Solana surged 5.5% on Friday and hit a daily peak above $241—the highest price seen since late January, as SOL gets a bullish boost from institutional interest.
Forward Industries, a Nasdaq-traded design firm that serves medical and technology companies, announced earlier this week it had inked a $1.65 billion private investment in private equity, or PIPE, deal led by crypto financial services company Galaxy Digital, infrastructure firm Jump Crypto, and venture capital firm Multicoin Capital.
The company, which trades on the NasdaqCM exchange under the FORD ticker, saw its price briefly touch $46 on Friday. But at the time of writing, it’s fallen back to $37.72. Despite the retrace, it’s still trading 9.41% higher than yesterday.
Solana climbed above $215 when the PIPE deal was announced at the start of the week, but it’s reached even higher highs in the 24 hours since the deal closed. As of this writing, Solana is still 18% shy of the $293.31 all-time high that it set in January, according to crypto price aggregator CoinGecko.
With the latest price move, users on Myriad, a prediction market owned by Decrypt parent company DASTAN, have become increasingly certain that SOL will keep climbing. In the past week, users who think Solana will rise to $250 sooner than it can drop to $130 have increased from 66% to 89%, as of this writing.
The token’s price has also been boosted by the news that BIT Mining, which plans to change its New York Stock Exchange ticker to SOLAI, has added 17,221 SOL to its treasury. In July, the company saw its shares, which currently trade under the BTBT ticker, soar to more than $5 per share after the Akron, Ohio firm said it would begin building a Solana treasury.
At the time of writing, BTBT is trading for approximately $3 per share after having gained 1.9% on the day.