Solana was one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies in 2021 (among the most highly capitalized cryptocurrencies, only Shiba Inu managed to perform better) and according to many experts, this trend is set to continue in 2022.
Solana’s 2022
Solana (SOL) has become a major player in smart contracts and blockchain alternatives to Ethereum’s In the past year, the network’s total locked value (TVL) has grown by $660 million and spans over 40 decentralized applications.
Nigel Green, CEO and founder of deVere Group, a leading consulting and fintech firm, predicts an overtaking of both Ethereum and Bitcoin in 2022.
After all, if one considers that while Bitcoin has grown by 62%, Ethereum by around 250%, Solana in 2021 would have grown by almost 13.000%. From this, it can be seen that this prediction does not seem too far-fetched.
Solana’s growth rate
The great strength of Solana’s blockchain is its huge transaction speed (50,000 transactions per second, compared to Ethereum’s 15-30, with costs of $0.00025 per transaction) making it one of the most scalable and cost-effective blockchains around.
With over $52 billion in capitalization Solana is the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
Solana has become the blockchain of choice for NFT projects over the past year. Despite the fact that Ethereum is still the biggest in terms of volume, the growth rates over the past year are all in Solana’s favour.
It is no coincidence that even a giant like the Grayscale fund added Solana to its Digital Large Cap Fund in October.
Solana is currently the third-largest cryptocurrency in the derivatives market, after the two giants Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Solana’s vulnerabilities
But 2021 has not been all roses for Solana. On 4 January, the platform suffered a new down after a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, which occurs when multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system. And this is the second such attack, following the one that occurred around 20 days ago.
These attacks show how the Solana blockchain still remains quite unstable compared to those of Bitcoin or Ethereum. Not least because it is still a relatively young project compared to many of its competitors. In September, an excessive number of users accessing the network caused transactions to come to a standstill. The fault was only resolved after a few hours with a restart of the system.
The fact that many of Solana’s projects are still in a testing phase makes it still rather risky for most investors. The question now is whether these issues will worsen in 2022, making the project less secure and stable than Cardano or Polkadot.
For most experts, however, the positive aspects of Solana will prevail. These are represented above all by its great adaptability for DeFi and NFT applications, two sectors that are expected to grow strongly in 2022.
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