Solana is currently one of the most hyped cryptocurrencies. The reason for this hype is understandable, though, as Solana has extremely low transaction fees, has high bandwidth, and doesn’t suffer from scalability issues. This is why a Bank of America analyst said that Solana would become the Visa of crypto. At present, Visa is the largest payment processor globally, with the support of more than 24,000 transactions per second.
What makes Solana special?
Let’s see a little bit more detail that what makes Solana such a special cryptocurrency. First of all, while most popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum support less than 50 tps, Solana can go up to 65,000 tps. It has already processed more than 50 billion transactions and has become extremely popular due to its negligible gas fees. Solana also supports NFTs and has over 5.7 million minted ones on their blockchain. All this has helped SOL become the 5th largest crypto with a market cap of $47 billion.
So, in this sense, it is clear that the cheap cost and high bandwidth make it capable of becoming the Visa of crypto. While there are alternatives like the Bitcoin lightning network, that is a completely different topic. Solana might also give a tough competition to Ethereum as the cryptocurrency has high gas fees and much lesser bandwidth.
The problems
While the Bank of America analyst said about Solana being the Visa of crypto, this also brings in some issues. There are many cryptocurrencies that prefer decentralization over scalability, like Ethereum. On the other hand, Solana is doing the opposite as it is not very decentralized. This has led to its network going down 3 times in the last 6 months.
All this again brings the question that does decentralization comes with compromises or can figure something out. If Solana is unable to address the issues, it won’t ever become the Visa of crypto or get close to Ethereum. We should understand that most users of the crypto space value decentralization first, which puts SOL in the backseat.
The developers of Solana did say that they are working on the problems. So, do you think that Solana will be the Visa of crypto? And is it good enough to compete with the lightning network on Bitcoin? Let us know in the comments below. Also, if you found our content informative, do like and share it with your friends.
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