Solana, the touted “Ethereum killer,” has sustained losses in the past few months because of the bear market and its ties to Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-defunct crypto exchange FTX. But recently, the troubled ecosystem surpassed Shiba Inu and Tron in terms of market valuation. 

As of writing, SOL still held this advantage according to data from CoinMarketCap. This bullish action caused the crypto’s price to jump 0.9% in the daily timeframe, further beefing up its 36% increase in the past week.

Catalysts Of This Year’s Solana Rise

Solana has been on a roll recently because of two primary catalysts: Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, recently tweeted about the troubled ecosystem, saying now that “opportunistic money people” are gone from the platform, and Solana has a bright future ahead. 

This tweet showed the community that the cryptocurrency industry is a place for equal growth, pumping the price of SOL by 42% in just a single week. Bonk, the new and only memecoin on the ecosystem, has been making headlines as well. 

Because of Bonk’s release, the number of transactions on-chain has increased further spurring investor sentiment up. 

Adding to this upward pressure is the nearing migration of the Helium Network to Solana’s blockchain which would surely push SOL’s price further. However, hits on the ecosystem’s NFT space might be substantial as DeGods and y00ts migrated to Polygon and Ethereum. 

Can SOL Keep Up? 

Investors and traders shouldn’t discount the current problem with Solana; fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The FUD surrounding the ecosystem has been very strong post-FTX.

These recent developments might just be a way for Solana to distance itself from the negative vibes, something that they had done through Messari’s recent overview about Solana. 

But with the Solana Foundation’s significant exposure to FTX and the utter decimation of the ecosystem’s TVL, full recovery for the ecosystem will be hard. But with these developments, Solana is truly given a chance to pick up the pieces for a new start. 

Now, what does this mean for SOL? The resistance at $13.97 was significantly stronger as the token seems to be moving lower than its current support at $13.10. With SOL’s strong correlation to BTC and ETH, macroeconomic events could hurt the token’s recovery timeline. 

But with the Nonfarm Payrolls data showing positive growth along with a lower unemployment rate, the next metric investors and traders should watch out for is the Consumer Price Index data that will be released next week. 

Any bullishness in these metrics should help Bitcoin and Ethereum to go up, pulling SOL upwards as well. 

-Featured image: Bola.com