The positive momentum from the launch of spot ETFs is gaining speed, and capital inflows are picking up pace. On 8 February, net inflow amounted to $405 million, the third-highest in the past month. Grayscale's negative impact was notably less, going from $640 million on 22 January to the current $102 million.

The total volume of the nine newly created funds (Grayscale was converted to an ETF from a trust fund) has reached $10 billion in just one month. Sceptics had forecast that this would take at least a year. The impressive demand has compensated nearly two-fold the outflow from Grayscale, which is not related to interest in Bitcoin (we previously explained the reasons in our article).

This led to the rise of Bitcoin's price, which aims to break through the $50,000 level and strengthen its share in the cryptocurrency market.

The emergence of ETFs became irreversible in October 2023, when the deadline for the SEC to appeal the conversion of Grayscale's fund expired. Solana was one of several altcoins that were able to take advantage of the change in sentiment in the crypto market. The rise in the coin's price was also fuelled by its own factors, such as the joint creation with Visa of a pilot project to conduct interbank payments and the inclusion of blockchain transactions in the Shopify payment gateway.

Interest in Solana is driven by its high transaction completion speeds and low fees, which is why investment firm VanEck has estimated that the coin's price could reach $3,211 by 2030 in a favourable scenario.

Another thing fuelling the excitement around Solana was the absence of critical errors since February 2023, which came as a pleasant surprise to many observers (including us) since the network previously experienced outages an average of once per quarter. Unfortunately, however, it wasn't to go a full year without a shutdown. On 6 February, a critical error occurred that led to a 5-hour shutdown and network rollback.

When defending the product, supporters and management always refer to the fact that it's in beta, although Solana's history dates back to March 2020. Daniel Kuhn of Consensus magazine believes this is hypocritical since the sale of related products (for example, Saga smartphones) doesn't mention the network's beta status anywhere.

Failures cause a serious blow to its reputation, which is why pilot projects, like the network, can remain in beta forever. It is likely that Solana won't be able to grow with the same agility in the near future and will finally give way to Bitcoin in terms of growth rates in Q1. 

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

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