People are still in disbelief looking at the $SOL rally.

You may have seen some wild conspiracy theories around $SOL price growth.

Now, it's high time to actually understand what caused this rally and why there are higher chances that $SOL will keep pumping from here.

Why $SOL Pumped Hard?

Simple Answer: There's strong onchain demand, especially for Solana staking. Marinade Finance and Jito launched Liquid staking a few months back, sparking interest in SOL Liquid staking.

More than 71% of $SOL is staked right now, making it the second largest PoS based chain by Staking Market cap after Ethereum.

What is interesting here: If you decided to stake $SOL a year ago, you could have made a 2.5X return, the highest ROI in any staking.

$SOL is currently providing a 7.1% return even with 71% staked value. According to the SOL inflation and reward rate plan, they can even sustain APR above 4% even if the staked value goes above 85% in the next 12 months.

Such a higher APR in an asset like $SOL, which also has the potential to appreciate in value, will attract more people into $SOL staking. Since we have liquid staking platforms, more people could stake $SOL.

Liquid staking platforms like Jito and Marinade Finance saw over 350% growth in TVL in the past 30 days.

What is interesting here is that it's not only liquid staking where people are interested; people also started exploring DEXs on Solana. DEX volume on Solana is up by 333% in the past 30 days.

The average onchain demand for $SOL is up by 114% in the past 30 days.

I've shared more data in the infographics below.