Solana Regains 2-Year High as BONK, WIF Meme Coin Volume Surges

By Stacy Elliott

When Bitcoin set a new all-time high earlier this week, it pushed Solana—and most other major digital assets—to the highest price it's been for a long time.

The $139.96 it saw on Tuesday, March 5 was the highest SOL has been since January 2022.

But now, even though Bitcoin has slipped below $67,000, the Solana price has pushed past the high it saw on Tuesday and erased the dip it took when Bitcoin crashed. At the time of writing, Solana is changing hands for $141.15 after having gained 6% since yesterday and 7% since last week, according to CoinGecko.

Yesterday saw sky-high trading volume as $9.5 billion worth of SOL changed hands. In fact, there have only been three other days in early September 2021 when the volume was higher. At the time, U.S. comedian Steve Harvey had just changed his Twitter profile picture to a Solana Monkey Business NFT and sent the price soaring to nearly $200.

The current swell of volume has no doubt been helped along by the frenzy over meme coins, like BONK and Dogwifhat. Together the two meme coins saw more than $1 billion worth of trading volume yesterday, according to CoinGecko data.

Their dominance in the Solana meme coin ecosystem really can't be overstated. BONK and WIF each saw at least 3 times more volume than the next most popular Solana meme coin, Myro.

Another meme craze has been a batch of goofy presidential candidate-themed coins—like BODEN, TREMP, and DANOLD. Risk-loving traders who bought up the meme coins earlier this week saw it soar as high as $8.98 yesterday. But as with many meme coins, the rally was short-lived. At the time of writing, BODEN is trading for $0.0000000001384.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yankovenko has even been joking that if the Democratic National Party would do well to use "Boden wif hat" in marketing and campaign materials.

But meme coins can transcend their joke origins, he said. Earlier this morning he weighed in on the legitimacy of meme coins in response to a Twitter thread from Lumida Wealth CEO Ram Ahluwalia on the topic.

The investment advisor CEO had been arguing that making money with onchain digital assets, like Dogwifhat, is no less legitimate than trading traditional assets.

"At a certain level of economic security a meme coin becomes a culture coin," Yakavenko wrote in response, "and at another level of economic security a culture coin becomes a store of value."

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