SOL, the Solana network token, closed 2021 with a gain of 11,233 percent, outperforming many other cryptocurrencies, and has been hailed as the cryptocurrency industry’s next VISA.
The Solana network’s moment in the spotlight may still be far from over, especially now that Bank of America has expressed future optimism for the top smart contract platform, comparing it to the “Visa of the digital asset ecosystem” after it successfully completed a large number of transactions over the past year.
The investment bank opined in a note to investors on Tuesday, shortly after hosting Solana Foundation member Lily Liu, that Solana’s ease of use, scalability, and low transaction fees had primed it to become a worthy competitor of Ethereum, and that it might even beat it someday soon.
The advisory, written by BOA analyst Alkesh Shah, also highlighted Solana’s impressive growth numbers since its launch in 2020. According to Shah, it has settled more than 50 billion transactions, has over $11 billion in total value locked, and has been used to mint over 5.7 million non-fungible tokens (NFTs). According to Shah, this has made it ideal for carrying out micropayments and gaming transactions.
“Solana prioritizes scalability, but a relatively less decentralized and secure blockchain has trade-offs, illustrated by several network performance issues since inception.”
“Its ability to provide high throughput, low cost, and ease of use creates a blockchain optimized for consumer use cases like micropayments, DeFi, NFTs, decentralized networks (Web3) and gaming.” Shah stated.
“These innovations allow for the processing of an industry-leading ~65,000 transactions per second with average transaction fees of $0.00025, while remaining relatively decentralized and secure,” he adds.
Solana is currently the fifth largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization. With a market cap of around $47 billion and a daily trading volume of $2.2 billion, the network is only behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether USDT stablecoin and Binance.