Solana, the eighth largest cryptocurrency by market cap broke past $100 for the first time and continued its rally above $115. At press time, the price of SOL was $118.35.
Source: Trading View
Reaching a three-digit price wasn’t the only reason to rejoice for the Solana community. Its NFT marketplace, Solanart also recorded a milestone of one million SOL in volume. This amounted to more than $100 million traded on Solanart.
Almost two months ago, we launched https://t.co/tPritDMeeN, first #NFT marketplace on #Solana
Today, we broke 1,000,000 SOL in volume, and as $SOL breaks $100, that's over $100,000,000 traded on our platform ?
Thank you for making us number one ❤️
New features coming soon ? pic.twitter.com/wjA0EFtTqf— Solanart (@SolanartNFT) August 30, 2021
Place in the Sun
Founded 2017-2018, Solana currently has a market cap of $34,328,795,445. The blockchain offers a speed of 2030 live transactions per second and has 923 validator nodes. More than 320 new validators came on board since June 2021.
3/ Since June 2021, over 320 new validators have come online, reflecting the exploding interest in all levels of the #Solana ecosystem. pic.twitter.com/ByWHFuLZOS
— Solana Foundation (@SolanaFndn) August 27, 2021
Solana’s growth was boosted by its active presence in not just the dapp scene, but also the NFT and DeFi spheres.
Degenerate Ape Academy, an NFT art project on the Solana blockchain featuring whimsical gorillas, helped spur the alt coin’s popularity (and revenue). In DeFi news, Solana announced that more than 100 teams were integrating the on-chain data network PythNetwork.
However, Solana also attracted interest from more traditional organizations. In August 2021, digital asset investment firm Osprey Funds submitted a form to the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to apply for an Osprey Solana Trust. Even Grayscale Investments has expressed its interest.
Hype Highs
Santiment showed that Solana Weighted Sentiment values had shot to an all time high of four standard deviations over the mean.
#Solana's run-up just keeps getting more historic. #Crypto traders are discussing the #NFT darling at rates most #altcoins can only dream of. Weighted sentiment has surpassed 4 deviations above mean, sending crowd positivity & volume to historic levels. https://t.co/ntE9ljEf4u pic.twitter.com/8mf9tJV6Qc
— Santiment (@santimentfeed) August 31, 2021
Yet, positive commentary and market greed usually trigger a fall in prices. Due to this, more experienced Solana traders might be watching these same developments with caution. For now, the alt coin enjoys its rally.
It is tough to narrow down Solana’s meteoric rise to just two or three factors. The platform’s popularity with both crypto artists and traditional investment firms offers an interesting suggestion: that alt coins hoping to climb the rankings could perhaps increase their presence in both crypto and non-crypto spaces instead of gunning to be the next “Ethereum killer.”
