Solana continued its upward trend, surpassing $100 on Saturday afternoon for the first time in 20 months since April 2022, marking a 770% increase since this time last year.
SOL is up 6% on the day, with the current price jumping to nearly $103 after hovering below $100 for the past few days, according to data from CoinGecko. The cryptocurrency upset XRP on Wednesday to become the fifth-largest coin by market capitalization, and later on Thursday upended Binance Coin (BNB) to take the fourth spot.
As of this writing, Solana has a market capitalization of $44 billion. Last week, weekly Trading volume on the Solana blockchain’s decentralized exchange (DEX) surpassed that of rival Ethereum for the first time. This is partly driven by the rise of popular meme coins such as Solana’s BONK and Dogwifhat (WIF).
Other Solana-based tokens have recently seen declines, but have seen significant gains in recent weeks. For example, BONK is It soared to an all-time high of $0.00003416 on December 15th. It has since fallen nearly 45%, demonstrating the volatility meme coins are famous for, but has remained up 347% over the past month.
Meanwhile, WIF is down nearly 28% from its all-time high on Friday but is up 294% this week alone. Crypto-based wireless network Helium’s HNT token has surged 217% over the past 30 days, while the network’s MOBILE token has gained 1,316% this month following the nationwide expansion of its Helium Mobile service.
Among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, Solana has seen the biggest gains over the past 24 hours, and is also prominent within the top 100, up 37% over the past few days. Other hot coins this week include Ethereum scaling network Optimism’s OP token (up 49%) and Near Protocol’s NEAR token (up 47%).
By comparison, the two largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, Bitcoin and Ethereum, have each seen gains of about 3% over the past seven days.
Editor: Andrew Hayward