Solana On-Chain Activity Spike Could Lead to Further SOL Gains

Solana has been hit harder than most during the latter stages of this bear market. However, things could be looking up as markets recover and Solana continues to survive.

Several on-chain metrics have ticked up for Solana over the past few weeks. Granted, they are nowhere near pre-FTX crash levels, but they’re at least off the bottom.

Since the beginning of the year, Solana’s total value locked in DeFi has increased by 33%. This has outstripped the pace of overall DeFi TVL gains of 26% in the same period.

According to DeFiLlama, TVL on Solana is currently $280 million, and its leading protocol is the Marinade Finance liquid staking platform. Marinade has an estimated TVL of $156 million, which gives it a Solana market share of around 56%.

Liquid staking platform Lido is in second place with a market share of 21%. Lido also offers liquid staking for SOL, and it has 2.3 million tokens staked worth roughly $58.6 million.  

Solana Narratives Strengthen

Aside from DeFi, nonfungible token activity has also been on the up for the Solana ecosystem. According to Solscan, 24-hour NFT volume has surged 27.4%. Furthermore, the network has around 4 million NFTs listed, and the leading collection in terms of weekly volume is Okay Bears.

MagicEden remains the top NFT marketplace, and its volume even doubled over the past 24 hours.

Additionally, Solana’s decentralization properties have improved over the past two years. This trend will likely continue if it can extricate itself from the FTX/SBF baggage.

On Jan. 24, Solana Compass commented on the decentralization of the network:

“There is room for improvement – some continents are still under-represented – but the trend is clear: Solana is increasingly global + decentralized year on year.”

Additionally, the head of the developer ecosystem at the Solana Foundation, Chase Barker, joined the narrative, stating:

“It’s abundantly clear that Solana is and will be part of the conversation with regards to blockchain adoption for a very long time as long as we don’t get comfortable. We’ve been tested to the max and survived. Keep building, keep surviving. I have no doubt we will.”

Price Outlook

SOL prices have gained a marginal 1.3% on the day to trade at $24.92 at the time of writing. Furthermore, the coin has gained a whopping 53% over the past fortnight and has more than doubled over the past month.

SOL is trading at its highest price since Nov. 9, when the FTX meltdown sent it crashing to a low of around $11.

However, SOL has a long way to go having lost 90% since its all-time high of $260 in November 2021.