After some volatile days, Solana (SOL) has broken out of a three-day downtrend, fueling inventors’ bullish sentiment for its short-term performance. A crypto analyst suggested that SOL might be preparing to surpass $300 soon if a key level is reclaimed.

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Solana Holds Despite Volatility

Solana, the fifth-largest crypto by market capitalization, has performed remarkably over the last week, fueled by US President Donald Trump’s token launch.

Last Friday, President Trump launched his official memecoin, TRUMP, on the Solana network after months of speculation and fake launches. The launch kickstarted a three-day crypto market frenzy that propelled TRUMP to an all-time high (ATH) of $75 and a market capitalization of $15 billion.

Amid the frenzy, Solana jumped 25% in 24 hours, hitting $270 before climbing another 9.5% to its new ATH of $295.83. Moreover, Solana’s Total Value Locked (TVL) surpassed its 2021 record of $10.02 billion and hit $12.1 billion on Sunday, DeFiLlama data shows.

Analyst Rekt Capital noted that Solana needed a weekly close above $250 followed by a possible retest to confirm its breakout from the re-accumulation range. However, the second launch of a Trump-related memecoin sent SOL’s price 12% down, closing the week at $241.

On Sunday afternoon, Us First Lady Melania Trump announced her official memecoin, MELANIA, on social media. The token received heavy backlash from the community, and the crypto market saw a 6.6% correction in a few hours, with Bitcoin dipping below momentarily $100,000.

Despite the correction, SOL held above the weekend breakout levels, hovering between the $230 to $270 price range over the last three days but failing to hold above $260 for most of this period.

SOL Preparing For Jump To $300

On Wednesday, Solana’s price saw a 10% surge to $264 before retracing. Crypto analyst Jelle highlighted that the “SOL hourly chart just looks like it wants another stab at $300 this month.”

The analyst pointed out that the cryptocurrency had broken out of its three-day “Post-trump shitcoin launch downtrend,” while indicators like moving averages were “back to bullish.” The post also noted that SOL’s recent performance was trying to reclaim November highs.

According to Jelle, the cryptocurrency displays bullish momentum and is “on the edge of entering price discovery” like BTC. He also noted that Solana has turned its previous high against its Ethereum (ETH) trading pair into support.

As a result, reclaiming the $260 range could propel SOL’s price to new highs. “Reclaim $264, and all bets are off,” he stated. Similarly, Nebraskangooner shared a positive outlook for Solana, noting that it is “consolidating right at all-time highs… no reason to think this doesn’t melt up from here.”

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Analyst Byzantine General suggested there could be “a bit more chop because we are at OI resistance, but it might have already bottomed out,” but concluded that Solana “looks pretty good” in the short term.

As of this writing, SOL is trading at $255, a 2.5% increase in the daily timeframe.

Featured Image from Unsplash.com, Chart from TradingView.com

AI companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic want you to believe we’re on the cusp of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—a world where AI tools can outthink humans, handle complex professional tasks without breaking a sweat, and chart a new frontier of autonomous intelligence. Google just rehired the founder of Character.AI to accelerate its quest for AGI, OpenAI recently released its first “reasoning” model, and Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei says AGI could be achieved as early as 2026.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: in the quest for AGI in high-stakes fields like medicine, law, veterinary advice, and financial planning, AI isn’t just “not there yet,” it may never get there.

The Hard Facts on AI’s Shortcomings

This prediction is based on several decades of research that my colleagues and I have been undertaking at the University of Oxford to establish what makes people willing to fight and die for their groups. We use a variety of methods, including interviews, surveys, and psychological experiments to collect data from a wide range of groups, such as tribal warriors, armed insurgents, terrorists, conventional soldiers, religious fundamentalists, and violent football fans.

We have found that life-changing and group-defining experiences cause our personal and collective identities to become fused together. We call it “identity fusion.” Fused individuals will stop at nothing to advance the interests of their groups, and this applies not only to acts we would applaud as heroic—such as rescuing children from burning buildings or taking a bullet for one’s comrades—but also acts of suicide terrorism.

Fusion is commonly measured by showing people a small circle (representing you) and a big circle (representing your group) and placing pairs of such circles in a sequence so that they overlap to varying degrees: not at all, then just a little bit, then a bit more, and so on until the little circle is completely enclosed in the big circle. Then people are asked which pair of circles best captures their relationship with the group. People who choose the one in which the little circle is inside the big circle are said to be “fused.” Those are people who love their group so much that they will do almost anything to protect it.

This isn’t unique to humans. Some species of birds will feign a broken wing to draw a predator away from their fledglings. One species—the superb fairy wren of Australasia—lures predators away from their young by making darting movements and squeaky sounds to imitate the behavior of a delectable mouse. Humans too will typically go to great lengths to protect their genetic relatives, especially their children who (except for identical twins) share more of their genes than other family members. But—unusually in the animal kingdom—humans often go further still by putting themselves in harm’s way to protect groups of genetically unrelated members of the tribe. In ancient prehistory, such tribes were small enough that everyone knew everybody else. These local groups bonded through shared ordeals such as painful initiations, by hunting dangerous animals together, and by fighting bravely on the battlefield.

Nowadays, however, fusion is scaled up to vastly bigger groups, thanks to the ability of the world’s media—including social media—to fill our heads with images of horrendous suffering in faraway regional conflicts.

When I met with one of the former leaders of the terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, he told me he first became radicalized in the 1980s after reading newspaper reports about the treatment of fellow Muslims by Russian soldiers in Afghanistan. Twenty years later, however, nearly a third of American extremists were radicalized via social media feeds, and by 2016 that proportion had risen to about three quarters. Smartphones and immersive reporting shrinks the world to such an extent that forms of shared suffering in face-to-face groups can now be largely recreated and spread to millions of people across thousands of miles at the click of a button.

Fusion based on shared suffering may be powerful, but is not sufficient by itself to motivate violent extremism. Our research suggests that three other ingredients are also necessary to produce the deadly cocktail: outgroup threat, demonization of the enemy, and the belief that peaceful alternatives are lacking. In regions such as Gaza, where the sufferings of civilians are regularly captured on video and shared around the world, it is only natural that rates of fusion among those watching on in horror will increase. If people believe that peaceful solutions are impossible, violent extremism will spiral.

Labour’s plan to drag pensions into inheritance tax will be a “slow-motion car crash” that could see grieving families hit with tax rates of up to 90 per cent on inherited pensions, Britain’s leading wealth management firms have warned.

The heads of firms managing £430billion for British savers have launched a coordinated attack on Rachel Reeves’ proposals to apply inheritance tax to undrawn pension pots.

The bosses of Hargreaves Lansdown, AJ Bell, Interactive Investor and Quilter have called on the Government to reverse the plans announced in the October Budget

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