Solana Doubled Its Stablecoin Supply Over the Month of January, Fueled by Memecoin Activity and Speculation on the Timing of a Solana ETF

January made for an auspicious start to 2025 for cryptocurrency investors around the world. None more so than for those with a vested interest in Solana ($SOL).

Solana’s stablecoin supply doubled over the month of January, fueled largely by memecoin activity and speculation on the timing of a Solana ETF.

According to recent reports, blockchain network Solana has doubled its stablecoin supply to a total of $10 billion. This growth is being attributed to several factors, including the launch of memecoins TRUMP and MELANIA, which have seen immense popularity on the network.

Solana’s network has seen a surge in activity, with viral memecoins like TRUMP and MELANIA emerging as some of the most popular drivers of the network’s growth. The growth in stablecoin issuance also signals a rapidly growing acceptance of the blockchain by institutional cryptocurrency investors and traders.

Over the past year, Solana’s market cap has nearly tripled, rising from $47 billion at the start of 2024 to over $110 billion in recent trading, as reported by CoinMarketCap.

Solana’s meteoric month was driven by the minting of $8.5 billion in USDC in January, doubling the total stablecoin market value on the network and outpacing Ethereum (the long-time incumbent) over the same time period.

Solana set consecutive daily records for decentralized exchange (DEX) activity with $28.2 billion of activity on January 18 and $39.2 billion of activity on January 19, coinciding with the launch of the TRUMP and MELANIA meme coins.

This rapid growth of stablecoin issuance and trading activity is relevant given Solana’s pitch to institutional users. Enhanced liquidity on the Solana blockchain could translate into lower transaction costs, increasing further institutional adoption.

While the network boasts a benchmark throughput of 65,000 transactions per second, a December 2024 upgrade enabled the network to process over 5,000 transactions per second across 2,000 globally distributed nodes.

To put this into perspective, Visa processed 212.5 billion transactions in 2023 at a rate of 6,741 transactions per second.

Taking into account merchant fees that can range from 2.0-3.0% of transaction value, the relevance of an efficient onchain solution becomes even more relevant. Consisting of a base and priority fee, a single transaction on Solana costs roughly $.00025.