3 Reasons Solana Regained its December Losses in a New Year Rally

Solana has rallied for the week as the network continues to gain more users. Excitement over the new memecoin, Bonk Inu (BONK), coincided with the cryptocurrency’s rally. The asset is moving in stride, brushing off recent losses in connection with the FTX’s collapse.

Solana is pulling through tough times. It’s rough for the Ethereum competitor, the DeFi ecosystem especially, as it is tough for the entire industry out there in this biting crypto winter.

The gains for Solana have pushed the coin up to $13.50, meaning a 40+% weekly surge. It had been trading below double digits by the end of December. So that’s a rally for Solana on the 5-day pane after a long, drawn-out tumble over the 30-day, 6-month, and 1-year view.

1. How Solana Is Weathering Its FTX Connections

Bonk Inu (BONK) has been taking the Solana blockchain by storm since its launch. In the one-page brief on the project, the founders say they eschew “Alameda-style” tokenomics in favor of a coin that’s fun and gives everyone in the community a fair shot. That’s good news after all the fallout from the Alameda-FTX scandal.

The platform also got a really nice note from a crypto competitor, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. He tweeted over the New Year holiday week that “smart people” he trusts have told him about the “earnest smart developer community in Solana.”

He said the chain has “a bright future” and seemed assured that “the awful opportunistic money people have been washed out.” He even added that he hopes that Solana “gets its fair chance to thrive.”

That’s a better turn of the week for Solana than for crypto lending partners Gemini and Genesis. They roiled in a public spat over the damage to their customers in the solvency crunch that took down the FTX exchange.

2. Solana Defi Platform Is Still Growing

So Solana seems to be weathering the damage from FTX very well. That is if you consider how much its price fell over the last six months and over the month of December.

A crypto column on the Motley Fool suggests there isn’t really any lower to go over FTX, “The market had seemingly priced in all the potential bad news scenarios and driven Solana down to a bargain-basement level.”

On-chain data shows that growth in new monthly addresses for Solana continued to swell throughout 2022, despite the deep freeze on crypto prices.

New monthly addresses and active monthly addresses slowed in growth in Q4 of 2022, but the network continues to generate new addresses and active monthly users.

3. New Meme Coin Explodes Over New Year Holiday

Enthusiasts are hailing it as the Dogecoin (DOGE) of Solana. To be fair to Dogecoin, it is a proof-of-work accounting blockchain fork of Bitcoin (BTC). It’s not an ERC-20 or BEP-20 token that lives in Ethereum or Binance, but a Layer 1 PoW coin as well as a meme token.

(Dogecoin recently introduced a new 5 million DOGE Core Development Fund. You can read more about it here.)

But Bonk Inu is certainly running for the title of Solana platform DOGE.

What’s been pushing the price of Bonk Inu crazy over the holiday week has been a spate of token burnings. It’s a page out of the marketing incentive playbook of Binance (BNB).

The team has gone on a public campaign of burning a large number of tokens, cryptographically locking them up forever. That results in giving value to the remaining coins in the token supply. So that’s generated a lot of excitement from traders. Like when the Bonk team just burned 500 billion BONK tokens up on Dec 4.

Liquidity providers are also yielding enormous yields for BONK tokens at the moment because of the rising volume and the huge demand for trades. It grew in fair market price by around 3,000% in about a week.