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455,000 Tokens Launched on Solana in May: Report
Solana saw the largest number of new token launches ever recorded on the blockchain last month, as celebrities joined the cohort of memecoin enthusiasts.
Solana’s high throughput and fast finality made it easy to experiment with token creation on the network.
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Posted June 4, 2024 at 5:30am EST.
Nearly half a million tokens were launched on the Solana blockchain last month, more than double the number of tokens launched on top of the Ethereum layer 2 network.
Data from The block shows that 455,000 tokens were launched on Solana during the month of May, while 177,000 tokens were launched on Base. Ethereum and popular layer 2 networks like Optimism and Arbitrum saw fewer than 20,000 new tokens created.
Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, told The Block that Solana’s rapid finalization, high productivity and low transaction fees made the blockchain an ideal place to cultivate the creation of these tokens in large quantities .
“The rise of mass token creation on Solana is downstream of these features, bringing the cost of experimentation and creating new ideas to near zero. Tokens on Solana should be as easy to create as content on the Internet,” Federa said.
It’s fair to say that many of these new tokens were memecoins, which are known to be extremely volatile, quite illiquid, and, in most cases, have no intrinsic value. Celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner, Iggy Azalea and Rich The Kid made appearances last month launched tokens on Solana: Each of these tokens saw an initial increase in price before dramatically decreasing in value. Pump.fun, a recently launched The Solana-based memecoin distributor makes it easy to create tokens in just a few clicks.
The topic was the ease of creating these tokens discussion within the crypto community earlier this year when an influx of offensive tokens crossed the line into what constitutes hate speech.
Even some members of the crypto community commented that Solana’s memecoin boom was reminiscent of the Ethereum ICO mania of 2017.