Solana's Price Surges 6.571% as Community Approves Alpenglow Upgrade

Solana's latest price was $208.86, up 6.571% in the last 24 hours. The Solana community has shown strong support for the Alpenglow upgrade, with over 98% of participants voting in favor. This upgrade aims to significantly enhance Solana’s network scalability and speed by introducing a new consensus mechanism. The Alpenglow upgrade replaces the existing Proof-of-History and TowerBFT systems with Votor and Rotor, which are designed to improve network performance. The upgrade is expected to drive adoption across various applications, including payments, trading, and gaming, by reducing transaction latency from 12 seconds to just 150 milliseconds. The Alpenglow upgrade is a key part of Solana’s long-term strategy to maintain network efficiency under high demand.

Pump.fun, a Solana-based memecoin launchpad, has introduced Project Ascend, a series of updates aimed at transforming its ecosystem and addressing sustainability issues for token creators. The centerpiece of Project Ascend is Dynamic Fees V1, a new tiered structure that reduces creator fees as a token’s market capitalization grows. This model is designed to make launching new coins more rewarding and encourage fresh talent while allowing successful projects to scale without being weighed down by costs. Additionally, Pump.fun has introduced a real-time revenue dashboard and the Glass Full Foundation, a fund dedicated to injecting liquidity into promising community-driven projects. The platform has also added a Kolscan-powered leaderboard to track top traders and influencers in real time. Despite these efforts, questions remain about whether Project Ascend can curb the plague of rug pulls and failed meme coins. Pump.fun’s broader strategy appears to be positioning itself as a central hub for Solana startups and meme projects alike, combining new fee mechanics, social trading features, liquidity injections, and real-time transparency tools to strengthen its reputation beyond just generating fleeting meme coins.

Solana’s decentralized exchange (DEX) activity has shown sharp declines after a year of explosive growth fueled by meme coins. August data shows that daily active traders on Solana DEXs have dropped 81%, from 4.8 million earlier this year to just 900,000 in August. Daily transactions have also fallen, sliding from 45 million in July to 28.8 million this month. This slowdown marks the fourth straight day that Solana’s trader count has stayed under one million, indicating what many see as the end of the frenzy that drove record volumes in late 2024. Activity had surged last year as meme coins and experimental tokens dominated trading, with weekly traders peaking above 30 million by October. But inflows collapsed in early 2025, leaving recurring users to sustain activity at a lower baseline of 10–15 million weekly. Amid this downturn, Pump.fun has staged a comeback after losing ground to Solana-based rival LetsBonk.fun in July. LetsBonk led daily volumes and revenue for nearly a month before Pump.fun reclaimed the top spot in early August. On August 6, Pump.fun outpaced LetsBonk across all metrics, including tokens minted, trading volume, and revenue. Fresh data from September 2 shows Pump.fun’s dominance, with $1.13 million in revenue over the past 24 hours. BonkFun followed with $381,730, while Sugar ($52,052), Heaven ($12,615), and Bags ($5,854) trailed far behind. Combined, Pump.fun and BonkFun account for more than 90% of fee revenue, reflecting a heavily concentrated market. Token creation trends mirror the revenue gap, with Pump.fun users minting 16,697 tokens in the last 24 hours, far ahead of LetsBonk’s 6,087. Pump.fun also led in graduations, with 164 compared to LetsBonk’s 32, though graduation rates remain below 1%, showing high churn across platforms.

The Solana community has overwhelmingly voted to approve the long-awaited Alpenglow upgrade. An exceptionally high percentage of participants, specifically 98%, endorsed the proposed changes, marking a decisive step forward for the network's evolution. This significant approval paves the way for the implementation of Alpenglow, which represents one of the most substantial technical advancements planned for the Solana blockchain in recent times. While encountering volatility in its decentralized exchange (DEX) user metrics, with reports indicating a notable decrease in DEX trader count over a twelve-month period, the protocol's development progress continues to advance. The successful community vote propels the Alpenglow upgrade closer to deployment, highlighting a pivotal moment in the network's ongoing technical roadmap aimed at enhancing its core functionality.