After slowing down briefly, Solana (SOL) has continued its rally and has now touched a new yearly high.
At the time of writing, SOL was trading hands for $62.16, according to CoinGecko. That’s a more than a 12% 24-hour climb.
The Ethereum competitor has the best gains over a seven-day period out of the top 20 coins by market cap too.
Renewed hype around SOL means that the asset, which has a market cap of $26.3 billion, has shot up by 165% in the past 30 days—making it the best-performing major cryptocurrency by far.
Investors are plugging cash into SOL again because they see value in the asset’s ecosystem—which has attracted interest from Visa and Shopify.
Patrick Felder, founder & CIO at Prismatic Capital, previously told Decrypt that the massive rise in SOL’s price earlier this month also came as a result of a short squeeze. That means traders who were short SOL, meaning they were betting the asset would go down in price, were forced to buy to avoid further losses.
Solana, which was red hot during the 2021 bull market and reached an all-time high of nealy $260, was once a favorite of collapsed crypto company FTX and its convicted criminal boss Sam Bankman-Fried.
Lawyers mentioned the coin at Bankman-Fried’s trial last month and its price was temporarily hurt due to an increase in traders betting on the asset’s fall.
Ethereum Rival Solana Is Back—Experts Say It’s No Surprise
Now the price of the asset is on the up again as the market once again turns bullish, partially because of the excitement around BlackRock’s entry into the Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF market—and the possibility that the SEC might finally approve such a product.
Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, dropped down nearly 1% over the day, and was trading for $36,180 when this story was published. Bitcoin is up 115% for the year.
Ethereum is down slightly today, trading at $2,013. ETH is up nearly 60% for the year.
Of all the major digital assets on Wednesday morning, SOL was by far the biggest gainer.
The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.
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