# Solana's Third Leap: Trading Dominance and RWA Expansion

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-08-03

## Transcript

so because we're talking about all-time highs i'm predicting that in this third leap solana will have a new all-time high so given that the previous all-time high is 290 dollars i think we can target Solana has had a tough bear market so far, but is it over for Solana or are they building for a monster bull run in the next cycle?
Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that this summer Solana Beach has been a lot more fun than Solana the blockchain, but that could change very soon.
I'm your host, John Gill, and today is Monday, August 3rd, and today we are joined by DJ Hotrank.
DJ is the head of research at BirdEye, a major crypto data and analytics platform where she authors data-driven reports on topics like Solana, ecosystem trends, stablecoins, RWAs, on-chain markets, a whole lot of other stuff.
DJ is going to share a lot of Solana Alpha with us today.
So if that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
And as a reminder, our podcast today is free and that would not be possible without our wonderful sponsors at Securitize, the regulated rails for tokenization.
So keep an ear out for more information about them later in the episode.
Without further ado, welcome back to the Milk Road Show.
DJ, how are you?
Good.
Hi, John.
Very happy to be back here at Milk Road to talk a little bit more about Solana and RWAs.
I'm happy to talk to you.
I always learn so much about Solana from you.
And I thought a good place to start would be to dive in with the recent report you published on Solana's first half of 2026.
It's called Primed for the Third Leap.
And I wonder if we could start with just that title.
What were the first two leaps that Solana went through?
And what is this third leap that you say is coming?
Yeah, for sure.
So the two first leaves that we talked about was the two moments where Seoul hit all time high.
So the first one was in November 2021, where Solana found product market feed as the fastest, cheapest chain.
And that led to Seoul climbing to an all time high of 260.
So I think if you remember, that was NFT season and DeFi summer on Ethereum extending to Solana in 2021.
But then FTX collapsed, so moved back to $10.
A lot of people lost hope.
But then the ecosystem kept building.
And thanks to the Memecoin season in 2024, Solana was back to its all-time high January 2025 at $290.
The title of our research was Prime for the Thirdly, meaning that the ecosystem is preparing for the next comeback and this time entering from quite a different position.
as the venue for everything trading on chain so it's not just nft not justify or just meme coins it's having a lot more to say and a lot more to look forward to in this next third leap Gotcha.
Okay, so the third leap is coming.
The first two have happened.
You say in this report that Solana has been consolidating its position as the go-to venue for everything trading on chain.
And you said that Solana has 54% of market share with $425 billion in volume of trading per month.
Is that market share for spot crypto?
Is it market share for everything?
And walk us through how Solana has captured so much market share here.
Yeah, that is on spot trading volume.
So spot is leading other types of trading on Solana at this point.
And I think if you look at daily ranking of DEX trading volume, Solana has been consistently in the leads.
And I think that is, there are two reasons backing that.
So the first one is infrastructure.
Solana has started positioning itself as the fastest and cheapest chain since 2021.
And I think they are still holding that to this day.
And we wrote about this infrastructure improvement in our Solana 2025 report.
And a lot has been still in the works to even further improve the infrastructure of Solana so that the chain is best positioned for everything trading.
So the idea is a trader comes on chain to solana he or she has the best user experience the smoothest trading the cheapest fee compared to other venues and one of the recent research that i found very interesting was that solana has been delivering materially better execution for sole usdc trade compared to centralized exchange and um this you know solana being better is expanding to other is showing size that it's expanding to other pairs as well.
So Solana is not just competing with other layer ones, they're directly competing with centralized exchange where traditionally has been having the best depth and having the best user experience for traders.
And I think that is the grand vision of Solana being everything trading on chain, that they're even better than centralized exchanges.
And the second reason that Solana is positioning itself as the home of Internet capital markets, I've been saying this a lot on a Milbra podcast, is that I think the BD effort of the foundation and other teams, you know, ecosystem efforts is driving that.
um aggressively so for example if you look at um sunrise or and backpack securities you see that every other week they have a new assets listed on solana so like um you have now you can trade bitcoin ethereum on solana you can even trade hype um it's athena right a morpho uh robin hood so everything that is capturing the volume and capturing the tensions of traders they are readily available readily available on solana even like um spacex stops it is available on solana from day one so i think that is the thesis that they have been very aggressively pursuing that if you need something if you want to trade something they are already available on solana with the great UX and the cheap fee.
So I don't see any reason why traders won't migrate to Solana to do the trades.
Hi, everyone.
This is John.
Listen, our Milk Road Pro analysts nailed this AI bull market.
They had dozens of calls pay off in a big way for our community.
