I’m buying Solana (SOL -2.59%) right now, and Samsung just gave me another reason to do so. Starting in late October, across 82 million Galaxy devices, U.S. Samsung Wallet users will be able to transfer money internationally with USD Coin, according to the Solana Foundation.
The implications for the price of Solana aren’t as straightforward as they may seem, so let’s examine why this news makes the coin worth buying.
Image source: Getty Images.
If the network holds up, it’ll be a major achievement
Remittances — the money people send to family abroad — are a decent use case for Solana. Its fees for token transfers are minuscule, under a tenth of a cent, and they’re executed within a few seconds on average, making use attractive. But Solana will need to share some of the action on Samsung devices. Sui is another one of Samsung’s network partners, so not every transfer will benefit Solana. Users will also not need to pay Samsung any transfer fees, so they’ll never need to hold Solana directly.
Today’s Change
(-2.59%) $-2.77
Current Price
$104.45
Key Data Points
Market Cap
Day’s Range
$103.51 – $108.45
52wk Range
$60.40 – $207.60
Volume
3.3B
That means there won’t be much in the way of coins getting burned and removed from supply as a result of the network activity. Ten million transfers would destroy about 25 SOL. Furthermore, the network issues new coins at an annual rate of 3.9%, or about 24.5 million SOL per year. So the math here does not suggest that Solana’s price is about to skyrocket as a result of the deal with Samsung.
Nonetheless, the prize is that Solana has attained its own distribution inside a phone app ecosystem that people already use to manage their payment cards, boarding passes, and IDs, among other documents.
It now has a real-world use case that’s undeniably economically valuable. Few other cryptocurrencies have accomplished the same.
Is Solana worth buying right now?
Solana is worth buying right now because the Samsung deal echoes a familiar and favorable pattern for holders, wherein the network is used as a rail for cheap, high-speed payments and transfers.
For instance, Solana had $16 billion in stablecoins parked on its chain as of Oct. 14. It also hosts 95% of on-chain tokenized stock trading volume. Tokenized stocks are blockchain tokens that track real shares.
Plus, the network is seeing an uptick in the rate at which AI agents use it to transact while performing individual tasks at the behest of their users, like executing trades and rebalancing portfolios, or in service of a larger human-set goal, like paying for access to data feeds needed to develop a market intelligence platform.
More users moving around more assets means more competition for the chain’s finite blockspace, which suggests that blockspace is valuable, and which raises the priority fees paid to the network’s validators.
And, in my experience investing in crypto, where there’s lots of demand for some of the resources that a blockchain has, there’s upside to be had, which is why I’m planning to buy Solana within the next few weeks.
