Stellar vs Solana for DeFi (2026): Fees, Speed, TVL, Use Cases

Stellar vs Solana at a glance

	Stellar	Solana
DeFi TVL (9 Oct 2026)	$250.0M (#19)	$6.21B (#2)
DEX volume, 30 days	$96.9M	$76.3B
Stablecoins (USD-pegged)	$942.9M	$16.0B
Protocols listed on DefiLlama	42 (34 excluding exchanges)	451 (400 excluding exchanges)
Block / ledger time	About 5 seconds	About 400ms per slot
Finality	Deterministic, at ledger close	"Finalized" about 32 slots (~13s) later
Minimum fee	100 stroops (0.00001 XLM) per operation	5,000 lamports (0.000005 SOL) per signature
Consensus	Stellar Consensus Protocol (federated Byzantine agreement)	Proof-of-stake
Staking / inflation	None / none	Yes / about 3.6% a year
Smart contracts	Soroban: Rust compiled to WebAssembly	Rust (Anchor, native) compiled to sBPF
Largest DeFi protocol	Blend Pools V2, $146.6M	Sanctum Validator LSTs, $1.81B

Sources: DefiLlama chains, DEX, stablecoin and protocol APIs; developers.stellar.org; solana.com docs; Solana mainnet RPC. All read on 9 October 2026.

Stellar vs Solana by the numbers (October 2026)

Per DefiLlama on 9 October 2026, Solana had $6.21B of DeFi TVL, $76.3B of 30-day DEX volume and $16.0B of USD stablecoins. Stellar had $250.0M, $96.9M and $942.9M. The trends point in opposite directions: Stellar up about 68% year on year, Solana down about 51%.

• TVL a year apart: Stellar went from $145.3M on 9 October 2025 to $243.7M on the latest daily point (DefiLlama's live chain figure was $250.0M). Solana went from $12.78B to $6.21B over the same dates. Solana's decline is mostly a market story: SOL traded at $109.60 on 9 October 2026, per CoinGecko, and TVL is priced in dollars.
• Trading: Solana's DEXs did $2.64B in the past 24 hours. Stellar's did $2.96M. Over 30 days, Aquarius accounted for $96.92M of Stellar's $96.94M. See the best DEX on Stellar.
• Fees paid by users: $453.0M on Solana over 30 days, led by PumpSwap and pump.fun; $5.27M on Stellar, led by RWA issuers Spiko and Ondo rather than trading venues. That one line tells you what each chain is used for.
• Tokenised real-world assets (excluding stablecoins): Solana $4.50B, Stellar $3.66B, per rwa.xyz on 9 October 2026. This is the one category where the two are comparable.
• Market size: SOL's market capitalisation was $64.5B and XLM's $6.76B, per CoinGecko.

How to choose

• You want to trade actively, or trade new tokens: Solana. The liquidity, the venues and the long tail of assets are there. Stellar's DEX volume is a rounding error by comparison.
• You want to move stablecoins or cash in and out: Stellar was built for it, with SEP-standard anchors and MoneyGram's cash ramps; see MoneyGram Ramps on Stellar. Solana has far more stablecoins in total, and MoneyGram Ramps reached it too in August 2026.
• You want yield on stablecoins or XLM: Stellar has a small, legible set of options: Blend lending, curated vaults, Aquarius LPs. See USDC yield on Stellar.
• You want protocol-level staking yield: Solana. Stellar has none.
• You are building settlement for a regulated product: Stellar's deterministic finality and issuer controls (authorisation, clawback) are the draw. Solana offers much more liquidity.

Fees — both cheap, priced differently

Stellar charges a minimum of 100 stroops (0.00001 XLM) per operation, plus resource fees for smart-contract calls. Solana charges 5,000 lamports (0.000005 SOL) per signature, plus optional priority fees. At October 2026 prices both cost a tiny fraction of a cent for a simple transfer.

The difference shows up under load. Stellar uses surge pricing: when demand exceeds a ledger's capacity, higher bids get in first, and every included transaction pays the lowest accepted bid. Soroban transactions pay a resource fee metered on CPU instructions, ledger reads and writes, bytes, events and rent. On 9 October 2026, Horizon's fee statistics showed the median fee charged at the 100-stroop minimum, with the 99th percentile at 317,680 stroops (about 0.03 XLM), at 61% ledger capacity. Our guide to Stellar transaction fees has the detail.

On Solana, half of the base fee is burned and half goes to the validator. Priority fees, set per compute unit, go entirely to the validator since SIMD-0096 was activated. In busy periods, traders bid priority fees to land transactions first, which makes Solana's effective cost more variable than its base fee suggests, and turns transaction ordering into a market of its own.

Speed and finality — what "fast" means

Solana produces a slot about every 400ms, so a transaction is seen quickly, but its documentation treats a block as finalised once at least 32 slots have passed, about 13 seconds. Stellar closes a ledger about every five seconds, and a closed ledger is final: there are no forks to roll back.

