SOL Weekly Data Report — October 5–11, 2026

2026-10-12 · Weekly Data Report · SolDataLab Research Desk

The first genuinely risk-off week of the quarter, and the first week in which the institutional demand channel and the price moved in the same direction - down. SOL closed at $110.00, down 9.5%, its worst week of the nine-week window, after losing the $116 support level and printing a liquidation cascade. TVL slipped 5.9% to $6.22 billion, DEX volume fell 20.9% to $12.88 billion, network fees fell 15.8% to $99.59 million, and stablecoin supply dropped 2.9% to $16.33 billion - the dollar layer's first decline in three weeks. Every number is machine-fetched and traceable, and every judgment below is stated as a judgment rather than buried in a table.

The week in numbers

One table, one word: reversal. Until this week the story was price and participation parting company - record stablecoins in a flat tape, fees holding while volume fell. This week they moved together, and all of them moved down. SOL lost 9.5%, TVL lost 5.9%, DEX volume lost 20.9%, fees lost 15.8%, and the dollar base lost 2.9% after two consecutive weekly records. The only rows that held were the ones that cost money to fake: Jito tips eased just 1.0%, and USDT actually rose.

The honest frame for the table: this is the first week of the nine-week window in which every headline metric except USDT moved down together, and the only rows that did not fall were the ones that cost money to fake - Jito tips eased just 1.0%, and USDT actually rose. That combination - broad liquidation, contracting dollar base, but a tips line that barely moved - is what a forced-deleveraging week looks like rather than a slow bleed.

Price: the $116 break and the cascade

The week's shape is a slow leak followed by a cliff. Monday through Wednesday held within 1% of the $121 open, then the series lost 3.7% into Thursday and 5.8% into Friday - the two sessions where the $116 support level gave way and roughly $21 million of Solana long liquidations unwound in an hour. Saturday printed the week's low close at $109.07, and Sunday recovered a modest 0.9% to $110.00. The high-low range widened from last week's compressed $3.92 to $12.45 - a 218% expansion from last week's $3.92.

Against the majors, SOL lagged by 5.4 percentage points on Bitcoin (-4.1% for the week) and 1.4 points on Ethereum (-8.1%) - the second consecutive lagging week, and the widest of the nine-week window. Market cap fell to roughly $64.8 billion on 589.1 million circulating SOL (CoinMarketCap) - a $5.7 billion reduction in a single week. The relative line is the one this report watches first in a down week, because it separates a token-specific problem from a market-wide one: this week was mostly market-wide - Ethereum fell nearly as hard - but SOL's 5.4-point give-up to Bitcoin is the part that belongs to Solana.

The nine-week series

Read down the columns and this week is the first break in the recovering pattern. The close of $110.00 is the lowest close since the week ending September 20 - it erased the prior advance in full. DEX volume's $12.88 billion is the weakest reading since the week ending August 16, when the series opened at $10.88 billion. Fees fell back below $100 million for the first time in five weeks. Stablecoins ended a two-week record run, and USDC posted its largest weekly drop of the window. The one row that ran against the tape all week is USDT, which rose for a third consecutive week even as the total fell - a small but persistent counter-current.

The restatement discipline matters as much as the numbers, and it cut the other way this week. Since last week's publication, the source has restated fees upward across the recent weeks - the prior week moved from the $111.67M published a week ago to $118.26M, with smaller upward revisions further back - and lifted the prior week's week-ending TVL from $6.52B to $6.61B. This report uses a single current vintage throughout so the nine rows are internally consistent; archived articles keep the vintages they were published with. The practical lesson is unchanged: never compare a fresh week against an old week's printed number without checking whether the source moved between them.

DeFi depth and activity

The splits inside the DeFi table show a coordinated retreat. TVL fell 5.9% while price fell 9.5%, which means deposits in SOL terms actually grew - capital did not flee, and the dollar value of TVL fell less than the token did. That gap is the reassuring part of an ugly week. Liquid staking TVL fell 4.5% and lending 4.5%, both shallower than price, so the yield stack held its shape; there was no visible de-leveraging of the lending base, which is what a genuine credit event would show.

The activity lines are where the damage concentrates. DEX volume fell 20.9% - the sharpest weekly contraction in the nine-week window - and fees fell 15.8% to a five-week low. But the two did not fall equally: volume dropped faster than fees in dollar terms, which pushed the fee-to-volume ratio to a new series high of about 0.77% - above last week's 0.73% and at the top of the nine-week range. In a week that removed 9.5% from the token, the fee market's price for priority barely moved. Tips at $2.88 million, a 1.0% decline, tell the same story: the urgent, latency-sensitive flow thinned, but far less than the headline tape.

Fee-per-volume: the ratio held near its high through a crash

Dividing the week's fees by its DEX volume gives about 0.77% ($99.59M against $12.88B) - a new series high, just above last week's 0.73%. The series now reads: 0.58%, 0.40%, 0.49%, 0.47%, 0.58%, 0.52%, 0.65%, 0.73%, 0.77% - and it set a fresh high in a week in which both inputs collapsed from a high base.

