Solana Outperforms Ethereum in This Key Metric

Solana’s sustained ecosystem growth over the past few months has been nothing short of extraordinary. After knocking at death’s door following the demise of FTX, the DeFi blockchain has now gained a whopping 849% in the past year to take its price well over USD $100 (AUD $147). And a new key metric shows that it isn’t just hype leading the current bull run, as Solana’s daily volumes continue to impress even the most bearish investors.

Stablecoin Transfers Top Ethereum

There’s been a lot of “first-time evers” for Solana over the past few months. The first big coup came in December, when trading volume on the network outpaced Ethereum’s over a 24-hour period. Although the cryptocurrency has yet to repeat this feat, another key piece of data has flipped in Solana’s favour – stablecoin transfers.

Stablecoin transfers are an excellent indicator of ecosystem health. While the average long-term investor may not be excited by stablecoins, the reality is most big players (whales) in the blockchain world use pegged coins to manage trading risk and perform large swaps. This means a crypto network with a high volume of stablecoin transactions has attracted some of the industry’s largest players.

Ethereum, the long-time king of stablecoins, managed weekly transfer volume of USD $90.87 billion (AUD $134 billion). But, for the first time, it has been dethroned by Solana, which recorded over USD $100 billion (AUD $147 billion) in stablecoin transfers in the past seven days. 

This data caps off a whole month of heightened ecosystem activity, as stablecoin volume has increased by 612.5% since this time in December. A key reason for this explosion has been the introduction of USDC – the most trusted USD-pegged cryptocurrency – to the Solana DeFi world. 

Although the metrics for Solana (SOL) look great, the coin’s price has been consolidating over the past week, down 3.6% from its peak.