Crypto Twitter This Week: Meme Coin and Base Are Booming While Solana Is Nervous

Degens and cryptocurrency fans spread some good vibes early this week, ending the month with Solana hitting a monthly high in activity across decentralized exchanges (DEXs). More than $58 billion in transactions took place in March, surpassing the previous monthly high of $28.5 billion in December.

Memecoin was a breeze. SolanaIn the wings: Quirky tokens like Dogwifhat (WIF), Bonk (BONK), Book of Meme (BOME), and Slerf (SLERF) have taken significant steps.

Doodles co-founder Jordan “Poopie” Castro also got in on the festive spirit, announcing in a blog post that he had created the POOP meme coin. Given the affiliation of prominent NFT influencers and perhaps the continued popularity of poop jokes, $POOP initially gained popularity.

Some Crypto Twitter denizens were quick to point out that while most meme coins are unofficial and unrelated to their namesake person or project, the dung-themed token has no official connection to Doodles.

However, no new token and airdrop plan is without controversy. Many POOP watchers were perturbed by on-chain data suggesting that token distribution was not particularly fair. Some wallet addresses recorded significant bowel movements before the meme coins were publicly announced.

As with most meme coins, the frenzy of joy and mayhem was short-lived. It rose to $0.0176 last Sunday, but is currently trading at $0.002737, a fraction of its initial value.

The bubbling enthusiasm for meme coins has understandably focused a lot of attention and activity on Solana, which is beginning to feel pressured. This opens the door to highlighting early meme coin offerings to fans of Base, and the blockchain incubated on Coinbase is seeing “parabolic” growth.

Even some basic skeptics were attracted to the ecosystem.

On Wednesday “Wormhole Wednesday,” with hundreds of millions of W tokens pledged to a total of over 400,000 wallets. Significant allocations have been secured for early adopters on several other chains, and governance tokens have also been listed on several cryptocurrency exchanges.

Another major governance token, Ethena Labs’ $ENA, was also launched this week. The debut comes alongside the expansion of synthetic dollar token USDe, a yield-generating stablecoin, and the addition of Bitcoin to the pool of supported assets.

Venture capitalist and Bitcoin fan Nic Carter seized the opportunity and said “I told you so” that the cryptocurrency would be “used with derivatives exchanges to generate non-bank Bitcoin-backed dollars.” You mentioned that you expected it to happen.

The launch was a success by all accounts and resulted in an initial market capitalization of $1.4 billion.

The price of $ENA rose to $1.22 in its mid-week debut and remains at $1.10 at the time of this writing.

On Thursday, the Crypto Twitter narrative rolled back to Solana, which is still struggling to keep up with demand. Blockchain observers have reported varying transaction failure rates. These are all too high figures for a network that promises to provide a future-proof platform.

Some people have said that the high failure rate is mainly due to bots spamming the network.

The more philanthropic takeaway is that all Ethereum challengers, including Solana, still have room to grow.

Meanwhile, Solana fans characterized network issues as an expected part of blockchains operating at scale and expressed confidence that Solana will once again emerge stronger than ever.