Solana (SOL) hits new all-time high amid Bitcoin, Ethereum market wipeout (2024)

• Solana has recorded a new record price and is the only cryptocurrency in the top 25 coins that is in the green in the past 24 hours.
• The blockchain project has seen tremendous growth in the past year, attracting new projects and some of the most connected people in the industry.

It’s not been the best start to a week for the overall cryptocurrency market. And as with most market movements in the recent past, it had a lot to do with Elon Musk. Bitcoin is currently clutching on to the $45,000 support level, losing 10 percent in the past 24 hours. Others like Binance Coin, Polkadot and Chainlink have seen bigger losses. However, there’s one coin that has defied the trend – Solana.

In the past 24 hours, Solana is the only coin in the top 25 cryptos that was on the green. The crypto gained 3.94 percent to trade at $48.90 at press time. It has gained 15.70 percent on Bitcoin and Ethereum in that time as well.

Interest from investors has shot up in the past day as well, with trading volume up an impressive 220 percent in that time to $2.5 billion. Solana now has a market cap of $13.3 billion, making it the 16th largest digital currency by market cap.

What’s most impressive about the rally, however, is that Solana managed to hit its all-time high price at $52.50.

Solana has been one of the best performing cryptos in 2021, which is a great feat given how most projects have shot up. Year to date, it has gained over 3,000 percent, having started the year at a mere $1.5. For a project that launched its mainnet beta in March last year, Solana has been on an eye-catching run.

Could Solana challenge Ethereum for the throne?

On its website, Solana describes itself as “a fast, secure, and censorship resistant blockchain providing the open infrastructure required for global adoption.” As with many other new generation blockchains, it has ‘cracked the code’ when it comes to speed and efficiency, something Ethereum is still struggling with. It claims to process 50,000 transactions per second.

One of the ways it has achieved this high transaction speed is through ‘proof of history’, a new consensus mechanism. This mechanism works by timestamping each transaction and disabling the ability of miners to decide the order of transactions recorded on the blockchain.

Anatoly Yakovenko, the creator of Solana, claims that proof of history allows for greater security and censorship resistance. It also allows the network to be way faster than its rivals.

Speaking to TechCrunch, he noted, “Basically, the speed of light is how fast we can make this network go.”

And while some are already branding it as the Ethereum killer, Yakovenko has bigger ambitions than that. He is aiming to disrupt Wall Street and the traditional financial and capital market at large. He told the outlet that what he’s looking to build is “an open, fair, censorship-resistant global marketplace that’s better than anything inside of the New York Stock Exchange or any other means of settling trades.”

He added:

Everything that we do to make this thing faster and faster results in this better censorship resistance and therefore better markets. And price discovery is what I imagine is the killer use case for decentralized public networks. Can we be the world’s price discovery engine? That’s an interesting question to ask.

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