Editing Photon

**Photon** is a [[Solana]] trading platform, often called a trading bot or terminal, used to buy and sell memecoins quickly; it launched in January 2024.[^1] It was one of the highest-earning crypto applications during the 2024 memecoin rally.[^2][^3]

## History
Coinbase analysts named Photon among the most profitable trading bots in November 2024, all of them Solana-only, and noted that memecoin traders appeared insensitive to execution fees.[^2] On 17 November 2024 Photon earned $2.36 million in fees, its fifth-highest day, ranking seventh among all crypto products that day.[^3] DL News reported in July 2025 that it had earned over $400 million since launch, against about $200 million for [[BullX]], but that both had lost most of their volume to [[Axiom]], which then held 72% of Solana bot volume.[^1] Photon was still among seven Solana applications that each earned over $100 million in 2025, alongside Axiom, BullX, [[Jupiter]], [[Meteora]], [[Raydium]] and [[pump.fun]].[^4]

## How it works
Platforms such as Photon let traders buy new tokens within seconds of launch and set a priority fee to get transactions included early; Photon's default priority fee was 0.001 SOL, about $0.19, in January 2025.[^5] Its speed made it a common tool for [[Sniping]] in the [[Trenches|trenches]].[^5]

## Timeline
- 2024-01: Photon launches[^1]
- 2024-11-17: $2.36 million in daily fees[^3]
- 2025-07-07: over $400 million lifetime fees reported; share lost to Axiom[^1]

## See also
- [[GMGN]]
- [[Trojan]]
- [[Moonshot]]
- [[DEX Screener]]
- [[Jito]]
- [[Copy trading]]

## References
1. [Solana bot platform Axiom takes over AI coder Cursor with $150m revenue fuelled by airdrop hype](https://dlnews.com/articles/defi/solana-bot-axiom-takes-over-cursor-with-150m-revenue/), DL News, 2025-07-07
2. [The Unique Way the Solana Trading Ecosystem Is Making Bank](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/11/09/the-unique-way-the-solana-trading-ecosystem-is-making-bank), CoinDesk, 2024-11-09
3. [Solana-based DApps rake in record fees as memecoin frenzy returns](https://cointelegraph.com/news/memecoin-frenzy-sees-solana-based-dapps-rake-in-record-fees), Cointelegraph, 2024-11-18
4. ['The year of revenue, assets, and trading': Ethereum and Solana boast growth in 2025](https://www.theblock.co/news/ecosystems/2026-01-06-the-year-of-revenue-assets-and-trading-ethereum-and-solana-boast-growth-in-2025-384535), The Block, 2026-01-06
5. [Someone Just Spent $200K on a Solana Priority Fee—It Didn't End Well](https://decrypt.co/300084/solana-trader-paid-200k-fee-didnt-end-well), Decrypt, 2025-01-08