SOL coin price prediction: What will SOL be worth?

Contents

• From the Solana white paper
• Crypto crashes
• How PoH works in the Solana ecosystem
• Ignition fires up
• The roads to recovery
• The path to glory
• Solana (SOL) price prediction
• FAQs

SOL, the native coin of the Solana blockchain, boomed last year. By 6 November, a new all-time high of $260.06 was recorded. However, it is currently trading at $118.72. At the time of writing, the coin appears to be on an uptrend – trading up almost 4% from its previous close. Let’s take a look at what’s driving the price rise, and what the SOL coin price prediction might be.

From the Solana white paper

The ‘Solana: A new architecture for a high performance blockchain’ founding document was published in November 2017, and is 32 pages long. The white paper proposed a new blockchain architecture, called Proof of History, a technique for keeping time between computers that do not trust one another. 

The document describes the blockchain as “an implementation of a fault tolerant replicated state machine”.

It goes on to say: “Current publicly available blockchains do not rely on time, or make a weak assumption about the participants’ abilities to keep time. Each node in the network usually relies on their own local clock without knowledge of any other participants’ clocks in the network.

“The lack of a trusted source of time means that when a message timestamp is used to accept or reject a message, there is no guarantee that every other participant in the network will make the exact same choice. The Proof of History presented here is designed to create a ledger with verifiable passage of time, i.e. duration between events and message ordering. It is anticipated that every node in the network will be able to rely on the recorded passage of time in the ledger without trust.”

Crypto crashes

The cryptocurrency market saw crashes in May, September and December of 2021. Almost every crypto that’s not a stablecoin has taken big hits. Markets often correct themselves and, over time, the prices readjust. This is true of SOL.

Solana might be an extreme case, with it reaching a new all-time high of $260.06 on 6 November, but seeing lows of $170.20 by 1 January 2022. By 27 January, the coin saw further losses and was valued at $86.19, down almost 67% from its previous all-time high.

However, increased investor confidence in cryptocurrencies in 2022 might help kick-start another bull run. Renewed confidence in the crypto market will also help Solana to be seen as a viable, cheaper alternative to Ethereum.

How PoH works in the Solana ecosystem

There is also the very nature of Solana itself, which has made it attractive to investors. While it does a lot of the same things that Ethereum does, it does them in a different way. For instance, the Ethereum blockchain runs on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) method. This means that, in short, if you want to mine ETH, how much ether you can mine depends very much on how many ETH coins you already hold. If you lock in a certain amount of your ether coin into a special wallet, that gives you mining power. Staking also helps to check and process transactions on the blockchain. 

Solana is different because it uses a method called Proof of History (PoH), as mentioned in the white paper above. The idea is to create timestamps that show how much someone held and when they held it. This is to make sure that the data reflected is accurate and people are able to access coins and systems in a fair manner.

PoH is built on the same basis as PoS, so the technology that is used can run smoothly. What this means is that while the Solana blockchain, like Ethereum, is involved in things such as smart contracts, decentralised finance and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), it has something which makes it different from Ethereum. Indeed, Solana says it is potentially much faster than Ethereum. Regardless, this means that it could be an interesting crypto for investors who are looking at what might be able to challenge ether in the world of altcoins.

Ignition fires up

Another driver behind the rise in the value of SOL was that as the end of August approached, there was much excitement surrounding a Solana event called Ignition. While people did not know what it was going to be, there was considerable speculation, which meant there was a real buzz on crypto social media. In turn that meant more and more people invested in SOL, helping to drive the price up.

Although there was a belief in some circles that Ignition would involve some SOL coins being burned, an event that would result in fewer Solana coins to increase the value of those that survived, that prediction was wrong.

Instead, Ignition was what Solana, or at least what passes for the organisation behind the blockchain, called a ‘hackathon’. The event, which launched on 31 August, saw programmers competing to present ideas for things that could run on the Solana blockchain. There are, the organisation says, prizes worth $5m to be won and categories include Web3, which focuses on things such as decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), decentralised apps (DApps) and other infrastructure schemes, sponsored by the tech giant Microsoft.

Microsoft’s involvement is a particularly interesting part of the event, as it shows a traditional tech company – and one of the world’s biggest at that – becoming involved in the world of crypto and helping fund prizes worth $120,000. There are also categories for decentralised finance (DeFi), gaming and NFTs.

