LUCKNOW (CoinChapter.com) — Solana has topped as the most popular cryptocurrency ecosystem of 2024 so far, according to new data from CoinGecko. This year, the high-throughput layer-1 protocol has captured a 49.3% share of global crypto investor interest in chain-specific narratives.
A Closer Look at the Driving Forces
A perfect storm of catalysts has powered Solana’s overwhelming dominance. The SOL token has rallied 13% over the past day to $191, regaining ground towards its 2021 highs. This revived investors’ faith in the network’s fundamentals. The rise of popular meme coins like Dogwifhat and successful projects like the Pyth oracle also attracted investor interest, pushing Solana to the top.
Indeed, Solana’s decentralized finance (DeFi) space has been hot lately. Over just the past month, the total value locked (TVL) across Solana DeFi protocols has skyrocketed by nearly 80% to reach $4 billion, according to DefiLlama. This represented a two-year high in Solana’s TVL.
The explosion in Solana’s DeFi activity has been driven by a 125% surge in the daily trading volume on the network over the past month, peaking at $3.7 billion. Total daily fees hit an all-time high of $1.6 million as trading revenues topped $3.6 million.
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SOL is currently trading at $191 with a 24-hour trading volume of $9 billion. With a market cap of $85 billion, SOL now ranks as the 5th largest cryptocurrency.
Can Ethereum Keep Pace with Solana’s Surge?
While Solana has topped the Blockchain Ecosystem, Ethereum still ranked second with 12.7% of investor interest. However, Ethereum’s mindshare as an established ecosystem may be capped, with much of the speculative investing interest dispersing into layer 2 solutions building atop it.
After Ethereum, Binance’s BNB Chain (5.4%) and layer 1 blockchains Cosmos (4.5%) and Avalanche (3.9%) rounded out the top five most popular ecosystems year-to-date. For Cosmos, successful airdrops and the growth of chains like Sei and Injective have driven interest in the ecosystem’s interoperability focus. Meanwhile, Avalanche has captured mindshare thanks to its meme coin potential exemplified by tokens like Coq Inu and the blockchain’s partnership to bring MapleStory gaming on-chain.
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Among Ethereum layer 2s, Arbitrum has emerged with the most mindshare, at 3.3% of chain interest. This is closely followed by the Base ecosystem, at 3.2%. Polygon (2.0%), zkSync (1.3%), and Metis (0.9%) were the only other major layer 2 ecosystems among the top 20 rankings.