Last month, Ethereum reclaimed its title as the leading smart contract blockchain for decentralized exchange (DEX) trading, as the market swoon dampened activity on Solana, the go-to platform for memecoin traders.
Ethereum-based DEXes registered an industry-leading cumulative trading volume of $64.616 billion in March, beating Solana’s tally of $52.62 billion by 22%, according to data source DefiLama. That’s the first time since September that Ethereum topped the charts, pushing Solana to the number two spot.
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The change in leadership happened as the total crypto market capitalization fell 4.2% to $2.63 trillion, extending February’s 20% loss, as macroeconomic uncertainty and disappointment over the lack of fresh BTC purchases in the U.S. strategic reserve saw bitcoin slip below $80,000.
The bearish market sentiment dampened speculation across the broader landscape, especially within the memecoin sector, as reflected in the significant decline in activity on Raydium, the leading Solana-based DEX and a hotspot for meme trading in late 2024.
Throughout March, Raydium did not log a single day with trading volume exceeding $1 billion, highlighting a considerable decrease from its record-high of $13 billion on Jan. 18, DefiLlama data show.
Additionally, daily volume on the Solana-based memecoin launch pad averaged less than $100 million in March, down significantly from the peak of $390 million in mid-January. Activity on Solana-based DEXes peaked with the debut of President Donald Trump’s TRUMP token in January.
Meanwhile, Ethereum’s outperformance was driven by Uniswap, which achieved over $30 billion in trading volume, with Fluid taking the distant second spot with $9 billion in activity.
Still, Ethereum’s ether token fell over 18% to $1,822 in March, registering bigger losses than Solana’s SOL token, which fell by 15.8%, per data source TradingView and CoinDesk.
Per observers, ether’s inflationary tokenomics and the growing popularity of Layer 2 solutions, which supposedly siphon activity from the main chain, are responsible for ether’s poor performance.
