BOME, SLERF, ETHFI: Are these March’s top 3 picks for you?

• BOME and SLERF were the products of Solana presale hysteria.
• ETHFI was backed by growing liquid restaking protocol Ether.Fi.

With not much to cheer from the heavyweights, cryptocurrency traders gravitated towards newly-launched tokens in pursuit of profit-making opportunities.

Indeed, leading assets like Bitcoin [BTC] and Ethereum [ETH], along with the broader altcoin market, have encountered double-digit losses over the week, as per CoinMarketCap.

At the same time, the market has seen the emergence of a slew of memecoins spawned by the presale hysteria, as well as tokens of emerging decentralized finance (DeFi) initiatives. These have piqued the interest, especially of the retail investors.

Some of the most prominent among these are BOOK OF MEME [BOME],  Slerf [SLERF], and Ether.Fi [ETHFI].

BOME’s boom

Originating from a presale campaign, BOME was airdropped to interested users after they deposited SOL coins to a designated address. This not only helped to seed the project but also generated significant hype before it was released to the public.

BOME rose nearly 25x thereafter, rising to a billion dollar market valuation in no time. The coin was trading at all major exchanges, including Binance, as of this writing,

While significant retracement followed due to aggressive profit-taking, BOME was back up 4% in the last 24 hours.

The meteoric rise resulted in billions of dollars in trading volumes over the last few days, with 16 March witnessing the peak at over $5 billion.

However, note that investors’ sentiment for the coin, after rising during the initial frenzy, came down drastically.

Source: Santiment

SLERF grows despite mishap

SLERF, another product of the Solana [SOL] presale mania, has generated enough publicity in the last week, both positive and negative.

After amassing more than 50,000 SOLs as part of the presale, the memecoin more than tripled in value, and saw high trading volumes. This, despite, a howler by the team behind the project, which “accidentally” burned $10 million worth of assets raised through the campaign.

SLERF crashed 8% in the last 24 hours, however the weekly gains stood at an impressive 9%. As seen from Santiment’s data below, SLERF rise has been more stable when compared to BOME.

Source: Santiment

ETHFI has strong fundamentals

Last but not the least, ETHFI, the governance token of the liquid restaking protocol Ether.Fi, debuted earlier in the week, as part of a mega airdrop.

Starting around $4.5, the token plunged sharply soon after as recipients immediately booked profits. ETHFI was trading at $3.86 at press time, down 5.62% since the airdrop. However, in the last 24 hours, it made an impressive recovery by rising 27%.

Note that while all the three tokens are newbies, ETHFI was backed by a reliable DeFi project. Ether.fi had deposits of around $2.6 billion as of press time, according to DeFiLlama.

On the other hand, the memecoin had no intrinsic value. The creator of BOME, Darkfarms, called the token a “shitcoin.”

While AMBCrypto doesn’t give any investment advice, it was advisable to research before dabbling your foot in the sea of new cryptos.