Solana Surges Into Top 10 Market Cap Following All-Time High

With a gain of more than 20% over the past day, Solana has surged into the top 10 cryptocurrencies in market capitalization.

As of August 15, SOL was trading around $45. But since then, the price bumped up to an all-time high of nearly $63 earlier today. This gain also made it the top performing altcoin among the top 30 crypto assets, according to CoingGecko data. With a market cap of $17.5 million, it just edged out Uniswap at $16.1 million for the tenth place position.

Degenerate Apes sales

Part of this performance can perhaps be attributed to the sale of all 10,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of the Degenerate Ape Academy collection. The NFTs were in such high demand that the whole collection of 10,000 apes sold out in eight minutes during its launch over the weekend.

However well it may have done to Solana, the Degenerate Ape Project felt it could have gone better. The project’s team admitted to being “overwhelmed with the wave that hit us in the past week.” It turned out to be “exponentially bigger than we thought,” they said, and users unable to mint apes were refunded.

However, those fortunate enough to successfully mint a degenerate ape NFT could do so for 6 SOL ($336). They then quickly found that the floor price had more than doubled to at least 13.8 SOL by earlier today. However, many other apes have sold for 25 SOL, with one being resold for 100 SOL ($5,600), and relisted for 500 SOL.

FTX plans

Solana has close links with the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. FTX’s sister company Alameda Research is a major investor in Solana, FTX also operates its own decentralized exchange called Serum on Solana.

Recently, FTX.US president Brett Harrison said the company plans to offer crypto derivatives trading to American customers within a year. He added that the company is currently in negotiations with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) which regulates the U.S. derivatives market.