The Speed Layer Proves Its Case
When Solana launched in 2020, critics dismissed its throughput claims as engineering theater. Six years later, with 100 million confirmed transactions processed on September 17, 2026, the network has empirically resolved the skeptics.
“Solana is the only blockchain that meaningfully competes with legacy payment networks on the metrics that actually matter in production: TPS, finality, and cost per transaction," said Lily Liu, Solana Foundation President, at Breakpoint 2026 in Singapore.”
Visa and PayPal Plug Into Solana
Visa expanded its USDC settlement pilot on Solana to include 12 new acquiring bank partners in Q3 2026, processing over $1.8 billion in merchant settlements using USDC on Solana as the interbank clearing medium. The program — which began as a pilot with Worldpay in 2023 — has become a production clearing channel, with settlement finality in 0.4 seconds versus T+1 for traditional interbank transfers.
PayPal's PYUSD (PayPal USD) deployed natively on Solana in early 2026 and has since grown to $4.2 billion in circulation on the network. PayPal reports that Solana-native PYUSD transfers cost 97% less than equivalent ACH transactions.
Solana DEX: A Record $12 Billion Day
On September 17 — the same day the network hit 100 million daily transactions — Solana DEXs set a new record with $12 billion in single-day trading volume, surpassing Ethereum mainnet DEX volume for the first time.
Jupiter Aggregator processed $6.8 billion of that volume, routing trades across Raydium, Orca, Phoenix, and Lifinity. Jupiter's perpetuals exchange crossed $2 billion in open interest.
Raydium reported $2.1 billion in daily volume, driven by memecoin launch pairs via Raydium's LaunchLab — a permissionless token launch platform that has displaced Pump.fun as the dominant new token venue.
The Consumer App Layer
Solana's application ecosystem has matured beyond DeFi into consumer applications with genuine non-crypto user bases:
