AVAX vs SOL: Better buy between Avalanche and Solana?

Avalanche price has crashed by more than 85% this year, giving AVAX a market cap of more than $4.9 billion. Solana price, on the other hand, has crashed by 82%, giving its market cap to more than $11.5 billion.

Challenging time for Solana and Avalanche

Solana and Avalanche are some of the biggest Ethereum rivals in the world. The two have significantly faster speeds and lower costs than Ethereum. In most cases, they can handle thousands of transactions per second for just a few dollars.

Solana and Avalanche are also well-known for their staking capabilities that make it possible for people to earn passive income. According to Staking Rewards, Avalanche has a reward of about 8.4% while Solana has 4.85%.

Avalanche and Solana have had a difficult year as the momentum that happened in 2021 faded. As a result, their tokens have crashed by more than 80%. Their key industries like non-fungible tokens (NFT) and decentralized finance (DeFi) have also plummeted.

Avalanche, which has more than 200 apps has a total value locked (TVL) of more than $1.5 billion, down from its all-time high of over $11 billion. Aave has a market dominance of 45%. On the other hand, Solana has 83 apps and a TVL of $1.3 billion, down from an all-time high of over $10 billion. Solend has a market dominance of 20.95%.

The volume of NFT sales in Solana and Avalanche has been in a downward trend this year as well. The monthly volume of Avalanche NFTs peaked at over $151 million in January 2022 and then crashed to just $758k in June. Solana’s NFT sales peaked at $286k in October last year and dropped to a low of $64 million in July.

Better buy between AVAX and Solana

So, which cryptocurrency should you buy between Solana’s SOL and Avalanche’s AVAX? As shown above, the two coins have a close correlation with each other, which explains why the prices have moved in sync this year.

In my view, I believe that Solana is a better investment than Avalanche. For one, its DeFi ecosystem is relatively more balanced than that of Avalanche. With Avalanche, AAVE has an outsize role with its 42% market dominance.

At the same time, Solana’s Web3 projects like StepN, Audius, Magic Eden, Swim, and Grape Protocol have a strong market share in their industries. Still, the biggest challenge for Solana is the frequent outages, as we wrote in this report. These outages could prevent more developers from embracing the token.