SOL Weekly Data Report — September 28–October 4, 2026

2026-10-05 · Weekly Data Report · SolDataLab Research Desk

A consolidation week that answered one question and sharpened another. SOL closed at $119.60, down 1.9% - its first weekly decline in three - on a tape where every level metric essentially held: TVL slipped 1.5% to $6.52 billion, network fees fell just 1.0% to $111.67 million, Jito tips rose to $2.91 million, and stablecoin supply set a second consecutive weekly record at $16.82 billion with USDC at a series high. DEX volume fell 11.1% to $16.28 billion, with a restated base and a real weekend dip inside the number. 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: compression. The price range narrowed from $10.93 ($111.15-122.08) to $3.92 ($118.04-121.96) - a 64% smaller band - while every dollar-denominated level within shouting distance of its high held. The two rows that moved most are the two this report reads most carefully: DEX volume, for the measurement reasons this report has documented for four straight weeks, and USDT, for the composition reasons in the stablecoin section.

The honest frame for the table: this is the first week of the eight tracked in which price fell while stablecoin supply set a record. That pairing - parked dollars up, token price down - is what a base-building week looks like in the data, and it is the reason the read below is consolidation rather than distribution. Distribution would show the dollar layer leaving alongside the price; the dollar layer did the opposite.

Price: a flat week with a rebuilt floor

The week's shape: a 2.6% step down into the September 29 point did the damage early, the September 30 point put back +0.2% on the quarter's final day, and from the October 1 low close the series printed three consecutive gains - $118.38, $118.59, $119.60 - into the Sunday finish. The low close of $118.04 held $6.89 above the prior week's $111.15 open, meaning the pullback surrendered roughly a fifth of the prior week's gain. Three rising closes into a weekend is the constructive part; the fact that the whole week traded inside a $3.92 band is the tell that this was positioning, not a move.

Against the majors, SOL lagged by 2.3 percentage points on Bitcoin (+0.4% for the week) and 1.9 points on Ethereum (-0.02%, effectively flat) - the first week since September 7-13 in which it trailed both. Market cap moved to roughly $70.5 billion on 589.1 million circulating SOL (CoinMarketCap), and SOL sits 59.4% below its $294.33 all-time high of January 19, 2025. Relative performance is the series this report watches in flat weeks, because leadership changes announce themselves here first: one lagging week is noise, but it is also the pattern that preceded the last two trend breaks in this series.

The eight-week series

Read on one basis, the week is the series' quietest since mid-August on price, and mid-pack everywhere else. The close of $119.60 sits between the September 14-20 and September 21-27 prints. DEX volume's $16.28B is the lowest since the week ending August 16 - though half of that series' decline history is measurement, as the integrity section details. Fees at $111.67M are effectively a match for the series high. Stablecoins and USDC are the only two rows at series highs, and they are the two that measure parked intent rather than churn.

The restatement discipline matters as much as the numbers. Since the September 28 publication, the source has restated the Sep 21-27 DEX total upward from the published $17.48B to $18.32B, TVL from $6.64B to $6.62B, and fees from $112.88M to $112.78M. This report uses a single current vintage throughout so the eight rows are internally consistent - archived articles keep the vintages they were published with, each stating its own basis. The practical lesson is unchanged: never compare a freshly published week against an old week's printed number without checking whether the source moved the goalposts between them.

DeFi depth and activity

The splits inside the DeFi table say more than the totals. TVL's 1.5% dip roughly matches price's 1.9% slide, so deposits in SOL terms held approximately flat - capital did not leave, it repriced. Liquid staking TVL rose 0.5% while everything yield-adjacent held, and lending's 3.0% dip is the one row that moved against the consolidation narrative - small enough to be noise, worth a second datapoint before it becomes a sentence.

The fee line is the week's anchor: $111.67 million is within 1.0% of the series high, and the daily path stayed inside a $12.93M-17.40M band with no collapse day. Tips at $2.91 million are a series high, and they measure the part of demand that pays for priority - the adversarial, latency-sensitive flow that does not exist for optics. When tips rise while measured volume falls 11%, the urgent share of activity is growing, whatever the headline volume says.

Fee-per-volume: the ratio hit its eight-week high in a down week

Dividing the week's fees by its DEX volume gives roughly 0.69% ($111.67M against $16.28B) - the highest ratio of the eight weeks this site tracks, up from about 0.62% the week before on the same vintage and from 0.49% two weeks ago. The series now reads: 0.40%, 0.49%, 0.44%, 0.53%, 0.49%, 0.62%, 0.69% - rising in each of the last two weeks, with the two strongest prints arriving in the two weeks when volume was falling.

