There's a lot of money to be made in providing infrastructure for Solana on-chain markets.
That's according to David Duong and David Han, head of institutional research and institutional research analyst at crypto exchange Coinbase, who made the case in a Friday report that, if one looks at Solana's on-chain trading ecosystem as a financial sector in its own right, it's the third-most-profitable category in crypto — right behind stablecoins and layer 1s.
"Solana's trading-linked activity regularly accounts for 75-90% of [Solana] transaction fees, substantially higher than that of Ethereum and other networks like Base and Arbitrum," Duong told CoinDesk. "While layer 2 solutions have also shown growth and innovation, they face different scalability challenges and user fragmentation issues compared to Solana," Duong added. "Solana's approach, especially its fee dynamics and user activity patterns, remains distinct."