The “SOL” crypto bucking bearish conditions
Bitcoin, the top coin by market capitalization took the entire crypto index dramatically higher this week. BTC is currently down over 6% for the last two days. Todays and yesterday’s candle both contained long lower wicks illustrating how swiftly the price came down, but also how quickly it recovered much of its losses. At today’s low of around $65,500 Bitcoin was down over 10%. It has since regained half of the ground lost in trading today and at the time of writing (5:00 PM ET) BTC is pegged at $68,150.
Bitcoin led the way to lower prices just as it led the whole crypto sector to double-digit gains earlier this week. The losses felt across all blockchains averaged between 5% and 10%, but most had drifted much lower before the quick recovery today. The pace at which traders bought coins taking them off their recent lows highlights the sentiment in the market right now; optimistic, excited, and greedy.
Looking at a daily candlestick chart of Bitcoin one must conclude that it remains extremely bullish. Today’s low was just above the 20-day exponential moving average, BTC has held above this sensitive short-term market indicator since February 5th and since a $42,000 price. That is a very respectful near 2x for Bitcoin in under two months. However, there is one other crypto that makes BTC look like a teddy bear, and has been a sole outlier in the recent sell-off as it continued to make higher highs now for the fifth day in a row.
The “SOL” crypto bucking bearish conditions
It is probably no secret to you by now, Solana is the coin you should add to your bag before this bull run. If you follow my reports, you know I have been calling for Solana to become the “Ethereum” of 2024. Recently Solana surpassed Ethereum in both daily transactions and daily new users.
The resilience and robustness of SOL’s own ecosystem was evident over the past two days in which 99% of cryptocurrencies with a market cap larger than that of a decent house in an upstanding neighborhood dipped far into the red. Out of the six or so coins that as of now are posting gains over the last 24 hours Solana is the only high market cap. Coin amongst them. And the top gainer for the day (+29%), as well as number two for the week (+64.47%) is Jupiter (JUP). The token was created less than two months ago by the “Uniswap” of Solana. If you do not get that reference, they are basically the premier swap aggregator engine powering the Solana ecosystem. I personally use Jupiter myself and found it to be the fastest and most streamlined user interface I have come across to date. Its straightforward UX allows for deeper dives into a market and compliments Solana’s lightning-fast transactions like peanut butter to jelly.
Ethereum is fighting back against its dramatically cheaper and faster alternative. The Ethereum Foundation announced this week a major upgrade, the Dencun update.
The Dencun update (Deneb & Cancun), is technically a hard fork of the blockchain. Deneb is expected to improve Ethereum's scalability and drastically reduce the transaction costs of layer-2 solutions, enhancing the consensus layer. Conversely, Cancun enhances the management and processing of transactions at the execution layer.
I still feel it is not an adequate solution for Ether’s Trilemma and will still place it behind Solana in terms of active users and adoption. Solana’s market dominance moved above 3% this week now at 3.2% which is well above its dominance level when it hit $250 in 2021 and is higher than it has ever been. I predict that it will hit 5% this year.
I fully expect SOL to hit $500 this bull run and could reach prices near $1,000. So, if you missed the move so far, I would wait for a pullback and buy in because you ain’t seen nothing yet.