What Are the Top Projects to Watch on Solana 2025?

• DEXs: Jupiter, Meteora, Raydium, Pump.fun

• Lending protocols: Kamino

• Staking: Solayer, Sanctum

• NFTs: Mad Lads, Lifinity Flares

• Memecoins: PENGU, TRUMP

Key Takeaways

• Solana is a Layer 1 that offers high throughput and low fees for transactions. 

• Solana is well known for its popularity amongst retail investors and traders especially through memecoins.

• In 2025, many Solana ecosystem projects are growing to support the increased retail and trading interest, in particular the growth of DEXs such as Jupiter, Meteora and Raydium. Solana also became the choice blockchain for memecoin launches including the TRUMP and PENGU memecoin.

The Solana ecosystem began 2025 on a high note, hitting all time highs at the back of the launch of President Trump’s TRUMP memecoin. Despite the memecoin hype appearing to have died down, Solana easily maintains its position as one of the hottest L1 blockchains just right behind Ethereum.

Most notably, Solana is the choice blockchain for many NFT collections including Pudgy Penguins, Azuki and more to launch their own memecoins. We had another milestone in late 2024 with the Solana wallet application, Phantom taking second place in Apple’s US App Store utilities category. These achievements highlight the growth and popularity of Solana as a retail investor focused blockchain, which are aided by Solana’s cheap transactions and faster processing speed relative to many other smart contract blockchains. According to the network explorer, the Solana network processes at least 100 million transactions daily from an average of 500,000 active wallets and tons of decentralized applications and smart contract tokens.

Solana celebrates its fifth birthday this year, with the much awaited “Firedancer” performance upgrade is expected to arrive later this year. Join us as we take you through the top projects to look out for in the year of 2025.

This article was updated by Loke Choon Khei in April 2025.

Jupiter: Solana’s DeFi Conglomerate

Initially built as a DEX aggregator, Jupiter has grown to become a one-stop shop for all DeFi needs in Solana. The Jupiter platform now boasts features such as perpetuals trading, token launches, token terminals and even a dedicated portfolio viewer. Jupiter is able to offer a wide array of features due to the many strategic acquisitions it has made in the past year. Jupiter’s prolific acquisitions/investments include: SonarWatch, Coinhall, Solana.FM and MoonShot. Jupiter’s most recent acquisition of DRiP Haus, an NFT collection platform, suggests that Jupiter is likely planning to launch their very own NFT marketplace in the coming future.

After the decline of memecoins in early 2025, Jupiter rose to become the top fee generating protocol on Solana, with daily fees generated of over $2M according to DefiLlama.

Meteora: The Liquidity Arm of Jupiter

Meteora is a DEX focused on decentralizing the creation of liquidity pools through its unique Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker (DLMM) feature. Although Meteora operates as a separate entity, Meteora is owned by the Jupiter team and works extremely closely with their team members as well. Meteora is best known for its usage of liquidity providing (LPing) memecoins and new token launches, with famous examples including that of the MELANIA, ME and PENGU.

Meteora is currently the 2nd largest DEX on Solana, right behind Raydium with a total value locked (TVL) of over $500 million at the time of writing. Users of the platform currently await an airdrop from the platform as the team has confirmed that a MET token will be launched at an unspecified time.

Raydium: Innovations of the Biggest DEX on Solana

Raydium maintains its position as the largest decentralized exchange (DEX) on Solana, shipping new features at a rapid pace. Raydium’s key features include the usual suspects of DEXs: concentrated liquidity pools, token swaps and more. As the market leader, Raydium’s liquidity pools are often the largest (highest liquidity) which is a major selling point for users. Additionally, Raydium also launched their own perpetuals exchange in January 2025. Historically, perpetuals exchanges have been known to be highly profitable (see Hyperliquid), suggesting that this launch is generally bullish for Raydium. 

Finally, in March 2025, Raydium announced the upcoming launch of “LaunchLab”, its own version of a token launchpad, indicating its intention to compete with the token launchpad behemoth, Pump.fun. 

