Solana Up 48% This Week As Smart Contract Platforms Lead Crypto Recovery

Solana, the sixteenth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is up 12% in the past 24 hours and 48% in the past week, according to data from metrics site Nomics. Its current price is $41, the highest price since May 19, when it dropped from $56 to $35 over a day.

While Solana surges, the rest of the market stagnates. At $36,000, Bitcoin, by far the largest cryptocurrency and the bellwether of the market, is down 2% on the day. Ethereum, the second-largest, is down by 0.3% at $2,640.

Joining Solana’s resilience are the native tokens of other smart contract platforms, including Cosmos and Polkadot, according to a note from crypto research company Messari yesterday.

Analyzing the performance of five crypto sectors in relation to the recent market slump— smart contract platforms, decentralized finance, decentralized exchanges, currencies, and Web3—Messari found that smart contract platforms have proven the most resilient to the latest crypto market crash.

The crash, throughout May and in some of April, halved Bitcoin’s price to lows of about $32,000. Bitcoin recovered to highs of around $40,000 before falling to today’s price of $36,000.

Smart contract platforms recovered by 3.11% over the past week, while Web3 coins rebounded just 0.12%. Over the past 24 hours, Cosmos jumped in price by 2.77% to $15.28, and Kusama’s up 1.67% to $414. Polkadot is down 0.48% to $24.33.

Ethereum killer?

Founded in 2017, Solana is a blockchain that supports highly scalable decentralized applications (dapps). It’s often touted as “Ethereum killer” because the project claims to process 50,000 transactions per second (TPS).

That is far faster than Ethereum’s average of between 10 and 15 TPS, and Bitcoin’s average TPS of between five and seven.

However, with a market cap of $11 billion, Solana still lags far behind Ethereum, the dominant smart contract network, which has a market cap of $306 billion.

There have been several confidence-boosting developments for Solana.

Multiple sources told Decrypt yesterday that Solana is raising between $300 million and $450 million to bulk out its platform, far exceeding its intended—but undisclosed—level of funding for its round in March, which it chose to extend after huge investment interest.

And a new NFT marketplace, Metaplex, launched on Solana on June 2. Pitched as "Shopify for NFTs,” Metaplex allows creators like Grammy-winning musician RAC to create their own NFT stores. Unlike some popular NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, Metaplex is decentralized. It’s much cheaper to use than Ethereum NFT platforms—it reportedly costs 35 cents to mint an NFT and $3 to auction.