SOLANA: BOOM TIMES OR BLIP? Solana’s SOL token, which crashed in value from over $200 in 2021 to beneath $10 in 2022, has buoyed again above $100 in latest months, making it one one the largest beneficiaries of the latest crypto market surge. The Solana blockchain was pilloried final cycle for its shut ties to Sam Bankman-Fried and its spotty monitor document of community outages. SOL’s newest value features have been considered by some as a sign of wider confidence within the ecosystem – a sign that merchants see sordid firm and efficiency points as issues of the previous. However the features to SOL had been accelerated largely by auxiliary memes and airdrops, with a frenzy in direction of just a few Solana-based tokens driving a lot of the hype. The largest winner was BONK, a meme coin that has lept in value by over 200% prior to now 30 days. (A humorous side-plot to the BONK growth is that it was airdropped to homeowners of the Solana telephone, which suffered from dismal gross sales till folks realized they may purchase it to nab BONK tokens, which had been for a time price greater than the system itself.) Different winners included Pyth, a Solana-focused oracle community that just lately launched a token; and Jito, a liquid-staking service whose just-airdropped JTO token marked an enormous payday for some unsuspecting customers. The Solana community has seen some technical enhancements prior to now couple of years, however, as is commonly the case on the planet of blockchains, it stays to be seen whether or not the constructive market developments had been pushed by real adoption of the speed-focused blockchain ecosystem, or by merchants that may quickly go away in favor of different buzzy bets.
