Illustration by Mitchell Priefer for Decryption
Degens and cryptocurrency enthusiasts were posting positive vibes at the start of the week, which ended the previous month marking an all-time high monthly level for Solana activity across decentralized exchanges (DEXs). March saw over $58 billion traded, surpassing the previous monthly high of $28.5 billion in December.
Memecoins were the wind beneath her SolanaWings: Tokens such as Dogwifhat (WIF), Bonk (BONK), Book of Meme (BOME), and Slerf (SLERF) have generated significant movement.
Doodles co-founder Jordan “Poopie” Castro was also feeling festive, announcing in a blog post that he had created the POOP meme coin. Due to the affiliation of a prominent NFT influencer — and presumably the enduring popularity of poop jokes — $POOP first came about.
Some Crypto Twitter users were quick to point out that the poop-themed token has no official connection to the doodle, though most coins are unofficial and have no connection to the person or project they are named after.
However, no new tokenization and airdrop scheme is without controversy. Many POOP observers were alarmed by on-chain data suggesting that the token distribution was not particularly fair. Some wallet addresses recorded large bowel movements before the meme coin was announced publicly.
Like most meme coins, the wave of fun and chaos was short-lived. After debuting at $0.0176 last Sunday, it is now trading at $0.002737 – a small fraction of its initial value.
The frothy coin frenzy has understandably focused a lot of attention and activity on Solana, who has begun to crack under the pressure. It opened the door for Base fans to highlight emerging cryptocurrency offerings, and the blockchain incubated by Coinbase saw “parabolic” growth.
Even some Al Qaeda skeptics have found themselves drawn to the ecosystem.
Bring Wednesday”Wormhole Wednesday“, with hundreds of millions of W tokens promised for over 400,000 total wallets. Large early adopter allocations have been made to several other chains, and the governance token has also been listed on several cryptocurrency exchanges.
Another notable governance token was also launched this week: $ENA from Ethena Labs. The debut came with the expansion of its yielding stablecoin, the synthetic dollar token USDe, and the addition of Bitcoin to its portfolio of supporting assets.
Venture capitalist and bitcoin fan Nick Carter took the opportunity to say: “I told you so,” noting that he expects cryptocurrencies to be used “in conjunction with derivatives exchanges to create non-bank, bitcoin-backed dollars.”
The launch was a success by all accounts, with an early market capitalization of $1.4 billion.
$ENA rose to $1.22 in its mid-week debut, and has settled at $1.10 at the time of writing.
On Thursday, the Crypto Twitter story came back to Solana, which was still struggling to keep up with demand. Blockchain observers have reported a range of transaction failure rates, all of which are clearly extremely high for a network that promises to provide a future-proof platform.
Some said the high failure rate was mostly due to bots spamming the network.
What was even more fortunate was that all of Ethereum's competitors, including Solana, still had some time to go.
Meanwhile, Solana's fans have framed the network's issues as an expected part of a blockchain operating at scale, expressing confidence that Solana will – once again – come out the other side stronger than ever.
