This article provides an in-depth analysis of Solana's on-chain performance.

Written by: Frank, PANews

On November 21st, Phantom, a cryptowallet in the Solana ecosystem, 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 performance for a crypto-native application in the mainstream app market. The underlying reason is the recent data explosion on the Solana chain.

Is the crypto world entering a real active period? What more meaningful facts are hidden behind the active data on the Solana chain? PANews conducted an in-depth analysis of Solana's on-chain performance.

Solana on-chain data saw exponential growth in November.

First, let's review the astonishing performance of Solana on-chain recently. On November 9th, the active wallet data for Solana was 4.33 million, which reached 7 million active wallet addresses by November 21st. On October 5th, this data was only 893,000, so this data increased nearly 8 times in just over a month. On November 3rd, the number of new accounts was 10.19 million. By November 20th, the number of new accounts had reached 21.75 million, more than doubling the number of new accounts.

During this period, the biggest driving force mainly comes from MEME coins. The performance of Pump.fun is particularly eye-catching. Data on November 2nd showed that the application interaction volume for Pump.fun was 130 million, and by November 20th, it reached a peak of 489 million, nearly a 4-fold increase. In terms of daily active users, it was 81,500 on November 3rd, peaking at 277,000 on November 21st, more than tripling. The total transaction volume was also significant, with 1.82 million transactions on November 3rd, and this data was 4.82 million on November 22nd.

The user activity brings a significant increase in transaction amounts. According to Defillama data, the trading volume of decentralized exchanges (DEX) on the Solana network in November first exceeded $100 billion, reaching $109.8 billion. This data is nearly double the monthly DEX trading volume of the Ethereum mainnet ($55 billion), and compared to October's $52.5 billion, it increased by over 100%.

Currently, the number of monthly active addresses on Solana has reached 107.5 million, which is expected to break the record of 123 million set in October by the end of the month. The SOL token has recently surpassed its historical high of $264 in 2021.

MEME is active, but PVP is more challenging.

Next, let's observe the daily situation of average active addresses.

Before describing specific data, it is necessary to explain the new account mechanism of Solana. The new account address count referred to here is not the same as the active address count described in conventional blockchain explorers, but rather the total number of new token addresses on the Solana chain. For example, a user address may purchase multiple tokens, and each time a new token is purchased, a new account address is created. Therefore, this new account address count is much higher than the count of active wallet addresses.

A comparison of data from November 1st and November 20th. On November 1st, the number of active addresses was 4.74 million, and the number of new account addresses created that day was 12 million, with an average of 2.53 new token addresses created per active address that day.

By November 20th, 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 purchased per active wallet. This data indicates that not only has the overall data seen a tremendous increase, but user trading enthusiasm has also been greatly boosted.

But does the surge in on-chain data represent an opportunity for players who are actively trading MEME, or does it lower their chances? How many holders are there for the tokens generated each day? On November 1st, 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 receiving each new token. By November 20th, 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 for each SPL token distribution. This also indicates that although the overall on-chain heat is increasing, it seems to have caused a more intense PVP phenomenon, where the speed of token issuance far exceeds the speed at which new users enter the market.

Males born in the 90s and 00s are the main force on the Solana chain.

The application that gained the most on the Solana chain is undoubtedly the Phantom wallet. On November 21st, Phantom reached a peak ranking of 6th overall in the Apple App Store, ranking first in the tools category. Before November 6th, Phantom did not even have ranking data, and in just half a month, it skyrocketed from 95th in the tools category to first.

According to data from Similarweb, analysis from user data shows that the recent growth of Phantom is primarily from Brazil and the United States. The traffic from the United States reached 27.38%, with a growth of 24.82% in the past month. Although the proportion from Brazil is not high at 2.97%, the growth rate is 70.17%. The top five countries are: United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Brazil, and Pakistan.

In the audience of Phantom, 70.5% are male and 29.5% are female. The age group with the most visitors is 25 to 34 years old, accounting for 41.76%, while users aged 18 to 24 make up 20%. This data also shows that the main players in on-chain MEME currently focus on those born between the 90s and 00s, with this age group accounting for over 60%.

Currently, only Sui has kept pace with Solana's data growth.

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 applications have seen growth. Besides Phantom, Coinbase's recent ranking has also risen to a peak of 29th overall, ranking first in the finance category. Other applications like Solflare, DEX Screener, MetaMask, and Crypto.com have also seen varying degrees of growth and entered the forefront of data rankings.

In contrast, the performance of on-chain data for Ethereum has also seen some improvement since November, but the increase is not significant. The number of active Ethereum addresses was 437,000 on November 6th and peaked at 545,000 on November 22nd, with an increase of about 24.7%. Other data also saw slight increases but did not spike.

Sui seems to keep pace with Solana in terms of growth. The daily active addresses on November 5th were 617,000, and by November 23rd, it exceeded 1.4 million, with an increase of over 1 time. However, it is unclear whether the Sui network is once again facing a spam attack, as on November 22nd, the number of network transactions exceeded 298 million, causing a brief network interruption. This data not only increased by 20 times compared to the previous daily average of 15 million transactions but also broke the record for the number of transactions in a single day across all blockchain networks. However, this sudden surge in data has occurred multiple times on Sui, so the crypto community seems to be not too surprised.

At present, this phenomenon of data explosion on-chain is mainly driven by the popularity of MEME coins on Solana. However, this wave of enthusiasm has started to cool in recent days. Since November 21st, the active data on the Solana chain has begun to decline, and the number of active wallets has now basically returned to pre-surge levels. The daily number of newly created tokens is still maintained at around 60,000, while the number of newly created accounts has significantly declined. This also indicates that although the daily issuance of tokens is still considerable, the number of holders for each token has noticeably decreased.

For MEME players who are keen on PVP, paying more attention to some macro on-chain data to adjust positions may also be a wise choice.