The Crypto Currency That Is Rising Faster Than Bitcoin

The question on everyone’s lips right now is what is Solana? In the last few weeks, crypto has defied various price crashes, rising faster than Bitcoin. 

The last few weeks have seen the crypto market crash, resulting in 100s of billions of dollars from the market. This has created lots of fears in the market, with some people fearing that Bitcoin and other cryptos will lose all gains made in the last 12 months. 

But one of the two cryptocurrencies has managed to pass through the crash unaffected, and at the same time, is soaring to new highs 

Solana’s token SOL achieved an all-time high of $214.96 last week. Mind you, 12 months ago; the coin was worth less than $2. 

The recent price surge has placed Solana’s market cap above $69 billion, pushing it ahead of the likes of Dogecoin and Ripple (XRP). Thus making it the sixth most valuable cryptocurrency in the world. 

“The majority of the crypto market slid with BTC, demonstrating the relative immaturity of the asset class and the market’s dependency on bitcoin,” said Alexandra Clark, a sales trader at UK-based digital asset broker GlobalBlock. “But Solana remained largely unaffected and instead have seen double-digit returns.”

This recent surge and stability is down to the underlying technology, which many people believe would be able to rival the likes of Ethereum and ADA

Solana claims it has the world’s fastest blockchain capable of supporting smart contracts, NFTs, and other platforms emerging in the decentralized space. 

There are close to 500 projects currently running on Solana’s ecosystem, with the SOL cryptocurrency registering 1000 transactions per section. The fantastic thing is that each transaction averages just under $0.00025. This is cheap when compared with BTC and ETH. 

One of the several projects on the SOL blockchain is Aldrin, a crypto exchange that decentralized and centralized finance together. 

“Crypto will accelerate what will be the biggest social impact change of our lifetimes,” said Hisham Khan, who launched Aldrin. “Ethereum has influenced a wave of putting power back into the hands of people, but so far has been too expensive and too exclusive, simply mirroring the wealth gap we see in traditional finance. Solana is lowering the barriers of entry and furthering the mass adoption of the decentralization movement.”

SOL has enjoyed a 12,000 percent price rise since the start of 2021. This is more than the 1360 percent price seen by Cardano’s ADA, 349 percent price increase by Ethereum, and 63 percent price increase by Bitcoin. 

“Literally, the goal of Solana is to carry transactions as fast as news travels around the world – so the speed of light through fiber. Who we’re competing with is Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange,” Clark said.

“We are 100 percent focused on making sure these order books that are running on [Solana’s decentralized exchange] Serum can be competitive with not Ethereum, but with the New York Stock Exchange, with NASDAQ, with the biggest retail exchanges with equities. If we can accomplish that, as a decentralized open-source project… I think that is an exciting outcome. It’s worth trying.”