Solana is breaking records because of meme coins
3
The start of the new bull season has led to increased demand for small-cap coins. Crypto enthusiasts started buying meme coins in the hope that their prices would increase multifold, and the media published articles about successful investors becoming dollar millionaires in just a few days.
This time, the Solana network came under the most stress due to its ultra-low fees for minting and exchanging coins. In recent days, it's even overtaken Ethereum in terms of trading volume, which was at $3.4 billion for Solana versus Ethereum's $2.4 billion. The record high was on 15 March, when the figure reached $3.8 billion.
On this day alone, 9,943 new meme tokens were minted, which was also a record high for the network.
The speculative boom is so strong that some new coins have reached a volume of billions of dollars in a matter of days. The leader among them is Book of Meme (BOME), whose capitalisation exceeded $1.5 billion on 16 March and whose price rose from $0.001 to $0.026 in three days of trading.
These tokens carry no payload, and a single resourceful entrepreneur is often behind the issuance. Most experts compare such speculative waves to the ICO boom of 2017, when about 90% of investors exited projects in the red.
Solana validators were undoubtedly the winners. Daily commission revenue reached a record $5 million. By comparison, that figure didn't exceed $500,000 last year.
The native token, SOL, which is used in settlements between counterparties, also saw a 40% increase in March.
Statistics show that interest in 99% of freshly minted coins will wane in 3-6 months, leaving most investors with losses. Notable exceptions include Ethereum-based Shiba Inu, although it's also trading at a 64% discount from its 2021 high.
StormGain Analytical Group
(platform for trading, exchanging and storing cryptocurrency)