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Here at Lightspeed, we’re not fans of measuring protocol success by the popular metrics of active addresses or total value locked.
Instead, fees can be a useful measure of demand for different apps and services. Blockchain addresses and TVL are playable, but fees are real funds that change hands to do something onchain, at least in theory. So here are this year’s top 10 Solana protocols by cost, based on DeFiLlama data as of December 27.
1. Raydium – $648 million
It was a banner year for decentralized exchange Solana, which capitalized on the memecoin fever that infected the crypto world for much of 2024. Some accused the app of being a venue where memecoins could create fake volume to appear more legitimate, but the numbers tell a clear story. Raydium raised quite a few fees.
2. Jito – $633 million
Jito’s Jito-Solana client made MEV adjustments and became a go-to for many validators using Solana’s software. Jito takes 5% of the MEV tips that users pay to transact on Solana – which has become a huge amount this year as memecoins have increased the demand for paying MEV tips and land transactions on the blockchain.
3. Pump.fun — $308 million
In less than a year, memecoin launch platform pump.fun has raked in more than $300 million in fees. Read that sentence again. If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that crypto users really Real like to speculate on tokens.
4. Foton – $248 million
The Solana trading platform Photon also rode the memecoin wave worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Photon offers memecoin feeds for users to view, but its real calling card is speed. Photon claims that its data comes in 15 times faster than DEX Screener, and that it offers a “quick buy” feature to reduce friction during trading.
5. bloXroute — $136 million
This one was a bit of a head-scratcher for me at first, as I hadn’t heard bloXroute mentioned much in the context of Solana. The infrastructure company offers a blockchain distribution network and merchant APIs that are largely marketed as a way for merchants to get Solana transactions faster.
6. Trojan Horse – $121 million
Trojan offers a popular Telegram bot that allows users to create a Solana wallet and buy and sell cryptocurrencies, all within the messaging app.
7. BONKbot — $118 million
The team behind the popular Solana memecoin released BONKbot as a Telegram trading bot, indicating that the bear market memecoin’s creators might have some technical skills as well.
8. Marinade – $88 million
Marinade offers the third largest Solana liquid staking token after offerings from Jito and Binance. This year it debuted “Marinade v2,” which brought an auction mechanism to its stake pool in hopes of increasing yields and wooing institutions. Some accused Marinade of enlisting sandwich attackers in the process.
9. BullX – $85 million
BullX is another memecoin trading platform. It markets itself as offering the “fastest indexing,” which is the process of making blockchain data readable – and something Coinbase has struggled with in recent weeks.
10. Kamino – $81 million
Kamino is a DeFi protocol that has risen to over $2 billion in TVL by 2024. The app is popular for its lending feature, leading some to compare it to the Aave or Solana. Notably, Kamino was home to most of the liquidity incentives doled out to drive adoption of PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin on Solana.
