Solana has become one of the best-performing cryptocurrencies within the top 10, with the price of its SOL token surging more than 26% in the past week. The network’s tokens hit an all-time high in November 2022 and then fell below that. By June 2023, it will be over $10. SOL is now set to surpass $100.
Despite being only three years old, Solana is widely regarded as one of the potential “Ethereum killers” thanks to its high speed and low headroom. Her recent moves mirror the cryptocurrency market as a whole and have been further fueled by news of new stablecoins joining the network, as well as the resurgence of meme coins and NFTs.
New York regulators approve first Solana stablecoin
Paxos has received approval from New York financial regulators to expand its services for Solana, according to Fortune. This approval means that Ethereum is no longer the only network that can operate as USDP natively. With a market capitalization of over $370 million, USDP’s news of Solana’s expansion quickly contributed to its performance.
The main difference between Paxos and other major stablecoins is that the company cannot scale as fast as its competitors because it has decided to cooperate with regulators. Up to this point, the New York Department of Financial Services has only approved Paxos to operate on the Ethereum network.
Paxos’ decision to expand to Solana comes at a time when the company is collaborating with PayPal to issue a new stablecoin, PYUSD. According to Walter Hessert, head of strategy at Paxos, PayPal will also be interested in solidifying its presence on the Solana network, which could further increase adoption of the protocol.
Memecoin Mania Powers Solana
Another key driver of Solana’s price surge is the popularity of Bonk Inu ($BONK), a memecoin created in direct response to the fall of FTX. Like DogeCoin and Shiba Inu, BONK is tradable and has no purpose beyond being a parody of other coins. However, this did not stop the coin’s value from rising by more than 300% in the past month.
With a market capitalization of over $1.1 billion and a trading volume of over $304 million, word of mouth has fueled Solana’s growth. These tokens were also linked to Solana’s Saga smartphones, giving owners of those phones an exclusive airdrop of 30 million BONK.
Binance’s recent decision to launch a BONK futures product has also contributed to Memecoin’s popularity. This comes less than two weeks after BONK was listed on the world’s largest exchange, with over 120 million USDT in 24-hour trading volume on the platform at the time of this writing.
NFT trading volume flows back to Solana
As NFTs have made a comeback over the past few months with major companies launching new collections, Solana has benefited from its share of the ecosystem. Currently Solana’s most popular NFT marketplace, Tensor has enabled Solana to attract more and more collectors from other networks.
Tensor co-founder Ilja Moisejevs told Bloomberg that the VC initially favored seeing the market move to other networks, but opinions appear to have already changed. Tensos surpassed Magic Eden in trading volume earlier this month after rumors of the airdrop spread widely among NFT community members. According to our own data, Tensos currently accounts for 75% of all NFT transaction volume on the Solana network.
According to the third quarter report from DappRadar and Blockchain Gaming Alliance, Solana has emerged as one of the top five gaming blockchains by number of transactions. This comes despite a quarter-on-quarter change of -42%, which saw the network lose its dominance over Wax.