Solana’s continued doing well in December, as meme coins helped it gain market share against Ethereum and other blockchains.

According to DeFi Llama, Solana’s (SOL) protocols in the decentralized exchange industry were the most active in December. 

Its volume rose to over $97 billion, much higher than the $22.6 billion it handled in the same period last year. 

Notably, it was the third consecutive month that Solana outperformed Ethereum (ETH), which has dominated the industry for years. Ethereum’s protocols had a volume of over $74 billion, while Base and Arbitrum handled $42 billion and $37 billion.

Solana also performed great in November, where its DEX networks had a volume of $129 billion, higher than Ethereum’s $70.6 billion. A month earlier, Solana handled volume of $52 billion, while Ethereum processed $41 billion. 

Most of Solana’s DEX volume was because of Raydium (RAY), a network that handled coins worth $65 billion in the last 30 days. Orca handled $24 billion, while Lifinity, Pump, and Phoenix had volumes worth over $5.93 billion. 

Solana’s DEX volume has jumped because of the meme coin industry, which has continued doing well this year. Solana has attracted thousands of meme coins this year, helped by the creation of Pump, the biggest token generator. All Solana meme coins have a market cap of over $14.1 billion, led by Bonk, Dogwifhat, Popcat, and Peanut the Squirrel. 

This growth has been highly profitable for Solana and its native apps. All Solana native dApps generated a record $365 million in revenue in November, a record high. Similarly, according to TokenTerminal, Solana’s blockchain generated a record $725 million in fees in 2024, making it the third-most profitable chain after Ethereum and Tron. 

Developers and users love Solana because of its substantially lower fees and higher throughput. 

Base, the layer-2 network launched by Coinbase, has also been a big breakout star in 2024 as its total fees rose to over $82 million. It has become the biggest layer 2 network in the blockchain industry, with its DEX networks handling over $181 billion in assets, while its total value locked soared to $2 billion.

HyperLiquid, a layer-1 blockchain and decentralized exchange for perpetual futures (perps), has experienced a notable outflow of the USDC stablecoin amid speculation North Korean hackers are interacting with the platform, according to a post on X by pseudonymous observer Tay, known for tracking threats posed by to crypto protocols by the country.

A record $60 million of USDC fled the exchange by 10:00 UTC Monday, according to Hashed Official’s Dune-based tracker. USDC, the world’s second-largest dollar-pegged stablecoin, is used as collateral on HyperLiquid. The deposit bridge still holds $2.2 billion in USDC.

Addresses associated with hackers from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) have accrued losses exceeding $700,000 while trading on HyperLiquid, Tay said. The transactions indicate the hackers are potentially familiarizing themselves with the platform’s inner workings to launch a malicious attack.

“DPRK doesn’t trade. DPRK tests,” Tay said.

CoinDesk contacted HyperLiquid on X for comments on the USDC outflows and potential threat from North Korea.

Tay said they reached out to the platform two weeks ago, offering help in countering a potential threat.

“I really want to emphasize that these are the most sophisticated and rapidly evolving of all of the DPRK threat groups. They are very creative and persistent. They also get their hands on 0days (such as the one Chrome patched today,” Tay’s message to the platform said.

HyperLiquid is the leading on-chain perpetuals exchange, commanding over 50% of the total on-chain perpetuals trading volume, which tallied $8.6 billion in the past 24 hours.

The platform debuted its token HYPE on Nov. 29. Since then, it has
surged over 600% to $28.6, briefly topping $10 billion in market capitalization. As of writing, HYPE was the 22nd largest digital asset in the world, according to Coingecko.

There’s been a change of guard at the rankings of the $3.4 billion tokenized Treasuries market.

Asset manager Hashnote’s USYC token zoomed over $1.2 billion in market capitalization, growing five-fold in size over the past three months, rwa.xyz data shows. It has toppled the $450 million BUIDL, issued by asset management behemoth BlackRock and tokenization firm Securitize, which was the largest product by size since April.

USYC is the token representation of the Hashnote International Short Duration Yield Fund, which, according to the company’s website, invests in reverse repo agreements on U.S. government-backed securities and Treasury bills held in custody at the Bank of New York Mellon.

Hashnote’s quick growth underscores the importance of interconnecting tokenized products with decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and presenting their tokens available as building blocks for other products — or composability, in crypto lingo — to scale and reach broader adoption. It also showcases crypto investors’ appetite for yield-generating stablecoins, which are increasingly backed by tokenized products.

USYC, for example, has greatly benefited from the rapid ascent of the budding decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Usual and its real-world asset-backed, yield-generating stablecoin, USD0.

Usual is pursuing the market share of centralized stablecoins like Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC by redistributing a portion of revenues from its stablecoin’s backing assets to holders. USD0 is primarily backed by USYC currently, but the protocol aims to add more RWAs to reserves in the future. It has recently announced the addition of Ethena’s USDtb stablecoin, which is built on top of BUIDL.

“The bull market triggered a massive inflow into stablecoins, yet the core issue with the largest stablecoins remains: they lack rewards for end users and do not give access to the yield they generate,” said David Shuttleworth, partner at Anagram. “Moreover, users do not get access to the protocol’s equity by holding USDT or USDC.”

“Usual’s appeal is that it redistributes the yield along with ownership in the protocol back to users,” he added.

The protocol, and hence its USD0 stablecoin, has raked in $1.3 billion over the past few months as crypto investors chased on-chain yield opportunities. Another significant catalyst of growth was the protocol’s governance token (USUAL) airdrop and exchange listing on Wednesday. USUAL started trading on Binance on Wednesday, and vastly outperformed the shaky broader crypto market, appreciating some 50% since then, per CoinGecko data.

BlackRock’s BUIDL also enjoyed rapid growth earlier this year, driven by DeFi platform Ondo Finance making the token the key reserve asset of its own yield-earning product, the Ondo Short-Term US Government Treasuries (OUSG) token.