Solana is an open-source project that works on blockchain technology and provides decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions. Work on Solana started in 2017 but the project itself was launched in March 2020 by the Solana Foundation located in Switzerland. The main focus of Solana is to advance decentralized app (Dapp) creation. Solana is governed by a hybrid consensus model consisting of introduced proof of history (PoH) and fundamental proof of stake (PoS) on the blockchain.

Proof of history consensus protocol developed by one of Solana’s founders Anatoly Yokovenko makes Solana unique and offers higher levels of scalability, which in return increases usability. Due to its unique consensus model, Solana (SOL) offers its users incredibly high transaction speeds, with low gas fees. This benefit of Solana was quickly recognized by private and public sectors, and Solana quickly skyrocketed into crypto orbit. The price of Solana reached an all-time high of $260 on November 6th, 2021 according to Coinmarketcap. Coinmarketcap also reports that the price of Solana was at $0.50 around the time of launch. What that all means is that investors were able to make a whopping 51900% increase on their investment. With all the benefits of Solana mentioned above, the project also became one of two major platforms for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) together with Ethereum. In fact, Solana took away a big chunk of NFT traffic from Ethereum due to its lower transaction costs and great scalability. Many crypto enthusiasts started dubbing Solana the Ethereum “killer”, due to its advantages over the rival, and rapid increase in the number of developers developing on the network. People in the financial world started saying that Solana is on a fast track to becoming the “Visa of Crypto”. Due to all of this positive information surrounding the Solana network, it was not a surprise that SOL relatively quickly broke into the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap in 2021.

With all that being said, Solana also had some bad moments, from its glory until today. Despite all the positives and all the hype, Solana faced technical issues by having repeated outrages, which negatively affected its price. In addition to this, the project was accused of favoring venture capitalists over small investors with unfair tokenomics. Due to all these issues price of Solana collapsed with the current bear market, and is now just over $18 at the time of writing, losing over 94% of its ATH value in 2021.

But despite all the issues surrounding Solana, I am a firm believer that this project has a bright future ahead, and that in the next bull run of 2024 and 2025, Solana will come back even stronger and break its all-time high. The network foundation is still there and work is being done to minimize network outrages, and improve scalability even more. Recently Polygon (MATIC ) made a major announcement regarding its likely increase in the network’s capabilities and offerings. The blockchain has added Eclipse as its newest partner to launch new software that enables Solana apps to migrate to Polygon or go multichain. Polygon Sealevel Virtual Machine (SVM) is the name of the software that will play a crucial part in bringing Solana’s Sealevel Virtual Machine to the Polygon ecosystem. SVM on Polygon will expand throughput and add to interoperability for crypto-related businesses, including DeFi, gaming, and more.

The current price tag gives many investors a great entry point and a possible life-changing chance of making big money in 2-3 years. According to predictions NFT market on Solana is going to grow and come even closer to Ethereums, while many other promising projects are being built on the Solana network as well. We cannot look away from the lightning speed and transaction per second capacity Solanda network offers, at a fraction of the cost of its main competitors. Time will tell us how this will play out, but with the support of renewed crypto developers such as Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, the future of Solana looks bright and I will be there to capitalize on it.