Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News
Driven by the hype around the official launch of Meme coin TRUMP by former US President Trump, Solana (SOL) saw a rapid surge in the late night of January 18, reaching a new all-time high of over $270, with a 24-hour gain of 23.02%.
After breaking the high and completing the delivery action, SOL fell 6.46% within about 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 at $124.6 billion.
Meanwhile, Ethereum has continued to show weakness. Since the current bull market began, Ethereum's performance has remained sluggish. Although it has rebounded to $3,525 recently, it failed to break further and instead led the decline 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 bucking the trend and continuously expanding its gap with Ethereum.
According to on-chain analyst Yu Jing's monitoring, possibly affected by the surges in TRUMP and SOL, several whales sold ETH on January 18: @Christianeth transferred 8,161.7 ETH ($26.59 million) to Binance in the past hour, stating that they have converted a quarter of their on-chain assets to SOL; @0x Vladilena transferred 5,018 ETH ($16.36 million) to Binance 2 hours ago; the address 0x e 43...bd 7 sold 5,000 wETH on-chain 3 hours ago and converted it to $17.25 million USDC.
The Rising Tide of Public Chains
TRUMP has garnered widespread market attention and has caused a stir 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 brave enough to be in touch with public sentiment may issue their own meme token. Although the economics of these tokens may become chaotic, TRUMP's market cap could reach $100 billion.
Binance subsequently announced that it will list the TRUMP-PERP perpetual contract with up to 25x leverage on January 18 at 21:00. Due to the overwhelming trading of the TRUMP token, the related exchanges and blockchain networks have faced 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, additional time is required to process the withdrawals.
Market maker Wintermute stated that TRUMP tokens are now tradable on Wintermute's OTC trading desk. Early on-chain analysis showed 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, strengthened the market's recognition of it as the preferred platform for new token issuance. This enhanced recognition is forming a virtuous cycle, attracting more projects to choose Solana as their issuance platform.
DefiLlama data shows that the 24-hour trading volume on Solana's on-chain DEXes exceeded $16.48 billion, 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, with 15 of those transactions being at the short-term highs.
Community members, especially long-term holders, may question the Foundation's ability to stabilize the market, which could affect long-term market confidence and holder behavior. As a result, Marc Zeller, the founder of the Aave Chan Initiative (ACI), published a post stating that to solve the Ethereum Foundation's problems, 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.
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 aims 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, censorship resistance) 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. Considering Trump's previous association with the Ethereum-based World Liberty Finance, this choice may hint at a broader market trend shift.
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 account, with users able to access the token through the GetTrumpMemes website. TRUMP's performance after launch was exceptionally strong, reaching a market cap of around $700 million in less than 30 minutes. Subsequently, with Trump retweeting the news, TRUMP's market cap rapidly surpassed the $10 billion and $20 billion milestones.
At 11 PM on the 18th, Trump's son Eric Trump tweeted to confirm the "legitimacy" of TRUMP, quoting crypto czar David Sacks' statement 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. Influenced by this news, TRUMP price broke through $34, with its market cap briefly exceeding $30 billion.
Arkham Intelligence analysis suggests that if CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC are actually owned by Trump, his net worth increased by $22 billion overnight. And based on the current price of around $28, these holdings 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 launch, some of which have been provided as unilateral liquidity pools, and some transferred to CEXes or used for market making. Over the past 17 hours, the Trump team addresses have deposited tokens worth $20 million to 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."
Interestingly, the timing of this release coincided with Trump's celebration of his return to the White House at the inaugural Crypto Currency Ball in Washington, D.C., which brought together 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, several of Trump's new cabinet members, and his son Donald Trump Jr.
According to Fox, after the token launch news broke, some attendees expressed skepticism, speculating 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 address 6QSc2 acquired funds 4 hours before the TRUMP token launch and purchased $1 million in the first minute, netting a nearly $116 million gain. The address then transferred all 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 brought short-term market attention and traffic to Solana, but its ability to maintain long-term market hype 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 to wider institutional adoption and deposits will be key factors in determining Solana ecosystem's continued expansion. If Solana can gain greater recognition among institutional investors, this could further boost the price of SOL and strengthen Solana's market share.
