For anyone wondering “Should I buy Solana coin now?”, know that your investment horizon and risk tolerance are the two most important factors to consider. The Solana blockchain has demonstrated remarkable growth and adoption, and if you believe in its long-term potential, buying SOL now could prove to be a prudent choice.
That’s because Solana is one of the few cryptocurrencies that has partnered with Visa, it has one of the largest ecosystems where you can play Web3 games and earn money, you can mint or trade NFTs or simply yield farm a variety of tokens. These are some of the many use cases for Solana, which makes it one of the best investments in the crypto space right now.
Should You Buy Solana Coin?
Solana offers lightning-fast transactions with the lowest transaction costs compared to all other blockchains. Its ecosystem is growing with new applications being launched daily. This is the only major blockchain that has launched its own smartphone and has partnered with Visa for USDC settlements.
How Solana Coin Has Performed Since Launch & This Year
The Solana Foundation was established in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal when they started raising funds to develop a new crypto network. The Solana coin, however, was officially launched three years later in March 2020 after raising $1.76 million in a public token auction.
In April, the coin was listed on major exchanges with a starting price of $0.98 per coin. A few months later, it dropped to $0.51, marking SOL’s all-time low.
After that, the SOL price started to climb, reaching the top at $260 in November 2021, at the same time when Bitcoin topped $68,000. This marked a total of 26,430% gain from the listing price to the top. If you invested $10,000 at the price of $0.98 per coin, you would have $2,548,000 at the top.
However, just as all riskier assets took a blow with rising interest rates, SOL started to slowly drop, reaching a bottom at $8.9 per coin following the FTX crash. Despite that, SOL is still up, trading in a narrow range of between $20 and $26 for most of this year.
- Solana coin launch in March 2020
- SOL traded at $0.98 in April 2020 when it launched on exchanges
- Bottom in June 2020 of $0.51
- $260 top in November 2021, marking a 26,430% gain since launch
- New bottom in November 2022 at $8.9
- Trades between $20 and $26 for most of 2023
What Factors Determine the Price of Solana & its Potential?
Solana is growing in popularity in the crypto space due to its impressive scalability, low transaction costs and blazing-fast transaction speed. To determine SOL’s future price and its potential, we have to see what Solana does better than other blockchains.
Low Transaction Costs
Solana is different from all leading blockchains because of its tech. It uses a unique consensus mechanism, called Proof of History (PoH), along with a high-speed Runtime. The latter is a concurrent transaction processor that allows for transactions to execute in parallel instead of one by one in line.
This is something that Visa praised in its Solana deep dive as the company runs a USDC settlement payment test with the Solana blockchain to improve the speed of cross-border settlement.
Unlike Ethereum where the transaction fee, called a gas fee, is high and often unpredictable. Solana transactions typically cost less than $0.001 and they almost never go above that. For comparison, the average cost is $7 per transaction on Ethereum, but during times of high congestion, it can go as high as six digits as we’ve seen when a whale paid 64 ETH ($119k) for a single transaction.
So is Solana coin a good investment?
Solana is trading 92% below its peak price of $260. Given the low risk and high potential to skyrocket, Solana is one of the best cryptocurrencies to buy at the moment.