Trading, stablecoins, memecoins and tokenized stocks. The most important parts of the ecosystem built on Solana.
Low fees have made Solana a popular place for trading. Decentralized exchanges such as Jupiter and Raydium handle large volumes every day.
Lending and staking services have also grown, including liquid staking, where you receive a token as proof of your stake and can use it elsewhere.
Solana has become one of the most important networks for stablecoins, especially USDC. Visa has tested settlement in USDC on Solana, and PayPal's stablecoin is also on the network.
The low fee level makes Solana well suited to payments of small amounts.
Solana became the centre of memecoins, tokens driven by internet culture and speculation rather than utility. Services such as Pump.fun made it possible for anyone to create a token in minutes.
The activity has brought the network large volumes, but also a lot of fraud and heavy losses for many.
In recent years, tokenized versions of US stocks have become available on Solana. That makes it possible to trade stock exposure around the clock, directly on the blockchain.
This is one of the areas where Solana competes most closely with Ethereum.
For a time Solana had a large NFT market, with Magic Eden as the biggest marketplace. The technology is also used for games and tickets, where many small transactions need to be cheap.