Cryptocurrencies have amassed a significant amount of popularity in recent years and with that popularity came considerable growth of different projects. However, one project has broken records regarding explosive growth since its price has grown in value ten times in mere four months. That’s right, we’re writing about Solana.
Solana is a high-speed crypto network that allows users to build out applications with low fees and a high transaction speed. Its native cryptocurrency token is SOL (Solana). The main goal of Solana is to allow developers and users to create blockchain applications that can support high user count and do not require high fees.
Solana has taken a distinct approach to its functionality by using a mix of diverse highly scalable technologies to achieve its unprecedented speed and low fee structure. One thing that Solana does is that it sacrifices decentralization for the sake of speed and scalability, which is not that common for a blockchain network.
Using this distinct approach, Solana manages to achieve fees of sub $0.01 and a transaction per second speed of 65K.
SOL is a ticker symbol for Solana. Here is how you can use your SOL:
At the time of writing (April 2022), Solana’s price is $53.9. The current Market Cap ranking is #8, with a market cap of $18.1B.
Solana reached its all-time high price of $259 in June of the previous year, making it almost 26x from its $1.8 price at the start of the year. Since then, the price has dropped, and it is currently fluctuating between $80 and $100.
Solana has averaged 343.6% year-on-year growth since the day of its inception.
Solana has a total token supply of 511M tokens. At the time of writing, there are 334M tokens in circulation. Solana’s current inflation rate is 8% per year, but it has a disinflation rate that reduced the inflation of 8% by 13-15% each year.
Solana’s initial token distribution:
As one of the most popular Ethereum alternatives with a high supply offering, Solana has seen an increase in demand since hitting an all-time high.
The primary way people buy their Solana is through centralized exchanges because they offer the ability to purchase them with credit and debit cards, which most people prefer.
Although significantly more complicated, the second way is through decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap. Decentralized exchanges usually require users to already have some cryptocurrencies in their wallets to buy other cryptos.
Finally, it can be purchased easily through a broker app such as our Veli App, where you can get your hands on some Solana in just a few taps on the screen.
The two most important people behind Solana are Anatoly Yakovenko and Greg Fitzgerald. Anatoly was a senior staff engineer at Qualcomm, where he worked with Greg.
In 2017, they founded a Solana Labs project that later created Solana as we know it today.
Solana has amassed a substantial community since it was created. It has its official podcast and multiple live official Solana events.
Solana counts over 2 million community members across the most popular social media channels.
Solana has raised $335.8M over six investment rounds. The latest funding round happened in June of 2021. Some of the VCs that invested in Solana are Collab Currency, Alameda Research, Memetic Capital, Blockchange Ventures, Coinshares, and many more.
Solana has not had any outstanding legal issues since its creation.
Solana has started growing exponentially at the start of the last year, and it is not slowing down. Here are some numbers that illustrate that:
Solana’s main competitors are Ethereum and BNB. Here is why they are the main competitors to Solana.
Ethereum is the world’s first programmable blockchain. The main difference between Ethereum and Solana is that Solana is much faster than Ethereum, but it achieves that by sacrificing the decentralization that Ethereum offers. Solana also has much cheaper fees than Ethereum.
BNB is the blockchain network created by the Binance exchange. It is similar to Solana in that it offers users the ability to create different kinds of applications, except that Solana is much faster than BNB, and applications built on BNB are usually centered around Binance exchange products.
Here is a table with some additional numbers to help illustrate this competition.
Solana | Ethereum | BNB | |
Transactions per second | 50,000 | 15 | 55-60 |
Time needed to confirm a transaction | 13s | 6 min | <5s |
Average transaction fee | 0.00025 | 15$ | 0.31$ |
Market cap | $29.14b | $310b | $60b |
Circulation supply | No limit on the number of tokens | No limit on the number of tokens | 98.89% |
Total number of wallet addresses | 2m+ | 150.6m | 155.6m |
Total number of daily active users | 195k | 509k | 1.2m |
Launch date | 2020 | 2015 | 2017 |
Average growth rate | 340.60% | 178.20% | 211.40% |
When it comes to investing, there are obvious risks, just as there are with any other asset type. Because there are so many different types of cryptocurrencies, risks may be divided into two categories: generic risks that apply to all cryptocurrencies and coin-specific risks.
We’ve put up a guide that covers broad cryptocurrency investment risks and provides advice on how to reduce them, while risks related to individual assets are handled specifically in coin guides such as this one.
Website: https://solana.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/solana
Telegram: https://t.me/solana
Medium: https://medium.com/solana-labs
Solana is one of the most popular Ethereum alternatives. Solana is leveraging new blockchain technologies to achieve unprecedented scalability allowing it to process up to 65000 transactions per second.
The past year was significant for Solana since it has reached its all-time high price and accelerated its adoption significantly. This has attracted many investors who have invested over $335M over six investment rounds, allowing the Solana network to expand in many ways, including more users, more developed applications, and a massive increase in community members.
The Web 2.0 cloud computing market is a $350 billion annual revenue and $4.6 trillion market value opportunity. Solana has positioned itself as a leading Web 3.0 challenger that is already beginning to take market share.
