last year in November Solana's Phantom wallet flipped the coinbase app by downloads in both the Google play as well as the Apple App Stores this suggests that 2025 could be the year of onchain crypto and salana is Ground Zero the only problem is that Soul's price hasn't been performing nearly as well as you'd expect given this bullish backdrop at the same time so-called salana Killers such as sui have been surging higher and that's why today we're going to bring you up to speed on what salana has been up to I take a close look at
Soul's price action assess its upcoming milestones and explain why it could be the top crypto of 2025 stay tuned before we begin it's important to note that nothing in this video is financial advice it's just educational content intended to inform you about what's been going on with salana I'll also note that many members of the coin Bureau team hold Soul as part of their personal crypto portfolios along with eth and so-called salana Killers such as SOI so this means you can rest assured we will be as objective as possible as always if you want to
know which other cryptos we hold and which ones we're accumulating or considering you can find out by becoming a member of the coin Bureau Club it's over here where we also do deep dives into small cap altcoins every week the link will be down in the description now the last last time we covered salana was almost 3 months ago in early November back then we predicted that Soul would experience a massive breakout because of the US election and that's exactly what happened what we didn't anticipate though was what came in the weeks that followed November
was extremely bullish for soul and not just because Pro crypto candidate Donald Trump won the election her first coinbase launched CB BTC on salana making it possible for Bitcoin Wales to use their BTC in defi in Solana's ecosystem uh you can refer to our Bitcoin defi collateral video for more info about that then PayPal's PUSD stable coin integrated layer zero to make it easy to move py USD between ethereum and salana for context PayPal is explicitly looking to use salana for payments worth py USD consider that one of PayPal's subsidiaries launched crossborder stable coin settlements
shortly after speaking of stable coins sky formerly known as madal launched its usds stable coin formerly known as D on salana for reference usds is the largest decentralized stable coin by market cap a sky co-founder run Christensen is so bullish on salana that he once wanted Sky to create its own svm chain but what about sui I hear you ask well uh sui actually experienced its first outage around the time that all these bullish announcements were coming out about about salana if you're wondering how the two cryptos compare then you can refer to our video
right over here which has a comparison for you now the most bullish announcement for salana came on November 21st when SEC chairman Gary Gensler formally announced that he would be stepping down at the end of January something that's likely already happened by the time you see this video the result was multiple spot salana ETF filings now for those unaware there's a good chance that a spot salana ETF could be a approved as soon as March specifically March 11th which is when the SEC is expected to make decisions about the first spot ETF applications it goes
without saying that a spot salana ETF approval would be very bullish for Soul's price meanwhile the meme coin hype had DJ's trading on salana so much that Phantom wallets actually flipped coinbase in both app stores this might have something to do with all the headlines about mcoin Traders making millions on slot but of course everything changed in December by the way if you're liking what you're hearing then let us know by Smashing that like button and subscribe to the channel and ping the notification Bell as well to make 100% sure you don't miss our next
crypto update now on the first day of December xrp flipped Soul by market cap had taken salana out of the spotlight as far as investment go a few days later reports started emerging that the SEC would be unlikely to approve the spots Lana ETF applications and could even reject them all before Trump got into office meanwhile Austin federa the head of strategy at the salana foundation announced that he would be stepping down funnily enough uh atto's co-founder Mo Shake also stepped down a few weeks later creating fud for yet another salana killer which is what
Aptos could be FYI we also did an aptose verse salana video uh you can find that right in the description as well anyways in retrospect the Catalyst that kicked off Soul's downturn was the Haley Welsh aka the hawk tour girl launching her meme coin and allegedly dumping on all the fans who bought it combine this with the hawkishness from the Federal Reserve and you've got quite a recipe for a serious Soul correction pretty soon Soul was basically back at the same price it was trading at during our previous update but while the headlines were getting
more and more bearish sana's fundamentals continued to get more and more bullish for starters salana onboarded more developers than ethereum for the first time ever to put things into perspective ethereum has been the top destination for new Developers for the past eight years Trump also announced that David saxs would be his quote crypto Zar in other words the person who will oversee the Trump administration's crypto strategy and apparently also its AI policy not only is David a salana bull but he's also an ex PayPal executive recall that PayPal is used in salana for payments on
that note salana added $1 billion of stable coins in December according to defi llama mostly usdc logically this suggests that lots of capital is moving into Solana's ecosystem as you'll see Solana's tvl has been rising even though Soul's price has been falling foreshadowing a massive breakout for s first though some more fud earlier this month it started becoming clear that AI agents on base were starting to take market share away from meme coins on salana and this resulted in a lot less demand for soul since soul is used to buy mem coins and this contributed
