Layer by Layer: Solana Sets New Records with Surging Memecoin Activity

Over the past year, Solana has become synonymous with memecoin trading. This is in large part due to the emergence of Pump.fun’s token launchpad protocol, which makes it easy for anyone to deploy their own token and liquidity pool on Solana. From a technical perspective, Solana is the natural choice for speculative trading on-chain because of its ability to process a large number of transactions in parallel while maintaining low fees for users. While other Layer 1 (L1) blockchains like Sui and Aptos have made strides towards matching Solana’s performance, none have been battle-tested to the same degree through high, sustained, and organic user demand. In recent months, Solana’s dominance in on-chain trading volumes has continued to grow, accelerating recently due to a number of high-profile token launches on the network. 

On January 17th, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the launch of his official memecoin on Solana, dubbed TRUMP, igniting an on-chain trading frenzy that sent Solana’s DEX volumes soaring to a new single-day record of ~$35.9 billion. Within the course of ~36 hours after launch, TRUMP reached a staggering peak fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $75 billion and has since fallen to an FDV of ~$28 billion, as of this writing.