The price of then native token of smart contract platform Solana, SOL, has been significantly outperforming most other digital assets over the past few weeks, to the point that it’s nearly overcoming Binance’s BNB to become the fourth-largest digital currency by market capitalization.
According to available market data, Solana’s current market capitalization stands at $84.4 billion after the cryptocurrency surged more than 6% over the past week, to now trade at $179.5 per token.
Meanwhile Binance’s BNB has an $88.5 billion market capitalization at the time of writing, with each BNB token currently trading at $606. When it comes to total value locked on the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols within each network, Solana is seemingly also in the lead.
According to DeFiLlama data, Solana currently has $6.3 billion in total value locked on decentralized finance ecosystem, compared to $4.7 billion on the BNB Chain. The platform’s data also shows 6.5 million active addresses on Solana, compared to 965,000 on BNB.
Solana’s outperformance has been notable so far this year, with data from CryptoCompare showing SOL is up over 445% over the last twelve months, while BNB is up nearly 167% over the past year.
Source: CryptoCompare
It’s worth pointing out that both cryptocurrencies have very distinct supply mechanics, even though both are gas tokens used within their blockchains that power their decentralized finance ecosystems.
While BNB has a real-time burning mechanism that was introduced with BEP-95 and sees a portion of the collected gas fees get burned in each block in a bid to reduce its total circulating supply, Solana doesn’t have a maximum supply, but rather an inflation mechanism.
Solana is an inflationary token whose supply increases at a predetermined rate. At launch, it had a 500 million SOL supply allocated during the creation of the genesis block —the first block on a blockchain. The current total supply now stands at 587 million SOL.
Featured image via Unsplash.
