Solana steals the show
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 18th March 2024.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
Don’t invest in crypto unless you’re prepared to lose all the money you invest. This is a high-risk investment and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong.
What’s up
On The Wings Of Network-Spawned Memecoins, Solana Is Flying High
Solana spent yesterday, St. Patrick's Day, riding on a float and then going on a bender. The party has not stopped.
Outfitted head to toe in green (+7.6% in 24 hours), the network's native SOL crossed $200. Such a lofty per-coin mark hasn't been met since November of 2021.
SOL, in terms of total market capitalization ($92 billion), is now the fourth-largest digital asset, overtaking BNB.
"Network activity is likely being driven by the meme coin frenzy," CoinDesk said. "Scores of newly issued tokens boast trading volumes of tens of millions, showcasing network usage and demand for blockspace."
An array of Solana network measures – volume, wallets, TVL and fees – reached lifetime peaks over the weekend.
What's down
Bitcoin Rebounds After Rocky Weekend
Solana is now 20% off its record high of roughly $260 reached Nov. 6, 2021.
Bitcoin's all-time high of about $73,740 came last Thursday on the back of robust ETF inflows. Heading into the weekend, though, some unexpected, and very unwelcome, inflation news helped send the largest crypto to below $70K while traders nervously digested reports of a large BTC transfer into Binance's hot wallet.
BTC did green up in the past 24 hours, reaching $68,200 as of 8 a.m. (EST). BTC was sub-$67K only three days ago.
It’s down 5% since last Monday.
What's next
Sizzling Solana Looks To Sustain Comet-Like Streak
In the thick of the crypto comeback spurred on by the Bitcoin ETF craze there's been a Solana-based memecoin mania. Might this latter trend be reaching a crescendo?
Over the weekend, Solana memecoins generated $100 million in pre-sales (CryptoSlate).
One of these coins, NAP, was created by a digital artist, Kero; a fellow NFT creator, Dekadente, raised $30M worth of SOL in the pre-sale of a memecoin dubbed SMOLE. But the Solana-run memecoin that everybody's talking about right now is SLERF. It garnered $10M ahead of today's botched launch in which the developer supposedly inadvertently burned half-a-billion tokens designated for pre-sale participants.
Well, experts have warned that participation in a pre-sale doesn’t guarantee a token allocation.
“Bidding ponzis,” is how Ethereum chronicler Anthony Sassano described memecoin pre-sales.
“People can do what they want with their money but sending money to a ‘memecoin pre-sale that has a 99.9% chance of rugging is actually just dumb as hell,” Sassano said.
The popularity of memecoin pre-sales soared after the unexpected success of BOME which gained 1,000% soon after its release last week.
Checking in on BOME, we find a total market cap of $744 million, enough to make it CoinGecko's 139th-largest token. BOME has been as low as $0.00005848 and as high as $0.02689.
Solana-run BONK, which helped kick-start this whole craze and which reached its ATH on March 4th, has a market cap of $1.7 billion. BONK is the 69th-largest token, per CoinGecko.
Solana's boomtown of an ecosystem has the crypto community envisioning the possibility of a new record high for SOL. In the past month, daily Solana network fees have surged to $3.8 million, a 754% increase. Trading volumes on decentralized exchanges running within the network have also reached a zenith, hitting $3.8 billion in a recently concluded 30-day period, up 430% versus the prior month.
If Solana sustains current activity levels and avoids technical setbacks, U.Today said, "SOL will be in an exceptional position."
