You can tell things have really changed in the Solana space when a price around $13 is seen as cause for celebration by investors and supporters. But that’s the case today as SOL has rebounded strongly from its recent drop to nearly $8, and the reason for this week’s excitement appears to be a new dog-themed token called BONK.
Solana is up 16% in the past 24 hours to a price of around $12.90 as of this writing, according to data from CoinGecko, with a weekly gain of 19%. This morning, Solana hit $13.21 but has fallen slightly since that seven-day high.
Much of the chatter and hype in the Solana ecosystem over the past few days has focused on the rise of BONK, a Solana-based token with the same sort of “dogemem” theme as Dogecoin (DOGE) and the Ethereum-based token Shiba Inu (SHIB).
BONK launched a large-scale airdrop in late December, sending free tokens to a variety of token wallets Solana developer and NFT collectors. This included developers who have joined LamportDAOa hub for Solana builders as well as owners of NFTs from projects like DeGods and Famous Fox Federation.
A total of 100 trillion BONK tokens were minted. According to the BONK website, 50% of the total supply to developers, NFT owners, creators, and artists has been airdropped, with some of the remaining supply also included in vested contracts for BONK contributors.
Nothing makes me happier than seeing Solana users having fun. and boy are they having fun.
Keep it positive, inclusive, welcoming, aggressive, and fun! and the rest will work out in 2023.
— Raj (@rajgokal) January 2, 2023
Following the holiday airdrops that began on December 25th, BONK has become the growing focus of conversation and development among Solana developers and users on Crypto Twitter. Projects are being built with BONK and the token integrated, and the growing usage and excitement seems to be boosting both the price of BONK and SOL’s own value.
BONK is up 58% in the last 24 hours to a current price of $0.00000105, according to CoinGecko, with a trading volume of nearly $20 million over the span and a market cap of nearly $58 million. BONK showed more than 100% day-on-day gains this morning as the coin’s price continued to rise, but momentum has since waned.
It’s arguably the brightest sign the Solana market has seen in the past two months since the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX in early November torpedoed SOL’s price and dampened enthusiasm in the space.
SOL was trading as low as $37 just prior to FTX’s liquidity crisis, and FTX’s close association with Solana appears to have tumbled the price more than other leading cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Solana fell out of CoinGecko’s top 10 coins by market cap and briefly tumbled out of the top 20 last week as the price neared $8 for the first time in almost two years.
Even amidst this week’s price surge, SOL is still 95% below its all-time high of $260, set in November 2021. Solana rose in value in late 2021 but fell sharply last year due to major crypto market struggles, technical issues and finally the added impact of the FTX sinking.
Solana creators and developers are currently flocking to BONK, but meme coins and tokens are notoriously volatile and their swings can be short-lived.