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 non-fungible tokens (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 eighth. Bitcoin is No. 1 at just over $879 billion. Ethereum is No. 2 at $398 billion. At eighth 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 notes that some industry watchers have speculated 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.
Update: Solana has announced the Ignition event is an upcoming virtual hackathon with up to $5 million in seed funding and prizes.