The price of Solana’s (SOL) token cooled in the days after Christmas despite an impressive 120% monthly rally in December that saw its market cap grow larger than that of Binance’s BNB (BNB).
The retrace saw Solana’s price fall below $100 before spending several hours at pre-holiday prices just above $101.
At the time of publication, Solana is changing hands for $105, down roughly 14% from its yearly high of $123, which it notched on Dec. 26, according to TradingView data.
However, an unexpected 9% uptick in the price of BNB has now seen the Binance-linked token reclaim its position as the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
Solana’s rally saw several SOL-based memecoins, including Bonk (BONK) and Dogwifhat (WIF), also witness incredible price action over the last few weeks, posting gains of 650% and 123,000% between Nov. 22 and Dec. 22, respectively.
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However, both memecoins have since retraced over 50% from their all-time highs, each beginning their tumble three days before Solana notched its yearly high on Dec. 26.
Running parallel to the outsized gains in the price of Solana was an influx of trading activity on the network, which briefly saw trading volumes on SOL-based decentralized exchanges (DEXs) eclipse that of Ethereum for the first time.
BREAKING: @solana 24H DEX VOLUME OVERPOWERS THOSE OF @ethereum AND @arbitrum COMBINED pic.twitter.com/9WqBmmOeXB
— DEGEN NEWS ️ (@DegenerateNews) December 22, 2023
Solana DEX volume has since cooled off and fallen to $1.1 billion in the last 24 hours, roughly half that of Ethereum’s $2 billion, according to DefiLlama data.
Meanwhile, Ether (ETH) has also recently posted a 5% weekly gain, leading many traders and analysts to speculate that it could start outperforming its competitors soon.
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