Solana Surges 16% as Doge-Themed SHIB Rival BONK Takes Off

By Andrew Hayward

You can tell that things have really changed in the Solana space when a price around $13 is seen by investors and supporters as a cause for celebration. But that’s the case today with SOL rebounding sharply from its recent fall to nearly $8, and the cause for this week’s buzz appears to be a new dog-themed token called BONK.

Solana is up 16% over the past 24 hours to a price of about $12.90 as of this writing, per data from CoinGecko, with a weekly gain of 19%. Earlier this morning, Solana hit $13.21, but has come down slightly since that seven-day peak.

Much of the chatter and hype in the Solana ecosystem over the last days has focused on the rise of BONK, a Solana-based token with the same kind of “doge meme” theme as Dogecoin (DOGE) and the Ethereum-based token Shiba Inu (SHIB).

BONK launched in late December with a large-scale airdrop, with free tokens sent to the wallets of a wide array of Solana developers and NFT collectors. This included developers that joined LamportDAO, a hub for Solana builders, as well as owners of NFTs from projects including DeGods and Famous Fox Federation.

Overall, 100 trillion BONK tokens have been minted. According to the BONK website, 50% of the total supply has been airdropped to developers, NFT owners, creators, and artists, with a chunk of the remaining supply also locked into vesting contracts for BONK contributors.

Following holiday airdrops that began on December 25, BONK has become the growing focus on conversation and development among Solana developers and users on Crypto Twitter. Projects are building with BONK and integrating the token, and the growing use and excitement appears to be fueling a surge in both BONK’s price and SOL’s own value.

BONK is up 58% over the past 24 hours to a current price of $0.00000105, according to CoinGecko, with nearly $20 million in trading volume over the span and a market cap of almost $58 million. Earlier this morning, BONK showed a more than 100% day-over-day rise as the coin’s price kept surging, but the momentum has softened since.

It’s arguably the brightest sign that the Solana market has seen in the last two months, since the early November collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX torpedoed SOL’s price and dampened enthusiasm in the space.

SOL traded for as much as $37 just before FTX’s liquidity crisis, and FTX’s close ties to Solana apparently crashed its price harder than other leading cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Solana fell out of CoinGecko’s top 10 coins by market cap and briefly crashed out of the top 20 last week as the price neared $8 for the first time in nearly two years.

Even amid this week’s price rise, SOL is still down 95% from its all-time high of $260 set in November 2021. Solana surged in value in late 2021, but fell sharply last year amid wider crypto market struggles, technical issues, and eventually the added impact of the FTX downfall.

Solana creators and developers are currently rallying around BONK, but meme coins and tokens are famously volatile and their surges can be short-lived.

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