A new king has risen on the chain as the president takes office.
Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News
Driven by the hype around the official launch of the Meme coin TRUMP by former President Trump, Solana (SOL) saw a rapid surge in the late night of January 18, reaching as high as $270, a 23.02% gain in the past 24 hours, setting a new all-time high.
After breaking the high and completing the delivery action, SOL fell 6.46% in nearly 13 minutes, with the intraday low touching 242.5 USDT. As of the time of writing, SOL is currently priced at $255.26, firmly the 5th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, with a market value of $124.6 billion.
Meanwhile, Ethereum has continued to show weakness. Since the start of this bull market, Ethereum's performance has remained sluggish. Although it has rebounded to $3,525 recently, it failed to break further and instead led the decline back to $3,225, currently trading at $3,348.8.
According to Trading View data, the SOL/ETH exchange rate briefly broke through 0.08178 overnight, reaching a new all-time high, and is currently at 0.07634.
Trump's TRUMP coin has attracted all the market hype, almost "draining" the entire market sentiment, but Solana has been rising against the trend in this environment, continuously widening the gap with Ethereum.
According to on-chain analyst Yu Jing's monitoring, or affected by the surge in TRUMP and SOL, on January 18, several whales sold ETH: @Christianeth transferred 8,161.7 ETH ($26.59 million) to Binance in the past 1 hour, stating that he has converted a quarter of his on-chain assets to SOL; @0xVladilena transferred 5,018 ETH ($16.36 million) to Binance 2 hours ago; the address 0xe43...bd7 sold 5,000 ETH on-chain 3 hours ago and converted it to $17.25 million USDC.
The Next Wave of Public Chains Hits the Shore
TRUMP has garnered widespread attention in the market and has caused a violent reaction on multiple crypto trading platforms. BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes commented on social media X that Trump's launch of the TRUMP token marks the opening of the political Memecoin market, and any politician who dares to keep up with public sentiment in real-time may issue their own meme token. Although the economics of these tokens may become chaotic and disorderly, the market cap of the TRUMP token could reach $100 billion.
Binance subsequently announced that it will list the TRUMP U perpetual contract with a maximum leverage of 25x on January 18 at 21:00. Due to the overwhelming trading of the TRUMP token, the relevant exchanges and blockchain networks have encountered tremendous pressure.
Binance temporarily suspended SOL withdrawals, and the withdrawal channels between the Solana network and the BNB Chain were also temporarily closed. Bithumb also announced that due to the sharp increase in Solana withdrawals, withdrawals will require additional time to process.
Market maker Wintermute stated that the TRUMP token is now available for trading on Wintermute's OTC trading desk. Early on-chain analysis shows that the largest holding address of TRUMP is suspected to be Wintermute, indicating that Wintermute may have collaborated with the TRUMP token project earlier to provide market-making services.
Looking at the market performance, the successful launch of the TRUMP token in the Solana ecosystem has produced a significant Matthew effect. The $400 million trading volume and over 400,000 new user growth created by the Moonshot platform within just 12 hours have proven Solana's advantages in user experience and transaction efficiency, and more importantly, have strengthened the market's recognition of it as the preferred launch platform for new tokens. This increased recognition is forming a virtuous cycle, attracting more projects to choose Solana as their launch platform.
DefiLlama data shows that the trading volume of Solana's on-chain DEXes exceeded $16.48 billion in the past 24 hours, surpassing the total of all other chains and accounting for 57.7%.
The Dilemma of Ethereum
Meanwhile, the Ethereum ecosystem is facing a critical period of governance structure adjustment. The Ethereum Foundation has sold 4,466 ETH (about $12.6 million) in 32 transactions over the past year, 15 of which were at the short-term high.
Community members, especially long-term holders, may question the Foundation's ability to stabilize the market, thereby affecting the long-term confidence in the market and the behavior of token holders. As a result, the founder of the Aave Contributor Initiative (ACI), Marc Zeller, wrote that to solve the problems of the Ethereum Foundation, it is necessary to immediately fire 80% of non-developers and current leaders, cut 95% of current subsidies, stop selling ETH, and instead use LST to lend stablecoins through Sky/Aave, while also reducing operating costs, etc.
