While Solana’s SOL price has been rising sharply of late, activity on this blockchain is following suit. Let’s shed some light on these figures.
The Solana craze is exploding at the end of the year
It’s certainly not escaped the attention of anyone with an interest in the cryptocurrency ecosystem that Solana is enjoying a particularly encouraging end to the year, ending so far with SOL recording a year-on-year performance of over 1,000%.
The asset thus consolidates its 4th place in the market capitalization rankings, with $48.87 billion, for a unit price of almost $113 at the time of writing. It is now ahead of BNB, with over $7 billion in additional capitalization.
Figure 1 – SOL price progression in 2023
Significant growth in on-chain business
This enthusiasm is also reflected in on-chain activity. And for good reason: despite a slight slowdown during the holiday season, the number of daily active addresses has exploded over the past 3 months, rising from 750,000 to 1.3 million in recent days.
By extension, the number of token registrations on said addresses has also followed suit:
Figure 2 – Active addresses on the Solana blockchain
The creation of new tokens has seen a sharp increase, too, and is currently on its all-time highs (ATH) according to blockchain explorer Solscan. On the day of December 23, for example, almost 7,800 tokens were created, compared with around 50 per day two months earlier.
Solana is also experiencing strong growth in decentralized finance (DeFi). Indeed, the blockchain has seen its TVL increase by 136% in the space of a month, including 48% in the past week alone, bringing the total to $1.6 billion.
These figures are, however, a long way behind Ethereum, but enough to place the network in 5th place among DeFi’s blockchains:
Figure 3 – Ranking of DeFi blockchains by TVL
With the exception of protocols that can distort the actual TVL through double counting, such as liquid staking services, the applications gathering the most funds on Solana are well-known names such as Solend for lending, or the decentralized exchanges (DEX) Orca and Raydium. These have capitalizations of $216 million, $211 million and $133 million respectively.
Of course, while the fervor surrounding blockchain seems particularly intense of late, it’s important to be cautious. Any uptrend is not without a correction, and it’s important not to take unnecessary risks when it comes to the money management of your portfolio
