Crypto World

Solana price climbs back above $90 as upgrade narrative meets heavy trading

Published

4 weeks ago

25 March 2026

Solana price rises back above $90 with multi-billion-dollar volume as traders bet on congestion fixes, the Alpenglow upgrade, and SOL’s role as a leading high-throughput layer-1.

Summary

Solana price is trading around $92–$93 today, with a market cap near $52.9 billion and 24-hour volume of roughly $4.2–$4.4 billion.
The layer-1 token has gained about 3.3% over the past 24 hours and roughly 2.8% in the last seven days, outpacing the broader market’s 1.3% daily rise.
Ongoing work to address network congestion and upcoming protocol upgrades are helping shape Solana’s position as a high-throughput Ethereum rival despite its history of outages.

Solana (SOL) price is changing hands around $92.39 today, up 0.62% in the last hour, 3.27% over the past 24 hours and 2.78% in the past week, giving it a market capitalization of about $52.88 billion and 24-hour trading volume near $4.18 billion. External dashboards place SOL’s current price in the $92.02–$92.64 band, with a circulating supply of roughly 572.25 million tokens, a market cap of around $52.65–$52.89 billion and 24-hour volume between about $4.34 billion and $4.39 billion. Over the past several sessions in March, daily closes have clustered roughly in an $86–$94 range, confirming a consolidation phase after a volatile start to the month.

Solana price climbs back above $90 as upgrade narrative meets heavy trading - 1 — SOL price 3-month chart, source: TradingView

That performance is unfolding in a firm market: the total crypto market cap stands near $2.45 trillion, up about 1.31% over the last day, putting Solana among the stronger large-cap performers over the same period. In earlier March snapshots, SOL traded around $84.56 with a market cap of $48.18 billion and 24-hour volume of $5.40 billion, then climbed toward the mid-$90 area with a market capitalization near $54 billion and daily volume described as “moderate,” highlighting a steady recovery rather than a single spike. Together, these figures point to a liquid, actively traded market where price is being driven by both spot demand and derivatives positioning.

Solana is a high-throughput layer-1 blockchain that combines a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism with a timing technique called proof of history, which allows validators to order transactions more efficiently and target tens of thousands of transactions per second. The network has become a core venue for decentralized finance, NFTs, and consumer apps, with SOL serving as the native asset for transaction fees, staking and collateral, firmly placing it in the layer-1 smart contract platform category rather than a DeFi protocol or AI token. Historically, this speed-focused design has come with a trade-off: Solana has experienced multiple outages and congestion episodes, including several multi-hour network halts in 2023 and earlier, which pushed developers and validators to prioritize stability improvements.

More recently, the project has been preparing a major core protocol overhaul known as Alpenglow, described as the most significant reconsideration of Solana’s architecture to date and expected in the first half of 2026. Community governance records show that about 98% of participating token holders backed the upgrade in a 2025 vote, indicating broad internal support for changes aimed at improving decentralization, throughput and fee dynamics. In parallel, client teams have rolled out updates such as version 1.17.31 and follow-on releases to mitigate persistent network congestion and transaction failures that surfaced during recent periods of high meme-coin and NFT activity.

Although detailed whale transaction feeds for Solana are spread across multiple analytics sites, available market metrics demonstrate heavy participation by larger traders and leveraged players. Historical data shows that on March 25, 2026, SOL traded in a $90.82–$93.21 band with daily volume around 4.43 billion units, corresponding to multi-billion-dollar turnover at current prices. Another dataset cites a volume-to-market-cap ratio near 8.2–8.3%, based on roughly $4.34–$4.39 billion in volume against a market cap just above $52.6 billion, a level of activity consistent with ongoing directional trading and derivatives hedging rather than solely passive holding.

Sector-wide, Solana is part of a cluster of alternative layer-1 networks that includes Ethereum, Avalanche and Sui, all of which compete on smart contract capacity but with different trade-offs in fees, security models and decentralization. Today, Ethereum trades around $2,180 with a market cap of about $263.11 billion and 24-hour volume near $19.19 billion, while Avalanche changes hands around $9.74 with a market cap of $4.21 billion and $262.28 million in daily volume, and Sui trades near $0.969 with a market cap of $3.78 billion and $382.72 million in 24-hour volume. This positions Solana as one of the most valuable and actively traded non-Ethereum smart contract platforms, a status that has persisted despite its checkered stability history and now rests heavily on the successful delivery of congestion fixes and the Alpenglow upgrade.

