Coinbase Wallet Adds Support for Solana

Top U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has added wallet support for Solana (SOL) and its Solana Token Ecosystem (SPL).

Coinbase said that investor interest in Solana has surged over the past 12 months as they look for low-cost alternatives to ethereum, a key reason they added support for the Solana network.

The expanded wallet support comes days after Coinbase launched Coinbase Pay, which enables users to fund their wallets directly through a web browser extension.

In a blog post published on March 18, Coinbase also roughly outlined plans for "further integration" with Solana, linking Coinbase wallets with decentralized applications (dApps) and NFTs hosted on the Solana network, which was championed by FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

Users of Solana-based wallets like Phantom and Solflare can now also import their existing wallets into Coinbase Wallet via a desktop browser extension.

Following the addition of the Solana network, Coinbase Wallet now supports the Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, BNB Chain, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Stellar Lumens, and Ripple networks. Coinbase says:

“Many users have been looking for scale-optimized networks that offer low-cost transactions and fast transaction times. Solana has been one of the fastest-growing blockchains over the past year.”

The Solana blockchain currently ranks fifth among decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols in terms of total value locked (TVL) at $6.94 billion, according to Defi Llama. NFT data aggregator CryptoSlam ranked it as the second-highest blockchain in secondary sales last month at $156.28 million.

Like most of the cryptocurrency market that has underperformed this year, SOL’s price is down 18% over the past 30 days, sitting at $85.90 at the time of writing. In the short-term, Cointelegraph's Rakesh Upadhyay has identified targets for SOL at $122 if the price breaks above the 20-day moving average at $86, or $66 if the market fails to support and sustain above this area.