Marinade.finance is the first Liquid staking protocol built on Solana, and is supported by the Solana Foundation. The users stake their SOL tokens with Marinade-, which is using automatic staking strategies to delegate the SOL to validators, -and the user receive "staked SOL" tokens called mSOL that they can use in the world of DeFi or to swap any time back to original SOL tokens to unstake.

Solana saw significant volatility and network milestones between mid October and late November 2025. After rallying to multi month highs near 200 dollars in late October, SOL fell roughly 25 percent during the broad crypto selloff in November, trading in the mid 130 dollar range by November 22. Despite the downturn, the Solana network demonstrated strong resilience under pressure. During the October market crash that triggered 19 billion dollars in liquidations, Solana processed more than 100,000 transactions per second at peak without performance issues. The network also remained fully operational during a major cloud outage on October 20 with no reduction in throughput.

Throughout this period, Solana’s ecosystem continued to expand. Developers prepared two major upgrades, the Firedancer validator client and the Alpenglow consensus update, both aimed at improving network speed and latency. Within the broader ecosystem, Coinbase acquired a Solana based trading application, and Cash App, with tens of millions of users, confirmed plans to enable USDC payments on Solana in early 2026. Retail activity slowed as daily active addresses fell to around 3.3 million, down from nearly 9 million at the start of the year, but DeFi activity strengthened. Total value locked on Solana held near 10 billion dollars, and the supply of stablecoins issued on the network rose back above 15 billion dollars.

Institutional interest in Solana surged during this timeframe. On October 28, Bitwise launched the first United States spot Solana ETF, which accumulated more than 400 million dollars in its first week. Other major asset managers, including Fidelity, VanEck, and Grayscale, introduced their own Solana investment products, bringing combined Solana ETF assets above 500 million dollars. With regulatory approval secured, Solana became only the third cryptocurrency, after Bitcoin and Ether, to have a spot exchange traded product in the United States. Strengthening regulatory acceptance, continued development progress, and sustained network performance highlighted Solana’s expanding role in the broader crypto landscape as 2025 neared its close.