Solana charts new ATH at $260

TL;DR Breakdown

• Solana hits new ATH price at $260.
• SOL flips Cardano as number four crypto coin.
• SOL blockchain has surpassed $500M since Nov.

Trending crypto coin Solana has yet again rallied to a new all-time high price at $260. The coin set this record just two days after Ethereum, a coin it is primed to kill crossed the $250 threshold.

Solana investors are hoping for a day when SOL will surpass Ethereum as the go-to platform for smart contracts and muscle its competitor out of the No. 2 position.

At press time, SOL has dropped and trades at $251.53, a 3.32 percent pullback, but still 35 percent higher than it was last week. Its surge over the past days has seen it topple Cardano to become the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Similarly, the total value locked in decentralized finance protocols on Solana is also sailing at a record high of $15.14 billion, according to DeFi data aggregator DeFiLlama. Its price surge comes as the first day of the Solana’s Foundation’s inaugural conference approaches.

The event, Breakpoint, holds in Lisbon until Wednesday. Guest speakers include Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, Coinshares CSO Meltem Demirors, and FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

Solana and NFTs, Ethereum

Another platform the altcoin is making waves is in the NFT space. According to NFT data aggregator CryptoSlam, which counts Mark Cuban among its backers, NFT sales on the SOL blockchain have surpassed $500 million since August, including $12 million in November so far.

It is anticipated that as long as the demand for NFT and DeFi remains, SOL price would continue to surge.

SOL claims to be a much more scalable and cheaper alternative to Ethereum. Ethereum currently suffers from what’s known as a ‘transactions bottleneck,’ meaning that the network can only handle about 12-14 transactions a second. Solana claims to be able to handle 50,000 TPS, which makes it one of the speediest blockchains on the market.