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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some said the high failure rate was mostly due to bots spamming the network.
A more charitable take was that all Ethereum challengers, including Solana, still have some growing up to do.
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.
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