The Solana crypto (SOL) is one of the world’s top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
It debuted on the markets only a year ago, with a price of just under $1, and throughout the course of 2020 had never exceeded $5.
In December 2020 it was back below $2, but since February 2021 the price has soared, first reaching $17 in the last week of February, and then, after a brief correction to $13, rising to an all-time high of almost $36 yesterday.
In other words, over the course of 2021, it has gained more than $2,200 in three and a half months.
It now has a market capitalization of around $8 billion, which puts it above Neo and Monero, but below Tron and Filecoin.
The particularity of this blockchain is the use of the Proof of History (PoH) consensus algorithm, a solution developed by the Project Solana team to permanently eliminate problems related to the veracity of timestamps in a distributed network.
In fact, other blockchains solve the timestamp problem by relying on reliable but centralized third-party timing solutions, or by calculating an average timestamp.
Proof of History, on the other hand, proves that an event occurred in a certain period of time after another event, but before another one.
Not only a crypto: the Solana blockchain
This solution allows many transactions to be handled very cheaply, so much so that Tether decided some time ago to issue USDt tokens on Solana as well, seeing that up to 50,000 transactions per second are possible, with fees of less than a thousandth of a dollar per transaction.
Solana is not only a super-fast blockchain based on a simple layer 1, but was designed specifically to allow dApps to function optimally, and has its own decentralized marketplace. The possibility of using USDT to make purchases on a marketplace certainly has a lot of potential, which is also why the project is enjoying some success.
To date, more than 15 billion transactions have already been recorded on the Solana blockchain, at a rate constantly exceeding 550 transactions per second. On the Bitcoin blockchain, for example, an average of three transactions per second have been recorded in the last 24 hours, while on the Ethereum blockchain there have been around 17.
In other words, this is a third-generation, high-performance on-chain blockchain, and since it is already in use for USDt trading, for example, investors have also become interested in it.
In theory, the Solana project is meant to be a real alternative to Ethereum, although to date it has not been able to even challenge Ethereum’s dominance of the dApp market and especially of DeFi. However, it is still a very young and fast-growing project, so with time, it could also gain prominence and, perhaps, start to challenge Ethereum.
In particular, in March, it was announced that the two crypto exchanges OKEx and MXC were investing $40 million to launch developments on this blockchain, given that, due to its characteristics, it lends itself particularly well to the creation of decentralized exchanges. The fact that a DEX based on the Binance Smart Chain (PancakeSwap) recently managed to challenge the world’s most widely used DEX on Ethereum (Uniswap) shows that there is indeed room for DEXs that are not based on Ethereum.
