Solana continues its bull run into early trading on Tuesday as investors eagerly look forward to the unveiling of the ‘Ignition’ event later in the day, climbing higher in optimism that it could further boost its appeal among users, projects and investors. At the time of writing, SOL/USDT is trading at around $118, heading towards new all-time highs.

A strong competitor to Ethereum in the DeFi space, Solana hit a new ATH in the previous session and is now trading just below this level, registering daily gains of over 17% and weekly gains of almost 50%. The possibilities of what Ignition could be vary from a liquidity mining program to grants for developers working on interesting dApp projects or for NFT creators. The teaser video and webpage offer little information so far except for the fact that it will run from August 31 until October 8.

So far this year, Solana has strengthened by more than 6,000%, making it one of the most exciting blockchain networks of the year. The meteoric rise of DeFi and NFTs has been one of the biggest drivers of this strong bullishness as the blockchain boasts one of the highest transaction speeds and efficiencies, making it an attractive platform for such projects.

Solana’s performance in 2021 has caught the eye of institutional investors as well, driving significant inflows into the cryptocurrency in recent weeks. Last week, Osprey Funds registered the Osprey Solana Trust with the US SEC – an attempt to give wealthy investors an opportunity to invest in this digital asset.

With crypto investors looking to do more than just trade cryptocurrencies, the focus on DEXs, DeFi projects and NFTs has soared lately. One such project on the Solana blockchain – Soldex, offers traders AI-powered algorithms for efficient trading. Making the most of the super-fast transaction speeds offered by the network, the DEX also empowers users by giving them the ability to conduct transactions in real-time, participate in community governance and even provides incentivized liquidity as a way for them to earn interest on locked funds within the DEX. Such projects can drive up more interest in the blockchain and attract more users to the network, supporting the value of the SOL token going forward.

Solana’s capabilities in the DeFi space received an additional boost after decentralized data oracle Pyth Network went live on its ecosystem late last week. Pyth Network will send real world data into the Solana blockchain, gathering data from prominent providers including FTX, Jump Trading, CoinShares, and more. In addition, it plans to offer interoperability protocols so that data can move between Solana and other leading blockchains in the space, such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Terra, offering higher levels of versatility and scalability to both projects and users.

Key Levels to Watch

Technical analysis of the H4 chart of SOL/USDT reveals a strong bullish bias among moving averages as well as leading technical indicators MACD and momentum. Solana’s price stays comfortably above the pivot point at $86.03 and has broken past resistance at $106.02 and at $117.82.

Buyers can take the SOL even higher smoothly until they face resistance again at $149.61.