Solana surpasses Bitcoin and Ethereum in weekend trading volume

Crypto traders’ interest in Solana remains very high as the trading volume for the digital asset surpassed that of Bitcoin and Ethereum on major centralized exchanges during the weekend.

Conor Grogan, a director at Coinbase, first pointed out this milestone on Dec. 24, saying SOL saw more trading than the combination of the top two largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

Riyad Carey, an analyst with Paris-based crypto intelligence platform Kaiko, further corroborated this finding, saying the same trend was observed on Kraken and Gemini, two of the largest U.S.-based crypto trading platforms.

SOL’s trading volume also beat BTC and ETH on UPbit and MEXC for the past 2 and 3 days, respectively.

Carey further shared a chart showing that SOL’s trading activities, compared to ETH and BTC, were experiencing an uptrend. According to the chart, SOL trading is approaching 40% of trading activities on centralized crypto platforms, while ETH and BTC were declining.

According to Carey, these metrics are “unprecedented” and show the sustained interest SOL is currently generating in the market.

Why SOL volume is rising

Over the past year, Solana has experienced remarkable growth, defying earlier associations with Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange. Despite this, the network has flourished, attracting an expanding user base.

During this period, Solana forged strategic alliances with renowned global financial players like Visa and Shopify. These partnerships harness blockchain technology to streamline payment procedures, showcasing SOL’s network’s potential to a broader global audience.

Moreover, the recent surge in interest surrounding the Solana-based BONK memecoin and the resurgence of decentralized finance (DeFi) activities on the smart contract-enabled blockchain have contributed significantly to its recent upward trajectory.

These developments have helped push the price of SOL to new highs, up more than 800% on the year-to-date metric to nearly $120 as of press time, according to CryptoSlate’s data.