Investing.com – With a gain of more than 22% in 24 hours and almost 30% in one week, the is by far the best performing cryptocurrency in the top 20 on Wednesday morning, while the stable since yesterday and gains at barely more than 1% over the last 7 days.
The thus marked at 4 a.m. CET on Wednesday a peak of $14, the highest since December 16. Note that between the low of December 29 at $8.09 and the high of this morning, Solana posted a gain of more than 73%.
Solana (SOL) recovers from the shock of FTX bankruptcy
Recall that SOL had previously suffered more than other cryptocurrencies from the FTX bankruptcy scandal, due to Solana’s close ties to Sam Bankman-Fried. The crypto had indeed plunged 71.7% between a peak at $38.75 on November 5, and a low at $10.96 on November 22.
In a note published earlier this week, analysts at Bernstein pointed out that “Solana has suffered from FTX being its biggest champion and biggest investor focus,” explaining that “multiple DeFi applications within Solana have had an early involvement of FTX, which led to the evaporation of its DeFi ecosystem during the demise of FTX, and judging that “Solana needs to rebuild” and “now needs to play the more organic game of bringing in motivated developers “.
The BONK project fuels interest in the Solana
However, the latest news shows that “reconstruction” is in the market for Solana. Indeed, much of the hype in the Solana ecosystem over the past few days has focused on the rise of BONK, a Solana-based meme token that aims to compete with (DOGE) and the token. based on (SHIB).
BONK launched in late December via a large-scale airdrop, with free tokens sent to the wallets of a wide range of Solana developers and NFT collectors. Bonk has seen over $13.7 million in on-chain volume in the past 24 hours alone and is showing a 73% 24-hour price increase, a craze that is also benefiting Solana, whose blockchain is used by BONK.
The recent price surge has also been reinforced by a “short squeeze,” as evidenced by the rise in the number of short position liquidations, according to data from Coinglass.
Bernstein cautious about Solana’s future
However, as Bernstein analysts point out, all is not won for the Solana. They indeed noted that “with Ethereum becoming much more than a blockchain, with ecosystem efforts driven by multiple Layer 2 teams (Polygon, Arbitrum, etc.), the competitive landscape for Solana is difficult”.
They thus wondered if Solana can “find a new niche”, suggesting a possible specialization “on payments thanks to its efforts in the field of Solana Pay / Solana Mobile” and warning “that the crypto community will ask for more proof of an ecosystem of independent developers and more proof of innovation, before trust is restored.”