Solana (SOL) Keeps Climbing And Breaking All-Time Highs
Solana (SOL), a crypto project that promises lower transaction times, increase capacity and decrease costs to a fraction of a penny per transaction, has hit another all-time high.
At the time of writing SOL trades for $164, with more than 14% gains on a daily chart. Solana is ranked as 7th crypto asset by market cap.
The coin has appreciated 70,632% since it was launched a year and a half ago.
What Is Solana (SOL)?
Solana is a highly functional open source project that banks on blockchain technology’s permissionless nature to provide decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions. While the idea and initial work on the project began in 2017, Solana was officially launched in March 2020 by the Solana Foundation with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
The Solana protocol is designed to facilitate decentralized app (DApp) creation. It aims to improve scalability by introducing a proof-of-history (PoH) consensus combined with the underlying proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus of the blockchain.
Because of the innovative hybrid consensus model, Solana enjoys interest from small-time traders and institutional traders alike. A significant focus for the Solana Foundation is to make decentralized finance accessible on a larger scale.
Why Is Solana Rallying?
Solana’s price climb comes at a time when the market is desperate for a smart contract-enabled blockchain that offers high throughputs at a low cost. Ethereum, its main competitor, is fit to burst; a hotly-awaited upgrade is taking a long time and transactions are expensive.
Solana’s latest all-time high coincides with the launch of an NFT marketplace on FTX that lets people trade the NFTs across Solana and Ethereum. The marketplace grabbed headlines today after customers spammed submissions of NFT fish. FTX has since introduced a fee for NFT submissions.
Although people can’t yet withdraw the NFTs minted on FTX’s new marketplace, the premise of minting NFTs for trivial amounts of money (compared to the ~$80 it costs to mint an NFT on Ethereum) on a major exchange that supports the Solana ecosystem could have turned new investors onto the cryptocurrency.
The rest of the market has been flagging green today. Bitcoin is currently trading at $52,574, while the market waits El Salvador making officially Bitcoin as its national currency, and Ethereum is closing in on $4,000 as the NFT market continues to grow.
