With SOL rising and ETH falling, the SOL/ETH exchange rate has hit a new all-time high, and Solana has also seen a surge in protocol revenue, network activity, and open interest contracts.
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According to TradingView, BTC has dropped -1.46% in the past 24 hours, ETH -4.39%, while SOL has instead risen 1.96%, with a 11% gain in the past 7 days, making SOL and DOGE (9.58%) the only two tokens in the top 10 by market cap to have increased in the past 7 days.
The SOL/ETH exchange rate has reached as high as 0.06925, surpassing the previous high of 0.065 in August, and the SOL/BTC rate has also reached its highest point in over two months.
Meme Frenzy Boosts Solana
Solana has greatly benefited from speculative trading in meme coins, with most of the activity concentrated in the chain's DeFi protocols. The recently surging Goatseus Maximus (GOAT) has seen its market cap skyrocket to $600 million (rank 207) within two weeks of its launch,
Protocol Revenue Surges
Token Terminal data shows that Solana's daily transaction fee revenue has exceeded $4 million, nearing its all-time high in March, and has grown tenfold since the low point in early September.
Raydium alone ($2.81 million) contributed two-thirds of Solana's transaction fees, approaching Ethereum's $3.74 million, while Solana's active user count has also reached a new high, exceeding 8 million.
Open Interest Contracts Surge
According to CoinGlass, Solana's open interest contracts have soared to over 18 million SOL, worth $3.09 billion, the highest level since January 2023.
In just the past four days, the open interest contracts have increased by around 3 million SOL, worth $506 million, and the current perpetual contract funding rate has reached an annualized 10%, indicating that most investors are still long on SOL.
Ignas: Institutional Adoption of ETH is Happening
KOL Ignas also tweeted about ETH's predicament and the rise of SOL.
Ignas said that he chose to allocate his funds to ETH and BTC during the bear market, as they were believed to not disappear, but as traditional finance capital entered Bitcoin, many long-term holders started to move ETH to new tokens.
He believes that BTC is the more stable choice, Solana is the riskier choice, and ETH is caught in between, as its performance has not been able to attract enough attention.
Only when the value accumulation of L2 is clearly proven, institutional adoption accelerates, and the future ETH scaling plan generates market enthusiasm, can ETH regain popularity. However, Ignas is also not optimistic about the upcoming Pectra upgrade, pointing out that its appeal is not as strong as previous hard forks (such as the PoS transition).
Nevertheless, Ignas still points out the positive factors for ETH, particularly the growing institutional adoption of ETH, such as Visa launching a token-based asset platform (VTAP) on Ethereum, and Blackrock planning to tokenize financial assets. But with the ongoing FUD (such as the rise of SOL) during the adoption process, Ignas himself is also uncertain whether he can see a bright future amidst these uncertainties.
I loaded it up with ETH and BTC during the bear, knowing that at least these two won't disappear.
Many did the same. It was a safe bet. Expecting ETH to outperform BTC in the bull.
With TradFi capital entering into BTC (but not ETH yet), old degens like me keep selling that… https://t.co/A0zKimNqBf pic.twitter.com/s7AEn14X78
— Ignas | DeFi (@DefiIgnas) October 23, 2024
