Solana price prediction: why DeFi capital sits at a six-week low

Here are the facts: the capital locked in DeFi applications on the Solana blockchain stands at $5.72 billion in DefiLlama's daily series, and at $5.75 billion when we pulled the figure on Monday afternoon. The last time the value was lower was September 16, 2026. Over the same period, $1.45 billion changed hands in 24 hours on the blockchain's decentralised exchanges, more than on Ethereum and Base combined. Our assessment follows further down: we treat this gap between shrinking capital and steady volume as the more telling signal than the price level, and we also name the figure that argues against it.

The price itself barely moved. CoinGecko put it at $100.89 on Monday afternoon, 0.45 percent below the level of 24 hours earlier, with a market capitalisation of $59.49 billion. Where the price can point over a horizon of months is set out in our Solana price prediction. For this Monday the price is the least telling number of the day, because it stayed quiet while something shifted underneath it.

$5.72 billion: Solana's DeFi capital is back at its mid-September level

Total value locked, or TVL, measures the dollar value of all deposits in a blockchain's applications: liquidity in trading pools, collateral in lending protocols, deposits in yield products. The figure says nothing about how much happens on a blockchain. It says how much money sits there and works.

On Solana that is currently $5.72 billion. On September 28, the high of the past 30 days, it was $6.61 billion. That is 13.4 percent less in four weeks. The decline did not come as a one-day drop but in steps: $5.98 billion on October 22, $5.86 billion on the 23rd, $5.77 billion on the 24th, $5.78 billion on the 25th and now $5.72 billion. Any single day looks like noise. The series does not.

Part of that is arithmetic rather than an outflow. TVL is measured in dollars, and when the SOL price falls, the same stock of tokens shrinks on paper with it. SOL currently trades 65.6 percent below its all-time high of $293.31. The other part is real money that investors and funds have pulled out of the applications. How large each share is cannot be separated from the dollar series alone, and anyone who claims otherwise has not measured it.

Base has been ahead since October 10

At the time of the Monday afternoon pull, Solana ranked third among blockchains by locked capital with $5.75 billion. Ethereum leads by a wide margin with $48.33 billion, Base follows with $6.03 billion, then BNB Chain with $5.52 billion and Tron with $5.44 billion.

The swap between Base and Solana is a good two weeks old. On October 10 both blockchains stood at around $6.16 billion in the daily series, and Base has been ahead since. At roughly $280 million the gap is small enough for one quiet week to erase it. It is still worth noting, because Base and Solana take entirely different routes: Base is a layer-2 blockchain on Ethereum with a strong tie to a single exchange, Solana a standalone blockchain with its own validator set.

$1.45 billion in daily volume: trading holds, capital does not

The second number tells a different story. Decentralised exchanges on Solana handled $1.45 billion over the past 24 hours. On Ethereum the figure was $726 million, on Base $716 million. Solana therefore turns over slightly more in a day than the two combined.

Over seven days the picture is the same: $13.44 billion on Solana, $7.56 billion on Ethereum, $6.03 billion on Base. Over 30 days Solana reaches $62.22 billion. Trading has not collapsed, then, while locked capital gave up 13.4 percent. That simultaneity is the finding of the day.

Capital turnover compared: Solana 25 percent, Base 12 percent, Ethereum 1.5 percent

Taken together, the two numbers produce a third that appears on no dashboard and that we therefore calculated ourselves: capital turnover. It divides daily volume by locked capital and says how often a deposited dollar is traded in a day.

• Solana: $1.45 billion in volume on $5.75 billion of capital, or 25.2 percent in a single day.
• Base: $716 million on $6.03 billion of capital, or 11.9 percent.
• Ethereum: $726 million on $48.33 billion of capital, or 1.5 percent.

A dollar of liquidity on Solana works about twice as often in a day as on Base and roughly seventeen times as often as on Ethereum. That is not a verdict on the blockchains but a description of how they are used: on Ethereum a lot of capital sits long term as collateral, on Solana comparatively little capital turns over very fast. For a forecast it means that Solana depends less than other blockchains on locked capital and more on live trading. Should trading fall away, the support goes faster than elsewhere.

How locked capital, trading volume and fees hang together

The mechanism behind it takes three sentences. Whoever puts liquidity into a trading pool earns a fee on every swap. The higher the volume for the same pool, the higher the return on the capital deposited, and the more likely that capital stays put. If volume falls while the capital remains, the return per dollar drops and the capital moves away.

On Solana the rarer direction is playing out right now: the capital leaves, the volume stays. Arithmetically that lifts the fee yield of the remaining liquidity providers, because the same volume is spread across fewer deposits. That is the stabilising part of the picture, and it is the reason a falling TVL alongside steady volume is not the same thing as a falling TVL alongside falling volume. Providers of liquidity, and anyone earning interest through lending protocols, will find the platforms and their terms in our crypto lending comparison.

The counter-test is still outstanding. Should volume also give way in the coming days, the reading flips: the TVL decline would then have been the precursor of a broader retreat and not the consequence of a price drop. That is visible in the seven-day volume series, not in a single day.

437.7 million SOL are staked, 152.1 million move freely

To understand how sensitive the price is to capital movements, it helps to know how much SOL is freely tradable at all. We measured this on Monday afternoon directly against a node of the Solana blockchain rather than taking it from a statistics page.

There are 589,819,536 SOL in circulation. Of those, 437,716,746 SOL are staked with validators, spread across 664 active and 26 delinquent validators. That is 74.21 percent of the circulating supply. Freely moving, therefore, are 152,102,790 SOL, worth roughly $15.3 billion at the current price.

