The crypto industry has had a rough start to 2022 as it has largely remained on a downward trajectory over the past few weeks. Its global market cap is $2.1 trillion at press time, having dropped more than 3% in valuation in the past day. Much of this can be attributed to the BTC sell-off that caused the coin to slip below $42,000, however, the altcoin market is experiencing a similar fate.
This trend has been shifted in the trading patterns of leading digital assets Bitcoin and Ether, both of which have registered record flows in the past few weeks. As reported by Coinshares most recently, Bitcoin saw outflows exceed $55 million in the week ending January 17, while the negative sentiment around Ether resulted in a total of 30 outflows. million dollars in the same period.
Solana goes upstream
Breaking the bearish wave is Solana’s native token, as the ‘investor favorite’ saw inflows totaling $5.4 million last week. The report adds that the digital asset has experienced no more than two individual weeks since August 2021, highlighting the continued positive sentiment surrounding it.
This is also a time when the network has been making waves as a potential competitor to Ethereum due to its significantly lower transaction costs and high speed. Since then, the smart contract platform has emerged as an alternative for many to launch DeFi and NFT projects, with Solana’s total DeFi TVL reaching a record high of over $12 billion on October last year.
The network has also pledged to go carbon neutral by 2022, as environmental concerns remain one of the biggest barriers to mass adoption of cryptocurrencies.
Widespread praise
This surge in popularity has also been accompanied by praise from financial experts across industries, including Bank of America, which last week announced that Solana will soon beat Ethereum to become the “Visa” of the digital asset world” due to its relatively faster settlement.
However, it should be noted here that Solana regularly sees congestion issues along with denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This has worked considerably against the network’s prospects as a viable alternative to the once congested Ethereum.
Furthermore, other ETH killers are also a significant threat to Solana’s succession. This recently played out during Cardano’s significant uptrend over the past week. During this time, its ADA-native asset even surpassed Solana to become the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Late last year, the network hit a major milestone when it successfully surpassed 20 million transactions in over 1500 days of zero downtime.