Solana active users: 4.6M to 10.2M real people a month

01 · One afternoon13,521 buyers, 8 cents

Crypto apps like to tell you how many people trade a coin. A coin's page counts its buyers. A chart of a whole network adds up the wallets that traded each day. Making a new wallet costs nothing, so a count of wallets is easy to pad.

On 20 January, a coin called REKTLESS launched on Pump.fun, the memecoin launchpad where anyone can create a coin in a few clicks. By midnight, 13,895 different addresses had traded it, and 13,521 of them had spent less than a cent each. All but one of those made a single purchase and never traded again on any other day in our data.

Most of those buyers had been sent a little SOL, Solana's own coin, that afternoon by one of just three addresses. We checked 20 of their purchases on a public Solana node. Every one carried a second signature as well as the buyer's, and in 17 of them the second signer was one of those three addresses.

Anyone who looked at the coin that afternoon saw thousands of buyers. The tiny ones put in 8 cents between them, and the few hundred others put in about $61,000.

Bitquery records the swaps on Solana's exchanges. We went through them from 30 October 2025 to 7 October 2026 and tested every wallet that traded for signs of a bot, such as trading around the clock or never putting in a dollar. In each full month, 5.9 to 17.3 million wallets traded. Most passed every test and looked like people, yet those people-like wallets made only 22% to 32% of the swaps. They rarely stayed: most made a handful of swaps and were not seen again, and only about 1.0 million passed our tests in at least half of the months.

02 · The countWhat counts as a Solana trader?

Solana is a blockchain, a shared public record of who owns what, known for fast and cheap payments. Much of the trading on it happens on decentralized exchanges, or DEXs. These are apps where you swap one coin for another against a pool that holds both coins, with no company in the middle. Each swap is written to the chain together with the wallet that made it.

A wallet is just an address, and anyone can make as many as they like. Trading apps make one in seconds. Most swaps cost a fraction of a cent in fees, so a bot can trade thousands of times per day for very little, and many do.

That matters because wallet counts get read as head counts. Dashboards report how many addresses traded on a chain each day. A coin's page shows how many bought it, a number many traders check before they buy. A padded count makes a coin look popular and a chain look busy.

We counted a wallet as a trader in a month if it made at least one swap that month on a DEX that Bitquery covers, using Bitquery's Solana DEX data. The full history of those swaps is also sold as files on the Bitquery Data Store. Then we sorted each month's wallets into three groups. Bots trade like software. Dust wallets put less than a dollar into swaps all month. We call the rest people-like, because nothing in how they trade looks like a machine.

03 · The totalHow many active wallets trade on Solana each month?

People-like wallets were the largest group in every month, and dust wallets made the September spike.

The count stayed under 10 million per month until September, when it jumped to 17.3 million. Dust wallets made most of that jump: September had 3.8 times as many as August. Almost all the increase came from wallets that traded mainly on PumpSwap, the exchange where Pump.fun coins trade once they graduate from the launchpad.

The people-like count rose too, by 35%, and 79% of September's people-like group had never traded before in our data. The table gives the counts behind the chart.

04 · The heavy hittersWho makes most of Solana's swaps?

A small group does most of the work. Some wallets made 10,000 swaps or more in a month, which is more than one every five minutes, day and night. No month had more than 15,097 of them, yet together they made about half or more of all the swaps on Solana's DEXs.

The busiest of them all is an account that no person can sign for. It is a Pump.fun program wallet, which buys and sells new coins in their first day of trading. In September alone the account made 19 million swaps.

Much of the money that moves is not real trading either. Many bots buy and sell the same coin in the same pool inside one transaction. That adds volume and leaves the coins where they started. It is a form of wash trading, and we call it a round trip. Over the whole period, round trips made up a fifth of all swaps and 79% of the dollar volume. Each month they were under a third of the swaps but at least half of the dollars.

The rest of the money is top-heavy too. With round trips taken out, the top thousand traders in a month still moved 39% to 52% of the month's DEX dollars.

05 · The botsWhat do Solana trading bots do?

To see what the bots do, we took one day in the middle of each month and looked at every address that made 300 swaps or more that day. Each address went into the first group in the chart whose test it met, counting from the top.

New-coin bots made the largest share. At least half of their swaps were in coins that first traded that day or the day before. The median one traded 43 different coins in the day, around the clock.

Volume bots come next. They make the round trips. In one hour we checked, 95% of round trips had the buy on one wallet and the sell on another, inside the same transaction. We wrote about these volume bots in September. A round trip adds trades, traders and volume to a coin's page.

Arbitrage bots trade in a loop inside one transaction and finish with the coin they started with. In one loop we checked, a bot swapped 5 USDC, a stablecoin worth a dollar, for SOL in one pool and back to USDC in another, and came out 0.0005 USDC ahead. Bots like these keep prices on different pools in line, for very little per trade: our study of arbitrage on other chains found each trade earned cents.

The rest are small: accounts run by programs, bots that trade SOL against stablecoins, and snipers, which buy a new coin within a second of its first trade. Other memecoin bots, which met none of these tests, made 11% of the heavy swaps.

06 · DustWhy do memecoins show thousands of tiny buyers?

At the other end are the dust wallets. Each month there were 1.2 to 6.9 million of them, 19% to 40% of the month's traders, yet they made less than 2% of the swaps. The REKTLESS launch from the start of this story shows how they are made.

A program sends about 37 cents of SOL to each of thousands of fresh wallets. Each one buys a speck of one coin, with a second address signing alongside it. Memecoin charts then show thousands of buyers, or "makers", for the coin. The REKTLESS buyers never traded again. A similar trick on another chain padded memecoins' holder counts with addresses nobody uses.

