Solana Down Despite Strong Network Activity

Between January 30 and February 1, Solana's (SOL) native token saw a 9.8% decrease, failing to break above the $104 resistance for the fifth time in the last four weeks.

Over a longer period of time, SOL fell 10.7%, while ETH and BNB both experienced declines of 1.2% and 2.6%, respectively, in the same 30-day period.

Given the strong network fundamentals, investors are prompted to inquire as to why SOL has underperformed.

Solana's market capitalization of $45 billion, at $104, is equivalent to that of its direct rival BNB. DeFiLlama claims that BNB Chain has a $3.54 billion total value locked (TVL), which is more than twice as much as Solana's $1.6 billion.

Compared to BNB Chain, Solana has less activity with decentralized applications (DApps).

Notably, in just 30 days, BNB Chain's total active addresses interacting with DApps (UAW) surpassed Solana's 2.65 million by a significant margin. In a similar vein, BNB Chain's 30-day DApp volume was $20.8 billion, significantly less than Solana's $2.75 million.

The Jupiter (JUP) airdrop on January 31 has drawn attention to the Solana network recently. At the moment, JUP has a market capitalization of $800 million.

Members of the Solana Foundation celebrated the successful launch of the Jupiter decentralized exchange aggregator, which handled millions of transactions without any issues.

More than 438,000 addresses have claimed their JUP airdrop to date, and 9,391 of those addresses have received more than 5,000 JUP, or $3,000 in today's currency.

Over the past week, demand for Solana's ecosystem has increased in addition to Jupiter's successful airdrop.

This covers games, yield protocols, some non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces, additional decentralized exchanges, and liquid staking options.

MeanFi, MarginFi, Wormhole, Drift Protocol, Kamino Finance, and Jito are just a few of the Solana DApps that are seeing significant user growth—even if one ignores Jupiter's numbers, which have been artificially inflated by the airdrop.

Essentially, Solana's network activity shows no signs of weakness—quite the reverse.

Since Solana still needs to establish itself among the top 3 networks in terms of TVL and volumes, it is unclear how likely it is that SOL will break above $104 and ultimately surpass BNB's valuation.

Sources:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/solana-sol-price-is-down-but-network-activity-reflects-strength

https://coinmarketcap.com/