The complete collection of 10,000 apes were sold out eight minutes after the minting process and raised around $2.5 million. The Solana network’s scalability was tested after the rapid spike of interest in the Degenerate Ape project. As of Monday evening, Solana had reached a new all-time high of $74.44. Over the last 24 hours, SOL has risen by 18.42% to $72.97, and within seven days, the cryptocurrency has increased by 80.25%, according to CoinMarketCap.com statistics.  Whatsmore, the token of the high-performance blockchain focused on decentralized finance, or DeFi, has increased by 169.34 percent in the last 30 days. Trading analyst Josh Rager has stated about Solana that it has “Been on a tear since July, I’m certainly a buyer of dips if this pulls back into the $60s range again.” Indeed SOL has soared 3,910.55 percent since the start of the year. According to SOL’s TradingView data, the cryptocurrency is trading comfortably above the 20, 50, and 200-day exponential moving averages. With that being said, the trade volumes are not spectacular, which indicates that buyers are prevailing, but it appears it is only a matter of time before the bears enter the market. Indeed, If Solana can keep its price over $70 for a week or more, it could well be an indication the DeFi project is on its way to $80 or perhaps $100 later this year.

Solana draws attention from investors 

Dubbed an “Ethereum killer,” it has garnered substantial investment and backing from venture capital companies, including the last financing round of $314.5m, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital. Alameda research, the investment arm of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, also took part in the historic fundraising effort with FTX. Solana uses an open platform to enable more reliable scalability on a broader scale. For its customers, the Solana network offers transaction rates of up to 50,000 transactions per second, as well as a comprehensive security infrastructure. Also, the Wormhole network, initially designed as a bi-directional bridge between Ethereum and Solana, going live means that it stands to support Solana in terms of blockchain development and discovering uses for non-fungible tokens (NFT), Oracle Market Data, governance, and voting. DeFi tokens like Solana have continued to rise despite the news of the $611 million Poly Network attack. Twitter’s platform has seen 7,621 mentions of SOL in the last 24hours, which is 2,263 more than Bitcoin, the second most discussed coin. [coinbase]