Solana traded at $110.15 at 22:19 UTC on Saturday, September 19. It was down 2.2% from Friday’s close. Even after the retreat, SOL stood 8.4% above Thursday’s close and retained most of a 10.82% Friday jump to a seven-month high.
The timing is notable. Solana’s larger Transaction V1 format has just gone live on mainnet, while a broad crypto rebound and fresh U.S. regulatory support for tokenized stock trading have pulled investors back toward higher-beta digital assets. The upgrade is real; the harder question is whether it can produce enough valuable activity to justify the price move.
Friday’s Solana move was large—and broad crypto helped
Yahoo Finance’s daily data show SOL rising from $101.60 on Thursday to $112.60 on Friday, an absolute gain of $11.00, on reported turnover of $6.48 billion. That volume was 2.17 times Thursday’s $2.99 billion. The session high was $114.06.
Saturday’s pullback to $110.15 matters because crypto trades continuously: the rally was no longer just a closing print from a finished equity session. At the same time, it is too strong to attribute the move solely to a network release. Bitcoin reclaimed $80,000 and several large altcoins rose with it, while short covering added fuel across the market.
Regulation supplied another tailwind. On September 17, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission granted temporary, conditional relief for venues trading tokenized U.S.-listed shares. The order does not name Solana as a winner, and it does not turn SOL into a claim on equity-trading revenue. It does, however, improve the policy backdrop for networks competing to host tokenized assets.
What Transaction V1 changes
Solana’s official upgrade record says the maximum transaction size has increased to 4,096 bytes from 1,232 bytes. The txv1 feature activated at the start of epoch 1035 on September 15. Existing legacy and v0 transactions continue to work.
The 3.3-fold increase gives developers room to place larger zero-knowledge proofs, multisignature instructions and batched operations into one transaction. That can remove awkward workarounds and make complex financial applications easier to build. It does not automatically increase throughput by 3.3 times, nor does it guarantee more fees or demand for SOL. Applications and wallets still have to support the new format, and users have to choose services that need it.
The Foundation’s August ecosystem roundup provides the bullish case: it reported more than $4 billion of real-world assets on the network, over $500 million in xStocks assets and $4 billion of cumulative tokenized-stock volume on Raydium. These are Foundation figures rather than audited network earnings. Still, they explain why investors may connect a larger transaction envelope with financial applications instead of only speculative trading.
The strongest counterargument is in the fee data
Greater technical capacity does not ensure greater economic returns. DeFi Development Corp.’s second-quarter shareholder letter filed with the SEC estimated that Solana processed 9.8 billion transactions in the quarter, up 9% from a year earlier. Yet estimated network revenue fell 81% year over year to $51 million, while application revenue dropped 78% to $198.6 million. Median transaction fees were 57% lower.
That is the valuation tension behind the rally. Lower fees can attract activity and make tokenized markets practical, but token holders still need evidence that rising usage creates durable demand for block space, staking or SOL itself. If activity grows while fee economics continue to weaken, the upgrade may improve the product without strengthening the token’s cash-flow-like fundamentals.
The next test for SOL
The immediate levels are clear: Friday’s $114.06 high is the first upside reference, while $101.60—the pre-rally close—is the cleaner downside test. Holding above $110 through weekend liquidity would preserve most of Friday’s breakout, but price alone cannot verify the upgrade thesis.
Investors can check three things over the next several weeks: whether wallets and major applications adopt Transaction V1, whether tokenized-asset and stablecoin activity keeps expanding, and whether network revenue improves alongside usage. The upgrade removes a technical constraint. It has not yet proved that Friday’s 10.8% repricing belongs to Solana rather than to a market-wide relief rally.
