Solana broke into the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap ranking, after an impressive run up following a week-long gain of 72%. We took a look into what caused this bullish run.
While popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are constantly on the radar of investors, talks about Solana are picking up amongst investors. Thanks to its tremendous bullish run over the past week, the cryptocurrency project is making the headlines.
Solana (SOL) Gained 72% in a Week
According to data on CoinMarketCap, Solana is currently no.2 on a list of top-100 gainers in the past seven days. As of press time, the native token of the decentralized computing platform, SOL, was trading at above $68 following a week-long gain of 72%.
Solana has had a rather impressive year. The digital asset began the year trading at less than $1.85. With a current price of over $68, Solana has posted a staggering 3600% gain in 2021. Interestingly, SOL was trading at only $38.95 just a week ago. The token rose to $41.41 on Thursday, August 12, and $43.56 by Friday. By Saturday, SOL climbed even further to $44.04, posting even more gains by the end of Sunday at $52.95.
What Happened to Solana (SOL)?
The utility of Solana’s solution is coming into the limelight. Last week, Mango markets, a high-speed decentralized exchange that is powered by Solana successfully raised $70 million in crowdfunding. More notably, the Solana Foundation launched the Wormhole 2.0 update.
Wormhole is an interoperability protocol that enables communication between high-value blockchains. The communication bridge allows several top blockchains, such as Terra, Ethereum, and Binance Smart Chain to benefit from Solana’s low cost and high speed. Consequently, developers can now deploy functionality to transfer data and tokens across several blockchains. More information about Wormhole could be found here.
Wormhole could eventually become a cornerstone for trustless bridges between smart-contract protocols, as developers look to connect decentralized apps from other blockchains to Solana.
In addition to the launch of Wormhole, SOL’s latest price rally can also be attributed to the successful launch of a new NFT project hosted on the Solana blockchain. Over the weekend, “The Degenerate Ape Academy NFT” sold its collection of 10,000 ape tokens in eight minutes. Amid the buying frenzy during the sales, Solana’s trading volume exceeded US$2.5 billion. It is also worth mentioning that the transaction fee was minuscule, costing around US$0.01 to mint, and there was no network congestion during the sale.
An Ethereum Killer?
Several projects have earned the catchy title of “Ethereum killer” since late 2017. The likes of Cardano, Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain and Solana, have been dubbed possible Ethereum killers as the leading blockchain struggles with surging demand in the DeFi and NFT sectors. In the case of Solana, the project is on a mission to scale blockchain for global adoption.
Speaking of scalability, the platform can process more than 6,000 transactions per second, according to data from Solana Beach show. However, its website boasts of a maximum throughput of 50,000 transactions per second.
For more articles on Solana, check out the following!
A Deep Dive Into Solana
Market Review: How Solana and Other Tokens Fared in February
Solana Labs Raises $10M in Token Sale
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