SOL

Solana Starts New Year With Double-Digit Bounce

by BSCN

January 2, 2023

$SOL is up 12% and Solana DEX activity is surging. After an important show of support from Vitalik, is Solana making a comeback?

Solana DEX Activity up in Past Week

There still appears to be life in Solana, after all, as the beleaguered blockchain posted a soaring increase in Decentralized Exchange (DEX) activity in the past week and its SOL coin rebounded by 12% in the New Year.

According to DefiLlama, DEX volume on Solana has increased by nearly 90% in the past seven days, to nearly $200 million. At the same time, DEX volume on almost all other major chains declined significantly; for example, Avalanche volume decreased by 55%. (Ethereum and BNB Chain were the most stable, with a 3% and 7% decline, respectively.)

Meanwhile, the value of $SOL increased by 12% in the past 24 hours to $11.10, according to CoinGecko. That’s the best price performance among all coins in the top 40 according to market capitalization.

Solana has taken a beating as a result of the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX empire and the departure of several key projects. But toward the end of the year, Solana got some much-needed support from mega-crypto influencer Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum.

Some smart people tell me there is an earnest smart developer community in Solana, and now that the awful opportunistic money people have been washed out, the chain has a bright future.

Hard for me to tell from outside, but I hope the community gets its fair chance to thrive🦾🦾
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 29, 2022

Is the recent increase in $SOL’s value a dead cat bounce or the first step in a major recovery? We’ll see.

What is Solana:

Solana is a public, open-source blockchain that allows for smart contracts, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and various decentralized applications (dApps). The SOL token, which is native to Solana's blockchain, provides network security through staking as well as a means of transferring value.