Solana (SOL) is an up-and-coming Ethereum competitor. It’s a proof-of-stake coin, and its network is extremely fast and powerful. The requirements to run a validator are extreme (it requires a powerful server with 128GB of RAM, which is a lot).
Apparently the Solana network can support more than 1,000 transactions per second, which is impressive.
I completely missed Solana’s massive run-up this year. Its price has grown from around $0.70 in April 2020 to more than $70 today. Ouch.
Solana looks like a very promising project. But is it worth its current fully-diluted market cap of $36 billion?
I don’t think there’s enough information to answer that question. Solana doesn’t have a ton of organic usage right now, but it is starting to happen.
Earlier this week, the Solana network hosted its biggest art NFT sale to date, a project called Degenerate Apes. Here’s an excerpt from Decrypt’s reporting about the sale.
SOL’s dramatic rise follows the launch of Degenerate Ape Academy — a non-fungible token (NFT) project built on the Solana blockchain — on Sunday.
The launch saw a collection of the 10,000 unique pictures of cartoon apes sell out in a mere eight minutes, with the overall trading volume reaching almost 96,000 SOL (over $5.9 million).
But Solana is also facing a scandal. Luna Yield — one of the first initial dex offerings on Solana — apparently “rug pulled” investors and users, stealing more than $6 million worth of crypto.
So these would-be Ethereum killers are still quite early, and their ecosystems are not well developed yet. But I’m keeping an eye on them and hope to be able to buy a little in the next crypto winter. These competitors have the potential to build a more scalable version of Ethereum, which is absolutely worth paying attention to.