Degenerate Apes cause Solana to surge into crypto top 10

Degenerate apes are aping into Solana, causing the high-performance blockchain project to lead crypto gainers this morning.

The Ethereum competitor surged past Uniswap’s UNI token on at least one widely used coin-ranking website this morning to become the No. 10 crypto with a market cap of US$16.2 billion.

#SOLANA is top #10 🥳

— NFT TRAPPAHOLIC 👾🎨🥰💸 (@SOLTRAPPER305) August 15, 2021

remember people saying “so much for solana summer” or “what happened to $sol-summer”. Approaching top 10, $SOL-summer is here ☀️ ☀️ ☀️

— Señor Chimp ☀️ (@algonaut721) August 11, 2021

SOL tokens were changing hands at US$56, up 24.9 per cent in the past 24 hours and up 50.8 per cent in the past seven days.

And the reason doesn’t seem to have much to do with Solana’s innovative “proof of history” mechanism for reaching network consensus, its new “wormhole” for transporting tokens from Solana to Terra, Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, or the launch of the new Solana-powered decentralised exchange Mango Markets.

No. It’s friggin’ apes.

The Degenerate Ape Academy NFT project sold out its collection of the 10,000 “smoothest brained” apes in eight minutes during its launch over the weekend.

The minting fee was six SOL tokens (about US$336) per ape, but the added transaction fee to use the Solana platform was minuscule.

Other popular NFT launches on Ethereum have badly clogged the network, causing gas fees to skyrocket so high that transactions momentarily cost hundreds of dollars in Ether.

When .@DegenApeAcademy launched on $SOL a light bulb went off for me. The cost is around $0.01c to mint as opposed to thousands and we saw something like this take place with $BNB over the summer on BSC chain. New people will migrate to things that are faster, cheaper, + easier

— Pentoshi 🐧 Wont DM You (@Pentosh1) August 15, 2021

The Degenerate Ape Project admitted on its Twitter feed that the launch was “shitty at best” as the team was “overwhelmed with the wave that hit us in the past week”.

“It was exponentially bigger than we thought,” they wrote, promising quick refunds to users who tried to mint apes but found them sold out.

But those who did get apes were pretty happy with them.

I’m an Aussie, and I get a Crocodile Dundee hat – Fan-Bloody-Tastic! pic.twitter.com/nrJscc4CXD

— Clinton Ξdwards | clint.eth (@ClintonEdwards) August 15, 2021

The “floor price” (minimum price) for degenerate apes on Solanart this morning was 13.8 SOL, meaning those who had been lucky enough to mint them had at least doubled their money in just 24 hours.

A number of apes had recently sold for 25 SOL or so, with an ape sporting a beer hat fetching 100 SOL (US$5,600) earlier this morning. Its new owner had already relisted it for 500 SOL.

Sold a degenerate ape at 20 and someone immediately flipped it for 49 gg

— gigabear (@2170cell) August 15, 2021

Coinmarketcap and Coincap.io still had Solana behind Uniswap at lunchtime (Sydney time), but Coingecko had it ahead.

Overall market up 1.4%

The crypto market was up 1.4 per cent to US$2.1 trillion, with only a handful of top 100 tokens losing ground.

The worst laggard in the top 100 was the fading SafeMoon, which was down 12 per cent and is now just the No. 93 crypto.

XRP was trading at US$1.30, up 66 per cent from a week ago, and Cardano had reclaimed the No. 3 spot on Coingecko with a 50 per cent gain in the last seven days. It was changing hands at US$2.14.

Dogecoin was up 8.8 per cent to US33.7c