Solana DeFi tokens drop up to 6.1% as SOL holds steady

The quick take

Price: Solana ($SOL) traded at $121.05, up 0.4% in 24 hours (CoinGecko, as of 5:39 p.m. ET, Oct. 6).
Trigger: Backpack Exchange ($BP) fell 6.1%, while Jito ($JTO), Pump.fun ($PUMP) and Kamino Finance ($KMNO) each lost about 5%.
Watch: Whether deposits in Jito, Kamino Lend and PumpSwap stay flat if the token selling goes on.

What happened

Solana DeFi tokens fell together on Tuesday while the network’s own coin barely moved. Backpack Exchange ($BP) dropped 6.1% in 24 hours to $1.17, CoinGecko data show as of 5:39 p.m. ET. Jito ($JTO), Pump.fun ($PUMP) and Kamino Finance ($KMNO) each lost between 5.0% and 5.1%.

$SOL itself rose 0.4% to $121.05 over the same period. The wider market was quiet too. Bitcoin ($BTC) slipped 0.4% to $85,572 and Ethereum ($ETH) 0.6% to $2,697, according to LiveCoinWatch.

Not every Solana token fell. Jupiter Exchange ($JUP) and Raydium ($RAY) each gained 1.5%. Jupiter Perps LP (JLP), Jupiter’s perps liquidity pool token, was flat at $4.90.

Why it moved

The cause is not confirmed. None of the four projects announced news in the past day that would explain the drop, and the slide did not come from a single sharp sell-off.

$JTO was the clearest case. On Binance’s JTO/USDT pair it peaked near $0.592 around 11 a.m. ET, then fell for most of the afternoon. It now trades at $0.5475, close to its 24-hour low of $0.545 on CoinGecko.

$KMNO slipped more slowly. On Binance’s KMNO/USDT pair it eased from $0.0415 late Monday to $0.0391, a little lower in most hours. The token is now down 11% in a week.

The other two were giving back recent gains. $BP set a record of $1.65 on Oct. 1, CoinGecko shows, and now trades 29% below it, though still 148% above its level a month ago. $PUMP is still up 5.9% over seven days, even after Tuesday’s drop to $0.006187.

Who’s buying and selling

On-chain trade counts tell a mixed story. Of the four tokens’ largest Solana pools tracked by DexScreener, only $JTO showed more sells than buys. Its pool with JitoSOL on Orca logged 803 sells against 557 buys, and GeckoTerminal counted 814 sells.

Buyers were busier elsewhere. Kamino’s KMNO/USDC pool on Orca had 12,353 buys and 10,396 sells. The PUMP/USDC pool on PumpSwap had 7,612 buys against 6,470 sells.

These pools carry only a slice of each token’s trading. The PUMP/USDC pool handled $4.3 million in a day, while CoinGecko counts $224 million of $PUMP volume across all markets. So the pool data cannot show who did most of the selling.

The money inside the apps stayed put. Jito Liquid Staking held $1.26 billion, Kamino Lend $1.40 billion and PumpSwap $400 million, DefiLlama data show. Each sat within 1% of its level at the start of the UTC day. Solana’s total DeFi value was $6.62 billion, with $2.06 billion of DEX trading in 24 hours.

Pump.fun also kept earning. DefiLlama puts its revenue at $1.89 million over the past day and $11.87 million over seven days.

What to watch next

The gap between token prices and deposits is the thing to follow. Steady deposits mean users have not pulled money out of these apps so far. If deposits in Jito, Kamino Lend or PumpSwap start to drop as well, the picture would change.

For $BP, the distance from its Oct. 1 record matters. For $KMNO, the question is whether an 11% weekly slide stops while Kamino Lend’s deposits hold near $1.40 billion.

Bottom line: Four Solana DeFi tokens lost 5% to 6% on Tuesday without a confirmed trigger, while $SOL edged up and the deposits in their apps held steady.