Solana Cools Slightly as Bitcoin and Ethereum See Prices Slump

By Decrypt Staff

Solana, which soared past the $100 mark over the weekend, has cooled slightly.  At the time of this writing, SOL is trading for $109.20—down 11% in the past day.

But notably, SOL has remained above $100 since it edged past that milestone on Saturday. This increase is part of a broader positive trend in the crypto market, with Solana's market capitalization ranking it as the fourth largest crypto asset. That's spurred a lot of trading activity. In the past day, volume reached $5.6 billion, according to CoinGecko.

In fact, SOL did its highest 1-day volume of the year—$6.2 billion—and could be on track to beat that again today. It's now doing more than double the volume that Binance's BNB token has seen in the past day. BNB is a utility token for the Binance crypto exchange, which is used to trade and pay fees. Solana recently flipped BNB and took its spot as the fourth-largest asset by market capitalization on CoinGecko.

Meanwhile Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two largest crypto assets by market capitalization, have each taken a 4% haircut. At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading for $41,861.48 and Ethereum for $2,197.27.

Both BTC and ETH have rallied, thanks to anticipation around possible spot ETF approvals. A handful of Ethereum ETF applications have only recently been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but analysts expect that the SEC will issue a decision on several Bitcoin ETF applications in the next two weeks.

Solana's recent performance has been particularly noteworthy, considering its association with the fallen crypto empire FTX and the disgraced crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried. Despite the turmoil surrounding FTX's bankruptcy in November 2022, Solana has made a remarkable recovery, with an 880% increase year-to-date. This rebound is further highlighted by a significant rise in network activities and an increase in new addresses on the Solana network.

The institutional interest has been accompanied by lots of meme coin activity. Solana meme coin BONK has held onto its place in the top 100 assets, although it has fallen a bit since rising as high as 69. BONK hit an all-time high after it began trading on Coinbase. Despite its rapid rise, it's still an incredibly volatile meme coin. It's currently trading for $0.00001615, down 15% since yesterday.

There's an even newer dog-themed meme coin, too: Dogwifhat. It rose as high as $0.33 on Friday—an all-time high for the coin that had only started trading on December 13. However, it has since lost some of that momentum and is currently trading at $0.15, down 30% in the past 24 hours.

Editor’s note: This article was written with the assistance of AI. Edited and fact-checked by Stacy Elliott.

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