Just a few months ago, there were bullish investors trading on Solana. counted [SOL] reaching $300. However, as of going to press, SOL was trading at $83.45, having gained 1.53% in the past 24 hours, but down 10.39% in the past seven days.
That said, prices are just one dimension of a crypto asset, and on an episode of The Money Movement podcast, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko spoke with Circle’s Jeremy Allaire about the state of the Solana network and the plans to expand.
SOL me this pen
Ethereum was never far from Yakovenko’s mind when he described Solana’s recent behind-the-scenes progress. The co-founder explained that the network saw two million monthly active users — or active signers, as Solana calls them.
He further expressed his surprise at the popularity of Metaplex, the NFT Solana standard, which was launched in May 2021.
“However, there are over a million users with NFTs in their wallets, I think nearly eight million NFTs have been minted. I think it mints, I don’t know, I forgot, but as a multiple of the number of mints on Ethereum, in terms of real NFTs being launched. So that was the most surprising use case of all things to me.”
The Solana co-founder then complained about the lack of a crypto-based payment system that could rival Venmo. Yakovenko then suggested that Solana could help meet such a demand and accommodate people who could not access Venmo for various reasons.
To achieve this, he emphasized the importance of a reliable user interface and educating new users on how to protect their cryptocurrencies.
Hope vs Reality
During his conversation with Allaire, the Solana co-founder also spoke about the drive to get thousands of developers and 100 million users on the network. Let’s take a look at what the stats say to see how that goes.
Data from Santiment showed that both Solana’s development activity and contributors to the development activity were on a downward trend at the time of the press release. This can be partly attributed to the state of the market lately, as well as Solana’s struggles with network performance earlier this year.
Source: Santiment
Also at press time, Solana was the ninth largest cryptocurrency, trailing Cardano in terms of market capitalization.
That said, however, Solana’s collaboration with Circle suggests that the project, known for its speed, wants to move beyond DeFi and enter the payments market as soon as possible.
This post Solana to compete with Venmo? Here’s what SOL holders need to know
was published first on https://ambcrypto.com/solana-to-compete-with-venmo-heres-what-sol-holders-need-to-know/
