Solana has become the de facto chain for launching meme coins because of its lower gas fees, faster transactions, and good user experience. Solana’s DeFi ecosystem is growing rapidly in lending, liquid staking, and the perpetual space. Currently, Solana has $10 billion in TVL and $118 million in NFT trading volume, second only to Ethereum.

Stats on Solana:

On May 26, the Phantom Wallet surpassed Facebook and ChatGPT in the Google Play U.S. ranking, as shown below.

Solana LST Space is growing rapidly.

Solana DEX Volume is growing rapidly.

Solana has the highest stablecoin transactions of all blockchains.

A lot of DeFi primitives that are built on Ethereum are being deployed on Solana, like LST and others.

Why Solana is so retail friendly:

• Gas fees are still cheaper than Ethereum layer 2s.

• Multiple actions can be done in a single transaction, unlike EVM chains where users need to perform two transactions just to swap tokens.

Final thoughts:

Gas fees on Solana are increasing. The daily average gas fee has risen from $0.004 in February to $0.028. Meanwhile, during the same period, the base gas fee has decreased from $0.30 to $0.06. If gas fees on Solana continue to rise and become higher than Ethereum layer 2s, we can expect meme coin trading to shift to other chains. It safe to say that DeFi activity will not be as affected since it is not as gas-sensitive and Solana will remain in the top 5 chains in terms of activity because of the current network effects.

This article is part of a series created to understand where Chains Fit.

With the launch of numerous L2s, L1s, and app chains, where does Ethereum fit.