Solana Touches $50 Per Coin While Tron and Optimism See Gains

By Mat Di Salvo

Solana (SOL) has continued its seemingly unstoppable surge and is now trading for more than $50 per coin.

The seventh biggest digital asset is booming so much, it's not too far from overtaking USDC in terms of market capitalization. The dollar-pegged stablecoin currently has a market cap of $23.9 billion. Meanwhile, SOL has added more than $3 billion to its market cap since yesterday and is currently sitting at $21 billion, according to CoinGecko.

At the time of writing, SOL was priced at $50.61, a nearly 9% rise over the past 24 hours. In the past week, it's up 24%.

But looking at the coin over a 30-day period and it is touching a gain of 127%. No other major cryptocurrency has increased in value that much over the same timeframe.

Experts spoke to Decrypt this week and last about SOL's comeback. The reason? A combination of short sellers and interest from major players.

Not too long ago, SOL had been battered by the collapse of the FTX megabrand exchange and its related companies. FTX was a major investor in SOL and even launched a marketplace for Solana NFTs.

When FTX went bankrupt last November, the price of SOL plummeted.

But since then, the likes of payments giant Visa and e-commerce platform Shopify have decided to utilize the Solana blockchain, which is supposedly quicker and cheaper than rivals, like Ethereum's.

Also, lawyers mentioned SOL at ex-FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried's criminal trial last month. The price was temporarily hurt due to an increase in short-selling activity—which is when traders bet on the future price of an asset going down.

But this led to a short squeeze, according to experts. A short squeeze is a phenomenon in markets when price of an security or digital token shoots up unexpectedly due to short sellers exiting their positions.

Despite its recent growth, SOL is still over 80% below its November 2021 all-time high of $259.

The rest of the crypto market was doing well on a weekly basis, with every major coin and token up over a seven day period.

Bitcoin, the biggest digital asset, only yesterday hit an 18-month high on news that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission might finally approve a spot crypto exchange-traded fund for American investors.

While other altcoins such as Tron (TRX) and Optimism (OP) were both doing well, making gains of nearly 5% and 3%, respectively.

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