SOL (Solana) down 3.79% in the past 24 hours, currently at $123.77

Gate News Bot Message, December 18 — According to CoinMarketCap data, at the time of press, SOL (Solana) is trading at $123.77, down 3.79% in the past 24 hours, with a high of $139.99 and a low of $122.10. The 24-hour trading volume reached $5.394 billion. The current market capitalization is approximately $69.567 billion, a decrease of $2.741 billion from yesterday.

Solana is a leading high-performance network powering internet capital markets, payments, and crypto applications. As one of the world’s largest startup and enterprise platforms, Solana boasts the most users, the most developers, the highest trading activity, and the highest real-time transaction throughput. The network has processed over 472 million transactions, with a transaction per second (TPS) of 2,635, 50 million active addresses monthly, 3.5 billion monthly transactions, a total transaction volume of $3.3 trillion, and application revenue of $3.4 billion.

Global top-tier financial institutions and tech companies such as Western Union, Visa, and PayPal are building application ecosystems on Solana, covering stablecoin issuance, asset tokenization, and more.

Important recent news about SOL:

1️⃣ DApp ecosystem revenue continues to lead, but on-chain TVL faces structural pressure
The Solana blockchain has led all L1 and L2 chains in DApp revenue for 19 consecutive months, demonstrating its ecosystem’s actual monetization ability. However, the total value locked (TVL) on-chain has fallen over 34% from its peak of $13.22 billion in mid-September to $8.67 billion, hitting a six-month low, and has remained below $10 billion over the past 30 days. The decline in TVL mainly stems from Jito’s liquid staking, which has decreased by 53% since mid-September, while Jupiter DEX, Raydium, and Sanctum protocols have decreased by 30%, 46%, and 46%, respectively. This divergence indicates that although the ecosystem generates revenue, capital allocation is shifting from DeFi to other application layers, reflecting market expectations of structural adjustments within the ecosystem.

2️⃣ Expansion of derivatives market infrastructure, institutional adoption accelerates
dYdX has formed an official integration partnership with Meme coin BONK, a leading project in the Solana ecosystem. BONK launched branded web and Telegram frontends on December 17, enabling Solana community users to seamlessly access perpetual contract trading supported by dYdX through this portal. This move signifies further integration of Solana’s derivatives ecosystem with mainstream application scenarios, strengthening its position as a diversified financial infrastructure.

3️⃣ Quantum-resistant upgrade initiated, long-term network security protection on the agenda
The Solana Foundation has successfully deployed post-quantum digital signatures on the testnet, collaborating with Project Eleven, which focuses on post-quantum cryptography, to complete a systematic quantum resistance assessment. The evaluation covered core protocols, validator security, user wallets, and long-term cryptographic assumptions. Results indicate that end-to-end quantum-resistant transactions are feasible and scalable. This demonstrates Solana’s strategic investment in system resilience for the coming decades, ensuring current network security while preparing for future threats, highlighting its emphasis on long-term competitiveness.

Technical analysis: Currently, SOL’s price has fallen over 50% from its high of $250, hovering around the key support level of $120 for repeated consolidation. Although the ecosystem fundamentals remain strong, the number of validator nodes has sharply decreased by about 68% over the past two years to 800 nodes, with staking costs rising to $17 million per node, posing a real threat to network decentralization. In the short term, the price faces continued downside risk; in the medium term, the robustness of the network structure is crucial for ecosystem resilience.

This message is not investment advice; please be aware of market volatility risks.