Solana reduced to a meme chain? They are the ones who hold up TVL

Airdrops are brewing for new infrastructure.

Written by: Weilin

Priced at US$599, Saga, the Web3 mobile phone officially launched by the Solana blockchain network, has been selling poorly since its launch in May this year. However, in December, the official airdropped 30 million BONK tokens to each mobile phone buyer. These BONK The tokens are worth US$700 upon receipt, and the phone buyer not only repays the money but also makes a profit.

As a result of this stimulus, Saga mobile phones were sold at a 500% premium on eBay, with orders going for $3,000.

The “bait” BONK of Soga mobile phone is also the fuse that has recently activated the Solana chain. This Meme coin (meme concept) with the image of a dog as its logo has risen from around US$0.0000038 to a maximum of US$0.000034 in 30 days, directly " 0" has increased nearly 10 times. Although it has fallen back to US$0.000015 recently, the increase within the month is still 290%.

Low prices and high increases can stimulate the nerves of players in the currency circle. BONK is also said to have completely ignited the Meme craze of the Solana chain, with “Shiba Inu”-themed WIF tokens, “Dragon”-themed SILLY and other animals A series of Meme tokens were launched one after another, and funds subsequently flowed into the Solana chain. The total value of crypto assets on the chain (TVL) increased to 1.475 billion US dollars within the month, an increase of 120% during the month.

The active trading of Meme on the Solana chain has also driven the demand for Gas “SOL” on the chain. Coupled with the promising secondary market, the price of SOL exceeded 100 within a month, reaching a maximum of $113.27, an increase of 92.67%.

There is a voice saying that “Solana is becoming a Meme chain”, but if you take a closer look at the transaction volume and project distribution of this chain, you will find that funds are still in the DeFi infrastructure, including decentralized trading applications DEX, lending DApps, For applications such as liquidity management, some new infrastructure protocols have begun to appear. In addition, applications such as Metaverse and games have also retained some funds.

When the Solana chain came back to life, Meme’s “wealth effect” brought indispensable attention. The key to Solana’s healthy life is still the construction of on-chain applications, and some new applications have begun to appear.

Meme coins collective disco

If you are keen to “dig gold” in the “altcoin” market of crypto assets, you must have heard of “Silly Dragon” recently. Its token is called SILLY. Since its launch on December 5 , it facilitated a transaction volume of US$30 million on the decentralized trading application (DEX) Jupiter Swap within 2 days. The current price is US$0.12. When it was first launched on the secondary market, there were two "0"s before the decimal point.

The image of the “silly dragon” first appeared on the clothes of Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. At the end of October this year, he wore this clothes at Solana’s Breakpoint 2023 annual conference. Appear. Two months later, the image had its own meme coin, SILLY, and its creator remained anonymous.

Although inspired by Anatoly’s clothes, SILLY is not the most popular Meme coin on the Solana chain. The real spark is BONK, which was created a year ago. After nearly a year of “zombie” status, SILLY was launched in December this year. From the 13th to the 15th, this old Meme announced that it would officially launch a large-scale airdrop for the Solana ecosystem. One of the targets is the purchaser of the Web3 mobile Saga launched by Solana.

BONK price data collected by CoinGecko

During the BONK airdrop plan, the American crypto asset exchange Coinbase was the most astute. It launched BONK on December 15, pushing the price up by 50% within 24 hours, reaching a maximum of $0.000014, and facilitating a transaction volume of over $2.35 billion.

The Meme craze on the Solana chain has just started. WIF (Dogwifhat), PONKE, Popcat, Eggdog, and Melon Dog all came out, just like an “animal currency” meeting. Among them, WIF was launched during Thanksgiving. The Meme character is a Shiba Inu wearing a knitted hat. The token was born on the Solana chain on December 18 with an initial market value of US$100 million. By December 24, the market value doubled. More than $220 million.

Meme coins gather in Solana chain‍‍‍‍‍

During this period, the most direct impact of the Meme craze on the Solana chain was to push up the total value of encrypted assets locked up (TVL) of the chain.

DefiLlama data shows that on December 1, the TVL of the Solana chain was US$670 million. By December 27, this number had become US$1.475 billion, an increase of 120.14%.

Also increasing simultaneously is the price of the Gas token SOL on the Solana chain, which rose from US$59 on December 1 to a maximum of US$121, also doubled, and is now back around US$110.

New application “airdrop” surges

From a time perspective, the inflow of funds on the Solana chain is indeed consistent with the active and savvy users of Meme coins during this period who want to obtain popular chips at lower prices directly from the chain or within the application. Some people wait for centralized exchanges to pay attention to these Meme, thereby obtaining new increases; others directly provide liquidity within the DeFi application on the chain to receive application rewards.

These have driven the demand for Gas token SOL. But if you take a closer look, what really supports the activity of transactions on the Solana chain is still the infrastructure, which is an important carrier of funds and traffic.

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Top 10 projects with 24-hour transaction volume on the Solana chain on December 26

According to DappRadar data, judging from the 24-hour transaction volume, established projects in DeFi, games, metaverse, governance and other sectors on the Solana chain have maintained a very high level of activity, including Chainlink, Aave, Jito, Raydium, STEPN , Helium. These are the keys to ensuring the healthy development of Solana.

In the list of the Top 10 trading volume in 24 hours, there are actually only 3 Meme projects.

The decentralized oracle network ChainLink is almost the infrastructure of all blockchain infrastructures, because on-chain applications require such smart contracts to connect off-chain data. On December 26th alone, it generated a value of 6.17 on the Solana chain. The transaction volume is US$213 million; the lending application Aave ranks second with a transaction volume of US$213 million. The sneaker game STEPN and the metaverse game Star Atlas also have more than one million dollars in funding.

It is worth mentioning that the recently popular decentralized mobile device network provider DePIN project “Helium” is also on the top 24-hour transaction volume list on the Sonala chain, contributing a transaction volume of US$29.83 million. Helium is the largest DePIN project on the chain.

It can be seen that although Meme coins are popular, the capital activity on the Solana chain is not only concentrated on Meme. And all old players in Web3 finance know that Meme is hot enough, but it will not last long.

Solana’s founding team is also thinking about what will happen after the Meme carnival.

“I am very happy that BONK has performed well. Let the upcoming DeFi tokens also achieve great success.” On November 20, the post of @R89Capital, a KOL in the crypto circle, attracted the attention of Solana co-founder Anatoly, who asked a question, “Do you think Meme coins will always be just Memes (a completely acceptable outcome)? Or do you think we can build a global development movement based on rewards for people to perform some kind of ‘task-based’ work?”

Placeholder VC partner Chris Burniske believes that “if done correctly, cryptoassets will allow valuable labor to be more closely integrated with the capital it creates. So, while Meme coins are interesting, I focus on turning the latter situation into Reality."

What Chris is concerned about is indeed happening. Some new DeFi applications and NFT projects are emerging and starting to encourage users to interact. On the chain, interactions often leave traces, and these interaction records will be the “tickets” for interactors to obtain application airdrop rewards in the future.

These relatively early applications include:

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New applications on the Solana chain

Among them, derivatives trading application Zeta Markets has established a “Z-Score” points system, lending application Kamino also has points settings, and AMM application Meteora has confirmed its airdrop.

The Meme craze has once again attracted the market’s attention to Solana. This chain has begun to recover from the shadow of the FTX thunderstorm, and traffic and funds are pouring into this chain again. The next test is whether more interesting applications can take over or even retain these factors. Traffic from Meme.