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The crypto market is in the green today—but Solana is greener than most, with SOL popping to a 2023 high price as it continues its recent upswing.
Solana rose above $80 for the first time since May 2022 early Wednesday, jumping as high as $80.77 before settling slightly to about $79.50 at the time of writing. SOL is up 8% on the day and 35% over the past 30 days, with a 546% surge since this time last year.
Amid its latest price jump, Solana’s market cap has grown to $34.4 billion, surpassing XRP—the cryptocurrency of the Ripple ecosystem—to become the fifth-largest cryptocurrency per data from CoinGecko. Binance Coin (BNB) is next up the chart with a market cap of about $39.7 billion.
While still far from its all-time high of nearly $260 set in November 2021, Solana has seen its fortunes rise in recent months as investors take a fresh look at the blockchain ecosystem. In fact, Solana started the year at a price of about $10.
Other Solana-based coins are similarly hot lately, with dog-themed meme token BONK spiking to a new peak last week. It’s still up 90% on the week despite plunging since hitting that all-time high. Crypto wireless network Helium’s HNT and MOBILE tokens are also on the rise, with HNT up 94% this week and MOBILE multiplying several times over with a 468% jump.
Even the Solana Saga smartphone, which launched earlier this year to apparently muted response, is benefitting from the ecosystem’s bounce-back. Solana Labs fully sold out of its initial Saga production run last week, as crypto traders rushed to snap up the phone thanks to the ability to claim an airdrop of BONK that had become worth more than the phone’s own price tag.
Solana has also played host to some of the biggest recent token airdrops, notably Jito, which dropped $225 million worth of tokens to DeFi users earlier this month. The next big Solana DeFi airdrop looks to come from aggregator Jupiter, which plans to airdrop 1 billion JUP tokens to users in January.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.