Solana drops over 15% in a single day, giving up entirety of weekly gains

Solana (SOL) fell 15.9% on March 19 to a five-day low of $166 after a week-long rally that briefly took it close to $210 as it a new all-time high market cap of around $92 billion.

As of press time, SOL had recovered some of the losses as market momentum shifted to bullish after a full day of bleeding. The token was trading at roughly $174 as of press time with a market cap of approximately $77 billion, according to CryptoSlate data.

Solana last saw comparably low numbers on March 14, at which time the asset was priced as low as $162 and had a market cap of $71.9 billion.

Despite being one of the biggest losers over the past day, SOL is still just slightly below recent highs. However, the overall market trend has been bearish since March 16, and both Bitcoin and altcoins continue to lose ground as bears push the prices down.

Solana tokens down

Solanas losses extended to all but 71 of 85 Solana-based tokens based on CryptoSlate data. LuaSwap (LUA) saw the greatest daily losses (-62%), followed by KING (-32.3%). Meanwhile, the two main DEXs on Solana, Jupiter (JUP) and Raydium (RAY), were down 13.27% and 22.17%, respectively.

A number of Solana-based tokens nevertheless escaped the downward trend: DEX launchpad Dexlab (DXL) saw gains of 31%, while the infamously hacked DeFi platform Mango (MNGO) saw gains of 21%. Eleven other Solana-based assets saw gains between 3% and 13%.

Tokens in the category fell 6.21% over 24 hours on average, representing a downturn slightly less severe than the crypto markets overall losses of 8.0%.

Memecoin hype fading？

Earlier in the month, Solana prices rose alongside memecoin excitement that was in part driven by the Dogwifhat (WIF) craze. Like many other tokens, SOL also benefitted from a crypto market that has remained strong even after Bitcoins brief, recent all-time highs.

Solana has also seen high DEX trading volumes, with $2.8 billion in reported volume on March 18. This coincided with an all-time high for SOL against the price of Ethereum (ETH).

The latest losses suggest that Solanas per-token price in US dollars will not rise indefinitely, though it is possible that other trends and developments could revive its price performance.