The altcoin market at this moment seems to be at a standstill: let’s take a closer look at the price trends of SOL (Solana), SUI, and SHIB (Shiba Inu).
Solana (SOL), SUI e SHIB (Shiba Inu): the current price analysis
During 2025, the trend of the price of SOL, the native cryptocurrency of Solana, was not great.
Indeed, in some ways it might even seem concerning.
Suffice it to say that both SOL and BTC have reached new all-time highs in 2025, but while Bitcoin is now down only -6% from those highs, Solana is even at -51%.
Moreover, Bitcoin recorded new highs just a month ago, while those of Solana date back to January. From February onwards, BTC first fell, and then rose again, while SOL fell a lot, and rose very little.
Suffice it to say that at the end of October last year, before the mini-altseason of November triggered by the Trump trade, the price of SOL was well above $150, while now it has dropped to $145. Furthermore, in April it hit an annual low of $105, a price not seen since February 2024.
The problem seems to be related to memecoin.
During the last major bull run crypto (the one in 2021), the price of Solana reached a peak of about $240, but then during the subsequent bear market, it plummeted below $10.
It began to recover at the end of 2023, first with a normal rebound above $50, and then particularly thanks to the memecoin.
In fact, thanks to very low fees, many new memecoins have been launched on Solana, which from this point of view has taken the place of Ethereum. The boom of memecoins on Solana allowed the price of SOL to rise above $190 at the beginning of 2024, and then after a return to $120, to rise to over $190 in January of this year.
It should be remembered that the fees on transactions of any token on Solana, including memecoin, must necessarily be paid in SOL.
This dynamic, which lasted for about a year and a half, seems to have ended in February of this year, with the price dropping first below $120 and then also below $110.
The rebound of the last two months hasn’t been much, so much so that the price is still below $150.
Shiba Inu (SHIB)
SHIB is the token of Shiba Inu, one of the most important memecoins in the world.
SHIB is the second memecoin in the world by market capitalization, behind only DOGE of Dogecoin.
Dogecoin capitalizes more than 25 billion dollars, while Shiba Inu stops just under 7 billion. In third place is PEPE with just over 4 billion.
Dogecoin, however, is not only the first memecoin to have been created, back in 2013, but it stands on its own, especially thanks to the support it received in the past from Elon Musk.
Therefore, it is Shiba Inu, and not Dogecoin, that best represents the bull market of memecoins.
The first thing you notice is that the current price of SHIB is still even 87% lower than the all-time highs of 2021, which it has never even come close to again, not even during the mini-altseason of November 2024.
In fact, it is even 37% lower than the price twelve months ago, due to a collapse that occurred in the last few months in two phases, one between January and March of this year, and an even more recent one in May. This collapse still seems to be ongoing, although it is possible that sooner or later it will stop.
The lows of the bear-market of 2022/2023 are still distant, but not too far, and this is most likely due to the competition from memecoins.
Memecoins tend to make a splash only once and to face strong competition from new memecoins in subsequent cycles.
Furthermore, starting from February of this year, the entire memecoin market has been experiencing some difficulties, although from this point of view it might only be a temporary setback.
All this also explains very well why the price of Solana has not rebounded like that of Bitcoin.
SUI
A completely different discussion is the one concerning SUI.
The blockchain of Sui is not particularly used for memecoins. It is instead used mainly in the DeFi sector.
This is a crypto project launched just a couple of years ago, and it has already reached a TVL DeFi exceeding 1.7 billion dollars.
Although such a TVL has led Sui to surpass much more historical projects, such as Avalanche or Polygon, lately a potentially strong new competitor has emerged, Hyperliquid, which has already surpassed it in DeFi TVL, albeit slightly.
The price of the cryptocurrency SUI, however, does not seem to have been significantly affected by this new potential competition.
In fact, after reaching the new all-time high in January of this year, above $5.3, in the following months it experienced a strong correction down to $2, which, however, never brought it even close to the $0.8 of the end of October 2024.
Furthermore, starting from the end of April, it marked an interesting rebound, even though it ended shortly before mid-May. Now the price is $2.8, which is at a level higher than any price it had historically before the Trump trade.
