Deep Dive: Solana On-Chain Activity - April 2025

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Syndica Deep Dive: Solana On-Chain Activity - April 2025

Part I: Network Capacity & Compute Efficiency

What is compute? What are compute units (CU)? When you execute an on-chain transaction, it uses up computational resources or compute. Compute is measured in compute units (CU).

Block Compute Budget

• Each block: limit of 48M CU
  (raised to 50M CU on April 10)
• Divided across transactions
• Transactions are split into instructions

Instruction Limits

• Default: 200k CU per instruction
• Maximum: 1.4M CU per instruction
• Each instruction deducts CU from block budget

Compute usage has grown by over 40% in a year. Solana’s daily compute units surged 40%, from 2.7T daily CU in Jan-Apr 2024 to 3.8T in the same period of 2025. Mining drove summer 2024 peaks near 6T CU, with usage now stable above last year’s levels.

Solana's utilization rate dipped slightly since 2024. Programs request compute units upfront when executing transactions. Utilization rate measures efficiency—compute used divided by compute requested. Solana’s program efficiency dropped from 28% in Jan-Apr 2024 to 25% in Jan-Apr 2025. Mining programs drove peaks of over 50% in the summer of 2024.

Solana blocks show room for growth. Solana’s blocks use 79% of the compute limit. 74% of compute comes from non-vote transactions and 5% from vote transactions. On Epoch 720 (April 10), the compute limit was raised from 48M to 50M, but block usage stayed similar. Blocks averaged 42M CU from April 1 to April 10, and 41.5M for the rest of April after the limit was raised.

The busiest blocks used more compute after the limit increase. The compute usage for top 10% of blocks (P90) grew from 44.5M to 46M after the limit increase. P100 grew from 46.4M CU to 47.9M CU, and at times surpassed the previous limit of 48M CU. This suggests the compute limit increase was effective, boosting network throughput by allowing more compute-heavy transactions per block.

Solana activity has grown year-over-year, even during quiet periods. Solana’s median non-vote TPS rose from 800 in Jan-Apr 2024 to 1100 in Jan-Apr 2025. The P99 percentile (top 1% of periods by activity) increased slightly from 1900 to 2200. The P1 percentile (lowest 1%) jumped from 60 to 320, a 5x increase in "baseline" activity.

Part II: Program Activity - Who's Using Solana?

DeFi is king of Solana compute. Across Solana’s full history, DeFi leads compute usage at 60% with top projects Jupiter (20%), Raydium (10%), and Meteora (5%). Solana Program Library (SPL) programs follow at 9%, driven by the SPL Token Program. Oracles take around 6%, and Mining 4%.

Raydium dominated DeFi, and MEV/Arbitrage bots surged. DeFi held 53% of Solana’s compute in April, with Raydium (12%) overtaking Jupiter (11.50%). Meteora and pump.fun both sit around 8%. MEV/Arbitrage bots emerged as the second category by compute at 17%, with Solana MEV Bot leading at 6%.

Over Solana's full history, invocations have been driven by System programs and DeFi. SPL programs account for 38% of invocations led by the SPL Token Program. DeFi contributes 35%, with Jupiter (8%) and Raydium (6%) as the top protocols. Oracles add 17%, with Pyth (14%) as the top protocol.

Year-over-year, DeFi and SPL increased in invocations. From Q1 2024 to Q1 2025, DeFi's share of invocations stayed steady at around 40% with Jupiter (12%) Raydium (7%) and Meteora (7%) leading. SPL programs grew from 46% to 51%, dominated by SPL Token Program.

Spot DEXes and aggregators lead DEX compute share. Spot DEXs like Raydium (or Serum initially) dominated Solana’s DEX compute share. Perpetual DEXs like Mango or Drift surged in late 2022, briefly taking the lion's share of compute. Into 2025, aggregators grew to 31% of compute, spot to 55%, and perpetual's share dropped to 8%.

Beginning in March, PumpSwap surged in DEX spot compute. PumpSwap, launched on March 21, quickly captured around 20% of Solana’s DEX spot compute. SolFi rose to as much as 10% in February and has stabilized around 4% since then.

PumpSwap has driven the pump.fun surge. Pump.fun’s compute and invocations grew steadily until PumpSwap’s release, after which both went parabolic. The last week of March saw pump.fun hit 275 million weekly invocations and 8 trillion CU.

Jupiter dominates perps volume share with minimal compute usage. Jupiter leads Solana perp DEX volume in 2025 with 84%, but uses only 4% of compute. With 0.3% volume, Zeta spends the most compute among perp DEXs at 70%. This disparity arises from design choices. Zeta’s on-chain orderbook and matching engine drive high compute usage. In contrast, Jupiter’s liquidity pools and running part of the computations off-chain matching minimize compute spent on Solana.

Token Extensions has lagged in invocations. Token Extensions tokens grew to 25% of Solana’s newly created fungible tokens in 2025, reaching a peak of over 40% in January. However, invocations for Token Extensions averaged only around 1% in 2025 compared to the original SPL at 99%. This discrepancy stems from SPL tokens’ dominant role in DeFi and token swaps, which drive most activity on Solana.