As cryptocurrencies become more mainstream, investors are looking beyond bitcoin and ether to take action. These two coins still hold the lion’s share of the $1.7 trillion global crypto market (all figures in US dollars), but as they become increasingly in sync with the stock markets, some investors are buying altcoins to diversify their holdings.
One of the beneficiaries of this trend is SOL, the original currency of the Solana blockchain. It is currently the ninth largest cryptocurrency, with a market cap of approximately $28 billion, as of March 21, 2022, per CoinMarketCap. SOL traded above $175 in early January, but fell to around $81 on March 15, 2022, amid a broader market decline. At the time of writing, there were approximately 320 million SOL tokens in circulation.
If you’re looking to expand your crypto exposure or add coins that are less sensitive to news headlines, SOL deserves a closer look – here’s what you need to know and where to buy it.
What is Solana?
Solana was co-founded by Anatoly Yakovenko, Greg Fitzgerald and Stephen Akridge, all former employees of American chipmaker Qualcomm. Solana Labs is the company that operates the Solana blockchain. Launched in March 2020, Solana is a powerful, open-source blockchain platform designed to support smart contracts and the creation of decentralized applications (dApps). For that reason, Solana is considered one of the strongest challengers to Ethereum, a much bigger rival with similar capabilities.
Solana operates on a hybrid protocol of proof-of-stake (PoS) and proof-of-history (PoH), a proof for verifying sequence and passage of time between events. This unique protocol design allows Solana to process up to 50,000 transactions per second, compared to 15 to 30 transactions for Ethereum. (Ethereum is currently transitioning from its proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocol to a more energy-efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism.)
Lower costs and faster transactions are tacky features that encourage users to stay within the Solana ecosystem, particularly for their decentralized financial (DeFi) apps and non-fungible token (NFT) purchases, said Michael Zagari, an investment advisor at Mandeville Private Client. and Zagari + Simpson.
“When it comes to gaming, finance and NFTs, transactions need to be processed quickly and at low cost, and an easy-to-use platform to build on top provides a better user experience and help scale decentralized applications,” he says. that Solana seems to be attracting developers faster than ethereum did at the same stage of its growth cycle.
Solana’s ecosystem spans a range of technologies that work synergistically, including decentralized apps, DeFi projects, NFT marketplaces, and lending protocols, built on Solana’s open infrastructure. The more users a dApp attracts, the greater its network effect and value. In Solana’s case, “the higher the demand for dApps built on its network, the stronger the demand for SOL, its own currency,” Zagari says.
This post How to Buy Solana (SOL) in Canada
was original published at “https://www.moneysense.ca/save/investing/crypto/how-to-buy-solana-sol-in-canada/”
