June 21, 2022 41 min to read.

What is Solana SOL

What is Solana used for? Is Solana better than Ethereum? Is solana a good investment? Solana vs Cardano

Table of Content

1. What is Solana SOL: Is it faster than VISA
2. How to buy Solana cryptocurrency and where to store it
3. Is solana a good investment
4. Solana taps
5. HODL ("buy and hold")
6. Staking
7. Exchange trading
8. NFTs
9. Project history and development team
10. Solana Ecosystem
11. How Solana works: Proof-of-History and other features
12. Cryptocurrency tokenomics SOL
13. SOLUSD exchange rate forecast for today and 2022
14. How to buy Solana
15. Where to buy Solana
16. Frequently Asked Questions

What is Solana SOL: Is it faster than VISA

Solana is a popular blockchain platform for smart contracts and decentralized applications. The idea of ​​​​creation appeared in 2017 amid problems with scaling in Bitcoin and Ethereum. The project entered the crypto-exchanges in 2020, attracted multi-million dollar funding from venture funds, and the SOL cryptocurrency showed a yield of more than 5000% in 2021. The Solana blockchain is very fast (thanks to the innovative Proof-of-History algorithm): 50,000 operations per second, which is 2500 times faster than Ethereum and 20 times faster than VISA. The project is named after the popular beach in California Solana Beach - apparently the rest there is really great.

How to buy Solana cryptocurrency and where to store it

It is likely that you are considering purchasing Solana cryptocurrency, since you are reading this article. Now, let's examine how we can do it conveniently and profitably. Initially, it is important to select a wallet in which to store SOL. A digital address will be provided to assist in sending the cryptocurrency:

If you want to avoid making a mistake when copying an address, it is best to use a special button (to the right of the address) - this will guarantee that the address will be copied completely to the clipboard. Moreover, most cryptocurrency applications allow you to scan the address via a QR code, which is even safer.

Today there are a huge number of cryptocurrency wallets, many of them have already added support for the Solana network. Here is a list of good options among different types of wallets:

Binance

Trutee Wallet

Solana Ledger

Phantom

A few words about each option:

• Binance is the largest cryptocurrency exchange. It is most profitable to buy and exchange digital assets on exchanges, and you don’t have to bother with passwords and private keys of wallets. A great place to store small sums of SOL: the security on Binance is quite good, and the passive profit from staking is the highest - up to 11% per annum. It is better for large investors to withdraw money to external wallets in order to have 100% control over their money and passwords.
• Trustee Wallet is a popular open source mobile wallet with a good level of security. Supports storage and exchange of more than a hundred cryptocurrencies. It differs from analogues in the presence of a convenient Russian interface and high percentages of SOL staking.
• Solana Ledger is the most famous cold wallet. The most secure place to store cryptocurrencies: the wallet connects to the network only when necessary, making it virtually unhackable. Outwardly similar to a flash drive, it costs $100-200 depending on the model.For more information you can visit solana ledger websites.
• How to stake solana on Phantom?Phantom is currently the best option for using and staking Solana on PC (through a browser). Supports dozens of other blockchains as well as NFTs.

Once you have decided on the choice of wallet, it remains to choose a way to buy Solana. I wrote in detail about all the ways to buy cryptocurrencies in this article and there are at least ten of them, but thanks to the low commissions in the Solana network, two are quite enough:

The Binance crypto exchange always has the best buy price due to high liquidity - millions of traders participate in trading. Of the minuses - mandatory verification and a small number of replenishment methods (bank card and several payment systems).

is solana a good investment

As is common with crypto currencies, Solana's price fluctuates. The price of Sol has fallen in the last two days, but does that mean it's a bad investment? Of course not. Solana is still one of the fastest growing blockchains in the world, and it has a number of possible applications. DeFi, crypto credit web 3, and NFTs are all areas where Solana could excel.

Solana has now been used in hundreds of applications. Brave Browser, Audius, MetaPlex, and Grape Protocol are the most prominent examples. Solana is one of the fastest developing blockchains in the world. According to reports, it can help developers build high-quality applications for DeFi, crypto-lending web 3 and NFTs that are both faster and cheaper.

