Solana surges 40% over the weekend as the ecosystem expands

Solana set a new all-time high on Sunday of $19.38 and the ecosystem now includes over 120 different projects.

High-performance infrastructure blockchain Solana has seen a surge in popularity recently. It started Friday at $12.98, before rallying 40% over the weekend to reach a new all-time high of $19.38 yesterday. The price has dropped slightly since, settling at $18.20 at the time of writing. In fact, so far in 2021, Solana has made gains of over 1,100%, having started the new year trading at $1.51.

Solana is one of several blockchains to have been hailed as an “Ethereum killer” as it offers a high speed, low cost, scalable and smart contract compatible environment in which to build decentralised applications (dApps). The blockchain claims to be able to handle 50,000 transactions per second at an average fee of $0.00001.

Solana is a relatively new project – although the idea was first conceived in 2017, the protocol wasn’t launched until March 2020. It uses a component of its proof-of-stake consensus mechanism called proof-of-history, which enables events to be time-stamped in relation to real-time – something which no other blockchain has done.

The price of Solana first took off at the end of July 2020 on the back of the announcement by cryptocurrency derivatives exchange FTX that it had chosen Solana on which to build its non-custodial decentralised exchange (DEX) Serum.

Since then, the Solana ecosystem has expanded to incorporate more than 120 different projects, encompassing wallets, storage solutions, lending protocols, digital games and much more. Projects building on Solana includes payments technology company Circle Pay which has brought a circulating supply of 320 million USDC to Solana, music streaming platform Audius which now has 3.5 million monthly active users, and the automated market maker (AMM) aggregator of liquidity pools Orca.

Just last Friday, crypto exchange OKEx revealed that its investment arm, Block Dream Fund, would be accelerating the growth and development of the Solana ecosystem by bringing $20 million of new capital to it.

The other so-called “Ethereum killers” have also done well in 2021: Polkadot is up 270% since the start of the year and Cardano is up over 560% as excitement grows around the upcoming Goguen mainnet release which will bring smart contracts to the blockchain.