This calculation has two sides. A high staking share takes supply out of the market and supports the price as long as holders stay the course. It also makes the freely traded remainder thinner, and a thin market moves further in both directions for the same amount of capital. Staked SOL is not immediately available either: undoing a delegation only takes effect at the end of the current epoch.

Inflation of 3.59 percent against a staking yield of 4.96 percent

New tokens keep being issued throughout. The inflation rate of the Solana blockchain stands at 3.5857 percent a year in the current epoch, measured on Monday afternoon through the network interface. The share going to the Solana Foundation is zero; the entire issuance flows to validators and to the accounts that have delegated SOL to them. How that path is laid out is described in the technical documentation on the inflation curve: the rate falls by a fixed percentage every year until it reaches a floor.

Against that stands the staking yield. Our article of October 25, 2026 put it at 4.96 percent a year; that was the return a delegated account could expect over a year. The difference to the inflation rate is around 1.4 percentage points. That is how much share of the total supply an account that stakes gains in a year over an account that merely holds the same amount of SOL. In the same calculation, the holder without staking loses about 3.5 percent of their share of the total supply in a year, even though their token count stays the same.

Both figures move. The yield depends on how much SOL is staked in total and how high fee income turns out; the inflation rate follows the fixed path and falls with every epoch-year boundary. Calculations based on expected values are therefore better built on the difference than on the yield alone.

Epoch 1069 starts in the night to Tuesday

Solana counts in epochs of 432,000 slots. The current epoch carries the number 1068 and stood at slot 360,434 on Monday afternoon, or around 83 percent. At a target time of about 0.4 seconds per slot, just under eight hours remain until the switch to epoch 1069, which therefore falls in the night to Tuesday.

The epoch change is not a price event, but it is a date with practical consequences. At that moment staking rewards are distributed, newly delegated SOL becomes active, and undone delegations become freely available. Anyone who cancelled a delegation in recent days has their SOL back to hand from the switch onwards. In total this regularly involves sums in the hundreds of millions that can reach the market, though they need not.

Day low $99.82, day high $102.48

The daily range was narrow. Between the low at $99.82 and the high at $102.48 lie $2.66, or 2.64 percent of the day's low. The 24-hour volume across all recorded venues stood at $2.25 billion according to CoinGecko.

Three values can be justified from that range. The round $100 level sits in the middle of the daily range and was crossed several times in both directions today; it therefore serves as orientation, not as a signal. The day low at $99.82 is the lowest point at which buyers stood today. The day high at $102.48 marks the point where they ran out of air. Traders working with leverage calculate their liquidation distance against those two values and not against a round number.

Compared with our last piece on the Solana price prediction, the picture has shifted slightly. On October 25, when we looked at the USDC rollout to 82 million Samsung devices, SOL stood a good two dollars higher, and the level discussed then has held since without turning into upward movement. What is new is the TVL decline, which at that point was not yet a six-week low.

Holding period and staking: the rule for investors in Germany

This is where the German situation parts from international coverage. Gains from selling SOL count as a private disposal transaction under section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. If more than twelve months lie between purchase and sale, the gain remains tax free. Below that it counts towards taxable income as soon as the total of all private disposal transactions in a year reaches the exemption limit of 1,000 euros. An exemption limit is not an allowance: one euro above it makes the entire amount taxable.

For staking, a clarification has applied since the German Federal Ministry of Finance's letter of May 10, 2022 that many investors have missed to this day: staking does not extend the holding period to ten years. It stays at twelve months. The ongoing staking rewards themselves are untouched by that; they count as other income under section 22 number 3 and are to be recognised at their value at the time of receipt, with an exemption limit of their own of 256 euros a year. For rewards that are sold, a separate twelve-month period then runs from receipt.

In practice that means: holders who have held and staked SOL since autumn 2025 have already completed the period for the original position, while every single reward has its own clock running. Tracking that by hand quickly becomes unmanageable with weekly inflows. Tools that record the time of receipt automatically take that work off your hands; the providers are linked further down. This section does not replace tax advice; for larger amounts the case belongs in expert hands.

Our assessment of the situation at Solana

In the view of the newsroom, the TVL decline on its own is the weaker signal and its combination with steady volume the stronger one. Three documented figures support that: volume of $13.44 billion over seven days, which exceeds that of Ethereum and Base; capital turnover of 25.2 percent a day, which is more than double the Base figure; and a staking share of 74.21 percent, which keeps the freely traded supply at around $15.3 billion. A blockchain whose usage stays stable while the money parked there shrinks loses buffer, not demand.

Against that stands a figure we are not going to explain away: a 13.4 percent decline in four weeks is not noise, and Base has been ahead for two weeks. Should the seven-day volume series also give way in the coming days, our reading collapses, and the TVL decline was the earlier indicator. The Fed rate decision on Wednesday is the nearest date at which direction for the broader market can be settled. This assessment evaluates the situation and is not a buy or sell recommendation.

Solana at $100.89: volume carries, capital does not

1. Start by comparing the seven-day series of trading volume with that of locked capital instead of looking only at the price level. If both fall, the situation changes fundamentally. Which platforms show these series side by side is set out in our comparison of analytics platforms.
2. If you hold SOL for longer than twelve months, note the purchase date and the receipt dates of staking rewards separately. That decides tax exemption, not the price. The tools for it are in the comparison of tax software.
3. Before buying, weigh the venue's fees against the expected holding period: for a position meant to sit for twelve months, a one-off trading fee weighs more than the daily price level. The terms offered by regulated providers are in the exchange comparison.

The figures on locked capital and trading volume come from DefiLlama, the price data from CoinGecko, and the values for supply, staking, epoch and inflation rate from a direct query of the Solana blockchain.

(As of October 26, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)