to Soul's poor price action obviously being the chain for mean coins is a kind of double-edged Sword because even though it can result in lots of speculative inflows a mcoin casino is also so not the best look uh case in point founders of salana projects noted in a recent survey that the association with mean coins is one of the biggest barriers to building in the ecosystem but that hasn't stopped them from building salana is reportedly pushing validators to integrate Franken Daner the de facto test net for fire Daner a validator client that will make salana
faster and more resilient a salana developer also created a Quantum resistant Vault for assets on salana as a cherry on top salana managed to flip both ethereum and base by Dex trading volume the caveat is that most of this trading volume is believed to be coming from Trading Bots and the like however this doesn't change the fact that this trading activity fundamentally creates demand for soul and this brings me to the moment you've all been waiting for and that's Soul's price action and this is sole on the weekly those trend lines are the ones we
drew in the previous video we haven't changed them at all what's crazy is that they suggest that the recent dip to $168 was the local bottom and a big bounce is in order evidence of a big bounce for soul can be found in the aforementioned fundamentals which are looking objectively bullish this is the total value locked AKA tvl in Solana's defi protocols what's crazy is that it's at levels not seen since the 2021 bull market top despite Soul's price being much lower now again this suggests that there are significant inflows into Solana's ecosystem and analytics
from the Wormhole Bridge suggest that this is indeed the case as you can see there have been hundreds of millions of dollars of crypto flowing out of ethereum in recent weeks and most of that has been flowing into salana the caveat is the number of active wallets according to Soul scans analytics the number of active Wallets on salana has been in a a downtrend since late November this could be bullish though because if the number of active wallets is declining but tvl is rising this suggests that crypto Wales are getting positioned and this makes perfect
sense when you consider the backdrop besides the fact that the spot salana ETFs are likely to get approved in the coming months most of the top players in Trump's Administration are affiliated with PayPal David who's a former PayPal executive Elon Musk who's a PayPal co-founder and even vice president JD Vance who's known to be backed by PayPal co-founder Peter teal when you remember that PayPal is looking to use salana for payments via its PUSD stable coin and realize that PayPal is one of the world's largest payment processes you understand that Soul's sluggish price action is
unlikely to last for long and it could be sprinting by the time you see this video never mind that stable coin regulations are reportedly front and center in Trump's crypto policy and this is why we believe that soul is probably going to be the top crypto for this cycle and this then begs the question of How High could it go well in the short term the charts suggest that Soul could rally somewhere in the low $300 range say 310 to 330 by short term we mean the next couple of months aside from all the pro
crypto stuff that Trump is is probably already doing the primary Catalyst will probably be FTX creditor repayments which are expected to start sometime in February and last until early March creditors with less than $50,000 in claims will collectively be getting 1.2 billion that means retail which of course means altcoins and the fact that FTX was a close with salana suggests that a lot of this money will go into soul in terms of How High Soul could go in the long term the answer is the same as it was in the previous video we reckon that
soul will hit a cycle top of somewhere around $1,000 and this is based on several factors and mostly the theory that soul is following e one cycle behind eth hit a market cap of around $550 billion during the last cycle if Soul were to hit a market cap of $550 billion that would translate to a sole price of $1,000 in this case the primary Catalyst would likely be a combination of spot salana ETFs being approved a stable coin regulations being passed and salana becoming the de facto blockchain for stable coin payments macro factors such as
stimulus out of China should provide additional Tailwinds as well in case that didn't make it clear enough Soul isn't going to hit $1,000 overnight it's going to take at least a few months we reckon the soonest it could happen is sometime in the summer which is when the crypto Market could top and you'll know this if you watched our 2025 predictions video which is over here anyhow whether Soul could hit $11,000 or more ultimately depends on its upcoming Milestones although salana doesn't have an official road map its Milestones are pretty easy to figure out the
big daddy is the full launch of fire dancer which is expected to occur sometime later this year salana founder anatol yabano has mentioned in views that once fire dancer has fully launched and it's been used by at least onethird of Solana's validators salana will technically be complete so yeah it's a pretty big deal and it's definitely the type of catalyst you see around a cycle top the launch of Solana's Seeker phone sometime later this year could also be a potential top signal as it will put salana firmly in the spotlight hopefully for good reasons the
last salana phone was a bit of a slow burner but it did expose its ecosystem to a wider group of potential users that reminds me in an interview last November Anatoli said something quite fascinating in short he essentially said that Solana's core Focus now is to compete for users this makes sense given the backdrop we're about to see Pro crypto regulations passed in the wealthiest country in the world the result is going to be competition for adoption unlike like any other and it seems that the salana team is hyper aware of this and it wouldn't
