You know Bitcoins. Most likely you have heard of: Ethereum. And even if you just watched TV this year, chances are you’re familiar with Dogecoin at.
What about SAUL? A lesser-known coin is going through a turbulent period of the cryptocurrency’s rise, rising up the charts lately to cement its place in the top 10 cryptocurrencies. It rose about 28% in the seven days leading up to April 4, at a time when bitcoin price remained flat after a jump of about 40% from its January low.
SOL, a cryptocurrency powered by the Solana blockchain, is seen as a potential long-term competitor to Ethereum. This is because it is more than just a coin: Solana and Ethereum have received support from the communities of programmers who have created features such as smart contracts and NFT on the platforms. Evangelists hold regular meetings from San Diego to Hong Kong.
According to Jonathan Cheeseman of the FTX crypto derivatives exchange, Solana’s recent surge may be due to the popularity of its Solana-based STEPN fitness-related app and its intention to incorporate NFT from its blockchain into OpeanSea, a major digital trading platform. collectibles. †
Compared to other dominant coins, Solana is relatively young. Solana’s idea was first published in 2017 by developer Anatoly Yakovenko, and SOL debuted last year, and costs skyrocketed towards the end of the summer.
An important advantage? Transactions in the Solana blockchain are relatively cheap. Miners verifying transactions in Solana charge much less than those in Ethereum, as the Solana technology allows for many more transactions per second – tens of thousands compared to less than 100 for Ethereum. Basically, this means that the competition for a spot in the Solana blockchain isn’t that great.
“Ethereum is catching up here,” said Ed Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda. “They will increase the speed of their transactions, but their costs will still be much higher than Solana’s.”
But things didn’t go smoothly for Solana. In September, trades were interrupted for 17 hours due to a serious outage. Some questioned the network’s ability to grow, while supporters of Bitcoin and Ethereum saw this as evidence of the benefits of using more established crypto projects. Supporters said it was a growth disease attack.
In this wild competitive hunt for the next big thing, SOL stood out. Thousands of new coins have flooded the crypto space, the vast majority of which do not have the functionality or depth of major coins like SOL, although new projects, new stocks, and new investors appear daily.
What is SOL?
SOL is a coin that runs on the Solana network. Solana is a platform for decentralized financial applications and other smart contracts. On it, people can borrow, trade, borrow and use crypto assets. SOL is thriving, promising that unlike Ethereum, its main competitor, transactions on Solana will be cheap and ultra-fast. In other words, the project rejects the assumption that blockchains should be expensive, slow and inefficient. Thanks to this potential, the coin’s value has increased by about 488% in the past year.
How’s SAUL?
According to CoinMarketCap, as of early April, SOL has become the seventh largest cryptocurrency by market cap with a value of approximately $44 billion. This is well below Bitcoin’s market value of approximately $877 billion. This is also lower than the roughly $418 billion worth of Ethereum, which took second place. But SOL tends to rank above other altcoin favorites like Cardano or Litecoin, as well as non-utility players like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, another dog-related coin pegged to Elon Musk.
Prominent Solana investors join us. In June, Solana Labs announced that it had raised $314 million through the sale of coins to the network. Investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain Capital, Alameda Research and CoinShares.
How’s the purchase going?
If you like smart contracts, charts comparing cryptocurrencies by market value can be misleading. This is partly due to the fact that crypto networks have such different use cases. Paul Veraditakit, a partner at California-based company Pantera Capital in Menlo Park, divides crypto projects into several categories.
Mr. Veraditakit combines the Solana network with Ethereum, which pays a lot of attention to allowing people to create computer applications within their system. Users can create so-called smart contracts, with which, under certain conditions, at a predetermined time, for example, payments are made automatically and data is exchanged.
“Right now I would say that Solana is the main competitor in developer adoption and dynamics compared to all smart contract platforms,” said Mr. Veraditta Kit.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, he sees as a means of savings and possibly as a currency. According to him, consumers in emerging markets may eventually prefer using bitcoin over their local currency because the cryptocurrency, as unstable as it is, may be more stable.
like you