Solana Surges as Token Creation Hits Record High in May

• Creators are reported to have created almost half a million tokens on the Solana blockchain, surpassing the likes of Base and BNB Chain in May. 

• Interestingly, the majority of tokens created were memecoins following the success stories of Dogwifhat, Bonk and Book of Meme. 

As a beacon of speed and efficiency, Solana (SOL) stood tall among competitors as creators launched almost half a million tokens on the blockchain. According to The Block Pro data reviewed by Crypto News Flash, 455,000 tokens were created compared to the 177,000 tokens created on the Ethereum Layer 2 Base and the 39,000 tokens created on the BNB Chain. On the Ethereum mainnet as well as the Layer 2 networks Arbitrum and Optimism, tokens of fewer than 20,000 were created in May. 

Explaining this milestone, Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation stated that the existing fast finality, high throughput, and low transaction fees contributed to the mass creation of tokens on the blockchain. 

Solana is built to be a general-purpose layer 1, with fast finality and high throughput with extremely low transaction fees. The rise of mass token creation on Solana is downstream of these characteristics, bringing the cost of experimentation and new idea creation to near zero. Tokens on Solana should be as easy to create as content on the internet.

Memecoins Dominate the New Tokens Created on Solana Blockchain 

Per our investigation, the majority of the tokens created on Solana were memecoins. Interestingly, this has become the new “craze” since the successful launch and acceptance of Dogwifhat, Bonk and Book of Meme. Also, experts attribute part of the success to the Pump.fun, a website designed purposely for token creation with just a few clicks. Its convenience and easy navigation have spurred the creation of many more tokens over the past few months. This year alone, 1.1 million new tokens have been created on Solana.

For context, the token creation website was a launchpad for political memecoins like Jeo Boden and Doland Tremp. Last week, these political memecoins rose to fame after former US President Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Within the period, one of the political tokens called FreeTrump ($TRUMP) surged by 330% to trade at $0.019. Also, Jeo Boden surged by 9% to reach $0.3319. However, several Trump-related political memecoins saw pullbacks. The MAGA (TRUMP) token, for instance, fell by 16% in the past day to reach $11.54. MAGA VP (MVP) also fell by 16.5% to reach $0.48. 

Reasons for These Impressive Figures

According to Steven Zheng, director of research at The Block Pro, the meme mania and the success of Pump.fun was the major reason for this milestone. 

The memecoin mania plus the success of Pump.Fun has made Solana the current leading blockchain to launch new tokens. It is still to be seen whether Solana can capture the mindshare of token launches beyond memecoins.

To appreciate this milestone even more, it is important to note that the Base network which has seen high activity recently was overtaken by Solana in May. In April for instance, Base recorded 240,000 new tokens while Solana only saw 229,000. Interestingly, both have taken the charge from BNB Chain which saw an average of 95,000 tokens created per month between 2021 and 2022. 

In total, 7 million tokens have been launched on six blockchain networks since 2017 with BNB Chain leading the chart with 3.7 million tokens. This is followed by Solana which has 1.4 million tokens. According to experts, newly created tokens are not the ultimate metric to assess a crypto ecosystem. Instead, it only shows the chains that are cheaper and have a higher throughput. 

At press time, SOL was trading at $165 after declining by 0.09% in the last 24 hours.