Solana is undoubtedly one of the hottest projects this year, with a lot of the community’s attention headed its way for quite some time now.

However, the past 7 days have been an absolutely wild ride for Solana’s price as it’s up around 90% over the period. The chart surely is impressive:

The astronomic rally saw SOL’s price head from slightly below $40 to today’s high at $75, and it also saw the interest in the cryptocurrency surge by about 15% in the same timeframe.

With this said, let’s take a look at some of the possible reasons for which the price of Solana increased so much in such a short time.

Broader Market Recover

Right off the bat, it’s important to note that Solana’s price isn’t the only thing increasing throughout the past week.

The entire market is painted green, as can be seen in the heatmap below.

It becomes clear that Solana is not the only cryptocurrency that’s charting notable gains – a lot of them are. Luna presents similar gains, while some larger-cap altcoins such as Cardano’s ADA and Ripple’s XRP are also well over 40% in the green.

The newfound bullishness in the market over the past month surely must have pushed Solana’s price on the positive trajectory – as it’s almost always the case within the cryptocurrency market.

NFT Mania and Degenerate Ape Academy

In the past few weeks, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are once again in the spotlight. Plenty of projects are building in this field, and the same is true for teams on Solana.

One of the most recent efforts in the field of NFTs is the Degenerate Ape Academy. In essence, it’s a platform that minted 10,000 Ape-themed NFTs, and users were able to mint them at the cost of 6 SOL a pop.

The first minting process was a failure as the platform was overloaded with demand, but they managed it on the second go, and all 10,000 apes sold out in less than 10 minutes, creating some serious hype in the community. Here’s just an example of how the apes are sketched:

All apes have different traits with various rarities. For instance, the hat might be super rare while the shirt – just common, and so forth.

The founder of Arweave – Sam Williams – took it to Twitter to reveal that the daily request on the platform reached a height of 60 million requests per day. Moreover, when the Degenerate Ape Academy NFTs dropped, their platform received 1 million requests in a single minute.

In any case, it’s unclear whether or not this project alone was responsible for the huge uptick in demand for SOL, but it’s definitely part of the reason.

Overall Growth of Solana

The community of Solana is booming across the board, with many proponents highlighting its benefits over competing blockchains such as Ethereum.

Audius – a project focused on music streaming, is one of the more popular ones in the entire space – it has over 1 million monthly listeners. It has moved to Solana and also recently announced a TikTok integration where users can share tracks directly from Audius to TikTok.

Another thing to consider is the first-ever Solana-organized conference. Break Point will take place in November, and it’s going to be in Lisbon. Some of the speakers include Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder, and CEO at Circle, Sam Bankman-Fried – CEO at FTX, Meltem Demirors  CSO at CoinShares, and many more.