What is inside the active-address number
Solana reports around 2.35M active addresses a day, and that is the figure everyone quotes. Most of them never trade: they move tokens, pay fees, mint, vote or do something no exchange would recognise. Among those who did trade, most moved very little: 47.9% of them under ten dollars. That is a statement about addresses, not about people — one person can run hundreds of them, and the bottom bucket is where automation lives, as well as where the late-2024 spike on the chart came from.
Busy in dollars, thin in wallets
Trading volume and the number of addresses behind it describe the same network from two sides, and it is the second that shrank. Fees do not care which side you look at: every transaction pays 5,000 lamports per signature whether the wallet behind it moved fifty cents or fifty thousand dollars. So a thinner base of participants does not thin the fee income by itself. What it does mean is that a dollar figure alone tells you how much moved, never how many moved it.
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FAQ
Are these people or wallets?
Wallets. Every figure on this page counts addresses, and one person can control any number of them while one address can be a script. The bucket for addresses moving under a dollar is where automation most plausibly sits.
Why is this lower than the active-address number?
Because trading is only one of the things an address can do on Solana. The rest send tokens, pay fees, mint, close accounts or interact with programs that are not exchanges. Roughly a quarter of active addresses trade on a given day.
Does the number of traders affect my staking rewards?
Not the larger half of them. Issuance is minted on a fixed schedule regardless of how busy the chain is. Transaction fees do respond to activity, and they are the largest single part of what an operator earns — but what reaches you as a delegator still depends first on your validator's commission.
Where does this data come from?
One on-chain series, one row per day: the number of addresses that made at least one spot DEX trade, split into five buckets by the dollars they moved. The share of active addresses is computed here by dividing it against our own transaction activity series for the same days.