Solana's memecoin mania pushes on-chain volumes and fees to new highs

The popularity of memecoin trading and speculation on Solana has pushed on-chain volumes — in U.S. dollar terms — to a new all-time high on Friday.

Volume on Ethereum's foremost competitor exceeded $3.79 billion to end the work week, according to data from DefiLlama. The blockchain's previous all-time high volume was $2.85 billion — a figure set earlier this month. Saturday was close to Friday's all-time high. $3.44 billion in volume was recorded by DefiLlama yesterday. 24-hour volume is currently at $3.61 billion.

In other metrics, a seven-day moving average of active addresses on the Solana network continues to push higher. According to The Block's data, 1.2 million active addresses were clocked yesterday — highs not seen since approximately June 2022.

At the same time, a seven-day moving average of the number of new addresses on the Solana network continues to surge in parabolic fashion to new all-time highs. According to The Block's data, nearly 870,000 new addresses were recorded yesterday.

Total fees on Solana are also at new all-time highs. According to The Block's data, the total transaction fees paid on Solana yesterday amounted to $3.83 million, or 20,350 SOL — the vast majority of which was non-vote priority fees.

Memecoins and presales driving activity on Solana

Driving activity on Solana is an ongoing memecoin rush — with the latest token garnering attention for shockingly high return-on-investment numbers being Book of Meme, or BOME, which was listed on Binance and has seen an increase of some 1500% since its creation only a few days ago.

Meanwhile, presales have exploded in recent days. An artist pseudonymously known as Kero launched a presale by posting a wallet address that rapidly accumulated funds — eventually totaling nearly 55,000 SOL, or $10.66 million at current prices. Kero later publicly admitted that they had no idea what they would make when they initially polled their audience on Twitter. 

Various other Solana-based memecoin presales have been sparked — with some being accused of being mere scams, and others being verified scams .

Dog-themed Solana-based memecoins Dogwifhat and BONK also continue to record significant volumes as a slew of new memecoins continues to be created in real time.

The ongoing memecoin craze on the blockchain has pushed Solana-based decentralized exchange aggregator Jupiter to do more volume in the past 24 hours than Uniswap V3's Ethereum DEX, per data from CoinGecko.

Solana's market capitalization reached a new all-time high on March 15. SOL is currently trading around $193, per The Block's price data .