Solana, the smart contract altcoin, has had one of the most impressive runs in the crypto world in recent months. The coin rose more than 800% within two months to surpass Dogecoin as the seventh most valuable cryptocurrency based on market cap. It grew more than 35% within 24 hours.
At the same time, Dogecoin has not been the most impressive in its price performance. While the wider crypto market has been on a rise since July, some of the other crypto projects rose faster than DOGE. Also, the coin tends to be more volatile and swings in price changes more than Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The rise of Solana
While Dogecoin has been slow to regain as the market corrects, Solana has seen tremendous growth. Even though Solana had a small rise at the beginning of 2021, the major boost began in July.
The coin had a market cap of around $6.1B on the 20th July, however, within two months the market cap had risen to $41.63B. The price of SOL has also been on a sustained bullish run. It rose from the lows of 35 cents to hit $136.
Why is the Solana price surging?
The general crypto market has been in a positive market movement since late July. However, Solana has surpassed the growth prospects of other cryptocurrencies. Dubbed as the “Ethereum killer,” such price movements make it seem like the Ethereum challenger that it was meant to be.
One of the reasons behind this massive growth is the Worldwide Hackathon the platform is running until October 8th. The Hackathon has led to massive platform adoption as it promises to award prizes worth $5million to the best projects built on the platform.
The Hackathon has also shown the institutional approval of the token given the sponsors include Microsoft, Standard Chartered, and Jump Capital.
What is Solana?
Solana is a highly functional open-source crypto project that looks to use blockchain technology to provide decentralised finances (Defi) solutions. Launched in March 2020, Solana is an alternative cryptocurrency that looks to unseat Ethereum. It supports the development of decentralised applications (Dapps).
One of the most unique features of Solana is the proof-of-history (PoH) consensus, which allows for greater scalability of the protocol. The protocol makes Solana one of the fastest blockchains in the world with the platform currently processing around 710,000 transactions per second.
The scalability of the network also works best for the transaction costs for both network users and developers. It currently charges an average of $0.00025 for every transaction, which is some of the lowest in the crypto world.
Even though Solana currently remains with an eight-time less market cap compared to that of Ethereum, with such growth patterns it can offer a formidable challenge. It can even surpass it in the long run.
