Solana’s blockchain native token, SOL, led the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, in terms of price appreciation in the month of March 2022. The token gained approximately 23.25%, from $99.52 at the beginning of the month, to end the month trading at $122.66.
This price appreciation saw SOL’s market capitalization end the month of March at $39.9 billion, a 25.25% increase from the start of the month, where it stood at $31.9 billion. SOL has a total volume of $70.6 billion in the month of March and it also ended the month ranking #6, ahead of Cardano, XRP, LUNA and AVAX.
According to Messari, Solana has an inflation rate of 8.86%. Solana’s emission type is programmed in a way where its inflation rate decreases over time. It also has a stock-to-flow of 11.29 as of the time of this writing. The network is one of the fastest blockchains as it is currently processing 1,204 transactions per second.
What you should know
- SOL has a total supply of 518,793,811, however, 325,813,558 of the total supply is currently circulating, which is 62.80% of the total supply. The top 20 Solana addresses own 79.5 million units of SOL, which accounts for 24.39% of the circulating supply and 15.32% of the total supply.
- According to Staking Rewards, 387,584,135, which is 74.71% of the total supply, is currently being staked. In fact, Solana currently leads the top 10 cryptocurrencies by staked value, with a staked value of $53,181,366,179. Others on the list include Ethereum, Terra, Cardano and Avalanche.
- The total amount of SOL being staked has been on an uptrend since the start of March from 382.5 million units at the beginning of the month, to end the month with 393.1 million units, which accounted for 75.81% of the total supply. Although we have seen a pullback, this value is trading around its all-time high and hence why we are seeing a lot of bullish price action on the token.
- In the 4 days in April, SOL’s price has traded a high of $140.26, which represents 14.35% gain in the month of April. Right now, it is the highest performer in terms of price appreciation of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
- Another reason for the rapid price increases we are seeing today is as a result of strong demand for the SOL token. The demand for the token is so high, that Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) acknowledged this and is considering launching SOL futures, days after announcing Micro-Sized Bitcoin and Ether Options.
- Speaking during the Crypto Compare Digital Asset Summit, Payal Shah, the director of equity and cryptocurrency products at CME, stated that they were looking beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum owing to increased demand from clients and could soon add Solana and Cardano futures.
- She stated, “We are looking at it. The number of client requests in anything outside the top two, such as Solana and Cardano had grown enormously.”
- Solana also recently surpassed $1.5 billion in NFT sales, making it the second-largest blockchain for NFT related transactions. Solana managed to achieve the new milestone just months after surpassing $1 billion for the first time. NFTs issued on Solana have generated over two million transactions with 314,910 buyers and 260,844 sellers.
- SOL’s price rally can also be attributed to a slew of positive news seen in March. Digital asset manager CoinShares and crypto exchange FTX jointly launched an exchange-traded product that offers SOL staking rewards without directly buying the token. The product is geared chiefly towards institutional investors and is expected to draw a large amount of capital to SOL.
The token also makes up nearly a quarter of the weightage in a recently launched smart contracts fund by the world’s largest digital assets manager, Grayscale. Large-scale trading by investment houses is credited with spurring a massive crypto rally in 2021, and as such, is usually a bullish indicator.
Ethereum’s planned shift to a PoS model has also spurred interest in other projects in the space. After recent gains, SOL is the second-largest player in the space. Cardano’s native token, ADA, came in second, gaining 18.77% in the month of March. Avalanche’s native token, AVAX, came in third, returning 14.92%.