A key advantage of Solana is that transactions with comparable blockchain apps are slower and more expensive. Solana, for example, is capable of processing more than 2,000 transactions per second. That is much more than Ethereum, which processes fewer than 20 transactions per second.

So, is solana a good investment or not? The answer is depends on what you are expecting from sol. Investing in Solana involves lots of risk, just as it would with any smaller altcoin. Experts recommend considering the potential of Solana and its relatively stable (albeit short) historical performance among the top crypto assets by market cap before purchasing it.

The best ways to make good investment in Solana

Solana taps

Let's start with the simplest way. Most cryptocurrencies can be obtained without investments on special faucet sites - Solana is no exception. The easiest way to earn money is to visit such sites every 10-60 minutes and make a click, for which a certain amount of cryptocurrency will be credited to the account. By repeating the operation daily, you can save up a good amount, especially if the price of the crypt goes up. Here are the best sites of this kind:

On such sites, there are also additional tasks - polls, clicks on links, and so on. If you have free time, use them too to accumulate enough cryptocurrency for withdrawal faster.

HODL ("buy and hold")

Solana is the fastest growing cryptocurrency in 2021, in just a year after entering the crypto exchanges, it entered the top 10 by capitalization. This is a promising project that already occupies a good share in various areas of the crypto market and is suitable for long-term investment using the simplest “buy and forget” or HODL strategy. True, due to the high risks (the blockchain has not even left the beta yet and stopped working several times), the share in the crypto portfolio should be smaller than that of Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Most likely, the result of 2021 will remain a record in the history of Solana, but even a profit of 10 times less will be extremely pleasant for investors. However, the drop in quotes can also be significant - the project has a short history and many problems that may disappoint investors in the future.

Personally, I have been investing in Solana since November 2021, the share of my total investment is less than 1%. Despite the hype around the project, I consider it too young for serious investment - problems and network failures confuse me. But small investments with the expectation of the full realization of the project's potential and, as a result, a multiple increase in the price of SOL look more adequate to me. The investment horizon is several years, so I use staking to increase earnings from the first day.

Staking

SOL cryptocurrency uses the Proof-of-Stake algorithm, so it can be earned by staking cryptocurrency . It is most profitable to launch your own node (cryptocurrency network node) - this is how you get passive income without intermediaries. True, this requires good technical skills and powerful hardware:

In addition, you need to have enough cryptocurrency in your wallet so that staking covers the costs of the server - but there are no conditions for the minimum amount of SOL in staking (for example, in Ethereum - 32 ETH). In general, for most of us, creating our own node is difficult and stressful, so staking through an intermediary is more suitable for us. The best interest rates are offered by the Binance crypto exchange:

Due to the high popularity, the offer is not always available, especially in a bullish trend - they are sold out instantly. The only disadvantage of staking on Binance is that you need to lock up the cryptocurrency for a certain amount of time. It is possible to close staking ahead of schedule, but all accumulated income will be lost.

Exchange trading

Solana can be traded on crypto exchanges in order to obtain the highest income possible. Especially when you consider the higher volatility of the cryptocurrency compared to Bitcoin - it can fluctuate by tens of percent per month. Ideally, you should link cashback from trading commissions to maximize your trading income:

Beginners in exchange trading should avoid risking large amounts as, due to inexperience, they are likely to remain in the red. As a result, the profitability of trading in Bitcoin must be at least as high as the profitability of investing in the currency, otherwise such a risk is not worthwhile.

NFTs

An NFT (non-fungible token) is a digital signature that ensures the uniqueness of any digital object. The system works in much the same way as confirming the authenticity of a painting: they may have thousands of copies, but the original is always the same, and it is in the gallery. This area experienced explosive growth in 2021.

Solana is one of the three most popular NFT blockchains, and the platform has a number of NFT marketplaces where thousands of works of "digital art" are traded:

As you can understand, each picture costs a lot of money and their price may rise even more in the future. NFT trading may be profitable, but it is important that you understand the topic well and know what will be of real value in the future. It is possible to resell the property more expensively to the next "investor".

