The smart contract platform Fantom and its FMT token stood out as the big winner in the crypto market today, after a massive weekend price rally fuelled by growth in the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) trading. Meanwhile, the Solana network’s native token SOL also shot higher, breaking through the important USD 100 level for the first time in its history.
At the time of writing (09:08 UTC), Fantom’s FMT token was up by 43% over the past 24 hours to trade at a price of USD 0.7259. The price is further up 30% for the past 7 days, although it has not yet managed to regain its all-time high of USD 0.9587 from May this year.
Similarly, Solana’s SOL token was up markedly today, trading 7.5% higher over the past 24 hours to a price of just over USD 99.65. The break of the significant USD 100 level for SOL first happened between 2 and 3 am UTC, meaning it occurred in the early hours of Monday trading in Asia and late Sunday night in the US, before it retraced slightly later.
The growth for both platforms comes as the NFT space is continuing to heat up, with NFT-related activity accelerating on both Solana and Fantom.
Fantom, on its end, reported a surge in NFT trading last week, while the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi-related protocols on the network has also accelerated over the past month, according to data from Defi Llama. As the time of writing, Fantom’s TVL stood at nearly USD 600m, more than doubling in a month.
At the same time, the creator of the major DeFi protocol Yearn.Finance (YFI), Andre Cronje, has stepped up his shilling of the Fantom project with a series of tweets in recent days, while receiving praise from the community in return:
Almost a year later.
Cross chain defi is growing.
Bridges are significantly more decentralized.
And L1's are the new L2's.I'm embracing it. Fantom is an ETH scaling solution. Going to be relentlessly shilling FTM. https://t.co/74uAxpphCZ
— Andre Cronje (@AndreCronjeTech) August 30, 2021
Meanwhile, the much larger Solana network has also seen massive growth in the total value locked on the platform, moving from USD 1.22bn on August 1 to more than USD 3bn today, per Defi Llama. Not surprisingly, the rise in DeFi usage on the platform has also pushed the price of SOL higher, rising more than 170% from about USD 35 at the beginning of the month.
The growth for Solana also comes as the team teased an “Ignition” event set to commence on Tuesday this week. It is still unclear what exactly “Ignition” refers to, with some users speculating it is a token burn event, and others believing it to be a type of launch event for decentralized application (dapp) developers.
And while fans will have to wait and see what the Solana team is planning, the price of SOL has remained strong in the market, despite a suspected “rug pull” earlier in the month. The token has kept the top 10 position that it secured two weeks back, currently ranking as the 8th most valuable cryptoasset, per CoinGecko’s ranking.
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Source: Cryptonews
