Solana's $110B Surge: Memecoins, Stablecoins Fuel Institutional Rush

Solana's market capitalization has nearly tripled in the past year, reaching over $110 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. This growth has been fueled by the issuance of viral memecoins like TRUMP and MELANIA, as well as rapidly growing acceptance of the blockchain by institutional cryptocurrency investors and traders.

Stablecoins play a crucial role in onchain investment markets, providing a stable value for investors to on-ramp and off-ramp their investments into onchain assets. The total stablecoin market cap is over $223 billion, with Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC accounting for 86% of the market. Over 75% of stablecoins rely on collateralization of an underlying asset, with over 98% denominated in USD.

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. This growth in stablecoin issuance signals rapidly growing acceptance of the blockchain by institutional investors and traders. In addition to total issuance, 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, coincident with the launch of TRUMP and MELANIA meme coins.

The launch of the TRUMP memecoin divided the crypto community, with skeptics cringing from its "horrible look" while others saw it as a window of possibility for more companies to leverage cryptocurrency as a viable capital raising and customer acquisition tool. Within 48 hours of its launch on the Solana blockchain, TRUMP's market capitalization reached $14 billion, fueled by a perfect storm of speculative trading, social media hype, and the renewed polish of the Trump brand.

Solana's high throughput, low transaction costs, and scalability make it an attractive option for a wide range of financial applications. The network's benchmark throughput of 65,000 transactions per second, combined with its ability to process over 5,000 transactions per second across 2,000 globally distributed nodes, positions it as a viable onchain payments solution to challenge the card networks like Visa. The relevance of an efficient on