Mark Weaden
The Degenerate Apes NFT launch was a sellout and has largely contributed to the soaring price of Solana.
Solana (SOL) reached an all-time high of $64.48, rising over 40% in a matter of days. The trend of cryptocurrencies prices rising now isn’t news, but the fact Solana has surged into the top 10 most valuable coins is certainly newsworthy.
The growing altcoin market is led by SOL after the release of the sellout Degenerate Ape NFTs, as well as the blockchain communication bridge Wormhole. SOL has been touted as one of the most important coins of 2021 and it has certainly been fulfilling that prediction in recent weeks.
However, it’s not just Solana that has seen a huge gain in market price over the past week, with Ripple and Cardano gaining over 60% and 50%, respectively. We are seeing the end of the crypto bear run and things are starting to get very interesting once again.
What is Solana?
SOL was founded in 2018 and has since slowly built its way to the point where the Solana Foundation is holding its first conference in Lisbon from the 7th to the 10th of November. The community has grown very quickly and recognizes the value of a company that offers decentralized finance networks the ability to connect with existing projects, like Terra, Ethereum, and Binance Smart Chain to move tokenized assets across blockchains. This is particularly useful in the NFT space, which is what we saw with the latest NFT sale.
The high speed and low cost of the SOL network have made it particularly interesting to investors. With the Degenerate Ape NFT project, we saw the sale of its entire 10,000 unique NFT collection in a matter of eight minutes, which is a testament to the speed of the SOL blockchain network. What’s more, the NFT market is buoyant right now and with the Solana blockchain offering so much value, we may see many more NFT producers opting for SOL as well.
As well as the NFT sale, the Solana Wormhole offers a decentralized token bridge between Solana and the high-utility blockchain Ethereum. Many coins are considered the ones that will wipe out the other, but Solana works in tandem with Ethereum and many other networks.
Solana performs transactions 2,000 times faster than Ethereum, but this doesn’t make it better. For the cryptocurrency industry to truly thrive, there must be interoperability between networks and a willingness to pursue this. Allowing the entire cryptocurrency and blockchain sphere to interact seamlessly should be the shared goal for the community, rather than wiping one another out.
