Meteora Generates More Fees Than Raydium and Orca Combined

SOL is down 55% since October. Total Solana DEX volumes have contracted. Half of crypto Twitter is debating whether we're in a bear market.

Meanwhile, Meteora quietly generates more daily fee revenue than Raydium and Orca combined. With 60% less capital locked.

I pulled every number from DeFiLlama and Dune to verify this. Every claim below links to a public data source. No narratives without numbers.

The Macro: SOL Crashed 55%

This isn't a correction. SOL went from $186 in late October to $84 today. It hit $70 in early February. The entire Solana DeFi ecosystem felt it — volume, TVL, and user counts declined across the board.

With that as the backdrop, the question becomes: which protocols held up, and which ones bled?

The Fee Story Nobody Is Publishing

Here's what I found when I compared the three major Solana DEX protocols on DeFiLlama.

Meteora pulls in $417K per day in protocol fees. Raydium does $150K. Orca does $101K. Combined, the other two make $251K — 40% less than Meteora alone.

Over 30 days, Meteora has generated $10.7M in fees. Raydium: $6.3M. Orca: $3.2M. This isn't close.

Why? Fee Yield Per Dollar

The raw fee numbers are one thing. What matters for LPers is fee yield — how much your capital earns. And this is where Meteora separates.

Your dollar earns 6.8x more on Meteora than on Raydium. Annualized, Meteora LPs see roughly 37% fee yield on their TVL. Raydium LPs see 5.5%. Orca sits at 14%.

Think about this: Raydium has $1 billion locked. Meteora has $407 million. But Meteora's smaller pool of capital earns 2.8x more total fees. That's not luck. That's concentrated liquidity doing what it's designed to do.

DLMM Is the Engine

64% of Meteora's fees come from one product: DLMM — the Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker.

DLMM lets LPers concentrate their capital in specific price ranges. Instead of spreading $1,000 across the entire price curve (like a traditional AMM), you focus it where trading actually happens. More capital at the active price means more fees captured per trade.

The result: Meteora matches Raydium's daily volume ($139M vs $142M) with 60% less TVL.

Raydium needs a billion dollars to process $142M in daily volume. Meteora does nearly the same with $407M. That's the DLMM capital efficiency advantage in one table.

TVL Resilience

Meteora's TVL hasn't crashed with SOL. It went from roughly $378M in early November to $407M today — steady through a 55% price crash. The DeFiLlama chart barely flinches.

Think about what that means in SOL terms. At $186 per SOL, $378M was about 2 million SOL. At $84 per SOL, $407M is about 4.85 million SOL. People are actively adding liquidity to Meteora while SOL crashes. That's conviction following yield.

Raydium sits at $1B TVL but earning 0.015% daily. Orca at $263M earning 0.038%. Rational capital follows the yield — and the yield is on Meteora.

Who's Actually Trading Here

Clean metric from Dune: unique wallet addresses interacting with each DEX per week. No volume inflation, no double-counting.

Meteora peaked at 1.15 million unique traders in a single week (November 10). Through January and February, Meteora consistently had 1.5-2x more unique traders than Raydium. Both are declining now — the bear market doesn't spare anyone — but Meteora's user base established itself as a peer to Raydium during the active period.

The Weekly Fee Trend

Fees tell you whether the protocol is alive. Here's Meteora's weekly fee generation through the bear market.

The November spike ($59.8M in one week) was the memecoin wave that hit all of Solana. What matters is the floor: even in the quietest weeks (Feb 2: $2.3M), Meteora was generating meaningful revenue. The current run rate of $4M/week annualizes to over $200M.

The 90-Day Trend

One day of data is a snapshot. Here's the full trend since January — daily fees for all three protocols, sampled weekly.

In January, Meteora was generating 9-12x more fees than Raydium. The market contracted. Everyone's fees dropped. But the ratio held. In April, Meteora still leads by 2.5x.

This isn't a one-day anomaly. It's a structural advantage that has persisted through every phase of the bear market.

The Full Scorecard

Where the Others Win

This isn't a "Meteora beats everyone at everything" article. The data is more nuanced than that.

Orca has the highest capital efficiency on Solana — 0.77x volume-to-TVL ratio. It routes more trading volume per dollar locked than anyone. For SOL/USDC and other major pairs, Orca's Whirlpool concentrated liquidity is exceptional. If you're LPing stablecoin or blue-chip pairs, Orca is a strong choice.

Raydium has the deepest TVL at $1 billion. For traders who need minimal slippage on large orders, that liquidity depth matters. Raydium's LaunchLab is also competing directly with Pump Fun for new token launches.

Where Meteora dominates is memecoin and new token liquidity — DLMM pools with dynamic fees that adjust to volatility. These pools charge higher fee rates (often 0.5-2% per swap vs Orca's 0.05% on majors), which is why Meteora's fee yield is 6.8x Raydium despite less TVL. The fee advantage is real, but it's concentrated in specific pool types.

The right framing isn't "which DEX is best" — it's "which DEX is best for what you're doing." For memecoin LPing, the data is clear.

What This Means for LPers

If you're providing liquidity in memecoin or new token pools on Solana, this data says one thing clearly: your capital works hardest on Meteora.

Not the most TVL. Not the most volume. But the most fees per dollar deployed in the pools that generate the most yield. The gap isn't 10% or 20% — it's 6.8x vs Raydium and 2.7x vs Orca on fee yield.

And this is in a bear market. These fee yields are what DLMM generates when SOL is at $84 and volumes are depressed. When the market turns — when memecoin volume returns — these ratios don't shrink. They compound. A protocol generating $387K/day in fees during a bear market prints multiples of that when the market heats up.

The infrastructure is built. The capital efficiency is proven. The fee generation is live. The bull market just hasn't arrived yet.

Caveats

Fee data is a snapshot. The numbers above are from April 16, 2026. Fees fluctuate daily with volume. The 30-day trends are more reliable than any single day.

TVL includes all Meteora products — DLMM, DAMM V1/V2, and Dynamic Bonding Curve. DLMM is 64% of fees but the TVL split across products varies.

Fee yield is protocol-level, not LP-level. LPs earn the majority of fees — protocol takes a cut. The relative comparison (Meteora vs Raydium vs Orca) still holds because all three have similar fee-sharing structures.

Unique trader counts from Dune may overcount Meteora due to how DLMM trades are recorded (bin-level interactions). We used trader_id (unique wallets) which is clean, but the underlying trade count data has known inflation for DLMM specifically.

This is not financial advice. Higher fee yields come with concentrated liquidity risk — impermanent loss can be larger on DLMM when price moves outside your range. The data shows what has happened, not what will happen.

All data from DeFiLlama and Dune Analytics. Verified April 16, 2026. Built with TrackLP.