Shortly before taking office, Donald Trump launched his own meme coin on Solana. Melania Trump followed suit a day later. Solana faced major congestion issues as millions of users flocked to the network to trade tokens.
Chris Chong, CEO of Solana exchange Titan, said that the bottlenecks came from decentralized applications (dApps) rather than the blockchain itself. The event proved that Solana was ready for mainstream adoption.
Trump and Melania Crash the Cryptocurrency Market
Just 48 hours before he takes office as US President, Donald Trump announced the launch of the TRUMP meme coin on his official X and Truth Social accounts.
Within a day of launching the meme coin on the Solana network, TRUMP reached a market cap of over $14.5 billion and a trading volume of over $26 billion.
Noticing the success of her husband's meme coin, Melania Trump launched her own coin, MELANIA, the day before Trump's inauguration.
Shortly after launch, MELANIA’s market cap surpassed $5 billion. This rapid and sharp rise caused the TRUMP token to drop by $7.5 billion in value in ten minutes.
The performance across the Solana network also shook.
Users Report Congestion on Solana Amid Increased Traffic
Due to the unexpected launch of these presidential tokens, the Solana ecosystem saw a surge in transaction levels as users rushed to participate in the trade. Reports of congestion and failed transactions quickly rose across various platforms.
“During the TRUMP launch, the entire Solana ecosystem handled it perfectly. There were no block production issues and no network congestion at the time, partly due to the meme coin launching at night in North America and the uncertainty of whether it was real or not. As liquidity was distributed across the network, there were instances of price disparity as new pools were added. The problems came when MELANIA launched. With the TRUMP precedent, a very large number of traders either started rolling into the new token or moving to sell TRUMP in record volumes,” said Chong.
While the unexpected movement certainly tested Solana's infrastructure, Chong emphasized that the bottlenecks can be traced back to decentralized applications (dApps) that handle transaction volumes.
On the day of the MELANIA launch, Phantom, a leading wallet provider on Solana, took to social media to inform the public that it was experiencing a stress on its infrastructure.
X's post read: "We are currently experiencing a massive surge in requests exceeding 8,000,000 requests per minute. As we work to stabilize our platform, transactions may have difficulty going through on the first attempt.
Meanwhile, Jito Labs, a major infrastructure provider for the Solana network, reported that its Block Engine API was experiencing “severe degradation” due to the massive volume of transactions.
Most validators on the Solana network use services like Jito Labs, which are designed to help execute transactions faster. Amid the MELANIA launch, the provider’s deteriorating performance caused the priority fees on the main chain to rise.
“This in itself is the intended mechanism to prioritize higher value transactions; however, some applications have encountered issues where their maximum gas fees were no longer sufficient to land their users’ transactions. Additionally, the increased traffic has also caused some critical APIs to crash as their services were flooded, leading to some market disruptions,” Chung explained.
The increased demand in the market has also hampered the effectiveness of arbitrage robots, which usually help keep prices under control.
Arbitrage robots fail to stabilize prices
Arbitrage bots are automated trading software that play a vital role in maintaining price stability across cryptocurrency markets.
These bots help ensure that prices remain consistent and efficient by identifying and exploiting price disparities between exchanges. However, these programs struggled to function during the period of increased congestion following the launch of MELANIA.
“During market turmoil and congestion, many arbitrage bots were unable to execute their own trades, causing significant price discrepancies on some pools,” said Chung. “In particular, we saw some Titan users being able to find pools that allowed them to buy Sol for $150 while the market price was $250. This led to more trades being submitted to try to take advantage of these opportunities, causing even greater congestion.”
In response to the increased trading volumes, the Solana blockchain has suffered.
Solana Network Shows Resilience
The massive surge in trading volume on the Solana network, which reached a record high of $10 billion in 24 hours, has put significant pressure on the ecosystem.
While this high volume of activity caused some performance challenges, Chong noted that the Solana blockchain remained up and running throughout the period.
The event demonstrated the network’s resilience by continuing to process transactions and maintaining network stability despite the low performance of Solana-based decentralized applications.
“In fact, the launches were handled well by the blockchain itself. The priority fee mechanism worked as expected, and it was the decentralized applications that had a hard time keeping up. This shows that it is time for applications and ecosystem participants to upgrade and evolve to be able to handle the future volume of traffic that everyone believes is possible,” said Chong.
Solana has a history of network outages caused by sudden spikes in transaction volume, such as those caused by meme coin launches or high trading activity. In 2022, the network experienced as many as 14 outages.
However, as the network takes proactive steps to increase scalability, these outages are becoming less frequent. The last time Solana experienced a network outage was in February 2024.
For Chong, the fact that Solana didn’t experience an outage after the Trump and Melania meme coins were launched indicates that the network is ready for mass adoption.
“With the lessons learned from the weekend, I believe Solana is very well positioned for a significant increase in user activity as the blockchain itself continues to process transactions under load and priority fees increase as expected,” Chong said.
However, dApps must prepare for when this becomes a reality.
Decentralized applications struggle to keep up with the pace
For Chong, the main reason Solana users faced so many issues trading presidential meme coins was the inability of decentralized applications to facilitate transactions.
“Many dApps have had issues where they set their gas fee cap to a predetermined number, so when the gas fee exceeded that cap, users in those apps had issues completing transactions as their gas fee became too low. This caused users to flood the network even more in an attempt to complete a transaction on the chain,” he explained.