Solana network’s recent activity has overtaken Ethereum, causing the network to struggle to keep up. According to Blockchain data analytics platform DefiLlama, on March 16th, Solana’s total transaction volume exceeded Ethereum’s, reaching $3.52 billion and surpassing Ethereum’s daily volume by more than $1.1 billion.
Intense Interest in the Solana Ecosystem
However, the Solana network struggled to keep up with the surge in activity, with many users on platform X frequently complaining about failed or incomplete transactions. The congestion on the Solana blockchain network sometimes caused the network to slow down or even halt.
According to Solana Validator data shared by a user named Dagnum on platform X, Solana’s ping time on March 16th at 23:00 ranged from 20 to 40 seconds, causing approximately 50% of transactions to fail for about 20 minutes.
The significant increase in activities on the Solana network was driven by a high appetite for new memecoin projects. On March 14th, investors showed a strong interest in a new memecoin project called Book of Meme (BOME), which surged from near zero to a market value of $1.45 billion in just 56 hours.
Another memecoin called $NAP (NAP) also saw significant interest from investors, jumping from a market value of about $20 million to over $330 million in less than 18 hours.
What’s Happening on the Solana Front?
Solana’s price has also risen along with the surge in network activity, and according to CoinGecko, SOL is currently trading at $200, showing an increase of 7.6% over the past week and 38.4% over the past month. The airdrop events and memecoin hype within the Solana ecosystem are contributing to a significant momentum in SOL’s price.
Solana’s recent gains have also led the token to surpass Binance‘s BNB, reaching a market value of $88.5 billion and becoming the fourth-largest cryptocurrency. Due to the overall increase in Solana’s total supply, the network’s market value is currently about $12 billion above its previous all-time high market value of $76.5 billion reached on November 7, 2021.
