You may be wondering what Solana is? Well, it is “a public, open-source blockchain that supports smart contracts, including non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and a variety of decentralized applications (dApps). Native to Solana's blockchain is the SOL token which provides network security through staking as well as a means of transferring value” (blockworks.co). The Solana  blockchain has grown very rapidly in the past years, launching in March 2020. 

The start of Solana was very normal, but cool as well. Hedge fund managers were gathered for a private seed funding round, often at a discount to the public ICO price. In this case, it was around 22c a token. Now, SOL is $101.32 with an ATH of $259.83. Solana is mostly a “utility token”. This basically means that it has many utility functions to it, such as NFTs, Smart Contracts (Rust, C, C++), DeFi dApps, and even Metaverse. The number one NFT marketplace on Solana is MagicEden. MagicEden is having a huge influx of volume with over 76,907 SOL ($7,844,514) just today! An even more surprising volume of 8,294,571 SOL ($846,046,242) of the entirety of the platform. A big reason for the growth of Solana is the lightning fast TXN speeds and the low TXN costs, around $0.00025 per transaction and the insane capability of 60,000 TXNS a second, more than Visa! What is even more crazy is the growth the platform has had, launching a small 2 years ago, the blockchain processes around ~3,000 TXNS a second on average, has a total 65,208,213,293 TXNS and a Market Cap of $50,431,565,361.31. The SOL blockchain is also going to go crazy due to the big Metaverse & NFT Gaming. Solana is ideal with these things due to the primarily inexpensive and fast transaction times, unlike ETH or BTC, which cost upwards of $5 per TXN, or even in some cases, upwards of $200. If you are looking for a crypto to invest in, I would look into sol. 

Aside from all the great stuff, NFTs are the main part of SOL. NFTs as most people know are non-fungible-tokens. Most people clown the nfts, due to them thinking they have no “value” and they can “screenshot” them. However, this is not the case. These NFTs are not purely art. They have utilities in them. These utilities can vary, some examples are having the NFT being used in a game, Staking which allows a holder to receive passive income or even daily/weekly airdrops that also give passive income. Daily/weekly airdrops are quite interesting, I hold a few NFTs with daily airdrops ranging from $10->$30. These can be profit sharing from a business, marketplace or even an online casino!

All in all, SOL and crypto overall is a great place for people to build on, and for everyone to make money! It is a spectacular, all in one utility token which is not overpriced and is my top pick for crypto in 2022.