Coin to Watch: Red-hot Solana up 30-fold year-to-date, now a top 15 project
Coinhead
Coinhead
A high-speed blockchain project started by engineers from big tech companies like Google, Qualcomm, Microsoft and Twitter has been one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies this year, even setting new highs last week even as the rest of the market crashed.
In the past three weeks Solana has leapfrogged nine cryptocurrencies — including Tron, Stellar, Theta and Terra — to become the 13th most valuable crypto by market capitalisation, with a collective value of $US12.6 billion ($16.2 billion).
The token’s value has more than tripled in the past 30 days, trading Monday afternoon at $US46.84, up from less than $US2 at the start of the year. Solana coins were sold for as little as US4c apiece during an April 2018 seed sale.
Solana is going crazy. Just goes to show that people are just dying to find efficient and low-gas alternatives. Plus, Solana has the backing of the Alameda / FTX stable which are intent on growing out its DeFi ecosystem. Will be doing an updated vid soon 🙏
— Coin Bureau (guy.eth)🕵🏻 (@coinbureau) April 25, 2021
I think we see Solana projects outperform the rest of the market for the next few months
— Altcoin Psycho (@AltcoinPsycho) April 26, 2021
I bought SOL last September when it was $3.00. It’s hard to get myself to buy more at $45.00. However, if it’s following the same path as ETH, then it’s still cheap. Sol’s technology is far superior to that of ETH or any other blockchain. #solana
— Aaron Zuckerman (@ZuckermanAaron) April 25, 2021
The project says an innovation called “proof of history” allows Solana to achieve such high performance without the use of sharding or layer 2 solutions, by time-stamping transactions on the blockchain.
The @solana blockchain uses PoS and PoReplication.
Proof of History is a sequence of computation that can verify passage of time between two events. It uses a cryp-
tographically secure function written so that output must be completely executed to generate the output.— Technician (@fibtechnician) April 18, 2021
The Solana ecosystem includes the decentralised exchange token Serum, an automated market maker called Raydium, as well as a host of other projects.
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I personally believe in combination that Ethereum and Solana will be the foundational building blocks of our next tech revolution at an internet level scale.
The economic opportunity here is trillions of dollars.
— Adam Cochran (@adamscochran) April 22, 2021
Of course, there are a number of other high-speed blockchain projects — including Cardano, Tezos, Algorand, Tron, EOS, Avalanche and Elrond — looking to displace Ethereum’s dominance as the leading smart contract platform. Thus far, none have succeeded.