As the broader cryptocurrency market records a robust recovery by surging 3.5% in the last 24 hours, Solana witnesses the most gains, soaring past $100. At press time, the SOL price was up 6.58% and was presently trading at $104 with a market cap of $44.4 billion.
Solana Bounces Back Strongly, Outperforms Bitcoin
As per on-chain data provided by Santiment, Solana (SOL) has emerged as one of the standout performers among altcoins this week, displaying a significant surge in value compared to Bitcoin. Solana has surged back above the mark of $100, indicating an increase in investor confidence.
Over the past 36 hours, the SOL/BTC pair has undergone a significant increase of 4.5%, marking a positive turn of events for Solana.
This surge comes following an outage that had worried traders earlier in the week. On the other hand, what was at the beginning perceived as a setback for Solana turned out to be a local bottom, with the uncertainty and doubt surrounding the outage that occurred, it seemed as a catalyst for the subsequent price rebound.
The Outage on February 6th
Earlier this week, on Tuesday, February 6, the Solana blockchain network encountered a massive outage with 5-hours of downtime. Later on, the network blockchain resumed production as developers released the latest upgrade into v1.17.20, and the validator operators restarted the cluster as well.
The downtime occurred due to a malfunction in the BPF loader, also referred to as the “Berkley Packet Filter,” which is accountable for deploying, upgrading, and executing programs on the Solana network. To solve this issue, the developers have improved the BPF code lines on the development network.
On-chain Metrics and SOL Price Forecast
On January 31, the highest number of active users on the layer-1 network logged in since its inception in 2020, reaching a total of 875,940 users. However, as per the data from Token Terminal, the network activity experienced a decline in the first week of February. Moreover, the network activity appears to have taken a further hit amid the outage incident.
On the upside, Solana’s primary resistance level is $110. If the SOL price surpasses that, it could initiate another 50% rally all the way to $170.