Layer 1 blockchain Solana had the second-highest day in total transaction fees paid by users yesterday, data from blockchain analytics firm Artemis shows.
On March 7, users paid roughly $1.1 million in gas fees to transact on the Solana blockchain, with a large part of those fees coming from memecoin trading on decentralized exchanges.
Solana’s second-highest day in fees generated comes a little over a month after the blockchain network recorded its high of $1.2 million in daily fees on Jan. 31.
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Per Artemis, of the top five applications of Solana ranked by gas consumption, three of them are DeFi protocols, specifically trading platforms: Raydium, Jupiter, and Drift. The three collectively have generated almost $470,000 in gas fees over the past 24 hours.
A Dune dashboard created by data scientist Andrew Hong shows that the second most traded pair on Solana-based decentralized exchanges in the past seven days is SOL-WIF with a trading volume of $1.04 billion, behind SOL-USDC with $5.14 billion at the time of writing. Additionally, of the top 10 trading pairs by volume on Jupiter, five of them include dog-based memecoins, namely WIF and BONK.
“Our hypothesis [for the spike in fees generated] is overall higher usage due to memecoins — there’s also a spike in wallet transfer gas usage so likely folks moving SOL to and from CEX to trade,” said Artemis co-founder Jon Ma in a Telegram message to Unchained.
The price of SOL, the native token for Solana, currently sits at $145, an 11.2% increase in the past week. Moreover, BONK and WIF each have a market cap of over $2 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.
