SOL price rose 13% over the weekend following the launch of a new NFT marketplace and rumors of a $450 million fundraising round.
After reaching an all-time high above $60 last month, SOL fell with the broader cryptocurrency market and plunged below $20 a few days later during the May downturn. However, while much of the crypto market stagnated over the weekend, SOL stood out with a 13% gain.
Solana is a blockchain protocol designed to build scalable decentralized applications (Dapps), offering an open infrastructure focused on global adoption. The notable weekend gains for SOL were likely driven by the volume of development activity occurring across the ecosystem.
Sam Bankman‑Fried has invested heavily in the Solana ecosystem. His quantitative crypto trading firm Alameda Research helped fund Solana’s hackathon project Step Finance earlier this year.
Bankman‑Fried’s derivatives exchange, FTX, also chose Solana to launch its non‑custodial decentralized exchange (DEX), Serum. The DEX has seen user growth and last month surpassed $4 billion in trading volume.
There are now more than 150 projects in the Solana ecosystem, which expanded last week with the launch of the Metaplex NFT marketplace. The new marketplace excited many creators because it lets artists easily deploy their own NFT storefronts and, by leveraging Solana’s blockchain, enables minting at an average cost below $1.
Development is far from finished. According to reports, Solana is raising up to $450 million to accelerate its goal of becoming a primary destination for Dapps, a move that could position the project to compete more directly with Ethereum.
Ethereum fees are relatively low at the moment, with an average transaction cost of $3.68. However, fees are likely to rise again before Ethereum 2.0 is fully deployed, increasing demand for cheaper alternatives.
Solana currently offers an average transaction fee of $0.00025, block times under one second, and a theoretical capacity of 50,000 transactions per second.
Following the weekend rally, SOL continued to climb this morning and was trading at $43.70 at the time of writing. Solana’s speed, scalability, and low costs suggest the ecosystem will continue to grow as more projects choose to build on the network, which could support further upside for the price of SOL in the future.