Solana Emerges as Top Pick for Retail Investors: Report

Solana has emerged as the asset of choice for most market participants in this cycle, according to a recent crypto trends report by Gemini, an American cryptocurrency exchange, and Glassnode, a blockchain market intelligence platform.

Researchers assessed speculative flows by isolating the realized capitalization of coins that have been traded on each blockchain by active wallets in the previous seven days. According to this ‘hot realized cap’ metric, the shift to Solana began in October 2023.

Solana’s active addresses have also surpassed Bitcoin and Ethereum’s this cycle. Its 12.3 million daily active addresses (DAU) are 16.2 times more than Bitcoin’s 760,000 DAU and 24.6 times more than Ethereum’s 501,000 DAU.

Unsurprisingly, memecoins attracted the most capital share of altcoins in 2024 and have been a prominent feature of the current cycle. The data shows that Solana’s memecoin ecosystem captured a significantly higher capital inflow than Ethereum’s.

Since January 2024, the aggregate realized cap of the top two meme coins on Solana, BONK and WIF, has grown by 477%, from $901 million to $4.3 billion. Meanwhile, the aggregate realized cap of the top two meme coins on Ethereum, SHIB and Pepe, grew by 45% from $12.7 billion to $18.4 billion over the same period.

Additionally, according to the report, there has been an influx of retail investors into the market due to the surging prices of crypto assets. Gemini and Glassnode data shows that Bitcoin and Solana have attracted increased interest from new investors. At the same time, Ethereum has lost appeal, falling below both.

The report also noted that onchain activity in the Asia Pacific region has been growing at a faster pace than in the US and Europe.