Franklin Templeton foresees Solana as third-largest cryptocurrency

Asset management firm Franklin Templeton sees growing potential in Solana to solidify itself as the third-largest cryptocurrency in the market.

The asset manager, which has over $1.5 trillion in assets under management (AUM), went to X on May 2, praising Solana, which is now the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

“Solana’s growth is likely to continue as it is well positioned to capture the next wave of crypto adoption and solidify itself as the third-largest crypto asset after Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH),” the firm said.

in the note shared At X, the firm announced that Solana captured some of the cryptocurrency momentum in Q4 2023 through local airdrops, which subsequently supported the entire SOL ecosystem.

Franklin Templeton also talked about the robustness of the network. Solana was hit hard by FTX’s crash in 2022 but managed to rebound with solid adoption numbers. Due to its low fees and scalability, Solana has also capitalized on the memecoin craze, creating popular meme tokens including BONK and WIF, which remain among the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap.

The Wall Street giant expects Solana to expand its reach as its performance and network effects position it to benefit from the next crypto trends. The network hosts several startups deploying use cases including payments, decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN), and non-compressible non-fungible tokens (NFTs); Franklin Templeton believes these will help blockchain usher in the next wave of adoption.

The company’s note stated the following:

“Crypto enthusiasts are wondering what the next big thing in crypto could be… While we don’t know the exact answer, we think there’s a strong chance it could happen in Solana.”

While the organization acknowledged that the increased activity caused operational issues in Solana, it also recognized the efforts of developers who worked to fix these issues as quickly as possible.

On October 31, Dan Albert, managing director of the Solana Foundation, announced the launch of the Firedancer testnet, an anticipated scaling solution for Solana.

The project, spearheaded by web3 development firm Jump Crypto since last August, is expected to increase the speed, reliability and validator diversity of the network, with the mainnet launch projected for the first half of 2024.