The CEO of the world’s largest cryptocurrency management company explains why the company launched a “SolanaTrust” service for its popular altcoin project Solana, which has yielded over 10,000% returns last year. Michael Sonnenshein took over as CEO of Grayscale Investments in January. Grayscale Investments has launched a trust that passively invests in the native Solana token. The launch of the Solana Trust follows the addition of SOL to the Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund. Detail Cryptocoin. com
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Trust service for popular altcoin Solana
Crypto experts explain why they’re so bullish on SOL, which has soared over 10,000% over the past year. Grayscale Investments, the world’s largest crypto asset manager, has launched a trust that passively invests in the native token of the layer one protocol Solana (SOL). The trust has a minimum investment of $25,000 and an annual 2%. It has a fee of 5. Solana was the fourth-largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of over $64 billion in New York as of Monday afternoon. According to CoinGecko pricing, the SOL token has become parabolic.
The layer one protocol has been considered a serious competitor to other smart contract platform Ethereum (ETH), which has high fees and slow transactions. Using a mix of proof-of-history and proof-of-stake models, Solana is one of the fastest and least costly blockchains. With an average cost per transaction of $0.0025, it can process 50,000 to 65,000 transactions per second. Solana has caught the attention of investors not only with its technology, but also with an ecosystem of more than 400 projects covering decentralized finance, NFTs, Web3, and more. Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein told Insider:
We really see it as a platform where users can learn, experiment and build in a more cost-effective way than some other blockchain networks like Ethereum. Solana is faster and cheaper, so it’s been a really great launcher for those looking to buy NFTs, DeFi, or various apps built on top of it.
Billionaire support
Solana’s rapid rise to become the fourth-largest cryptocurrency may also have to do with public support from crypto giants like FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of Alameda Research. Bankman-Fried said in an interview that Solana remains one of the few blockchains that has a real chance of mass adoption:
If you look at what it takes to get a billion people to use cryptocurrencies and a billion to use blockchain infrastructure. If each of these uses the same way we use social media or finance today, that would likely create millions of transactions per second for blockchain.
In his view, Solana is one of the blockchains that can scale to this level. But will the wider adoption of Solana lead the token to overtake altcoin ETH by market cap? The 29-year-old crypto billionaire isn’t so sure. He explains that while the prices of tokens tend to follow the adoption of their protocols, tokens can gain mass acceptance even without their protocol. The mass adoption of Bitcoin and the underutilization of the Bitcoin blockchain are good examples. Investor says:
Whether you see mass adoption of Blockchain Ethereum or not, you can see mass adoption of ETH, so it’s hard to make a concrete prediction on what the pricing action will be. On the other hand, you could see Solana not being massively adopted on the blockchain side. I’m optimistic that something really good is out there, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen.
NFTs, DeFi and metadata storage
So far, market momentum around Solana ecosystem growth has shown no signs of slowing down. According to CryptoSlam data, the secondary sales volumes of Solana-based NFTs have reached approximately $735 million since the beginning of August. As of Monday afternoon in New York, Solana ranks fourth. On the DeFi front, the total value locked in the solana blockchain was about $14.5 billion, according to DeFi Llama, with its seven largest projects locking in over $1 billion in crypto each.
Solana’s ecosystem also includes metaverse-connected gaming projects like ATLAS, which rose 72.4% last month despite the wider pullback of the crypto market. According to CoinShares, investors have logged $187 million into Solana to date. However, despite its yield of over 10,000% last year, the price of the popular altcoin SOL could still decline. In September, the protocol was disrupted with an outage of 17 due to an increase in network activity.