SOL, the native coin of the Solana blockchain, boomed late last year. By 6 November 2021, a new all-time high of $260.06 was recorded. However, by 14 June 2022, the token was trading at lows of $26.06 following multiple market-wide crashes.
Let’s take a look at Solana price prediction: Does Solana have a good future?
Solana whitepaper
The founding document, Solana: A new architecture for a high performance blockchain, was published in November 2017, and is 32 pages long. The whitepaper proposed a new blockchain architecture, called proof-of-history (PoH), a technique for keeping time between computers that do not trust one another. It goes on to say: “Current publicly available blockchains do not rely on time, or make a weak assumption about the participants’ abilities to keep time. Each node in the network usually relies on their own local clock without knowledge of any other participants’ clocks in the network.
Crypto crashes
The cryptocurrency market saw crashes in May and September 2021, and May and June 2022. Markets tend to correct themselves naturally and, over time, the prices readjust. This is true of SOL.
The initial positive performance in 2022 could have been attributed to non-fungible token (NFT) markets-related news and a marketwide bounce towards the end of the first quarter. By 2 April 2022, the token hit a $143.02 peak. At the end of the first quarter, Solana had become the second-largest protocol by NFT sales volume, second only to Ethereum. Solana had also experienced continued growth in network infrastructure, network usage and the overall ecosystem over the first quarter.
However, the lows of $26.06 in mid-June were ultimately catalysed by a long-running bear market and a mass crypto sell-off. In May, Terra Luna lost its dollar peg, prompting a mass sell-off and a string of liquidations.
How PoH works in the Solana ecosystem
There is also the nature of Solana itself, which has made it attractive to investors. While it does a lot of the same things that Ethereum does, it does them in a different way.
Solana is different because it uses the PoH (proof-of-history) method. The idea is to create timestamps that show how much someone held and when they held it. This is to make sure that the data reflected is accurate, and people are able to access coins and systems in a fair manner.
PoH is built on the same basis as PoS, so the technology that is used can run smoothly. What this means is that while the Solana blockchain, like Ethereum, is involved in things such as smart contracts, decentralised finance and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), it has something which makes it different from Ethereum.
Indeed, Solana says it is potentially much faster than Ethereum. Regardless, this means that it could be an interesting crypto for investors who are looking for something that might be able to challenge Ether in the world of altcoins.
Ignition fires up in 2021: Initial surges
Another driver behind the rise in value of SOL in 2021 was that, as the end of August approached, there was much excitement surrounding a Solana event called Ignition. While people did not know what it was going to be, there was considerable speculation, which meant there was a real buzz on crypto social media. In turn that meant more and more people invested in SOL, helping to drive the price up.
Although there was a belief in some circles that Ignition would involve some SOL coins being burned, an event that would result in fewer Solana coins being in circulation and so increase the value of those that survived, that prediction was wrong.
Instead, Ignition was what Solana, or at least what passes for the organisation behind the blockchain, called a “hackathon”. The event, which launched on 31 August, saw programmers competing to present ideas for things that could run on the Solana blockchain. There were prizes worth $5m to be won and categories included Web 3.0, which focuses on things such as decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), decentralised apps (dApps) and other infrastructure schemes, sponsored by the tech giant Microsoft.
Microsoft’s involvement was a particularly interesting aspect of the event, as it saw a traditional tech company – and one of the world’s biggest at that – getting involved in the world of crypto, and helping fund prizes worth $120,000. There were also categories for decentralised finance (DeFi), gaming and NFTs.
The DeFi category was sponsored by Standard Chartered and Jump Capital. Again, Standard Chartered’s involvement was significant because a multinational banking company was taking part in something that could potentially serve as an alternative to traditional banking. Even if that were common, having the same sponsor as Liverpool FC can’t have harmed Solana’s event any. There were prizes worth $185,000 in this category.
Finally, the gaming and NFT categories (sponsored by Forte and Metaplex, respectively) carried prizes of $120,000 each.
