A great battle of meme tokens emerged in the early days of 2023. The year started with Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Bonk (BONK) showing good performances. But who may be the great champion of this hype war?
As Shiba Inu is already well known in the cryptocurrency market, before analyzing it, let us explain what Bonk is. For those familiar with the concept of a meme altcoin, the new token has nothing truly special beyond helping the Solana (SOL) ecosystem.
How come?
Bonk is described as the first dog coin for the people, by the people. As such, 50% of the total token supply was released to the Solana community. As observed in recent years, altcoin memes have great strength in speculation and usually have good trading volume for a few days before losing that momentum.
As a token on the SOL blockchain, the project wants to de-image Solana from Alameda Research and bring liquidity back to the altcoin's decentralized exchanges.
In 2022, Solana was one of the cryptocurrencies most impacted by the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried's (SBF) empire. The former billionaire was a big proponent of one of the biggest Ethereum killer bets.
This support led SBF and his trading company to invest not only in Solana, but also in tokens on the cryptocurrency's blockchain. Soon after the entrepreneur's downfall, these assets underwent severe corrections and were even delisted from some exchanges.
A good example of this was the stablecoins on Solana's network, USDT and USDC, which came out of major crypto platforms such as Binance and OKX.
However, this early 2023 has shown that Bonk's initiative has worked for Solana, as the altcoin has grown by over 40% in the last seven days, following BONK's even more surprising rise.
Shiba Inu vs Bonk
When it comes to capitalization growth, that victory belongs to Solana's network token. BONK has grown by about 1,800% in the last seven days, while SHIB has experienced a 3% increase in the same period.
However, this significant growth has occurred because BONK has a much smaller market cap than Shiba Inu, which is ranked 16th by market capitalization, and the new altcoin is only ranked 2,593, making it much easier to grow.
Indeed, the hype around BONK may continue for a while, with new investors deciding to venture in, but to trust that it will be eternal, that its burns will help the token keep going up, or that it will be largely responsible for Solana's rebirth into the top 10, is to take the crypto investor away from reality.
Hypes are not eternal on the cryptocurrency market and SOL's own co-founder said that there is still a lot of work ahead.
As for Shiba Inu, the scenario may be a little better, even if it does not aggressively affect the altcoin's prices. This is because it is moving closer to Shibarium, a Layer 2 solution that can lower the token's transaction fees on the Ethereum network (ETH), making its use more interesting for day-to-day transfers.
Gamza Khanzadaev
Alex Dovbnya
Arman Shirinyan