This month, more new fungible tokens have been minted on Solana than at any point in the network’s history—by a staggering degree.
In the last two weeks alone, 72,202 new tokens have popped up on Solana using the SPL token standard, according to data from Solscan. That’s over 71 times the amount of coins created on the network during a comparable period in October.
Daily stats for new token creation on Solana are now consistently about four times higher than they’ve ever been since Solana launched in 2020.
While the Solana ecosystem has enjoyed a resounding comeback in the last two months—one that’s boosted SOL, Solana NFTs, Solana meme coins, and even demand for the Solana smartphone—such a dramatic spike in token creation likely cannot be explained by organic increases in network activity.
Numbers of new SPL tokens created daily in the last three months. Courtesy: Solscan
“Maybe you can assume a doubling or tripling of [new SPL token creation] because of an uptick in general activity,” Slorg, a pseudonymous blockchain investigator and the project lead of Solana NFT tool Sol Incinerator, told Decrypt. “But how do you account for the other 6,000 tokens a day?”
Slorg got sucked into the conundrum when a fake token for Sol Incinerator recently popped up on Solana. By tracking on-chain transactions, Slorg and their team discovered that the imposter had created dozens of new SOL coins that same day, pumping and dumping each of them within a matter of minutes, before moving on to the next: PUZZ, RUN, BABY DINO, and DEGEN BOT, just to name a few.
Today our team discovered that someone had launched a fake Incinerator token on Birdeye.
As we started to dive into the wallet responsible, things became much more interesting.
16 hours ago he sent himself SOL from Binance, which was the first transaction of the chain of… pic.twitter.com/LToXpQPEYC
— Slorg (@SlorgoftheSlugs) November 13, 2023
“Of these 7,000 tokens being launched daily, a lot of them are these 30-a-day style churn type tokens to farm people watching the ‘recent’ tab on Birdeye,” Slorg said, referencing the popular crypto trading data aggregator. Slorg tweeted this week that they “found wallet trails where one guy launched 300 [tokens] himself in a week.”
To be clear, not every hyped Solana meme coin is more than an hour-long rugpull. BONK has stuck to its elaborate roadmap (including launching its BonkBot automated trading bot, which is gaining traction); the token was launched by a team including prominent Solana builders and enjoys broad ecosystem support. And Dogwifhat has remained steadily capitalized since its launch last month.
But the success of some of those tokens, in the context of Solana’s broader resurgence, appears to have attracted enough deployers who—enticed by the prospects of making even a few dollars each gambit—are willing to flood the ecosystem with sham coins.
“A lot of people tell me, ‘This is the entire point of crypto,’” Slorg said. “And it’s kind of demoralizing, because I think we can be so much more.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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