Bumpy September is out of the way and a race to the moon is on for the rest of the year folks. The race does come with its share of obstacles i.e., the debt ceiling issue that hasn’t been resolved as of yet. But crypto is still chugging along despite market volatility. BTC and ETH continue to be the mainstays in the field however a need for faster network speeds and lower transaction fees is pushing investors to alternative choices. For more on this you’re going to have to stick around.
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Big dog Ethereum appears to be losing steam falling behind ETH killers Solana, Cardano and Polygon. Over the past year the value of Ethereum increased by 830% making it the second highest crypto by market value. During the month of September, the coin’s value dropped 16%. This decline was fueled not only by September uncertainty and hesitancy but also by the slow network speeds and high transaction fees plaguing the asset.
It is here where the altcoins shine. Solana has seen almost a 4800% growth since September of last year. Solana boasts cheaper fees and faster usage than Ethereum. But that’s not all. Solana has found a driver in the NFT and DeFi market. Solana is processing 50,000 transactions per second at only $0.00025 per transaction. Ethereum has not come up with a way to compete with that. Ethereum’s transaction speed is limited to 13 transactions per second with much higher fees than Solana.
Investors are catching on and while not completely leaving ETH outright, they are diversifying and giving a bigger piece of the crypto pie to alternative blockchains.
For example, Grayscale, a crypto asset manager, has added Solana and Uniswap to one of its funds per the Market Insider. The company said it had added the solana network's sol token and uniswaps' uni to its Digital Large Cap Fund, which has $494.6 million assets under management, according to its website. The weightings were adjusted so that bitcoin would have the largest weight followed by ether, ada, sol and then uni based on "quarterly reviews", Grayscale said.
If that wasn’t all, Solana-based NFT SolMonkey sold for $2 million. SolMonkey was the latest Solana-based non-fungible token to be sold at a very expensive price. Earlier this month, The Block Crypto reported that the SolMonkey was only sitting at more than $1 million value three weeks ago. Some people doubt Ethereum blockchain's dominance in the market since many NFTs are struggling to keep up there. However, the #1355 Solana Monkey, which depicts a skeletal monkey donning a colorful crown, has been bought for $2 million. In the collection, it was said to be the most unique NFT.
In more NFT/Solana news Genopets a Play-to-Earn NFT Game has announced its decision to build on the Solana ecosystem. According to the announcement, Genopets revealed that more than a million people actively played a Play-to-Earn blockchain game daily.
Also, the blockchain gaming platform revealed that its decision to build on Solana was due to its scalability, top-notch security, fast transactions, cheap costs, among others.
“[…] Solana is scalable and cost-efficient, so you don’t have to worry about growth on fragmented Layer 2 systems or sharded chains,” Genopets noted.
While I’m still on the fence when it comes to the lasting power of NFT’s this is affirmation that Solana itself is a great investment.
Another Solana convert is Bancambios. The long-awaited Bancambios DeFi initiative has finally begun. The token (ticker: BX) will be created over the Solana blockchain, and the foremost invitation to join will be sent to the Solana and DeFi communities. Bancambios is on course to meet its blueprint release deadline (Q4 2021 – Q2 2022).
