Solana SOL/USD is currently trading at $168.8, down nearly 1% in the last 24 hours and over 5% in the past week. After reaching the $180 level, the token struggled to maintain momentum and is showing signs of bearish pressure. The price slump comes amid Solana's bearish pressure while the community waits for key developments like the Alpenglow Upgrade and Solana Spaces take shape.
Solana may soon undergo its most significant consensus update to date with the introduction of Alpenglow, a proposal put forward by a developer to improve the blockchain's throughput and reliability. The new model introduces a two-layered solution intended to enhance the network's speed.
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The upgrade announced on Monday by Anza, a Solana Labs spinout, will replace the Proof of History and Tower BTF systems with Votor and Rotor, leading to faster transaction processing. Alpenglow's Votor system can finalize blocks in one voting round if 80% of the stake is online, or two rounds if only 60% respond. Both modes operate simultaneously to ensure faster finalization.
Rotor reduces the number of hops data takes between nodes, helping maintain faster block times. No official launch date has been confirmed yet, but this upgrade could reshape Solana's trajectory.
Max Resnick, a lead economist at Anza, endorsed Solana during his keynote at Solana's Accelerate Conference, stating that it was never meant to compete with Ethereum ETH/USD, but with the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), NASDAQ Inc NDAQ, CME Group Inc CME, and other centralized venues.
According to Resnick, the goal is to reach a round trip confirmation time of 159 milliseconds. The platform will be doing consensus on multiple blocks at the same time, eventually once every 20 milliseconds, to pop out a new block, or a set of blocks, from concurrent leaders.
Solana Spaces store in New York has reopened as a temporary pop-up with a new core team, fueled by memecoin funding. Season 2 of Solana Spaces aims to run pop-up stores for crypto merchandise during crypto conferences. The revival of the physical store stoked fans, along with the varied merchandise on sale from multiple Solana-based projects and NFT collections.
The technical indicators are sounding caution, with the Ichimoku Cloud indicating market indecision and a bearish tilt. The token's BBTrend is currently in the negative territory for the third consecutive day at -4.31, suggesting bearish pressure.
Solana's EMA indicators are nearing a potential death cross, wherein the short-term EMA moves above the long-term EMA, indicating a bearish signal. If this occurs, SOL could retest support at $170. A break below this may drag the price down to $153.99, with a deeper slide towards $141 if bearish momentum increases.
If Solana manages to reclaim the upward momentum, the first key resistance will be $176.77, a breakout above which could open the path to the next target at $184.88.
Despite major protocol changes looming, investor confidence in Solana is lagging, as caution dominates market sentiment.
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