Solana Flips Tether Again to Reclaim Place as Fourth Largest Crypto

Despite backtracking from its historical all-time high, SOL, the native token of the Solana blockchain network, is striving to cement its position as the world’s fourth most valuable cryptocurrency.

Amid the overall crypto market surge, SOL has moved up to fourth place in the rankings. With a market capitalization of $75.02 billion, the asset is now above the industry’s largest stablecoin Tether (USDT).

The gap between the two coins is not huge though, with Tether’s current market cap standing at $74.49 billion, according to data from CoinGecko.

This is not the first time that SOL has flipped Tether. The so-called “Ethereum killer,” as the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) coin is sometimes referred to, hit an all-time high of $260 on Sunday, October 7, briefly overtaking both USDT and Cardano (ADA).

Ethereum is still the most popular blockchain for building decentralized applications (dApps), however. Still, it comes with a trade-off—due to increased interest in decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), transaction fees are often prohibitively high.

Solana, on the other hand, boasts fast and low-cost transactions, with fees as little as $0.001 – $0.002 per transaction, providing a viable alternative for users.

At the time of writing, SOL is trading hands at $248.4, up 1.2% over the day, and up 21.8% in the last week.

However, with both Bitcoin and Ethereum entering into previously uncharted price ranges, and the combined market cap of all cryptocurrencies soaring to $3.085 trillion, Solana is enjoying its share of glory as well.

One obvious reason for the influx of funds into the Solana network is the upcoming integration of Solana into the privacy-focused browser Brave.

Announced on Monday, the partnership between Brave and Solana will see the browser add support for SOL early next year. Currently, Brave has a built-in crypto wallet with support for Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum-based tokens.

Boasting more than 42 million monthly active users and 14 million daily users, Brave is now the third-most downloaded internet browser, after Opera and Google's Chrome, according to App Figures.

“With more and more users and creators requiring tools for fast and affordable access to the decentralized Web, this integration will seamlessly pave the way for the next billion crypto users to harness applications and tokens,” said Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave.

The integration between Solana and Brave was also bullish for the Basic Attention Token (BAT), Brave’s Ethereum-based token.

By press time, BAT is changing hands at $1.23, up 24.2% over the last day, according to CoinGecko.