Some dust wallets will be people trying an app with pocket change. But on 18 September alone, 297,741 addresses made exactly one swap, worth a median 3 cents, much like the REKTLESS buyers.

07 · The peopleHow many Solana traders are real people?

We set aside every wallet that, in a month, did any of these:

• made half or more of its swaps in same-transaction round trips;
• made half or more of its swaps in arbitrage loops;
• made 10,000 swaps or more;
• traded in at least 20 of the day's 24 hours, on two days or more;
• traded through an account that a program controls instead of a private key;
• appeared on the bot lists from our other Solana studies: sandwich bots, which trade just before and just after someone else's swap, arbitrage bots, snipers, and senders of 10,000 or more failed swaps;
• put less than a dollar into swaps all month.

The rest, 4.6 to 10.2 million wallets per month, behaved like people. That is 58% to 79% of each month's traders. When we say real people, we mean these wallets: they passed every bot test. The count is an upper limit, since one person can run many wallets. The bots were far fewer, yet they made two thirds to three quarters of the swaps. Added up over the 11 months, bots were 2% of the wallets but made 72% of the swaps.

The people-like group made only 22% to 32% of the month's swaps. Once round trips are taken out, they moved 26% to 39% of the money. That is more than their share of the swaps in nine of the 11 months, so their swaps tend to be bigger than a bot's.

Most of them trade very little. In the median month, 63% of them traded on a single day, and a quarter made exactly one swap.

08 · Coming backHow many new traders come back?

Very few. Of the people-like wallets that first traded in a given month from December on, only 11% traded again the next month, and 5% were still trading three months later.

Even counting every people-like wallet, new or old, only a fifth to three in ten came back the following month.

Over the whole period, 50.8 million addresses passed our tests in at least one full month. Of those, 87% passed in only one month.

About 1.0 million passed every test in six months or more, and 121,951 did so in every full month from November to September. That core is the closest thing in the data to Solana's regular traders.

09 · The clockWhen do people trade on Solana?

Solana trades around the clock, and neither line drops near zero at any hour. The line for everyone other than bots swings more, and people-like wallets make 94% of its swaps. It peaks at 15:00 UTC, when the US is awake and Europe is still at work, and is lowest at 10:00 UTC. Bots stay closer to flat. We used a similar clock test to find Polymarket's bots, which place orders around the clock.

10 · Wallets and peopleCan you count people from wallets?

Not exactly. One person can run many wallets, and trading apps often make a fresh one for each user. So the people-like count is an upper limit on the number of people. Some people also run bots, and some of the addresses we kept will be bots too slow to trip our tests.

Snipers show how often that happens. Our study of Solana snipers listed the wallets that buy new coins in their first seconds. On their own, our tests flagged them in fewer than one in ten of the months they traded, because each trades only a little. We count them as bots through that study's list, but other slow bots will still be in the people-like count.

The tests are simple on purpose. A degen, crypto slang for a risk-loving memecoin trader, could trade all night and trip the 20-hour rule, and a slow bot that trades a few times per day would pass every test. Counting everyone with 1,000 swaps or more in a month as a bot, and everyone who traded 20 hours on even one day, still leaves at least 98% of the people-like wallets in every month. The dust line matters more. Raising it from $1 to $10 per month would remove another fifth to three in ten of the people-like group. Counting devs' bundle wallets as bots would remove 2% to 4%. A dev is a coin's creator, and bundle wallets are the extra wallets a dev uses to buy the coin at launch.

11 · MethodHow we did this

We used Bitquery's records of every successful swap on the Solana DEXs it covers, from 30 October 2025 to 7 October 2026: the full-history archive up to 5 July and Bitquery's live Solana data after that. A wallet is the account that owns the coins in a swap. When an account run by a program traded for many different signers, we counted each signer instead. Dollar values use the SOL price at the minute of the swap.

For each day we looked at every transaction. A swap counts as a round trip when the same transaction both bought and sold in that pool, and as arbitrage when a wallet's swaps in one transaction touched two or more pools and ended in the coin it started with. We checked examples of both on a public Solana node. An hour counts as active when the wallet made at least one swap in it, in UTC.

We checked the monthly totals against a count of every swap on every day, and they match. The bot groups in section 05 use one day in the middle of each month and look at the direction of each swap, the coins traded and how new each coin was. The same data can be queried through the Bitquery MCP, and the full history of Solana swaps is sold as files on the Bitquery Data Store.

12 · EvidenceAddresses and transactions cited

FAQ

How many people use Solana?

Nobody can count people from the chain, only wallets. In each full month we studied, 5.9 to 17.3 million wallets made a swap on Solana's DEXs. Most of them behaved like people rather than bots, but most of those traded in only one month. About 1.0 million passed every test in at least six of the 11 months.

How many daily active users does Solana have?

Counting wallets that made a DEX swap, Solana had about 840,000 on the median day in our data and 1.6 million on the busiest day. By our tests, bots made most of the swaps on every day.

How much of Solana trading is bots?

By our tests, bots made two thirds to three quarters of all swaps on Solana's DEXs in each full month, though they were only 1% to 3% of the wallets. The people-like group made 22% to 32%.

What are Solana volume bots?

Volume bots buy and sell the same coin in the same pool inside one transaction, which we call a round trip. It adds trades and volume to a coin's page while the coins end up where they started. Over the 11 months, round trips made up 79% of the dollar volume on Solana's DEXs.

Why do some coins have thousands of buyers who spent almost nothing?

A bot sends many fresh wallets pocket change and has every one buy a speck of the coin, so the coin's page shows thousands of buyers. In our data, 1.2 to 6.9 million Solana addresses per month put less than a dollar into swaps.