Solana’s sol token has rallied sharply this year. 3d illustration.
The price of Solana’s sol token has soared this year, leaving many other cryptocurrencies in the dust as this innovative blockchain project continues to generate visibility.
The digital token reached an all-time high of $214.36 last night on Messari.
At this point, it was up more than 13,200% from its price of $1.61 on January 1, additional Messari figures show.
The digital currency later pulled back, and was at $192.72 at the time of this writing, at which point it was still up more than 11,800% year-to-date.
[Ed note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]
The project, whose innovative technology has generated significant visibility, claims that it has created the world’s fastest blockchain.
According to the Solana white paper, the network could theoretically process 710,000 transactions per second (TPS) using a 1 gigabit per second network connection.
Anatoly Yakovenko, founder and CEO of Solana, wrote a blog post offering a more specific example on the blockchain’s bandwidth.
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“On current iterations of the Solana Testnet, a network of 200 physically distinct nodes supports a sustained throughput of more than 50,000 transactions per second when running with GPUs,” he stated.
“Achieving as such requires the implementation of several optimizations and new technologies, and the result is a breakthrough in network capacity that signals a new phase in blockchain development.”
Solana uses a consensus algorithm called proof-of-history, which “creates a historical record that proves that an event has occurred at a specific moment in time.”
In addition to having promising technology that could provide very high transaction capacity, Solana has other things going for it.
According to the project’s website, the average transaction fee is $0.00025, far lower than the cost of the average Ethereum transaction at the time of this writing.
Solana Labs, the company behind the network’s software, raised more than $300 million in a token sale led by big-name companies Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital.
Alameda Research, a venture capital firm founded by cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, also participated in the funding round.
In light of Solana’s recent visibility, and the sharp gains enjoyed by sol, several analysts offered some perspective on the network, as well as the factors that may have helped drive its tokens higher.
“Solana is a legitimate competitor to Ethereum, with lightning fast transactions at a fraction of the price,” said Scott Melker, a crypto investor and analyst who is the host of The Wolf Of All Streets Podcast.
“The rapid increase in value is largely a result of crypto gaming and successful NFT launches,” he stated.
“Developers and projects have been building on Solana for years, which is manifesting in an explosion of price and adoption.”
Loan Venkatapen, who serves as both cofounder and managing partner of Blocklabs Capital Management, also chimed in.
“Solana blockchain is an ultra high performance, low latency blockchain and fully smart contract compatible,” he stated.
“There is an historical compromise in blockchain technologies between security, decentralization and speed. Solana is the first serious attempt at resolving this dilemma.”
“By integrating a proof-of-history mechanism to the standard proof-of-stake consensus, Solana has built a network natively able to process up to 65K TPS with an average transaction cost less than 1 cent while most other blockchains are still working on Ethereum based layer 2 solutions or side chains,” noted Venkatapen.
“Solana is a unique blockchain that offers below second block finality,” said Marius Rupsys, a digital currency investor.
“This creates opportunities for use cases that were not possible before,” he added.
“For example, games can work on this blockchain. Star Atlas is the most notable being built on top of Solana.”
“Further, NFTs are a really hot market now,” Rupsys stated, emphasizing the recent announcement that crypto derivatives exchange FTX had launched a platform for creating NFTs that will exist cross-chain on both Solana and Ethereum.
He summed things up nicely, stating that “there are many use cases for this blockchain,” which has both a “big community” and “influential investors.”
Disclosure: I own some bitcoin, bitcoin cash, litecoin, ether and EOS.
