Solana: Meme Coins Mania Explodes As pump.fun Market Cap Surpasses $8 Billion

The Solana price has surged past the bullish $241 target as volume on the network’s decentralized exchanges (DEXs) skyrockets amid a seemingly unstoppable meme coin mania.

Solana (SOL) price has surged past the bullish $241 target as volume on the network’s decentralized exchanges (DEXs) skyrockets amid a seemingly unstoppable meme coin mania.

Layer 1 blockchain Solana’s price can reach $500 by year’s end as its speed and efficiency advantages over competitors like Ethereum continue to impact market positioning.

If Solana can hold the break above the crucial $241 level, then the next target for bulls is $291, which is well into price discovery territory – the SOL all-time high is $259.

It would be a steep climb to hit $500 by the end of the year, but even a shallower ascent would easily capture $350-$400 price range targets. 

DEX daily volume on Raydium is more than double that of Ethereum-based Uniswap ($3.93 billion vs $1.45 billion), according to the latest DefiLlama data.   

Solana Meme Coins Explode As Pump.Fun Market Cap Surpasses $8 Billion

Behind the surge is the explosive growth of meme coins on the Solana chain, which has become the de facto home of meme coins, helped by the pump.fun launchpad breakout success. 

Through its clever implementation of bonding curves that abstract away complexity through its user-friendly design, pump.fun enables anyone to quickly spin up a meme coin at the click of a button at minimal cost.

The pump.fun ecosystem is today valued at $8.2 billion with an equally impressive 24-hour trading volume of $4.3 billion.

Leading the charge on pump.fun is Peanut the Squirrel ($PNUT), commanding a market value of $1.6 billion a little more than two weeks since its launch.

Since its listing on Raydium on November 3 at $0.075 the $PNUT price has surged 2,046% to $1.61. If you had bought it at its lowest point on the open market ($0.0318) you would have bagged a return of 5,099%.

Those who bought $PNUT on the bonding curve prior to its Raydium listing will be sitting on an even bigger return on investment.

To be listed on Raydium, tokens must reach a market cap of $69k. When that is achieved, $12,000 liquidity is deposited on Raydium and burned. 

Here’s How To Find The Next Gem Like PNUT On Pump.Fun

For those hunting for the next hot pump.fun token, the ‘about to graduate’ section in the advanced section of pump.fun shows users what’s in the imminent listings pipeline.

Pump.fun launchpad tokens are all fair sales, so there is no presale or team allocation.

If more evidence is needed of the growing dominance of Solana in the meme coins category, take a cursory glance at the CoinMarkeCap homepage:

Solana is now the second most valuable blockchain for running smart contracts. Its proof of stake and proof of history technology is proving its worth as a scalable solution for commercial activity, even though meme coins are of course primarily vacuous viral efforts from the standpoint of their use value.   

Robinhood And Coinbase Helped Boost Solana FOMO

Another couple of things have helped Solana over the past few days. Last week, Robinhood reversed its previous delisting of several coins, including Solana—it no longer thinks there is a danger that the formerly delisted need to worry about the Securities and Exchange Commission’s unregistered securities diktats.

In addition, Coinbase launched its COIN50 index aimed at helping institutions to easily track the market. Eligible institutions outside of the US, Canada and UK can trade the index. 

Solana is in the index with a weighting of 6%. However, Solana market cap as a percentage of the total crypto market cap is 3.56%, so 6% represents an overweight position. In other words if a company were looking to replicate the COIN50, they would need to buy more than the market cap weight of the coin. Bitcoin has a weighting of 50% in the Coinbase COIN50 index while its actual dominance of total market capitalization is 59%.

Solana: Institutions Are Coming, With Sol Strategies And ETFs Smoothing The Way

Institutional interest in Solana is exploding as financial advisors and asset managers adjust their portfolios to allocate to crypto inside the 5% portion typically reserved for alternative asset classes, or those deemed high-risk and more speculative. 

On that, Anchorage Digital CEO and co-founder Nathan McCauley told the Washington Post last week, “The next wave of crypto adoption likely won’t be driven by crypto-native individuals, but by mainstream investors who prefer to access digital assets through their existing wealth management and financial adviser relationships.” Anchorage is the only federally chartered crypto