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Solana has dipped by 0.5% today, with the SOL price dropping to $163.27 as the cryptocurrency market as a whole falls by 1% in the past 24 hours.
Solana’s moves today also come amid a new market trend for meme tokens styled after Peanut, a viral and Instagram-famous pet squirrel which the Department of Environmental Conservation put down over the weekend.
The seizure and euthanizing of Peanut has caused a storm online and even “fired up” presidential candidate Donald Trump, with crypto capitalizing on the incident by launching several Peanut-themed tokens.
And while the value of such tokens is very questionable, their emergence nonetheless highlights Solana’s status as the go-to platform for new coin launches.
Solana Meme Coin Craze Explodes After Peanut the Squirrel’s Viral Story – Will SOL Price Follow?
Depending on the accounts you follow on X, your timeline may currently be awash with outrage regarding Peanut’s story.
Peanut was a mini-celebrity, and it seems that his former popularity is now feeding into anger, which in turn has been feeding into an appetite for Peanut-referencing and Solana-based meme tokens.
Some of the more popular examples on CoinGecko include Peanut the Squirrel (PNUT), Peanut (PEANUT), Peanut (PNUT) and Pnut (PNUT).
The biggest by market cap, Peanut the Squirrel, is currently down by 57% in the past 24 hours, but still holds on to a value of $50 million.
And while some are up today (e.g. Peanut (PNUT)), the rest have correct substantially.
Nevertheless, their appearance is arguably good news for Solana and the SOL price, since they underline how the layer-one blockchain remains the dominant platform for new token launches.
And while the SOL price is down today (and in the past week), it’s now in a position to recover strongly over the next few days.
For instance, its relative strength index (purple) has risen above 50, having been around 30 at the start of the month.
This indicates a return of demand, while it also seems that SOL’s 30-period moving average (orange) has bottomed out in relation to the 200-period average (blue).
In other words, SOL could surge tomorrow and this week if Trump wins the US presidential election.
The market generally regards Trump as more crypto-friendly than his rival, Kamala Harris, so a victory for the former Apprentice star could result in more a bullish climate for cryptocurrencies.
In such a context, the SOL price could rise to $200 by the end of the month, and $250 by the end of the year.
Bigger Gains with New Small-Cap Alts
While a Harris victory could dampen the market over the coming days and weeks, one way of avoiding underperformance is to take a chance on smaller cap tokens and presale coins.
Most such coins are risky, but one presale token doing very well at the moment is layer-two project Pepe Unchained (PEPU), which has now raised over $24.5 million in its very popular offering.
Pepe Unchained is launching a L2 network for Ethereum, which will provide instant bridging to and from itself and Ethereum, as well as competitively low fees.
Its long-term goal is to become an ecosystem for meme tokens, potentially attracting usage away from Solana and other layer-twos.
Helping it to attract users will be the fact that its speed enables it to offer double the staking rewards it would have provided as a layer-one meme coin.
This will provide greater incentive to hold PEPU, while its utility as the payment coin for transaction fees will also magnify adoption.
As a coin, it will have a max supply of 8 billion PEPU, with its protocol allocating 30% to staking and 20% to its presale.
Yet possibly the most bullish feature of all is that it now has a large and growing community, with its official X account boasting over 52,000 followers.
Read More: Pepe Unchained Price Prediction
This is massive for such a new coin, with investors still able to join its sale at the coin’s official website.
PEPU is now available at a price of $0.01219 per token, with this price rising again in just under two days.
It will list once the sale ends in the next few weeks, with its early popularity pointing towards a very profitable opening.
Disclaimer: Crypto is a high-risk asset class. This article is provided for informational purposes and does not constitute investment advice. You could lose all of your capital.