Solana's DEX Volumes Are Looking Thinner Than a Testnet—Will $80 Hold the Line?

Solana's DEX volumes have plummeted to $55.5 billion, their lowest level since September 2024, raising concerns about a potential SOL price correction to $75. The native token faced an 11% correction after rejection at $93 last Wednesday and has lagged the broader crypto market over the past week, repeatedly testing the critical $80 support level. For those keeping score at home, SOL is looking more like a discount bin find than the rocket it once was—though "discount" in crypto is a word that ages like milk.

Network fees on Solana dropped to $18.5 million in March, a 42% decline from January's $30 million. Most of this stems from lower DEX activity. Meanwhile, total value locked on Solana stands at $6.3 billion—still a significant gap compared to Ethereum's $54.1 billion. To put that in perspective: Ethereum's TVL is basically SOL's sugar daddy, holding roughly 8.6 times more value. Ouch.

However, Solana isn't exactly crying poor. The network amassed 80% more network fees than Ethereum over the last 30 days, largely due to Ethereum's incentives for layer-2 rollups that use temporary data blobs to cut costs. In other words, ETH is basically subsidizing its own L2s to save users money, which is like giving your kids an allowance to buy their own lunch—noble, but it makes your fee numbers look humble.

Ethereum's L2 dominance is growing. When aggregating