Project history and development team

In 2017, Anatoly Yakovenko, an engineer at Qualcomm, had the idea to create a new blockchain. At that time, there was a great deal of hype in the crypto industry, which clearly illustrated the problem of scaling Bitcoin and Ethereum. Anatoly is experienced with data compression algorithms and developed a timestamped algorithm referred to as Proof-of-History. Due to this, it became possible to create one of the fastest blockchains in the industry, able to process tens of thousands of transactions per second (compare this with Bitcoin, which processes 3-5 transactions per second)..

The creators of the project characterize it as an operating system using the blockchain. As I understand it: the focus is not on the distribution and marketing of cryptocurrency, as in Bitcoin, but on the development of blockchain technologies and tools for creating Dapps (decentralized applications), as in Ethereum. In my opinion, the second approach has more prospects in the future.

The first test blockchain was launched in 2018, and the release of the SOL cryptocurrency to the exchanges in 2020. The project quickly gathered a large community around itself: the number of subscribers on the official Twitter has exceeded one million and is growing faster than Ethereum:

At current growth rates, Solana will overtake Ethereum in this indicator as early as early 2023. And this is despite the fact that the Solana network is still running in beta:

Probably only this can partially justify several cases of network shutdown:

• December 5, 2020 - at 6 o'clock;
• September 14, 2021 - at 17:00;
• December 9, 2021 - at 6 o'clock;
• January 23, 2022 - for 48 hours.

This is not to say that other blockchains do not experience similar problems, but Solana is definitely among the record holders. It would seem that a decentralized network should not fall, because it works through hundreds of nodes around the world - but due to bugs or DDoS attacks, it can go down, which creates risks for coin owners.

Despite all these facts, the project received good funding in 2018-2021:

The largest funding round took place in July 2021. The venture funds Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital invested $314 million in the project with the participation of a dozen more crypto companies through the purchase of the SOL cryptocurrency at an exchange price of about $40. After 5 months, the price exceeded $ 200 - the investment paid off quickly.

Who is developing the project? There are two companies:

• The Solana Foundation is a non-profit organization headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. He is engaged in popularization, decentralization and network security. Attracts investments and sponsors community projects.
• Solana Labs is a technology company based in San Francisco, California. Works on the development of the Solana ecosystem. Responsible directly for the development and improvement of the blockchain.

The scheme is already familiar from Ethereum and Cardano: the blockchain platform is officially registered in Switzerland (a country friendly to crypto companies), and the main development team works through a partner company. Solana Labs employs several dozen people, many of whom previously worked at Qualcomm. Main people in the project:

Anatoly Yakovenko is the co-founder and CEO of Solana Labs, President of the Solana Foundation. In 2003, he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in Computer Science. Prior to Solana, he spent 12 years at Qualcomm (developing operating systems), half a year at Dropbox (studied data compression), and a year at Mesosphere (developing distributed systems). Has several technological patents. In 2017, he published a White Paper mentioning the Proof-of-History protocol, which has become a hallmark of the Solana blockchain.

I think, for a better understanding of the Solana project, it is useful to listen to the opinion of the founder (which is rarely possible, in Russian!), Here is one of the interviews of Anatoly Yakovenko:

Anatoly was not the only founder of Solana, here are some other important members of the team:

Greg Fitzgerald is the co-founder, chief blockchain architect of Solana and CTO of Solana Labs. In 2003, he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in computer engineering. He was the head of the research department at Qualcomm, worked together with Anatoly Yakovenko. Studied embedded systems, created products for the BREW operating system. Also published a large number of open source projects.

Eric Williams is co-founder and chief scientist at Solana Labs. He is engaged in data science and cryptocurrency tokenomics. He studied particle physics at Columbia University Berkeley, where he received his PhD while hunting for the Higgs boson at CERN. He also received a postdoctoral degree in medical physics from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, after which he worked at Omada Health, where he led the Data Science direction.

Raj Gokal is co-founder and COO at Solana Labs. Member of the board of the Solana Foundation, where he promotes the development, decentralization and security of the blockchain. He was educated at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. For more than 8 years he worked in the venture capital fund General Catalyst. He was a co-founder of Sano (specializes in medicine) and was able to attract more than $ 20 million in investments into it. Worked at Omada Health as Product Director.

