What is Solana? The crypto that defied the price crash and is growing 200 times faster than bitcoin in 2021

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A crypto crash that wiped hundreds of billions of dollars off the market this week raised fears that bitcoin and its rivals could lose all gains made in 2021.

But a leading cryptocurrency not only managed to weather the turmoil unscathed, but in fact set new records.

The Solanas SOL token hit an all-time high on Thursday, peaking at $ 214.96 according to the CoinMarketCaps price index. Just a year ago it was worth less than $ 2.

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The surge in prices propelled Solanas’ market cap above $ 60 billion and propelled it past dogecoin and Ripple (XRP) this week to rank sixth in the world for cryptocurrencies.

The majority of the crypto market has slipped with BTC, demonstrating the relative immaturity of the asset class and the markets’ reliance on bitcoin, said Alexandra Clark, a salesperson at the digital asset broker. UK based GlobalBlock. But Solana remained largely unaffected and instead posted double-digit returns.

How it managed to turn the market around may have something to do with its underlying technology, which its supporters say could potentially see it compete with Ethereum (ether) and Cardano (ada).

The developers of Solanas claim that it is the world’s fastest and censorship-resistant blockchain capable of supporting smart contracts, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other platforms in the world. booming space for decentralized finance.

There are currently over 400 projects running on the Solanas ecosystem, while the SOL cryptocurrency records around 1,000 transactions per second. More remarkable than the volume is the cost, with each transaction averaging just $ 0.000025.

One of those projects is Aldrin, a crypto exchange that merges both centralized and decentralized finance.

Crypto will accelerate what will be the biggest social impact change of our lives, said Hisham Khan, who started Aldrin. Ethereum has influenced a wave of handing over power to people, but so far it has been too expensive and too exclusive, simply reflecting the wealth gap we see in mainstream finance. Solana lowers barriers to entry and promotes mass adoption of the decentralization movement.

Despite these comparisons to its open-source competitor Ethereum (ether), which holds a market cap just behind that of bitcoin, this is something the creators of Solanas sought to avoid.

I hate the Eth-killer thing, Solana Labs co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko said at a developer conference earlier this month. I am an open source developer.

The big misconception that people have about open source projects is that it is possible to kill them. There is no way to kill Ethereum. It’s basically not something we think about.

Beyond actual platforms, the crypto tokens associated with them have generated enormous interest from investors and traders throughout the 2021 bull market. Price charts made comparisons inevitable, and none did better than SOL.

A 12,000% price hike since the start of the year has eclipsed gains in bitcoin (63%), ether (349%) and Cardanos ada (1360%).

But rather than Ethereum comparisons and price charts, Yakovenko instead has a bolder goal of building a network that can not only compete but beat the creaky infrastructure of traditional finance.

Literally, Solana’s goal is to transact as fast as information travels around the world, hence the speed of light through the fiber. Who were in competition with the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange, Yakovenko said.

We strive 100% to ensure that those order books that work on [Solanas decentralised exchange] Serum can be competitive not with Ethereum, but with the New York Stock Exchange, with NASDAQ, with the biggest retail exchanges with stocks. If we can accomplish that, as a decentralized open source project … I think that’s a very interesting result. It’s worth a try.

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