Weekly Report 1

Solana DeFi has cooled significantly since the September 2025 peak, with TVL now around $6B, roughly 53% below ATH.

But underneath the slowdown, the ecosystem still looks active and the composition has shifted. Capital is moving away from lending and speculative DeFi, and into structurally stickier categories.

A few things still stand out:

• RWA crossed $2.5B

• SOL ETFs reached roughly $1B cumulative inflows

• Stablecoin liquidity remains above $13B

• The Alpenglow upgrade expected in Q3 2026 is becoming the next major narrative

Rather than capital fully leaving Solana, the market looks more selective and defensive, with RWAs and ETFs becoming the strongest support for the ecosystem.

Institutional flows are accelerating even as DeFi activity cools.

One of the strongest signals right now is ETF demand. SOL ETFs crossed roughly $1B cumulative inflows, while BTC also saw a sharp comeback in May with a massive $622M single-day inflow on May 11. Even with DeFi activity slowing down, institutional appetite for crypto still looks strong.

Stablecoin liquidity has definitely cooled off since March, but it has not disappeared.

Supply dropped from roughly $15B at peak to around $13B+, with USDC still representing about 75% of the balance. After the Drift exploit, Tether stepped in proposing to help the ecosystem, implying a possible stablecoin dominance shift toward USDT.

The bigger change is that stablecoin capital is becoming more selective. Lower yields and weaker lending opportunities pushed a lot of liquidity away from traditional DeFi strategies. That is very different from a full loss of confidence in Solana itself.

RWA keeps getting bigger, even while the broader market weakened.

Growth has slowed compared to last month, but it is still positive even while the broader market weakened.

SOL has built the most consistent ETF inflow trend, and BTC has come back strongly. ETH continues to lag.

Earlier this year, lending and liquid staking dominated the ecosystem. Today, RWA has become the single largest category by far.

We are now in week 19. All rates below are compared WoW with week 18.

This week confirmed a few important trends:

• USDT spike trades already came back to equilibrium — rates collapsed as predicted

• YIELD became the new dominant campaign structure

• Standard LST looping compressed but spread still positive for more than a month for certain pairs

• The more scalable setups are now directional rather than pure arb

The market still looks active underneath, but the opportunity set is becoming much more selective. Right now the highest yields are tactical, fast-moving, and heavily rate-dependent. The more durable setups are lower yield, but structurally cleaner.

The strategy count barely moved, but the entire platform structure rotated underneath.

This week basically became the YIELD launch week. The system completely rotated away from USDT dominance into campaign-driven yield farming. At the same time, USDT finally collapsed exactly as predicted.

The market is now separated into four different opportunity buckets.

• YIELD campaign trades now dominate absolute APY

• BTC Short became the strongest scalable directional trade

• corvusSOL trades still work, but are clearly decaying

• traditional LST emode trades are basically gone

Key takeaway

YIELD completely took over the leaderboard.

• YIELD campaign strategies took 6 of the top 10 spots

• BTC Short jumped from rank 9 to rank 2

• corvusSOL/SOL is still alive but clearly decaying

Directional trades became more important this week. BTC Short became one of the strongest structures on the entire platform.

• BTC Short is now the best directional trade on the platform by APY

• SOL Short lost yield but remains the best scalable opportunity by liquidity

• ETH Long improved slightly but still remains structurally negative

YIELD / SOL is the highest APY on platform. The strongest setups in the cluster offer a combination of high yield and manageable borrow cost.

Traditional LST looping got weaker this week and effectively disappeared from active strategies.

Rising SOL borrow costs hurt almost every high leverage strategy. JupSOL saw the sharpest deterioration, while INF was the only setup that actually improved. Right now, hyloSOL and mSOL look like the strongest standard emode structures overall.

The highest APY trades are no longer the largest deployable trades.

The best scalable setups right now are probably BTC Short, SOL Short, larger YIELD pairs, and corvusSOL / SOL.

The highest APY setups remain tactical and fast-moving. The cleaner long-duration trades are now mostly lower yield.