1 | From Winter Laggard to Spring Leader

When 2024 closed, many analysts had written Solana off as “just another alt rally that fizzled.” Yet by late-May 2025 SOL has clawed from a January base near $90 to trade in the mid-$170s—out-pacing both ETH and the broader CoinDesk Market Index. Three forces explain the reversal: a maturing DeFi stack, a forthcoming consensus overhaul, and dramatically lower outage frequency.

CoinDesk

2 | Alpenglow: the Headline Catalyst

On 21 May developers published Alpenglow, a proposal to swap Solana’s Proof-of-History/Tower-BFT combo for a “Votor + Rotor” design that targets sub-second finality—a 100× speed jump over today’s ~13 s averages. If main-net validators ratify the change later this year, Solana would leapfrog every major L1 on throughput, opening the door to real-time trading, gaming, and IoT use-cases.

CoinDesk

DL News

3 | Firedancer & the Block-Space Doubling

Speed is useless if bottlenecks lurk in the validator client. Thankfully, Jump Crypto’s Firedancer client has been chewing through test-net milestones since late-2024 and is on track for a 2025 main-net slot. Internal benchmarks show 10× transaction-per-second gains and a dramatic cut in resource requirements. In parallel, the core team plans to double block space, easing the fee-spike episodes that plagued NFT mints in 2023.

Blockworks

Solana Compass

4 | Ecosystem Health Check

TVL & DEX volumes: Weekly DEX turnover hit $22.4 B in May, while total value locked climbed to $9.4 B, its highest since the FTX shock.

Wallet growth: More than 11 M addresses now hold at least 0.1 SOL—a simple but telling diffusion metric.

Permission-less innovation: Confidential transfers, private order-books, and Saga-native “xNFTs” are drawing developers who might have defaulted to Ethereum L2s a year ago.

CoinDesk

5 | Technical View—What the Chart Says

Trend: Price rides a clean ascending channel that began in early April; the 7-, 25- and 99-day moving averages are fanned bullishly ($172 / $166 / $145).

Resistance: $178–180 is the final daily close barrier before psychological $200.

Support: Mid-channel & MA 25 (~$165); deeper trend invalidation only kicks in below $145.

Momentum: Spot volume expands on green candles, while derivatives open interest has fallen—a healthy divergence that implies rallies aren’t purely leverage-driven.

A decisive daily close above $180 would place price in the “fresh-air zone” last visited during the 2021 blow-off. Failure to hold $165, however, opens a vacuum to $150 and even $135.

6 | Macro & Competitive Landscape

Bitcoin dominance has stalled near 49 %, freeing risk capital for large-cap alts. Ethereum’s Cancun/Dencun upgrade solved L2 fees but hasn’t yet lifted base-layer throughput. Meanwhile, TradFi giants (Visa, Shopify) continue to trial stable-coin rails on Solana—the sort of institutional validation that Cardano and Avalanche are still chasing. A global liquidity hiccup—think Fed re-tightening or a sharp BTC draw-down—remains the elephant in the room.

7 | Final Word

Solana enters summer 2025 as a rare crypto asset sporting both narrative juice (blistering speed upgrades) and actual usage growth (DEX volumes, active wallets). That combination was missing in prior hype cycles. While no blockchain is immune to macro shocks or self-inflicted bugs, the probability of SOL reclaiming its November 2021 all-time high (~$260) over the next 6-12 months looks materially higher than at any point since the FTX collapse. Strategic bulls have fresh technical levels to lean on; nimble bears have clean invalidation lines. Either way, volatility is opportunity—just manage it.