Solana gains 80% in a month as Firedancer goes live on testnet

Solana’s SOL (SOL) has posted 30-day gains of nearly 81% and has rallied over 30% in the past week amid the testnet launch of the blockchain’s long-awaited scaling solution, Firedancer.

SOL reached over $41 on Nov. 2, touching highs it hasn’t seen since August last year, Cointelegraph Markets Pro data shows.

Long touted as an “Ethereum killer,” SOL has vastly outperformed its rival, Ether (ETH), which posted under 11% gains in the past month.

SOL-related investment products have also seen millions of dollars worth of inflows over the past few weeks, according to CoinShares. SOL is, however, still down around 84% from its Nov. 6, 2021, all-time high of almost $260.

On Oct. 31 at Solana’s Breakpoint conference, Solana Foundation executive director Dan Albert announced the testnet launch of Firedancer, which Web3 development firm Jump Crypto has been building since last August.

Firedancer is a new validator client for the network, which Solana Labs founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko has said is aimed at increasing speed, reliability and validator diversity. Its slated mainnet launch is in the first half of 2024.

Firedancer has been dubbed the long-term fix to Solana’s past network outage problems, which Yakovenko called a “curse.”

Solana suffered 14 partial or major outages in 2022, but its uptime improved in 2023, with only one major outage, reported in February. ​​

However, there are concerns that selling pressure could hit SOL as $56 million worth of the cryptocurrency tied to FTX was unstaked and sent to an unknown wallet. An additional $32 million worth of SOL linked to FTX and Alameda Research has also moved to a wallet suspected to be the firms’ designated liquidator, Galaxy Digital.

Related: VanEck predicts a 10,600% Solana price rally by 2030

Other altcoins also saw strong price rallies over the month as crypto market sentiment turned positive. On Nov. 2, the Crypto Fear & Greed Index jumped six points from the day before to 72 out of 100, reflecting a sentiment of “greed.”

Chainlink’s LINK (LINK) saw an over-54% gain in the last 30 days. Meanwhile, Bitcoin (BTC), Avalanche (AVAX) and Near (NEAR) posted 30-day gains of 30%, 32% and 37.5%, respectively.

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