***** continued to soar on Sunday, climbing to unprecedented levels with a market capitalization exceeding $14 billion.
Notably, the meme token, launched by U.S. President-elect Donald ***** on Saturday, has captured the cryptocurrency world’s attention, surging by an astounding 223% within 24 hours of its debut. At press time, the token was trading at $64.6 after climbing to the 14th spot among the largest cryptocurrencies, surpassing prominent tokens like SHIB and TON.
The ***** token launched with an initial supply of 200 million coins, while the total emission is capped at 1 billion. According to the project’s roadmap, tokens will be unlocked incrementally over three years. Notably, 800 million tokens (80% of the total tokens) are reserved for creators and CIC Digital, a company tied to *****’s NFT ventures, raising concerns about centralization.
That said, the launch of ***** has not only energized its ecosystem but also fueled remarkable growth for Solana (SOL), the blockchain hosting the token.
At press time on Sunday, Solana was trading at an all-time high (ATH) of $285.76, reflecting a 19% surge in the past 24 hours, buoyed by a surge in network activity and trading volumes. On-chain data from analytics platform DefiLlama revealed that Solana’s decentralized exchanges (DEXs) experienced a staggering $21 billion in daily trading volume for two consecutive days, solidifying the network’s dominance in the DEX segment with 52% market share.
Beyond the hype surrounding *****, Solana’s surge can be attributed to investors rotating funds back into SOL after cashing out of meme coins. On-chain data from Solana Floor shows that the ***** team wallet, which deploys liquidity on Meteora’s pools, has been using fees collected to purchase SOL, acquiring over $7 million worth since launch.
Lookonchain also reported several such instances with one whale who bought 1M ***** for 11.5M USDC, selling the meme tokens for 312,571 SOL, netting an unrealized profit of $9.8M.
That said, Solana’s seamless handling of a recent surge in transaction volumes has earned widespread praise, highlighting its significant progress since facing network outages in 2023 and early 2024.
“Make no mistake, the Solana of the pre-era (March 2024) could not have handled this launch gracefully. The degree to which Solana knocked it out of the park on a technical level last night is astonishing. So much progress in just 9 months, and we are just getting started.” Max Resnick, lead economist at Solana-focused firm Anza, noted.
Arthur Cheong, founder and CEO of Defiance Capital, also lauded Solana’s resilience, saying, “Solana really passed this $***** TGE network resiliency test with an A+ score. The chain would have been unusable a year ago with such levels of traffic and transactions.”