SOL Rises 35% in Q3, ETH Up 60%, DFDV Holds 2.38M SOL

Solana (SOL) surged more than 35% in the third quarter, though it fell short of Ethereum (ETH)'s approximately 60% gain during the same period. While corporate SOL accumulation and network technology improvements continued, it is premature to conclude that such buying has spread across the industry.

AMBCrypto reported Solana rose over 35% in Q3, while Ethereum climbed nearly 60%, causing the SOL/ETH ratio to drop more than 13% over the past three months. Although Ethereum outperformed in relative returns, Solana's absolute price trend has not collapsed. The gap in returns between the two assets and their individual price movements should be considered separately.

DeFi Development Corp. (NASDAQ: DFDV) is cited as an example of corporate accumulation. The company increased its SOL holdings by 55,491 SOL from August 27 to September 11, raising total holdings to 2,388,923 SOL, according to SEC filings. This represents a roughly 2% increase over prior holdings. However, this figure does not reflect industry-wide corporate demand, and DFDV remains the only confirmed case so far.

DFDV also established a $300 million (approximately 40.41 billion KRW) CHAD preferred stock ATM program to fund additional SOL purchases. On September 8, the company raised about $11 million (approximately 1.48 billion KRW) through a CHAD offering and plans to use most of the proceeds for SOL acquisitions.

The practice of issuing stocks or preferred shares to secure funds before holding digital assets as financial assets is known as 'Digital Asset Financial Strategy' (DAT). The actual impact depends on factors like funding scale, purchase timing, and asset price fluctuations. No official announcements have been made about other companies adopting similar SOL buying strategies.

Network activity showed strong metrics: SolanaFloor reported over 1.49 million tokens issued in the past seven days, a weekly record. However, high token issuance does not necessarily translate to sustained SOL demand or network revenue; it must be verified whether this is driven by short-term speculation or actual user growth and transaction volume.

Solana Foundation announced it will implement Transaction v1 on mainnet, increasing the maximum transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes. The feature supports zero-knowledge proofs, large multi-signatures, and batch processing. Mainnet activation is scheduled for September 15, 2026, at 10:20 a.m., though application and wallet support will affect user experience.

Technological upgrades like Solana's Transaction v1 are separate from short-term price movements. As previously reported, network improvements should be evaluated independently of price performance. Current key metrics include SOL's Q3 gain over 35%, ETH's nearly 60% rise, and DFDV's holding of 2,388,923 SOL. Future developments will depend on whether DFDV continues purchasing SOL, other companies join the trend, and how Transaction v1 performs after mainnet deployment.