“Ethereum Killer” Solana Pulls Ahead Of XRP After 17% Daily Gain

Over the past 24 hours, Ethereum rival Solana (SOL) has overtaken Ripple’s XRP with a double-digit surge in price, achieving a staggering $65 billion market valuation and getting the title of the sixth most valuable cryptocurrency in the market.

The market cap of XRP remains slightly below that of Solana at $51.37 billion.

Solana Outpaces XRP In Market Cap

Earlier today, the entire cryptocurrency market experienced a bullish impulse as most cryptos in the market surged in value. The price of SOL, the native cryptocurrency of the Solana blockchain network, rallied 13.52% percent. Even more significantly, the rally has caused SOL’s market cap to skyrocket past that of Ripple’s XRP token. 

Although it’s too soon to say whether this will be a permanent fixture, the SOL price has been on an absolute tear in recent weeks. In the past week alone, the asset’s value has climbed over 36 percent, bringing it to a present value of $218. This is, however, still slightly below its September all-time high of $222.

SOLUSD Chart by TradingView

Today’s increase is a continuation of that bullish trend. Analysts have attributed the upsurge in the price of SOL to the pursuit of a larger piece of the decentralized finance (DeFi) cake, which started on the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum. As of press time, Solana has registered a record of $13.52 billion in total value locked (TVL) on the network, according to data aggregator DeFi Llama.

Saber is the top-ranked DeFi protocol on Solana, responsible for over 15% of the value — or $2.06 billion. Moreover, there are presently at least four other DeFi protocols built atop the smart contract network that all boast a TVL of over $1 billion, including Raydium ($1.92 billion), Sunny ($1.73 billion), Serum ($1.67 billion), and Marinade Finance ($1.63 billion).

For customers to use any of the DeFi applications, they have to hold the SOL cryptocurrency. Similar to Ethereum, conducting transactions on the Solana blockchain requires transaction fees to be paid in this token.

The crypto asset’s value proposition is that it’s outrightly faster than Ethereum, which can only process 15 transactions per second. Solana, on the other hand, was designed to handle the massive transaction load required to make the DeFi sector operate more efficiently.

Solana recently indicated that it plans to onboard more DeFi projects to its platform after the successful completion of its Ignition hackathon earlier this month.