Solana’s currency suffered a sharp drop in value on Monday, reaching its lowest point since February, with the price falling to $110. The decline also affected the network’s most popular meme coin. Cryptocurrency markets have experienced wild volatility in recent week amid concerns that the U.S. economy could enter a recession and liquidations of carry trades tied to the Japanese yen. While Bitcoin has lost 20% of its value over the past week, Solana has lost 30% of its value, and is now trading below $132, marking a recovery from its previous lows.
One meme coin in particular is Dogwifhat, which reached an all-time high of $4.58 in March but has fallen 43% in the past week to $1.33. The sudden rise in February reflects Solana’s growing influence in the meme coin craze, since the asset was launched in December.
Of the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap tracked by Coingecko, Dogwifhat has seen the biggest losses over the week. To put things into perspective, Dogwifhat’s total circulating supply market cap has dropped by more than $1 billion over the week, to $1.3 billion.
On Monday, Dogwifhat’s trading volume even exceeded its market value, reaching $1.8 billion. The asset is widely traded on major exchanges, and people tend to exchange it for the stablecoin Tether, or USDT.
This year, Solana has become a go-to platform for users to trade volatile assets. While some meme coins have seen impressive gains, their recent sharp declines have also caused concern among some industry observers.
Many memecoins are traded on decentralized exchanges, which allow anyone to list tokens. Raydium, Solana’s leading decentralized exchange, saw daily trading volume hit $12 billion on Saturday, just shy of the previous record of $12.1 billion set in March, according to data from the Dune dashboard.
Bonk, a Solana-based meme coin modeled after a dog, was also one of the cryptocurrencies hit hard last week, as its price plummeted amid discussions over whether the Federal Reserve would keep interest rates steady. As investors worried about the rapid deterioration of the U.S. job market, they began to withdraw from risk assets, causing Bonk's price to fall 33% in the last seven days to $0.000018.
Among Solana-based memecoins with multi-million-dollar market caps, cat-based tokens have performed particularly poorly on Monday. Over the past day, MEW and POPCAT have fallen 27% and 34%, respectively, bringing their prices down to $0.003677 and $0.3182, respectively.
For POPCAT traders, Monday’s drop came shortly after the memecoin hit an all-time high of $0.98 in mid-July. Over the past 14 days, the memecoin has lost more than half its value, a 52% drop.
While Solana has experienced a particularly severe drop during the week, Ethereum’s sudden crash on Sunday evening brought ETH and SOL’s market caps closer than ever before, pushing the SOL/ETH ratio to a new all-time high.
