Solana-based stablecoins approach the $10 billion milestone after TRUMP liquidity infusion

Solana stablecoin supply is on track to reach $10 billion for the first time after a recent surge in stablecoin inflows to the network. According to data from Defillama, the Solana stablecoin market cap has reached $9.88 billion, marking a 67.59% increase in the last seven days.

With this increase, stablecoin supply on the network has reached a new all-time high, surpassing its peak of $6.25 billion in June 2022. The surge is mostly tied to the growth of Circle’s USDC in the past few weeks.

According to Defillama, USDC has a market cap of $48.16 billion, with a 12% growth in the past month alone. With USDC supply increasing generally, its supply on Solana has also experienced a substantial surge, with a 76.25% rise in the last seven days.

It is now the dominant stablecoin on Solana, with a $7.73 billion market cap, enough to account for a 79.72% dominance. Tether’s USDT has $1.66 billion in supply on the network, while PayPal PYUSD, Ondo USDY, and Sky Dollar USDS have $163.1 million, $108.23 million, and $97.8 million, respectively.

Despite growing more than 67% in the past seven days, Solana’s stablecoin supply remains substantially below the liquidity on Ethereum and Tron networks. The two account for over 70% of all stablecoins, with $113.118 billion on Ethereum and $59.79 billion on Tron.

Solana’s activity surge responsible for stablecoin supply growth 

The massive increase in Solana’s stablecoin supply and the subsequent increase in liquidity within its ecosystem is a sign of the network’s growth. Solana, one of the best-performing networks in terms of trading volume over the past year, reached a new high over the weekend after President Donald Trump’s team launched the official TRUMP memecoin on the network.

The token’s launch, which went to a $20 billion market cap within a few hours, led to massive volume across multiple protocols, with popular SOL wallet Phantom recording over 10 million transactions. Over the last two days, it also set the record for decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume twice, with $28.2 billion and $38.2 billion on January 19 and 20. In the same period, it recorded $1.5 billion in stablecoin swaps.

Meanwhile, the popular cross-chain bridge platform deBrigde reported massive activity on Solana over the weekend. According to its report, over $202 million flowed into the network through deBridge, and more than $97 million came from Ethereum alone. The cross-chain bridge also recorded over $320 million in trading volume.

All that activity translated into massive revenue for Solana validators, with the network seeing $50 million in real economic value (REV) on January 20. Jito tips also reached an all-time high of $25.2 million.

Solana network surge came with glitches  

The massive activity on the network over the last few days also presented challenges for the network, with some people claiming that the network experienced an outage at some point. However, Mert Mumtaz, the CEO of Solana infrastructure developer Helius Labs, described the surge in network activity as a valuable stress test.

According to him, the network’s leading validator Jito experienced degraded performance due to high demand after the launch of the MELANIA memecoin. In reaction, some users, particularly the sniper bots and arbitrage traders, started using Solana main fees instead of Jito tips, causing fees to go up.

Meanwhile, Coinbase has also been criticized for its delays in processing deposits and withdrawals on the Solana network. The exchange suggested long processing times of between 100 and 1000 minutes at some point. Stakeholders noted that this is due to the exchange indexers’ inability to handle the transaction volume.

The Block co-founder Mike Dudas said:

“coinbase says the future of crypto is on-chain, but they clearly believe on-chain = evm despite solana being the #1 chain by volume.”

Competitor exchange Kraken also took that opportunity to take a swipe at Coinbase by stating that SOL is working fine on its platform.

Coinbase protocol specialist Andrew Allen acknowledged the issue, noting that this was not Solana’s fault but rather due to the surge in network usage, pushing Coinbase infrastructure past its limits. He added that the exchange is working on a solution.

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