Binance Chain joins meme coin party as Base and Solana meme tokens recover

Binance Chain, in a strategic move, announced on Tuesday a meme coin competition with prizes of up to $1 million to encourage developers to create new meme projects on its blockchain. Amid the move from the third-largest blockchain, the meme coin market is beginning to post a few green candles after Bitcoin's price drop saw most of them lose steam.

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Binance wants to grab a share of the meme market

Binance Chain is looking to grab its share of the meme coin pie with the BNB Chain Meme Innovation Battle after Solana and Base blockchains have grown sharply in the past month following increased attention given to meme tokens.

The BNB Chain Meme Innovation Battle will see developers and creators compete to share a "dynamic prize pool that can reach up to $1 million" by building meme tokens within the BNB ecosystem, according to a blog post announcement by the Binance Chain. According to the announcement, the final amount of the pool will be determined by "the trading volume of qualified memes during the competition period (...) the higher the trading volume, the larger the prize pool."

Registration will end on April 9, after which the competition will kick off the next day and run for 30 days.

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Growth of Solana and Base meme coins

This strategy from Binance echoes interest in the increased total value locked (TVL), and revenue that Solana and Base saw in the past month following high meme coin activity in their ecosystems.

For example, Solana almost doubled its TVL in March, growing 88% from $2.5 billion to about $4.8 billion, according to data from DeFiLlama. Revenue grew from under $134,000 to about $1.38 million, coupled with a significant price increase in SOL. On the other hand, Base's TVL grew nearly 150% to reach $1.2 billion, while revenue increased about 1,700% from about $50,000 to $900,000, the data shows.

These meme coins are increasingly being launched in chains like Solana due to their low transaction fees and simple user interface, said Arthur Hayes, BitMEX co-founder. With Binance Chain's move, the crypto market may witness more influx of meme tokens.

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Meme tokens show signs of recovery

Recent bullish and bearish moves in the market showed that meme coin prices often are more volatile compared to Bitcoin and top altcoins' price movements. For example, with the recent crypto market crash on Tuesday, several meme coins were down in double digits, while most top altcoins only recorded losses in single digits.

However, a few meme coins are beginning to post signs of recovery on Wednesday, especially those in the Solana and Base chains. In the past 24 hours, dogwifhat (WIF) is up 4%, Book of Meme (BOME) increased by 6.4%, cats in a dog world (MEW) grew by 42.5%, Brett (BRETT), and Toshi (TOSHI) of Base are up 3% and 14%, respectively.

All of these indicate the meme party may not be over as the recent crash in their prices suggested.