Indeed, the market value of the world’s fifth-largest cryptocurrency increased from $51.17 billion to $56.76 billion in only 24 hours on December 16, according to CoinMarketCap.  To be precise, SOL added $5.59 billion over the period, although at its lowest point in the last day, Solana’s market cap was $48.67 billion before its upwards move. Currently, Solana is now trading at $183.71, up 10.3% in the last 24 hours, although it is still down 2.54% over the previous seven days.

Solana price predictions

Notably, the price of SOL is expected to trade around $185.44 by the end of December, according to the latest predictions of the CoinMarketCap crypto community.  The ‘Price Estimates’ function of cryptocurrency data analytics platform CoinMarketCap allows users to make six-month price forecasts and see what other people think about them in real-time. At the time of publication, 20,411 individuals have voted to arrive at an estimate of the median price. Interestingly, the price is expected to decline into next year at $171.55, predicted for January with 11,189 votes. It appears that since Solana has been experiencing performance issues in the last week, crypto traders could have taken that into consideration when casting their vote. It’s worth mentioning that SolChicks, a new non-fungible token (NFT) initiative developed natively on the Solana network, debuted on December 13. However, immediately after launch, the SolChicks team announced on social media that “CHICKS HAVE TAKEN DOWN SOLANA.”  Hardly the kind of news investors want to hear about a blockchain designed to withstand high usage. On December 9, the network was severely slowed as a result of a distributed denial-of-service attack. Even though Solana was able to solve the issues without requiring a network outage, it raised severe worries about the network’s security.  In September, the Solana network had a similar problem when a rapid increase in transaction traffic resulted in a network outage that lasted approximately seventeen hours. The developers working on the problem at the time were unable to resolve it, and validators were forced to restart the network.

Michael Jordan to launch HEIR 

Conversely, Solana’s recent price climb could be attributed to basketball legend Michael Jordan and his son Jeffrey Jordan launching HEIR, a platform for empowering athletes built on Solana, which is set to launch in 2022. The HEIR platform is intended to bring together professional athletes and their most fervent fans in a collaborative effort. It will include an HEIR token, which will be issued on the Solana blockchain, as well as NFT assets and community-building features, such as the ability for fans to join an athlete’s limited-capacity “huddle” in order to get access to unique rewards and experiences. Disclaimer: The content on this site should not be considered investment advice. Investing is speculative. When investing, your capital is at risk.