$TRUMP’s Historic Weekend on Solana: Records, Trends, and Insights
The information provided in this article, including but not limited to research, analysis, data, or other content, is offered solely for informational purposes. This article is not intended to constitute financial investment or trading advice. Nothing herein constitutes a solicitation to buy, sell, or hold any assets mentioned.
Introduction
January 18th and 19th, 2025, marked a historic weekend for Solana. During this period, the network broke numerous records, marking a significant retail onboarding event. The network achieved unprecedented activity levels, stress testing infrastructure, and surpassing all-time highs of activity for any blockchain in the industry’s history.
This article examines the impact of the $TRUMP and $MELANIA token launches, structured into three sections:
- The $TRUMP Token: This section explores the launch mechanisms, tokenomics, and initial market performance, including price action and market capitalization, of the Trump family tokens.
- Key Statistics and Data: This section evaluates the wider impact of the launches through metrics such as new user onboarding, network fees, exchange volumes, and stablecoin growth.
- Challenges and Issues: This section analyzes the problems encountered during the launch period, including the Jito block engine API outage, suboptimal application priority fee configurations, scheduler inefficiencies, and excessive compute unit (CU) usage.
While these sections are best read sequentially, each can be consumed independently.
The $TRUMP Token
On January 17, 2025, three days before his presidential inauguration, Donald Trump launched the $TRUMP memecoin. The absence of a public announcement initially sparked concerns that the token might be a scam and not officially linked to the president-elect. However, Trump later confirmed the launch, announcing $TRUMP on his X and Truth Social accounts.
The following sections analyze the token and its launch period.
Launch Mechanism
The $TRUMP memecoin launch leveraged Meteora's Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker (DLMM) protocol as its primary liquidity venue. Specifically, the TRUMP token utilized Meteora’s Intuitive Launchpool Model (ILM), a framework previously employed by Jupiter for their JUP governance token launch. The ILM enables projects to allocate liquidity across a specified price range using Meteora’s DLMM pools. Tokens are distributed across bins at varying price points, guided by a customizable bonding curve that dictates price increases as tokens are withdrawn. The single-sided liquidity mechanism fosters deep liquidity, allowing larger buyers to trade significant volumes without inducing substantial price volatility.
Seventeen hours before the launch, 10% of the total $TRUMP supply was deposited as a single-sided liquidity position on Meteora’s DLMM. Unlike most tokens, which often pair liquidity with SOL, $TRUMP liquidity used USDC as the quote token. At the time of writing, $428 million in USDC is paired with $TRUMP on Meteora.
Tokenomics
The TRUMP memecoin has a total supply of one billion tokens. Eight hundred million are owned by two Trump-affiliated companies, CIC Digital, linked to previous sales of crypto Trump collectible NFTs launched in 2022, and another entity, ‘Fight, Fight, Fight.’ The initial token launched with 200 million tokens publicly released. The official website states TRUMP tokens are "an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol '$TRUMP'" and are not an investment or security.
World Liberty Financial, a separate cryptocurrency initiative linked to Trump, announced on January 20th that its initial token sale, which raised $300 million, was successful. The project also revealed plans to issue additional tokens in the future.
Price Action
The $TRUMP memecoin experienced a dramatic surge in value, climbing from under $10 on the morning of January 18th to a peak of $74.59 the following day. $TRUMP sucked liquidity from most other Solana memecoins, causing tokens to fall in value as traders sold their existing holdings to buy $TRUMP. Price briefly plummeted to approximately $30 in response to the launch of $MELANIA. Since then, $TRUMP has stabilized around the $20-30 range over the past few days. Remarkably, the token achieved a top ten fully diluted market capitalization within three days of trading.
The $MELANIA Token
First Lady Melania Trump announced her memecoin, $MELANIA, on Sunday, January 19th, the eve of her husband’s inauguration. Like $TRUMP, $MELANIA was launched through Meteora ILM, using USDC as the quote token. At the time of writing, $200.8 million USDC is paired with $MELANIA on the Meteora platform.
According to the official $MELANIA token website, the token distribution is as follows: 35% will be allocated to the team with a 13-month vesting period, 20% each to the treasury and community, 15% to the public sale, and 10% reserved for liquidity—an initial supply of one billion tokens. The memecoin originates from Mrs.Trump’s own incorporated company, MKT World LLC, which she has operated since 2021 for various ventures, including selling portraits from her time as First Lady. The website features buyer disclaimers similar to those of the $TRUMP token.
The launch of $MELANIA triggered a sharp reaction in the $TRUMP token, which plummeted by 50% at its lowest point. Within 40 minutes of $MELANIA's debut, $TRUMP's market cap shed $5 billion, dropping its price 38% from $74.6 to $45.9. Meanwhile, $MELANIA surged to a peak of $13.59 before settling at its current trading price of approximately $2.6 with a market capitalization of $393 million.