be farfetched to say that the mean coin Mania could have been a way of putting Solana's ecosystem on everyone's radar the next stage in that sense would be stable coin payments and this is where things get interesting there are multiple payment protocols building in Solana's ecosystem and one of these protocols is called Perina and in a December interview Perina founder and Yuan revealed just how deep salana is getting when it comes to stable coin payments and the like for example they're looking to make it possible to seamlessly switch between stable coins when they come from
the same issuer like py USD and usdp both of which are issued by paos at present this would require creating a liquidity pool for both on salana which is redundant and inefficient we strongly suggest giving that interview a watch if you're interested in this kind of stuff the link of course course will be down below and if you're not convinced that salana is about to make a big pivot into the so-called payi then look no further than the event the salana foundation did back in December it effectively involved shopping for Christmas gifts using shopify's salana
Pay integration and its blockchain links AKA blinks which makes it possible to integrate Solana's web3 payments into Web Two platforms like Facebook and X if you're wondering when exactly this pivot Could Happen our research suggests it could be sometime in mid-February and that's because there would be a payi focused Salon event on February 17th then again uh the event doesn't look that big so it may end up being a nothing Burger we'll have to wait and see one thing is for sure though salana needs to start focusing on more than meme coins if it wants
to continue staying relevant and this is something that Solana's other Founders are seem to be hyper aware of including Raj who seem to hint that deepen could be sana's next big thing in 2025 the only problem is that deepen is unlikely to drive demand for soul the same way that mem coins did and this of course brings me to the challenges that we foresee for salana and the first challenge is well competition it's hard to put into words just how Wild the crypto Market is going to get when Trump's proc crypto policies come into play
defi nft stable coin payments almost nothing nothing will be off limits but the key word being almost this is going to result in extreme competition between high performance blockchains as a fun fact Anatoli sees sui and Aptos as the primary competitors to salana due to their novel Virtual machines the same is apparently true for coinbase's base layer too albeit to a slightly lesser extent since it still uses the evm the thing is is that there are other blockchains that could jump into the ring such as ton coin which is reportedly targeting the US market after
a change in its leadership at the ton foundation in case you missed the memo ton coin is used by telegram one of the world's most popular messaging apps and this ties into sana's Second Challenge and that's development namely the risk of further outages as the fire dancer client is rolled out some of you might recall that in our previous salana update we flagged the fact that there was almost an outage on salana over the the summer last year as amusing as it is for these so-called salana Killers like SOI to have experienced outages of their
own the fact of the matter is that they've experienced far less of these than salana case in point that aforementioned survey of the biggest issues facing salana developers included transaction congestion if salana tries to address these pain points while simultaneously trying to onboard millions of users with things like stable coin payments its blockchain could EXP erence issues this would result in not only users but also developers leaving Solana's ecosystem for sui and base per the aforementioned survey with all that said though the challenges that salana faces pale into comparison to the advantages it has over
other blockchains most notably its accessibility and its ux it's actually mindblowing that the Phantom wallet flipped coinbase in not one but both mobile app stores that's not something to shrug off it's proof that salana front ends like Phantom are just as userfriendly if not more userfriendly than centralized equivalents it's safe to say that the prospect of becoming a mecoin millionaire is probably what Drew people to Phantom but this is arguably no different from speculating on altcoins on coinbase Solana's only challenge in this sense is how it can convince users to keep coming back when other
userfriendly wallets such such as Aptos Petra start gaining traction from our perspective the easiest solution to this problem is to do air drops for the crypto wallets just like salana did for its phones imagine a scenario where top crypto wallets like metamask and Phantom are announcing airdrops as a means of attracting users and tvl to their respective chains this is much more likely than you might think and it will be all but guaranteed under the right regulatory framework creating a truly wild crypto Market to be clear neither metam Masque nor Phantom have announced airdrops and
they've even gone out of their way to specify that they have quote no plans to launch a token the catch is that no plans doesn't mean it will never happen if other big wallets start doing it chances are they will follow that's a long-winded way of saying that 2025 is going to be an exciting year for crypto holders but an even more exciting year for crypto users and if you've never actually interacted with crypto protocols before we strongly suggest trying it out with a small amount of capital and there's no better place than salana now
if you enjoyed that salana update don't forget to check out our comparison video of salana and suie right over here and if you're not subscribed to the channel yet already well you can do that right over here that's me for now see you next time [Music]
