Solana DeFi crossed back above $12B in onchain TVL during the 2024–2025 cycle and has held there into 2026, with lending, perpetuals, and liquid staking absorbing the bulk of that capital. The protocols below are the twelve that actually carry volume — ranked by category rather than headline TVL, because a lending market and an orderbook DEX aren't directly comparable. All figures cite DeFiLlama's Solana chain page as of May 2026; numbers move daily.
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Each protocol included here is live on Solana mainnet, has third-party TVL coverage on DeFiLlama, and dominates or meaningfully participates in its category. Speculative pre-launch products, defunct protocols, and copy-paste forks were excluded. The "standout feature" column reflects the reason a user would pick that protocol over a peer — not a marketing tagline.
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Categories covered: lending (Kamino, MarginFi, Save), liquid staking (Jito, Marinade, Sanctum), perpetuals (Jupiter Perps, Drift), spot DEX (Raydium, Orca, Meteora, Phoenix), and the cross-cutting aggregator layer (Jupiter). USDC remains the dominant Solana stablecoin at multi-billion onchain supply, with PYUSD growing on the Solana side after PayPal's 2024 SPL expansion. Stablecoin yield vaults sit alongside these protocols on the deposit side.
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The table below summarizes the lineup. Detailed write-ups follow.

Kamino runs Solana's largest unified lending market alongside a CLMM auto-rebalancing vault product, with combined TVL around $2.0B per DeFiLlama. Borrowers pull USDC, USDT, PYUSD, and SOL against LST, BTC-wrapper, and bluechip collateral; the vault side wraps Orca and Raydium concentrated liquidity into one-click strategies.
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The standout is the integration loop: deposit JitoSOL, borrow USDC, route into a Kamino USDC/PYUSD vault, all within one app. Power users size loops around mSOL/JitoSOL/SOL collateral to capture LST yield minus borrow APR. Full mechanics are in our Kamino Finance guide.
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Jupiter routes the majority of Solana spot swap volume by sweeping every AMM, CLOB, and RFQ source on the chain into one quote. It charges 0% on swap routing — fees are paid to the underlying liquidity venue. The perpetuals product, Jupiter Perps, runs against the JLP pool (a basket of SOL, ETH, BTC, USDC, USDT), and JLP currently sits near $1.4B in pool value.
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Perps charge 0.06% open / 0.06% close plus a borrow fee on open positions, with leverage up to ~100x on SOL and BTC. JLP holders earn 75% of those fees as the yield-bearing reward — covered in detail in our Jupiter Perps guide. Jupiter also issues JupSOL (its own LST) and operates a launchpad.
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Drift is the second major Solana perps venue, with around $650M TVL and a model that blends a CLOB, a JIT auction layer, and a vAMM fallback. That hybrid is the reason Drift fills more cleanly on long-tail markets than a pure JLP-style LP perp — there's an active market-maker book on top of the AMM.
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Fees are 2bps maker / 10bps taker, with leverage to ~50x on majors. The Drift Insurance Fund (DIF) and Drift Earn vaults give passive depositors a stake in trader PnL flow. Full breakdown in our Drift protocol guide.
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MarginFi is the second-largest Solana lender by TVL (~$450M), built around isolated emode pairs that let LST loopers borrow SOL against JitoSOL or mSOL at tighter rates than a unified pool would price. Liquidity is thinner than Kamino's outside the LST/SOL pair, but rates on that pair are often the most competitive on Solana.
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Insurance and liquidation parameters per pool are documented on the MarginFi docs. See our MarginFi lending guide for emode setup, oracle handling, and historical liquidation behavior.
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Marinade issues mSOL, the first liquid staking token on Solana, and runs a delegation strategy that spreads stake across ~100 validators to harden decentralization. mSOL pays roughly the network staking rate (around 6–7% APY in 2026) minus a 6% protocol fee on rewards. Native Stake (Marinade's second product) lets users delegate directly without minting an LST, keeping principal-protection guarantees.
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mSOL has the broadest DeFi integrations of any Solana LST after JitoSOL — accepted as collateral at Kamino, MarginFi, Save, and most DEX LPs. Compare it side-by-side with Jito and Sanctum in our Solana liquid staking comparison.
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Jito is the largest Solana LST by TVL (~$2.4B in JitoSOL) and the only one that bundles MEV tip revenue from its block-engine into staker yield. That MEV cut historically lifts JitoSOL APY 50–150bps above plain SOL staking, and Jito Labs runs the block-engine that processes the majority of Solana validator MEV bundles.
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The protocol fee is 4% of staking + MEV rewards. Jito also operates the JTO governance token and a restaking product (TipRouter). JitoSOL is the most-used Solana LST collateral on Kamino and MarginFi.
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Sanctum runs the Infinity pool, a single-token liquidity reserve that lets any Solana LST swap into any other LST (or into SOL) at near-zero slippage, plus a permissionless LST factory that lets any validator issue its own LST in a few clicks. TVL across Infinity and Sanctum-issued LSTs is ~$800M.
