SOL, the native cryptocurrency of Solana’s blockchain, has moved another place to become the seventh of the most valuable cryptocurrencies by total market capitalization. At the same time, Solana jumped over the front meme coin, Dogecoin (DOGE).
Solana is experiencing massive growth
Solana has seen an incredible increase in value in recent weeks, climbing over 300% in the last 30 days. During this period, SOL repeatedly set new levels of ATH, ranging from $ 35 per coin on August 1 to a new maximum price above $ 143. Solana has now grown by 23% in the last 24 hours and continues to grow.
On the other hand, Dogecoin has recently seen a more mixed performance. According to the data, its price has increased by 52% in the last 30 days, but by only 9.5% in the last week. DOGE returned faster than some competing coins when the cryptocurrency market began to recover at the end of July, but it is a historically volatile coin that tends to swing more in both directions than coins like BTC or ETH.
The price of Dogecoin has been rising sharply since the beginning of the year, rising from $ 0.0055 on January 1 to the current price above $ 0.29. That’s an increase of 5,200%, although Dogecoin is still at almost 60% of the maximum price of $ 0.73 set in May.
Solana is perceived as a growing rival to the blockchain Ethereum, which is currently the leading platform for creating smart contracts. Smart contracts are pieces of code that execute specified instructions and power decentralized applications (dapps), decentralized finance protocols (DeFi), and nonfungible tokens (NFT).
Although ETH has a huge lead over smart contracting blockchains, the network is often overloaded with activity and increasing transaction fees – especially during the current boom in the NFT sector. In addition, the current ETH mining model requires a lot of energy, although with the upcoming upgrade of the ETH 2.0 network it will move to a more efficient proof-of-stakeholder system.
Solana has been built from the ground up as a more energy-efficient proof-of-stake blockchain and offers fast transaction times and low fees. The rise in SOL token prices in recent weeks is partly attributed to growing DeFi and NFT activity on the platform, suggesting wider acceptance by developers and users alike.
Nevertheless, the alleged “Ethereum killer” lags far behind its established rival in terms of network activity. According to data from DeFi Llama For example, the DeFi protocols in Solana have locked-in assets worth $ 3.6 billion under their smart contracts, while the DeFi protocols based on Ethereum have locked-in assets worth $ 126 billion.
Solana (SOL), Polkadot (DOT) and Cardano (ADA). Which one will win.
