SOL strolls in the sunshine

Solana's token (SOL) over seven days' time is an Ethereum killer. SOL soared 52% in the past week as of Monday at 8:45 a.m. (versus an 18% gain for ETH during that period).

SOL gained 6.4% in the past 24 hours, reaching about $43.50. That’s 25% lower than the SOL all-time high reached on May 18. SOL is 8,500% higher since hitting a low of fifty cents in May of 2020.

The Solana blockchain, via a new consensus mechanism known as Proof-of-History (PoH), promises to be in a position to possibly usher in an era of increased scalability, prompting SOL itself to forge ahead with a plan to scale up.

The project’s team leaders, according to a report by Decrypt, are now in the process of raising as much as $450 million.

Solana most notably powers FTX's decentralized exchange, Serum, and going forward sees itself as being the go-to hub for decentralized apps (dApps).

On Sunday, Ethereum gas fees sank to their lowest levels this year, to as low as ten gwei (0.000000001 ETH, or about 60 cents) after reaching, at one stage during the recent non-fungible token (NFT) explosion, as high as almost 500 gwei (rhymes with May).

Solana's ambitious cash infusion campaign seems to suggest a belief there possibly might be some genuine Ethereum challenging to be had, but it seems the only Ethereum killer is Ethereum, industry watchers are usually quick to point out.

One of Solana's selling points is that it is a relatively less expensive platform on which to develop/transact. While dApps for trading, gaming and media are on the rise, the NFT juggernaut has lost steam. Daily sales fell by 60% since their peak and the number of active wallets in the NFT market has dropped by 40% (BeInCrypto).

Taking on the root causes of the massive surge of Central American migration, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris is visiting Guatemala today to meet with leaders from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, which includes Guatemala as well as Honduras and El Salvador.

Issues to be discussed include drug cartels, hurricanes, the pandemic and a loss of faith in government institutions. Add "financially underserved population" to the list. Partly to blame: large global banks that over the decades set up offices catering only to wealthiest of Latin Americans and then in recent years scaled back on even that.

It's believed that more than two-thirds of the active population of El Salvador does not have a bank account.

Addressing the Bitcoin 2021 Conference in Miami via pre-recorded video, Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, said that he is set in the coming weeks to introduce a bill that would make Bitcoin legal tender in his tiny nation, which is also riding another new and exciting wave – as a surfing Mecca.

Hype, hope, bombast and blather – everything we assumed would be on display at the Bitcoin Conference in Miami indeed turned out to be, in spades, an all-out orgy of influencers, prominent speakers and the largest collection of maximalists since a team of designers convened in Las Vegas in the mid-'70s to build the Liberace mansion.

Were the conference not postponed last May, the topic on everyone's mind then would have been the "halving" of mining rewards, a quadrennial event that had just kicked in at the end of last May; but there was no shortage of halving conversations, as pertaining to BTC recently going from above $60K to a recent low of nearly $30K.

Miami's mayor, Francis Suarez, got the crowd's juices flowing with pro-crypto statements exemplifying shifting governmental attitudes. Brian Brooks, former federal currency overlord turned crypto exchange executive, took to the main stage to attest to the fiat currency folly that is excessive printing.

The Winklevoss twins and Jack Dorsey hosted intimate chats. Turns out, they love Bitcoin.

Dorsey spoke of the bankless population: “Internet needs a native currency,” he said. “We need to be able to transact with it every day.”