Solana price is turning around
The Solana Coin SOL was one of the biggest loosers in the past two years, falling -96% from its ATH at $260 to a low of $8 in late 2022. Background was the fall of FTX exchange, which was one of the largest holders of SOL back then. Now it seems that the turnaround is successful, the Coin is up +350% since then and managed to break the important resistance zone at about $32 last week.
VISA cooperation
One of the main drivers seem to be the growing partnership with payment giant VISA. The are working with Solana on using blockchain technology for cross border transactions with stable coins. Solanas‘ USP always has been its speed, having a block time of about 0.4 sec and being able to process 400-2000 transactions per second, which is much faster than any other relevant Blockchain project. This obviously is the reason why they were chosen as partner. VISA itself can handle a stunning 65.000 transactions per second with their network, Ethereum is averaging about 12. Don’t know exactly about Hive, that would be an interesting comparison.
Another background for this partnership is the transaction fees, which are very low on the Solana Blockchain, at Hive we have none. At least here we can compete.
As you can imagine, if this partnership would grow and be rolled out it was a great booster for Solana usage and certainly also for SOL price. At the moment it is still a pilot.
Shopify integration
Another reason why Solana is back on the watchlist of many investors is the integration of SolanaPay in the Shopify App. This was announced in summer and is important news since Shopify is one of the biggest E-Commerce companies apart from Amazon. The cooperation opens the gate to sellers and buyers on Shopify to do their transactions using USDC stable coin via the Solana Blockchain as payment on the Shopify platform. And it is almost free since fees are normally less than 1 Cent per transaction.
Breaking: Selecta pilot
Last but not least fresh news came out just today that Selecta, one of the biggest Food tech companies in Europe will setup vending machines which are able to use SolanaPay. So you can buy your Snickers or Walkers Crisps there with USDC or SOL in the near future.
Conclusion
If you are reading all those good news you can easily imagine why people get excited about Solana again. But of course there’s also another side of the story. Solana is said to have a very low level of decentralization and some people even say it’s not even a real Blockchain since it had several downtimes and was halted in the past.
Well, I am no tech expert but it certainly seems to have been an issue. We will see but what interest me is the potential from an investor’s point of view. And that looks promising to me. We seem to have started the turnaround chartwise and there is still a 700% gap until we are back at the old ATH. If we will reach it during the coming bull market? Not sure, but even if we made it back to $100 or $200 it would be a really good return in my view. I am holding a smaller position because of that potential, time will tell if it pays off. I am confident though.
What do you think about Solana? And does anyone of you know how many transactions per second the Hive Blockchain is able to handle?
