Solana Price Plunges 30% in a Week—And Its Biggest Meme Coins Are Down Worse

The price of Solana plunged Monday to its lowest price since February, falling to $110 as the network’s most popular meme coins also took a beating.

U.S. recession fears alongside unwinding carry trades involving the Japanese yen have stoked a crypto-wide market route within the past week. Over the past seven days, Bitcoin’s price has dropped 20%, while Solana’s has plunged 30% during that span at a current price below $132, marking a partial rebound from the earlier low.

Dogwifhat, a meme coin that touched an all-time high of $4.58 in March, has fallen 43% over the past week to $1.33, as of this writing. Launched last December, the asset’s sudden rise in February encapsulated Solana’s growing grip on meme coin mania.

Among the top 100 cryptocurrencies ranked by market cap and tracked by CoinGecko, Dogwifhat leads in terms of weekly losses. For perspective, the total market value of Dogwifhat’s circulating supply has shaved off more than $1 billion in the past week, falling to $1.3 billion.

The amount of Dogwifhat traded Monday exceeded the cryptocurrency’s market cap at $1.8 billion. Among the most popular trading pairs on various exchanges, people were swapping the asset for the stablecoin Tether, also referred to as USDT.

Solana has been a go-to network this year for users trading assets that rise and fall on little more than vibes. While some meme coins notch dizzying gains, their outsized losses have sparked a sense of apprehension recently among some industry watchers.

Many meme coins are traded on decentralized exchanges, where anyone can list a token. On Saturday, Solana’s leader Raydium recorded $12 billion in daily trading volume, just below a $12.1 billion record set in March, according to a Dune dashboard.

The Solana-based meme coin Bonk, which is also modeled on a dog, is among many crypto tokens that have plummeted amid questions around the Federal Reserve’s choice to keep interest rates steady last week. As investors have fled risk assets broadly on fears of a rapid deterioration in the U.S. labor market, Bonk’s price has fallen 33% over the past seven days to $0.000018.

Among Solana-based meme coins with multi-million dollar market caps, the tokens based on cats, coincidentally, fared worse Monday. Over the past day, MEW and POPCAT dropped 27% and 34%, respectively, to $0.003677 and $0.3182.

For POPCAT traders, Monday’s drop comes not long after the meme coin set an all-time high of $0.98 toward the middle of July. Over the past 14 days, the meme coin’s value has more than halved, sliding 52% during that period.

While Solana's weekly plunge has been especially rough, Ethereum's sudden crash late Sunday pushed the market caps of ETH and SOL closer than they've ever been, pushing the SOL/ETH mark to a new all-time high.

Edited by Andrew Hayward