The world’s most used blockchain just got its biggest daily payment yet. On Saturday, Donald Trump’s official token, TRUMP, was issued on the Solana blockchain, leading to an increase in trading volume over the weekend.
Between Saturday and Sunday, the network generated fees of over $35 million and revenue of at least $14 million, DeFiLlama data shows. This volume comes from about 6 million active addresses.
These fees are more than double the Nov. 22 levels of nearly $14 million, as more AI Agent tokens fill the network and lead to a trading frenzy.
Such fees are remarkably high for a low-cost blockchain, when transactions typically take fractions of a cent to settle. The TRUMP token attracted more than $3 billion in trading volumes on Saturday and Sunday, with other ecosystem plays, such as Jupiter’s JUP, seeing increased interest from traders.
The choice of Solana as an issuance network, in turn, has brought down the demand and sentiment for SOL tokens, as CoinDesk reported. SOL’s trading volume rose from $3 billion on Thursday to over $26 billion over the past 24 hours, with Saturday’s moves bringing the weekly gain to over 46%.
SOL has risen nearly 3,000% from its three-year low of $9 in December 2022 when the explosion of crypto exchange FTX and prominent Solana supporter Sam Bankman-Fried, dampened sentiment for the network.
Late Sunday, First Lady Melania Trump launched her own memecoin in a move that sent TRUMP down 50% at one point. High volume and network requests briefly caused ecosystem applications Jito and Phantom to experience delays during the morning hours in Asia, although these were quickly fixed.
Phantom reported 8 million transactional requests per minute on an X post. It said users exchanged more than $1.25 billion in volume and made 10 million transactions in 24 hours.
