SOL Surges 13% as Solana NFTs Overtake Ethereum, BONK Up 26%

Solana’s upward momentum continued unabated into Friday, with SOL posting double-digit gains and Solana’s leading meme coin BONK extending its skyrocketing surge to another all-time high. Amid the price action, Solana NFTs are also seeing substantially more trading volume—even higher than on Ethereum.

SOL popped as high as $73.85 early Friday, marking a new 19-month peak for Solana’s native cryptocurrency. While still far from its all-time high of nearly $260 in November 2021, SOL has seen a dramatic rebound from falling to almost $8 in late 2022. As of this writing, Solana sits at just above $73, marking a 13% jump in the last 24 hours per CoinGecko.

Meanwhile, BONK—the top meme coin on Solana—has continued its rocket ship ride up the charts in recent weeks, setting a new all-time high price of $0.00001314 early Friday.

Even down to $0.00001230 as of this writing, BONK has posted a 24% gain in the past 24 hours, and has tripled in price over the past seven days. During the last month, BONK is up a whopping 982%, flinging the token into the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap for the first time. BONK now has a market cap of $747 million.

Meanwhile, the recipients of Thursday’s Jito airdrop are sitting even prettier. The Solana DeFi platform’s new JTO token was handed out to thousands of early users, with the airdrop valued at $225 million in total as of late Thursday. But now the price has jumped 72% over the past day to $3.35 per token.

Buzz around Solana extends to its NFT collections, too.

Projects like Mad Lads and Tensorians have seen dramatic price increases in recent weeks, multiplying several times in price. And now, collective Solana NFT trading volume has topped that of Ethereum, typically the leading chain for volume and having the most valuable projects.

Solana NFTs racked up $14.8 million worth of trades over the past 24 hours, per data from CryptoSlam, compared to about $13.9 million worth on Ethereum. It’s due to a sizable boost in Solana trades, which have seen their volume grow about 92% in the past day.

Tensorians, which is tied to the Tensor NFT marketplace, is the top traded project during that span with over $4 million worth of sales.

Tensor, which rose to prominence earlier this year, is currently dominating on Solana with nearly 76% market share over the past 24 hours per data from Tiexo. Magic Eden, the multi-chain marketplace that previously owned the Solana space, has about 16% share during that span.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.