Solana has made a surprise jump, even surpassing giants Bitcoin and Ethereum in popularity among those who are new to the sector.
The Rise of Solana
This rise of Solana is not just an impression; it is supported by concrete data. A recent report titled "Charting The Tides", a collaboration between cex Gemini and the analytics platform Glassnode, has underlined this phenomenon. The report has underlined how the pace of adoption of Solana, the native token of the Solana blockchain, is unmatched compared to its main competitors, Bitcoin and Ethereum.
In the present paper, the authors estimate the "realized market cap" by closely following the transaction on each blockchain: they count the number of active wallets-a sort of digital wallet to store cryptocurrencies-in the seven days prior to gather. They have also come up with this notion of "hot achieved cap" that would point out the exact moment when a movement of capital on a blockchain took place.
This indicator only marked the beginning of the trend for Solana in October 2023, which already speaks of steady growth, not just a momentary peak.
Besides these more complicated data, some more "direct" indicators have come to corroborate this trend. The number of daily active addresses on the Solana blockchain has long bypassed those on Bitcoin and Ethereum, amounting to as much as 12.3 million, which is about 16 times more than Bitcoin and 24 times as much as Ethereum. This denotes a very high level of activity and interaction with the Solana blockchain.
The New Crypto Audience and the Memecoin Phenomenon
One of the main drivers of Solana's growth seems to be the appeal of memecoins. These types of cryptocurrencies have been in a real boom this year, 2024, and are a central part of today's crypto market, particularly on the blockchain of Solana. Memecoins are way more popular on Solana than on Ethereum or elsewhere.
Memecoins are pretty volatile
To put this into perspective, since January 2024 up until today, the Solana-based memecoins BONK and WIF have 10x outgrown the Ethereum-based memecoins SHIB and Pepe. This demonstrates very strong interest and inflow of capital into the Solana ecosystem memecoins.
But the most significant element seems to be the arrival of a "new audience" in the cryptocurrency world. This new audience, interested in the growth of Bitcoin but also in phenomena such as the political rise of Trump in the United States, seems to find fertile ground in Solana for the opportunities that it offers.The political memecoins $TRUMP and $MELANIA were finally launched, which catalyzed this interest arguably. Curiously enough, the strongest growth of Solana is not in the United States but among the Asia-Pacific audience, which might suggest a global spread of the phenomenon.
The conclusion is that Solana currently constitutes a very successful moment, favored by popularity among new retail investors and the memecoin boom.
It also seems that its speed, combined with very low transaction fees and a quickly growing ecosystem, has been quite crucial for its success. To what extent such a trend might consolidate over time, and the responses of Bitcoin and Ethereum in the face of this new player, remain a question.
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