SOL, BOME Trend on Social Media as Ether, Bitcoin Lag

• SOL and BOME received the most crowd attention over the weekend, according to data tracked by Santiment.
• Both cryptocurrencies have outperformed ETH, BTC and the broader market in the past seven days.
• Increased crowd chatter may be a sign of an impending retail investor frenzy.

Solana’s SOL and The Book of Meme (BOME), the meme coin built on Solana, were the top two trending tokens on crypto social media over the weekend, data tracked by Santiment shows.

“$BOME and $SOL are the top two trending assets across X [formerly Twitter], Reddit, Telegram, and 4Chan due to their outperforming the markets as of late. The crowd continues to regard Solana and associated meme coins as viable alternatives to Ethereum-based projects,” Santiment said in a market insights post.

SOL’s price has surged 45% in seven days, tapping highs of over $200 for the first time since December 2021, CoinDesk data show. The Book of Meme (BOME) has surged 82% since its debut on March 10. Crypto exchange Binance listed BOME perpetual futures on March 16.

Ether {{ETH}}, the native token of the world’s leading smart contract blockchain, has declined 6.3% to $3,640 despite successfully implementing the Dencun upgrade. Meanwhile, bitcoin {{BTC}}, the market leader, has held flat at around $68670, while the broader CoinDesk 20 Index has gained 0.7%.

Solana’s market-beating rally is consistent with renewed interest in its DeFi ecosystem. Data tracked by Top Ledger and OurNetwork show that Solana-based decentralized exchanges have registered a trading volume of $30 billion this month. That’s ten times higher than a year ago.

Increased crowd chatter

The number of “SOL” mentions on social media has risen to 322, according to Santiment. A similar spike in late December saw the cryptocurrency peak at $125 and eventually correct to $85.

Meanwhile, at press time, Google Trends, a widely used tool to gauge general or retail interest in trending topics, shows a provisional value of 100 for the worldwide search query “solana.”

A score of 100 represents peak popularity – the maximum number of searches observed for a term during a given time frame. It’s a sign that more and more people are scanning the web for information about the cryptocurrency that has outshined market leaders recently.

Increased crowd chatter is widely taken to represent an impending retail investor frenzy often observed at market tops. Google trends showed similar values in the final four months of 2021 as SOL’s bull market peaked above $200.

Google Trends provides a mostly unfiltered sample of search requests made to Google and scales their searches to a range of 0 to 100, according to the company. The search value represents the search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the selected region and time.