Original author: Frank, PANews
Recently, the performance of the BSC chain has once again attracted the attention of the market. From August 21 to 23, the trading volume of BSC DEX has surpassed Solana for three consecutive days, ranking second only to Ethereum. There are also signs of increasing discussions on BSC chain MEME coins on social media. In addition, Binance founder Zhao Changpeng is said to be released from prison on September 29, which will also bring positive additions to the development of the BSC chain ecosystem. From all indications, the BSC chain seems to be making efforts secretly, and it is possible to become a new MEME hot spot?
One is gaining ground while the other is losing ground, surpassing Solana
In fact, the gap between the BSC chain and Solana was not that big before. By November 2023, the daily transaction volume of the BSC chain was still ahead of Solana. Until the advent of this round of bull market, the MEME craze on Solana caused a group of MEME players to transfer from Ethereum and BSC chain to Solana. In addition, compared with the hot topics of Ethereum and Solana, BSC is more like a silent person in the community. But even in this case, BSCs DEX transaction volume has basically remained in the top 5.
As of the afternoon of August 27, the total transaction volume of DEX on the BSC chain was $1.34 billion, and that of Solana was $1.2 billion. Compared with the data in the past two months, the BSC chain has indeed ushered in a large increase. Previously, the transaction volume of BSCs DEX was about $500 million. By August 21, it suddenly surged to $920 million, an increase of nearly 100%.
In contrast, Solanas on-chain performance has recently begun to decline significantly. In the past two months, Solanas DEX daily trading volume has remained at around US$2 billion, with a peak of US$3.3 billion on August 5. However, starting from August 9, Solanas DEX daily trading volume began to fall below US$1 billion and continued to decline, falling to around US$600 million on August 16. Although it has rebounded since then, it has only increased to less than US$1 billion. The overall DEX daily trading volume has dropped by nearly 100%. 
As one grows, the other shrinks, and the BSC chain is able to surpass the Solana chain again. However, the glory of the BSC chain seems to be gone. In May 2021, the weekly data on the BSC chain reached 46.6 billion US dollars, averaging about 6.6 billion US dollars per day. The current data is only about 1/5 of that time.
CAT brings MEME fever?
CAT ranks first in terms of trading volume on BSC. This is a newly generated MEME token that has not been online for a long time (launched on August 22). However, data on August 27 showed that the two trading pools of this token contributed $80 million in trading volume, far exceeding other tokens.
CAT stands for Simons Cat Token, which is inspired by the animated web series and book collection created by Simon Tofield. This animation has accumulated more than 20 million fans worldwide. After its launch on the 22nd, CAT was listed on multiple exchanges such as Gate.io, KUCOIN, and MEXC within just a few days.
The token was launched by Floki and currently has more than 30,000 holders, with the largest increase of about 2 times. After the launch, the Binance exchange jointly airdropped to FLOKI holders, and eligible FLOKI holders were allocated 900 billion CAT tokens in proportion to their holdings. Based on the price of $0.000025 on August 27, the scale of this airdrop was about $22.5 million, which is already a large airdrop scale among MEME coins.
Perhaps it was the coin issuance boom brought about by the interview effect of CAT. On August 24, the number of newly deployed contracts on the BSC chain surged to 39,104, compared to about 10,000 on normal days. However, the number of verified contracts did not increase much, remaining at around 300.
Data from August 27 showed that the transaction volume of the new trading pool on the Solana chain (created within 24 hours) was about 220 million US dollars, accounting for about 18.3% of the days trading volume. For the BSC chain, the data was about 120 million US dollars, accounting for 8.9% of the total transaction volume on the day. This data shows that, in comparison, the new trading pool on Solana contributed a greater proportion to the days transactions. Similarly, according to the data of the newly issued trading pool on the same day, BSCs newly launched trading pool had 387 tokens, and Solana had 1,358. In comparison, BSCs current MEME issuance volume is still far behind Solana.
Perhaps in order to further boost transaction volume within the ecosystem, the BSC chain launched a three-month BNB Chain Gas subsidy program on August 19, with a total reward of over US$1 million. According to the announcement, this reward will subsidize up to 80% of the Gas fees for newly built DAPPs.
However, the one-click coin issuance platform, which is the most critical to boosting the MEME craze, has not developed well on the BSC chain. The recently launched BSC chain MEME coin issuance platform Four.meme had a market value of only $54,000 as of August 27.
Overall, although the short-lived explosion on the BSC chain is related to MEME, from the perspective of the issuance method, this popular CAT is not grassroots, but is successful because of well-known IP, mature community and strong endorsement from Binance. To continuously make the data of the public chain active, more similar projects may be needed. On the other hand, with the obvious decline in data on the Solana chain, the era of universal currency issuance seems to be quietly coming to an end.
