Solana Soars Into Top Four Amid SLERF Meme Coin Snafu

By Stacy Elliott

Solana has surged 11% in the past day to become the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, surpassing crypto exchange Binance's BNB token.

As of early Monday morning, the Solana price is $206.11 and has reached a market cap of $92 billion. SOL has gained a staggering 40% since this time last week, according to CoinGecko. That also means SOL has already soared past the new all-time high market cap that it first saw on Friday.

The recent rally means that there have been more than $1 million worth of short contracts liquidated in the past hour—more than either Ethereum or Bitcoin in the same time period—according to CoinGlass.  Altogether, more than $12 million worth of Solana short positions have been liquidated in the past day.

A short position is a strategy used by traders to profit off the price of an asset declining. Usually an investor will borrow the shares of the asset they think will decline in price, in this case SOL, sell them, and agree to buy them at market price at a future date.

If they were right, they'll buy the asset back at an even lower price than it was when they opened the contract. And the difference between the initial and buy-back price—minus fees—becomes their profit. If they were wrong in a big way—as was this case for a lot of traders today—brokerages and exchanges can liquidate their position and force them to close the contract to stem losses.

While Solana has been rallying, the ecosystem has been reeling from an issue with the SLERF meme coin launch.

A dev accidentally burnt $10 million worth of funds raised during a token presale. By noon European time on Monday, the dev responsible was having a second Twitter space called "I fucked up" to explain what happened to the community.

"It's not my project anymore," the dev said. "Obviously I don't have $10 million in my pocket to refund everybody, otherwise I'd 100% do it. That is what I'm working on."

Later, he added more context on X.

"However I fucked up we will keep grinding and do whatever I can to make this right," the dev said in a thread. "On a positive note: We made history. On the negative note: A ton of people have lost their money. We have full intentions of making this right the best we can for the presalers to make em whole."

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