from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.</strong></p>