Why this is the week's most interesting number: fees and volume both fell hard, but fees fell from a much higher base and held their per-dollar pricing. That means the transactions that kept happening were the kind that pay up - urgent, adversarial, or small-and-frequent - rather than volume-for-volume's-sake blocks that vanished with the leveraged flow. The interpretation this report stands by is unchanged: paid priority is the least gameable activity series on the chain, and a week in which it holds its ratio while the token loses a tenth of its value is stronger evidence of real usage than any week in which both lines rise together.

The stablecoin layer: the record streak ends

Two consecutive weekly records came to an end: total supply fell 2.9% to $16.33 billion. The composition is where the information is. USDC dropped 8.5% to $6.80 billion - its first weekly decline in three weeks and its largest of the window - and its share slipped from 44.2% to 41.6%. USDT rose for a third consecutive week, to $2.90 billion. And the third bucket, every issuer beyond the two majors, ticked up 1.2%, its share rising from 38.9% to 40.6%. So the dollar layer shrank, but not uniformly: the majors' USDC leg took the hit while the long tail and USDT held or grew.

The read: a fast USDC drawdown in a liquidation week is consistent with stablecoins being redeemed or rotated to fund margin and losses - the trading-and-settlement function of the dollar layer, not the payments function. The tail holding its ground while the largest single issuer contracted is unusual and worth watching: it suggests the exit was concentrated rather than broad. As always, supply series carry no intent, so this report prints the shape without asserting the motive - but the discriminator is simple. If USDC resumes climbing next week, this was a liquidation-demand spike; if it keeps falling while price recovers, the dollar layer is telling a different story.

Staking and the network

The staking table shows a market that barely noticed the price move. Staked SOL dipped just 0.6 million to 438.8 million, the validator count edged up three to 674, the staking rate held at 74.5% of circulating supply, and the median LST APY stayed pinned at 4.67% across roughly 50 tracked pools. A 9.5% price decline with essentially no change in the staked base is the supply-side signature of consolidation rather than capitulation - the same conclusion the TVL table reached from the demand side. Roughly three-quarters of circulating SOL remains securing the network.

The one number to treat cautiously is the RPC performance sample: the non-vote transaction and TPS figures come from a live sample window of well under a day, normalized per day, so move-to-move swings are noise more than signal. This report quotes them as directional and does not build any claim on a single sample. The staking and APY lines, by contrast, are level metrics that move slowly, and their flatness through a violent tape is itself the datapoint: holders of the yield stack did not exit.

Data integrity: what this report does and does not do

This week's disclosure is again about the source, and it moved in the opposite direction from last week's. On this fetch, DefiLlama restated the recent fee series upward - the prior week from the $111.67M published a week ago to $118.26M, with smaller upward revisions further back - and lifted the prior week's week-ending TVL from $6.52B to $6.61B. This report uses a single current vintage throughout, and the nine-week table above is internally consistent on that basis; archive articles keep the vintages they were published with, each stating its own basis. The revision history is now long enough that the standing advice is simply not to compare across vintages without a note.

Beyond that, the omissions rule is unchanged: no perps volume (DefiLlama's perps endpoint returned an error on fetch day), no priority-fee average, no active-address counts as a demand metric, no compute-unit totals. Metrics without a free and reliable source are omitted rather than estimated. Third-party figures quoted in this report (ETF flows, address counts, protocol milestones) carry their named sources inline, and network upgrade dates are attributed to the team that shipped them rather than asserted.

Methodology constants: weeks run Monday 00:00 to Sunday 23:59 UTC; price is the DefiLlama daily close at 00:00 UTC of the labelled date; TVL and stablecoins are week-ending level snapshots; DEX volume, fees and tips are summed across the seven daily buckets; market cap is circulating supply times close; week-over-week percentages are computed on the rounded values displayed in the tables.

Risk watch

Levels and lines that would confirm this week as a deleveraging episode - or mark the start of something longer:

• A weekly close below $109.07 - the week's low close - extends the break and puts the $100 round number in play; a reclaim of $116 would take back the level SOL lost on the way down, and $121.52 - the week's own high close - is the line a full retracement would have to clear
• A second consecutive negative ETF week would turn the demand channel's first reversal into a trend, and would leave the fee and dollar-base series to carry the institutional case alone
• USDC via stablecoin supply: a second weekly decline while price stabilizes would suggest genuine rotation out of the dollar layer rather than liquidation-driven redemption
• A fee-to-volume ratio that finally breaks down - fees following volume to a fresh low - would retire the 'fees are the harder currency' argument that has carried the usage thesis for weeks
• Staked SOL printing a second consecutive decline would upgrade a flat supply line into the start of a rotation trend, the supply-side mirror of the ETF question

Source: DefiLlama - Solana prices, TVL, DEX volume, fees, stablecoinsDefiLlama Yields - median SOL LST APY across ~50 poolsSolana RPC via PublicNode - stake, validators, performance samplesCoinMarketCap - SOL circulating supply 589.1M, 24h volumeThe Block via SoSoValue - Solana ETF flows, week of October 5-9, 2026Farside Investors - second-tally Solana ETF flow tableSolana Compass - 200ms slot time at epoch 1053 (SIMD-0525 completion)

Tags: DeFiStablecoinNetworkStaking