Solana takes over Ethereum for perpetual futures trading

Solana moved ahead of Ethereum for carrying perpetual futures trading. The network has been settling more SOL trades compared to centralized futures markets, showing increased demand for permissionless trading. 

Solana carried a higher volume of perpetual futures for the past 24 hours, moving ahead of Ethereum. Decentralized perpetual futures trading reached record levels, boosted by Hyperliquid. 

For Solana, the drive to perpetual futures trading was also facilitated by the Phantom wallet, offering direct native access, as Cryptopolitan reported earlier. The increase in Solana perpetual futures trading started in June, and continued as a trend by onboarding new users.

All other chains responded to the trend, expanding their volumes in the past week. The expansion was driven by general trading, as well as settlement for ETH and SOL on their native chains. Ethereum may still have an ecosystem advantage, due to the expansion of perpetual futures on L2 chains like Base and Arbitrum, allowing for high-speed trades with lower fees.

Solana has not yet flipped Ethereum on other metrics, currently producing lower fees as a chain. However, Solana apps often produce more fees compared to chains. Currently, SOL is in the process of recovering from a market downturn and a series of liquidations. The asset trades around $195.59, with the potential to recover the $200 milestone. 

Solana, Ethereum show DeFi expansion

The activity on Solana and Ethereum point to DeFi expansion in the past days. Ethena and Jupiter compete for the top ranking for decentralized protocols, only displaced by Tether as the leading smart contract. 

Solana and Ethereum have emerged as the main ecosystems for DeFi, carrying the most widely used apps, utility tools, and platforms. Other chains like BNB Smart Chain and TRON are still lagging, despite having their own active DEX. 

Solana’s perpetual futures platforms are mostly trading wrapped BTC, wrapped ETH, and the native SOL token. SOL settlements reached $2.89B in weekly volumes, boosted by the recent climb above $200. 

Solana TVL recovers above $10B

Solana’s decentralized ecosystem has been recovering in August, once again climbing over $10B in total value locked. Stablecoin liquidity returned above $12B after Circle minted several new tranches of USDC, with around $2B in USDT tokens. 

Kamino Lend emerged as the leading protocol, breaking above $3B in value locked. Kamino’s value locked rose by over 21% in the past month, as market confidence returned. Jito and Jupiter make up most of the remaining on-chain liquidity, due to demand for swaps and routing. 

The chain still supports a growing meme ecosystem, but has shifted to DeFi, with significant growth for perpetual futures. 

Drift is the leading perpetual futures protocol, recently expanding to record value locked of $1.2B. SOL and JLP are the main tokens with on-chain settlement, making up 68% of Drift’s activity.

Solana still makes a minor contribution to perpetual futures DEXs, with over 85% still carried by Hyperliquid. Solana’s protocols also offer passive income for providing liquidity to the perpetual futures DEXs. The perpetual futures ecosystem also boosts usage for stablecoins as the main source of liquidity and collaterals.