Solana’s price skyrockets as new dog coin BONK gains community hype • TechCrunch

Last week, Solana (SOL) fell to its lowest level since February 2021. But its price rose more than 12% in the past 24 hours on Tuesday after nearly nine days of consecutive losses that took its price to about $8 on Friday.

Amid Solana’s move, the two largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, bitcoin and ether, both changed by less than 1% in the past 24 hours, showing some stability.

Solana has been unstable for a number of reasons over the past few weeks, including one of its main backers being now-disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and major NFT projects planning to leave its blockchain.

But some attribute the recent spike in interest from members of the Solana community to Bonk (BONK), a new meme token that dumped around 50% of its 56 trillion token supply to users last week. Airdrop occurs when a cryptocurrency sends a free supply of its token to a number of crypto wallets in a way to gain users or reward loyal community members. In this case, Bonk was dropped

“We’re here to reward everyone who made #Solana what she is today,” the Solana-focused dog play tweeted about a month ago before gaining traction.

About 20% of Bonk’s total airdrop supply went to Solana NFT collections, which consisted of nearly 300,000 individual NFTs. The shiba inu dog-themed cryptocurrency is up around 96% in the past 24 hours, according to data from CoinGecko.

Even some big Solana projects have considered (or adopted) the newly launched token from big decentralized exchanges like orca to NFT markets like magic eden.

As Bonk gains momentum, chances are it will have a fate similar to other meme- or dog-focused crypto tokens that often see a pump, followed by an abrupt discharge and little or no recovery. In the meantime, however, it has helped the Solana ecosystem gain momentum at a time when many crypto players considered it a doddle.

As there has been a slight upturn for Solana, her future remains uncertain even amid her dog coin-related hype. To date, Solana has grown from the fifth largest token in early November to the 15th largest and is the number one cryptocurrency on CoinMarketCap.