We break down what's happening in the Solana (SOL) market and what to expect from the cryptocurrency's price. Solana Is Experiencing A Liquidity Crisis According to Artemis, the total trading volume on Solana-based DEX yesterday, on March 17, reached a new low since the beginning of the year. Trading volume has been consistently declining since January tenth. Thus, by Sunday the daily trading volume fell to $988 million, which is 97% lower than the peak value. This dynamics indicates a decrease in interest from traders and liquidity providers. Meanwhile, the futures market is seeing a drop in open interest (OI) in Solana. At the time of writing, the figure stands at $4.04 billion - down 24% from a month earlier. This trend indicates that the market lacks strong confidence in the prospects of SOL. Against such a background, the price of the cryptocurrency may go into a prolonged decline. SOL Forecast: Is A Drop To $108 Possible At the time of writing this analysis, SOL is trading at $123.45. It has fallen 3.1% in the past 24 hours. The cryptocurrency is holding above the support at $120.72. If the bears' pressure intensifies, the price may lose this level. In this case, token may return to levels near $108.23. On the other hand, if demand for SOL resumes, the price will have a chance to rise to $136.62. A successful breakout of this level could push the coin's value to $182.64. A Few Facts About Solana In Honor Of The 5th Birthday Of The SOL Blockchain Five years ago, on March 16, 2020, one of the largest and most popular blockchains, often called ”the killer of of Ethereum,” was launched - Solana (SOL)” In honor of Solana's fifth birthday, we've compiled the top interesting facts about the SOL blockchain. 1. The Solana Blockchain Was Launched In The Midst Of The COVID-19 Pandemic Anatoly Yakovenko, a former Qualcomm engineer, created Solana in 2017. That's when he presented white paper of the project. Its main goal was to solve the scalability problems of existing blockchains. The first block on the SOL blockchain was mined on March 16, 2020 - by then, the COVID-19 pandemic had nearly swept the world. 2. Origin Of The Name Solana was named after Solana Beach in California. Yakovenko lived near this location when he worked at Qualcomm. 3. Solana Is Powered By A Unique Consensus The Solana blockchain launched as the first ever blockchain with a Proof-of-History (PoH) consensus mechanism. This technology significantly increases the speed of transaction processing by cryptographically secured timestamps to organize transactions. 4. Since Launch, Solana Has Processed 408+ Billion Transactions According to the project team, since 2020, the total number of transactions processed by Solana exceeds 408 billion. Currently, there are more than 1,300 validators in the SOL blockchain that process transactions and keep the blockchain running; Solana's theoretical throughput is up to 65,000 transactions per second (TPS). However, so far, the SOL blockchain has not achieved such a figure. At its peak, the blockchain handles 2,900 TPS, which is 46 times Ethereum's ability. 5. Record Of Daily Active Users On November 18, 2024, Solana recorded a record number of daily active users - 6.4 million addresses. Neither Bitcoin blockchain nor Ethereum has ever approached such a mark. 6. SOL Is Among The Largest Cryptocurrencies On The Market At the time of writing, the price of SOL is $123, and the capitalization of the coin exceeds $65 billion. At the peak, the figure reached $125 billion. Now Solana cryptocurrency ranks sixth in terms of market value; 7. Solana Has Its Own Smartphone In April 2023, Solana Labs' subsidiary Solana Mobile launched the Android-based Solana Saga smartphone. In September 2024, the developers presented a new phone model, Solana Seeker. It supports artificial intelligence (AI). 8. The Solana Blockchain Sometimes Experiences Disruptions Despite its successes, periodically Solana crashes. The largest-scale failure occurred in September 2021, when the network was unavailable for about 17 hours due to transaction overload. In February 2024, the blockchain was down for five hours. 9. The FTX Bankruptcy Nearly Sank Solana Sam Bankman-Fried and the crypto exchange he founded, FTX, backed Solana and actively bought up SOL tokens. At one time, the businessman and his platform invested about $7.4 billion in the cryptocurrency. FTX declared bankruptcy back in November 2022, but is still in the process of unlocking hundreds of millions of dollars worth of SOL token wallets. Amid the collapse of the Bankman-Fried cryptocurrency exchange, Solana's capitalization plunged to a low of $3 billion. Many experts predicted the project's death, but it survived.
