Solana Validators Rake in $26M as Trump-themed Tokens Trigger Trading Frenzy

Solana validators witnessed an unprecedented influx of over 100,000 SOL, approximately $25.8 million, in fees and tips following heightened trading activities of the TRUMP and MELANIA tokens. This activity reached its zenith on January 20, with over 87,000 SOL received by validators, mainly fueled by the TRUMP token's rise, before the MELANIA token also garnered significant attention. The resulting surge led to the processing of 24.7 million transaction bundles to ensure transaction success.

Out of Solana's 4.5 million daily active users, 1.5 million were unique tippers, indicating a strong interest in token sniping strategies on platforms such as Meteora and Orca. In the Solana ecosystem, bundles are collections of transactions that validators process together. Tippers are users or automated bots who add extra fees to their transactions, motivating validators to prioritize these transactions in the processing queue.

The intense trading activity temporarily boosted passive income yields for stakers to an attractive 7.14% annually, coinciding with a reduction in inflation rates below 5%. As of Wednesday morning, the TRUMP token was trading at $42, marking a 25% increase over the previous 24 hours, whereas the MELANIA token faced minor declines, trading at $4.

As yellow.com reported earlier, the Official Trump memecoin was launched on January 18 , followed by the Official Melania token on January 19. The surge in trading activity was significant, leading to network congestion. Solana's blockchain explorer had not reported new transactions for 30 minutes as of 9:43 pm UTC on January 19.

Many users reported "500 Internal Server Errors" when conducting transactions via Solscan.

The ongoing debate regarding Solana's capacity for monolithic versus modular blockchain scalability was rejuvenated by a significant network failure in February 2024, which necessitated a restart by validators. However, despite these challenges, Solana maintained 100% uptime over the past 90 days with no outages since February 6, 2024, according to Status.Solana.