A cluster of massive Solana whale wallets has transferred over $60 million worth of $SOL to the Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase in a series of transactions that suggests the funds were moved by a single entity.

According to data from whale monitoring service Whale Alert, a series of transactions worth between $12 million and $12.5 million of Solana were made to the US-based cryptocurrency trading platform within minutes of each other.

Whale Alert flagged these transactions, which showed between 599,999 and 554,000 SOL moving to wallets controlled by the cryptocurrency Exchange. All of the transactions, which totaled 2,954,427 SOL and amounted to nearly $70 million, were completed in less than two minutes, suggesting the possibility of a single entity behind them.

As the cryptocurrency was transferred to a crypto exchange, it could potentially be sold on the open market. The transactions incurred negligible fees and come after Solana’s price moved up significantly earlier this year as it recovers from the collapse of FTX and has developers keep building on it.

Solana is a blockchain network founded by former engineers from Qualcomm, Intel, and Dropbox that employs a delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) consensus algorithm to achieve high performance. The network implements a distinctive approach to ordering transactions that substantially enhances its speed and throughput.

Historically, blockchain networks have faced challenges in scalability, and the few that have overcome them have encountered centralization issues. However, the creation of Solana in 2017 addressed the difficulty of developing a decentralized network with short confirmation times and low transaction fees.

A report by Coinbase Institutional has stated that despite challenges including network outages and market downturns, Solana remains a strong competitor in the layer-1 blockchain space.

The report highlights Solana’s focus on native scalability, its unique timestamping function, and its high throughput, with the ability to process up to 65,000 transactions per second. Solana’s low-cost fee structure and technical capabilities are also noted as advantages.

The report suggests that Solana’s technical advantages combined with its products and services that cannot be executed on other blockchains may help it reassert itself as a genuine layer-1 competitor.

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