If you want to see how our entire team of analysts are positioning for the crypto bull market that's going to come after this bear market finally ends, you can join us now at Milk Road Pro.
It's just a dollar.
Link is in the description.
You'll get access to all of our analysts' trades, their watch lists, and see how they're navigating this in their portfolios and get access to ask us questions in Discord anytime, day or night.
It's just a dollar.
Link's in the description.
Milk Road Pro.
Join now.
I'll see you there.
Gotcha.
Okay, well, that's quite a bull thesis.
I want to ask about something else you call out in this report, which is the growth of stablecoins on Solana.
Solana is leading the entire industry in this category.
There's an increase of 154% since January of 2025, a total of over $16 billion in stablecoin market cap so far.
What's driving this migration of stablecoins onto Solana?
Is this just all trading?
Is it spending?
Where's this coming from?
I think it's coming from...
all verticals.
So one big part of stablecoin on Solana is obviously trading.
It is the very vital liquidity anchoring the DeFi ecosystem on Solana.
And we see that even though USDC is still the dominant stablecoin on Solana, other stable coins are coming on chain to Solana too.
So we see USDT gaining more supply.
We see USDE deploying a lending market against USDG on Kamino and Jupiter land.
USD1 having days that have higher volume than even USDC.
And institutions are also deploying their own stable coins on Solana, such as Western Union's USDPT.
etc.
So I think the reason why it comes back to the fact that Solana is the home for everything trading and has a very great cohort of active traders every day.
So where there are demands and where there are traders, there will be capitals flowing into that place.
So I think what Solana is offering institutions and offering stablecoin issuers is that they have this very active and willing to learn, willing to try a cohort of users.
And so that's why issuers are coming to Solana, institutions are coming to Solana to capture this demand.
But further than anchoring DeFi, anchoring trading and anchoring lending, stablecoins in Solana are also being used for payments as well.
Even though I think Solana and Absolute Volume are still falling behind compared to Tron, for example, but we are seeing a lot of growth happening in payments on Solana.
So specifically, on-chain payment volume rose 87% year over year from 2025 to 2026.
And card payment alone processed 5x more volume than last year at $420 million.
Solana market share nearly doubled from 5% in the first half of 2025 to 10% in the first half of 2026.
So I think the growth is evident of stablecoin having diverse roles on Solana and are expanding their use cases.
Well, there's a lot of bullish information there, too.
This is one of the reasons why I love talking to you.
You know what's going on.
Another thing I want to ask about, and you highlighted this, too.
I think you wrote a whole report on this, but the growth of RWAs in Solana's ecosystem has been really impressive.
The tokenized stocks are just over a year old, I believe, on Solana, but they've grown past $500 million in market cap and done about $5 billion.
in volume.
Tell me about this explosion of tokenized stocks on Solana and just like, yeah, what's going on with all of this?
Yeah, right.
Tokenized stock, I think it's making headlines for the past year.
It's only like a year old.
It started around like July or August last year and it has exploded.
And I think the reason why it exploded is that people have been waiting for this for so long.
Ever since real-world asset was a thing, people were like, well, I want to trade stocks on chain.
It has been on the table for so, so many years because compared to other types of real-world asset, tokenized stock is the easiest one to trade and to get access to.
So I think it is just natural for tokenized stocks to explode once they are...
legally on chain um so for solana specifically i think um the issuer that started it was um x stocks by back finance and then ondo finance follow with their issuance of tokenized stocks on solana than pre-stocks and then most recently we have backpack securities issuing stocks via sunrise so we have a diversity of issues on solana and i think it goes back again to your first question of solana being the everything trading chain because stocks is for trading and traders love to um to trade stocks and There's no question why they wouldn't want to trade stocks on a chain that offers great UX and cheap fees.
And I think that's one of the reasons why tokenized stock is such a huge thing on Solana right now.
And the second thing is that, again, Solana has been aggressively delivering on real-world asset and on the fact that we are...
on the fact that users on Solana should be able to get access to the stocks as they are available on Wall Street.
And so I think the biggest bomb in the first half of 2006 was SpaceX launching.
And Solana was able to bring SpaceX on Solana the moment that it became available on Wall Street, on New York Stock Exchange.
And that...
alone i think drove like 500 million um volumes in in in a week um after launch on solana and still it is a big having a big volume and um market cap on solana the spacex took the stoke and high spacex um stocks and so um you know and after that it created a momentum for say um sk What is the name of that?
Yes.
Yes.
That also became available on Solana the moment that it became available on Wall Street.
So it set a standard, right?
Now, everything that got an IPO in Wall Street should be able to be available on Solana from day one.