Pump.fun: Bringing Memecoins to Life

Pump.fun took the world by storm in 2024, and is the centerpiece of the Solana ecosystem bringing both highs and lows to the entire network by way of its many successes and controversies. Pump.fun is a token launchpad best known for its use to create and launch memecoins, with many notable examples including MOODENG, FARTCOIN and PNUT. To date, Pump.fun generated over $500 million in revenue after its launch in early 2024, making it one of the fastest growing and most profitable crypto projects of all time.

Pump.fun teased the possibility of a token airdrop in late 2024, promising to “reward our earliest users”, making it one of the most anticipated crypto airdrops. Another recent development is the release of PumpSwap in late March 2025. PumpSwap is the native DEX launched by Pump.fun which boasts lower fees and better liquidity, with an upcoming creator revenue sharing feature. With the introduction of PumpSwap, all Pump.fun token graduations (read more on this here!) will now automatically migrate to PumpSwap instead of Raydium. The recent developments of both Raydium and Pump.fun suggests that the two protocols are close rivals.

Kamino Finance: The Market Winner of Lending Protocols

After many rounds of innovations and some slip ups from its competitors, Kamino Finance has emerged as the largest and most successful lending protocol in the year 2025. Since the beginning of 2024, Kamino’s TVL has grown from $200 million to over $2 billion by 2025.

Kamino launched its Lend V2 program in late 2024, introducing “The Vault Layer”, which aggregates and automates liquidity across various markets to deliver risk-optimized yields. An interesting innovation of theirs is the “Scam Wick Protection”, enabled by their next-generation liquidations engine that protects users from unnecessary liquidations as a result of an unexpected and severe price crash that showcases itself as a “scam wick”.

Source: https://x.com/KaminoFinance/status/1830991868449968571

There is currently an incentivized points program running on Kamino (season 3 at the time of writing), allowing platform users to earn points and earn an allocation of the platform’s governance token, KMNO in upcoming seasons of their token airdrop.

Solayer: Solana’s “EigenLayer”

Solayer began as a crypto project dedicated to enabling restaking on Solana, a process in which staked tokens are then further used to secure the networks of other crypto projects. Solayer continues to innovate, venturing into other fields of Solana DeFi, beginning with the launch of the stablecoin sUSD (Solayer USD) in October 2024. sUSD is a US treasury backed stablecoin launched in collaboration with the Ethereum NFT marketplace OpenSea. The Solayer team unveiled their grand vision in January 2025, where they introduced the world to “Solayer InfiniSVM”, a hardware accelerated Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) Layer 1 blockchain. 

Solayer conducted the token airdrop of their governance token, LAYER in February 2025, reaching a peak market capitalization of around $300 million within a few days of launch. The continued developments of Solayer showcased their unique evolution from a simple Solana restaking protocol into an upcoming DeFi powerhouse with their very own blockchain makes this project one to look out for.

Sanctum: Unifying Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs)

Sanctum began as a crypto project that aims to solve the issue of fragmented liquidity between various liquid staked Solana. Currently, users have an extremely wide range of liquid staked providers to choose from such as Jupiter, Drift, Jito, Marinade and more. To streamline and unify the liquid staking process, Sanctum created the “Infinity Pool”, a multi-asset liquidity pool that holds various LSTs and enables efficient token swaps with minimal slippage. The staked rewards are also aggregated for their users.

Sanctum currently holds an impressive $1 billion in TVL, making them a major player in the Solana staking ecosystem. Sanctum’s CLOUD governance token airdropped in July 2024, where they pioneered the use of the “yap-to-earn” airdrop criterion. Sanctum recently enabled CLOUD staking in February 2025 where they aim to incorporate and utilize Jupiter’s Active Staking Rewards (ASR) system. ASR means that staking rewards are given based on governance proposal participation.

Mad Lads: Solana’s Most Renowned NFT Collection

The Mad Lads NFT collection was created by Coral, a Solana framework development company.  It is a collection of 10,000 unique artwork featuring humanoid characters with specific attributes and rarity. About 9,966 Mad Lads have been minted and are held by over 4,200 NFT collectors on the network. Each piece of art in the collection has a unique identity; the rarity attributes apply to the character’s gender, clothing, facial expression, type, and hair, amongst other attributes. 

