Key takeaways:
- Solana was sent to new highs after the Degenerate Ape NFT sale garnered a massive amount of interest
- Since its ICO sale in March of 2020, the price of SOL is up by more than 270x
- The Degenerate Ape NFT sale lasted all but eight minutes before the characters were sold out. The price of the most expensive one reached 100,001 SOL, which is more than $6 million USD
Solana (SOL) continues to reach new milestones. The massively popular blockchain project that started in March 2020 is having a stellar year. After the most recent price surge, which can mostly be attributed to an NFT sale of so-called Degenerate Apes, the price of Solana has set a new all-time high of $64.43.
What is Solana?
By straying away from complex layer-two solutions and employing the innovative proof-of-history mechanism (PoH), Solana is capable of outperforming the throughput of competitive networks while having extremely low fees of just one-thousandth of a penny per transaction.
Solana’s blockchain is optimized for 50-65k transactions per second. Low transaction fees and very high transaction throughput make Solana network a suitable candidate for issuing non-fungible token (NFT) projects, hosting decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and all kinds of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.
A quick recap of Solana’s price history
At the time the Solana ICO token sale took place in the middle of March of last year, the price of Solana was just $0.22. By the end of 2020, the SOL token was already trading at $1.70.
What followed was explosive price growth, which was abruptly stopped just before reaching $60 USD on May 19, when the whole crypto market suffered a cumulative loss of approximately $300 billion, while the price of Solana dropped by 65%. Since then Solana did manage to slowly recover a decent amount of its single-day loss in the following months.
This week, more precisely today, a quick and unexpected surge sent the price to before unseen territory. On a tailwind of a massive amount of interest garnered by the NFT sale of “Degenerate Apes”, the price of Solana reached new highs. SOL gained almost 40% and managed to climb to $64.43, before dipping down to $61.29 at the time of this writing.
What are Degenerate Apes?
The sale of Degenerate Apes reinforced the notion that the NFT sector has a lot of room left to grow and is still far from reaching its full potential.
Launched on Solanart NFT marketplace, the Degen Ape sale lasted all but 8 minutes before items were sold out. The price of certain NFTs reached 100,000 SOL or more than $6 million USD.
The Degen Ape Academy is committed to donating a portion of the NFT proceeds to charitable causes. According to the Academy’s website, a percentage of overall sales will be reinvested back into the community vault for future academy and project endeavors.
As a part of its long-term roadmap, the Academy is planning to have “every single ape as a playable driver in a student only kart racing game”.
