Creators launched nearly half a million tokens on the Solana blockchain in May, as lower barriers to entry and the desire to create a hit memecoin caught hold. 

In May, 455,000 tokens were created on Solana, according to data compiled by The Block Pro. This compares to 177,000 tokens on Ethereum Layer 2 Base and 39,000 tokens on BNB Chain. The Ethereum mainnet and Layer 2 networks Arbitrum and Optimism each saw fewer than 20,000 tokens created.

"Solana is built to be a general purpose layer 1, with fast finality and high throughput with extremely low transaction fees," said Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation. "The rise of mass token creation on Solana is …