2025 Retrospective: Solana enters the radar of Trump and Wall Street

Source: PortaldoBitcoin Original Title: Retrospectiva 2025: Solana enters Trump and Wall Street’s radar Original Link: The native token of Solana reached a new all-time high early in the year, but the 2025 story of the fast layer-one network was not entirely positive: SOL ended the year with a sharp decline, significantly less than the same period last year.

Still, the network gained media attention, achieved important technical improvements, launched another phone, and found a way to better integrate with traditional financial markets.

Trump launches a memecoin

The election of President Donald Trump sent a wave of positivity to the cryptocurrency markets in November 2024. And although speculators might have foreseen more flexible regulations and favorable market conditions, they could not have predicted that the president would launch his own memecoin — TRUMP — on the Solana blockchain.

But that’s exactly what happened on the night of January 17, a few days before Trump’s inauguration. That night, Solana cryptocurrency traders were surprised by the launch and promotion of the official TRUMP token on social media. After the initial shock and skepticism about the token’s validity, it quickly reached a multi-billion dollar fully diluted valuation, with trading volume in the billions.

The frenzy of the moment also impacted SOL, which followed TRUMP to reach its all-time high on January 19, when the network’s native token was traded at $293.31.

But the momentum soon dissipated, causing both TRUMP and SOL to fall from their peaks — gradually at first and more rapidly due to trade wars and Trump’s tariff announcements. On April 6, Solana had fallen nearly 64% from its top, trading at $105.77, the token’s lowest point of the year.

By December 15, SOL was trading at $127.70, a decline of over 56% from its all-time high. TRUMP holders performed much worse, with the president’s cryptocurrency falling nearly 93% from its peak, trading at $5.33 on December 15.

Alpenglow on the way

Although the SOL token’s price performed worse since its January high, the Solana network has been steadily improving throughout the year. In May, developers introduced Alpenglow — a new consensus protocol that could reshape network performance, improving transaction finality by at least 5 times.

In September, Solana validators officially voted in favor of implementing the network upgrade, with 98% of votes supporting it. After approval, Anza’s chief economist and co-author of the Alpenglow white paper, Max Resnick, commented: “Applications will become much more agile, and exchanges will be able to credit deposits more securely and much faster.”

The upgrade is just one of the major improvements planned, as its creators and developers race to make the layer-1 network the home of the “world’s most liquid markets.”

Alpenglow is expected to be deployed on the testnet by December, with mainnet launch scheduled for the first quarter of 2026.

Solana treasuries emerge

Despite becoming the sixth-largest crypto asset by market capitalization, Solana may still seem like a less attractive option for traditional investors who have had much more exposure to major brands like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

But the SOL token of the layer-one network made a big debut in traditional stock markets this year, as a wave of digital asset treasury (DATs) traded publicly began accumulating the token for their balance sheets. These companies followed in the footsteps of Bitcoin giant, which pioneered the wave of crypto treasuries.

In early April, a real estate technology company implemented a strategy to build its treasury focused on Solana. A consumer products company created a similar strategy in the same month.

Throughout the year, the two companies raised hundreds of millions of dollars combined and accumulated over 4 million SOL in total — about 2 million SOL each, now valued at around $284 million for each respective treasury.

For a while, this was enough to put them at the top of the list of publicly traded Solana treasury companies — until September, when a medical design company acquired nearly 7 million SOL using almost all the resources from a $1.65 billion PIPE.

But although the initial excitement around their creation led to peaks in stock prices, trading of the DATs began to unwind as the year progressed and crypto asset prices fell. One company’s shares traded as high as $22.70, then fell to $2.04 in early December — a 91% drop. Shares of other companies declined similarly, with some plunging about 84% from their peak.

Growing doubts remain whether they will ever recover. The interim CEO of a Solana treasury management company told Decrypt in November that he believes there is no sustainable model for DATs, adding that approval of staking ETFs “will end the competition.”

Wall Street joins the party

One of the last dominoes of traditional markets fell to Solana with the approval of spot and staking ETFs, allowing a broader range of investors access to the token.

Much anticipated, Solana funds received the “almost guaranteed” label earlier this year from ETF analysts, but government shutdown delayed their launch until the last week of October.

Nevertheless, the launch of a Bitwise ETF attracted over $69 million in inflows on its debut. Other ETFs were also approved. Shortly after, Solana launched its own leveraged ETF at 2x, allowing more adventurous investors to seek double the return of the asset.

Overall, ETF launches were well received by investors, resulting in a sequence of 21 days of net inflows after the first approval. By December 15, SOL ETFs had generated over $600 million in net inflows.

And although some predicted that the launch of these ETFs, and the resulting buying pressure on digital asset (DATs), would lead to an “epic” appreciation of the asset by year-end, that has not yet happened.