Cashing in on President Donald Trump’s meme coin may not have been as easy as it sounds.
Solana-based applications like the decentralized exchange Jupiter and digital wallet Phantom experienced degraded performance Sunday, with users reporting issues not long after First Lady Melania Trump’s own meme coin caused Official Trump’s (TRUMP) price to plummet.
As markets mulled the first lady’s move, Phantom said on X that user activity had thrown off its platform’s stability. A few hours later, Phantom said its systems had rebounded from an "unprecedented surge in activity,” with users swapping $1.25 billion worth of digital assets over the past day.
“Welcome to mass adoption,” Jupiter said on X, warning users that its systems had also come under strain due to an “extreme load.”
For TRUMP traders, the ability to swap assets during that window may have separated initial winners from losers. While TRUMP’s price was near its all-time high of $73.43 when the first lady’s meme coin launched, it fell 44% to $48 in about an hour.
When TRUMP launched Friday, some onlookers remarked the meme coin’s relatively smooth debut was “only possible on Solana,” highlighting the network’s ability to process a flurry of speculators at once.
Trump’s meme coin may have sent Solana’s price to an all-time high of $286 this weekend, but traders’ activity appeared to push the network’s ecosystem toward its limits, too.
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According to Richard Wu, co-founder of the NFT marketplace Tensor, it wasn’t just TRUMP traders’ rush for the exit that caused Solana applications to struggle.
“Someone nuked SOL on-chain,” Wu said on X. That sparked a bombardment of arbitrage bots that make money by buying an asset in one place and then quickly selling it somewhere else, pocketing the profit made between differing prices.
Most meme coins, including TRUMP, trade on a decentralized exchange or DEX. Using smart contracts, these platforms seek to replace financial intermediaries with self-executing code, and within the context of Solana’s ecosystem, they support that token, too.
On Jupiter, the price of Solana fell as low as $200 Sunday, according to the DEX’s website. Solana was trading near $255 on Coinbase at the time, per its website.
A spike in priority fees—which users can pay in addition to typical transaction costs to increase the likelihood of Solana confirming said transaction quickly—stifled some users as trading bots rushed to capitalize on cheap Solana, Wu said.
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Indeed, the average Solana transaction fee jumped 173% Sunday, rising to $0.41 from $0.15, according to a Dune dashboard.
TRUMP traders in the U.S. may have encountered additional hurdles Sunday while trying to cash out their crypto holdings, with Coinbase experiencing issues of its own. The leading crypto exchange in the U.S. has experienced “Delayed Sends & Receives” with Solana since Friday.
A Coinbase spokesperson referred Decrypt to the exchange’s status page, which said that the firm is “continuing to investigate this issue.” Coinbase listed TRUMP for trading on its platform Monday, but the firm warned the token faced “significantly delayed sends and receives” too.
Decrypt has reached out to Jupiter and Phantom for comment, but is yet to receive a response.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair
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