During what has been a catastrophic price crash for the broader crypto market, Solana (SOL) now valued at $86 has dropped by more than 16 percent in the last 24 hours and around 40 percent in the preceding week.
SOL’s current price is now 68.3 percent below its all-time high of $259, which it reached on November 6, 2021. Bitcoin ($33,809) and Ethereum ($2,266), on the other hand, have dropped by 21% and 32%, respectively, in the last week on the crypto market.
What’s the deal with Solana’s price drop?
The Solana blockchain has experienced severe levels of network congestion, adding to what has already been a dismal start to the year for cryptocurrency values.
The network experienced a “partial outage” on January 21, 2022, and January 22, 2022, according to the Solana website.
According to Solana Status, a Twitter account that monitors network activity, “The network congestion on the Solana mainnet beta was extremely high. This was connected to issues that engineers had previously discovered and were working to fix and resolve.”
18 hours ago, Anatoly Yakovenko, one of the network’s co-founders, tweeted, “Huge gratitude to all the guys that debugged these difficulties over the last 48 hours.”
Solana’s fall from grace
Following an exceptionally strong finish to 2021 for the Ethereum rival, the network has now experienced network issues. Solana began 2021 at a low price of $1.52 and soared 11,150 percent by the end of the year.
“At the start of 2021, Solana was practically unknown in the wider crypto/blockchain community—the conventional opinion at the time was that breaking Ethereum’s network effect ad developer moat would be nearly impossible,” says the report. SOL investor and CEO of Sino Global Capital, Matthew Graham
The value of the token has continued to plummet since then.