Solana Network Activity Overtakes Ethereum Amid SOL Meme Coin Mania, Spectacular BOME Explosion

Updated: 18 March 2024

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Solana recorded more network activity than Ethereum this past weekend as investors rushed to scoop up SOL meme coins amid the spectacular rise of Book of Meme (BOME).

Solana’s total trading volume surged to $3.52 million on Mar. 16, enabling it to outperform its main competitor, Ethereum, by over $1.1 billion in daily volume, according to data from DefiLlama.

BOME Skyrockets

New meme coin sensation BOME saw its market cap rally from close to zero to $1.45 billion in just 56 hours shortly after the leading crypto exchange Binance announced it would list it.

BOME is currently down 21% in the past 24 hours at $0.01397, but is still up 1,430% since launch on Mar. 14.

#Binance will list @Darkfarms1 $BOME with Seed Tag applied.

👉 https://t.co/GOtazMmfBk pic.twitter.com/fMUligOan6

— Binance (@binance) March 16, 2024

The investor frenzy around Solana meme coins powered the SOL price above strong resistance at $200. Following an 11% increase in price over the past 24 hours, SOL continues to trade above this mark as of 4:20 a.m. EST, according to CoinMarketCap.

SOL was also able to flip Binance Coin (BNB) to become the fourth largest crypto in terms of market capitalization.

Top 5 biggest cryptos by market cap (Source: CoinMarketCap)

Failed Transactions

The sudden wave of activity proved to be too much for the Solana network on several occasions. Many users took to X to complain about frequent instances where their transactions either failed or were missing.

During the high traffic period, the network’s ping time also increased to between 20 and 40 seconds. This subsequently resulted in around 50% of the transactions failing for approximately 20 minutes.

🚨#Solana is currently congested with an Average Ping Time of 20-40s, 30-50% Ping loss, up to 50-80% failed transactions. $SOL

Solana's TPS isn't 50k due to vote transactions; it's just marketing. In reality, under full network conditions with 30-50s wait times, Solana maxes out… pic.twitter.com/NJJfZGDBgo

— Dagnum P.I. (@Dagnum_PI) March 17, 2024

In tandem with the surge in network activity, several other on-chain metrics also jumped over the weekend. The number of active Solana addresses rose to 1.2 million on Mar. 18, according to data from The Block, which is a level that has not been seen since around June 2022.

Nearly 870,000 new addresses were also created on the network yesterday, while transaction fees reached a new all-time high as well.