Solana (SOL) is one of the leading blockchain platforms and one of the top ten cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization. Due to the recent developments and the way it is expected to perform this year, by the end of 2024 many traders expect SOL to skyrocket as high as $400 per coin.
Solana is an open-source project targeted to host decentralized finance (DeFi) projects and provide DeFi solutions. Even though the team started the initial work on it in 2017, Solana was officially released only three years later – in 2020 by the Solana Foundation based in Switzerland. Initially, the project was founded by Anatoly Yakovenko and Greg Fitzgerald – together they founded Solana Labs. Yakovenko’s professional IT career started at Qualcomm college and it was his former colleagues who joined him to help build Solana and then launch it to the public.
About Solana project: what makes it “Ethereum killer”
Unlike other cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Cardano and Ethereum, Solana runs on a combination of a proof-of-history consensus algorithm (PoH) with the proof-of-stake model lying in the basis. This innovative hybrid model enables Solana to attract both small and institutional traders. PoH was developed by Yakovenko himself to provide Solana usability with great boost.
It helps Solana to process transactions much faster than cryptocurrencies running on proof-of-work (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, etc) and working on proof-of-stake (such as Ethereum, Cardano, and many others). It also allows for faster smart contract execution. This quality has gained the attention of institutional investors and traders to the project. Solana was designed in such a manner which firmly excludes any transaction cost hikes in the future while maintaining scalability and high speed of transaction processing. All these factors combined helped SOL to reach the top seventh position by market cap by September 2021 and have led to being called “Ethereum killer” by both its creators and users.
The September 2021 surge was preceded by an immense bull run that year, when the coin surged by 700% since July. The well-famous NFT collection called Degenerate Ape built on Solana pushed the SOL price over the $60 all-time high. The next historic peak followed quite soon – in September SOL surged to $216.
Since then, SOL has been going up steadily owing to an increased developer activity, large interest from financial institutions, and the stable boost of the DeFi system in the crypto space. Besides, the growing trend of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has also contributed to the staggering Solana growth over the past three years.
Solana is currently sitting on the fifth position on the CoinMarketCap’s top list with a market capitalization of $77,593,141,256. The “Ethereum killer” coin is trading at $168.88. The circulating supply of it comprises 459,505,027 SOL with a total supply counting 576,940,827 SOL.
SOL might get next spot ETF approved by SEC
The recent approval of spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) by the American Securities and Exchange Commission last week which followed the similarly successful outcome for ETFs based on the Bitcoin spot price has driven many financial experts to believe that this year the regulator may approve ETFs based on other altcoins and on Solana in particular.
The excitement about this potential approval is growing within the community. Recently, a Solana Foundation representative Austin Federa discussed this possibility in an interview. He believes that should the regulator’s choice indeed fall on SOL, this would greatly increase the coin’s market presence and accessibility, which in its turn would attract a larger number of investors to it.
Federa has congratulated the Ethereum community on the spot ETH ETF approval and expressed a hope that other proof-of-stake-based coins, such as Solana, will be able to stand next to it in this respect in the near future. He stated that since the US government is becoming highly interested in leveraging the blockchain technology for sustaining the US dollar’s dominant position in the world, Solana has good chances to be chosen for this honorable mission. It does not even have to surpass Ethereum by market cap to achieve that, according to Federa, SOL just needs to pull a long-term focus on its tech vision and its ecosystem expansion.
In a recent tweet, the renowned US financier and founder of SkyBridge Capital Anthony Scaramucci also stated that he expects Solana to get the next spot ETF going after Ethereum and Bitcoin.
SOL price prediction 2024
With all the vast prospects rising on Solana’s horizon this year and its strong continuous technological development, many experts believe that by the end of the year, SOL may easily advance to the third largest position on the CoinMarketCap scale from its current fifth one, surpassing BNB and USDT.
If this happens, predictions show that by the end of the year, SOL may be trading between $342 and $400, setting a new all-time high after the $260 peak it reached in September 2021.
