In the previous month, Ethereum reclaimed its status as the foremost smart contract blockchain for decentralized exchange (DEX) trading, as a downturn in the market curtailed activity on Solana, which is often favored by memecoin traders.
Ethereum-centric DEXs reported an impressive cumulative trading volume of $64.616 billion in March, surpassing Solana’s $52.62 billion by 22%. This marks the first time since September that Ethereum has led the rankings, relegating Solana to the second position.
This shift in dominance occurred alongside a 4.2% decrease in total cryptocurrency market capitalization, which fell to $2.63 trillion, extending February’s 20% decline as macroeconomic uncertainties and letdowns over the absence of new Bitcoin purchases in the U.S. strategic reserve saw Bitcoin dip below $80,000.
The negative market mood somewhat reduced speculation across the wider industry, particularly in the memecoin arena, illustrated by the notable drop in activity on Raydium, the top DEX on Solana and a key hub for meme trading towards the end of 2024.
Throughout March, Raydium failed to record any day with trading volume surpassing $1 billion, a vast reduction from its peak of $13 billion on January 18, according to metrics.
Furthermore, the average daily volume for the Solana-oriented memecoin launch pad was below $100 million in March, a significant decline from the mid-January high of $390 million. Trading activity on Solana-based DEXs peaked following the launch of President Donald Trump’s TRUMP token earlier in January.
On the other hand, Ethereum’s impressive performance was largely attributed to Uniswap, which recorded over $30 billion in trading volume, while Fluid held a distant second with $9 billion.
Despite this, Ethereum’s ether token dropped more than 18% to $1,822 in March, experiencing larger losses compared to Solana’s SOL token, which fell by 15.8%, as per data from TradingView and other analytics.
As noted by analysts, ether’s inflationary tokenomics and the increasing adoption of Layer 2 solutions, which seemingly divert activity away from the main chain, have been identified as factors contributing to ether’s underwhelming performance.