Following a flat weekend, Solana (SOL) tokens gained more than 8% over the past 24 hours despite bigger cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) being little changed.
After nearly nine straight days of losses that saw SOL trade at just under $8 on Friday, they traded over $11 on Tuesday. Because of the tokens’ close ties to Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of crypto exchange FTX, who is facing charges of fraud and misappropriation of client funds, selling pressure came at the time.
Last week, Bonk (BONK), a newly launched token themed around the Shiba Inu dog breed, announced it would airdrop 50% of its token supply to users, contributing to Solana’s price recovery.
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.
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.