And people are like, okay, now I can just go on Solana and then I can get access to the hottest IPO on Wall Street without having, you know, geopolitical restrictions and i think that is such a great thesis and i don't see why people won't buy into it Sorry, that was just a great way to deliver that.
Yeah, no, I think the adoption kind of speaks for itself there.
I wanted to ask you about something that you commented on in this report, which is Hyperliquid.
A lot of people view Hyperliquid as a competitor to Solana, but something you said in this that got my attention was that hype is driving a huge amount of the trading volume on Solana.
Could you tell me a little bit more about the nature of this relationship and where this volume is coming from?
Yeah, so again, Solana wants to have the hottest token that has the biggest volume on its own chain that is available to trade for their active, their wealth of active users.
So Hype was brought on chain via Sunrise to Solana.
And on the peak day, it did more volume on Solana than...
on Central Exchange, not on Coinbase and Binance.
I think it was $107 million per day on Solana.
So I think it came back easily to the thesis that I've been saying forever is everything trading chain.
So because Hyperliquid has been doing so well on the perps frontier.
And there has been, I think, a lot of discussion on the hyper token.
And especially now that the discourse has moved a little bit away from the token as a form of speculation.
into this token as a realization of the project's own business and profits.
So it's like stocks, right?
People are seeing the token of a certain project as a stock of a company.
So if the project is doing well, if the project is actually gaining money, actually making profits, not just running on premises, then the token should reflect that growth in its price appreciation.
And so I think Hyperliquid has brought in a lot of, well, I think it has broken a lot of records on being the biggest profit per capita, per employee for several years now.
And so it's easy to understand the hype on hype.
And so it just makes sense that people want to trade hype.
People want to speculate on hype.
People want to do everything with it.
So it is available on Central Exchange and it's also available on Solana.
And as similar to other tokens that are available on Solana with great UX and cheap fees, HAP was just another token that captures the attention of people and happens to capture the volume on Solana.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So Hyperliquid is doing great.
People want to trade Hyperliquid.
They want to trade hype.
And they're doing that in a large part on Solana.
Exactly.
Something else you said in this report.
Yeah.
So something else you said in this report was that Solana's perps growth is actually outpaced hyperliquids in this year.
Solana's perps have grown 57% versus hyperliquids 6%.
And I'm curious about the differentiation between Solana and hyperliquid.
You spoke about this a little bit, but a lot of people see them as competitors, but I think they're starting to differentiate themselves.
How would you distinguish hyperliquid from Solana and what are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, so I think I do need to provide a little bit of context on the growth figure because as hyperliquid entering is more or less maturing phase, its growth compared to previous periods, it has slowed down a little bit compared to Solano, which just entered the perps frontier, I think like half a year ago.
and um so we're seeing you know the growth figure being like a lot because it's growing from a little absolute to a slightly larger absolute so it's the growth figure um but anyway i think um well there has been a lot of complaints from ecosystem to solana foundation about solana being so slow too slow on capturing herbs being itself as the chain for trading like why would you be a train for trading without having perps right it just doesn't make sense and um i think solana has missed that um opportunity to hyperliquid and hyperliquid has obviously for uh for a couple of years mature into this specialized chain for um perpetrating and also i think they're extending as well um to like prediction markets and and whatnot but i think as so The differentiation that you asked for, I think, lies in the two chains direction.
So Hyperliquid started as a specialized chain for perpetuals and slowly expanding to other frontiers of the whole DeFi stack, such as spot shading and prediction markets.
Solana started as a general purpose chain.
wants to do a lot of things.
So you can do a lot of things on Solana.
The tech stack is pretty general.
So you can build games, you can build NFTs and whatnot on Solana.
So it's moving in different directions.
So Solana doesn't just...
directly compete with Hyperliquid on perps alone.
So it's like a mother with a lot of children.
It has to take care of a lot of different aspects, right?
Spot trading, NFT, collectibles, games, prediction markets, and then perps.
Hyperliquid is doubling down on perps, slowly extending and testing the waters on other frontiers and seeing if they fit or if we should just stick to whatever we do best.
which is perps.
So I think the direction of growth is a little bit different.
Of course, competition is still there because we're doing this on the same field and we're competing for the same cohort of users who want to trade perps.
But I think what Solana is trying to provide, it's not like the ultimate venue for perps.
What Solana wants to provide is is to the cohort of users that are already on chain and is already exploring Solana.
And, you know, you go to Solana and Solana is like, hey, I have literally everything.
You can try everything here without having to go anywhere else.
But if you are like a, like a...
I just want to do perps.
You're just like the only perp guy.
Then probably you have already been on Hyperliquid already.
