once upon a time many soul holders were predicting
that Salana would surpass $1,000 These days though many are wondering if Salana will ever
shake off its reputation as a memecoin casino Meanwhile Salana has continued building Promising
crypto projects in its ecosystem have continued gaining adoption and now public companies are
starting to buy billions of dollars worth of soul And this begs the question of whether Salana
could make an epic comeback and whether Soul could still hit that 4 figure target Today we aim
to find the answer My name is Nick and if you hold Salana this is a video you cannot afford to miss
Before we get started it’s important to note that nothing in this video is financial advice It’s
educational content intended to inform you about Salana Also do note that many members of the Coin
Bureau team do hold Soul as part of their personal crypto portfolios but you can rest assured that
this won’t affect today’s video And if you want to know what other cryptos we hold then uh become
a member of the Coin Bureau Club That’s where we do weekly reviews of promising small cap altcoins
share alpha about upcoming crypto catalysts every day and discuss the next hot narratives in our
Discord The link will be down below Now it’s been about 3 months since we last covered Salana
but a lot has happened since then In retrospect we basically reviewed Salana at its local top Trump’s
memecoin had just launched and the resulting frenzy sent Soul skyrocketing to new highs before
experiencing an epic crash Now for context this was at the end of January when there were still
high expectations for the massive bull market the Trump administration would supposedly deliver
As many of you will know these expectations were not met and the crypto market was dragged through
the mud in February Obviously that was because of Trump’s tariff threats which began around that
time But let’s back up Prior to Trump’s tariff threats there were two Salana updates that seemed
to have flown completely under the radar And the first was the fact that the launch of the Trump
and Melania meme coins had caused the supply of stable coins on Salana primarily USDC to balloon
past $10 billion And this was because both the Trump and Melania meme coins were pulled against
USDC not sold like 99.99% of other meme coins And this means that everyone who bought Trump or
Melania first had to buy USDC either directly or indirectly which caused the supply to increase And
what’s fascinating is that even though Trump and Melania have since collapsed the supply of USDC on
Salana didn’t and it continues to grow Anyways the second Salana update that everyone seems to have
missed was the news that Virtual’s protocol had expanded to Salana Now for reference virtuals is
arguably the most popular protocol for AI agents and it first caused a buzz late last year when it
launched on base And if you watched our subsequent review of Virtuals you’ll know that it had been
planning a launch on Salana for a while But of course this was all completely overshadowed by the
memecoin scandal that followed a few weeks later The TLDDR is that the Argentinian president
shilled a memecoin that turned out to be a rugpool In contrast to prior memecoin rugps
this essentially revealed the dirt underneath And that’s because it implicated some of Salana’s
top protocols including Meteora and Jupiter whose founders allegedly had prior knowledge of
the memecoin launch And the result was the resignation of one of Meteora’s co-founders and
a collapse of trust in Salana’s ecosystem Throw in a bearish macro backdrop because of tariffs
and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a massive crash which is exactly what Solano got Soul fell
by 40% in February and the total draw down from the local top in January to the local bottom in
April was a staggering 66% Not surprisingly the sentiment around Salana fell even harder with many
saying that Salana had even topped for this cycle However in recent weeks Salana has rallied
50% from the lows and is showing early signs of a proper recovery And this means the story
may not be over just yet And the developments that Salana has seen since February suggest that
what lies ahead could be even better than what for Salana First Trump announced that the US would
establish a quote crypto strategic reserve that includes XRP Soul and ADA Funnily enough Salana
founder Anatoli Yakaveno wasn’t too keen on the announcement worrying that it would threaten the
decentralization of the cryptos in question and some would argue that Salana is already pretty
centralized In any case so Trump’s announcement was followed by an actual executive order which
specified that the crypto strategic reserve would actually be a quote digital asset stockpile
consisting of cryptos that the US government had already seized And notably the executive order
also specified that the exact cryptos included in the stockpile would be identified within 60
days of that order which was last week No updates at the time of shooting but chances are that Soul
will be included especially given Trump’s previous announcement Regardless the second bullish
tailwind for Salana in March was the launch of Salana futures on the CME which happened in
mid-March Now for those unfamiliar it’s believed that CME futures contracts are a prerequisite for
the SEC to approve the spot Salana ETFs and this is part of why Bloomberg’s ETF analysts recently
increased the chances of a spot Salana ETF approval in 2025 to 90% As you can see the final
decision date for the Spotana ETF is estimated to be sometime in early October this year And it’s
possible that the SEC will approve the ETF much sooner than that now that Paul Atkins the new pro
crypto SEC chair has been approved and taken his post Another factor that could improve the chances
of a Salana ETF being approved is Kristen Smith’s decision to join the Salana Policy Institute Now
for those unfamiliar Kristen was the CEO of the Blockchain Association which is effectively the
most powerful cryptolobbying group in America Her decision to pivot to focus exclusively on
