- SOL’s user base may witness a surge given Solana’s strategic partnership with Visa.
- The impending FTX sell-off threatened to put downward pressure on SOL.
Despite the less-than-exciting price trajectory of Solana’s native token, SOL’s ecosystem has been reverberating with a wave of positive developments lately.
Amid the relative calm of the bear market, the proof-of-stake (PoS) network focused on building high-profile partnerships. This will stimulate development activity and make the chain an attractive hub of decentralized finance protocols (DeFi).
How much are 1,10,100 SOLs worth today?
Popular on-chain researcher Emperor Osmo drew attention to some of the ecosystem’s significant developments in recent months and how they position Solana for long-term market value expansion.
Solana for stablecoin settlement
Perhaps the most important of these was the partnership with Giant Visa. The partnership included expanding its stablecoin settlement capabilities to the Solana chain. The Solana community widely welcomed the announcement. This is because a major TradFi player has considered the network for payments for the first time.
While Visa was already using Ethereum [ETH] For the pilot project, the decision to add support for Solana was driven by its high transaction throughput and low fees. Visa recognized Solana’s strategic benefits and announced the partnership.
“The Solana blockchain has block times of 400 milliseconds, an average of 400 transactions per second (TPS) and typically increases to more than 2K TPS1 for different usage scenarios during periods of peak demand.”
The admission was a testament to Solana’s long-held story about a powerful blockchain. Due to its high transaction speeds, it is often projected as the “Ethereum Killer”. In fact, a comparative data analysis by Artemis found that Solana was miles ahead of its competitors in facilitating on-chain transactions.
The partnership with Visa is expected to increase numbers even further.
Source: Artemis
MakerDAO prefers Solana
In addition to Visa’s partnership, the Solana ecosystem was also the leading stablecoin issuance protocol of MakerDAO’s network of choice. Earlier this month, Maker’s co-founder Rune Christensen proposed building the protocol’s upcoming standalone blockchain by forking Solana’s codebase.
Christensen praised Solana’s technical capabilities and stated that the PoS network would continue to be the best fit for Maker’s specific needs. He also cited the strong developer ecosystem as an important reason for choosing Solana.
“This means that it will have a significant Lindy effect and is likely to persist in the long term, and that development and maintenance costs will be much lower, and that there will always be a high-quality pool of talent available for Maker to access has and can contribute to. Unpleasant.”
The importance of high development activity in luring investors is repeated ad nauseam. However, the above scenario served as a great reminder.
Referring specifically to the FTX fiasco, Christensen praised the way the ecosystem weathered the headwinds it encountered on the way to building its developer base. His claims were confirmed by data from Token Terminal.
It was revealed that Solana’s developer count remained intact from what it was a year ago in early 2023.
Source: Token terminal
Events on Solana’s DeFi front
Emperor Osmo also highlighted Solana’s significant progress in improving its DeFi credentials. Maple Finance, one of the leading players in the real-world assets (RWA) industry, returned to Solana months after leaving the blockchain network in the wake of FTX’s demise.
Given Maple’s previous contributions to Solana’s liquidity, the returns were believed to be a win-win for both parties.
In addition to RWA, there are also plenty of opportunities in the largely untapped liquid staking token (LST) sector. While Solana boasted one of the largest market caps, only about 5% of its supply was available as LSTs.
The emerging liquid staking protocol Jito was trying to capture a share of its market. It recorded a sharp increase in SOL deployments since July.
Overall, Solana has come a long way since the cascading effect of FTX’s collapse. Its total value has more than doubled year-over-year (YTD) to nearly $790 million at the time of writing, according to DeFiLlama.
Source: DeFiLlama
Realistic or not, here is SOL’s market cap in BTC terms
Will this ruin the party?
It was clear that the Solana community had a lot to offer. That said, there were growing concerns about FTX’s upcoming liquidation plan, which could flood the market with additional SOL tokens.
In fact, nervous holders began dumping their holdings, fearing a major crash in the coming days. The sign collapsed 9.4% in the past week to a press-time value of $17.68.