Ethereum Competitor Solana Hits All-Time High As Market Continues to Rise

Having briefly entered the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization earlier this week, Solana has set new all-time highs over the last few days, including today. The SOL token briefly set an ATH of $78.63 in the early hours of this morning UTC, according to crypto data aggregator Nomics. 

Solana’s price has since retreated a little. It currently sits at $78.17, though this still represents an overnight increase of 8.91%. Solana’s price was under $40 at the beginning of last week, so in the last fortnight SOL has blown up by around 100%. 

Solana has enjoyed a string of DeFi and NFT related good news over the last week. On Sunday, Degenerate Ape Academy’s NFTs launched on the Solana blockchain. The digital collectibles sold out within eight minutes. The most expensive digital ape was being resold barely 24 hours later for 100,001 SOL, or over $6.2 million at the time of purchase. 

On Tuesday the Solana network passed $2 billion in total value locked in DeFi protocols, at the same time setting a former ATH of $74.08 for SOL. Solana is sometimes touted as an Ethereum killer, largely because the Solana blockchain also incorporates smart contracts, an innovation first popularized by Ethereum, and because the Solana is currently more scalable than Ethereum. 

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The Solana network mines SOL using a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism that uses much less energy than the hardware-intensive proof-of-work consensus model currently employed by Bitcoin and Ethereum. 

Ethereum is expected to migrate to PoS sometime later this year. While Ethereum fans wait for that to happen, Solana claims to have already solved some of the issues that Ethereum users struggle with, including scalability. 

Solana handles 1,365 live transactions per second and claims that its maximum capacity is 50,000 TPS, far greater than Ethereum’s currency capacity of about 15 TPS. 

Solana isn’t the only Ethereum alternative to be rallying right now. Polygon, a layer-2 solution that sits atop the Ethereum blockchain and alleviates much of the pressure of validating transactions, is also surging right now. The blockchain’s native MATIC token grew 12% overnight to hit a new price of $1.68. That’s still a long way off its former all-time high of $2.45 set in mid-May this year.

On Thursday, Polygon announced plans to launch a Polygon Ecosystem DAO that will unite the disparate DAOs on the network. Polygon will tap some of its $150 million #DeFiForAll fund to establish and maintain the organisation. 

Last week, Polygon also announced a $250 million merger with platform Hermez, another Ethereum scalability solution. Holders of Hermez’s native HEZ token will be able to swap their tokens for MATIC at a rate of 7:2, while Hermez’s layer-2 roll-up tech will be incorporated into Polygon’s suite.