Within that broader landscape, Solana’s latest push back above $90 looks like a textbook consolidation rally in a flagship layer-1: price grinding higher in a defined range, supported by billions in daily volume and a clear catalyst path in the form of protocol upgrades and congestion relief.

Source link

Crypto World

LayerZero Says Kelp Setup Caused Exploit, as Aave Loss Questions Mount

Published

4 minutes ago

20 April 2026

NewsAdmin

LayerZero Says Kelp Setup Caused Exploit, as Aave Loss Questions Mount

Interoperability protocol LayerZero claims that an inadequate setup tied to Kelp’s decentralized verifier network (DVN) enabled malicious actors to steal $290 million from Kelp DAO, adding that preliminary signs point to North Korea-linked threat actors.

An attacker drained about 116,500 Restaked ETH (rsETH), worth as much as $293 million at the time, from Kelp DAO’s LayerZero-powered rsETH bridge on Saturday.

LayerZero said Monday that the exploit stemmed from a single point of failure in Kelp’s setup, which relied on a single LayerZero DVN as the only verified path, despite LayerZero previously advising them against this.

“LayerZero and other external parties previously communicated best practices around DVN diversification to KelpDAO. Despite these recommendations, KelpDAO chose to utilize a 1/1 DVN configuration.”

In practice, that meant Kelp relied on a single verification path for cross-chain messages rather than requiring multiple independent checks.

The exploit quickly shifted attention from the technical cause to the question of who should absorb the losses, while the fallout spread into Aave, where the attacker used rsETH as collateral to borrow real liquidity.

Aave’s total value locked (TVL) had fallen by about $8.9 billion to $17.5 billion at the time of writing after the exploiter used the stolen funds to borrow on Aave, leaving about $195 million in “bad debt,” triggering withdrawals on the lending protocol.

LayerZero said Kelp’s rsETH bridge relied solely on the LayerZero Labs DVN, and argued that the incident reflected an unsafe application configuration rather than a compromise of LayerZero itself. The company said it is now urging all applications using 1/1 DVN setups to migrate to multi-DVN configurations and will stop signing or attesting messages for apps that retain the single verifier design.

Losses spark blame fight after $290 million Kelp exploit

With no recovery or compensation plan yet announced, users and market observers spent Monday debating whether losses should sit with Kelp DAO, LayerZero, Aave or rsETH holders themselves.

Yishi Wang, founder and CEO of open-source hardware wallet OneKey, said that the best path forward was to negotiate with the hacker, offer a 10% to 15% bounty, and get the bulk of the funds back.

“If negotiations fail, LayerZero’s ecosystem fund should foot the bulk of the bill—it’s got the deepest pockets and the most long-term skin in the game,” wrote the founder in a Monday X post, adding that Kelp DAO is “broke” and could make it up with tokens and future revenue, or consider selling the project.

Analytics platform DeFiLlama’s pseudonymous founder, 0xngmi, outlined three solutions, including the option to “socialize” losses among all users, “rug rsETH holders on L2s,” or try to return holder balances to a pre-hack snapshot, which would be “very hard to do,” he wrote in a Monday X post.

Cointelegraph reached out to Aave for comment, but had not received a response by publication.

Exploit raises Aave liquidation risks

Investor concerns about the Kelp exploit have significantly reduced Ether (ETH) liquidity on Aave, the lending protocol’s core collateral asset.

This low liquidity presents a “critical safety risk where liquidations of ETH collateral cannot take place while markets are at 100% utilization,” said MoneySupply, the pseudonymous head of strategy at Aave competitor lending protocol Spark, in a Saturday X post.

“With current illiquidity conditions on Aave, a 15-20% ETHUSD price drop could cause significant bad debt accumulation (on top of any potential issues attributable to the direct rsETH exploit),” he said.