A trading frenzy on the Solana blockchain over the last few days had led one of the top U.S. crypto exchanges to struggle with record-breaking demand.
On Wednesday, Trump’s memecoin caused crypto investors to sell off other cryptocurrencies in an effort to free up capital, leading to “an explosion of on-chain activity.”
Trading volume—the sum of money flowing in and out of a cryptocurrency within a given time period—on Solana reached as high as $36 billion immediately following Trump’s launch, according to crypto data platform DeFiLlama. The increase in trading caused a backlog of Solana transactions on Coinbase, leading some X users to complain about long wait times for transactions.
This is not the first time that Coinbase users have experienced service delays because of high crypto demand. Last February, after the launch of Bitcoin exchange-traded funds led to increased traffic, some customers experienced errors in buying and selling, and others saw incorrect balances.
The recent Solana-fueled outage reignited criticism of Coinbase’s infrastructure, with X users lambasting the company for not having resolved the long-standing issue and claiming to have lost out on gains.
Andrew Allen, a protocol specialist at Coinbase, took responsibility for the issues in an X post on Monday. “It’s on us to improve. Not Solana’s fault. Solana usage has pushed our infra past its limits, and the team is well aware and actively working on it…”