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Infinity swaps are 0% fee; LST issuers pay Sanctum a share of staking rewards. The result is that small validator LSTs (bonkSOL, picoSOL, dSOL) get instant exit liquidity without each needing their own AMM pool — a structural advantage no other chain's LST ecosystem currently has.
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Raydium is Solana's longest-running AMM, running both a classic constant-product pool and a CLMM product with ~$1.7B aggregate TVL. Fees are 0.25% per swap, with 0.22% going to LPs and 0.03% to the treasury. Raydium is also the default deep-liquidity pool for almost every meme launch routed through pump.fun's graduation flow.
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For a token launcher needing day-one Jupiter routability, Raydium remains the default. For an LP optimizing capital efficiency on bluechip pairs, the CLMM product competes directly with Orca and Meteora.
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Orca's Whirlpools product is the cleanest concentrated-liquidity AMM UX on Solana, with pool tiers from 0.01% (stable pairs) up to 1% (long-tail). TVL sits around $300M — smaller than Raydium or Meteora but historically known for tighter spreads on USDC/USDT and SOL/stable pairs.
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The Orca SDK is widely integrated into vault products including Kamino's automated LP strategies. For a retail LP wanting a "deposit and rebalance later" experience without DLMM bin management, Orca is the path of least resistance.
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Meteora's Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker (DLMM) is a bin-based AMM similar to Trader Joe's Liquidity Book, and it has eaten significant share of Solana market-maker LPing because it lets makers concentrate liquidity into single price bins. TVL is ~$1.1B across DLMM and the legacy dynamic vault products. Fees are pool-set, often 0.2–2% on volatile pairs.
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Meteora's dynamic vaults route idle LP capital into lending markets (MarginFi, Kamino, Save) to earn baseline yield while waiting for swaps — one of the more capital-efficient designs on Solana.
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Save rebranded from Solend in 2024 and continues to run isolated-pool lending markets, including permissionless pools for long-tail assets that Kamino and MarginFi won't list. TVL is around $200M, with the main pool covering SOL, USDC, USDT, mSOL, JitoSOL, and a handful of memecoins.
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Save's isolation model is the relevant feature: a bad listing or oracle failure on a long-tail pool can't contagion into the main pool. That makes it the venue of choice for borrowing against assets the bigger lenders skip.
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Phoenix is the only fully onchain central-limit order book on Solana that's seen meaningful market-maker resting liquidity. Resting TVL is small (~$30M) because CLOBs don't pool capital the way AMMs do, but Phoenix routes volume through Jupiter and is the venue most pro market makers prefer when they want a CLOB experience without running their own RFQ infrastructure.
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Fees are 0% maker / 1bp taker. Phoenix has no token and no plans for one — the protocol is designed as neutral infrastructure for integrators (including Jupiter, Drift, and DEX aggregators) rather than a destination DEX for retail.
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For a stablecoin holder, the cleanest first stop is a Kamino USDC or PYUSD lending deposit, or a Jupiter swap into JLP for perps fee yield. For a SOL holder, JitoSOL (Jito) or mSOL (Marinade) deposited as collateral on Kamino unlocks the loop strategies that drive most Solana DeFi yield in 2026. For a trader, Jupiter for spot and either Drift or Jupiter Perps for leverage cover 95% of execution needs.
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The categories that have consolidated hardest in 2026 are liquid staking (Jito + Marinade + Sanctum account for the overwhelming majority of LST TVL) and aggregation (Jupiter dominates routing). Lending and DEX TVL remain spread across three to four credible competitors each, which keeps fees competitive.
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Most stablecoin treasuries originate on Ethereum L2s — Base, Arbitrum, Optimism — but Solana DeFi denominates yield in USDC and PYUSD on Solana. Funding a Kamino deposit, a JLP position, or a Drift collateral account from an EVM USDC balance requires a cross-chain move into Solana. Eco's stablecoin routing covers USDC and USDT into Solana, which removes one step for users sourcing capital from an EVM treasury into Solana DeFi.
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Sources and methodology. TVL figures sourced from DeFiLlama's Solana chain page and individual protocol pages, May 2026 snapshot. Fee schedules cited from each protocol's docs: Kamino, Jupiter, Drift, MarginFi, Marinade, Jito, Sanctum, Raydium, Orca, Meteora, Save, Phoenix. Stablecoin supply figures from DeFiLlama Stablecoins, May 2026. Numbers move daily; treat as snapshot, not live quote.
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Kamino Finance: Solana's lending + LP protocol
​Jupiter Perps: fees, leverage, JLP mechanics
​Best Solana liquid staking: Jito vs Marinade vs Sanctum
​Drift Protocol: Solana perpetuals DEX deep dive
​MarginFi: Solana lending protocol guide
​Solana DeFi apps overview
​Jupiter aggregator guide
​USDC on Solana
​Best stablecoin vaults for yield
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