The market cap of Solana, a cryptocurrency connected with Decentralized Finance or DeFi, grew by 400 percent in the summer of 2021. Originally launched only in April 2020, the rapid growth in 2021 made the digital coin one of the biggest in the world in terms of market capitalization. The altcoin's move into the spotlight coincided with the growing interest in NFTs and especially DeFi, as Solana is one of the biggest blockchains in this world. It is seen as a direct competitor to Ethereum, in that it can power decentralized applications, but in a more efficient way. Solana is said, for instance, to reach transaction speeds that are similar to a VISA transaction whilst using far less energy than Bitcoin miners.

The dominance of Solana (SOL) almost tripled between July and August 2021, and continued to grow in the following months. Within the crypto world, this so-called "dominance" ratio is one of the oldest and most investigated metrics available. It measures the coin's market cap relative to the overall crypto market - for instance, it shows how strong Bitcoin is compared to all the other cryptocurrencies that are not BTC, called "altcoins". In the case of Solana, the dominance somewhat reveals how often it is used for smart contracts and whether it is a popular blockchain for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) applications.

Detailed Market cap (fully diluted) metrics and analytics for Solana, including historical data and trends.

Following NFT hype and growing demand in the DeFi community, the price of cryptocurrency Solana or SOL more than tripled during the summer of 2021. This had all but evaporated by the end of 2022, as a price of 143.82 U.S. dollars for SOL on March 25, 2025 was similar to the price of Solana in early 2021. The collapse of crypto trader FTX in 2022 especially impacted the cryptocurrency, as FTX and its sister firm Alameda Research sold a large amount of the coin in order to avoid bankruptcy. The Solana protocol is similar to Ethereum in that can allow for nun-fungible tokens to be created ('minted') or traded. Solana, however, uses a technology called 'PoH' or Proof of History, which allows it to reach high transaction speeds. The Solana Foundation - the creators of the protocol, based in Switzerland - claims they could reach up to 65,000 transactions per second compared to 16 for Ethereum. Additionally, Solano had no transaction fees or 'gas', unlike Ethereum, which had growing transaction costs. These two reasons combined - Solana being deemed cheaper and faster than Ethereum - turned this relatively young protocol into a breeding ground for NFT projects in August 2021.

A league table of the 120 cryptocurrencies with the highest market cap reveals how diverse each crypto is and potentially how much risk is involved when investing in one. Bitcoin (BTC), for instance, had a so-called "high cap" - a market cap worth more than 10 billion U.S. dollars - indicating this crypto project has a certain track record or, at the very least, is considered a major player in the cryptocurrency space. This is different in Decentralize Finance (DeFi), where Bitcoin is only a relatively new player. A concentrated market The number of existing cryptocurrencies is several thousands, even if most have a limited significance. Indeed, Bitcoin and Ethereum account for nearly 75 percent of the entire crypto market capitalization. As crypto is relatively easy to create, the range of projects varies significantly - from improving payments to solving real-world issues, but also meme coins and more speculative investments. Crypto is not considered a payment method While often talked about as an investment vehicle, cryptocurrencies have not yet established a clear use case in day-to-day life. Central bankers found that usefulness of crypto in domestic payments or remittances to be negligible. A forecast for the world's main online payment methods took a similar stance: It predicts that cryptocurrency would only take up 0.2 percent of total transaction value by 2027.

Detailed Market cap (fully diluted) metrics and analytics for Marinade, including historical data and trends.

Detailed Market cap (fully diluted) metrics and analytics for Raydium, including historical data and trends.

Detailed Market cap (fully diluted) metrics and analytics for Drift Protocol, including historical data and trends.

The market cap of cryptocurrency Algorand nearly tripled between August and September 2021, and initially continued to grow in November 2021. The rise of the ALGO coin in September was noticeable, as it came in a time when the market cap of Bitcoin and other digital coins was declining. The Algorand coin is similar to Ethereum, Cardano, Solana and Polkadot in that is powers its own layer 1 blockchain, an environment for smart contracts and essential for setting up Decentralized Finance or DeFi projects. The market cap increase in September likely reflects a sentiment that Algorand has the potential to become a new Solana.