Key Statistics and Data
This section will explore the key statistics and data from the period surrounding the launches of $TRUMP and $MELANIA, including the launch events and immediate aftermath.
New User Onboarding
Memecoin launchpad Moonshot was prominently featured on the official $TRUMP website as the recommended platform for purchasing the tokens. Following this endorsement, Moonshot quickly ascended to the top of the U.S. Apple App Store rankings for finance apps. It also became the fifth most popular free app by daily downloads, surpassing platforms like Instagram and TikTok. On January 18, Moonshot reported processing nearly $400 million in transaction volume. They later announced onboarding 400,000 new users, with over one million daily active users. Moonshot generated over $12 million in revenue in three days from inflows related to TRUMP. Previously, it had averaged $20-40 thousand in daily revenue.
During the $TRUMP token launch weekend, the cross-chain bridging protocol deBridge facilitated $202 million in inflows onto Solana as users from other networks rushed to buy. Of this, $97 million originated from Ethereum. Centralized exchanges also witnessed record outflows of SOL and USDC tokens as users moved assets on-chain to purchase $TRUMP.
According to data from analytics firm Chainalysis, half of the $TRUMP and $MELANIA token holders are wallet addresses with no prior history of purchasing Solana-based altcoins. Additionally, 47% of buyers created their wallets on the same day they acquired these tokens. Furthermore, 83% of all holders have a portfolio value of less than $1,000 in Solana-based assets.
On January 19th, Phantom, Solana's leading wallet provider, announced it had handled eight million transaction requests per minute. Over 24 hours, users conducted transactions totaling over $1.25 billion in volume and completed ten million individual transactions.
Real Economic Value
Real Economic Value (REV) is a standardized metric designed to measure the value accrual generated by user activity on a blockchain. It encompasses both in-protocol transaction fees—such as Solana’s priority and base fees—and out-of-protocol tips, like Jito tips, paid by users for transaction execution. REV reflects the monetary demand for conducting transactions on a blockchain.
On January 19th, Solana's daily REV reached a new all-time high of $56.9 million, more than double the previous record of $27.2 million set in November. In the following days, REV stabilized at approximately $20 million per day, nearly double the average daily level observed before the $TRUMP token launch.
Exchange Trading Volumes
Solana achieved record-breaking decentralized exchange (DEX) volumes of $28.2 billion and $39.2 billion on January 19th and 20th, respectively. Total trading volume on Solana's DEXs surged more than 3x week-over-week, with the peak day exceeding the previous all-time daily high across all blockchains combined. Remarkably, over 10% of Solana's all-time cumulative volume occurred within the seven days surrounding the $TRUMP token launch. While DEX volumes have since declined from their peak, they remain elevated at approximately $10 billion per day, significantly higher than the pre-launch baseline of $6 billion.
According to data from DefiLlama, Meteora emerged as the first decentralized exchange across all networks to surpass $50 million in 24-hour fees. It ranked as the top protocol by fees generated across all networks during the launch weekend.
Stablecoin Growth
Amid the trading frenzy, Solana's stablecoin supply saw very significant growth. In just six days, the total stablecoin supply on Solana surged by 72%, rising from $6.15 billion on January 17th to $10.6 billion by January 23rd. This growth is especially noteworthy, as stablecoin liquidity on Solana has historically trailed behind other networks.
Returning Users
The number of returning active addresses on Solana has gradually increased over the past quarter. During the $TRUMP token launch weekend, this figure saw a significant jump from 1.9 million to 2.7 million returning daily active addresses.
Issues Encountered
This section will examine the network challenges that arose during the launch period of the two Trump family memecoins.
Jito Degraded Performance
A wave of arbitrage transactions was triggered shortly after the $MELANIA launch by a major on-chain sale of SOL tokens. The price of SOL briefly plummeted to $200, approximately $50 below its price on centralized exchanges. This price disparity activated arbitrage bots, flooding an already busy network with transactions and driving up fees.
Due to extreme demand, Jito’s block engine API became overwhelmed and experienced degraded performance for over three hours. Jito segments the users willing to pay a premium for reliability, securing inclusion of top-of-the-block transactions and lowering the median fees for non-Jito transactions. During this short window of degradation, traders using Jito tips quickly adapted to using priority fees. Median priority fees jumped 5000x, non-vote transaction count fell 66%, and compute units per block fell 50%.
Many of these bots rely solely on Jito for transaction submission and send transactions using outdated logic, further inflating priority fees. During periods of extreme price volatility, slippage issues also increase the number of failed transactions for regular users.