The interpretation this report stands by: a rising fee-to-volume ratio means each measured dollar of volume carried more paid priority - more adversarial flow, more urgency, or a mix shift toward small urgent tickets. The Bitquery ~58% bot-volume estimate is the structural backdrop, and it is also the reason the ratio's rise is read neutrally here rather than bullishly: if most of the churn is arbitrage, the ratio mostly measures how hard bots are competing, which is a real activity signal but not a retail one. Either way, the standing practice holds - lead with fees and tips, quote volume with its caveats, and never let one soft series drive the conclusion.

The stablecoin layer: a third straight record, led by the majors

The second consecutive weekly record is the headline; the composition swing is the information. USDC's $7.43 billion is a series high on this site's eight-week basis, and USDT's 6.4% jump is its largest weekly gain since the week ending September 27 - a second consecutive weekly gain after the September contraction. The third bucket fell 3.2% and its share dropped from 40.4% to 38.9%, giving back part of last week's record diversification. Two hundred million here, three hundred million there - the dollar layer is being actively repositioned, not passively parked.

The read: majors-led records in a price-down week skew toward trading and settlement demand rather than retail payments flow, and that fits everything else in this tape - an ETF complex in quarter-end digest, a DEX series cooling, and a fee line full of urgent transactions. The watch item is USDT: one strong week after three weak ones is a bounce until it repeats. If it prints a second consecutive gain, the composition story of September - USDC's slow climb to dominance - has a counter-narrative.

Staking and the network

The staking table shows its first real movement in weeks: staked SOL declined 1.2 million between the two snapshots and the validator count shed four. A stake outflow of this size is worth stating plainly rather than explaining away - it is consistent with delegation rotation after the post-September fee records (validators' commission and performance choices get re-litigated after strong fee months), but this report does not have a source that decomposes the outflow, so it prints the number without inventing the story. The staking rate of 74.6% still means roughly three-quarters of circulating SOL is securing the network.

Transaction counts moved the other way: non-vote transactions per day rose 5.9% to 197 million and non-vote TPS to 2,282 on the sample window. The window is roughly half a day normalized per day, so week-over-week moves inside a band are noisy - but a rising print in a falling-price week is the right direction for the usage thesis, and it agrees with the fee line. The 4.68% median LST APY across 50 tracked pools is essentially unchanged, which is what a mature staking market looks like through a consolidation.

Data integrity: what this report does and does not do

This week's disclosure is again about the source. After the September 28 publication, DefiLlama restated the Sep 21-27 DEX total upward from the published $17.48B to $18.32B, TVL from $6.64B to $6.62B, and fees from $112.88M to $112.78M - the fourth consecutive week with a revision in the tape. Separately, the week-ending TVL for October 4 settled at $6.52B after an initial intraday read had printed $6.61B for the same day; this report uses the settled value. This report uses a single restated vintage throughout, and the eight-week table above is internally consistent on that basis; archive articles keep the vintages they were published with, each stating its own basis.

One aggregator-level caveat sits inside the DEX series and is now part of the record: Jupiter's reported volume previously moved independently of its fee line, and this site flags rather than adjusts anomalies it cannot recompute. 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, 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, app revenue, quarterly transaction counts) carry their named sources inline.

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 that would convert this week's consolidation into something else, or confirm it:

• A weekly close below $118.04 - the week's low close - hands the initiative back to sellers and puts the prior week's $111.15 open back in play; above $121.96, the high close, the consolidation resolves upward
• A second consecutive DEX decline below $16B would make the decline a trend on any vintage; the number to watch is whether the fee line holds its $15-17M weekday band if it happens
• USDT printing a second consecutive weekly gain would confirm the composition shift back toward the majors; a fade back below $2.7B restores September's pattern
• Staked SOL declining for a second snapshot in a row would turn a one-off rotation datapoint into a trend question
• ETF flows going negative for a full week - the fourteenth week survived by $1.3M; the fifteenth starting with two outflow days would test it early

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 volumeSoSoValue - Solana ETF daily net flows, week of Sep 28 - Oct 2, 2026Farside Investors - second-tally Solana ETF flow tableTradingNews - ETF by-fund breakdown and technical levels (Oct 2026)

Tags: DeFiStablecoinNetworkStaking