Altcoins
Solana Leads Altcoin Rise to All-Time High, Topples Uniswap
Solana is driving a surge in the cryptocurrency market, with the price of its SOL token soaring 41% today to hit a new all-time high of $64.48. Other top-performing stocks include Ripple’s XRP and Cardano’s ADA, both of which have gained over 63% and 51%, respectively, over the past week.
Solana price has increased by more than 65% in the last seven days, thanks to the launch of Wormhole — a communication bridge between Solana and other peaks decentralized finance networks that enable existing projects, such as Terra, Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain to move tokenized assets transparently on blockchains to benefit from the high speed and low cost of Solana.
SOL’s price rise of over 41% today can likely be attributed to the successful launch of a new non-fungible token project hosted on the Solana blockchain — “The Academy of Degenerate Apes NFT.” The NFT project sold out its collection of 10,000 unique NFTs in eight minutes when it launched this weekend. At the time, the minting fee was six SOL tokens per monkey, and the collectors’ buying frenzy saw Solana’s trading volume exceed $2.5 billion.
The Solana Wormhole
As Ethereum has been struggling lately with growing demand in the DeFi spaceit has given rise to potential rivals – known as “Ethereum killers” – such as Cardano, Peas, Binance Smart Chain And Solana time to enter space.
The public blockchain Solana, in particular, has been turning heads in the blockchain world due to its transaction speeds, which are around 65,000 transactions per second, making it around 2,000 times faster than Ethereum and 40 times faster than Visa.
While the nickname “Ethereum Killer” is catchy, experts don’t entirely agree that there’s only room for one smart contract platform.
“I think the term ‘Ethereum killer’ is not quite correct, because I see the whole ecosystem growing so much and it’s hard to say that one is going to kill the other” , said Charlie Morris, managing partner of an asset management company. CMCC Global, in an interview with Forkast.News. “I think both [Ethereum and Solana] will grow phenomenally from here. I think we’re already seeing it, just look at Wormhole, which is a bridge between Ethereum and Solana. I strongly believe in long-term interoperability between many different chains.
Solana and Certus One created Wormhole last year, an interoperability protocol that enables communication between high-value blockchains. Last week, Wormhole 2.0 launched its mainnet and transformed into a fully generic cross-chain messaging protocol.
In simple terms, this means that full communication between the Solana, Terra, Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain ecosystems is now possible and allows developers to build features to transfer data and tokens and engage in use cases entirely different, including cross-chain governance decisions. Wormhole 2.0 can now meet the DeFi community’s demand for trustless bridges between smart contract protocols, as many seek to connect decentralized applications and smart contracts from other high-usage chains to utilize the fast transaction speeds and Solana’s low gas costs.
Since the launch of Wormhole 2.0 on August 9, the price of Solana has increased from US$37 per SOL token to US$64.48 today.
Degenerate Ape NFTs Prove Solana Has DeFi Capability
The Degenerate Ape Academy NFT project is one of the first to launch using Solanart – the first NFT platform on the Solana blockchain – and, needless to say, it was a huge success.
Ape NFTs sold out in eight minutes after their launch on Saturday, and the transaction fees for using the Solana platform were tiny, costing about $0.01. No slowdowns or traffic jams were also recorded on Solana. This could be a harsh lesson for the Ethereum community, which has experienced a severely clogged network during popular NFT launches, causing gas fees to skyrocket so high that transactions momentarily cost hundreds of dollars worth of Ether.
The cost to create a Degenerate Monkey NFT at launch was 6 SOL. Now, the floor price for purchasing Degenerate Monkeys on Solanart has increased to 13.8 SOL, meaning those who were lucky enough to create one can now double their money, just 36 hours after launch.
Some monkeys have already sold for around 25 SOL, with one monkey sporting a beer hat reaching 100 SOL this morning. Its new owner has already put it back on sale for 500 SOL.
What is truly remarkable about the development and effects on the price of SOL is that Degenerate Apes is only the first major NFT development on Solana.
“There are hardly any notable NFT projects, if any, on SOL, but what happens when the market starts to evolve? The demand for SOL will drive prices to new highs and looking at the chart it is primed for price discovery,” wrote a top crypto trader who goes by the name Pentoshi on Twitter.
CMCC Global’s Morris agreed that Solana was poised to take over a significant share of the DeFi market.
“About 90% of all small contract developers are doing it on Ethereum, and what we’ve seen is that Solana has started to attract a lot of the DeFi crowd because what Solana offers is this incredibly high throughput platform at a very, very high price. low fees,” Morris said. “If you want to build an on-chain order book, you need something that is going to process a huge volume of transactions at a very low cost and very, very quickly. And that’s what Solana does. I think there’s a mix of some existing Ethereum projects and existing players in the blockchain ecosystem looking at this and thinking, “Wow! we should try this platform because it might be able to do what we couldn’t do with Ethereum.
At the time of writing, the price of Solana was down slightly, to US$63, from its all-time high. With more projects likely to capture Solana’s broadband opportunities, SOL price could see a wild ride in the coming weeks.