The world’s most used blockchain just scored the highest daily fees in its history. On Saturday, Donald Trump’s official token, TRUMP, was issued on the Solana blockchain, leading to a spike in trading volumes over the weekend.
Between Saturday and Sunday, the network generated fees of more than $35 million and revenue of at least $14 million, DeFiLlama data shows. This volume originated from about 6 million active addresses.
These fees are more than double the November 22 levels of nearly $14 million, when several AI Agent tokens populated the network and sparked a trading frenzy.
These fees are notably 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, and other games in the ecosystem, such as Jupiter’s JUP, saw increased interest from traders.
The choice of Solana as the issuance network, in turn, increased demand and sentiment for SOL tokens, as CoinDesk reported. SOL trading volumes have skyrocketed from $3 billion on Thursday to more than $26 billion in the past 24 hours, with Saturday’s moves pushing weekly gains up more than 46%.
SOL is up almost 3,000% from its three-year low of $9 in December 2022, when the implosion of crypto exchange FTX and prominent Solana backer Sam Bankman-Fried affected sentiment towards the network.
On Sunday night, First Lady Melania Trump launched her own memecoin in a move that saw TRUMP drop 50% at one point. High volumes and network requests briefly caused the Jito and Phantom ecosystem apps to experience delays in the Asian morning hours, although these were quickly rectified.
Phantom reported 8 million transactional requests per minute in a post
