The “official” memecoin of incoming US President Donald Trump has boosted interest in Solana (SOL), leading to an increase in both its price and trading volume, which in turn helped the total dollar value locked (TVL) on the network to top 10 billion for the first time since the collapse of FTX.
Donald Trump’s choice to issue the memecoin on Solana helped SOL rise more than 23% since the announcement, moving the cryptocurrency’s price to a new record high and increasing the dollar value locked on its smart contracts. Data from DeFiLlama shows that TVL on Solana is now $12 billion, a new all-time high.
Measured in SOL, the value locked on the network has been growing steadily since the beginning of last year and recently reached 45 million SOL. This level has not been seen since August 2022, prior to the collapse of FTX, whose co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was a big proponent of Solana.
The launch of Donald Trump’s official memecoin, $TRUMP, was coordinated by CIC Digital LLC, a Trump-affiliated organization, the BBC reported. Along with Fight Fight Fight LLC, they own 80% of the memecoin’s supply set to be released over the next three years.
Memecoin, which has dominated headlines in the space and is set to list on major cryptocurrency exchanges including Binance and Coinbase, is currently the third largest across all blockchains behind Shiba Inu and Dogecoin in terms of market capitalization.
Launched by a team including Solana ecosystem protocols Jupiter and Meteora, the token led to a trading frenzy on the network’s decentralized exchanges, with DeFiLlama showing Raydium surpassing Tether in 24-hour fee generation.
Moonshot, the memecoin trading platform featured on memecoin’s website released on social media by President-elect Donald Trump, reported a 12-hour trading volume of nearly $400 million after the memecoin’s launch, adding that it deployed over 200,000 users to the network in the process.
https://x.com/moonshot/status/1880659326395666759
The network choice also helped increase the perceived odds of a spot Solana exchange-traded fund (ETF) launching in the first half of the year. Polymarket traders went from weighing a 43% chance that such a product would be launched on July 31 to 61%.
The trading frenzy came over the weekend, when trading volume is typically muted as many institutional investors and professional traders are less active. This means that the speculative activity on the network may well continue during the week.
In addition to that, the memecoin’s launch Solana brings an influx of new users and presents the network, which has suffered several major outages, with an opportunity to show its resilience. If it passes the test, the Solana ecosystem could continue to see significant influxes.
The introduction of Trump’s token also signals the US government’s change in attitude towards the cryptocurrency sector and gives it increased legitimacy, as the president of the world’s largest economy has quite literally launched a Solana-based memecoin.
The rollout of memecoin signals a “change in US fintech policy toward much more permissive innovation,” commented crypto OG and Shapeshifter founder Erik Voorhees.
