SOLANA: BOOM TIMES OR BLIP? Solana’s SOL token, which crashed in value from over $200 in 2021 to underneath $10 in 2022, has buoyed again above $100 in latest months, making it one one the largest beneficiaries of the latest crypto market surge. The Solana blockchain was pilloried final cycle for its shut ties to Sam Bankman-Fried and its spotty observe report of community outages. SOL’s newest value features have been seen by some as a sign of wider confidence within the ecosystem – a sign that merchants see sordid firm and efficiency points as issues of the previous. However the features to SOL have been accelerated largely by auxiliary memes and airdrops, with a frenzy in the direction of just a few Solana-based tokens driving a lot of the hype. The largest winner was BONK, a meme coin that has lept in value by over 200% prior to now 30 days. (A humorous side-plot to the BONK increase is that it was airdropped to house owners of the Solana telephone, which suffered from dismal gross sales till folks realized they might purchase it to nab BONK tokens, which have been for a time price greater than the system itself.) Different winners included Pyth, a Solana-focused oracle community that not too long ago launched a token; and Jito, a liquid-staking service whose just-airdropped JTO token marked an enormous payday for some unsuspecting customers. The Solana community has seen some technical enhancements prior to now couple of years, however, as is commonly the case on the earth of blockchains, it stays to be seen whether or not the optimistic market developments have been pushed by real adoption of the speed-focused blockchain ecosystem, or by merchants that may quickly depart in favor of different buzzy bets.