Solana set another all-time high last night. Just two days after the Ethereum competitor crossed the $250 threshold, prices surged yet again, taking Solana to $260 by 9.39PM UTC. At the time of writing, it trades for $251.53, a 3.32% pullback, but still 35% higher than it was seven days ago.
Today’s news adds further excitement to what has been a momentous week for the rising currency. On Tuesday, Solana flipped Cardano to become the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, and then on Thursday it reached prices of $250.
It’s also worth noting that the total value locked in decentralized finance protocols on Solana is also sailing at a record high of $15.14 billion, according to DeFi data aggregator DeFiLlama.
All these great tidings come just in time for the first day of the Solana’s Foundation’s inaugural conference. Breakpoint is on in Lisbon until Wednesday. Guest speakers include Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, Coinshares CSO Meltem Demirors and FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
What is Solana?
Solana was founded in 2017, and the mainnet officially launched in March 2020. Designer Anatoly Yakovenko enabled smart contract technology (self-executing financial contracts, initially popularized by Ethereum) on the Solana blockchain to support the creation of decentralized finance products and decentralized applications (dApps).
Solana claims to be a much more scalable and cheaper alternative to Ethereum. Ethereum currently suffers from what’s known as a ‘transactions bottleneck’, meaning that the network can only handle about 12-14 transactions a second. Solana claims to be able to handle 50,000 TPS, which makes it one of the speediest blockchains on the market.
Moreover, Solana has pretty fast block times too. In cryptospeak, ‘block time’ is a measurement of time indicating how long it takes to produce a ‘block’. A block is a file containing a list of transactions on the network over a given period. Solana claims it can finish a block in a little over 400 milliseconds.
In addition to dapps, Solana is also capable of hosting NFTs. NFTs on Solana aren’t as big as Ethereum NFTs, but there’s plenty of room for growth. Last month, sales of a Tungsten Cube NFT on Solana raised $100,000 for crypto lobbying organization Coin Center.
Solana is faster and cheaper than its competitors, and it’s constantly getting lots of TLC from its developers. This week’s news positions Solana as the solid frontrunner for the title of “Ethereum killer.”
