Solana DEX Volume Still Leads, But Is Down 50% From 2025

Cointelegraph said on X that Solana has posted the highest quarterly DEX volume for eight quarters running. Summing DefiLlama's daily Solana figures by calendar quarter backs that up. Solana DEX volume closed Q3 2026 at $199.4 billion, ahead of every other chain in the dataset. Yet the same numbers describe a much calmer market than a year ago.

Eight quarters at number one, checked

Ethereum held first place until Q3 2024, when it edged Solana by a small margin. Solana has won every quarter since, which confirms the claim.

In Q3 2026 Ethereum came second, with BSC third, then Robinhood Chain and Base. Robinhood Chain is new to the table, because DefiLlama shows no volume for it before Q3. Solana's lead over Ethereum is close to double.

DefiLlama's Solana DEX page in quarterly view, where the early 2025 peak dwarfs the recent bars.

Solana DEX volume: up on April, down on last year

Compared with the spring, the quarter grew slightly, and volume built steadily through July, August and September. Set against Q3 2025, though, it is down about 50%. The chart shows the early 2025 peak towering over every recent bar.

Share tells a quieter story. Total DEX volume across all chains grew faster than Solana's in Q3, so its slice slid from 29.2% to 26.1%. Solana held far more of the market in early 2025. BSC grew sharply over the quarter while Base shrank, and the all-chain chart shows the wider market sitting well below its own 2025 high.

The same DefiLlama dataset for all chains, in quarterly view, with every venue added together.

PumpSwap now carries a quarter of Solana's trading

Under those totals, the venue mix flipped. PumpSwap handled 26.3% of Solana's volume in Q3, up from 10.8% a year earlier. Its sibling launchpad, pump.fun, adds a smaller slice on top.

Older names lost the most ground. Raydium's AMM went from first place to under a tenth of the total. Orca kept about a third of what it had, and HumidiFi lost most of its volume. Meteora's pools combined also gave up more than half of their share.

Newcomers filled part of the hole. BisonFi and Manifest Trade had almost nothing a year ago and now rank among the busier venues. DefiLlama also renames venues, so SolFi V1 disappears as V2 shows up, which makes single-venue comparisons tricky.

The latest week against the quarter average

Over the last seven complete days, September 29 to October 5, Solana averaged about $2.24 billion a day. That sits slightly above Q3's daily average of $2.17 billion.

Daily numbers wobbled within that stretch. The busiest day came on October 2, and the quietest followed a day later. Volume fell by about a tenth from the previous week. Solana's share of all DEX volume over those days ran a little below its quarterly level. The October 6 day was still running when the data was pulled, so it is left out.

What DefiLlama volume cannot show

The dataset counts swap value, not people. Nothing in it separates organic buying from bots, wash trading or one wallet looping funds. A token-launch frenzy on PumpSwap would look just like steady demand. It also says little about liquidity depth or what traders paid in fees. Volume is quoted in dollars too, so a broad price rally can lift it without any new trading activity.

Treat Solana DEX volume share shifts as a map of where swaps settle, not proof of where users prefer to be. Earlier reporting on Solana's 250ms slot times covers the network side. All figures here come from DefiLlama's API as pulled on October 6 around 11:30 UTC.