Solana (SOL) tokens have gained more than 8% over the past 24 hours even as larger cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH), were little changed following a flat weekend.
SOL traded over $11 on Tuesday following nearly nine straight days of losses that saw them trade at just over $8 on Friday. Selling pressure on the tokens, at the time, came because of their close links to Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of crypto exchange FTX, who faces charges of fraud and misappropriation of client funds.
Part of Solana’s price recovery came amid rising interest among Solana community members for Bonk (BONK), a newly launched token themed around the shiba inu dog breed that said it would airdrop 50% of its token supply to users last week.
The airdrop likely drove massive community interest, with 20% of the total airdrop supply going to Solana NFT collections – comprising 297,000 individual NFTs – and 10% to Solana-focused artists and collectors. Airdrops refer to an unsolicited distribution of a cryptocurrency token or coin, usually for free, to numerous wallet addresses and are generally used as a tactic to gain users.
It’s a new year, maybe we should integrate some new cryptocurrencies or chainsShould we start with $BONK? Idk
— Magic Eden 🪄 (@MagicEden) January 2, 2023
Bonk saw over $19 million in on-chain volumes in the past 24 hours alone. As of Tuesday, since its Dec. 25 issuance, Bonk has over 85,000 holders and a market capitalization of nearly $93 million. Users have conducted over 500,000 transactions using bonk tokens in the past week, data shows.
Several Solana projects have already integrated bonk tokens for use as payments for listed NFTs, while some introduced “burn” mechanisms for NFT-based events. Token burning means removing coins from the overall supply of a cryptocurrency.
Bonk prices rose some 95% in the past 24 hours. Major memecoins such as shiba inu (SHIB) and dogecoin (DOGE) were unchanged.
Memecoins are known to attract irrational exuberance from the crypto community, with the market capitalization of SHIB and DOGE reaching over $30 billion each in early 2022.
