Solana Network Activity Surges as Crypto Traders Turn Bullish on SOL

Solana is having a strong week with SOL up 25% over the past seven days, popping back above the $100 mark after dipping below $80 last week. The latest revival comes amid surging network activity ahead of Wednesday’s Jupiter token airdrop.

According to data from CoinGecko, Solana has ticked up about 2% on the day to a current price of about $103. While still far from the 2021 peak price of nearly $260, Solana has bounced back from the lows of late 2022 when it sank down near $8. It’s up 333% over the last year.

Solana is seeing substantially higher activity amid the price jump as more and more traders turn to the network due in part to lower fees and speedier transactions than Ethereum. Trading volume on Solana decentralized exchanges (or DEXes) topped that of Ethereum for the rolling 24-hour window ending Sunday evening, per data from DeFi Llama.

Other data from Hello Moon shows that an array of on-chain metrics have surged in recent days, including daily active users with a SOL wallet balance. Solana also saw an all-time daily high of new wallets being used to sign transactions last Friday at nearly 750,000 in total.

SOL’s uptick and rising network usage come as the ecosystem prepares for the January 31 launch of JUP, the official token of DEX aggregator Jupiter. The long-awaited token will be made available to nearly a million wallets to claim for free.

Jupiter tested out its new token launchpad over the weekend with the debut of WEN, a meme coin that more than a million eligible wallets could claim for free. Ultimately, more than 271 billion WEN tokens went unclaimed by the Monday morning deadline, representing about 39% of the airdrop allocation and 27% of the total token supply.

WEN’s creators burned the unclaimed tokens, cutting the total supply, but traders quickly turned bearish on the meme coin since the initial hype. The token has lost 52% of its value since Monday morning’s all-time peak, falling to a current price of $0.000086.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.