Stephen Akridge is a Principal Engineer at Solana Labs. In 2006, he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in computer engineering. He has 10 years of experience in GPU optimization at Qualcomm and Intel. Led the development of the display compositor and image codecs for BREW-based CDMA phones, and the development of the GPGPU driver for all Android and Windows phones. In 2018, he participated in the launch of the Solana testnet prototype.

Unfortunately, there is no section with the project team on the official website, something similar can be found at this link . Now the company employs 33 people:

By the standards of the largest crypto companies, this is not much, but the experience and skills of this team are very good. In any case, it's not about the number of people, it's about the usefulness of the product - and Solana is definitely generating a lot of interest from developers who are building an ecosystem around the blockchain.

Solana Ecosystem

The Solana ecosystem is one of the fastest growing in the crypto industry. A complete list of projects can be found at solana.com/ecosystem , there are currently more than 1300 projects:

A really great result for a blockchain that isn't even out of beta yet. There are also interesting statistics, according to which Solana is considered the most popular blockchain among developers, and by a solid margin:

There are some questions about the counting method, but the essence remains the same - Solana attracts a lot of community interest and has a lot of ecosystem growth potential. In principle, this is the main reason why the SOL cryptocurrency was the record holder in terms of profitability in 2021 - the blockchain has taken a good position in the crypto market and this has significantly increased interest in the coin.

For example, in the DeFi (decentralized finance) sector, Solana occupies 4% of the market and is in 6th place in terms of TVL (funds blocked on deposits):

In this sector, there is fierce competition for the 2nd place after the undisputed leader of Ethereum, and being in the top ten of the ranking is already a good achievement. Among the most popular DeFi applications on Solana are:

• Serum is a decentralized exchange (DEX) backed by the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
• Quarry is an application for a variety of passive income programs.
• Solend is an algorithmic protocol for lending and borrowing.

Another important element of the work of the DeFi sector is stablecoins, that is, cryptocurrencies tied to an asset with a stable price (usually to the US dollar). In 2021, the most popular stablecoin USDT (Tether) was launched on the Solana network, which allowed its owners to send money at a fraction of the cost:

The Solana network also supports the second most popular stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC), which is considered more reliable than Tether USD due to regulation by US financial institutions. Support for popular stablecoins attracts additional investment through DeFi applications on Solana.

And, of course, where without NFT in 2022. In this sector of the crypto market, Solana ranks third in the blockchain ranking with a share of less than a percent:

Here, the dominance of Ethereum is even more impressive, but if you look at the number of collections, then Solana has only 4 times less, so it is a solid 2nd place in terms of asset diversity and good prospects for increasing market share in the future. The most popular NFT marketplaces: Solanart, Solsea, Magic Eden .

In the GameFi sector (crypto games for making money), which took off amid the popularity of NFTs, Solana lags far behind the leaders, but still takes 6th place in terms of daily turnover of gaming funds:

Here, too, there are good prospects: in December 2021, a $150 million fund was established to invest in GameFi projects based on Solana. Examples of popular games that are now: Star Atlas, Aurory, Naga Kingdom.

It is also worth noting interesting projects that work using Web 3.0 technologies (decentralized Internet):

• Audius is an audio and music listening platform where content creators can work directly with listeners and profit without intermediaries.
• Grape is a decentralized social network protocol for building token-based online communities on the Solana blockchain.
• Squads is an application for deploying DAOs (decentralized organizations) on the Solana blockchain.

Well, from the latter, in February 2022, Solana Pay was launched - a payment protocol that will allow transactions between buyers and sellers at high speed, with low commissions and without intermediaries. Moreover, the focus is not on paying for goods with cryptocurrencies, but on USDT and USDC stablecoins. The idea is to create a competitor to existing payment systems, but avoid the risks of the volatile price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

To sum up, the developers of Solana managed to attract a lot of developers and interesting projects to their ecosystem, which allowed it to grow significantly. This did not happen in a vacuum: the company regularly holds hackathons, where the best project ideas receive support and part of the prize fund of several million dollars. Good technical characteristics and features of the blockchain are also important, which we will talk about now.

