Solana, the third most popular blockchain, in recent weeks thanks to AI memecoins, artificial intelligence and a new cryptographic niche derived from Internet jokes. Running Solana, the original token of the Solana blockchain on which many memecoins are built, has sent above $175 for the first time in two months.
While the broader crypto market continues to consolidate this week after early October lows, Solana’s gains have outpaced those of the largest cryptocurrencies. Sole is beating Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and others CoinDesk 20 index. Solana is up 19% over the past seven days, while Bitcoin is up 0.8%, while Ethereum and XRP are down 3%.
Solana’s price action this month, which it touts as an alternative to Ethereum’s high fees and slow transaction rates, has brought SOL to an all-time high against Ethereum, with 1 Sol equal to 0.07 Ethereum, and the highest price in Bitcoin since August
AI memecoins have captivated the crypto community since Goatseus MaximusA new memecoin sparked conversation about the intersection of the two technologies. The frenzy has sent daily active users of the Solana blockchain to a record of nearly 9 million, and transaction fees reached a record high of $4.5 million on Wednesday, according to DeFiLlama data.
Goatseus Maximus or GOAT was created on October 10th by an anonymous developer known as Pump.fun and gained a lot of attention when Marc Andreessen sponsored the Truth Terminal AI bot. accepted on X
The token, created by coining AI bots with goat memes, has reached a market cap of $722 million since its inception two weeks ago and has sparked a spate of new AI-created memecoins.
The sector has reached a market cap of more than $2 billion, up 24% in the last day, according to CoinGecko. Other Solana-based memecoins are also on the horizon. “Popcat” and “cat in a dogs world” are both up more than 20% this week.
Another factor in Solana’s recent run may be his consistently fast pace expansion of decentralized finance or DeFi.
Solana is up more than 450% this year. Since January, the total value locked in Solana — the US dollar value of digital assets locked through DeFi — has nearly quadrupled to $6.9 billion.
