Solana (SOL) Price Prediction: Funding rate turns to "negative value," is 180 USD the next stop?

Solana (SOL) has failed to break through $180 since late May, raising doubts about whether a Rebound could still occur in 2025. The demand for SOL leveraged long positions has experienced a big dump, negatively impacting market sentiment. On Monday (July 7), the funding rate for SOL Perptual Futures turned negative, indicating an increase in short positions (selling) demand. This change is relatively rare, showing a lack of confidence among bullish investors.

(Source: Laevitas)

Solana faces increasing competition from L2

Some analysts believe that SOL's competitive advantage is threatened by the rapid expansion of Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem.

At the same time, others emphasize that the built-in user experience of Solana is a major highlight of the platform. Although SOL has declined after the memecoin craze, new use cases have also emerged.

Jito is currently the largest decentralized application (DApp) on Solana, with a total locked value (TVL) of 17.92 million SOL, growing by 12% since January.

By providing MEV value optimization staking and integrating decentralized finance services, Jito proves that Solana continues to innovate and does not rely on token issuance platforms.

The staking rate of Solana is as high as 66.5%, which means the supply of SOL tokens available for sale on exchanges is decreasing. In contrast, the staking of ETH on Ethereum is less than 30%, while the staking rate of Cardano's ADA is as high as 58%.

The current annual staking yield for SOL is 7.3%, providing strong incentives for holders.

Solana's Q2 revenue exceeds Ethereum and Tron

According to an article by SolanaFloor on X, Solana has led all blockchains in terms of network revenue for the third consecutive quarter.

(Source: SolanaFloor)

In the second quarter of 2025, Solana's revenue was $271.8 million, which is 64% higher than Tron and twice that of Ethereum's $129.1 million.

Solana's dominance is also reflected in the activity level of DApps, with users spending as much as 460 million dollars on transaction fees in the past 30 days. This reflects that Solana has a healthy ecosystem that encourages developers to develop on the platform.

Although some criticize the trading failures and high operational concentration, this is the result of well-considered design decisions, representing optimization opportunities rather than structural weaknesses.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenet stated that their build on Solana was rejected due to concerns about MEV, adding that they hope to have "complete control over the validators."

If these statements are true, and large institutions continue to ignore Solana, this may limit the growth of SOL. These concerns indicate that interest in leveraging SOL positions is weakening, which is related to Ethereum's strategy of incentivizing rollups with extremely low data fees.

For SOL holders, the key question is whether Ethereum will eventually abandon its pricing model and compete on equal footing with other platforms. Currently, the possibility of SOL recovering to $180 remains very low.