In the VIP club of the most popular blockchains, Solana (SOL) has undoubtedly established itself as a leading player. This momentum is driven by its ongoing developments, such as the recent integration of its validation software, Firedancer, which is capable of boosting its performance.
Firedancer: 1 million transactions per second (TPS) on Solana?
While time is a testament to quality, the promises made by the Firedancer validation software—recently integrated into Solana—could be numerous. Indeed, its development required the commitment of developers from the venture capital firm Jump Crypto over a three-year period before it finally became operational at the end of this year.
In practice, this new tool initially allows Solana to increase the diversity of its client software, designed to facilitate validators’ connection to its blockchain in order to verify transactions and participate in its consensus, while helping to limit potential outages that could occur, according to a recent report by Helius, a Solana R&D firm.
Relying entirely on a single client implementation is a significant driver of centralization, as it carries the risk that a critical software bug could cause a liveness failure across the entire network.
Helius
Originally scheduled for the second quarter of last year, this integration of Firedancer follows a testing period of approximately 100 days conducted with a select group of validators, involving the production of 50,000 blocks.
Since its inception in 2022, this client software has aimed to help the Solana blockchain move closer to its goal of 1 million transactions per second (TPS), notably through its “tile-based modular architecture” capable of executing multiple tasks in parallel.
Solana: The Most Widely Used Blockchain in 2025
At the same time, the year-end review period is beginning to yield reports on the blockchain sector. And according to data collected by Jon Ma, co-founder and CEO of the analytics firm Artemis, Solana has emerged as the most popular blockchain over the past year.
Indeed, the Solana blockchain outperforms its competitors in many areas, to the point of establishing itself as the number one in terms of:
- Monthly active users (MAU) estimated at 98 million, which is 5x more than Base;
- Transactions, with a total of 34 billion—18 times more than the BNB Chain;
- A trading volume of $1.6 trillion, equivalent to 1.7 times that of Ethereum;
- dApp fees totaling $5 billion, or twice those of Ethereum;
- Total revenue estimated at $1.5 billion, which is 2.4 times that of Tron (TRX).
Solana emerges as the most popular blockchain of the year
Ethereum still dominates in terms of total transaction volume (Solana 3). But in terms of pure usage, Solana appears to be the most widely used blockchain in 2025.
Jon Ma
This finding is also confirmed by the CoinGecko platform, which describes the Solana ecosystem as “the most popular for the second consecutive year, capturing 26.79% of global interest in blockchain-specific crypto narratives in 2025.”
