Bitcoin is on fire this week, but it isn’t the biggest gainer among the top five cryptocurrencies by market cap. Instead, it’s Solana, which jumped up to a 22-month high on Thursday. And its spike may suggest interest from crypto traders to take advantage of other rising opportunities.
Solana is up 16% over the past 24 hours to a current price above $131, and rose slightly higher above $134 earlier Thursday morning. That’s the highest price that Solana has seen since April 2022, and represents a 26% leap over the past seven days.
If Solana rises a little more, to nearly $137, then it will set a more than two-year high. SOL last hit that level in January 2022, according to data from CoinGecko.
By comparison, Bitcoin is actually down less than 1% over the last day to a current price just under $62,400, but has climbed 21% over the past seven days. Ethereum, meanwhile, is flat today at $3,450, but up 16% in the last week.
Looking more broadly to the top 10 cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin is the biggest gainer in that group over the past week, up 53% to a price of nearly $0.13.
And meme coins on Solana are similarly soaring, thanks in part to the broader market boom and likely Solana’s own accelerated climb. Leading Solana meme coin Bonk (BONK) has more than doubled in price over the past week, up 104% to a price of $0.000024 at present—a 48% spike in just the last 24 hours.
And WIF, aka Dogwifhat—a coin based on a meme image of a dog wearing a hat (yes, really)—has jumped 156% this week to $0.82, and set an all-time high above $0.88 early Thursday. With these latest spikes, BONK has a market cap of nearly $1.6 billion, making it the 64th biggest coin by that metric, while WIF’s market cap has spiked to $823 million.
As Bitcoin goes, so too do most major altcoins—and Bitcoin is absolutely booming of late. BTC nearly hit $64,000 on Wednesday, marking the highest price seen for the leading coin since 2021. At that point, it was also just 12% away from the all-time high price just above $69,000 from November 2021.
What’s driving Bitcoin’s resurgence and potentially impacting the rest of the market? Bitcoin has seen sizable gains in recent months due in part to the approval and adoption of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States. They allow traders to gain exposure to Bitcoin without holding the actual asset.
Billions of dollars are flowing into such funds, and the fund operators are thus buying up loads of BTC to support those funds. On top of that, excitement over the next Bitcoin halving—upon which mining rewards are cut in half, slowing the production of new BTC—may be driving gains ahead of the expected mid-April event.
SOL may be a leading beneficiary of these Bitcoin events, but the Solana ecosystem has seen its own substantial growth and renewed optimism in recent months. The cryptocurrency fell as low as nearly $8 in December 2022 following the collapse of FTX, but has rebounded dramatically since. It’s up 468% in the last year alone.