Solana's on-chain activity has never been busier. Spot ETF assets under management crossed $1 billion by the end of May, stablecoin supply swelled past $16.4 billion, and the blockchain handled $64.6 billion in perpetual futures volume last month. Yet SOL is trading near $63 — roughly flat for the week. The disconnect is real, and it highlights a tension between network usage and token value that the Solana developer community is still trying to solve.
Record network activity, muted token price
May was Solana's best month for its spot ETF in 2026, with net inflows of $115.3 million. The tokenized real-world assets market on Solana hit $2.8 billion in market cap, and the chain accounted for 97% of all on-chain tokenized-equity spot trading volume. By any raw usage metric, Solana is the busiest smart-contract platform for certain categories. But SOL has not followed the activity upward.
“Network activity does not directly translate to value capture for SOL holders due to the fee structure,” Jake Kennis, senior research analyst at Nansen, told GFdaily. That line is worth unpacking.
Why fees matter for SOL
Solana's base fees are split 50% to burn and 50% to block producers. The problem is that priority fees — the extra payments users add to get their transactions included quickly — dominate during high throughput, and under the SIMD-0096 change, those priority fees go 100% to validators. So the bulk of fee revenue never reaches the token supply. SIMD-0547, a proposal now under discussion, indicates the current burn rate is only about 648 SOL per day even at sustained high throughput. That's tiny relative to an initial inflation rate of 8% (which declines 15% per year toward a long-term target of 1.5%). In other words, the network is burning almost nothing while still issuing new tokens at a meaningful pace.
SpaceX IPO and other macro drags
Even if the fee structure were different, this week brings a major macro event that's pulling risk capital away from crypto. SpaceX is pricing its IPO, targeting a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion and at least $75 billion in proceeds. Retail investors have been allocated up to 30% of shares. OpenAI and Anthropic are also queued behind SpaceX. Nasdaq's new fast-entry rule could let eligible mega-caps join the Nasdaq-100 within 15 trading days, which could draw passive fund demand away from crypto assets.
“Macro events like the SpaceX IPO cause risk assets across equities, credit, and crypto to reprice,” said Ryan Day, CMO of Solstice. Bitcoin is at $61,500, reflecting that same risk-off pressure. SOL's inability to decouple from broader market sentiment, combined with its own tokenomics headwind, has left it stuck.
The fee debate continues
The Solana community is not ignoring the issue. SIMD-0547 is under active discussion, and any change to how priority fees are distributed — or how inflation is managed — could shift the value-capture equation for SOL holders. But those are design decisions, not quick fixes. For now, the chain is running hotter than ever, and the token is sitting still. The SpaceX IPO closes later this week, and the market will have to decide whether the next Solana upgrade can close the gap.