Cryptocurrency historical datasets from January 2012 (if available) to October 2021 were obtained and integrated from various sources and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) including Yahoo Finance, Cryptodownload, CoinMarketCap, various Kaggle datasets, and multiple APIs. While these datasets used various formats of time (e.g., minutes, hours, days), in order to integrate the datasets days format was used for in this research study. The integrated cryptocurrency historical datasets for 80 cryptocurrencies including but not limited to Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Binance Coin (BNB), Cardano (ADA), Tether (USDT), Ripple (XRP), Solana (SOL), Polkadot (DOT), USD Coin (USDC), Dogecoin (DOGE), Tron (TRX), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Litecoin (LTC), EOS (EOS), Cosmos (ATOM), Stellar (XLM), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), Uniswap (UNI), Terra (LUNA), SHIBA INU (SHIB), and 60 more cryptocurrencies were uploaded in this online Mendeley data repository. Although the primary attribute of including the mentioned cryptocurrencies was the Market Capitalization, a subject matter expert i.e., a professional trader has also guided the initial selection of the cryptocurrencies by analyzing various indicators such as Relative Strength Index (RSI), Moving Average Convergence/Divergence (MACD), MYC Signals, Bollinger Bands, Fibonacci Retracement, Stochastic Oscillator and Ichimoku Cloud. The primary features of this dataset that were used as the decision-making criteria of the CLUS-MCDA II approach are Timestamps, Open, High, Low, Closed, Volume (Currency), % Change (7 days and 24 hours), Market Cap and Weighted Price values. The available excel and CSV files in this data set are just part of the integrated data and other databases, datasets and API References that was used in this study are as follows: [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/ [2] https://coinmarketcap.com/historical/ [3] https://cryptodatadownload.com/ [4] https://kaggle.com/philmohun/cryptocurrency-financial-data [5] https://kaggle.com/deepshah16/meme-cryptocurrency-historical-data [6] https://kaggle.com/sudalairajkumar/cryptocurrencypricehistory [7] https://min-api.cryptocompare.com/data/price?fsym=BTC&tsyms=USD [8] https://min-api.cryptocompare.com/ [9] https://p.nomics.com/cryptocurrency-bitcoin-api [10] https://www.coinapi.io/ [11] https://www.coingecko.com/en/api [12] https://cryptowat.ch/ [13] https://www.alphavantage.co/ This dataset is part of the CLUS-MCDA (Cluster analysis for improving Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis) and CLUS-MCDAII Project: https://aimaghsoodi.github.io/CLUSMCDA-R-Package/ https://github.com/Aimaghsoodi/CLUS-MCDA-II https://github.com/azadkavian/CLUS-MCDA

Bitcoin's role within the overall cryptocurrency market picked up in 2024, whilst Ethereum lost terrain to currencies like Solana. This according to a metric that compares a coin's market cap relative to the overall crypto market called "dominance". This ratio shows how strong, for example, Bitcoin is compared to all the other cryptocurrencies. A comparison between Bitcoin and multiple other coins reveals that the shape of the crypto market has changed dramatically over time.

Bitcoin and Ethereum together made up more than half of the crypto market in 2024, with newer coins losing out. One example is Polkadot or DOT, an altcoin that went live in August 2020 but, at first, increasingly attracting interest in 2021 as it was seen as a viable competitor to Ethereum's blockchain structure. Indeed, six months after its initial release, the value of Polkadot was already six times higher than it during its launch. By 2024, the market position of Ethereum had not changed that much.

This is a submission for Challenge #24 by Desights User

Click here for Challenge Details Note: This submission is in REVIEW state and is only accessible by Challenge Reviewers. So you might get errors when you try to download this asset directly from Ocean Market.

Submission Description

The cryptocurrency is not just a new form of value store and exchange, it is a revolution of its own. Beginning with its use to provide peer-to-peer payment network (or digital money) like Bitcoin, today’s cryptocurrency, or crypto for short, have evolved way beyond its humble start. Underlying the crypto world, there lies amazing technology called Blockchain. In simple term, blockchain is a decentralized and shared digital ledger that records transactions transparently and immutably across nodes in the network. Today’s Crypto community has slowly turned into industry of its own introducing a whole spectrum of enigmatic pattern, trends, and economic framework. In this report we will explore the trend, correlations, and dynamics related to 20 selected Crypto projects to derived insights and build models that predict the future of crypto. Key Findings: Our exploratory data analysis (EDA) underlines the span and general pattern of the Google Trend and Price related data. The data being analyzed span from the earliest entry on 2014-09-17 up to the latest on 2024-04-07. Time series decomposition was performed to extract trend, seasonal cycle, and residuals that made up the Google Interest Trend data. Analysis on the time-series decomposition help us distinguish cluster (a) with projects on the rise such as Solana, SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol; and cluster (b) containing old project such as Dogecoin, Litecoin Filecoin, Tezos that are facing stagnant/downfall trend. Based on the Google Trends’s Correlation across projects we characterize Highly correlated projects cluster with correlation of about >0.8, and up to 0.92 with Bitcoin-Ethereum-Chainlink-Litecoin-Monero as the prominent group members. By introducing additional Google Trend data to understand Crypto Narrative, we worked toward building interpretable Event/Entity driving the market sentiment to explain our decomposed Time-series data. Based on Lag Characteristics in Correlation of Google Trend and Price/Trade Volume we highlight the tendency for the correlation to accumulate at longer lag time. Using NeuralProphet Framework we build forecasting models for Google Trend and Token Price for all 20 projects investigated here. We deployed these models to predict Trend and Price for all 20 projects for the following 52 weeks (up until April 2025). The developed models performed extraordinarily well with the R^2 value for most fall between the range of 0.75-0.88, while the highest goes up to 0.919. We highlight the correlation between Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ocean, with the rest of other projects. Ocean and Bitcoin, also Ethereum and Solana are the most correlated, both with correlation value of 0.89. The Kucoin’s KCS token is the least correlated with both Ocean and Bitcoin (0.31), while with Ethereum, Filecoin have the least correlation (0.41).