I don't want to kind of snatch those people into our house, but I want to provide like a full option, like a buffet for everyone who has already been on this chain.
Real world assets like funds, treasuries and private credit are still running on rails built decades ago.
Gated, paperwork heavy, slow to settle.
Everyone's talking about tokenizing them, but far fewer can actually do it and do it without cutting regulatory corners.
Securitize can.
It's the SEC regulated infrastructure bringing real world assets on chain.
Nine years in, native tokenization, not wrapped, backed by BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and Cathie Woods Ark Invest, and chosen by the New York Stock Exchange, VanEck, BNY, and Apollo to do it at scale.
It's the regulated bridge between traditional finance and crypto.
Tokenize the world at milkroad.com forward slash securitize.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
And you've written about chain specialization a lot recently, and we can come back to that.
But you mentioned prediction markets.
Something that stood out to me in this report, which I did not know, was that Solana hosts 37 different platforms for prediction markets, and there are seven that are attempting novel formats.
In other words, like...
completely new kinds of prediction market platforms that have never been tried anywhere else.
What do you think made Solana the home for this like experimental hub in prediction markets?
And yeah, what do you make of this like explosion of prediction markets on Solana?
Yeah, I think it goes back to two reasons.
So the first one is it's pretty cheap to deploy stuff on Solana and it's pretty open.
And I think, so, well, It wouldn't be fair to say that it's like Solana VM.
It's very easy to deploy compared to EVM because EVM is like so well spread.
Wouldn't be fair.
But I think it's pretty easy to deploy things on Solana and to experiment and to try things, you know, tinkering on Solana.
Secondly, there's a lot of...
hackathons on Solana.
I think the culture has been great.
Colossum doing very well.
Superteams doing very well in promoting the idea that you can just build things.
You can just tinker things on Solana and there will be like a whole, you know, layers of support system that can help you deliver.
and try this out.
And so I think that is a great culture to cultivate when it comes to having innovations on your own playground.
And also I think another reason possibly was that prediction markets such as like Polymarket has been so established and so easy to clone on EVM that it would just make sense to try other things on another VMs like Solana VMs.
I would love to see new prediction markets on Solana, like new types of prediction markets, because even during this severe, very hard, cold winter, we see Colossum still doing hackathons and there is a lot of effort in supporting new builders.
um on solana for example bird eye ourselves we sponsor a lot of hackathons in the solana ecosystem providing free apis for the builders so that they can test and try it out and um even we have like discounts when they are entering their um you know post hackathon phase and still needing help um in you know bootstrapping and thin on capital whatnot we are very open on um all of that just you know they just they can just shoot an email tell us that hey we need a little support we're like we got you as long as you can do stuff we got you so yeah i think that's a great culture to cultivate in this ecosystem Yeah, well, the culture of building has definitely been noted.
And yeah, if anybody has a great idea for a hackathon project on Solana, BirdEye is a great place to start with that.
I want to ask about another report you wrote.
You wrote a report called the On-Chain Gold Rush, all about tokenized gold and what you're seeing there.
I'm really curious, what made you want to write a dedicated report specifically on tokenized gold on chain and sort of the high-level takeaways from this report?
To be honest, I'm going down the stack.
I'm going down the real one asset stack and being like, okay.
I'm writing about reward asset on chain specialization.
What am I going to do next?
And I think Tokenize Goal has had a great moment throughout this year with price appreciation and just crazy volume on chain.
And I think it will be interesting to dive into it a little bit and see what has been built.
around this type of asset.
And I think what is interesting is that, so previously people think of gold and I think it is the situation now, even in Vietnam where I am, is people think of gold as an asset of a reserve asset, right?
A safe net.
So people just buy gold and keep it.
And people are sure that gold will appreciate in price, in time, and then they will be able to get profit from that.
So basically gold is not used.
It's just bought and stored and kept away until a better time.
But on-chain gold, on-chain gold is to be like that too.
On-chain gold is to be just this representation to main players that is Tether and Paxos.
They have tokenized gold on chain.
People just buy it on Ethereum and just kind of leave it there.
But after this, you know, gold rally in early, late 2025, early 2026, we see an ecosystem being built around tokenized gold.
So we have.
First of all, a lot of issuers coming on chain, not just Tether, not just Passos.
We have like VN, VNX.
We have MatrixDocs.
We have ComTechGold, Wisdom3, et cetera, tokenize their goal on chain.
They will also have tokenized stocks and ETFs, issuers issuing ETF wrappers of goal-backed funds like the...
iShares Gold Trust and the SPDR Gold Shares.
So the trader of today has more than one, more than two options to buy tokenized gold on chain.
