In the smart contract industry, Solana(SOL) is now a strong player. SOL’s total value locked (TVL) in 2021 increased by $660 million. This TVL is across 40 decentralized applications (DApps). The TVL reached a high of $11 billion across all applications.
Despite the strong growth, investors are questioning the current market cap of $56 billion. Investors are also drawing comparisons to other networks such as BNB, AVAX, and MATIC.
Analysis of performance data of the past six months reveals a decoupling from LUNA, SOL, and AVAX. This is in comparison to the other competitors in smart contract platforms.
Solana’s Market Cap
SOL’s market cap is twice that of AVAX and LUNA. AVAX and LUNA each have a market cap of $26 billion. SOL has a range of institutional investments. It had a private token sale by Solana labs for $314 million. There was also an $18 million fundraiser by SOL’s DEX project – Orca.
Based on the evidence, it is clear that SOL enjoys a robust institutional investment appetite. The success of SOL’s scalability can be judged based on its usage metrics. The aptest metric is the futures open interest in derivatives contracts. Based on this metric, SOL is the third largest. This metric is a measure of the aggregate number of contracts held irrespective of trading action.
There is considerable activity on SOL’s on-chain data and derivatives markets. Over the last half-year, SOL’s TVL grew 15X. SOL’s DApps users are half that on ETH. SOL is growing fast and catching up on three parameters – TVL, active users, and derivatives. The competition from LUNA, AVAX, and MATIC is weak. This probably explains the high market cap that SOL enjoys.
