SOL Weekly Data Report — August 17–23, 2026

2026-08-24 · Weekly Data Report · SolDataLab Research Desk

Our weekly quantitative pulse of the Solana network, covering the seven days through Sunday, August 23, 2026. Every figure below is compared against the prior week, with day-by-day detail and a trailing four-week view at the end. All data is cross-checked against Solscan, SolanaFM, DefiLlama, CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko; discrepancies between sources under 1% are normal.

Executive summary

A normalization week after the record, and the healthiest kind: SOL rose 1.5% to $190.26, usage held at the new baseline (366M non-vote transactions, 2.5M active addresses), TVL and stablecoins ground higher, and fee pressure fell across the board — priority fees, MEV tips and network fees all cooled as launch-window bursts faded. No incidents, no fee spikes, no de-pegs. The headline of the week is regulatory: the SEC acknowledged the spot SOL ETF 19b-4 filings, opening the review clock.

1. Market snapshot

A steady, low-volatility week. The -7.7% in 24-hour volume is a single-day artifact — Sunday versus Sunday — while seven-day volume rose 3.3%. Funding stayed mildly positive, indicating balanced positioning rather than a crowded rally, and SOL has now outperformed both majors for four straight weeks.

2. Network activity

The week answered the question a record always raises: was 58M a spike or a step-change? The answer is step-change. Daily volume never fell below 49M, the week summed to 366M, and new-address growth (+7.6%) again outpaced active-address growth (+4.2%) — onboarding, not just re-engagement.

Day-by-day transaction path

The shape of the week is a plateau, not a peak: transactions held in a 49M-55M band all week, with no single day dominating. The Saturday-to-Sunday pattern — high transaction counts with relatively lower address counts — remains characteristic of bot and script-heavy launchpad traffic, though the fee data below shows that pressure cooled versus last week. Daily active addresses are counted per day and therefore overlap across days; the 7-day active-address metric is de-duplicated.

3. DeFi

TVL reached $9.7B, a new local high, with perps volume growing fastest (+5.8%). Restaking growth decelerated to +3.8% after two stronger weeks — directionally positive, but the slope matters: if this is trend-forming, we would expect deposits to stick in week 3 rather than rotate out.

How much of the TVL move is price?

SOL rose 1.5% during the week. If TVL had only moved with price, it would have grown roughly 1.5%; it grew 3.2%. The extra ~1.7 points — about $160M — is net new deposits. Modest, but real, and consistent with the composition story: DEX liquidity and restaking vaults are adding capital, not just marking up.

4. Stablecoins

A third consecutive week of stablecoin growth, again led by USDC. The payments-corridor story flagged in the news review is now showing up as durable supply: two settlement corridors added in as many weeks, and USDC's share of the stack quietly rising. The next level to watch is $10B USDC — first time since late 2024.

5. Fees and staking

Fee markets normalized after last week's launch-window burst: priority fees fell 20%, MEV tips 29%, and network fees 14.5% — even though transactions rose 4%. This is the cleanest expression of the capacity story: more usage at lower fee pressure. Staking held steady at 65.2% with APY drifting down 0.1 pp, which is normal noise, not a trend.

Day-by-day fee pressure

The fee curve flattened compared to last week: no day exceeded 0.00010 SOL, versus 0.00017 at last week's peak. Sunday again processed heavy traffic at the week's lowest fee — the signature of high-frequency, fee-sensitive launchpad traffic that Solana absorbs without premium. The weighted weekly average lands at ~0.00008 SOL, matching the headline figure.

What the week tells us

Fastest-growing metrics

1. Perps volume: +5.8% — institutional-style activity, the fastest mover of the week.
2. DEX volume: +4.7% — Jupiter's routing upgrade showing in large-order flow.
3. Active addresses: +4.2% — usage held at the new baseline.
4. Non-vote transactions: +4.0% — the step-change confirmation.
5. USDC supply: +3.3% — settlement and payments compounding.

Declining or flat

• Jito MEV tips (-28.6%) and network fees (-14.5%) — launch-window bursts fading; usage is up, fee pressure is down.
• 24h trading volume (-7.7%) — a single-day comparison artifact; 7d volume was up.
• Staking APY (-0.1 pp) — structural drift, not a concern.

Anomalies and risks

No outages, no fee spikes, no stablecoin de-pegs — operationally boring in the best way. The one thing worth flagging is the mix: fee revenue fell while activity rose, which is the healthy version of normalization, but it also means the fee economy is more dependent on launch-window bursts than on settlement. That concentration is the structural risk to track, and it would show up first in Jito tips.

Trailing 4-week view

Four consecutive weeks of across-the-board growth, but the shape changed this week: the rate of increase slowed from the record week while remaining positive everywhere. Synchronous deceleration after a spike is healthier than a V-shaped reversal — it is the difference between a step-change and a blow-off.

Reading the slope

• Price: $170.1 → $190.3 (+11.9% over four weeks), with each weekly close above the last.
• USDC supply: +$0.9B over the month — the strongest sustained run of 2026.
• DEX volume: +26.4% over four weeks — the slope is steepening, then flattening.
• Non-vote txs: +12.6% over four weeks — a step-change, now testing whether it holds.

Fee math: what a transfer actually costs

Roughly one to two cents per transaction — and this week, at the low end of the recent range, since average priority fees fell. That fee efficiency remains Solana's structural advantage for high-frequency settlement, and it is the reason we report these numbers every week rather than just prices.

Indicator definitions and methodology

• Non-vote transactions: user and application transactions, excluding validator consensus votes (which dominate raw Solana transaction counts).
• Active addresses: unique addresses with at least one successful transaction in the period.
• Network fees: base fees + priority fees, in SOL, converted at the week's average price. Jito tips are reported separately as validator MEV income.
• Staking rate: staked SOL divided by total circulating supply.
• Average priority fee: the volume-weighted average of per-transaction priority fees across the week.
• Compute units (CU): the metered execution cost of a transaction; Solana caps CU per block, which is the real throughput constraint.
• Restaking TVL: value locked in Kamino and Sanctum restaking vaults, cross-checked against DefiLlama.
• Data reconciliation: all figures are pulled from Solscan, SolanaFM, Solana Beach, DefiLlama, CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko; where sources disagree by more than 1%, the discrepancy is flagged rather than averaged away.

Risk watch

• Fee-basis concentration: fee revenue is increasingly driven by launch-window bursts; if those fade without settlement growth replacing them, network fees could normalize lower — watch the mix, not just the level.
• Meme-cycle cooling: launchpad-driven activity can reverse as fast as it arrived; the leading indicator is Jito tips, which would fall before transaction counts do.
• Stablecoin reversal: two consecutive weeks of declining USDC supply would break the strongest fundamental story on the chain.
• Restaking outflow: early incentive-seeking deposits often rotate out; a sudden drawdown in Kamino/Sanctum vaults would look like risk-off, not a failure of the sector.
• ETF review: any comment-period surprise or delay would most directly hit price, with on-chain metrics lagging by days.

Bottom line

A normalization week in the best sense: the record was confirmed as a step-change, usage held and grew modestly, fee pressure cooled, and the regulatory process moved forward. The watch-items are the same ones we flagged last week — fee-basis concentration, meme-cycle dependence, restaking flow durability — none of which flipped this week. Steady, healthy, boring.

Tags: NetworkDeFiStablecoinPriority FeesStaking