Solana Network’s native SOL flipped $84 on Wednesday as it overtook XRP to become the fifth-largest cryptocurrency asset by market cap. The network, termed the Ethereum killer, reached a 20-month market cap high of $37 billion to enter the top five crypto asset list for the first time.
SOL also grew over 10% on Wednesday to hit $84.84 and $86 on Thursday at press time. The coin has grown by 17% in 7 days amidst Bitcoin’s recent patchy movement. SOL has now increased 16,685% from its all-time low in May 2020.
Solana Continues to Shine
The network’s token has completely kept the woes of FTX’s estate and its selling pressure behind it as its on-chain activity continues to skyrocket. Analysts have linked the recent surge in network activity and value to the network’s success with the launch of its SLP token, Jito (JTO).
Airdropped to selected users and launched on December 8, JTO became an instant success, getting launches from exchanges Binance, Bybit, and Bitget. The unprecedented hype around the token created further user activity on Solana’s network, affecting other tokens like memecoin BONK, which moved over 1,000% in a few days.
The success of BONK consequentially robbed Solana’s smartphone, Saga, which sold off in the US on December 15 and in Europe the next day. Saga owners received 30 million BONK, which at one point was more valuable than the amount spent on acquiring the phone.
Ethereum Killer?
Solana has recently outperformed market scalability king Ethereum in several areas, including daily active addresses, transactions, and DEX volume. The network’s activity has hit an all-time high in Q4, outdoing Ethereum by a whopping 300%.
Despite the buzz about the tokens on the network, Solana has recently improved drastically. Its increased scalability and stability have seen the ecosystem maintain uptime despite increased blockchain usage. The likes of Arbitrum and Zilliqa experienced an outage with even less activity than Solana. Although Solana’s boss, Anatoly Yakovenko, has warned against calling the network an Ethereum killer, the narrative seems to never go away.
