Solana Achieves Record-Breaking Weekend Amidst Crypto Frenzy

On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, daily trading volume on the DEX network of Solana surged to $27 billion, surpassing Ethereum’s $5 billion. These figures were highlighted by DeFi enthusiast and founder of Pink Brains studio, known as Ignas.

Probably the craziest weekend in crypto.

Here are 10 charts to visualize it:

1. Record-breaking DEX trading volume:

$27B on Solana, leaving ETH’s $5B well behind. pic.twitter.com/Yao1KDfPJs

— Ignas | DeFi (@DefiIgnas) January 20, 2025

Prior to this spike, trading volumes on decentralized exchanges in Solana averaged $5 billion.

As a result, the ratio of total DEX turnover to that of CEX jumped to 19%.

Blockworks analyst Dan Smith recorded $28.2 billion on January 18 and $39.2 billion the following day. The latter figure was driven by trading in Trump Family Tokens ($12 billion), the SOL/USD pair ($12.9 billion), and stablecoin swaps ($1.5 billion).

Solana sets back to back DEX volume all time highs with $28.2B yesterday and $39.2B today

Today we saw
— $12B on Trump Family Tokens ™️
— $12.9B SOL-USD
— $1.5B in stablecoin swaps pic.twitter.com/CgVHuTJeqg

— Dan Smith (@smyyguy) January 20, 2025

The team behind the popular Solana wallet Phantom reported record on-chain activity. On January 19, users conducted 10 million transactions totaling $1.25 billion, according to their estimates.

Transactions are landing much smoother now and all systems should be back to normal.

Despite all the challenges, our users swapped over $1.25B in volume and made 10M transactions today.

Huge thanks to the @0xMert_/@heliuslabs and @ethanyish/@AlliumLabs teams for helping us…

— Phantom (@phantom) January 20, 2025

According to Ignas, Solana’s success was fueled by capital flows from Arbitrum, Ethereum, Base, and BNB Chain. DeBridge reports weekly inflows of $300 million, with outflows of $140 million over the same period.

TVL in the blockchain rose to $11 billion, surpassing pre-FTX collapse levels. Solana’s market share increased to 9.06% (9.54% on January 20), according to DeFi Llama.

On the day of Trump’s launch, the SOL/ETH exchange rate saw a record increase of 25.4%.

Ignas noted a side effect of strong on-chain metrics, with some users experiencing “stuck” transactions and a spike in fees. Total fees for the day amounted to $57 million.

The expert cautioned against “hyping” the topic of “stable money,” even considering the burning of 81% of the daily issuance.

On January 19, the “meme token factory” Pump.fun on Solana celebrated its first anniversary. Since its launch, the platform’s total revenue from fees has reached $431 million.