One of the biggest movers on the cryptocurrency market in the past 24 hours is Solana. As of the time of this writing, Solana is up almost 20% over the past day, according to Coinbase. In the past week, it’s up over 58% and in the past month, it’s up 275%. As for the past year, Solana has surged over 2,348%.
But just what is Solana and why is it on fire right now? Here’s what you need to know.
- What is Solana? Solana is a decentralized blockchain platform. It facilitates the transactions of the SOL coin as well as digital assets like NFTs.
- Is Solana a bitcoin competitor? Sure, because it’s another cryptocurrency. But it’s more apt to liken Solana to Ethereum since both are blockchain platforms that handle smart contracts.
- What is Solana’s current price? As of the time of this writing, Solana is worth over $120 per coin.
- How many Solana coins are there? There are over 291,086,667 coins circulating.
- What is Solana’s market cap? According to CoinMarketCap, the market cap of Solana’s circulating supply is just over $35.1 billion. However, its fully diluted market cap (if all Solana coins were circulating) would be just over $60 billion.
- Where does Solana rank when compared to bitcoin and Ethereum and other coins? At a market cap of $35 billion, Solana is ranked 8th. Bitcoin is #1 at just over $879 billion. Ethereum is #2 at $398 billion. At 8th place, Solana falls just behind Dogecoin, which is worth $36 billion.
- Why is Solana surging? This is always a hard question to answer. Though Solana is holding some kind of mysterious “Ignition” event today. NASDAQ speculates that Solana might announce that it will “burn” tokens. That’s when a certain number of coins are removed from supply, making the remaining ones more scarce and thus more valuable. Alternately, Solana could be set to announce new smart-contract features.