Institutional Interest in Solana Growing, Says FTX CEO

Solana, an Ethereum challenger, has been seeing more interest from institutional players according to Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX exchange.

Institutional interest in Solana

Solana is an enterprise-grade blockchain, which was created by Anatoly Yakovenko.  It is backed by Alameda Research and FTX Exchange, which all fall under the watchful eye of crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. According to Bankman-Fried, Solana’s compelling long-term roadmap as a blockchain means that it will be able to support industrial uses of crypto.  According to Bankman-Fried, NFTs, decentralized finance, and the launch of the Pyth Network market-data feed has contributed, at least in part, to Solana’s popularity.   Bankman-Fried is busy with the development of the Serum derivatives exchange on top of Solana’s network.

Solana’s SOL token value soars

Solana’s SOL token has seen its value soar in recent weeks, surpassing Dogecoin, as of September 7, 2021.  It now sits sixth, at the time of this writing, at $182.56, surpassing XRP, which has not performed well this week, due in part to legal troubles.  

NFT platform SOLSEA contributes to Solana’s popularity

An NFT platform called SOLSEA, launched by Hong-Kong based derivatives exchange FTX, enables users to mint and trade NFTs on Solana and Ethereum.   Solana is a direct competitor to Ethereum, but has certain advantages.  Ethereum has high transaction fees, and has issues with network congestion.  The throughput on Solana has not been sacrificed, as with other smart-contract cryptocurrencies like Cardano and Polkadot, but delivers approximately 50000 transactions per second. 

According to solana.com, the average cost for each Solana transaction is $0.00025, this coupled with new licensing standards, and the high throughput, makes the Solana blockchain, the backbone of SOLSEA, attractive to an array of NFT enthusiasts.