Solana Price Just Hit a New 180-Day High

It was a strong summer for Solana. The popular altcoin was valued at just $142.02 at the end of April 2025, after dropping to a low of $95 earlier in that month. However, the Solana price hit a new 180-day high on September 11, reaching $229, more than double its lowest point this year. On a day-to-day and hour-to-hour basis, it has remained volatile, sometimes rising or falling as much as $20 in value over the course of a day.

What has driven such swift growth for the popular altcoin?

Two factors that receive the most attention in the media are an increasingly positive public sentiment toward crypto and a growing crypto-friendly environment in North America. There are a couple of other factors worth noting, though. Larger financial entities and whale traders have been trading larger amounts of SOL, driven by partial approvals for Solana in exchange-traded funds (ETFs). As more institutions look to trade in crypto, the structure and speed of the Solana blockchain can appear especially appealing.

The Impact of Institutional Investment on Solana Price

On April 14, just before Solana's price began the leap back from $95, Canada became the first country to approve spot ETFs for SOL. Since then, the United States has also approved staking ETFs for Solana, though not spot ETFs yet.

Over the summer, this has contributed to a bit of a gold rush as institutions have hurried to add Solana to their holdings. In May, DeFi Development, a NASDAQ-listed firm, made headlines when its stock surged 20% after the company purchased approximately $100,000 USD in Solana. In May and June, block traders hastened to participate in Solana’s $200 call option, as well. Visa, which piloted support for Solana in 2023, has expanded its support for Solana this year.

With the rise of fintech and Web3 apps, as well as the more widespread use of digital wallets, the popularity of DeFi blockchain platforms like Ethereum and Solana is likely to continue growing. Since Solana offers not just the volatile SOL but faster, quicker transaction processing for stablecoins like USDC and USDT, the platform is drawing more interest from banks and other large financial entities.

How Solana’s Unique Structure Drives Solana Price

When banks, large organizations, and spot traders are looking to move funds quickly over a decentralized network, Solana offers unique advantages that (for now) set it apart from its larger competitor, Ethereum. Solana’s founders set out explicitly to solve what Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin dubbed the “blockchain trilemma.” 

The trilemma refers to the three-pronged problem of needing to scale up the blockchain’s performance without losses in either security or decentralization. Solana is designed to be a decentralized network that can host apps as smoothly (or better) as centralized systems like Android and iOS. In fact, Solana even debuted its own smartphone (the Solana Saga), customized to its network and running Solana apps.

Whether Solana can achieve its dream remains to be seen, but for now, it offers faster transactions at lower cost than other large blockchain platforms. The blockchain’s home-grown protocol, Turbine, distributes data more efficiently, while the recent addition of the Firedancer validator client is intended to alleviate growing concerns about the platform’s security. (Solana suffered significant outages early last year, including a five-hour shutdown on February 6, 2024.)

By the numbers, Ethereum processes transactions at an average of fifteen per second, while Solana, requiring less computing power, can process up to 24,000 transactions per second.

Ethereum’s current average transaction fee is just under half a cent, but Solana’s transaction fees range between $0.0001 and $0.0025. This makes it especially attractive to altcoin creators, developers of decentralized applications, crypto traders, and financial institutions hoping to transfer large sums.

Put simply, Solana's price has risen fast because Solana itself is fast. This has led some, such as Alex Carchidi, a crypto analyst with the Motley Fool, to predict that  its price could even double again (“perhaps even as high as $500 or more”) by the end of the year.

What Lies Ahead for Solana Price

Solana is definitely not without competition, however. While its past outages have raised concerns among users and enhanced expectations for reliability, Ethereum tends to appear more stable. Although Ethereum’s base layer can be slower under load, its architecture, particularly with Layer 2 and protocol upgrades, provides it with more paths to scale and improve transaction throughput over time. Other, smaller blockchains, like Cardano, boast higher security and also threaten Solana’s share of the cryptocurrency market.

One other advantage Solana has is its native support for Web3 developers. Solana offers its own developer toolkit and supports a range of popular programming languages, including Rust, C, and C++. That lowers the barrier to entry for app developers, making Solana a frequent choice for Web3 enthusiasts.

While analysts disagree on whether Solana’s momentum will falter or accelerate, its  price is currently benefiting from several tailwinds: recent approvals for ETFs (spot in Canada and staking in the U.S.), its support for Web3, wider adoption among large institutions like Visa, and transaction speed. It will be interesting to see where Solana’s price lands at the end of the year.