The Sunrise Effect
Introduction
Birdeye Research showed that 2025 was the year of internet capital markets for Solana — a network that had already grown well past stablecoins alone to encompass native crypto assets, tokenized real-world assets, and institutional-grade settlement at scale. Sunrise represents the next step in that progression. Since launching only nine months ago, Sunrise has grown from a single listing into a diversified marketplace that has brought over $8.5 billion in cumulative volume to Solana.
What makes Sunrise worth studying is not any one asset but the shape of the whole: its listing history reads as a deliberate march from crypto-native tokens to real-world assets. In this article, we delve into the Sunrise ecosystem and uncover its growth across categories.
Key takeaways
1. Layer-1 majors anchor the venue: WETH and WBTC are ~51% of all market cap, while bridged HYPE became the standout with over $5 billion in lifetime onchain volume since its October 2025 debut and the top holder count outside BTC/ETH.
2. A deliberate march to real-world assets. The listing calendar moved from crypto-native base to June equities pivot (SPCX on SpaceX’s IPO day) to a deepening RWA slate, now including two-metal commodities after silver’s August debut.
3. Tokenized stocks are under 5% of market cap yet command ~43% of onchain depth and lead all new-listing volume with $2.49 billion lifetime.
4. Listing marquee names on their biggest days wins Backpack six of nine head-to-head stocks — 89% of SPCX trading and 96% of MU.
5. Layer-2 traded $95.8 million on a $2.3 million book, ~52% of its cap per day, second only to tokenized stocks.
Ecosystem overview
Sunrise brings six distinct market categories onto Solana: native tokens from layer-1, layer-2 and DeFi protocols, memecoins/fan tokens/collectibles, and real-world assets including tokenized stocks and ETFs and tokenized commodities. Every asset lists with day-one liquidity across a wide venue mesh spanning Jupiter, Kamino, Raydium, Meteora, Titan, dflow, Mayan, and Phantom, and a growing money-market layer built on Kamino and Jupiter Lend now allows the largest assets to be posted as collateral.
The listing calendar was strategic. Sunrise launched in November 2025 with a single token, MON, continued with 1-2 listings per month in Q3, and then accelerated into a crypto-majors surge across April and May that filled out its Layer-1, Layer-2, and protocol base. June was the pivot: the first tokenized equity, SPCX, listed on SpaceX’s IPO day, alongside the first tokenized commodity in PAXG, and from there the equities era took hold through July and August.
Tokenized stocks, which did not begin listing until June, are now the category with the highest token count, and the clear volume leader among Sunrise’s new listings. The sections that follow examine each of the six categories: by market capitalization, trading volume, holder base and composability.
Tokenized stocks / ETFs
Tokenized equities, issued via Sunrise by Backpack Securities, are the category that best captures where Sunrise is heading. By market cap it is led by MU and SPCX, at $7.24 million and $6.44 million respectively and together about 59% of the category, followed by the memory-and-semiconductor names SKHY at $2.92 million and SNDK at $1.77 million; the remaining seven names all sit under $1.31 million. The two leaders have diverged: SPCX peaked at $13.1 million in June and has since roughly halved, while MU has instead climbed to near its $7.3 million July peak as its supply expanded.
Despite relatively small market caps, tokenized stocks are the highest-volume new-listing category on Sunrise, with $2.49 billion in lifetime volume concentrated almost entirely in June ($1.12 billion) and July ($1.04 billion) as the equities wave landed. SPCX alone did $836.5 million in June, its SpaceX-IPO-day debut, and MU followed with roughly $525 million across June and July. Earnings-timed listings drove the sharpest spikes, with SKHY generating $222 million in July and SNDK $279 million over its lifetime.
That volume is the product of a deliberate listing strategy, not sheer breadth. Backpack Securities lists the most-watched names into their biggest days — earnings prints, IPO and first-trade debuts, and AI-hardware sector waves — at a cadence of roughly one a week, having listed in eight of the nine weeks since SPCX. Across the nine names where it competes head-to-head with xStocks or Ondo on the same underlying stock, it takes the majority of onchain DEX volume in six, including 89% of all SPCX trading ($1.17 billion against xStocks’ $134 million over the run) and 96% of MU.
Layer 1
The Layer-1 category is Sunrise’s foundation and its anchor. WETH and WBTC are original tokens bridged to Solana via Wormhole, and their status as blue-chip majors makes them the natural core of the venue. Combined, they account for about 51% of the total market cap of all Sunrise tokens.
Beyond that pair, HYPE is the standout. It was the largest foreign Layer-1 token by market cap at $43.8 million, some 40 times larger than the next name, MON, at $1.09 million, and at its June peak HYPE’s market cap reached $73.97 million. Yet market cap understates HYPE’s role, because on the trading side it ranked far higher than its size would suggest.
Despite sitting third behind WETH and WBTC by size, HYPE posted extraordinary volume on Solana. In May its $1.13 billion in volume ran ~1.9 times higher than WBTC and WETH combined at $585.9 million — itself roughly a 2.6x jump from April’s $432 million. June was HYPE’s biggest month at $1.99 billion in trading volume, about 2.35 times the $845.11 million that WBTC and WETH generated together.
The holder base tells the same story of genuine demand: even setting aside WBTC and WETH, whose holders together summed to roughly 139,000, HYPE remained the top token with more than 21,000 holders, having roughly doubled from 10,500 in April to 21,400.