The whole event proved to be a good move by Solana because it expanded interest in the blockchain and also helped push up the price of the SOL coin.
The all-time high (and beyond)
In the second half of August, the story started to get more exciting. On 15 August 2021, an intraday low of $43.45 was followed by a rise of more than 25% to an intraday high of $54.63. While SOL closed the day at $53.75, it opened the next day at $53.54 before rising more than 28% to $68.82. On 17 August the coin hit an intraday high of $74.89 before falling back to $64.21. The SOL price broke through the $80 barrier on 27 August 2021, shooting from a low of $72.72 to a high of $88.85, a rise of more than 22%.
The rise continued, to hit $130.01 before SOL fell more than 16% to close August at $108.48. That meant the coin had jumped in value almost threefold in a month thanks, in part, to the factors mentioned above – a remarkable explosion that it seems no SOL prediction anticipated.
On 9 September 2021, SOL reached a new high of $214.96, and then hit a further record of $218.73 on 25 October, and a new all-time high of $260.06 on 6 November 2021.
Solana’s rise to its all-time high in November came just after its venture capital arm Solana Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and FTX set up a new investment fund called GameFi. The $100m investment initiative is dedicated to Web 3.0 gaming. As Web 3.0 gaming has rocketed in popularity, the coin price rose substantially as more interest was generated. Increased network participation in the NFT space was also paramount in its price rally, with Solana NFT Marketplace going live on FTX on 11 October 2021.
The end of last year and into January were difficult months for cryptocurrencies, with Bitcoin down by almost a fifth over the course of December. SOL was no exception, and by 23 December it had lost almost a third of its value and the coin was valued at $178.93. Worse news was to come after an exploit of the Wormhole bridge resulted in degraded network performance in February.
However, SOL has led the way in Web 3.0 gaming in 2022. According to FXStreet, Amio Talio, the founder of UK-based Paradox Studio, said: “Games like Star Atlas on the Solana blockchain offer users the opportunity to earn cryptocurrency, increasing their wallet balance. This makes it more lucrative compared to games on other platforms.”
The rally in early April started after Coinbase Wallet added support for SOL and other Solana-based blockchain tokens on 18 March. There were also high hopes for OpenSea’s integration of the Solana network, but as trading volumes began to slide, so did investor confidence. The token has been on a downtrend since the brief peak of $143.02 in early April 2022.
Exacerbated by the market-wide crashes, the token went into a freefall, hitting lows of $26.06 in mid-June. As of 11 August, the token was trading at $44.38.
Increased investor confidence in cryptocurrencies in 2022 might help kickstart another bull run, but at this stage an immediate recovery to previous highs looks unlikely. However, renewed confidence might help Solana to be seen as a viable, cheaper alternative to Ethereum. Solana, like all other cryptos, is also at considerable risk of collapse should it not be able to compete in the rapidly maturing digital asset space.
Solana price prediction: Does Solana have a good future?
WalletInvestor is bearish about its SOL coin price prediction. The site forecasts that the Solana price in a year’s time will be less than $5.31, and does not expect the token to recover, suggesting it is a “bad long-term (one-year) investment”.
DigitalCoinPrice’s SOL coin price prediction 2022 believes it will reach $64.44 in September. The same site thinks the SOL price could reach an average of $62.73 in 2023 and then $69.32 in 2024. In 2025, the coin might be worth $84.49 while 2026 will see it at $81.27. In 2027, it might be worth as much as $109.50, before rallying to $146.11 in 2028 and $179.03 in 2029. The SOL coin price prediction for 2030 is $201.73.
Finally, Gov Capital’s SOL coin price prediction is around $249.97 a year from now. The SOL coin price prediction for 2025 is for the coin to be worth over $1,000 by September of that year, the most optimistic projection of our forecasts. In five years’ time, the site suggests the token could be worth as much as $1,868.09.
Hope you can get a better understanding about Solana price prediction. Does Solana have a good future? Let's wait and see.
