Bank Of America: This Cryptocurrency (Not Bitcoin) Could Become The ‘Visa Of Crypto’—A Huge Price Prediction For Solana And Ethereum

It appears that bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have bottomed out, ending the worst weekly cryptocurrency decline since last December, during which the top cryptocurrencies shed $300 billion in combined value.

This week, the world's #1 cryptocurrency, bitcoin, is up 3.3%. The price of its closest rival by market cap, ethereum, rose 5.3%. Other major cryptocurrencies are also on the rise. BNB is up 9.5%, cardano 16.2% and solana 10.6%.

While the entire crypto market is having fun, Bank of America

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has selected a cryptocurrency that could become the next big thing in town. In a recent note, its digital asset strategist Alkesh Shah said that solana could become the "Visa of the digital asset ecosystem."

“Its ability to provide high performance, low cost, and ease of use creates a blockchain that is optimized for consumer use cases such as micropayments, DeFi, NFT, decentralized networks (Web3), and gaming,” Shah noted.

The analyst noted that there are more than 400 successful decentralized projects on the solana blockchain.

Additionally, solana boasts some of the fastest transaction speeds around. Shah explained in the note: "These innovations enable the processing of an industry-leading ~65,000 transactions per second with average transaction fees of $0.00025 while remaining relatively decentralized and secure."

But the wide range of applications and industry-leading transaction speeds have their pros and cons.

“Solana prioritizes scalability, but a relatively less decentralized and secure blockchain has advantages and disadvantages, illustrated by various network performance issues from the start… Ethereum prioritizes decentralization and security, but at the expense of scalability, which which has led to periods of network congestion and transactions. fees that are occasionally greater than the value of the transaction being sent," the analyst wrote, quoted by Coindesk.

Solana launched in March 2020 as a decentralized blockchain that can host highly scalable applications. Today it is the fifth largest cryptocurrency, having settled more than $50 billion in transactions and minted more than 5.7 million NFTs, according to Alkesh Shah.

Solana is often compared to ethereum because both cryptocurrencies support smart contracts, which are the key component of decentralized applications such as blockchain-based banks and NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

Over the past year, the cryptocurrency has attracted a lot of attention from investors and has shot up a mind-boggling 4,000%. Still, its size pales in comparison to its closest rival, ethereum. Solana has a market capitalization of $47 billion, which is just over a tenth of the size of ethereum.

The BofA analyst believes this valuation gap bodes well for solana. It means that its great potential is not yet fully included in the price. And it gives the cryptocurrency plenty of room to grow as it erodes the market share of ethereum and other major cryptocurrencies.

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