Solana (SOL) bumps 30% to $67. Sets new all-time highs.

Solana surged over 40% to break into the top ten cryptocurrencies by market cap this morning, data from multiple sources shows. It trades at $67 at press time, and showed no signs of slowing down.

SOL, the network’s native token, native currency in Solana’s ecosystem. So the token can pass to nodes within the Solana cluster in exchange for running on-chain programs or validating its output. Payments via SOL are, additionally, also possible.

SOL currently has a circulating supply of 286 million tokens, with a total supply of 488 million. The network is worth $17 billion at press time, and has posted gains of 12,225.8% from May 2020 lows of $0.50 as of today.

Solana’s price charts look nothing short of a rocket. It traded at $45 yesterday and has zoomed to over $67 as of writing. As such, the move, as the below image shows, is part of a longer uptrend since the $35 price level.

Some of the biggest applications on Solana are decentralized exchange Serum and Mango Markets (which raised over $70 million after issuing its tokens last week). Yesterday also saw the ‘Degenerate Apes’ NFT collection have its fan moment with Solana followers (it sold out in minutes after launch).

…and then this happened. 🤯

Daily request volume on the https://t.co/3S12ndZ16m gateway reached the insane height of 60m requests/day recently.

When @DegenApeAcademy dropped, https://t.co/3S12ndZ16m received 1m requests in a single minute.

😐😐😐 https://t.co/OTbIZjrNYn pic.twitter.com/7GIVSXtbx4

— Sam Williams (@samecwilliams) August 15, 2021

Solana 101

Described as a ‘high-performance’ blockchain, Solana was created in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko to solve the throughput problems of both Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Unlike the two—which use a Proof-of-Work consensus design relying on miners—Solana was based on a ‘Proof of History’ mechanism, one that creates historical records that prove that an event occurs during a specific moment in time.

This allows for a faster and more secure network. Solana’s transactions per second (tps) count is an estimated 65,000 (faster than the Visa network), and it is capable to support dApps, non-fungible tokens, and other blockchain applications atop its chain.