For Helius, our high-priority dedicated staked connections remained stable despite the surge in network activity. This stability is evident from our ping dashboards, which track unique transactions sent every minute across three regions: Pittsburgh (USA), Frankfurt (Germany), and Singapore.
Suboptimal Priority Fee Settings
During extreme events, many applications fail to configure priority fees properly or set a maximum fee cap per transaction, inadvertently locking users out of competing in high-demand markets. This was seen during the Jito outage period when Jupiter’s price API experienced downtime due to overwhelming traffic of over 7,000 requests per second. Meanwhile, the quote API demonstrated resilience, handling over 30,000 requests per second for several hours. Despite this, Jupiter swap transactions faced issues because the default priority fee cap was too low. Even after the cap was raised, it remained insufficient, though the team was hesitant to increase it further. However, users who manually adjusted fees often managed to get their transactions through.
Local fee markets, while not without flaws (as discussed in our previous article), proved functional even under extreme conditions. For example, Helius's transaction-sending canaries consistently achieved a 100% transaction landing rate throughout the period, with fees as low as $0.001.
Additional challenges arose as several ecosystem applications struggled to display data on their frontends, primarily because the infrastructure was not scaled to handle the surge in demand. Centralized exchange Coinbase also faced significant delays caused by slow indexers, leading to widespread social-media user complaints about Solana network withdrawals being delayed for multiple hours.
Inefficient Scheduler
As outlined in our previous article on local fee markets, the current implementation of the Agave validator has significant room for optimization. While worker threads initially execute transactions in parallel at the start of a leader’s first block, this parallelism quickly breaks down into sequential execution. Specifically, only a single non-vote transaction thread continues processing, leaving other threads underutilized. This behavior points to a scheduler bug that prevents the validator client from leveraging its full capacity. Consequently, the system operates at only a fraction of its potential, suggesting that resolving this issue could enable the validator to handle up to four times the current transaction load.
Further analysis by Anza developers during the recent periods of high activity indicates the Agave validator’s Transaction Processing Unit (TPU) has up to 93% free capacity. For each transaction included in a block, the validator is ingesting two hundred to four hundred more that aren’t packed. Current block limits are small, so fewer transactions are included before the validator stops and switches to the next block. SIMD-0207 proposes to raise block limits from 48 to 50 million CUs. Further block limit raises are expected in 2025.
Excessive CU usage: Jupiter Case Study
Optimizing compute unit (CU) usage in programs is essential for enhancing application performance, allowing users to execute transactions more quickly and cost-effectively. Reducing CU requirements improves the user experience and lowers transaction costs. High-CU transactions consume excessive blockspace during peak activity periods, limiting the chain’s throughput. Since the release of Agave version 1.18, the transaction priority formula has been updated to favor transactions with lower compute demands, offering an advantage to developers and users who design efficient, resource-light transactions. Many teams request ten to twenty times more CUs than their programs require. This inefficiency leads to underutilized blockspace and inflated fees, as transaction fees are directly tied to CU usage.
A prime example of the benefits of CU optimization is the Jupiter aggregator, which has implemented several enhancements over the past half-year to significantly reduce CU usage. The graph below illustrates the reduction in compute units (CUs) consumed by Jupiter swaps over the past year, declining from over 200k CUs per swap to nearly 100k CUs per swap.
Key updates contributing to this significant reduction in CU usage include:
- Late April: Jupiter eliminated the use of the associated token account (ATA) program to create temporary wSOL accounts. This change removed one `find_program address` call, reducing CU consumption for swaps involving SOL as either an input or output.
- Early August: Custom event logging was introduced, replacing Anchor framework macros and further reducing `find_program_address` calls.
- Late August: Jupiter transitioned from Solana version 1.16 to 1.18 and updated from Anchor version 0.27.0 to 0.30.1.
- December 26th: Jupiter replaced Anchor in its main program with `solana-nostd-entrypoint`, a complete rewrite offering almost 100% backward compatibility. This optimization made cross-program invocations (CPIs) more efficient, further lowering CU consumption.
Conclusion
The fascinating aspect of complex systems is how unexpected interactions between their components can give rise to chaos. Specific issues only come to light in production environments. Stress tests, such as the $TRUMP token launch, provide valuable insights into how Solana’s systems operate under high load. Each large-scale event contributes to a more resilient and battle-hardened network. The issues uncovered this time are surmountable—solvable problems that, once addressed, equip teams to be better prepared for future occurrences.
Additionally, with the Trump family launching their memecoins, a new precedent may be set, encouraging politicians, influencers, and celebrities worldwide to explore similar ventures. Whether $TRUMP and $MELANIA launches are a one-off event or mark the beginning of a broader trend remains to be seen.
Many thanks to 0xIchigo for reviewing earlier versions of this article.
