Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for decoding
Degens and crypto fans spread good vibes at the beginning of the week, ending the month with a new monthly record for Solana activity across decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Transaction value in March exceeded $58 billion, surpassing December's previous monthly high of $28.5 billion.
Meme coins were a downstream wind SolanaWings of: Whimsical tokens like Dogwifhat (WIF), Bonk (BONK), Book of Meme (BOME), and Slerf (SLERF) have sparked significant action.
Doodles co-founder Jordan “Poopie” Castro was also in the festive mood, announcing in a blog post that he had created a POOP meme coin. Given its affiliation with prominent NFT influencers, and perhaps the enduring popularity of poop jokes, $POOP jumped out first.
While most meme coins are unofficial and have no connection to the person or project for which they are named, some crypto Twitter residents believe that the fecal-themed token has an official connection to Doodles. I was quick to point out that there wasn't one.
However, the new token and airdrop scheme is not without controversy. Many his POOP watchers were upset by on-chain data suggesting that the distribution of tokens was not particularly fair. Some wallet addresses recorded large amounts of defecation before the meme coin was publicly announced.
As with most meme coins, the merriment and mayhem didn't last long. It was trading at $0.0176 last Sunday and is now trading at $0.002737, a fraction of its initial price.
The frothy frenzy surrounding meme coins naturally focused a lot of attention and activity on Solana, which began to warp under the strain. This opened the door for fans of Base, highlighting its early meme coin offering, and the Coinbase-incubated blockchain experiencing “parabolic” growth.
Some base skeptics were drawn to the ecosystem.
Wednesday brought “wormhole wednesday”, hundreds of millions of W tokens were pledged to a total of over 400,000 wallets. Large allocations were secured for early users on several other chains, and Governance's tokens were also listed on several crypto exchanges.
This week also saw the launch of another prominent governance token, Ethena Labs’ $ENA. This debut comes alongside the expansion of the synthetic dollar token USDe, a highly profitable stablecoin, and the addition of Bitcoin to the pool of underlying assets.
Venture capitalist and Bitcoin fan Nick Carter seized the opportunity to state, “I said so,” that the cryptocurrency is “working with derivatives exchanges to create non-bank Bitcoin-backed dollars.” He predicted that it would be used.
By all accounts, the launch was a success, with an initial market capitalization of $1.4 billion.
The price of $ENA rose as high as $1.22 during its mid-week debut, but has settled at $1.10 at the time of writing.
On Thursday, the buzz on crypto Twitter returned to Solana, which is still struggling to keep up with demand. Blockchain watchers have reported varying transaction failure rates, all clearly too high for a network that promises to provide a future-proof platform.
Some say the high failure rate is primarily due to bots spamming the network.
A more charitable view was that all Ethereum challengers, including Solana, still need to grow.
Meanwhile, Solana fans framed the network's problems as an expected part of a blockchain operating at scale and expressed confidence that Solana would once again stand up to its opponents, stronger than ever.
