Have you ever heard about transaction monetization layers on Solana? It was a $1b market in 2025 but it could be bigger in the future.
In theory on the Solana network, a transaction remains private until it is officially recorded on the blockchain.
But in practice, there is an entirely different world evolving in parallel.
A monetization layer is built on top of Solana, allowing actors known as flow providers to monetize their transactions.
Flow providers can take several forms:
- Traders: They can share their own transactions with a monetization layer
- dApps / Wallets: Axiom, FOMO, Terminal, ...
- Landing providers: Temporal, Astralane, Fast, ...
- RPC / MEV infrastructure: Helius, Jito, Harmonic, ...
- Validators: Figment, Jupiter, Binance, ...
(These are examples. It does not mean that all of them already use a monetization layer).
A transaction on Solana is more than just a transaction. It creates value.
The main value that can be monetized in a healthy way for a company is through arbitrage.
If a transaction is going to create an imbalance or inefficiency in an AMM and you have that information in advance as a flow provider because you are part of the transaction transmission path to the network, you can monetize it.
Today, monetization layers are mostly focused on arbitrage because it allows a transaction to be monetized without having any harmful impact on the end user, simply capturing the value that was leaked during the trade.
Monetization layers are important for the ecosystem because they enable two main things:
- Generate extra yield for flow providers
- Stabilize markets, helping keep quoted prices as close as possible to execution prices during trades
This is where monetization layers stand today.
But if we take the thinking further, what is the future of monetization layers?
In my view, there are several ways these layers can improve, especially around prediction, which could enable a healthier and more optimal DeFi ecosystem with better resource sharing enabled by this type of infrastructure.
Routing prediction
The approach taken by
@dflow is very interesting and similar to what some arbitragers already do: determine an execution route initially, then during on-chain trade execution by the validator, try to find a route that generates more output than the one determined off-chain.
But this approach has some limitations. During on-chain execution, due to Solana's structure, they can only search very limited on-chain routes, typically between 1 and 6 liquidity pools maximum depending on the size of the trade.
If you have advance information about the trades that are going to be executed, this would allow an aggregator to pre-compute the impact of incoming trades and determine a more optimal route to maximize output value.
Let's take an example:
I trade 100 USDC → SOL.
- Jupiter shows me an output of 1 SOL.
- DFlow shows me an output of 1 SOL, but during execution finds a better route and gives me 1.02 SOL.
- An aggregator based on a Monetization Layer shows me 1.05 SOL because it has already accounted for the impact of transactions before they are even executed and can predict the fees/tips required to reach an optimal position in the block.
This approach could drastically improve DeFi and the prices traders receive for their trades.
Price prediction
PropAMMs allow SOL-USDC traders and now increasingly more trading pairs, to get better on-chain prices compared to CEXs like Binance. That is a fact.
This also implicitly means that traders will increasingly migrate on-chain to get the best price, right?
In the future, monetization layers will be able to predict the price of any asset in advance.
We are not talking about predicting the price of a memecoin here, but the price of Nasdaq assets and gaining an edge over traditional traders.
Large HFT firms compete in microseconds to execute their orders in traditional markets. Having even a few milliseconds of advantage could create a real competitive edge with massive impact.
Prediction is, in my opinion, one of the most important areas a monetization layer should focus on in the future, without having to leak the transaction itself.
This is the crucial point: the monetization layer must have the transaction in advance, but must absolutely not leak it, in order to avoid behavior that is harmful to the network.
This is where
@Circular_fi positions itself.
We are currently building a monetization layer for Solana and its ecosystem participants, enabling better revenue sharing for flow providers while also improving the efficiency of DeFi.
What about you? How would you improve DeFi efficiency with a monetization layer built on top of Solana?