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Degens and crypto fans were spreading good vibes at the start of the week, which closed out the prior month setting an all-time monthly high for Solana activity across decentralized exchanges (DEXs). March saw over $58 billion traded, blasting past the prior monthly high of $28.5 billion in December.
Memecoins were the wind beneath Solana’s wings: whimsical tokens like Dogwifhat (WIF), Bonk (BONK), Book of Meme (BOME), and Slerf (SLERF) drove significant action.
Doodles co-founder Jordan “Poopie” Castro was also feeling festive, announcing in a blog post that he had created a POOP meme coin. Given the affiliation of the prominent NFT influencer—and, presumably, the perennial popularity of poop jokes—$POOP popped off at first.
Some Crypto Twitter residents were quick to point out that the feces-themed token had no official connection to Doodles, although most meme coins are unofficial and have no connection to the person or project they’re named after.
No new token and airdrop scheme is without controversy, however. Many POOP watchers were rattled by on-chain data that suggested that the distribution of the token was not especially equitable. Some wallet addresses logged substantial bowel movements before the meme coin was publicly announced.
It arrived in wallets tied to doodles 40 mins before his announcement tweet, I saw my doodles wallets held it and the contract was locked. I loaded the token ID into photon and pressed buy when I saw a green candle
— Pranksy 📦 (@pranksy) March 31, 2024
Like most meme coins, the flurry of mirth and mayhem was short-lived. Emerging at $0.0176 last Sunday, it’s now trading at $0.002737—a fraction of its initial value.
The frothy frenzy over meme coins understandably focused a lot of attention and activity on Solana, which started to buckle under the strain. It opened the door to fans of Base to highlight its nascent meme coin offerings, the Coinbase-incubated blockchain seeing “parabolic” growth.
Even some Base skeptics found themselves drawn toward the ecosystem.
me 3 days ago – base season? can you guys just shut up, you just missed sol
me today – were buying memecoins on a base L3 memechain strap in boys
— moon (@MoonOverlord) March 31, 2024
Wednesday brought “Wormhole Wednesday,” with hundreds of millions of W tokens were promised to more than 400,000 total wallets. Substantial allocations were set aside for early users of several other chains, and the governance token was was also listed by several cryptocurrency exchanges.
W is now live, completing step one of the token’s launch roadmap ✅
Through a strategic rollout, W will become a natively multichain token, leveraging the strengths of both Solana and EVMs, while introducing the industry’s first multichain governance system.
Learn more below ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/S12T7ig9WR
— Wormhole (@wormhole) April 5, 2024
Another prominent governance token was also launched this week: $ENA from Ethena Labs. The debut came with an expansion of its yield-earning stablecoin, the synthetic dollar token USDe, and the addition of Bitcoin to its pool of backing assets.
Excited to announce that Ethena has onboarded BTC as a backing asset to USDe
This is a crucial unlock which will enable USDe to scale significantly from the current $2bn supply pic.twitter.com/FOZRWBrVZV
— Ethena Labs (@ethena_labs) April 4, 2024
Venture capitalist and Bitcoin fan Nic Carter seized the opportunity to say, “I told you so,” noting that he foresaw cryptocurrencies being “used in tandem with derivatives exchanges to create non-bank, Bitcoin-Backed dollars.”
The launch was, by all accounts, successful, hitting an early market capitalization of $1.4 billion.
Ethena can maybe even survive and thrive at a 6% rate in the long term, depending on the Fed funds rate
Worth noting, that Ethena is probably improving the efficiency of crypto derivative markets. Maybe it was inefficient that we had to pay so much in funding rates to go… https://t.co/ARj6Len7Ly
— BitMEX Research (@BitMEXResearch) April 6, 2024
The price of $ENA rose as high as $1.22 in its mid-week debut, settling to $1.10 at time of writing.
On Thursday, the Crypto Twitter narrative rolled back to Solana, which was still straining to keep up with demand. Blockchain watchers reported a range of transaction failure rates—all clearly too high for a network promising to provide a future-proof platform.
Solana users demand better: network congestion and transaction failures are unbearable.$SOL must step up to meet the demands of a bullish market with its current 76.8% transaction failure rate. pic.twitter.com/F0vVpUtyMj
— Kyledoops (@kyledoops) April 5, 2024
Some said the high failure rate was mostly due to bots spamming the network.
99% of these “failed transactions” are arbitrage bots spamming.
Solid engagement farming though with this tweet. https://t.co/b5Tt9gsCnC
— ◢ J◎e McCann 🧊 (@joemccann) April 5, 2024
A more charitable take was that all Ethereum challengers, including Solana, still have some growing up to do.
Around 75% of Solana transactions failing.
Let me start by saying to be 100% fair, I was trading a newly launched token the other day on Cardano, and the transactions took longer than I would have liked there as well.
All these chains have a ton of progress to be made.
While… pic.twitter.com/aSBSzfBqfe
— Dan Gambardello (@cryptorecruitr) April 4, 2024
Solana fans, meanwhile, framed the network issues as an expected part of a blockchain operating at scale, expressing confidence that Solana would—again—come out the other side stronger than ever.
Solana sees traffic and demand that no other network has ever come close to — it’s a stress test of the whole system. These are exactly the type of stress tests you cannot model in simulation, you have to just see how stuff works in prod and adapt.
The scaling and bug squashing…
— Austin Federa | 🇺🇸 (@Austin_Federa) April 6, 2024
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Source: https://decrypt.co/225112/this-week-in-crypto-twitter-meme-coins-and-base-are-booming-while-solana-strains
