76.8% of SOL Supply is Locked to Secure the Network and Not Available for Sale in the Market

Trading near $117, SOL is currently down just over 7.5% from its all-time high of almost $130, which was hit just about 24 hours back. With a market cap of $32.2 billion, SOL sits at 8th place in the cryptocurrency market. Last week, the Solana team helped push the prices of the token even higher by teasing a new feature. An ignition teaser video featuring a purple flame lighter was tweeted on August 27th. The tweet featuring the video was speculated to be referring to the burning of the SOL tokens paid in fees. https://twitter.com/rajgokal/status/1432802828225974276 Solana is an Ethereum competitor that markets itself as a faster and cheaper alternative. It is a public base-layer blockchain that features a new timestamp system called Proof-of-History (PoH) for enabling automatically ordered transactions and uses the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm to help secure the network. The token SOL is used to pay the transaction fees, and the protocol burns a portion of the fees it collects. Solana also creates new tokens based on a “dis-inflationary inflation schedule.” Besides being used to pay the fees, SOL is also used to secure the network through staking. While Ethereum has just started staking and only 6% of its supply staked and locked in the deposit contract, a whopping 76.81% of SOL supply is currently staked, according to Stakingrewards.com. Among popular PoS blockchains, Cardano, Polkadot, Terra, Avalanche, BSC, and Algorand, Solana has the highest percentage of its supply staked. Binance Smart Chain comes second at 71%, followed by Cardano’s 69.65%. https://twitter.com/joemccann/status/1432688493247877121 This means, only a small portion of the SOL supply is liquid and available for purchase in the market, which further puts upward pressure on the cryptocurrency. Much like other growing metrics, Solana also has an increasing amount of total value locked (TVL) in it, currently sitting at a $3.44 billion peak, with Raydium accounting for 32.16% of it. Solana-based DEX, Serum, which got the backing of FTX CEO Sam Bankman Fried, also has a $464 million value locked in it, up from $175 million a month back.  As we reported, Solana has also joined the NFT scene with their floor price - the cheapest price available for sale, moving up. The first-ever NFT on Solana, which gives its holders a share of revenue on their NFT platform, Solarians has their floor price rising to 39 SOL as well. On Tuesday, Aurory, a Solana-powered NFT game, launched its NFTs whose floor price is already past 60 SOL. Black Friday actually came early for Aurory as minting the NFTs cost 1 SOL instead of initially stated 5 SOL. However, some people fell victim to scams and ended up losing their SOL and NFTs both. Still, overall the project was a success as the team noted that the website saw 55k visitors rushing in to get their hands on NFTs, and everything was sold out in under 3 seconds.