Cryptocurrency winter? I take my coat and buy this cryptocurrency 

While stocks have flirted with bear market territory lately in a turbulent 2022, there is no doubt that cryptocurrencies have already beaten them, with the two leading cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, down nearly 40% respectively. and 50% on an annual basis at the time of this writing.

Many of the so-called altcoins have fared even worse. Experts speak of a "cryptocurrency winter" like 2018. But this time it's different. At the time, many projects were little more than a white paper and some hopes and dreams with little substance to back them up, while now cryptocurrencies are a much larger part of the overall global market and more widely adopted. Many of these projects are continuing to grow their user base, develop other applications, and gain more use cases. If winter has come, I put on the heaviest coat and buy this quality cryptocurrency.

StepNs and NFTs enrich the Solana ecosystem 

Like the vast majority of major cryptocurrencies, Solana (quotation SOL) had a rough start in 2022, with a loss of 77% so far, of which over 50% in the past 30 days. Solana has faced the same problems as other cryptocurrencies, such as a major hack of the Wormhole communication bridge connecting Solana to Ethereum and a series of denial-of-service attacks that slowed the network and took it offline multiple times.  

But there are some encouraging signs

StepN, a “move to earn” application, has become one of the most talked about projects in cryptocurrency, and is built on the Solana blockchain. To participate, users must purchase a non-fungible token (NFT) of a pair of sneakers - with a minimum price of around 12 SOL - and can then earn rewards by walking, running and exercising (in real life). With 2-3 million monthly active users using the app, StepN has likely brought a whole new array of users to the Solana ecosystem.

It is likely that some of these users have never interacted with Solana or other blockchains. The app has only been around for five months, so that's an encouraging sign for both Solana and StepN. StepN's native GMT token quickly amassed a market cap of $ 860 million, higher than many other cryptocurrencies.

In addition to StepN, Solana has established itself as the second blockchain for NFT (after just Ethereum) and surpassed $ XNUMX billion in total NFT sales in January. OpenSea, the largest NFT market in the world, began listing Solana NFTs in April, while previously it was the exclusive preserve of Ethereum and Polygon NFTs. Additionally, according to data from NFT tracker CryptoSlam, Solana recently surpassed Ethereum for NFT's total daily sales for the first time, so Solana is establishing itself as a viable Ethereum competitor in the NFT space.