Crypto investors were upbeat about Solana (SOL) this week as Bitwise filed for exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This resulted in the crypto market tracking the 4th largest digital asset as Bitwise launched Solana ETFs.
This comes at a time when SOL is hovering near its ATH and showing a high potential for massive surge.
The CEO of Bitwise, Hunter Horsley announced the Solana ETF launch in a tweet. Horsley revealed how the investment firm is competing with Canary Capital, 21shares and VanEck in launching ETFs.
This announcement coincides with a recent CoinShares survey which revealed that at least 20% of asset managers believe SOL has the most compelling growth potential out of all cryptos. Nearly the same percentage of crypto investors are found to have allocated funds to Solana.
The head of strategy at 21.co, Eliezer Ndinga said that SOL says that “smart money is coming this way”.
Solana is currently the largest staking exchange-traded product on 21.co as it has $1.4 billion in assets under management, followed by Bitcoin’s $946 million. All of this is made available to traders in the European Union.
The managing partner at Plaintext Capital, Francisco Oliva-Velez echoed the same sentiments when he said that the market's preference for Solana shows the advantages of the ecosystem including its scalability and speed.
Olivia-Velez elaborated on this by highlighting SOL’s dominance in the crypto hedge funds market as Solana makes up 38% of their capital investments. This marks an increase from last month's numbers. Nearly 42% of people in the crypto community keep an eye on the Solana ecosystem.
This boom in SOL comes at a time when interest in Ethereum has declined 26% from the 63% peak seen in June while interest in Bitcoin spiked by 13%.
This week Solana has surged over 20% to trade at $258 inches away from its 2021 peak at $260 with a $700 forecast by 2025 end from Standard Chartered UK.
The most important factor for this price surge is Solana ETFs. Bitwise which already has Ethereum and Bitcoin ETFs is trying to capitalize on Solana ETFs by filing for it in Delaware with US SEC in talks to approve it.
The blockchain’s focus on user engagement has resulted in 1500% yearly growth in its active users as daily new addresses have spiked by 11-fold. The YTD of Solana's net flow has surged to $1.6 billion.
The European Head of Bitwise, André Dragosch called these numbers incredible, highlighting how the onchain usage growth has caused the price to rally.
On November 21, SOL depicted a 350% year-on-year growth while the token traded at $249, 4% below its ATH. Hence, analysts are predicting that Solana could rise to $500 in the next 12-18 months as the Solana ETFs get approval under the Trump administration.
At the time of writing on November 22, Solana was up 1.90% to trade at $254 with a 5.22% decline in its trading volume which reached $8.79 billion and the market cap rose to $121.06 billion.