On January 19, Vitalik Buterin publicly revealed that the Ethereum Foundation is undergoing major changes to its leadership structure, which has been ongoing for about a year. Some reform measures have been implemented and made public, while others are still in progress.
The current goals the EF is striving to achieve include: increasing the technical expertise of the leadership; improving two-way communication and connection between the leadership and ecosystem participants (new and old), with the EF's responsibility to support users (individuals and institutions), developers, wallets, and L2s; bringing in new talent to improve execution capability and speed; more actively supporting application builders, and ensuring that important values and inalienable rights (especially privacy, open source, anti-censorship) exist for users (including the application layer); and continuing to increase the use of decentralization and privacy technologies as well as the Ethereum chain, including for payments and financial management.
At a deeper level, TRUMP's choice of Solana rather than Ethereum as the issuance platform reflects not only technical considerations, but also subtle changes in market forces. Given Trump's previous association with the Ethereum-based World Liberty Finance, this choice may hint at a broader shift in market trends.
TRUMP Breaks $30 Billion Record, Exchanges Profit Handsomely
On the morning of January 18, Trump announced the launch of his personal Meme coin TRUMP on his Truth Social media account, and users can access the token through the GetTrumpMemes website. The performance of TRUMP after its launch was exceptionally strong, reaching a market cap of about $700 million in less than 30 minutes of opening. Subsequently, when Trump retweeted the news, the market cap of TRUMP skyrocketed, quickly breaking through the $10 billion and $20 billion thresholds.
At 11 pm on the 18th, Eric Trump, the eldest son of Trump, tweeted to confirm the "legitimacy" of TRUMP, citing the comments of crypto czar David Sacks that "the reign of terror against crypto is over, and the beginning of American crypto innovation is just starting." He also mentioned Bitcoin, the family project World Liberty Financial, and the new official Meme project TRUMP. Affected by this news, the price of TRUMP broke through $34, and its market cap once exceeded $30 billion.
Arkham Intelligence analysis suggests that if CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC are actually owned by Trump, his net worth would have increased by $22 billion overnight. And based on the current price of around $28, these shares are worth $22.4 billion. Meanwhile, Forbes estimated Trump's net worth to be $5.6 billion as of November 2024 when he was elected president.
According to on-chain data monitoring, the Trump team has been continuously reducing their TRUMP token holdings since the token's issuance, some of which have been provided as unilateral liquidity pools, and some have been transferred to CEXes or used for market making. In the past 17 hours, the Trump team address has deposited $20 million worth of tokens into Bybit, possibly for market making purposes.
Crypto KOL Conor said, "It seems that every circulating token has either been sold into the market or provided as unilateral liquidity. But according to Arkham's analysis, the Trump team has not sold the $500 million in TRUMP. They point out that the team holds about $500 million in TRUMP liquidity pools on-chain, from which they have withdrawn a total of $20 million (as USDC). Additionally, the team appears to have sent $92 million worth of TRUMP to CEXes."
Foresight News: It is interesting that the release of this token coincides with Trump's first cryptocurrency ball in Washington, D.C., where the event gathered crypto industry OGs such as MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, the Winklevoss twins of Gemini, and Trump's crypto and AI advisor David Sacks, as well as politicians and several of Trump's new cabinet members and his son Donald Trump Jr. According to Fox, after the news of the token issuance broke, some attendees were skeptical, suspecting that the president-elect's account had been hacked. Trump's son may have known about this, as he was in a VIP-only area. It is unclear whether he discussed the TRUMP token with anyone there. According to Bubblemaps analysis, the smart money at address 6QSc2 had already obtained funds 4 hours before the TRUMP token was released and purchased $1 million in the first minute, making an unrealized gain of nearly $116 million. The address then transferred all the TRUMP tokens and distributed them to 10 addresses, selling them in batches. They have now sold $20 million worth of tokens and still hold $96 million worth. Overall, the launch of the TRUMP token has brought short-term market attention and traffic to Solana, but its ability to maintain long-term market heat remains uncertain. From a market perspective, whether TRUMP can maintain a price above $20, whether Solana's network effects can be sustained, and whether Solana can break through in broader institutional adoption and deposit volume will be key factors in determining whether the Solana ecosystem can continue to expand. If Solana can gain greater recognition among institutional investors, this could further increase the price of SOL and strengthen Solana's market share.
