SOL, the token underpinning the Solana blockchain, has spiked above $100 for the first time ever on Monday to continue the momentum that saw the asset’s price grow by 38.7% over the last week.
At its peak, SOL hit $101.42 according to data from CoinGecko, backtracking slightly by press time. With trading volumes over $2.2 billion and the market capitalization just a whisper shy of $29 billion, SOL is now the eighth-largest cryptocurrency.
Overall, the token has soared by more than 201% in the past month.
Solana, which mines its SOL token using a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, is positioned to compete with ETH, the world’s most popular smart contracts platform, opening multiple opportunities in the world of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
The network boasts approximately 1,000 live transactions per second, with developers claiming that this number could go as high as 50,000 at peak times. The transaction fees are also much cheaper than those currently offered on ETH.
A smart contract is a type of self-executing contract without the need for the parties to take a separate action. You can think of a smart contract as a line of code created to automatically execute a task, or series of tasks, once a triggering event occurs without any intermediaries.
Solana’s ambitious plans for the future
Earlier this year, Solana raised over $300 million to help launch an incubation studio to accelerate the development of decentralized applications (dapps) and platforms building on the blockchain.
Other plans for the future include a venture investing arm and trading desk dedicated to the Solana ecosystem.
Among the project’s prominent backers is Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of fast-growing crypto trading platform exchange FTX, which has built a decentralized derivatives exchange called Serum on top of Solana.
Solana’s other partners include Digital Assets AG, a Swiss firm that is offering tokenized stocks built on the Solana blockchain, with Facebook, Google, Netflix, Nvidia, PayPal, Square, and Tesla among the most popular shares available for trading.
