Author: Jack Kubinec, Blockworks; Edited by: Bai Shui, Golden Finance
At Lightspeed, we don't like to measure the success of a protocol using popular active addresses or total locked value metrics.
Conversely, fees can be a useful metric for measuring the demand for different applications and services. Blockchain addresses and TVL can be manipulated, but fees represent real money, which at least theoretically can be turned into something on-chain. Therefore, according to DeFiLlama data as of December 27, here are the top 10 Solana protocols ranked by fees this year.
1. Raydium — $648 million
It's been a brilliant year for Solana's decentralized exchanges, leveraging the meme coin craze that swept the cryptocurrency world for most of 2024. Some have accused the application of fabricating false trading volumes to appear more legitimate, but the numbers speak for themselves. Raydium has generated quite a bit in fees.
2. Jito — $633 million
Jito's Jito-Solana client modified MEV and became the preferred option for many validators running Solana software. Jito charges users a 5% 'tip' on MEV payments made for transactions on Solana — this year, with meme coins increasing the demand for paying MEV tips and conducting transactions on the blockchain, this amount has grown to enormous levels.
3. Pump.fun — $308 million
In less than a year, the meme coin launch platform pump.fun has generated over $300 million in fees. Read that sentence again. If we've learned anything this year, it is that cryptocurrency users really love to speculate on tokens.
4. Photon — $248 million
The Solana trading platform Photon also capitalized on the wave of meme coins, generating $250 million in revenue. Photon provides meme coin information for users to browse, but its real hallmark is speed. Photon claims its data transmission speed is 15 times faster than DEX Screener and offers a 'quick buy' feature to reduce friction during transactions.
5. bloXroute — $136 million
At first, this question confused me a bit because I rarely hear anyone mention bloXroute in the context of Solana. This infrastructure company offers a blockchain distribution network and trader APIs, primarily marketed as a way for traders to conduct Solana transactions faster.
6. Trojan — $121 million
Trojan offers a popular Telegram bot that allows users to create Solana wallets and buy and sell cryptocurrency within the messaging application.
7. BONKbot — $118 million
The team behind the popular Solana meme coin released BONKbot as a Telegram trading bot, indicating that the creators of meme coins in a bear market may also possess some technical abilities.
8. Marinade — $88 million
Marinade is the third-largest Solana liquid staking token, after Jito and Binance. This year, it launched 'Marinade v2', introducing an auction mechanism for its staking pool, hoping to increase yields and attract institutions. Marinade has been accused of fostering 'sandwich attackers' in the process.
9. BullX — $85 million
BullX is another meme coin trading platform. It markets itself as providing the 'fastest indexing', even as the process of making blockchain data readable — a problem Coinbase has been struggling with in recent weeks.
10. Kamino — $81 million
Kamino is a DeFi protocol whose TVL soared to over $2 billion in 2024. The application is popular for its lending features, leading some to compare it to Solana's Aave. Notably, Kamino is the origin of most liquidity incentives aimed at boosting the adoption of PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin on Solana.
