Solana Tops Chains with $91M in May App Revenue

Data from DefiLlama show Solana recorded $91 million in application revenue in May, ahead of Hyperliquid at $53 million and Ethereum at $52 million. Application revenue counts the fees decentralized applications retain from users, a narrower measure than total network fees that analysts use to gauge on-chain economic activity.

Solana led weekly application revenue for five consecutive weeks. In one of those weeks the chain posted $16.94 million in app revenue versus Ethereum’s $13.55 million. Much of Solana’s fee income came from trading venues and token-creation platforms, where memecoin speculation and high-frequency swaps generated heavy transaction churn.

SOL was trading near $81 after eight straight monthly declines from its 2025 peak, a drop that erased tens of billions in market value. Despite the price weakness, the Solana ecosystem reported $2.39 billion in revenue for 2025, and tokenized real-world assets on the chain exceeded $2 billion earlier this year. Network activity remained high, with the chain processing tens of millions of transactions per day.

Institutional channels showed continued interest. U.S. spot Solana exchange-traded funds have posted roughly $1.13 billion in cumulative net inflows since launch. Solana products drew inflows on days when bitcoin funds experienced outflows.

Analysts note that application revenue differs from total fees because it measures only the portion retained by decentralized applications rather than all fees processed on the blockchain. They also point out that a large share of fees is concentrated in a small number of high-volume, speculative venues.