Is Solana Still the Leader in DEX Trading Volume in 2026?

In 2024 and 2025 Solana became the main venue for on-chain spot trading: memecoins, trading bots and market makers moved there because transactions cost a fraction of a cent and confirm in under a second. In 2026 the picture got more complicated — the whole market shrank, Base held up better than others, and a brand-new network, Robinhood Chain, briefly overtook Solana on a few days in September. So is Solana still the leader?

Below we answer with one consistent dataset — DefiLlama's DEX volume by chain — for January 2025 through September 2026, plus the first half of October 2026. Off-chain prediction markets, which DefiLlama now adds to its overall total, are excluded so that only real on-chain DEX trading is compared.

#The short answer

Yes. Solana is still number one in spot DEX volume in 2026, but its lead is getting smaller and the volumes themselves are much lower than a year ago.

Source: DefiLlama, on-chain DEX volume by chain. In total, on-chain DEXes processed about $2.22 trillion in January–September 2026, against $3.57 trillion over the same months of 2025 — a 38% decline.

Solana was the number-one network in every month of 2026 so far. By day it led on 270 of the 288 days from January 1 to October 15.

#How Solana's share has changed

The chart shows two different stories:

• Volume fell in dollars. January 2025, at the height of the memecoin boom, was a record month with $314 billion. In 2026 monthly volume has mostly stayed between $57 and $140 billion. Part of the drop is simply the SOL price: it traded around $190 at the start of 2025 and around $120 in late September 2026, so every swap is worth fewer dollars.
• The share is drifting down. Solana took 33.9% of on-chain DEX volume in 2025 as a whole. In 2026 its quarterly share was 37.5% in Q1, 30.6% in Q2 and 28.0% in Q3, and 26.2% in September.

#When Solana lost the top spot

Since January 2025 there has been only one calendar month in which Solana was not number one: June 2025, when BNB Chain did $90.7 billion against Solana's $86.2 billion. That spike was driven by points farming for Binance Alpha, and it faded once Binance stopped counting trading volume toward the points.

By individual days, Solana gave up the lead on just 18 days between January 1 and October 15, 2026:

• BNB Chain — 8 days between July 25 and August 7;
• Ethereum — 6 days: April 19–23 and October 6;
• Robinhood Chain — 4 days, September 2–5.

#What drives Solana's volume in 2026

The sources of volume have changed a lot compared with 2025.

Source: DefiLlama, protocol breakdown for Solana.

1. Pump.fun became the main exchange, not just a launchpad. Together, the Pump.fun bonding curve and its PumpSwap AMM made up about 30% of Solana's DEX volume in Q3 2026, against about 9% in 2025. In 2025 the top venue was Raydium with 22%.
2. Prop AMMs. "Proprietary" AMMs such as BisonFi, HumidiFi and Tessera are run by professional market makers who quote prices themselves, mostly in SOL–USD pairs. They account for roughly 30% of Solana's DEX volume. This is professional flow on one main pair, not retail trading in thousands of tokens.
3. Memecoins came back. According to 21Shares, the memecoin share of Solana's spot volume fell from 40% in the first half of 2025 to 16% in the first half of 2026, and then recovered to about 34% by August 2026.
4. Aggregators. Most retail swaps go through aggregators: Jupiter handles roughly half of Solana's aggregator volume and DFlow about a third.
5. The network keeps getting faster. In 2026 Solana raised the block compute limit from 60 to 100 million CU (July 29), cut the slot time step by step to 250 ms (September 18) and is preparing the Alpenglow consensus upgrade, with mainnet activation scheduled for epoch 1064, expected around October 21. Alpenglow targets finality of about 150 ms instead of roughly 12.8 seconds.

#Where Solana is not the leader

Leadership in DEX volume does not mean leadership in everything:

• Centralized exchanges. Binance alone still trades far more spot volume than all Solana DEXes combined. That said, the DEX-to-CEX spot ratio reached a record of about 24% in the summer of 2026 (The Block), mostly because CEX volume fell.
• Derivatives. On-chain perpetual futures are dominated by Hyperliquid; its daily perp volume is often several times Solana's entire daily spot DEX volume. These are different markets, so the numbers should not be added together.
• TVL and stablecoins. In October 2026 Solana is third by DeFi TVL (about $6 billion against about $50 billion on Ethereum) and third by stablecoin supply (about $16 billion against about $144 billion on Ethereum and about $95 billion on Tron).
• Revenue. Huge volume at tiny fees does not turn into huge revenue: 21Shares estimates Solana's network revenue at $141 million in the first half of 2026, 87% less than a year earlier.

#What this means for traders and token creators

For anyone trading or launching tokens, Solana remains the deepest on-chain market for small and mid-cap tokens: the most pairs, the most launchpads and the cheapest transactions. ChainTx.Tools has a full set of Solana trading tools:

• Bulk Buy and Bulk Sell — trade one token from many wallets at once;
• Multi-Token Buy — buy several tokens in one go;
• Market Maker — Auto BUY and Auto SELL bots (see our Market Maker Cookbook for setups);
• Sell All Tokens — clear every token out of a set of wallets;
• RPC Nodes — check and pick a fast RPC endpoint, which matters a lot when volume and competition are high.

#Summary

In January–September 2026 Solana processed about $723 billion of DEX volume — 32.5% of all on-chain spot trading and almost twice as much as Ethereum. It was the number-one network every month and on the vast majority of days. But the lead is narrowing: the share fell from 37.5% in Q1 to 28.0% in Q3, Base proved the most resilient of the large networks, and Robinhood Chain showed how quickly a newcomer with a big user base can take a slice of the market. For now Solana is still the leader — but not by the margin it enjoyed in 2025.