Solana soared past US$100 on Saturday afternoon for the first time in 20 months, since April 2022, continuing a rally that has pushed SOL to an 870% gain compared to this time a year ago.
SOL is up 20% today, according to data from CoinGecko, jumping to a current price of nearly $118 after being below the $100 mark for the past few days. The cryptocurrency unseated XRP on Wednesday to become the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, and then beat Binance Coin (BNB) late Thursday to land in 4th place.
As of this writing, Solana has a market cap of US$49 billion. Last week, the weekly transaction volume for decentralized exchanges (DEXs) on the Solana blockchain exceeded that of its rival Ethereum for the first time, driven in part by the rise in popularity of meme currencies on the Solana network such as BONK and Dogwifhat (WIF).
Other tokens based on Solana have seen big gains in the last few weeks, although they have seen a decline in the last few days. For example, BONK surged to an all-time high of $0.00003416 on December 15th. Despite being down nearly 40% since then, it still shows the meme currency's notorious volatility, but still gained 360% in the last month.
WIF, on the other hand, is up 294% in just this week, although it is down nearly 28% from Friday's all-time high.
The HNT token from the Helium network, on the other hand, has recorded a profit of 250% in the last 30 days, while the MOBILE token of the network has risen by 1,800% this month after the official launch of the Helium Mobile service.
Solana was the biggest gainer in the last 24 hours among the 10 largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, and its 100% gain in a month makes it stand out among the top 100 as well. Other hot coins this week include the OP token on Ethereum's Optimum network (up 104%) and the NEAR token on the Near Protocol network (up 118%) in a month. By comparison, the two largest cryptocurrencies by market cap—Bitcoin and Ethereum—have each posted gains of about 15% in the past month.