What is Solanart.io - Solanaart NFT

Solanart is the pioneering NFT marketplace on the Solana blockchain (SOL). As well as offering a large selection of NFTs, Solanart also offers an extensive selection of NFT collections and work by up-and-coming artists, all of which can be bought and sold in an easy and intuitive manner. If a beginner has any questions, a comprehensive help function is available to them. Furthermore, you can benefit from all the features of the Solana blockchain by using Solanart.io. Consequently, the transaction fees are extremely low and the transaction times are considerably faster than the average.

What is Solsea.io - Solsea NFT

Solsea competes against Solanart! Solsea is also based on the Solana blockchain, however, unlike Solanart, it has an important feature: it is the first NFT marketplace where authors can choose and integrate licenses for their NFTs. This is intended to curb the widespread infringement of intellectual property rights in the NFT industry. Due to the fact that: With the appropriate license, NFT artists can prove what they are selling. On the other hand, buyers can rest assured that they are not dealing with a fake product. In addition, Solsea has a built-in NFT calendar. As soon as you visit the page, you will be able to see which NFT drops will be happening in the near future.

What is Magic Eden - Solana NFT Marketplace

Magic Eden is a marketplace for NFTs based on the Solana blockchain. Zhuoxuo Yin, a former Coinbase executive, founded the company, which is now considered the largest NFT exchange on the Solana (SOL) blockchain. Magic Eden also allows users to create, buy, and manage NFTs.

Magic Eden provides users with a variety of attractive features that add value. The launchpad is one such feature. In a matter of minutes, you can create NFTs - no prior experience is required. As a result of the flood of new NFTs, the platform is currently only accepting a limited number of projects, but this will change in the near future.

An NFT drop calendar is also useful. You will no longer be required to look for new projects from your favorite artists like you are searching for a needle in a haystack. In addition, Magic Eden provides you with a list of upcoming releases of your favorite titles - so you will always be on top of the latest news.

A similar service is provided by the "Popular Collections" feature, which allows users to view the latest NFT projects on the Solana blockchain, learn more about them and invest if they wish. Magic Eden's growth continues to be positive: The platform continues to expand! NFT, for instance, has just exceeded the $1 billion mark in trading volume on the secondary market!

How Solana works: Proof-of-History and other features

Solana is one of the fastest and cheapest (in terms of fees) blockchains in the industry. This has been achieved through many technical innovations. In this section, I will not go back to the basic concepts, so if you are not very versed in the technical side of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, I recommend that you first read the guide for beginner crypto investors - there you can learn the basics in an accessible language.

So, let's compare Solana's performance with the main competitors:

50,000 transactions per second is about 20 times more than the VISA payment system. Theoretically, Solana can produce significantly more - this requires more validators and more powerful hardware. That is, the rate of transactions per second can grow in the future only due to the development of the network and computer technology. High speed and low fees are what attracts developers of Dapps and other crypto projects.

What makes the Solana blockchain so fast? First of all, the innovative Proof-of-History algorithm (proof of history). A detailed description of it can be found in the White Paper (Russian version), though it will be difficult for non-programmers :) If you don’t go into technical details, then PoH is an additional algorithm that adds an encrypted timestamp to each transaction:

What does it give? The ability to agree on the order of events in the blockchain without the need for constant synchronization between nodes (computers that support the network). For example, in Bitcoin, the amount and order of transactions must be confirmed by thousands of computers around the world, and it takes so much time that money can flow from 10 minutes to several hours. In Solana, the order of transactions is agreed after the fact due to the presence of timestamps - that is, the order is known in advance and it is not necessary to confirm it through synchronization once again.

The question arises: after all, the time is different on each device, how to understand exactly which transactions follow each other? Normally, in a blockchain, nodes need to be constantly synchronized with a time reference, but the Proof-of-History algorithm itself works as a reference decentralized clock and allows you to prove, using cryptography, that a certain event in the blockchain definitely happened between two others. Thanks to this, it is possible to build the order of data in the blockchain after the transactions have taken place - without time synchronization between the nodes.

