Despite this accolade, bullish end-of-year projections seem somewhat stalled as the SOL price takes a 3.34% dip today, mirroring the trend seen in other notable altcoins.
In an attempt to recover the levels seen before the mass market-wide liquidation earlier this week, Solana has fallen short, retaining a 5.03% loss.
However, with a 12.21% lapse in trading volume over the past 24 hours, scraping $3.5 billion, this downward momentum appears to be waning.
Solana Becomes Preferred Choice Over Ethereum
Electric Capital’s Developer Report showed that Solana is the number one ecosystem for new developers in 2024.
Solana overtakes Ethereum for new devs. Source: Electric Capital.This marks the first time any other top layer 1 network has surpassed Ethereum for new developers since 2016, with 7,625 new developers reportedly building on Solana this year.
The report also highlighted Solana as the fastest-growing large ecosystem in terms of monthly active developers, boasting an 83% year-on-year (YoY) growth.
This impressive development has positioned the SOL ecosystem as a leader in low-fee use cases, accounting for 81% of all decentralized exchange (DEX) transactions and 64% of all NFT mint transactions across all chains.
2025 Rings Bullish for Solana: Is a $500 SOL Price Within Reach?
These developments have raised speculators anticipations for the altcoin going into 2025, with optimistic scenarios suggesting a SOL price peak above $500. While credible, these targets hinge largely on continued adoption and regulatory advances.
Asset manager Bitwise recently predicted that Solana’s growth would continue into 2025, suggesting that “serious” projects would migrate to the SOL ecosystem to complement the network’s dominance in meme coins.
As such, there are enough reasons to be optimistic about Solana, and with SOL-based ETFs becoming an increasing possibility once Trump takes office for a second time, the alt could see some real gains next year.
Looking ahead, the technical setup for Solana suggests how such targets could play out. The SOL price currently remains bound in a descending channel, consolidating before its next move up.
SOL / USDT 1D chart, descending channel pattern. Source: Binance.he daily 20SMA has proven to be stubborn resistance to recent breakout attempts, with the latest sparking today’s losses. Something expected to persist as long as the MACD line maintains its position below the signal line, a telling sign that the bulls have taken a back seat.
However, the approaching strong support provided by the 50SMA stands to see a potential reversal. If this level holds, a subsequent successful breakout attempt would set a short-term price target around $272.50 approaching the end of the year, a 20% advance on current prices.
This would reaffirm the early November breakout path of a cup-and-handle pattern forming since late 2021. Following this, the Solana price could see peaks of $380 within Q1 2025, representing a substantial 70% advance on current prices.
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