Beginning the year with new purchases connected to the Solana blockchain, Etherscan, which maintains an explorer for the Ethereum blockchain, is showing its commitment to the blockchain.
Etherscan officially announced the acquisition of Solscan, a leading block explorer for the Solana ecosystem, on January 3rd. According to Etherscan, the acquisition is a “collaborative merging” that extends the company’s attempts to develop blockchain data offerings across numerous networks.
At the time of this writing, Solscan’s community on X (which was once known as Twitter) has gathered more than 23,000 subscribers. Solscan was established in 2021 and has managed to serve more than three million people every month.
Many of the features included in the Solscan block explorer will be recognized by users of Etherscan. These features include extensive address, token, and transaction data, as well as application programming interfaces (APIs), dashboards, and nonfungible tokens—also known as NFT information.
After the acquisition is completed, Etherscan will continue to provide “credibly neutral and equitable access to blockchain data,” according to the release.
Additionally, the company intends to integrate additional capabilities across a variety of explorers and provide improved support going forward. Over many years, the Solscan team has demonstrated its expertise by providing customers with in-depth insights and data.
Additionally, their expertise in making blockchain data accessible and user-friendly coincides nicely with our objective at Etherscan, as stated by Matthew Tan, the CEO and co-founder of Etherscan.
Etherscan made the most recent acquisition during a period of significant price increase for Solana, the native coin of the Solana blockchain. On the 22nd of December, the market capitalization of Solana momentarily surpassed that of Binance Chain’s BNB.
This happened just one day after the market value of XRP increased. Over the last thirty days, the token has experienced a surge of sixty percent, exceeding one hundred dollars for the first time since 2022.
CoinGecko reports that the Solana token is currently trading at $110, reflecting a 3.5% decrease over the previous twenty-four hours.
According to market capitalization, SOL is now the fifth largest cryptocurrency, with a value of about $47 billion. There have been some market analysts who have speculated on whether or not the cryptocurrency known as SOL could one day surpass Ethereum.
Six largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization as of Jan. 3, 2024. Source: CoinGecko
Solana temporarily overtook Ethereum in terms of the daily trade volumes experienced on decentralized exchanges (DEX) at the end of December.
In late December, Solana also surpassed Ethereum in terms of global searches on Google. Solana achieved this feat by achieving a score of 56, which was higher than Ethereum’s score of 50.