This Week in Coins: Bonk Continues Surge With Solana Hype, Bitcoin Dips

By Mat Di Salvo

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.

It's been another great week for meme coin Bonk (BONK) and the network it runs on.

BONK seemed unstoppable this week—just as it did last week. The dog-themed meme coin is trading for $0.00002364 as of writing, according to CoinGecko. That's a solid rise of 67% over the past seven days, and an utterly bonkers 441% rise over the last two weeks. If you jumped into the fray a month ago, you'd have made your investment back six times over.

Traders were also crazy about Solana last month with investors pouring money into SOL and its related products.

Why? Because people were betting on the cryptocurrency's collapse during the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, but a short squeeze—when the price of an asset shoots up unexpectedly due to forced buying from short sellers—led to the price of SOL to blow up.

The asset still has some juice in its rally, too: it was up over 6% during the past week and is now trading for $74.11, a more than 20% gain since the start of December.

BONK, a token which runs on SOL, has experienced tremendous gains due to Solana's run. Coinbase, America's biggest crypto exchange, also said it would list the token this week.

But other meme coins haven't done as well. Dogecoin (DOGE), the 11th biggest digital asset, is down more than 3% over the past day. Over the week, it has dropped even more—by 8%—and is trading for $0.094.

Meanwhile, Shiba Inu (SHIB) saw a precipitous plunge late this week by 4%. It's still up over 17% over two weeks, though.

Other altcoins haven't experienced much price action. But Avalanche (AVAX) is the exception: this week it rose to become the 10th biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, overtaking DOGE.

Institutional investors are eyeing up the asset after banking giant JP Morgan's blockchain Onyx made use of the Avalanche blockchain subnet in a proof-of-concept trial. It's trading at $41.77 now, with solid green across the calendar: up 3% since yesterday, up 27% since last week, and up 78% for the last 30 days.

Bitcoin is down nearly 4% over the past seven days and is trading for $42,190 as hype surrounding the approval of an exchange-traded fund (ETF) seems to have calmed.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.

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