Solana Touches $50 Per Coin While Tron and Optimism See Gains

Solana (SOL) has continued its seemingly unstoppable surge and is now trading for more than $50 per coin.

The seventh biggest digital asset is booming so much, it’s not too far from overtaking USDC in terms of market capitalization. The dollar-pegged stablecoin currently has a market cap of $23.9 billion. Meanwhile, SOL has added more than $3 billion to its market cap since yesterday and is currently sitting at $21 billion, according to CoinGecko.

At the time of writing, SOL was priced at $50.61, a nearly 9% rise over the past 24 hours. In the past week, it’s up 24%.

But looking at the coin over a 30-day period and it is touching a gain of 127%. No other major cryptocurrency has increased in value that much over the same timeframe.

Experts spoke to Decrypt this week and last about SOL’s comeback. The reason? A combination of short sellers and interest from major players.

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Not too long ago, SOL had been battered by the collapse of the FTX megabrand exchange and its related companies. FTX was a major investor in SOL and even launched a marketplace for Solana NFTs.

When FTX went bankrupt last November, the price of SOL plummeted.

But since then, the likes of payments giant Visa and e-commerce platform Shopify have decided to utilize the Solana blockchain, which is supposedly quicker and cheaper than rivals, like Ethereum’s.

Also, lawyers mentioned SOL at ex-FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial last month. The price was temporarily hurt due to an increase in short-selling activity—which is when traders bet on the future price of an asset going down.

But this led to a short squeeze, according to experts. A short squeeze is a phenomenon in markets when price of an security or digital token shoots up unexpectedly due to short sellers exiting their positions.

Despite its recent growth, SOL is still over 80% below its November 2021 all-time high of $259.

The rest of the crypto market was doing well on a weekly basis, with every major coin and token up over a seven day period.

Bitcoin, the biggest digital asset, only yesterday hit an 18-month high on news that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission might finally approve a spot crypto exchange-traded fund for American investors.

While other altcoins such as Tron (TRX) and Optimism (OP) were both doing well, making gains of nearly 5% and 3%, respectively.