This week in Crypto Twitter: Meme Coins and Bases are on the rise as Solana gets stressed

Degens and crypto fans were spreading good vibes at the start of the week, closing out the previous month with an all-time high for Solana decentralized exchanges (DEXs). March saw more than $58 billion in transactions, surpassing December's $28.5 billion monthly high.

Memecoins was the underwind. SolanaWings: Amazing tokens like Dogwifhat (WIF), Bonk (BONK), Book of Meme (BOME) and Slerf (SLERF) have made significant moves.

Doodles co-founder Jordan “Poppy” Castro announced the creation of the poop meme coin in a blog post. Given the popular NFT influencer's relationship—and, presumably, the popularity of the annual comic strip—$POOP emerged early.

Some crypto-Twitter residents were quick to point out that the poop-themed token has no official connection to Doodles, although most meme coins are unofficial and have nothing to do with the person or project they're named after.

No new token and airdrop plan is without controversy, however. Many POOP watchers were outraged by on-chain data that suggested the token distribution was particularly unfair. Some wallet addresses have submitted significant gut movements prior to the MemCoin's official announcement.

Like most meme coins, the frenzy of excitement and hype didn't last long. Having popped up last Sunday at $0.0176, it's now trading at $0.002737—down from its original value.

Frustration over meme coins understandably focused a lot of attention and activity on Solana, which began to buckle under the strain. It opened the door to Base backers to highlight its fledgling meme coin offering, which is seeing “parabolic” growth in the Coinbase-incubated blockchain.

Even some base skeptics are drawn to the ecosystem.

Wednesday brought “Wormhole Wednesday”, with hundreds of millions of W tokens pledged to over 400,000 wallets. Significant allocations have been made for early adopters of many other chains, and the management token is also listed on several crypto exchanges.

Another popular governance token launched this week as well: $ENA from Etena Labs. The first product will be acquired by adding stablecoins, artificial dollar tokens USDe, and Bitcoin to its supporting assets.

Venture capitalist and Bitcoin fan Nick Carter took the opportunity to say, “I told you so,” recalling the foresight of cryptocurrencies as they used it to “create a non-bank Bitcoin-backed dollar.”

The startup was a success by all accounts, achieving an initial market capitalization of $1.4 billion.

The price of $ENA rose to $1.22 at the start of the week, settling at $1.10 at the time of writing.

On Thursday, the Crypto Twitter narrative returned to Solana, which was still struggling to keep up with demand. Blockchain watchers have reported a variety of transaction failures—all apparently too high for a network supposed to provide a future-proof platform.

Some attribute the high failure rate to mostly bots spamming the network.

In a more charitable move, all Ethereum challengers, including Solana, are still growing some.

Solana fans, on the other hand, have framed the network's issues as an expected part of blockchain, expressing their belief that Solana will come out the other side stronger-again-than-ever.