The DeFi category is sponsored by Standard Chartered and Jump Capital. Again, Standard Chartered’s involvement is significant because it sees a multinational banking company take part in something that could potentially serve as an alternative to traditional banking. Even if that were a commonplace thing, it can do no harm for Solana’s event to have the same sponsor as the English sporting giant Liverpool Football Club. There were prizes worth $185,000 in this category. Finally, both gaming (sponsored by Forte) and NFT (sponsored by Metaplex) categories also carried prizes of $120,000 each.

The whole event proved to be a good move by Solana because it expanded interest in the blockchain and also helped push the price of the SOL coin in an upwards direction.

The roads to recovery

Back on 18 May 2021, SOL was in a very good place, with an intraday high of $58.30, its first peak. Considering it had launched at around $0.78 in April 2020 and did not break the $1 barrier until July that year, the price demonstrates the growth that had happened during the cryptoboom of early 2021.

What happened the next day meant that SOL, along with most other cryptocurrencies, ended up in a bad place. It lost more than 48% of its value to reach an intraday low of $29.43 before recovering to close at $35.11. This loss may have looked like a short-term blip when 20 May’s high was $51.26, but any optimism was short-lived as the price spiralled down, ending the month at $32.82. Things then started to recover again, but the intraday high of $44.10 on 7 June was the best SOL price achieved that month. Having closed June at $35.56, the following month saw SOL remain sluggish, closing 31 July at $36.83.

The path to glory

In the second half of August, the story started to get more exciting. On 15 August, an intraday low of $43.45 was followed by a rise of more than 25% to an intraday high of $54.63. While SOL closed the day at $53.75, it opened the next day at $53.54 before rising more than 28% to $68.82. Although the coin dropped down to close at $62.43, 17 August saw it reach an intraday high of $74.89 before falling back to $64.21. The SOL price broke through the $80 barrier on 27 August, shooting from a low of $72.72 to a high of $88.85 – a rise of more than 22%.

Remarkably, it rose a further 14% the next day from $85.79 to $97.84, breaking $90 for the first time. SOL reached the promised land of $100 the next day, hitting an intraday high of $116.85 and the following day it managed to reach $130.01 before dropping more than 16% to close August at $108.48. That meant the cryptocurrency had jumped in value almost threefold in a month thanks, in part, to the factors mentioned above. This was a remarkable explosion that it seems no SOL prediction anticipated.

On 9 September, SOL reached a new high of $214.96, and then hit a further record of $218.73 on 25 October, and a new all-time high of $260.06 on 6 November. 

Solana’s rise to its all-time high in November came just after its venture capital arm Solana Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and FTX set up a new investment fund called GameFi. The $100m investment initiative is dedicated to Web3 gaming. As Web3 gaming has skyrocketed in popularity, the coin price rose substantially as more interest was generated. Increased network participation in the NFT space was also paramount in its price rally, and Solana NFT Marketplace went live on FTX on 11 October 2021. 

However, the end of last year and into January were difficult months for cryptocurrencies, and bitcoin was down 19% over the course of December. SOL was no exception, and by 23 December it had lost almost a third of its value and the coin was valued at $178.93. 

There was a further 67% loss from its all-time high over the winter period for Solana, and on 27 January, the coin was valued at $86.19. By 7 February 2022, the coin was trading at $118.72. According to the 10-day and 20-day SMAs and EMAs, the coin is currently on an uptrend, however, the RSI and longer-term moving averages indicate a stronger sell position.

So that’s the recent history of the SOL coin price. But what of the future? Let’s take a look at some of the different organisations that are offering a Solana price prediction.

Solana (SOL) price prediction

Wallet Investor is bullish about its SOL coin price prediction. It says Solana could reach $311.48 in a year’s time and $1,086.39 in five years’ time.

DigitalCoinPrice’s SOL coin price prediction 2022 believes it will reach a 47% increase in March and be valued at an average of $173.94 for the month. The same site thinks the SOL price could reach $207.85 in 2023 then hit $193.55 in 2024. In 2025 the coin might be worth $240.55 while 2026 will see it at $236.54. Twelve months later in March 2027, it might be worth as much as $343.77, before rallying to $471.36 in 2028. 

Finally, Gov.capital’s SOL coin price prediction is around $528.41 a year from now and $4,331.24 in five years’ time. The SOL coin is expected to break the $500 mark in November 2022, and the $1,000 mark in October 2023. The SOL coin price prediction for 2026 is for the coin to be worth well over the $4,000 mark towards the end of that year. 

FAQs

Further reading