Solana Overtakes Ethereum: SOL Price Surges Beyond $200, What’s on the Horizon?

Solana, Ethereum’s Layer-1 competitor has continued its remarkable price surge despite the overall market consolidation. On Sunday, March 17, the Solana (SOL) price surged by another 10%, surpassing $200 for the first time since December 2021. With gains of over 800% in the past year, Solana has significantly narrowed the gap with its all-time high levels

What’s Behind the Solana (SOL) Price Rally?

Over the weekend, Solana network activity surged past Ethereum’s as demand for Solana-based memecoins intensified, leading to strain on the network’s capacity. On March 16, Solana’s total trading volume surpassed Ethereum’s, reaching $3.52 billion and exceeding Ethereum’s daily volume by over $1.1 billion, according to DefiLlama.

This significant increase in Solana network activity was primarily fueled by a heightened interest in new memecoins. On March 14, investors flocked to a newly launched memecoin called Book of Meme (BOME), which swiftly surged from negligible value to a market capitalization of $1.45 billion within just 56 hours.

Furthermore, in the past month, Solana’s decentralized finance (DeFi) total value locked (TVL) has surged by more than 80%, as reported by DefiLlama. This remarkable expansion has propelled Solana’s DeFi TVL to its highest level in the last two years.

Currently, the network’s DeFi TVL stands at $3.8 billion. Among the top five DeFi networks based on TVL, Solana has experienced the most substantial growth over the past month.

On the other hand, a CoinGape report stated that the total number of SPL tokens on the Solana network surged to their all-time high. SPL, which stands for Solana Program Library, functions as the protocol for generating and administering tokens on the Solana blockchain, akin to Ethereum’s ERC-20 standard.

The Trading Activity Snapshot

Recently, the trading for meme coins has spurted on the Solana blockchain to a great extent. As per Looksonchain, trading Solana memecoins isn’t always profitable for everyone. A particular address engaged in 11 Solana memecoin trades within three days, experiencing losses on each trade. The total loss amounted to 754 SOL ($147K). This address appears to be driven by fear of missing out (FOMO), consistently purchasing at high prices and selling at lower ones.

Thus, investors need to be further cautious while trading meme coins on Solana amid the high market volatility. Also, big market players have indulged in profit booking as per the on-chain data.

Lookonchain further reported that with the surge in the price of $SOL, large investors are capitalizing on profits by selling their holdings. The whale identified as “BU6N2Z” deposited 200K $SOL ($39.85M) into Binance within the last two days. Currently, “BU6N2Z” still retains 1.62M $SOL ($323M), with 387K $SOL ($77M) held in their wallet and 1.23M $SOL ($246M) staked.