Solana Makes Its Way Into Crypto Top 10 Following New All-Time High

Solana is the latest project taking the crypto market by storm now. The blockchain is a rival to projects like Cardano and Ethereum in the fact that decentralized apps can be built on it. But there hasn’t been much noise made in the market by the project until now. The project which had been started in 2017 had taken three years to launch. Finally launching in March 2020 after three years of building out the blockchain.

According to the team, they are building a blockchain which is faster than any other existing blockchain. While Ethereum has an ETA for proof of stake scheduled for 2022, Solana is a delegated proof of stake network. Meaning that mining on the blockchain uses way less energy than Bitcoin and Ethereum. And the transactions carried out on the blockchain are faster than proof of stake blockchains.

The Solana blockchain and its native token, SOL, have been in the market for a while now. So why all the hype around it now? And why is the coin price surging now?

Reasons For The Surge

The price of SOL hit an all-time high of \$74 on August 17th, after gaining over 20% in the span of a day. This surge in the coin price put the project in the top 10 biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap. But the growth is attributed to something that has been making waves in the crypto space recently - NFTs.

The Degenerate Ape NFTs were minted on the Solana blockchain and although 10,000 of these NFTs were minted, the demand was so high, the whole collection had been sold out in just eight minutes. The NFTs sold out for \$336 per ape, about six SOL tokens, but the interesting part of the whole ordeal was that the fees required to mint these NFTs were minuscule in comparison.

Minting 10,000 NFTs on the leading NFT platform, Ethereum, would have seen the network fees surge, especially given the high demand associated with the NFTs. But the impact on the network fees of Solana was negligible. Making evident that the network is more scalable than the Ethereal network.

Solana Price Movement

The most notable movements in the price of SOL have happened in the span of two days. On August 16th, the price surged from \$43 to hit a new all-time high. Before losing steam which led to a dip in the price.

But this dip would not last long as another surge earlier today saw the price of the asset breaking the record it had set the previous. Surging past the $70 resistance point to land at $74. The price surge happened in the early hours of the morning. And by the time the markets opened, the asset had lost a bit of ground that saw the price crashing back down into the \$60 price range.

The price of the asset continues to trade in the green at the time of this writing. Rising up from the dip below $60 to be trading currently at $63.9, with a market cap of \$18.4 billion.