Quotes of most cryptocurrencies turned red this week, but Solana continues to grow faster than forecasts. At the end of August, we quoted the opinion of Bill Noble from Token Metrics that the coin will reach $145 in the near future. It took her 5 days to take the bar. Now, as a guideline, you can use the forecast of the executive director of Mercuryo, who is waiting for SOL at $500 by the end of the year.

The rise this year for Solana began with the debut of NFT, when a collection of 10 thousand monkeys was sold out in 8 minutes. Despite a number of errors, the network has confirmed the ability to process a large number of transactions in a short period of time. When the project is fully deployed, the speeds will reach 60 thousand transactions per second. It’s faster than Visa (NYSE:V), Ripple, Ethereum and Bitcoin combined.

Solana runs on the proof-of-stake protocol with a unique proof-of-history add-in, which allows you to process transactions as they arrive, without waiting for the block to be assembled. This gives an advantage both in speed and in the cost of transactions, which on average cost less than a cent.

Ethereum still dominates the NFT and DeFi markets, has 7,000 nodes and 90,000 validators against 600 nodes and 1,000 validators from Solana. However, high fees and the constant delay of moving to PoS force startups to look for faster blockchains.

So, DeFi Land has raised investments of $ 4 million to launch a financial game on Solana.

DeFi Land teaches users how to handle the decentralized finance market in a playful way and earn money from it. This should attract small players, whereas now more than 60% of transactions in DeFi are secured with institutional capital.

In the market of non-interchangeable tokens, Solana is also beginning to crowd Ethereum. According to Nathan Ross, Solana is more suitable for NFT, as it is both cheaper and easier. And the CEO of FTX announced on September 06 that they are launching their own platform for operations with NFT with Solana support.

Many are just tired of waiting for Ethereum to make the move to PoS. In addition, blockchains have appeared, which at the start are devoid of a number of disadvantages of the leading altcoin. All this leads us to the justification of the forecast from Mercuryo and the level of $500 for Solana by the end of the year.