Grayscale, the world’s largest asset manager for digital currencies, has added Solana to its portfolio for institutional investors and high net-worth individuals and thus launched the sixteenth product in their portfolio.
Grayscale Investments has created a new product with exposure to Solana for high net worth individuals and institutional investors. The Grayscale Solana Trust product becomes the sixteenth product in Grayscale’s product portfolio, after their Bitcoin Trust, Ethereum Trust, and many more. A minimum investment of $25,000 is required, together with an annual fee of 2.5%. The launch of this new product is occurring after the SOL token was added to the Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund in Oct 2021.
Solana’s high transaction speed and low cost bring in developers
Solana is a smart-contract-based blockchain that was introduced in 2017. It uses Proof-of-History as a blockchain consensus mechanism. Transactions occur much faster than Ethereum, with 50,000 to 65,000 transactions per second, compared to 15-30 transactions per second for Ethereum. It also beats Cardano, which does 250 transactions per second. The cost of doing transactions on Solana is $0.00001 to $0.00025, compared to $15-$40 per transaction in gas fees on Ethereum.
According to Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein, Solana has over 500 decentralized applications and 1.2 million active users on the network. The low transaction fees have driven developer interest in Solana and bodes well for the future of the blockchain, according to him. Late November saw $14.45B in total value locked in applications on the network and 1,750 active developers.
NFTs gaining traction
NFT collections like the Degenerate Ape Academy have also surfaced on Solana, and data from Cryptoslam places Solana in fourth place with respect to 24-hour NFT sales volumes. Ethereum, Algorand, Cardano, and Polkadot are all competing with Solana to be the network for decentralized finance applications, NFT trading, and blockchain gaming.
Solana’s popularity has also been boosted by FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s public endorsements, raising its public profile. It has, however, been subject to some teething problems, like the 17-hour outage experienced in mid-September.
