Solana (SOL) hit a new low last week, falling to levels not seen since February 2021. After nearly nine days of consecutive losses that brought its price to around $8 on Friday, its price has risen by over 12% in the past 24 hours on Tuesday.

While Solana was on the move, bitcoin and ether, the two largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, showed some stability by moving less than 1% in the past 24 hours.

One of Solana’s most prominent backers is the now-disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, and top NFT projects are planning to leave its blockchain, both of which have contributed to its recent volatility.

Bonk (BONK) is a new meme token that airdropped about 50% of its 56 trillion token supply to users last week, and this has been blamed by some for the recent increase in interest in the Solana community. To attract new users or to thank longtime community members, some cryptocurrencies use a practise known as “airdropping,” in which they distribute a small amount of their token for free to a random sample of crypto wallets. Here, Bonk was dropped from an aeroplane on

About a month ago, before it gained traction, the Solana-centric dog coin tweeted, “We’re here to reward everyone that made #Solana what it is today.”

Solana NFT collections received about 20% of Bonk’s total airdrop supply, or about 300,000. According to data compiled by CoinGecko, the cryptocurrency associated with the shiba inu dog has increased in value by around 96% over the past 24 hours.

From major decentralised exchanges like Orca to NFT markets like Magic Eden, even some of the largest Solana projects have considered (or actually did) adopt the newly launched token.

Despite its current popularity, Bonk is likely to follow the path of other meme- or dog-themed crypto tokens, which have experienced rapid price increases, followed by precipitous price drops and failed to recover. Nonetheless, it has helped the Solana ecosystem gain traction at a time when many crypto players considered it dead.

Although Solana has seen a slight uptick in recent days, the cryptocurrency’s long-term prospects remain murky, dog coin hype or no. Solana, which was the fifth-largest token in early November, is now the 15th-largest token and the most popular cryptocurrency on CoinMarketCap’s trending list.