Salana could therefore foreshadow regulations that are positive for it Whatever the case the
third bullish tailwind in March was Black Rockck launching its Bidd Salana As many of you will know
Black Rockck is the world’s largest asset manager and Bidd is its tokenized realworld asset product
Logically if Black Rockck feels comfortable enough to launch Bidd on Salana then any concerns around
things like congestion and outages are probably no longer valid April though was when things
started getting seriously interesting for Salana And that’s because two public companies announced
that they would collectively buy 1.5 billion worth of soul And the first was DeFi Development Corp
formerly known as Janova a real estate firm that was acquired by former executives of the Kraken
Exchange And the second was Soul Strategies which uh shouldn’t be surprising given the name
Soul Strategies announced that it had raised $500 million to buy Soul at the end of April and
recently announced that it has started doing so with this money Similarly DeFi Development
Corp announced that he planned to raise $1 billion to buy soul at the end of April and
recently bought a nice big bag of it And if you watched our recent video about the publicly traded
companies that have been accumulating soul you’ll know that they’ve purchased over 625,000 soul and
counting and that they plan on purchasing another 10 to 11 million more with their massive cash
piles And this would offset about half of Salana’s annual inflation which could be reduced as part of
a recent governance proposal More about that later The key takeaway is that companies are starting
to buy soul in size and this sets the stage for a dynamic similar to what we’ve seen with BTC namely
Soul being more resilient during crashes and more explosive during rallies And this effect could be
amplified once the spot Salana ETFs are approved Throw in stable coin payments on Salana after
stable coin regulations pass and it seems possible that Soul could hit that $1,000 target that
everyone has been eyeing And FYI PayPal one of the world’s largest payment processors is working to
expand the adoption of its PYUSD stable coin and will use Salana as its main payment rail And it’s
safe to say that this could have lots of investors Apin into soul Oh I didn’t see you there Well now
that I’ve got you I may as well let you know about waiting for and that’s Soul’s current price action
and future potential As I mentioned earlier it has taken a battering in recent months Some of you
might recall that we had flagged this crash risk as we noticed that Salana’s onchain activity
was starting to fall The bad news is that this onchain activity continues to be sluggish which
suggests that Soul’s recovery could also be slow The good news is that this onchain activity
appears to have bottomed which suggests that it could start to move higher along with soul’s price
And this begs the question of what the catalyst will be that triggers a soul recovery And it’s
possible that the answer will be AI agents And that’s simply because AI agents are analogous to
memecoins In practical terms this means that AI agents have the potential to create the same
demand for soul that memecoins did last year And as we saw with the virtual token AI agent
related hype can be enough to take a crypto’s price vertical It goes without saying that soul
is much larger So the chance of it going vertical because of AI agents is pretty low The caveat is
that Salana is much more than a memecoin casino It’s a generalpurpose layer 1 blockchain that
supports dozens of use cases many of which are likely to see true mass adoption As it so happens
it appears that Salana has been targeting two use cases in particular Deepen and payments On the
deepen front we’ve seen Salana projects like Helium acquire hundreds of thousands of paying
users with the lowcost mobile plan it offers with the help of T-Mobile In fact some would say
that Salana is also a de facto DPIN blockchain as it hosts most of the biggest projects in this
niche As for payments I’ll remind you that we’re still waiting for stable coin regulations to pass
At the time of shooting the Senate is trying to push through the stable coin bill but is facing
setbacks because of Trump’s crypto affiliations and perceived conflicts of interest With a bit
of luck uh these hurdles will be overcome And if they are we could see stable coin regulations
passed as soon as the end of May The combination of a speculative wave around AI agents deepen
and stable coin payments could be the catalyst that cause soul to recover and push it to new
all-time highs The first step though is for it to get back above that key level of $180 And this
would confirm a recovery technically speaking And if you’ve been keeping up with our Salon updates
you’ll already know that we believe it’s possible that Soul could hit close to $1,000 And that’s
just because we believe it’s possible that it is following ETH one cycle behind ETH hit a market
cap of around $550 billion in the previous cycle Soul hitting a market cap of $550 billion would
therefore translate to a price of around $1,000 But there’s one big caveat and that’s that Salana
could lose market share to competitors the same way that Ethereum did in the previous cycle The
elephant in the room here is of course hyperlquid which is gobbling up market share for derivatives
dexes and is starting to expand to general purpose offerings Take a second to consider that
Salana’s original goal was practically to do what Hyperlid is doing now be the top trading
platform for tokenized assets Given this fact we believe that a more realistic estimate for
the sole cycle top could be something around $500 But I will reiterate that $1,000 is still
possible precisely because big buyers are showing up in the form of public companies and soon in
the form of spot ETFs Now whether Soul could rally to $1,000 ultimately depends on Salana’s upcoming
milestones And the first milestone is a potential reduction of its inflation rate In March Salana
