Solana Smashes Through $177 Barrier—Can Its New Consensus Protocol Fuel a Rally to $389?
Solana’s price just ripped past $177, leaving traders wondering if its latest protocol upgrade could trigger a moonshot toward $389.
The ’Eclipse’ consensus mechanism—hyped as a game-changer—promises faster finality and lower fees. But let’s be real: in crypto-land, even the fanciest tech won’t save you from the next ’macroeconomic headwind’ excuse Wall Street trots out to explain their 37th consecutive bad take.
Watch the charts, not the whitepapers—this rocket could either double your stack or leave you holding the bag.
- Solana ($SOL) breaks out of an ascending triangle, indicating strong upward momentum.
- The Alpenglow update aims to boost speed but doesn’t fully solve network stability issues.
- Analysts expect SOL to surpass $389 by the end of 2025 if upgrades deliver results.
Solana SOL is currently trading at $177.04 with a 3.44% 24-hour advance. The trading volume also touched a record high of $5.69 billion and increased by more than 62% from before. In the last seven days, SOL experienced a modest increase of 1.82%, pointing toward cautious Optimism in trading circles.
As per analyst Ali, solana broke out of an ascending triangle formation, a technical charted shape renowned for signaling bullish continuations. The formation on daily charts since late 2024 has higher lows converging upon a static resistance level at approximately $120. As of May 20, 2025, the price already broke out above $180.74 in confirmation of the breakout. The volume spiked accordingly and in keeping with the conventional path and behavior when this happens.
Though it rallied, volatility from history casts a large shadow. Earlier in 2025, Solana fell below $150 after the LIBRA fraud broke out, which indicates investor sensitivity to ecosystem failures. Although confirmation of the breakout indicates good momentum, investors in cryptocurrencies remain cautious about such a movement and technical risks involved.
SOL infrastructure upgrade with Alpenglow
Solana’s infrastructure is also shifting on a grand scale. The Alpenglow upgrade, courtesy of blockchain development platform Anza, will substitute the present consensus systems, TowerBFT and Proof-of-History, for a dual setup: “Votor” and “Rotor.” These innovations guarantee quicker block affirmations at a possible 150 milliseconds as SOL moves ever closer to web-speed processing.
One of the researchers from the Alpenglow team, Roger Wattenhofer, called the upgrade Solana’s most important so far. The innovation doesn’t fully address the most critical problem of Solana’s network stability yet. The network continues to be based on a single validator client called “Agave” and remains susceptible if targeted by an attacker.
A parallel development effort to deploy a backup validator client known as Firedancer is also underway but until it’s integrated fully onto the mainnet, reliability issues remain a concern.
Solana price prediction for 2025
Looking ahead to 2025, many people expect Solana’s price to go up. Some experts predict that SOL could go past its previous highest price of $294.33 and maybe even reach $389.24 by the end of the year. This hopeful outlook comes from improvements in technology and upgrades like Alpenglow.
However, investors should be careful and keep in mind that Solana still has some problems to solve. Other platforms like ethereum are also making strong updates. For Solana to become a top choice, it needs not just to be fast but also to stay reliable over time.
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