coincodex.com
Key highlights:
- Solana reached new all-time highs above the $60 price level
- SOL even briefly entered the cryptocurrency top 10
- Solana's surge was helped by hype surrounding the Degen Ape Academy collection of NFTs
Solana hits new all-time high as hype builds around Degen Ape Academy NFTs
Solana recently entered the cryptocurrency top 10 for the first time after SOL surged to new all-time highs above the $60 price level. Over the last 7 days, SOL has established support at $40, and used it to leap over its previous ATHs in the last 24 hours.
Solana is a blockchain platform that supports smart contracts and is designed with a focus on scalability – it can handle around 50,000 transactions per second, making it very difficult for bottlenecks to occur and clog up the network. Solana is generally considered as one of the more credible competitors to Ethereum, and the project is backed by major investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain Capital and Alameda Research. Solana Labs, the company spearheading the development of the Solana blockchain, raised $314 million through a token sale announced in June this year.
While Solana has been gathering momentum for a while now, the recent price spike has been connected to Degen Ape Academy, an NFT series that’s heavily inspired by CryptoPunks and other collections with computer-generated characters. These kinds of CryptoPunks variants have been generating a lot of hype recently, as we could see with collections like Pudgy Penguins and Bored Ape Yacht Club.
While Degen Ape Academy goes for a more modern look and doesn’t rely on the same pixel-art aesthetic, the basic idea is the same as CryptoPunks. A basic template is used as the foundation to generate 10,000 unique images, which are distinguished from each other through traits of different rarities. The Degen Ape can have different fur colors, clothing, accessories and other traits.
Example of a Degen Ape collectible.
In order to mint a Degen Ape, users had to pay 6 SOL (about $360 at the time of writing). While that isn’t an insignificant amount, it seems to have been a good deal, at least for now – according to Solanart, the cheapest Degen Ape available on the market is currently listed at 14.89 SOL. The collection has so far generated a total trading volume of almost 100,000 SOL.
Arweave, a decentralized file hosting solution used to store the images of the Degen Apes, underwent a massive traffic spike as users tried to check out the freshly-minted digital collectibles:
...and then this happened. ?
— Sam Williams (@samecwilliams) August 15, 2021
Daily request volume on the https://t.co/3S12ndZ16m gateway reached the insane height of 60m requests/day recently.
When @DegenApeAcademy dropped, https://t.co/3S12ndZ16m received 1m requests in a single minute.
??? https://t.co/OTbIZjrNYn pic.twitter.com/7GIVSXtbx4
At the time of writing, SOL is just outside the cryptocurrency top 10, as Uniswap’s UNI token is currently still hanging on to the coveted 10th spot in the market cap rankings. SOL now has a market capitalization of $17.7 billion, compared to UNI’s $18.1 billion valuation.