Why Solana Price is up 7.5% at $38

Solana (SOL) has risen by 5% today relative to its 24-hour low, moving from $36.82 early this morning to $38.67 as of writing. Its current price also represents a 20% jump in the past week, according to CoinGecko, as well as a 19% increase in the last 14 days.

These moves make SOL the tenth-best performing cryptocurrency in the top 100 in the past week, behind such tokens as EVMOS, APE, XRD, ATOM, HNT, RPL and RVN. They also stand as something of a turnaround for the altcoin, which has had a difficult 2022, with a fall of 85% since the all-time high of $259.96 it set in November 2021.

But with Solana looking forward to a number of important developments, including integrations with Helium and Hivemapper, it looks like imminent expansion and evolution is pushing its native token upwards, and helping it make up for lost ground.

Solana (SOL) Price on Road to Recovery

While SOL does remain down by 17% in the past month, it’s also up by around 35% in the last 90 days. Importantly, its technical indicators reveal a regathering of momentum, with its relative strength index pushing above 60 today and closing in on 70.

It’s also worth pointing out that SOL’s 30-day moving average (in red above) remains below its 200-day average (in blue). This indicates that it’s still waiting for a rally, and with its RSI shooting up now, such a rally may arrive soon.

This suspicion is heightened by SOL’s fundamentals, which have been strengthened by increasing adoption of Solana. In particular, it seems that decentralized wireless infrastructure platform Helium is about to migrate to Solana, pending a vote by its community.

This vote closes in roughly eight and a half days, at which point the market may witness another SOL rally, assuming a positive outcome. Yet this isn’t the only interesting news on Solana’s horizon, with global map platform Hivemapper also launching on its blockchain in the coming months.

Such launches are incredibly bullish for Solana. And coupled with data showing a big spike in Solana-based NFT transactions and volume, they account for why SOL is having such a good time right now.

An Ethereum Killer?

Solana is currently the fifth-biggest layer-one blockchain in terms of total value locked in, according to DefiLlama. However, it had been on track to become even bigger in late 2021, prior to the ongoing market downturn and a number of unfortunate technical issues.

In fact, Solana has suffered at least five outages this year, with block production stopping at various points as a result of consensus failure and other bugs. Such incidents served to depress SOL’s price significantly, with the coin facing substantial drops early in 2022 and between April and May.

And with Solana also witnessing a minor outage in early August, it’s really only in the past few weeks that it has been able to return to growth. This has been helped by the aforementioned integrations, as well as a number of network upgrades that should hopefully reduce the chances of future outages.

In fact, a ByBit report from late August concluded that Solana had witnessed strong growth in Q2 of this year, largely on the back of upgrades that helped attract more traffic in various areas of activity, such as NFTs and DAOs.

“Q2 saw consistent growth in developer activity as daily active programs broke above 1,100 for the first time on May 30. With the incoming Solana Summer Camp hackathon taking place in Q3, we can expect further growth in this vertical,” wrote the report’s authors.

Such growth is highly encouraging, since Solana will need to continue updating its code and launching new apps if it’s to continue competing with Ethereum after this week’s Merge. However, with SOL rising by bigger percentages than ETH in the past week, there’s a chance it could do this.