Solana rally: What is behind $SOL’s 50% rise?

Proof-of-stake blockchain platform Solana’s native cryptocurrency $SOL has been a recipient of bullish rally recently. It has taken the coin to climb up by over 50% in the last two weeks.

According to the data tracked by crypto market data provider Kaiko, the Nasdaq-listed digital assets exchange Coinbase (COIN) was the major reason behind the significant push in bullish pressures for the cryptocurrency.

The token’s cumulative volume delta (CVD) has increased by nearly $1million on the platform since 25 October. This indicated the presence of net capital inflows.

The same had also turned positive early this week on other leading cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance and Kraken. However, the CVD on popular South Korean exchange Upbit has been negative and noted moving south-bound for the last two weeks.

The Cumulative Volume Delta (CVD) displays the cumulative volume changes based on the volume traded by sell aggressors versus buy aggressors and is displayed on the indicator and widget pane. It is therefore a running total of net bullish/bearish pressures in the market.

Positive values indicate an excess of purchase volume and negative values suggest otherwise.

A Kaiko analyst, Riyad Carey, took to X (formerly Twitter) to talk about the same. He noted the median order size on Coinbase being more significant than other exchanges like Kraken and Binance.

According to him, this could potentially be a sign of institutions bidding for $SOL through the Nasdaq-listed exchange.

The token’s price rise also comes on the back of a bullish report published by asset management company VanEck on Solana. This has been aiding the token’s uptrend since last week.

VanEck forecasted $SOL to touch $3K by 2030. Its diverse valuation scenarios for Solana’s price ranged from a conservative $9.81 to an ambitious $3,211.28 by 2030. The price target for Ethereum’s $ETH, in comparison, was set at $11,800.

This prediction was based on a potential scenario where the asset manager anticipated Solana becoming the first blockchain to accommodate applications with over 100 million users.

$SOL outperformed a majority of the top coins as it rose by about 260% year-to-date. In doing this, the coin successfully broke through its key $35 barrier. It has been up by over 70% in the last 30 days. This was facilitated by the continued betting on $SOL by institutional investors.

However, its on-chain activity told a different story. According to DefiLlama, the total value of assets locked in Solana-based DeFi protocols has declined from 12.03 million $SOL to 10.23 million $SOL in the last two weeks. This came out to be the lowest since April 2021.

While TVL is an imperfect metric, as pointed out by many, it is still one of the best measurements for overall usage of smart contracts on a network. However, one should note how the metric is highly reflexive with it growing and contracting according to ecosystem token prices.

Apart from the week of the FTX collapse, last week saw the highest DEX volume on Solana in several years. Total volume over the past seven days has been $685m, compared to less than $200m per week in most of September and August.

However, on-chain analyst, Patrick Scott, also highlighted how the volume on Solana-based decentralised exchanges and active addresses on the network has picked up, but not enough to justify the price gains.