Early on Monday, Solana (SOL) is holding mostly steady, keeping in line with a positive mood in the wider crypto sector despite China terming crypto transactions and mining as illegal on Friday – the most severe clampdown against cryptocurrencies till date. At the time of writing, SOL/USDT is trading at around $146.89.

Despite its network suffering an outage recently, investor interest in Solana continues to remain strong while its adoption is also on the rise. SolRazr – the blockchain’s first decentralized developer ecosystem offering a launchpad, accelerator and developer tools, announced an airdrop 100,000 of its tokens ahead of its IDO to drive up adoption.

On the fundamentals front, Solana’s DeFi capabilities have received a boost from Mercurial Finance’s recently launched liquidity pool for Wormhole wrapped stablecoins. Similar to Curve Finance on Ethereum, Mercurial Finance is a DEX that will allow users to swap like-assets such as two different stablecoins, and will allow the use of bridged stablecoins on the Solana blockchain. With this development, users can provide liquidity to the cross-chain pool in USDC, wUSDC, uUSDT and wDAI, gaining an APY of almost 160%.

The SOL token’s bullish moves could gain additional support from Hong-Kong based crypto exchange Coinsuper listing it for trading against the US dollar on its platform. Coinsuper announced the addition of the world’s seventh largest cryptocurrency, Solana, on its platform starting on 24 September with promotional offers giving traders 50% discount on its transaction fees until the end of this month.

Can Avalanche Unseat Solana in Popularity?

However, the ultra-fast blockchain network could face some competition from the emergence of another potential Ethereum killer, Avalanche. After announcing a recent network upgrade, the blockchain network has seen its largest DeFi project, Trader Joe, experience a surge in TVL over the past week. It also promises high transaction speeds and low transaction processing costs and has seen its TVL in DeFi projects soar over the past few weeks, ever since its announcement of a liquidity mining incentive program, Avalanche Rush.

Key Levels to Watch

On the H4 chart of SOL/USDT, almost all moving averages along with leading technical indicators MACD and momentum are signaling a strong bullish bias among investors. Solana’s price is sitting comfortably above the pivot point at $135.02.

Further bullishness in the cryptocurrency can see a test of the immediate resistance level at $154.05. A break above this can see buyers take the price past $160 and $170 as well until they encounter resistance again at $172.45.