Solana (SOL) reached a big milestone on February 6, 2025. It has now gone a full year without any network downtime. At the same time, it became the second-largest DeFi network. Solana now holds $9.34 billion in total value locked (TVL).
Solana has processed 369 billion transactions. It also has a market cap of $97.34 billion. In the past, the network had many outages, especially in 2022. But now, for the first time, Solana has had no network outages for an entire year.
Some users still face issues with failed transactions. Sometimes, as many as 40% of transactions fail. But the Firedancer upgrade has helped reduce this problem and improve Solana’s stability.
Solana is also growing fast in decentralized finance (DeFi). According to a report by Messari, Solana is now the top blockchain in DeFi. Its DeFi TVL grew 486% in 2024, from $1.5 billion to $9.34 billion.
The memecoin boom helped drive Solana’s growth. Pump.fun, a decentralized exchange (DEX) on Solana, played a big role. It processed billions of dollars in transactions, making up half of Solana’s activity between July and December 2024.
Solana’s 24-hour trading volumes are now almost double that of Ethereum (ETH). However, Solana still lags behind Ethereum’s $57.92 billion TVL.
Even with its success, Solana has some challenges. One issue is that more than 30% of its transactions fail on average. This issue continues to affect its reputation.
Solana has also not yet matched Ethereum’s dominance. Ethereum still leads the DeFi space with a much larger TVL.
Solana’s year of no downtime is a big achievement. Its $9.34 billion in TVL shows strong growth in DeFi. However, the network still faces challenges, especially with transaction failures. Solana has made great strides, but it still has work to do to compete with Ethereum.