So the ecosystem has expanded a little bit compared to the previous two years of just two types of token on Ethereum.
Now they have plenty of tokens and they are available in plenty of chains.
The second thing is that So the first layer is the asset itself, right?
It's the asset itself is expanding.
The second layer is the trading layer.
So we can trade gold on spot exchange.
And the volume actually broke out in Q4 of 2025 and peaked at $91 billion in Q1 of 2026.
Of course, most of that...
came from the gold rally itself but um the point is that there has been a market of spot gold on chain and it is expanding and it is evolving i think one of the interesting thing is that if you look past the tether impacts of gold which is still dominating you see the growth is happening at the perimeter so etf wrapper is compounded 72 times in a year to more than 20 million dollars in market cap and um and the gold purpose layer emerging on hyperliquid and so on as well and you see that um other tokens like metric docs um x a um um having a strong holder base on um like a real assets focus chain like plume having more than 66 000 holders on tune so the parameter is growing and the trading uh the spot trading layer is evolving and the third layer of that goal ecosystem is the utilization slash lending finance layer so goal is being put to work on chain as a collateral so you can use either You can use tokenized gold to either lock in and mint a stablecoin, as in the case of Falcon Finance USDF.
So you can lock Tether's gold in and then mint the stablecoin.
Or you can supply stablecoin as a collateral to borrow out the assets, mostly stablecoins.
On some of the protocols, you can just supply the tokenized gold and then earn yield directly on it.
do with tokenized gold on chain now and i think that's that's a great thing um thanks to the gold rally people are paying attention and people are building an ecosystem around it and um i think that's a great example and a great case studies for for um use cases for real world assets on chain and we're also which we also see with tokenized stocks too, right?
We can see the spot layer being built, the perps being built, the lending utilization layer, it's also being built.
So on-chain real-world assets is forming around ecosystem that is getting thicker and thicker.
And I think that's the future that we're all looking towards, towards to having everything on-chain.
Yeah, and I think it's a really great example.
Like a very ancient financial asset like gold is now being tokenized.
And like you said, that means you can do a lot more with it than just keep it in a bank.
So there's a lot more to come as that continues to grow.
DJ, I want to go back to something we started with, which is this third leap.
You talked about the first two leaps Solana made to new all-time highs.
You're talking about a third leap to a new all-time high for Sol that's coming.
Do you have a price target, a price prediction, or just like any other thoughts or forecasts around?
this third leap, when it might come, where it might land?
What are your thoughts on this third leap that's coming?
So because we're talking about all-time highs, I'm predicting that in this third leap, Solana will have a new all-time high.
So given that the previous all-time high is $290, I think we can target more than $300 this time.
So it's breaking $300 this time in the new.
in this new all-time high in this third leap.
The exact time, I don't know.
Probably when we get out of this very cold and harsh crypto winter and getting into a little bit of an uptime.
But yeah, I think a lot of the macros are saying like 2028.
So we have like one good year to go until we get to see that.
you know spring but yeah i think i think it's going to be a pretty long given this um geopolitical um climate still happening and um other macros effect other macros elements having an effect on crypto as well but i think the positive thing that we can look into that i will keep writing on is that the fundamental is still there and um bear markets as they say, it's the best time to build.
So I think we'll see more and more developments on not just Solana, not just real-world asset, but in the whole industry as crypto itself is expanding its frontier.
It's not just DeFi, it is approaching TratFi.
TratFi is paying attention, TratFi is pouring capital into crypto and trying to make a real like mass adoption use cases for it.
And I think that it's a good side that we can still pay attention to while we wait for the spring to come.
Well, I'm looking forward to talking to you in spring.
I like the bullish price prediction.
I love hearing that the fundamentals are still getting stronger.
I think this is exactly what you want to be looking for in a bear market is what products are still building and still shipping and still strengthening those fundamentals.
So a lot of encouraging alpha in this.
Thank you so much for sharing your research with us, DJ.
Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
Yep.
On Twitter, you can follow me at DJ HaChang.
And you can follow BirdEye at BirdEye underscore SO and BirdEye underscore Data.
And on LinkedIn, you can also find us on BirdEye Data.
Thank you so much for being here.
I always learn a lot from you.
I really enjoy these episodes.
Thanks for being on the Milk Road Show.
Thank you, John.
See you.
I'll see you soon.
Thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
So until next time, as I always say, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of the Milk Road Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event?
Subscribe to our channel and join the Milk Road Daily and Pro Newsletters and start investing like the top 1%.
This show is for educational purposes only.
Nothing we say is financial advice.
Investing is risky.
Never invest more than you can afford to lose.