Proof-of-History can work with industry-standard Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithms, the second option is just used in Solana. One of the validators is appointed leader for 1.6 seconds, validates transactions and passes the baton to the next validator - the order is known several steps ahead. You can see how it works in real time at solanabeach.io:

To protect the network from attacks, the Tower BFT algorithm is used - a variant of "Byzantine fault tolerance", which uses PoH to save time and reduce ping when a consensus is reached. Validators who vote for incorrect versions of the blockchain receive a delay on their next votes. Also, all validators are divided into clusters and separate groups vote for separate blocks, which speeds up the process. Voting takes place every 400ms, for consensus 2/3 of the nodes must reach agreement.

It is also worth mentioning Sealevel , a mechanism for running smart contracts in parallel, up to several tens of thousands at the same time. For comparison, in the Ethereum Virtual Machine, smart contracts are executed one after another and this is much slower. Another difference: smart contracts in Solana are written in the RUST low-level programming language , which complicates the development of applications, but increases the speed of work.

This is not all that the Solana developers came up with to increase the speed of the blockchain, but I don’t want to inflate the article even more. I propose to move on to assessing the prospects and value of the SOL cryptocurrency in the future, let's start with the economic model of the project.

"A Solana cluster is a set of validators working together to serve client transactions and maintain the integrity of the ledger. Many clusters may coexist. When two clusters share a common genesis block, they attempt to converge. Otherwise, they simply ignore the existence of the other. Transactions sent to the wrong one are quietly rejected. In this section, we'll discuss how a cluster is created, how nodes join the cluster, how they share the ledger, how they ensure the ledger is replicated, and how they cope with buggy and malicious nodes."

Cryptocurrency tokenomics SOL

Solana is considered an inflationary cryptocurrency, unlike Bitcoin or Cardano, it does not have a maximum supply - its number will increase indefinitely:

Growth comes from high staking rewards (currently around 7%) – a necessary measure for the initial growth of the project. Solana's inflation plan assumes that over time this figure will decrease due to reach about 2%:

The total amount of SOL in staking is kept in the range of 60-90% of the total cryptocurrency supply, so inflation by 2030 will fall to about 1.5%. If we compare it with inflation today, the difference will be an additional 5.5% - that is, the profitability of holding cryptocurrency will become 5.5% higher.

Another measure is used to combat inflation, already familiar to you from articles about Ethereum and Binance Coin - burning tokens. Part of the coins is withdrawn from the market (manually or automatically) and made unavailable, due to this, the total supply decreases and the price of the token rises. In the history of the project, there were moments of manual burning of Solana, but today this process is fully automated - 50% of the commissions in the network are destroyed. It is difficult to say exactly what effect this has on inflation, but it will certainly be significant when the blockchain is loaded with tens of thousands of transactions per second. It is through burning that the SOL cryptocurrency can become deflationary in the future and this will provide an additional incentive for prices to rise.

Statistically, all SOLs in circulation are distributed as follows:

Almost half of the tokens belong to the founders and others involved in the Solana project. Despite efforts to decentralize the network, this in itself creates risks: insiders could suddenly bring 150 million SOLs to the market and crash prices. In addition, due to the Proof-of-Stake protocol, the owner of a large amount of SOL is a kind of "oligarch" and can affect the operation of the entire network when a voting system is introduced - the vote weight usually depends on the amount of cryptocurrency in the account. Of course, developers initially have the opportunity to change the code as they see fit, but still this is a threat to the main idea of ​​​​cryptocurrencies - decentralization and independence.

So, we have analyzed all the nuances in detail, it remains only to evaluate the prospects and make a forecast of the Solana price for 2022.

SOLUSD exchange rate forecast for today and 2022

In my opinion, in 2022 SOL will continue to be a cryptocurrency with good growth prospects, there are all conditions for this:

• High interest of developers;
• Outside investment in the project;
• The rapid growth of social networks;
• No scaling issues.

Of course, it is worth mentioning the negative points and risks:

• Network crashes create risks for wallet owners;
• The main network is still in beta mode;
• Weak decentralization of cryptocurrency;
• High inflation in the coming years.

