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The Solana price is showing great momentum and that’s because its fundamentals are astounding.
Solana came to life in March last year, when its mainnet launched and genesis block was mined. Since then it has been onwards and upwards for the smart contract platform that looks like it could be one of the winners in the battle to provide the best value differential over Ethereum.
The winner of that battle – if there is one – is looking at an addressable market that is already realised at around $50 billion, but has much further to grow.
Solana has two things going for it, which is why savvy investors have made it one of the outperformers in the recent downturn seen in the crypto market.
Solana price: here’s the not-so-secret sauce
First, the technology behind Solana boasts a proof-of-stake protocol, a method of block verification that readers will be familiar with. Secondly, the secret sauce of Solana is its proof-of-history (PoH) technology.
Ordering of transaction (tx) is critical for all blockchains – consensus is about establishing one distributed version of the truth and a big part of that is the order of transactions.
For all the the brilliance of the coders who imagined and built the bitcoin protocol, the only way to be sure of the transaction and block ordering was to go back in the history a few blocks before the present one and to designate that as the most up-to-date block to be sure that it was good. This adds to the time it takes to arrive at consensus and therefore massively affects transaction speed.
Solana’s unique PoH time-stamping system provides Solana with a competitive advantage over other app platforms, including perhaps, Eth 2.0 – whenever it sees the light of day.
So how do the tx figures breakdown? Solana speeds along at 65,000 transactions per second (tps), which makes it roughly 10,000x faster than Bitcoin. As for Ethereum – its competitor of choice – Solana is 4,000x faster. And how does this compare to the legacy world, such as the Visa payments network? It beats Visa handsomely too, by 2.5 times.
Smart money is on Solana
The smart money is homing in on Solana and maybe you should too. The Solana Foundation recently raised $40 million from OKEx and MXC exchanges.
Just this week Decrypt reported that the Foundation was raising $450 million from venture capitalists, although the report was based on unattribured sources.
Also, in a sign of intent in Asia, it this week created a $20 million fund to encourage ecosystem growth in South Korea.
More than that, the worth of the technology is ultimately shown in its adoption success, and in that regard Solana is rocking. The number of dapps being built on the platform already numbers over 50 and is set to accelerate as the expense of developing on Ethereum bites. Among those Solana-based projects is Metaplex, which this week launched an NFT marketplace on the super-fast blockchain.
Anyone who remembers the CryptoKitties-induced meltdown of the Ethereum network in 2017 will have been aware of the premier app platform’s limitations: tx throughput is poor and cost is immense.
Rust helps put Solana out in front
The technological advantages of Solana doesn’t end at PoH. Solana is a base layer that is building on the most foresighted programming tech in the business (that is, software engineering business in general, not just blockchain engineering).
You can be forgiven for having never heard of Rust but it is a programming language that now has the enthusiastic backing of Big Tech and is where all the bright kids are developing.
Rust is built on the LLVM compiler language, which in turn enables developers to quickly build frontends for new programming languages and the instruction set backend. Solana is compatible with any language built with the LLVM compiler language (such as C, C++ and Move, the latter being the language invented by Facebook for its Libra coin – now rebranded as Diem).
You may not have heard of Rust but perhaps you have heard of Swift, the language invented by Apple that is used to develop apps for iOS and MacOS. Either way, now you know – and also now know why it matters and is another important facet of what makes Solana not just different but a contender for the winners’ podium in the dapp platform race.
Anyway, without getting any deeper into all the computer language stuff, suffice to say developers love Rust and aside from the cost and scaling advantages inherent in the Solana set up, its programming choices also appeal to the people who matter when it comes to building the killer apps of the future (and present).
I think technical analysis is important, but the fundamentals even more so. The 1-day chart (see at top of story) shows enviable price momentum but perhaps even more significantly, this is a project in which founder Anatoly Yakovenko has made all the right technology choices.
Solana is a strong buy for both short-termist traders and longer-term investors looking for a dapp platform with future-proof staying power.
How to Buy SOL and get airdrops too
The SOL native token of the Solana exchange can be bought at most top-tier exchanges. In addition to price appreciation, another advantage to holding SOL is the airdrops that are coming thick and fast to holders of the token as new projects adopt its blockchain.
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