What’s to come for Solana under a Trump presidency?
SOL is up 19% on the week leading up to Trump’s inauguration
Chip Somodevilla / Shutterstock modified by Blockworks
This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
Donald Trump begins his second term as President of the United States on Monday, and after an expensive campaign season, crypto will finally get its president.
Bitcoin gained momentum following Trump’s victory, largely due to his pledge to create a strategic bitcoin reserve that would see the US Treasury Department accumulate nearly 5% of all bitcoin. But Trump taking office may still reap benefits for a less reserve asset and more use case focused network in Solana, industry participants say.
SOL is up 19% on the week leading up to Trump’s inauguration. The asset spiked 5% right after the New York Post reported the incoming president is “receptive to the idea” of a second strategic crypto reserve of tokens founded in the US like SOL, XRP, and USDC.
On that point, listen: I’m receptive to the idea of playing in the NBA, but that doesn’t mean you’ll see me suiting up for the Knicks this weekend. I think Paradigm’s vice president Alexander Grieve was prescient on the America-first crypto reserve.
“View such stories with skepticism until it comes from [Trump] or his staff,” Grieve wrote in an X post yesterday. “And question why such details might be in the press in [the] first place—[and] who might have put them there.”
There was other reporting on the Trump-crypto front that felt much more plausible this week however. Reuters reported that under President Trump, the Securities and Exchange Commission would “potentially freeze” crypto litigation that does not come with allegations of fraud.
The SEC sued Coinbase and Binance in 2023, alleging that the crypto exchanges operated as unregistered broker-dealers for facilitating the trading of SOL, among other tokens.
In defining SOL as a security, Gary Gensler’s SEC essentially said that US firms that exchange the token are breaking the law. This is because it has only given out two of its special purpose broker-dealer licenses, and neither of those recipients offer SOL. The SEC already dropped its Solana allegations from the Binance suit, but if the Coinbase enforcement were to also be frozen, then a potential major obstacle to the network’s adoption would be cleared.
With Solana’s unregistered security issues seemingly being put to bed, some are already looking ahead to SOL ETFs that would see regulated Solana investment vehicles trade on public stock exchanges. Polymarket bettors give SOL ETFs a 75% chance of being approved in 2025, although Sol Strategies CEO Leah Wald said she doesn’t expect Solana ETFs to be approved “anytime soon” in a recent interview with Blockworks’ Katherine Ross.
There’s also arguably a more intangible benefit to come for Solana under a Trump presidency and friendlier regulatory regime.
When SOL’s regulatory status was uncertain, developers largely focused on facilitating memecoin trading, which was “effectively a form of protest” against regulatory unclarity coming from the SEC, Titus Capilnean, vice president of go-to-market at Civic Technologies, said.
With Trump in office, crypto “may see a shift from pure speculation to utility-driven growth as builders gain confidence to launch more sophisticated applications without fear of regulatory backlash,” Capilnean said.
Many US Solana builders have told me over the last year that with regulatory clarity, their products would stand a much better chance of finding product-market fit. Here’s their chance to prove it.
Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:
- The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
- 0xResearch: Alpha in your inbox. Think like an analyst.
