- Popcat crypto briefly flipped the seasoned meme token Floki in global ranks.
- Solana’s co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko breaks down meme coin bull cycles.
- Despite a harsh correction, the Solana meme coin section is valued at $9.35B.
A shift in crypto trader mentality has produced a massive rebound rally for popular memecoins, as the competition intensifies between tokens and their corresponding blockchains. While some crypto traders see memecoins as a leveraged play on the parent chain, Solana (SOL) has been the unofficial home of newcomer memecoins.
Solana Meme Euphoria Is Making a Comeback
The heavy hitters include Bonk (BONK), Dogwifhat (WIF), and several other, more recent tokens, such as Popcat (POPCAT), Moo Deng (MOODENG), and Smoking Chicken Fish (SCF).
The meme euphoria has sent Solana’s Popcat to unprecedented price levels, opening up the feline coin to a larger audience as it hits price discovery.
After hitting an all-time peak of $1.47 on October 7 in a trading volume-driven rally, Popcat saw a harsh drawdown the next day. On October 8, it slid from $1.47 to $1.24, marking a 16% retracement from the recently claimed price milestone.
Despite this, Popcat still has a market cap of over $1 billion, claiming the bronze medal in Solana’s meme coin ranking by global market capitalization. WIF, the largest Solana meme token, also dropped below key support of $2.50.
Meme Coins Have the Edge Over Regular Altcoins?
As the meme coin carousel picks up speed, social mentions have soared to similar levels seen in March 2024. This has raised eyebrows among seasoned crypto investors and prominent figures, such as Chris Burniske, a co-founding member of Placeholder, a major venture capital firm in New York.
Highlighting the mass appeal of memecoins this year, Burniske acknowledged that the “tendency to trigger” is the strongest argument in the success of the meme coin narrative, which overpowered Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Real World Assets (RWAs) in Q1 of 2024. On top of that, large-cap meme cryptos have outperformed top altcoins in yearly terms.
Considering this, Burniske compared the current meme currency hype to the remarkable NFT boom in 2021. “The cultural relevance some NFT collections garnered in 2021 will be surpassed by some memecoins,” forecasts the digital asset space professional.
Solana Founder Deciphers Meme Coin Phenomenon
Soon after, Solana’s (SOL) co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko weighed in to offer his take on why memecoins have led the crypto market’s success this year. According to him, the current bull cycle depends 90% on memes and just 10% on the actual product or utility.
“My theory is that memecoins today have completely absorbed the meme energy that drove other cycles, like DeFi summer,” contemplates Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko. Fortunately, this market tendency is quality control for regular altcoins and DeFi products, which “now have to make it purely on value.”
Solana’s meme section is valued at $9.45 billion, absorbing a 1.5% deficit over the past 24 hours. The longevity of these tokens is usually determined by the demand on speculative markets, as more crypto traders turn to leverage for potentially juicier gains.
To illustrate, Popcat and Dogwifhat thrive in the Derivatives markets. Dogwifhat encircles nearly $2 billion daily, with Binance taking up half of the Derivatives volume.
Popcat garnered $976 million over the past 24 hours, but the record-high OI funding rate of 0.1213% suggests that speculative interest is not reaching its pinnacle just yet.
On the Flipside
- Many crypto analysts mulled the rise of memecoins as an act of growing human desperation. As high risk-taking in the field becomes usual practice, “people are more desperate than ever to escape the matrix.”
- As a rising portion of the population struggles to afford necessities, they potentially turn to meme coins for quick gains and see it as a “vehicle of safety” in the wake of their financial despair.
Why This Matters
The return of meme coin season implies a change in trader mentality, with traders adopting riskier trading practices, such as trading with leverage and making short-term plays on the underlying asset.
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