Conclusion This investigative study presents a thorough data analysis and exploration of correlations, time-lag characteristics, and time-series decomposition concerning Google Trends and token prices for 20 selected crypto/blockchain projects. By decomposing the time-series data, we have identified several clusters of crypto projects that is moving up in popularity such as Fetch.ai, SingularityNet, Solana, Ocean and some others that are stuck or in downfall trend, such as Dogecoin and Litecoin. Our analysis also includes a detailed exploration of various factors that contribute to understanding the data better, such as the incorporation of event-driven trends that explain outlier spikes in the residual data from our decomposed time-series.

In addition to our in-depth analysis, we build strong mini-library of forecasting models for predicting the Google Trend as well as price for the upcoming year with R^2 score that goes as high as 0.88 for most cases. Moreover, in order to demonstrate the utility of our exploratory data analysis tools and pipeline in full we also include all the results and analysis output produced in this work.

Looking ahead, we plan to expand our developed forecasting models and the presented data into a "CryptoForecast MiniApp." This application, based on the Streamlit package, will be hosted on a decentralized cloud (Akash) and connected to the Ocean marketplace and Predictoor, enhancing accessibility and utility for users interested in real-time data for Google Trends and Crypto Token Price forecasts.

Detailed Market cap (circulating) metrics and analytics for Star Atlas, including historical data and trends.

By July 2024, over 464 million Solana tokens were issued and in active circulation - but new coins arrive slowly. Although the cryptocurrency has an unlimited supply - unlike Bitcoin, of which there can only be 21 million tokens and not a single more - the Solana blockchain only issues a set amount of new tokens at the beginning of each year. This issuance is based off the year-to-year inflation rate, and can therefore vary. When SOL first launched, there was a maximum supply of around 500 million, but the blockchain burned (erased from the blockchain) 11 million of them. By December 2021, the maximum supply was around 510 million SOL.

Detailed Market cap (circulating) metrics and analytics for Metaplex, including historical data and trends.

Detailed Market cap (circulating) metrics and analytics for Jito, including historical data and trends.

Transactions in NFTs were significantly lower in 2024 than during the summer of 2021 when several tokens gained popularity. Most of these transactions were likely related to play-to-earn Vietnamese video game Axie Infinity, which became the world's most valuable NFT collection in August 2021 - although its sales volume did decline since. The gaming segment reported the highest sales volume of the non-fungible token (NFT) market in 2020, with over six times the sales in sports projects. The overall market cap of NFTs in 2024, however, was noticeably smaller. NFT in 2024: Searching for legitimacy While cryptocurrency and Bitcoin saw their interest surge in early 2024 after the acceptance of Bitcoin ETFs in the United States, the NFT market has been struggling. For the larger audience, non-fungible tokens still seemed to be confusing what they are supposed to do, whereas crypto increasingly found legitimacy. The slowdown in the NFT market led one of the world's largest NFT marketplaces, OpenSea, to lay off large parts of its staff in October 2023. Solana to pave the way for NFTs? One of the blockchain networks that is closely affiliated with NFTs in 2024 is that of Solana. The monthly sales volume of this blockchain outperformed that of Ethereum in January 2024, causing Solana's market share in the overall crypto market to reach its highest value ever. Solana's position comes from relatively low costs but especially high transaction speeds and the sizable airdrops from multiple projects. This attracted significant amounts of capital, further fuelling the network. Solana's growth may provide the framework for the NFT market as a whole, as it slowly seeks to take over Ethereum's position in this part of the decentralized digital asset world.

Detailed Market cap (circulating) metrics and analytics for Sanctum, including historical data and trends.