This year, Solana outperformed all competitors in the top 30 in terms of price movement, as it saw over eightfold growth. After a long break, the network returned to fifth place by capitalisation with $36 billion, leaving Ripple behind.

On the one hand, the reason for the boost was its low price, as Solana suffered the most due to its close business ties with FTX and the latter's subsequent collapse. On the other hand, Solana's development team managed to sign high-profile partnership agreements with Shopify and Visa this year.

Its agreement with the payment giant was especially important. With it, Visa recognises that Solana's transactions are faster and cheaper. As part of a pilot project, the companies are testing ways to improve the efficiency of interbank exchanges using the blockchain. 

However, SOL's December jump from $60 to $85 has more to do with the unexpected success of its own Saga smartphone.

The phone started to be sold in May at $1,000 per unit. The developers realised the idea was unsuccessful due to sluggish demand, so they reduced the price to $599. Everything changed in December when the 30 million Bonk meme tokens that were airdropped for purchasing the smartphone rose in price nearly 10 times in a couple of weeks. On 15 December, the gift amount was already equivalent to $750, and the phones immediately disappeared from open sale. On eBay, the price for an unopened device rose to between $2,000 and $5,000.

What's worth noting is not so much the unexpected excitement around Bonk in the Solana blockchain as the network's trouble-free operation under the increased load. Daily minting of quasi-tokens (an analogue of ERC-20 in the Ethereum network) grew from a low of 34 in September to 5,000 now. Because of the speculative frenzy, the emergence of new NFTs also increased dramatically from 1,500 to 576,000, respectively.

For a network that experienced critical errors on average once every two months last year, achieving stable operation in December was a fantastic result. The same hype over quasi-tokens caused some blockchains to experience failures this month.

Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko hopes that the introduction of the new Firedancer validator will make failures forever a thing of the past and increase bandwidth dramatically. Its rollout is scheduled for the first half of 2024.

StormGain Analytical Group 
(platform for trading, exchanging and storing cryptocurrency)

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