Mad Lads NFTs are owned and created by the parent company, Backpack, the same company behind Backpack wallet. Due to this, the Mad Lads NFT can be seen as highly associated with Backpack, who is involved in many other crypto projects. For instance, Backpack’s successful acquisition of FTX Europe in January 2025 saw the Mad Lads price floor increasing by over 19% in a single day.

Mad Lads NFTs are xNFTs, which means they are NFTs with an embedded code script that can be executed by an application that supports them, like the Backpack wallet, which is also developed by Coral. For example, the programmable nature of xNFTs means that users don’t need to access third-party platforms to stake Mad Lads NFTs; instead the feature is integrated into the asset, and can be staked directly from the Backpack wallet.

The Mad Lads NFT had a resurgence in late 2024 with its floor price rising from 28 SOL to 78 SOL due to memecoin speculation. While this is still a far cry from its all-time high floor price of 229 SOL in December 2023, the Mad Lads NFT collection is still Solana’s largest NFT collection by market capitalization, being included in many crypto airdrops such as PYTH, W and DYM.

Lifinity Flares: Lifinity’s Official NFT Collection

Lifinity Flares is a 10,000 supply animated NFT collection launched by the Lifinity DEX in December 2021 with a mint price of 1.5 SOL and was fully sold out 2 hours after launch. Funds raised from the mint were placed into Lifinity’s liquidity pools, with the profits earned from those liquidity pools being used to buy back Lifinity NFTs from the open market.

Flare holders were eligible for a LFNTY token allocation (1% of token supply), which was distributed in May 2023. Although filled with rich history, Lifinity Flares saw a gradual price decline from its peak floor price of 16 SOL in January 2023 till 4.6 SOL in December 2024. Lifinity Flare’s decline reversed at the beginning of 2025, after Lifinity recorded significant increases in revenues. The revenue sharing nature of Lifinity Flares saw the NFT collection making a comeback with its floor price rising threefold to over 12 SOL in March 2025, making it the fourth largest NFT collection on Solana.

Lifinity’s increasing revenue as seen on Defillama.

PENGU: Pudgy Penguin’s Official Memecoin

Source: https://x.com/pudgypenguins/status/1864852000707420574

PENGU is the official memecoin of the famed Pudgy Penguins NFT collection, a collection of 8,888 unique cartoons of cute penguins on the Ethereum blockchain. The PENGU token launched in December 2024, in what was one of the most prolific airdrops at the time, rewarding not just their NFT holders but users of the Solana ecosystem in general, with over a million Solana wallets eligible for the airdrop. In just a few days after its launch, PENGU became Solana’s largest memecoin reaching over $2.5 billion in market capitalization.

Furthermore, PENGU has become linked to Abstract Chain, the new consumer-focused blockchain launched by Pudgy Penguins' creators. The Pudgy Penguins team has mentioned that the PENGU token will eventually be available on the Abstract chain. Some users speculate that PENGU holders may be included in a possible airdrop by Abstract chain.

TRUMP: The First “President” Memecoin

TRUMP is the official memecoin launched by the 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump. TRUMP’s launch in January 2025 saw it dethroning PENGU to become the world’s largest memecoin growing to over $13 billion in market capitalization in under two days. TRUMP’s launch heavily increased network activity on the Solana network and propelled the price of SOL to record highs of over $293.

TRUMP’s success heavily influenced the launch of many other “President” memecoins, many of which have been exploitative in nature such as LIBRA, the memecoin endorsed by the President of Argentina, Javier Milei. Due to this, TRUMP has faced criticism for paving the way for widespread user exploitation in crypto. Nevertheless, TRUMP remains Solana’s largest memecoin and a pioneer of its archetype, a memecoin endorsed by a large public figure.

Conclusion

The recent developments of the projects and builders on Solana suggests that the best is yet to come for the Solana network. That being said, SOL has seen some weaknesses as of late especially given how common Solana is being used for user exploitation with the likes of HAWK, LIBRA and many more. However, this is a classic case of Solana suffering from its own success, as the blockchain of choice for retail, it naturally attracts both real users and bad actors.

Note that this article only discusses projects in the Solana ecosystem and is not financial advice or endorsement for users to invest in these projects. Always do your own research before connecting your wallet to any protocol.