Solana’s native cryptocurrency (SOL) hit a new milestone on Sunday as bitcoin’s (BTC) breakout to new record prices accelerated the broad-based crypto rally following Donald Trump’s decisive election victory and the Federal Reserve’s additional rate cut.
SOL broke above its March-April cycle highs touching $212 for the first time since the 2021 crypto bull market peak. The token has gained 34% over the week, leading BTC’s 18% move and the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index’s 27% advances. SOL’s all-time record was $260, or just a bit more than 20% above the current price of $214.
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This week’s gains catapulted SOL to more than a $100 billion market capitalization, joining only three other cryptocurrencies with much longer history above that threshold: bitcoin, of course, leading layer-1 smart contract platform Ethereum’s ether (ETH) and dominant stablecoin tether (USDT). The “flippening” chatter has returned to crypto twitter, though this time around it’s the idea that SOL’s market cap might at some point top that of ETH, which currently sits at about $389 billion.
Solana achieved a remarkable comeback after the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Alameda Research in 2022, which was a key backer of the budding smart contract platform. The chain emerged as the go-to ecosystem for retail crypto users and a hotbed of this cycle’s memecoin craze, hosting for example the popular pump.fun protocol. Resurging decentralized finance (DeFi) activity also benefitted the network, making Solana’s on-chain trading ecosystem the third-most-profitable sector in crypto, a recent Coinbase report noted. The solana token was a standout among altcoins over the past year’s mostly bitcoin-dominated bull market, appreciating 275% year-over-year.
Solana’s milestone has broader implications for the crypto market, noted Julien Bittel, head of macro research at Global Macro Investor. SOL broke out from an eighth-month sideways consolidation channel, suggesting that the broader crypto bull market may have entered the most explosive phase, often referred as the “banana zone” for its near-vertical rally.
“We officially just started the next phase of the bull market,” well-followed cross-asset trader Bob Loukas said in a Sunday X post. In an earlier post, he forecasted that SOL could achieve its previous all-time high price in the coming weeks given its strength relative to the rest of the market.
“SOL to ATH within 14 days wouldn’t be a surprise now,” he said on Tuesday. “This one could get silly in 2025.”
