Solana’s Near 300% Price Rally Recently Led by Institutional Buying on Coinbase, Data Suggests

The price of the smart contract platform Solana ($SOL) is up nearly 300% so far this year and over 50% in the last two weeks, with the rally seemingly mostly being driven by buying pressure on the Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

According to data from Kaiko, as CoinDesk first reported, the cumulative volume delta (CVD) flowing into SOL has risen by almost $1 million on Coinbase, a sign of more buying than selling. On Binance and Kraken, the net flow also turned positive earlier this week, while on Upbit, a South Korean exchange, it has been negative and falling for two weeks.

CVD is essentially a measure of the net buying and selling volume, providing a continuous summary of the market’s bullish or bearish forces. A positive CVD indicates a predominance of buying activity, whereas negative values denote the opposite.

Kaiko’s data reveals an uptick in SOL’s CVD on Coinbase, suggesting robust buying interest on the platform. Riyad Carey, an analyst at Kaiko, pointed out that the average order size for SOL on Coinbase has been higher compared to other exchanges, hinting that institutional players may be accumulating SOL via Coinbase.

The buying has also been seen elsewhere, as Solana-focused investment products have notably seen their assets under management rise by 74.1% in October to $140 million, according to CCData’s Digital Asset Management Review report.

Coinbase’s position at the forefront of the SOL market comes at a time in which VanEck, an institutional asset manager overseeing several billion dollars, set forth a bullish case for the cryptocurrency’s price showing it could go as high as $3,200 by 2030.

That bullish prediction is based on a scenario in which Solana becomes the first blockchain to host applications with more than 100 million users. Notably, the total value locked on Solana’s decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols has risen from around $200 million at the beginning of the year to around $414 million at the time of writing.

In SOL terms, however, data shows that the total value locked actually dropped from around 12 million SOL to 10.33 million SOL, according to DeFiLlama, showing that most of the growth in US dollar terms came from Solana’s near 300% rise so far this year.

Featured image via Unsplash.