Solana (SOL) officially surpassed XRP, becoming the 5th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. The highest market cap of SOL over the past 20 months was $33.7 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
The attraction of the DeFi ecosystem and memecoin trend are creating momentum for Solana. This week, total value locked (TVL) on Solana reached $2 billion for the first time since FTX collapse last November. Decentralized exchanges on this ecosystem are also popular with DeFi users with constantly increasing volume. On December 15, DEX Orca processed more than $750 million in trading volume, while last month was only about $100 million.
The wave of growth was sparked by Bonk, the memecoin that is commanding $1.2 billion in market capitalization. Bonk attracted users by airdropping those who own Solana’s Saga phone. As a result, Saga suddenly became a rare item, with prices sometimes reaching up to $5,000 per unit. Following Bonk, some projects also distribute free tokens for Saga owners like Access Protocol.
Besides Solana, memecoin also becomes a hot trend on many different ecosystems. Users are hunting for memecoins that can give them thousands of dollars in return. They often accumulate SOL and then convert them to their preferred memecoin. Once that memecoin increases in price, they will sell it and convert it back to SOL.
At the time of writing, SOL is trading at $83.85, up over 10% in the past 24 hours and still showing no signs of falling down. Its trading volume also increased sharply by 100% to $3.9 billion.
