Solana now has a larger market cap than Cardano. Why are the reasons mainly to be found in the Metaverse and NFTs.
You’d think that it was about to begin: Solana (SOL) ousted competitor Cardano from 5th place in cryptocurrencies by market capitalization as a result of a massive increase. With an increase of 30.1 percent in the last 7 days and an increase of 16,808.2 percent in the past year, the climb towards the podium seems well deserved, especially when you consider how difficult Cardano is currently doing. The Solana investors: in any case, the price broke through the previous all-time high last night and briefly recorded a price of 245.69 US dollars. At the time of writing, the price is hovering around $ 239. It can be assumed that these price developments are driven by the announcements Facebooks, recently Meta, developments in the (NFT) space and concerns about Ethereum that have been expressed these days.
Digital identities on SOL
Mark Zuckerberg’s announcements to make the further development of the Metaverse the most important task of his company, now called Meta, have had great effects on the market and not least in the crypto space. For this space, the company recognized how Nike Many new business models are already emerging, which are related, among other things, to the design of the newly created rooms using NFTs.
However, the hype surrounding digital collectibles did not just emerge yesterday, but has been increasing for several months – Solana benefits particularly from this. CryptoSlam.io According to Solana, after Ethereum, Ronin and Wax, it is the fourth largest blockchain for NFTs, and the trend is rising. As the platform showed on November 1st (see tweets), Solana now has over 500 million US dollars in various NFT projects. In terms of secondary sales, those are Degenerate Ape Academy NFTs Leader at 105 million US dollars. It is followed by Aurory ($ 70 million) and the Galactic Gecko Space Garage ($ 41 million).
Solana can now not only record over 400 projects on its own blockchain, but also has over 1,100 validators in the network. No other platform can currently boast such a high staking share. This means that a high proportion of the tokens are kept in the wallets for a certain time and the holders are rewarded with so-called rewards. For Solana lies this share is around 77 percent, compared to Cardano just 52 percent. At the same time, the SOL system is fired up by regular hackathons that attract new projects.
Large investors also supported Solana Labs in their token sale in June with $ 314 million. These included venture capital companies like Andreessen Horowitz or Blockchange Ventures. A graphic Bloombergs according to Solana is currently the third most popular crypto currency behind Bitcoin and Ethereum for investors. By comparison, while the fourth-placed Cardano recorded inflows of $ 5 million last week, Solana received $ 15 million.
Second largest blockchain for dApps
As a result of the price increase, Solana is now also the second largest blockchain for decentralized applications (dApps). Only Ethereum is bigger at the moment – but by more than 460 billion US dollars. Nevertheless, Solana is often referred to as the “Ethereum killer”. Because the blockchain is on the one hand a lot faster: While Ethereum currently handles around 30 transactions per second, the time for SOL transactions is said to be over 50,000 per second. On the other hand, Ethereum currently sees itself despite the update London juxtaposed with horrific fees, while the Solana blockchain is known for its price efficiency. That may be one of the reasons why many developers are currently rushing to alternatives.