Solana battles Coinbase outages as SOL hits all-time high

Catherine McGrath

A trading frenzy on the <a href="https://www.binance.com/en/price/solana">Solana</a> blockchain over the last few days had led one of the top U.S. crypto exchanges to struggle with record-breaking demand.&nbsp;<div class="paywall-selector"></div><div class="paywall">



On Wednesday, <a href="https://fortune.com/company/coinbase/" target="_blank">Coinbase</a> CEO Brian Armstrong wrote in a <a href="https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1881987902701207678">post</a> on <a href="https://fortune.com/company/twitter/" target="_blank">X</a> that an issue causing Coinbase users to experience delays and cancellations of Solana transactions had been “triaged,” urging customers to retry their sends.&nbsp;



“It’s clear we need to step up our game on Solana, scale our infrastructure, and provide native support for common use cases like DEX/memecoin trading,” Armstrong wrote. He added that the company’s goal is to provide top-tier support for Solana in the future. Despite a deluge of customer complaints, he added, the surge in activity is “great for the ecosystem” and a “high-quality” problem to have. 



The outages occurred as the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap saw record trading volume, with the price of a Solana coin reaching an all-time high of $294 on Sunday.&nbsp;



Investors flooded the Solana blockchain after President Donald Trump <a href="https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/18/trump-memecoin-crypto-7-billion-solana-president-inauguration/">launched</a> a surprise <a href="https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1880446012168249386">memecoin</a> last Friday. The token immediately exploded to a multibillion-dollar market cap, which now sits just below $8 billion. The first lady also <a href="https://x.com/MELANIATRUMP/status/1881094861279129643">launched</a> her own memecoin on Solana this weekend. 



Ryan Rasmussen, head of research at asset manager Bitwise, said that the frenzy over 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.”&nbsp;



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 <a href="https://x.com/maxkmud/status/1881695780517577205">complain about</a> 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 <a href="https://x.com/CoinbaseSupport/status/1762899058060890556">experienced</a> errors in buying and selling, and others saw incorrect balances.&nbsp;



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 <a href="https://x.com/ann_droo/status/1881432172382577082">post</a> 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…”</div>

Trading activity on Solana exploded this week after Trump launched his memecoin.


Coinbase battles Solana outages amid record trading volume

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“It’s clear we need to step up our game on Solana.”


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