What the apps keep, not what users pay
The source counts application revenue, which excludes the part of a fee that never reaches the application — a swap fee paid to liquidity providers is the clearest case. Application fees, a different metric, count what users hand over in total and are therefore larger. Read this chart as what the businesses on Solana kept, not as what using them cost.
One name, most of the money
Over the past year the largest earner took 35.8% of all app revenue, and the top three took 54.1% between them. Pump has been the largest on 212 of the 214 days this year that can be attributed at all. The ten named here are the ten largest of the past year; the apps that led in earlier years sit inside the remainder band, so this share describes the market as it stands rather than a trend. Meanwhile the pot they are dividing has shrunk: the past year brought 53.8% less app revenue than the year before it.
Three different things called Solana revenue
This number is none of what a staker receives. Apps keep what is on this chart. The network separately collects transaction fees and tips, which is what the transaction activity and validator revenue charts track, and only that second pot pays operators and their delegators. An app earning a record day adds to your rewards only through the fees its users pay to the chain, which is a much smaller number than the one above.
Where staking income actually comes from
Stake.Cake charges 0% on both inflation and MEV rewards, and has run on mainnet since 2023.
FAQ
Is this what users pay to use Solana apps?
No. It is what the applications kept. A swap fee that goes to liquidity providers never reaches the application and is not counted here; the metric that does count it is application fees, and it comes out larger.
Does a record day for an app raise my staking rewards?
Barely, and only indirectly. Your rewards come from issuance and from the fees and tips the network collects, not from what an application keeps. Heavy app usage does push transaction fees up, and those do reach validators, but the amounts are far smaller than the revenue on this chart.
Why is one application so far ahead?
Because Solana app revenue is dominated by token launch and trading venues, where fees scale directly with speculative volume. That also makes the ranking unstable over years even while it looks fixed within one: the leader of 2023 is not the leader now.
What is in "Other apps"?
Everything outside the ten largest by revenue over the past year, added into one band rather than named. It is a remainder, not an application: the ten named columns plus this band always sum to the daily total, so a new app that has not been named yet still counts in the figures above.