Solana has recorded its first monthly gain in almost a year, with institutional investment, expectations of tighter future token supply and record network activity lifting SOL back above $100.
The digital asset was trading at about $106 on Sunday afternoon after reaching $110.38 on 27 August, its highest price since late January. SOL has risen approximately 46% during August and is about 80% above its June low, taking its market value back towards $61bn.
The advance ended a run of 10 successive monthly declines and gave Solana its strongest month since 2024. However, the token remains well below its January 2025 all-time high of about $293. It would need to gain a further 63.5% to return to that level, meaning August represents a recovery rather than a new phase of price discovery.
A significant source of buying pressure has come from regulated investment products. US spot Solana exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have attracted approximately $1.34bn in cumulative net inflows since launching in October 2025, according to data from sosovalue.com.
Bitwise’s BSOL Solana fund, which also operates as a staking ETF, has surpassed $1bn in assets under management.
Further access to the token is expected through Charles Schwab. On 27 August, the company announced plans to add spot SOL, avalanche (AVAX) and chainlink (LINK) to Schwab Crypto in the coming months. Charles Schwab oversees more than $12tn in client assets held across approximately 39 million brokerage accounts.
Corporate purchases have added to the demand. Defi Development Corp. bought 19,000 SOL at an average price of $98.14, taking its total holdings to about 2.33 million SOL. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, reported roughly $88m in exposure to Solana ETFs in its latest regulatory filing.
Solana has also approved a major change to the way new tokens enter circulation. Its first binding onchain governance vote, SGP-0002, known as “Double Disinflation”, passed with 67% support from participating stakeholders. That result only narrowly exceeded the required two-thirds majority.
The proposal doubles Solana’s annual disinflation rate from 15% to 30%. In practical terms, the supply of newly issued SOL will grow more slowly, while the network will retain its eventual inflation floor of 1.5%. Estimates suggest the change could reduce issuance by about 18.9 million SOL over six years.
The policy will not take effect immediately. Developers must complete the associated software work and activate the change across the network. Its implementation is therefore the next important point for traders assessing Solana’s future supply.
The price rally has coincided with a sharp increase in network use. The Kobeissi Letter reported on 25 August that Solana processed a record 4.2 billion transactions in July, a 13.5% rise from June and approximately 91% more than in December 2025.
Between 17 and 23 August, the network processed about 1.32 billion non-vote transactions, setting another weekly record.
More technical changes are planned. Transaction V1, scheduled for 9 September, will increase the maximum transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes. That will give applications considerably more capacity to include data within individual transactions.
Storage costs could also fall substantially. Solana’s planned rent reduction could eventually cut by 90% the deposit needed to keep data stored onchain. The change would lower expenses for developers working on token accounts, non-fungible tokens and tokenised real-world assets.
Leverage has amplified the move higher. More than $16m in Solana short positions were liquidated during the breakout towards $109, according to derivatives data from Coinglass.com. Forced buying can accelerate a rally, although the same mechanism can intensify losses if market momentum reverses.
September is likely to provide a tougher test. Traders will be monitoring the first rent reduction, Transaction V1 on 9 September, shorter transaction times and progress towards the planned Alpenglow consensus upgrade in October.
Those developments should help determine whether August marked the beginning of a broader Solana recovery or simply delivered the token’s sharpest rebound in almost a year.
