Nearly half a million tokens were launched on the Solana blockchain in May. The increase in token creation is attributed to lower barriers to entry and increased desire to create a popular memecoin.
In May alone, 455,000 tokens were created on Solana, dwarfing the numbers seen on other platforms. In comparison, 177,000 tokens were created on Ethereum layer 2 protocol Base, while 39,000 tokens were created on BNB Chain. The Ethereum mainnet and Layer 2 networks Arbitrum and Optimism each produced less than 20,000 tokens.
Austin Federa, director of strategy at the Solana Foundation, attributes this rise to Solana's unique features. “Solana is designed to be a high-throughput general-purpose layer 1 with fast completions and extremely low transaction fees,” Federa explained and added:
“As a result of these features, the increased mass token creation activities in Solana reduce the cost of experimentation and new idea generation to almost zero. Creating tokens in Solana should be as easy as creating content on the internet.”
Interestingly, the majority of Solana tokens are memecoins, which have recently attracted the attention of the cryptocurrency community. This trend comes after some Solana-based memecoins such as Dogwifhat, Bonk, and Book of Meme skyrocketed in the crypto market.
*This is not investment advice.