One of many beneficiaries of this pattern is SOL, the native coin of the Solana blockchain. It’s at present the fifth-largest crypto, with a market cap of about $69 billion, as of Sept. 24, 2024, per CoinGecko. SOL is at present buying and selling at $148.93, and there are practically 469 million SOL tokens in circulation.
If you happen to’re trying to expand your crypto exposure or add cash which might be much less delicate to information headlines, SOL deserves a more in-depth look.
What’s Solana?
Solana was co-founded by Anatoly Yakovenko, Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge, all former workers of U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm. Solana Labs is the corporate that runs the Solana blockchain. Launched in March 2020, Solana is a high-performance, open-source blockchain platform designed to assist good contracts and the creation of decentralized functions (dApps). For that cause, Solana is taken into account one of many strongest challengers to Ethereum, a a lot greater rival with related capabilities.
Solana runs on a hybrid protocol of proof-of-stake (PoS) and proof-of-history (PoH), a proof for verifying order and passage of time between occasions. Attributable to this distinctive protocol design, Solana can deal with as much as 50,000 to 65,000 transactions per second. Decrease charges and quicker transactions are sticky options that encourage customers to remain inside the Solana ecosystem, particularly for his or her decentralized finance (DeFi) apps and non-fungible token (NFT) purchases, says Michael Zagari, an funding advisor with Mandeville Personal Consumer and Zagari+Simpson.
“Relating to gaming, finance and NFTs, having transactions processed shortly, at low charges, and an easy-to-use platform to construct on high of make for a greater consumer expertise and assist scale decentralized functions,” he says, including that Solana appears to be attracting builders quicker than ethereum did on the identical stage of its development cycle.
Solana’s ecosystem includes a collection of applied sciences that work synergistically, together with decentralized apps, DeFi tasks, NFT marketplaces and lending protocols, that are constructed on Solana’s open infrastructure. The extra customers a dApp attracts, the better its community impact and worth. Within the case of Solana, “the upper the demand for dApps constructed on its community, the stronger the demand for SOL, its native coin,” Zagari says.
Staking SOL
Buyers can stake SOL to generate yield. Crypto staking means pledging or locking up crypto holdings in change for rewards or curiosity funds. Right here’s an excellent primer on the way it works.
You may also spend SOL on equipment whereas enjoying video games constructed on high of the Solana protocol. “If you happen to really feel like coming into the metaverse, you need to use SOL tokens to buy apparel to your avatar,” says Zagari.
