As most of the market saw a 10% to 15% dip in the past 48 hours, Solana (SOL) has defied that trend, crossing the US$200 mark for the first time and becoming the new sixth-largest coin by market cap a few hours ago, according to data from CoinMarketCap.com.
Fast facts
- SOL was trading at US$205.27 at press time, just below its all-time high of US$214.96, which it reached late afternoon, Asia time.
- Solana has been on a price tear recently, up by more than 100% since the start of the month alone, and up by more than 1100% since the start of the year. After only breaking into the crypto top 10 in August, it has rapidly overtaken crypto stalwarts Polkadot, Dogecoin, Circle’s USDC and now XRP by adding roughly US$10 billion to its market cap in a matter of days.
- With a market cap of over US$60 billion at press time, Solana is now less than US$10 billion behind Binance Coin and Tether in fourth and fifth place, respectively.
- Solana is one of a group of coins dubbed possible Ethereum killers due to it high transaction speeds — 6,000 times faster than Ethereum and 40 times faster than Visa — and the launch of its cross-chain communication bridge, Wormhole. It also supports NFTs, with the “Degenerate Ape Series” in particular proving popular, selling out its 10,000 unique pieces in eight minutes after launch.
- “People have realized that Ethereum can be extremely costly and slow,” said Jonathon Miller, Australian managing director of global exchange Kraken, in a recent interview with Forkast.News. “Solana just happens to be a project that is cut out for NFTs. It fits quite neatly into that space, and there have been some successful issuances of NFT on the platform, and the experience is faster and lower cost because there’s less demand. But it feeds the cycle that this is a meaningful alternative.”