Author: Frank, PANews
On November 21, the Solana ecosystem's crypto wallet Phantom ranked fifth in the free app rankings in the US Apple App Store. It ranked first in the tools category. This should be the best achievement for a crypto-native application in the mainstream app market. The reason behind this is attributed to the recent explosion of data on the Solana chain.
Is the crypto world entering a truly active period? What more meaningful facts are hidden behind the active data on the Solana chain? PANews has conducted an in-depth analysis of Solana's on-chain performance.
Solana's on-chain data saw exponential growth in November.
First, let's review the remarkable performance of the Solana chain recently. On November 9, the data for active wallets on Solana was 4.33 million, which reached 7 million active wallet addresses by November 21. On October 5, this number was only 893,000, representing an increase of nearly 8 times in just over a month. On November 3, the number of new accounts was 10.19 million. By November 20, the number of new accounts had reached 21.75 million, more than doubling the number of new accounts.
The biggest driving force during this period mainly comes from MEME coins. The performance of Pump.fun data is particularly outstanding. Data from November 2 shows that Pump.fun's application interaction volume was 130 million times, reaching a peak of 489 million by November 20, an increase of nearly 4 times. In terms of 24-hour active users, on November 3, it was 81,500, peaking at 277,000 by November 21, an increase of over 3 times. The total transaction volume also saw a rise, going from 1.82 million transactions on November 3 to 4.82 million transactions by November 22.
Behind user activity is a significant increase in transaction volumes. According to Defillama data, the trading volume on decentralized exchanges (DEX) on the Solana network exceeded $100 billion for the first time in November, reaching $109.8 billion. This figure is nearly double the monthly DEX trading volume on Ethereum's mainnet ($55 billion), and it represents an increase of over 100% compared to October's $52.5 billion.
Currently, the monthly active addresses on Solana have reached 107.5 million, and it is expected to break the October record of 123 million by the end of the month. The SOL token recently also broke its historical high from 2021, reaching $264.
MEME is active, but the difficulty of PVP is greater.
Let's observe the daily situation of average active addresses and their interaction with the meme coins.
Before describing specific data, it's important to explain Solana's new account mechanism. The number of new account addresses referred to here is not the same as the active addresses described in conventional blockchain explorers; rather, it refers to all new token addresses on the Solana chain. For instance, a user address may purchase multiple tokens, and each time a new token is purchased, a new account address is created. Therefore, the number of new account addresses is significantly higher than the number of active wallet addresses.
Comparing the data from November 1 and November 20, on November 1, the number of active addresses was 4.74 million, and the number of new account addresses on that day was 12 million, with an average of 2.53 new token addresses created per active address that day.
As of November 20, the number of active wallets was 6.66 million, and the number of new accounts was 21.75 million, with an average of 3.26 new tokens bought per active wallet. This data shows that not only has the overall data seen tremendous growth, but user trading enthusiasm has also received a significant boost.
But does the surge in on-chain data present an opportunity for players who are speculating on MEME coins, or does it reduce their chances? How many holders does each token have daily? On November 1, the number of newly generated SPL tokens was 22,908, and the number of new accounts that day was 12 million, with an average of 524 new addresses per new token. By November 20, the number of new SPL tokens was 76,838, and the number of new account addresses was 21.74 million, with an average of 283 new accounts allocated per SPL. This also shows that, although the overall heat on the chain is increasing, it seems to have led to a more intense PVP phenomenon, where the speed of token issuance far exceeds the speed of new users entering.
Males born in the 90s and 00s are the main force on the Solana chain.
The application that benefited the most on the Solana chain is undoubtedly the Phantom wallet. On November 21, Phantom's ranking in the Apple App Store peaked at 6th overall and 1st in the tools category. Before November 6, Phantom didn't even have ranking data, but within half a month, it skyrocketed from 95th on the tools list to 1st.
According to data from similarweb, from the user data analysis, Phantom's recent growth has been most notable in Brazil and the United States. The traffic from the United States reached 27.38%, growing by 24.82% in the past month. Although Brazil's proportion is low at 2.97%, its growth rate is 70.17%. The top five countries are: United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Brazil, and Pakistan.
Among Phantom's audience, 70.5% are males and 29.5% are females. The age group with the highest number of visitors is 25 - 34 years, accounting for 41.76%, while users aged 18 to 24 account for 20%. From this data, it can also be seen that the main players of on-chain MEME are concentrated among those born in the 90s to 00s, with this age group accounting for over 60%.
Only Sui has kept pace with Solana's data growth among public chains.
Is this data explosion limited to Solana or is it a collective explosion across the entire network?
Looking at the growth data from the App Store, most crypto-related applications have shown growth. Apart from Phantom, Coinbase's ranking has also risen to a peak of 29th overall and 1st in the finance category recently. Other applications like Solflare, DEX Screener, MetaMask, and Crypto.com have also experienced varying degrees of growth and have entered the top data rankings.
In contrast, the performance of on-chain data for Ethereum has shown some uplift since November, but the increase is not significant. The number of active Ethereum addresses was 437,000 on November 6, reaching a peak of 545,000 on November 22, with an increase of about 24.7%. Other data have also seen slight improvements, but it cannot be described as explosive.
Sui seems to be able to keep pace with Solana's growth, with daily active addresses on November 5 reaching 617,000, which then broke 1.4 million by November 23, representing an increase of more than 1 time. However, it is unclear whether Sui is facing another spam attack, as on November 22, the network transaction volume exceeded 298 million, causing a brief network interruption. This data not only increased 20 times compared to the previous daily average of 15 million transactions but also broke the single-day transaction volume record for all blockchain networks. However, this sudden surge in data has occurred multiple times on Sui, so the crypto community seems not to be particularly surprised.
Currently, the explosive phenomenon of on-chain data is mainly driven by the popularity of Solana's MEME coins. However, this wave of enthusiasm has begun to cool down in recent days. Since November 21, the active data on the Solana chain has started to decline, and the number of active wallets has basically returned to the level before the surge. The daily number of newly created tokens is still maintaining around 60,000, while the number of new accounts has significantly decreased. This indicates that although the number of tokens issued daily remains substantial, the number of holders for each token has noticeably decreased.
For MEME players who are keen on PVP, paying more attention to some macro data on-chain to adjust positions may also be a wise choice.