Solana, Ethereum Meme Coin Prices Blast Off as Bitcoin Stays Steady After Halving

The latest Bitcoin halving took place late Friday, cutting miner rewards in half for the fourth time in history—but BTC itself is hardly the biggest winner in the crypto markets this weekend. Instead, it’s meme coins leading the charge, with some prominent tokens marking sizable double-digit percentage jumps in the last day.

Dog-themed coins are the biggest winners so far this weekend, with the Solana-based BONK charting a massive 37% jump in price over the last 24 hours alone, jumping to a current price of $0.000021 per data from CoinGecko. BONK has effectively returned to where it was before plunging on April 12 alongside much of the rest of the market.

While BONK has seen the largest swing so far among the top 100 coins by market cap, other pup-centric meme coins on Ethereum are faring well this weekend too: FLOKI has jumped nearly 19% over the last day to nearly $0.00017, and Shiba Inu (SHIB) is up 14% to a price above $0.000026.

Other hot meme coins at the moment include Ethereum’s PEPE, up 13% to nearly $0.000006, and the Solana-based Dogwifhat (WIF), which has climbed almost 8% to about $3.00.

Ethereum and Solana meme coin traders may be returning to familiar, established meme coins while other traders explore the new frontier of tokens minted via Runes, the new Bitcoin fungible token standard that launched alongside the hazard. The protocol was created by Casey Rodarmor, inventor of the NFT-like Ordinals protocol.

There’s been immense hype around Runes as project creators raced to be one of the first to launch a Bitcoin token using the protocol, and users collectively spent millions to create and mint tokens during the first few blocks after the halving late Friday. But trading volume so far has been relatively modest, per data tracked by the OKX marketplace.

The most-traded Runes token over the last 24 hours, per OKX, is Satoshi Nakamoto, aptly named after the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin. The token has about $2.7 million worth of trading volume during that span, with a market cap of $136 million and a price of approximately $6.50 worth of Bitcoin.

That kind of market cap wouldn’t put the Satoshi Nakamoto token anywhere near the top 100 overall cryptocurrencies by market cap, per CoinGecko, which gives some sense of the current size of demand for early Runes. But some traders are betting that these early Runes will see wider interest in time as trading tools improve and the protocol becomes more established.

Bitcoin itself has failed to generate much short-term momentum after the halving. It’s up about 1.5% on the day to a current price just below $65,000, and at most has only climbed to about a 3% gain since the Friday night event.

But historically, Bitcoin’s biggest post-halving gains come several months later as the effects of the slowing supply increase start to be felt across the ecosystem.

Besides, this has been a unique cycle in that Bitcoin actually set a new all-time high price in March, breaking its 2021 peak ahead of the halving, amid the rise of spot Bitcoin ETFs. Post-halving price action this time around is entering uncharted territory.