Key takeaways:
- The most recent price surge has pushed Solana over the $100 psychological price limit
- Solana has been one of the more successful crypto projects of 2021, now up 6,486% since the start of the year
- The hype surrounding the “Ignition” event is mounting, some suspect it to be a SOL burning episode, others think its an NFT related event
Ethereum competitor Solana has achieved another major milestone. On the tailwind of a 10% daily gain, Solana has surpassed the $100 price point to set a new all-time high of $101.99. Solana now sits comfortably in the 8th spot on the list of largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, ahead of Polkadot and Uniswap.
The road to $100 USD
The three-day-long rally started on August 26, when at its lowest price SOL was trading at $66.8. Since then, the price of SOL quickly reached $78 and then continued its upward trend towards the all-time high price of just below $102. The price of SOL has now retraced a bit and is trading at $100.2 at the time of this writing.
The latest surge was preceded by a drastic uptick earlier in the month, which abruptly put an end to a relatively slow trading period from June to August. On the 16th of August, the hype built around the Degenerate Apes NFT sale was instrumental in pushing the price of SOL to new highs. The NFT sale lasted all but eight minutes before the stock of NFT characters was sold out, with some of the ape avatars reaching the 100,000 SOL price tag, which was worth more than $6 million at the time of the sale.
Altogether, Solana is now up a staggering 6,486% since the start of 2021 and 451x USD its ICO sale price.
What is Ignition?
Solana has strayed away from computationally taxing layer-two solutions and instead employed a proof-of-history (PoH) mechanism. This approach allows Solana to massively outperform competitive blockchain platforms, reaching up to 50,000 transactions per second while at the same time having very low gas fees of just one-thousandth of a penny per transaction. The combination of high throughput and low fees positions the network as one of the best for decentralized finance (DeFi) and particularly as a marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
A video shared by the Solana team in a Twitter post and on the Solana website has garnered quite a bit of attention since Friday. Many users suspect that “Ignition” might be a codename for an upcoming SOL burning event. Others are convinced that the tagline “The sky’s the limit. What will you launch?,” is more suited for an NFT-related event and less for a token-burning episode.
Whatever the case might be, the mystery surrounding the reveal coming on the last day of August might very well be contributing to the recent increased SOL market activity.
