Solana activity flips Ethereum amid memecoin craze, even as txs fail

Solana network activity surpassed Ethereum over the weekend amid a scramble for Solana-based memecoins — causing the network to struggle to keep up. On March 16, Solana’s total trading volume soared past Ethereum, reaching $3.52 billion and beating out the daily volume on the Ethereum network by more than $1.1 billion, per DefiLlama.

On March 14, degens began piling into a new memecoin called Book of Meme (BOME), which rallied from near-zero to a market capitalization of $1.45 billion in just 56 hours. Another memecoin dubbed “$NAP” (NAP) also garnered significant attention from traders, rallying from a market cap of around $20 million to over $330 million in less than 18 hours. The price of Solana (SOL) also rallied alongside the huge uptick in network activity, with SOL currently trading at $200, up 7.6% over the last week and 38.4% in the last month, per CoinGecko data. Solana’s recent gains have also allowed the coin to overtake Binance’s BNB coin to become the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap at $88.5 billion - nearly $12 billion above its former top market cap of $76.5 billion, which it reached on Nov. 7, 2021.

However, the Solana network struggled to keep up with the influx of activity, with many users across X complaining about frequent instances of failed or missing transactions. According to Solana Validator data, cited by pseudonymous user “Dagnum” on X, Solana’s ping time ran between 20 and 40 seconds at 8 pm UTC on March 16, resulting in approximately 50% of transactions failing for around 20 minutes.

Source: CoinTelegraph

SOL is in the Top 3 derivatives trends, with short liquidations twice times higher than long in the last 24H.

Total BTC Open Interest: $34.29B (-1.27%%)

BTC Volume (24H): $84.40B (-6.86%)

BTC Liquidations (24H): $38.53M (Long)/$35.39M (Short)

Long/Short Ratio: 50.54%/49.46%

Funding Rate: 0.0217%

Total ETH Open Interest: $13.00B (-2.98%)

ETH Volume (24H): $35.57B (-4.46%)

ETH Liquidations (24H): $24.38M (Long)/$32.59M (Short)

Long/Short Ratio: 50.75%/49.25%

Funding Rate: 0.0223%

BONE: $825.10K (+140.67%)

OM: $21.15M (+90.95%)

GAL: $27.27M (+57.34%)