Layer-1 is also the most composable category on Sunrise. WBTC and HYPE both anchor lending markets on Kamino and Jupiter Lend. HYPE serves as collateral to borrow USDC on Kamino, in a market managed by Allez Labs whose total market value passed $1 million a little over a month after launch. A Bitcoin market that uses WBTC as collateral to borrow stablecoins — USDC, USDT, and USDG — reached a market size of $1.46 million, with WBTC supplied peaking at $3.4 million in January 2026. WBTC additionally trades on Jupiter Lend as collateral against USDC, EURC, and USDS, with total collateral there surpassing $2.2 million. The blue-chips, in other words, are not simply parked; they are being put to work.
Protocol-native
The protocol-native category looks broad on a roster but is, in practice, two tokens. BP (Backpack) at $92.0 million and SLX (Solstice) at $73.3 million make up 99% of the category’s $167.3 million, while the other seven names — UNI, AAVE, MORPHO, ENA, CHIP, DMC, and INX — each sit under $0.6 million. Both leaders had dramatic Junes: BP peaked at $171.5 million, while SLX spiked to roughly $578 million during an extreme speculative run before retracing about 87%.
Lifetime trading volume for the category reached $284.8 million, concentrated in June at $73.8 million and July at $66.1 million. BP led with $140.0 million, built on a $50 million launch in March and another $49 million in June, while SLX is accelerating: it did $35.7 million in July, its biggest month, on the way to $80.8 million total since listing in May.
Tokenized commodities
Tokenized commodities began as a single-asset “digital gold” category built around PAXG, but tokenized silver’s August 13 debut turned it into a two-metal book. And silver arrived as the larger of the pair by a wide margin. On day five, SILV’s $6.08 million market cap already made up 79% of the category’s $7.69 million, roughly four times the size of PAXG’s $1.61 million gold book. The volume picture reflects two very different tempos. Lifetime trading reached $26.8 million: PAXG built its $18.0 million steadily over months, peaking at $10.3 million in July, while SILV did $8.7 million in just its first five days — a hot debut for a metal.
The starkest contrast is in distribution. SILV drew 2,800 holders in five days against PAXG’s 387 accumulated over roughly eight weeks, meaning silver pulled about seven times the wallets out of the gate, a far broader debut than gold ever got. On composability, PAXG remains one of only three Sunrise assets used as lending collateral, alongside WBTC and HYPE, with its Kamino isolated market holding roughly $425,000 of PAXG against about $256,000 of USDG borrowed (roughly 49% utilization, 2.5% borrow APY).
Layer 2
Layer-2 tokens form a small but genuine category of their own. At roughly $2.3 million in combined market cap, they sit far below the protocol blue-chips and tokenized assets, but still run ahead of the memecoin group at about $1.6 million. The category was effectively dormant through early 2026, when LIT was its only listed name, before filling out with the May listings of MEGA, BILL, and BLEND. Since then BLEND has grown into the largest asset in the category at $1.23 million, followed by LIT at $0.89 million, while BILL and MEGA trail at roughly $0.11 million each. No single giant carries the group, just a handful of comparably sized tokens.
Volume tells a different story. The category has done $95.8 million in lifetime trading — striking for a $2.3 million book, and the second-highest turnover of any Sunrise category at roughly 52% of market cap traded per day, behind only tokenized stocks. That activity clustered in the crypto-majors window, peaking in May at $21.9 million, then June ($19.0 million) and April ($18.4 million), before cooling to $10.4 million in July and a negligible August.
Memecoins / fan / collectibles
The speculative fringe of Sunrise is small in market cap and large in narrative. CASHCAT leads at $0.85 million, about 53% of the category, followed by the PSG fan token at $0.32 million, AFC at $0.26 million, and the SV151 collectible at $0.18 million. The peaks tell a boom-bust story: SV151 peaked highest at $1.57 million in June before an 89% collapse, CASHCAT peaked at $1.45 million in July, and PSG and AFC topped out at $0.41 million and $0.39 million respectively, both in May.
Lifetime volume reached $74.0 million, driven by two debut spikes — SV151’s $19.9 million June launch of tokenized Pokémon “151” packs, and CASHCAT’s $29.4 million July launch as the Robinhood-chain “runner.” PSG and AFC clustered their volume around the late-May Champions League final, in which both clubs were the finalists, at $12.0 million and $4.9 million. The biggest months were July at $31.9 million and June at $26.1 million.
Conclusion
Sunrise’s first year traces a clean arc from crypto-native blue-chips to real-world assets, and the venue’s data shows that transition is already reshaping where activity concentrates. Market cap still sits overwhelmingly with the Wormhole majors, but liquidity and volume have migrated decisively toward tokenized equities, which command 43% of onchain depth and lead new-listing trading despite representing under 5% of market cap. Composability is spreading from the blue-chips outward, with WBTC, HYPE, and now PAXG all serving as live lending collateral. As issuers continue to onboard and the RWA slate deepens, Sunrise is positioned as one of the most complete expressions yet of Solana’s ambition to host every asset class onchain.
Disclaimer: This report is prepared for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, business, investment, or tax advice. While the information contained herein is drawn from sources believed to be reliable, we make no representation as to its accuracy or completeness and accept no liability for any losses arising from its use. All analysis, estimates, and opinions reflect conditions at the time of preparation and are subject to change without notice. References to digital assets are illustrative only and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer of advisory services. This material is not directed at investors or potential investors.