Now that we have a price target, we can explore opportunities to buy SOL cryptocurrency, but is it worth doing it today? To find out, let's consider the current market situation and start with technical analysis. Usually it consists in studying price charts and special indicators, but if you don’t understand anything about this, you can use this widget:

If the arrow is in the buy zone, then the probability of Solana price growth is now quite high, which means that this is a good time to buy cryptocurrency. And vice versa, if the arrow is in the sell zone, most likely, the price will fall in the near future, you need to take profits or open short positions.

Unfortunately, technical analysis does not directly show how expensive or cheap a cryptocurrency is today. To understand this, you need some kind of benchmark, I prefer to compare with Bitcoin, which occupies almost half of the crypto market:

Solana is a relatively new project and its development potential is many times higher than that of Bitcoin, which has been known to people for more than 10 years. This does not mean that SOL will someday become more expensive than BTC, but the percentage increase in price will certainly be higher - for this reason, the SOLBTC rate will rise in the long term. We act accordingly:

• When the SOLBTC rate is close to the historical maximum, the price of Solana is already quite high and it is better to refrain from buying;
• When the SOLBTC rate is noticeably lower than the historical maximum, the price of Solana deflated and is much closer to the local minimum - purchases look much more attractive.

The last indicator that I often use to analyze cryptocurrencies is Google Trends:

It shows how often the query "solana" is mentioned in the Google search engine. This value correlates with the frequency of mentioning the Solana cryptocurrency in the media space. If it is high, the demand for SOL increases and prices rise. If the frequency of mentions is relatively low, there are fewer buyers and prices fall, which makes it possible to purchase cryptocurrency at a lower price.

Summing up, Solana in my understanding looks like a very promising crypto project. The developers have already solved the scaling problem that Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer from. Great efforts are also being made to attract new projects in the areas of DeFi, NFT and GameFi - the most "hot" ones to date. The Solana Pay project also seems interesting to me - an attempt to enter the e-commerce market and get closer to real business.

Unfortunately, there are several negative points, such as a periodic network drop - this happens much less frequently with competitors. However, this can be attributed to the youth of the project and work in beta mode. If the developers manage to fix the problems, this will definitely lead to an even greater increase in interest in Solana.

Solana vs Cardano

A comparison of Cardano and Solana: Does ADA lose to SOL in the smart contract arena? Who is the winner of Cardano vs Solana competition?

Yield Farming on Solana

It is important to remember, however, that the topic of decentralized finance is at the foundation of this trend. This is because yield farming would not be possible without decentralized finance. Even though DeFi drew attention as early as 2019, many investors have only become familiar with yield farming since 2020. This, in fact, was the driving force behind the DeFi boom that followed. When it comes to loans, people tend to turn to banks. A bank acts as an intermediary in financial transactions, i.e. it is a third party. This pool may be accessed by other participants and certain sums may be borrowed. Liquidity providers generate revenue by distributing fees incurred by crypto transactions. Thus, a liquidity pool is a fund that collects funds for the purpose of lending them out

How to Buy Solana

How to buy solana

Estimated Cost

$0

Estimated Total Time

5 min

What is necessary:

ID Card

E Mail

Phone Number

Payment Method

Tool: A cryptocurrency market.

Compare Cryptocurrency Markets

Find an exchange that lists SOL in one or more cryptocurrency pairings. Then sign up with your email address and password. Compare exchanges when buying SOL to find the lowest fees and the latest exchange rates. Note: Many exchanges require your full name, contact information, and ID before allowing you to trade.

Create an account

To create an account with an exchange, you must verify your email address and identity. Have your photo ID and phone ready.

Make Payment

If your exchange supports Solana, you can buy SOL directly with dollar, euro, pound or any other currency of your choice. Some exchanges charge commission fees that vary depending on the amount of SOL you buy, so be mindful of the cost of your transaction. Note: Some payment methods have higher fees and credit card payments are usually the most expensive.

solana buy

Select your chosen exchange to find the SOL match you want. Go to the markets section. Look at the buy SOL section and type in the amount of paired cryptocurrency you want to spend or the amount of SOL you want to buy. Note: Before completing the transaction, carefully review your transaction details, including the amount of Solana you purchased and the total cost of the purchase.

Where to buy Solana

Frequently Asked Questions