For a trader, Solana's quick confirmations matter more; for a payment or a fund settlement, Stellar's single, final answer is simpler to build around. A merchant on Stellar does not need to wait for confirmations to stack up. Solana is working to close this gap: Alpenglow (SIMD-0326), a new consensus design approved by validators in September 2025, targets far faster finality. As of 9 October 2026 it is running on Solana testnet and devnet but has not been scheduled for mainnet, according to the upgrade tracker xroot.

Raw throughput claims are less useful than they look. Stellar ledgers have capacity limits that validators vote to change; see Stellar's 2026 protocol upgrades. Neither chain is near its ceiling for ordinary DeFi use most of the time.

Consensus, staking and inflation

Solana secures itself with proof-of-stake: about 674 validators held active vote accounts on 9 October 2026, paid from inflation of about 3.6% a year. Stellar uses the Stellar Consensus Protocol, in which validators choose which other validators they trust. They are not paid, and no new XLM is issued.

The economic consequences run both ways. A SOL holder can stake and earn a share of issuance, but issuance dilutes anyone who does not stake; Solana's schedule started at 8% and falls by 15% a year towards a 1.5% floor. An XLM holder earns nothing from the protocol and is not diluted by it. Stellar's validators are run by organisations with a reason to keep the network working, which is a reputational rather than financial bond. Our explainer on the Stellar Consensus Protocol covers quorum slices and why this works, and XLM staking explains why products sold under that name are not staking.

Reliability

Both networks have stopped. Stellar halted once, for 67 minutes on 15 May 2019, with no fork and no lost funds. Solana had seven significant outages between December 2020 and February 2024, ranging from about four and a half to about 19 hours, according to Helius's outage history.

The causes differ. Stellar's halt came from too many validators being offline or misconfigured at once, and SCP chose to stop rather than risk disagreement, which is its design. Solana's outages came from software bugs and transaction floods; the most recent, on 6 February 2024, was a bug in a program cache that sent validators into a recompilation loop. Helius's history lists no outage after that one.

Building: Soroban vs Solana programs

Both use Rust. Soroban contracts are compiled to WebAssembly and run with explicit, metered resource limits and storage rent. Solana programs compile to sBPF, usually through the Anchor framework, and get speed from parallel execution across accounts that transactions declare up front.

Solana's developer base and tooling are much larger, which shows in the 451 protocols DefiLlama tracks there. Soroban is younger, live on mainnet since 20 February 2024, with a narrower standard library and tight limits on contract size, which push developers towards small, single-purpose contracts. What Soroban adds is direct access to Stellar's classic assets through Stellar Asset Contracts, so a contract can hold USDC or a tokenised fund issued on the network years ago. See Soroban smart contracts.

Use cases — who is actually there

Solana's fee and volume leaders are memecoin launchpads, trading terminals and high-frequency AMMs. Stellar's top fee earners are tokenised-fund issuers, and its largest DeFi protocols are a lending market and curated stablecoin vaults. The chains attract different users.

On Solana, the five busiest DEXs by 24-hour volume on 9 October were PumpSwap, BisonFi, Orca, Meteora DLMM and Raydium, and the largest DeFi protocols by TVL are liquid staking (Sanctum, Jito), lending (Kamino, Jupiter Lend) and AMMs (Raydium). Activity is fast, speculative and deep.

On Stellar, the top three by TVL are Blend Pools V2 ($146.6M), Stellar DeFi Hub ($55.8M) and Aquarius ($38.0M). Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund has used Stellar as a system of record since 2021, and Spiko, Ondo and WisdomTree issue there too, which is why Stellar's RWA total is comparable to Solana's while its DeFi is a twenty-fifth the size. For the full map, see the Stellar ecosystem map and RWA tokenisation on Stellar.

How these fit together

The headline numbers measure different things. Solana's TVL and volume measure speculative and trading activity, where it leads by a wide margin. Stellar's design choices, final settlement, no inflation, built-in issuer controls and anchors, measure up better in payments and tokenised funds, where the RWA figures put the two chains in the same range. A chain with small DeFi but large regulated issuance is not "losing"; it is serving a different market.

The weakness of Stellar DeFi is concentration: one lending protocol holds well over half the TVL, and one DEX does almost all the volume. That makes each failure more consequential, as Blend's 2026 incidents showed. Solana's risk is the opposite: breadth, speed and a long tail of young, unaudited contracts.

The takeaway

Choose Solana if you need liquidity, trading venues and staking yield. Choose Stellar if you need cheap, final settlement for stablecoins and tokenised assets, or yield from a small set of protocols you can actually read. Many users will reasonably hold both, and bridges such as Circle's CCTP make moving USDC between them routine; see bridging USDC to Stellar.

Sources: DefiLlama API (v2/chains, historicalChainTvl, overview/dexs, overview/fees, stablecoinchains, protocols), 9 Oct 2026; Horizon fee_stats, 9 Oct 2026; developers.stellar.org (fees and resource limits, ledgers, SCP, Soroban overview); solana.com docs (fees, transaction confirmation, programs, inflation schedule); SIMD-0096; Solana mainnet RPC getVoteAccounts and getInflationRate, 9 Oct 2026; xroot.dev SIMD-0326 tracker; Helius, "Solana outages: complete history"; stellar.org, "May 15th network halt"; rwa.xyz networks page; CoinGecko, 9 Oct 2026.