SOL, Solana blockchain’s native token, is on the rise thanks to another primate-themed NFT drop. SOL is officially the first cryptocurrency to reclaim and eventually surpass its all-time high level following the Marketwide crash in May.
At press time, the token’s price sits at $74.89 which represents a surge of 75.94% in the past 7 days. Solana is a web-scale blockchain that provides fast, secure, scalable, decentralized apps and marketplaces. Moreover, it claims to support 50,000 transactions per second (TPS), making it the fastest blockchain in the world.
However, it’s not the blockchain’s cutting-edge technology that’s pulling it to new heights. SOL’s rise in value can be attributed to an NFT Drop.
Solana’s NFT Lucky Charm
SOL has to thank Degenerate Ape Academy for the positive price action. The project’s 10,000 unique cartoon apes live on the Solana blockchain. The entire collection was sold out in eight minutes during the launch on Sunday, August 18.
The overall trading volume reached almost 96,000 SOL or over $5.9 Million. Two days after launch, the excitement hasn’t died down as the degenerate ape NFTs continues to change hands. Overall volume is now up to 131,100 SOL or around $7.7 Million.
By the own team’s admission, the NFT Drop was far from being smooth sailing. The Degenerate Ape Academy wrote on Twitter: “No, the drop was NOT smooth. It was shitty at best. We did A LOT wrong and the team was overwhelmed with the wave that hit us in the past week. It was exponentially bigger than we thought.”
Fundamentally, there was a missed opportunity because the team didn’t anticipate the market demand. The price to mint an ape was only 6 SOL. Meanwhile, at some point, the cheapest apes in the market were being sold for 13 SOL or a little around $1000. Nonetheless, it was a good day for those who mined the Degenerate Apes because they realized a hefty profit right away.
Solana Blockchain’s Performance
Yes, the NFT Drop propelled SOL to new heights but the platform has been doing things right the past few weeks. The layer 1 blockchain has seen increased usage in recent weeks. In fact, there’s a buzz that it is “crypto’s hidden gem.”
Solana combines the proof of stake consensus algorithm — PoS for short — with a novel proof-of-history, or PoH, system. To illustrate, networks that use PoW like Ethereum approves the most expensive transactions faster than smaller ones resulting in high gas fees. In contrast, PoH is built like a clock. Thus, it records all transactions in real-time, making sure they are processed in order while speeding up the entire network.
Solana’s technology has attracted game-changing partnerships. For example, Chainlink, one of the blockchain’s largest smart contract networks has completed the integration with the network. Chat app Kik’s native crypto token, Kin, also migrated to the network bringing along 58,925,415 wallets.
So Solana is picking up steam fast but it should not be mistaken as an overnight success because it has the technology and real utility.
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