A quick look at the top 10 Solana protocols ranked by fees in 2024

Author: Jack Kubinec, Blockworks; Compiler: Baishui, Golden Finance

At Lightspeed, we don’t like to measure the success of protocols by popular active addresses or total locked value metrics.

Instead, fees can be a useful metric to measure the demand for different applications and services. Blockchain addresses and TVL can be played with, but fees are real money that can, at least in theory, change hands to do something on the chain. So here are the top 10 Solana protocols ranked by fees this year, based on DeFiLlama data as of December 27.

1. Raydium – $648 million

It’s been a banner year for the Solana decentralized exchange, which has capitalized on the meme coin craze that has swept the cryptocurrency world for much of 2024. Some have accused the app of being a place for meme coins to create fake trading volume to appear more legitimate, but the numbers speak for themselves. Raydium collects quite a bit in fees.

2. Jito – $633 million

Jito’s Jito-Solana client makes a modification to MEV and has become the go-to choice for many validators running the Solana software. Jito collects 5% of the MEV “tips” users pay to make exchanges on Solana – an amount that has grown to massive levels this year as meme coins have increased demand for MEV tips and transactions on the blockchain.

3. Pump.fun – $308 million

In less than a year, meme coin startup platform pump.fun has brought in more than $300 million in fees. Read that sentence again. If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that crypto users really, really love speculating on tokens.

4. Photon – $248 million

Solana exchange Photon also rode the meme coin wave, earning $250 million. Photon provides meme coin information for users to browse, but its real signature is speed. Photon claims that its data transmission speed is 15 times faster than DEX Screener, and provides a "quick buy" function to reduce friction when trading.

5. bloXroute – $136 million

At first, this question confused me a little because I rarely heard anyone mention bloXroute in the context of Solana. The infrastructure company provides a blockchain distribution network and trader API, and is mainly promoted as a way for traders to make Solana transactions faster.

6. Trojan – $121 million

Trojan offers a popular Telegram bot that allows users to create a Solana wallet and buy and sell crypto within the messaging app.

7. BONKbot – $118 million

The team behind the popular Solana meme coin released BONKbot as a Telegram trading bot, suggesting that the creator of the bear meme coin may also have some technical skills.

8. Marinade – $88 million

Marinade is the third-largest Solana liquid staking token after Jito and Binance. This year, it launched “Marinade v2,” which introduced an auction mechanism for its staking pools in hopes of boosting yields and attracting institutions. Marinade has been accused of enabling “sandwich attackers” in the process.

9. BullX — $85M

BullX is another meme coin trading platform. It advertises itself as offering the “fastest indexing,” the process of making blockchain data readable — something Coinbase has been working to address in recent weeks.

10. Kamino — $81M

Kamino is a DeFi protocol that has seen its TVL surge to over $2 billion in 2024. The app has become popular for its lending capabilities, leading some to liken it to Solana’s Aave. Notably, Kamino is home to most of the liquidity incentives designed to drive adoption of PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin on Solana.