Driven by the launch of a meme-laden NFT collection, the Ethereum killer Solana storms into the crypto top 10. What’s behind the hype about the “degenerate monkeys”? The market update.
The Solana price starts with a strong daily plus and a fresh all-time high into calendar week 33. In a 24-hour comparison, the Ethereum competitor was able to gain an impressive 40 percent. At press time, SOL is trading at $ 63.86 – about 140 percent higher than 30 days ago.
The SOL course has achieved most of the course gains within the past 48 hours. The rally correlates with the launch of the NFT project “Degenerate Ape Academy”. As with the NFT pioneer CryptoKitties, the “degenerate monkeys” are a kind of virtual card collection that is created and traded on the blockchain. Each of the 10,000 monkeys that were generated by users for the launch of the collection on August 15 is unique, made up of a total of seven optical features (headgear, mouth, fur, glasses, teeth, clothing and background). The characteristics vary in rarity, from “common” to “mythical”. The fee for creating an ape was 6 SOL.
NFT monkeys: blockbuster despite a bumpy start
Meanwhile, the launch of the NFT monkeys on Solana did not go smoothly. Within eight minutes, all 10,000 “Degen Apes” were created and sold out. Good news if there weren’t many users who missed the sale and are now waiting for their SOL tokens to be refunded. The team speaks of an “overflow” of transactions on Twitter and takes full responsibility for the process of the NFT drop, which it describes as “shitty at best”. Due to the high demand, there were delays and the platform has meanwhile gone offline.
The reimbursement of the SOL tokens to the cheated investors should take place promptly:
Most urgently, we want to deal with the overflow of transactions that we have received. Your SOL IS SAFE. We’ll go through the logs and issue refunds. We don’t expect them to be issued within 24 hours, but it’s our top priority.
This is what the Degenerate Ape Academy promised on August 15th Twitter.
Solana NFT: The secondary market is picking up
For most of those who managed to get hold of one or more Degen Apes, it was already a profitable business – if they found a buyer. Recently they can be traded on the Solana NFT marketplace solanart.io. At the time of going to press, the cheapest Degen Ape is available there for 13.5 SOL.
Apart from the initial difficulties, the Degen Apes hit Solanart like a bomb. The NFT marketplace today announced a 24-hour trading volume of over 100,000 SOL – around 90 percent of this is due to the degenerate monkeys.
The degenerate apes have made Solana one of the top 10 largest crypto networks by market capitalization. Currently this amounts to around 17 billion USD for Solana – almost 1.7 billion more than for the eleventh-placed Uniswap (UNI). Solana’s share of total market capitalization is 0.85 percent at the time of writing.
Bitcoin rate continues on its way towards USD 50,000
Meanwhile, the industry leader Bitcoin is also pointing to further growth. Even if this looks more modest than Solana with a daily increase of 1.44 percent, the Bitcoin price continues to defend the recently conquered mark of 47,070 USD. BTC-ECHO chart analyst Stefan Lübeck identified this as the key resistance for the journey towards the USD 50,000 mark in the previous course analysis. Bitcoin dominance, meanwhile, continues to weaken. At the time of going to press this is 44.39 percent. At the end of July, it last scratched the 50 percent mark. Since then, it has been following a downward trend, which is mainly due to the strong growth in top altcoins such as Ethereum and Cardano.