Top Ethereum Rival Could Become the ‘Visa’ of Crypto Assets, According to Bank of America Analyst

Bank of America analyst says smart contract platform Solana (SOL) could become the “Visa” of digital assets.

According to a new report, Alkesh Shah says that while top altcoin Ethereum (ETH) prioritizes decentralization and security at the expense of scalability, SOL does the opposite, making it a prime candidate to eat into ETH’s market share.

“[Solana’s] innovations allow for the processing of an industry-leading 65,000 transactions per second with average transaction fees of $0.000025 while remaining relatively decentralized and secure.”

According to Shah, Solana’s blockchain is optimized for micropayments associated with gaming and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). As such, the network is compared to Visa’s payments platform..

“Solana could become the Visa of the digital assets ecosystem.

Ethereum’s prioritization could optimize it for high-value transactions and identity, storage, and supply chain use cases.”

SOL has seen its price soar over 4000% in the last year, vastly outpacing Ethereum in terms of growth while bringing its market cap up to $47 billion. Since its launch in March 2020, Solana has seen more than 50 billion settled transactions and more than 5.7 million NFTs minted on its blockchain, per the report.

Though praised for its speed, SOL has made headlines recently over its performance issues. The blockchain has been plagued with long wait periods and network congestion due to distributed-denial-of-service attacks that occurred both in December and January.

SOL is exchanging hands at $150 at time of writing, a 12.5% increase from its seven-day low of $133. ETH is trading for $3,266, an 8.5% increase over the same period.

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