Meme wanes, narratives cool: Solana's cyclical boom ends as it falls below $80.

Written by: Mach , Foresight News

Solana, one of the most successful public blockchains, is also facing a winter.

Since the market crash on February 5th, the Solana token SOL once fell to $67, a new low since December 2023. As of now, the latest price of SOL is $80, a 24-hour drop of 3.57%. Looking at the monthly chart, SOL has been falling for five consecutive months since its high in October 2025, with a maximum drop of over 71%. The most famous NFT in the ecosystem, Mad Lads, once saw its floor price drop to 22 SOL, equivalent to approximately $1760, while at its peak, this NFT was worth over $40,000.

Looking back at this bull market, SOL rose from a low of $8 to $295, performing exceptionally well among public chains. Coupled with the explosion of the Meme sector, even US President Trump chose to launch his token on the Solana network, resulting in countless wealth stories during this period.

However, when the market turned bearish, the price of the token fell, TVL was halved, on-chain transaction volume plummeted, and the growth flywheel stalled, Solana also faced its own various problems.

The meme craze is over.

This cycle of meme hype began with Solana. From late 2024 to early 2025, Solana, through its Pump.fun platform, sparked a "Meme Summer," with daily new token issuance exceeding 10,000 at one point and peak trading volume surpassing $6 billion. Meme tokens like Dogwifhat and Bonk saw their market capitalization soar, driving Solana's overall activity to its peak. This peak coincided with Trump's issuance of Trump, reaching an all-time high of $295. However, due to various scams and the loss of the wealth effect, the meme craze began to cool from mid-2025, with many projects achieving graduation rates of less than 2% and funds starting to flow out.

According to Defilama data, the Meme platform pump.fun reached an all-time high in trading volume in the months surrounding 2025. Weekly trading volume exceeded $3 billion twice, after which it declined steadily. By early 2026, its trading volume had been hovering around $500 million, which was only one-sixth of its peak.

Meanwhile, some meme traffic shifted to BNB Chain. BNB Chain rapidly rose to prominence through the Four.Meme platform. In the second half of 2025, Chinese-themed memes such as "Binance Life" and "I'm Coming!" triggered FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), causing BNB Chain's meme market capitalization to grow from almost zero to hundreds of millions of dollars, with 24-hour trading volume reaching $460 million. In contrast, while Solana's meme market capitalization still stands at several billion dollars, its growth has stagnated, with many projects falling more than 95% from their peak.

In October 2025, BNB Chain briefly replaced Solana on the trending meme list, demonstrating a clear rotation of funds: when the BNB Chain meme surged, Solana's funds contracted; after the BNB Chain meme declined, although some funds flowed back, the momentum was weak. Furthermore, BNB Chain, influenced by influential figures CZ/He Yi, experienced short-term growth, while Solana's Pump.fun, despite its first-mover advantage, faltered due to a lack of narrative and incremental funding.

The end of the Meme wave means that the demand for its public chain tokens has also decreased.

Public blockchain narratives are cooling down

Furthermore, the overall cooling of public blockchain narratives further weakened Solana's ecosystem expansion plans. Between 2025 and 2026, the crypto market retreated from its early high leverage and over-expansion of narratives. Many weak narratives, such as celebrity tokens and meme crazes, quickly faded, shifting focus to more practical and institutionally backed areas. Solana's narrative as a "high-speed public blockchain" initially attracted developers, but as the market entered a "deeper value zone," investors favored the "digital gold" or "settlement layer" positioning of mainstream assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, leading to a continuation of the overall bear market and exacerbating the outflow of funds from Solana.

This narrative weakness reflects a shift in public blockchain competition from a simple TPS (transactions per second) contest to one focused on ecosystem maturity and regulatory compliance. Solana's previous TPS and ecosystem advantages have been diluted. Both its memes and airdrop incentives have diminished its appeal to new users.

Meanwhile, the significant speed improvements on the Ethereum mainnet have weakened Solana's core advantage. Ethereum, through its Fusaka upgrade in 2025, increased its data blob capacity from 3 to 6-9 and introduced the PeerDAS mechanism, drastically reducing transaction fees and increasing throughput, resulting in a rebound in transaction volume and active addresses.

Data shows that Ethereum's DEX trading volume saw an overall increase at the end of 2025. Entering 2026, the Glamsterdam upgrade will achieve near-perfect parallel processing, further accelerating block verification and reducing fees, bringing the mainnet closer to an "operating system" level. These improvements allow Ethereum's mainnet TPS and costs to approach Solana levels, while retaining higher security and decentralization, reducing the need for users to switch to Solana.

Another rising competitor, Base, is also growing rapidly, especially attracting many users with its AI token. According to DefiLlama data, its TVL (total value added) remains at a high level of $4 billion.

Amid the tokenization craze, RWA is increasingly concentrated on Ethereum, further marginalizing the Solana ecosystem. As of February 12, 2026, data from rwa.xyz shows that RWA assets on the Ethereum mainnet totaled $14.9 billion, while Solana's were only $1.7 billion, a significant gap. The tokenization trend of RWA emphasizes stability and compliance, and Ethereum's leading position makes it difficult for Solana to gain a foothold.

Digital asset treasury buying failed to offset overall bear market selling pressure.

From the perspective of Digital Asset Treasury (DAT), in 2025, the DAT model was all the rage, with many publicly traded companies such as Forward Industries, Upexi, and Sharps Technology purchasing large amounts of SOL as treasury assets through private financing or debt issuance.

Entering 2026, as the price of SOL fell from its 2025 peak of $200 to around $80, the market value of these DAT companies shrank significantly. For example, Forward Industries, which spent $1.58 billion to buy SOL, is now only worth $555 million, causing some investors to lose confidence.

In addition, the DAT buying frenzy has weakened, new companies have entered the market at a slower pace, and while early purchases of locked-up SOL have reduced the circulating supply, they have failed to offset the overall bearish market pressure.

Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have suffered significant price drops in the recent bear market. BTC has fallen from $126,000 to $67,000, and ETH from $4,900 to $2,000.

In January 2026, Solana founder Toly tweeted in Chinese on X: What do you think is Solana's biggest challenge right now? His comments section received a variety of feedback and answers, including: no direct exchange, and users' limited awareness of other product ecosystems besides Meme, etc.

Perhaps Solana will find its own solution.