Solana Price Surge to New High Surpassing Dogecoin Market Cap

A Solana price surge Friday sent it to a new high and put its market value above Dogecoin's, making SOL the seventh biggest cryptocurrency.

By midday, the Solana price was up 13% to $143.68, after reaching a high of $145.97. That gave it a market cap of $40.6 billion. It raced ahead of Dogecoin, which dipped 0.1% to 29.9 cents, with a market cap of $39 billion.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, rose 1.8% to $50,427. And Ethereum, the second largest, gained 3.8% to $3,940.

The Solana price rally came in the wake of "Ignition," a global hackathon to build new platforms on the Solana blockchain, according to CoinTelegraph.com. The hackathon runs until Oct. 8.

Investors are betting Solana will succeed in the decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFT) sector.

Amid the Solana price spike, cryptocurrency stocks also made moves. Coinbase closed up 3.8%, Marathon Digital (MARA) climbed 2.9% and Riot Blockchain fell 4.25%.

Solana has shot up more than 40% this week alone and has soared more than 7,500% since the start of this year.

That growth is driven by rising demand for the tokens in minting thousands of NFTs being launched on the Solana blockchain, analysts say. Some say it's proving to be a potential rival to Ethereum, due to lower gas fees — the fee to perform a network transaction — and higher scalability.