Solana logged 1.88 million unique active daily addresses on Oct. 9, its highest reading in 13 months, but the on-chain burst sits awkwardly next to two months of spot ETF outflows, leaving traders to argue over which signal will matter more. Network growth metrics are up 124% versus early September, yet skeptics note that a majority of the new wallets hold no SOL at all.
The figures come from SolanaFloor and the Blockworks analytics dashboard, with Santiment supplying the growth comparison. Daily new wallets have averaged 1.71 million through the recent stretch. Not everyone is convinced: Hello Moon data shows more than 86 million wallets with zero SOL and another 15.5 million holding less than one SOL, and Keyrock’s Justin d’Anethan observed that the value of most Solana addresses sits below $10. Critics read both numbers as bot churn rather than genuine adoption, the same debate that surrounded Solana’s memecoin-era address counts. Radix founder Dan Hughes countered that wallets transacting through exchange or DeFi venues can carry little or no balance while still doing real work, which is how high-frequency market infrastructure looks on-chain, and the stablecoin subset he cannot explain away sits on the bullish side of the ledger.
Stablecoins are the part nobody calls a bubble
The usage spike is not only bot-wrapped speculation. Daily active stablecoin addresses reached 888,000 in September, up 269% year over year, and stablecoin supply on the network stands above $15 billion across 14 million holding wallets. Solana settled 3.18 billion non-vote transactions in September alone. Every one of those stablecoin addresses holds something worth a dollar, and moving it costs fees, so this cohort is harder to dismiss as synthetic growth than the zero-SOL wallets pulling the headline count upward. Over a longer window the network added more than 10 million stablecoin-holding addresses in under two years, coming from under 4 million at the end of 2024.
The institutional layer is moving in step. The Solana Foundation released an open-source Delivery-versus-Payment settlement framework on Oct. 6 for tokenized asset settlement, with J.P. Morgan contributing to the standard, aimed at atomic real estate and fund transactions in seconds. Circle has kept minting large USDC batches on the chain, including $750 million in a single 24-hour window earlier this month. Stablecoin-linked card spending has crossed $1 billion cumulatively, bridging on-chain dollar balances to ordinary merchants. Samsung’s late-October Wallet integration on 82 million U.S. Galaxy devices, announced Oct. 8, adds a consumer distribution channel none of the zero-SOL skeptics have explained away.
The network is also rebuilding its engine
Underneath the usage story, core developers are closing in on infrastructure changes aimed at cutting block times roughly 200-fold, from about 800 milliseconds to around 4 milliseconds, and shortening consensus confirmation from 2.5 seconds to about 100 milliseconds. The upgrade set, which the community has discussed under the Alpenglow banner, carries a fee-adjustment component on top, a sign the network is normalizing monetization after years of near-zero fees. Validators have staged the work as a series of testnet activations, and the throughput targets are meant to keep the chain ahead of the stablecoin and payment volumes now being routed onto it.
That engineering work matters for the adoption argument because payments are unforgiving. Samsung’s cross-border remittance flows, Circle’s mint-and-settle loops and J.P. Morgan’s DvP standard all assume settlement finality at sub-second speed. Visa already settles USDC payments on Solana for its card program, and PayPal issues PYUSD with Solana as one of its two main networks. If the upgrade ships on schedule, Solana keeps the slot it has built; if it slips, rivals selling faster finality get an opening, and in payments the switching cost is low once velocity converts to habit elsewhere.
SOL price goes the other way
SOL trades near $198, down about 6% over the past week and 40% below its September peak of $330, according to CoinGecko. The gap between record activity and falling price has a visible feature: capital is not confirming demand. Market cap to TVL still sits near 8.6, i.e. roughly one dollar staking and collateralizing per 8.6 dollars of market cap, high even by Solana standards, while the futures funding rate stays negative, the kind of setup in which short sellers pay longs to stay patient in a ranging market.
The ETF side is more direct. U.S. spot SOL funds recorded net outflows of more than $22 million through early October after September delivered inflows, so the same weekly horizon contains both a network at a 13-month usage high and institutional vehicles bleeding cash, while bitcoin funds have taken their own nearly $1 billion weekly hit in some sessions. The September stablecoin record of $17.3 billion has also drifted down to the current $15 billion, which the bear case reads as real ecosystem shrinkage rather than routine rotation.
That asymmetry now defines the disagreement. The bear case is that address counts are inflated by bot infrastructure and that the stablecoin drawdown confirms flows are leaving with the price. The bull case leans on composition instead: stablecoin addresses, card spending and the Samsung retail pipeline are dollar-denominated flows rather than leverage, and each has shown independent growth. The next checkpoints are simple enough to track: whether the daily active count holds above 1.5 million, whether SOL ETF flows print a positive day, and whether stablecoin supply starts climbing back toward its September record. Between those three, the tape will resolve the argument on its own schedule, and if the answer does not arrive within a month or two, the long side has already paid for the wait.