validators narrowly rejected a proposal that would see inflation changed so that it would be based on
state supply like Ethereum While the proposal did not pass there continues to be a discussion about
changes to inflation The second milestone is one I’m sure you’ve all forgotten about and that’s
the launch of Salana’s Seeker phone A blog post from Salana Labs in January noted that the phone
would launch in mid 2025 Promotional content for Salana’s upcoming Accelerate Conference suggests
the launch could be announced about that time And in case you missed the memo Accelerate Conference
is from the 19th to the 23rd of May The third milestone is one I’m sure you all remember very
well and that’s the launch of the Fire Dancer client for validator nodes The TLDDR is that Fire
Dancer will make Salana exponentially faster than it is now Although there’s no exact release date
for Fire Dancer a recent validator discussion panel revealed that the date for Fire Dancer’s
launch could also be announced at the Accelerate conference The fourth and fifth milestones are
two that I mentioned earlier and that Salana doubling down on Deepen and Stablecoin payments
and this is something that Anatoli has mentioned in many interviews but I’ll repeat that we’re
probably going to need to see more meaningful regulations for these catalysts to take effect
As a fun fact Anatoli and other members of the Salana team have been asked whether they regret
the fact that Salana has become associated with memecoins Lo and behold they’ve started saying the
same thing that we’ve been saying in our previous reviews Memecoins were a net benefit because they
fundamentally stress tested the Salana blockchain If it can handle a memecoin craze then it can
handle anything All we wondering is how exactly Salana wants to position itself going forward Uh
for example Anatoli mentioned in an interview that the endgame with Salana’s phones is to disrupt
the duopoly of Apple and Android in the mobile scene And this would fit handin glove with the
focus around deepen projects like Helium which you’ll recall offer mobile services The thing
is that this might not be good news for Soul’s price And this brings me to the challenges that
we foresee for Salana And the first challenge is its association with memecoins The fact of the
matter is that Salana is still ground zero for most of the memecoin speculation Fortunately or
unfortunately there’s nothing the team can really do to change this From what we’ve seen this
seems to be a big turnoff for developers with many saying that the memecoin association is one
of Salana’s biggest issues in a survey concluded back in January And there seems to be something
to this as some crypto projects we’ve reviewed in the coin bureau club explicitly stated that
they decided against launching on Salana because of its memecoin association and that’s bad news
for future adoption The silver lining is that it seems that most retail investors have learned the
hard way that meme coins are one-way tickets to getting wrecked rather than actual investments And
this means the words memecoin and Salana should appear less frequently in the same sentence in
all of the crypto headlines And this ties into the second challenge though and that’s adoption
The double-edged sword of Salana’s memecoin saga was that it damaged the project’s reputation but
also reportedly onboarded millions of users to its ecosystem Now Salana needs to find a way to
keep its users and stuff like deepen probably isn’t going to cut it And that would explain why
stable coins are the primary focus But again we’re going to need to see stable coin regulations pass
for Salana to get any meaningful adoption on that front And as I mentioned earlier Trump’s ties
to the crypto industry are starting to stall crypto bills in Congress And this is bad news for
Soul whose future demand drivers are dependent on Salana unlocking new use cases that require
both stable coin regulations and broader crypto regulations For what it’s worth the fact that
Salana continues to have the most userfriendly frontends means it’s perfectly positioned not only
to keep its existing users but also expand its user base And this is a not so subtle reference
to Phantom which could someday offer airdrops to incentivize new and existing users However
this relates to the third challenge and that’s development Uh perhaps we’re mistaken but Salana
seems to be lagging behind its competitors when it comes to development And a big one here is
SUI which has been vertically integrating its architecture and shipping products left and
right In plain English Salana’s competitors are moving faster and that’s mostly because
they’re more centralized in their architecture and organization And this pertains to something
we’ve mentioned in many of our altcoin reviews And that’s that when it comes to layer 1’s it’s
a race to the bottom in terms of centralization uh the most centralized crypto will eventually win
because it will be the fastest and the cheapest In other words Salana might not be centralized
enough to compete with the next generation layer ones like Hyperlquid And this sounds crazy
but it seems to be playing out before our eyes Salana needs to coordinate its ecosystem more
effectively if it wants to stay ahead Thankfully this seems to be happening with Salana Labs
finally launching a full website complete with blog posts and milestones And that’s why many
members of the Coin Bureau team still hold Salana as part of their personal portfolios and still
believe that it has amazing potential Even though this potential could be getting smaller because
of competition Salana remains the most dominant layer 1 by a wide margin across multiple metrics
All it needs to do is to maintain this lead and ideally increase it and its price will eventually
reflect this reality Okay our thoughts on Salana I hope you found them useful And if you want
to learn more about Hyperlid then check out our video on that right over here And if you’re
not subscribed to the channel yet you can do that right over here That’s me for now Thank you
very much for watching and I’ll see you again soon
