Is Solana a Good Investment Right Now? It Reclaimed $100 After Losing It on the Vote.
Solana lost the $100 level after a Senate vote, then clawed it back within days while its network quietly hit new highs. Whether that reclaim holds depends on two factors most buyers are overlooking.
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On September 13, 2026, Solana (CRYPTO:SOL) closed below $100 at $99.26, following a Senate vote on the crypto market structure bill. It fell again on September 15 and 16 but closed above $100 on September 17 at $101.54, and was trading near $110 as of September 18.
The coin fell for two days, then recovered over the next two. So, what does a quick reclaim of the $100 level indicate, and what can buyers expect at these prices?
What the $100 Reclaim Signals
SOL closed at $99.26 on September 13. Two days later, on September 15, it dropped to $96.82, hitting an intraday low of $95.71. However, on September 17, it bounced back to $101.54.
During the same week, Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) fell 1.09%, Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH) dropped 3.08%, and Solana fell slightly by 1.18%. The three major cryptocurrencies moved in tandem around the Senate vote, suggesting broad selling pressure rather than something specific to Solana.
On September 15, SOL’s intraday range was $95.71 to $102.85, and it closed near the low. The recovery day had a trading range of $98.38 to $101.98, with the second-largest volume recorded during this sequence. When price levels break during general risk-averse conditions and return within two days, it usually suggests that short-term holders and leveraged positions were cleared while spot demand remained stable.
What Solana Gained in Two Weeks
Ten days before the Senate vote, the SEC designated SOL as a core ETF asset, qualifying it for spot product frameworks alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum. On September 17, the agency announced its Innovation Exemption, a five-year conditional relief allowing Tokenized Securities Venues to trade tokenized NMS stocks through permissioned automated market maker pools. Solana, Ethereum, and BNB (CRYPTO:BNB) Chain were identified as chains that could benefit.
However, the conditions for tokenized stocks are stricter than the headlines suggested. These stocks must carry the same rights as the underlying shares, smart contracts must be auditable, public, and deployed on a permissionless ledger, and trading must cease when the underlying stock halts on its primary exchange. These are engineering requirements rather than administrative filings.
On the same day, the CFTC extended no-action relief to passive software providers, a framework that began with the March 2026 letter to Phantom Technologies, a wallet built for the Solana ecosystem. The network economics show why Solana continues to come up often: fees under a cent, pre-confirmation latency of about 400 milliseconds, and a target slot time the network aims to cut to 250 milliseconds.
Despite these advancements, SOL’s price has not reflected them. The coin is down 18.65% year-to-date and 59.1% over the past year.
Solana’s Activity Grew While the Price Fell
The prevalent bearish narrative suggests that Solana gained regulatory wins while its network was deteriorating. However, data indicates otherwise.
Total value locked in Solana’s lending and liquidity applications grew from about $4.82 billion on August 16 to $5.92 billion by August 30, a 23% increase. By September 18, it held at $5.914 billion for a second consecutive week, enduring the Senate vote and the Fed’s decision.
Trading activity followed a similar trajectory. The seven-day decentralized exchange volume rose by 7.8% to about $17.3 billion from September 7 to 13, reversing an 11.6% decrease the previous week. Real-world assets on the chain reached roughly $4.30 billion, up from $3.91 billion in August, with XStocks alone exceeding $1 billion in decentralized exchange volume as tokenized equities gained traction.
On the institutional side, Solana ETF assets surpassed $1 billion through products from Bitwise and Fidelity, with Morgan Stanley filing for its own Solana Trust. Moreover, Forward Industries now holds over 6.9 million SOL while operating its own validator.
So, Is Solana a Good Investment Right Now?
The case for buying Solana right now centers on a disparity. Solana’s network expanded and secured regulatory advantages across the same two weeks, while the token is down 59.1% over the past year. Investing at these prices means buying into activity and regulation that hasn’t been priced in yet, and that gap can stay open for a long time.
Rising interest rates are the main pressure on the token. The upper bound of the federal funds target rate reached 4.00% on September 16, and the 10-year Treasury yield hit 5.01% the same day, its highest in a year. Goldman Sachs predicts another hike in October, which raises the bar again for a token that pays no yield.
Two factors decide whether the reclaim holds. The first is whether tokenized stock volume moves onto Solana under the SEC’s exemption, meaning venues meet the auditable-contract and trading-halt conditions rather than announcing support and stopping there. The second is whether the Federal Reserve stops raising rates. Until then, Solana keeps trading on rates while its own network grows underneath the price.
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Sam Daodu is a crypto analyst and the editor of 24/7 Wall St.'s Crypto Desk, where he covers Bitcoin, XRP, Ethereum, Solana and the altcoins investors search for most. His work focuses on price levels, spot ETF flows, on-chain data and the regulatory decisions that move crypto markets, written so a first-time buyer and a seasoned trader can both use it.
Sam has written about crypto professionally since 2019 and has published more than 2,000 articles. Before joining 24/7 Wall St., he wrote for crypto media outlets and Web3 companies and ghostwrote for crypto founders and token launches. His analysis is syndicated on Yahoo Finance, MSN and AOL and has been cited by other crypto news sites. He also founded MacLabs Marketing, a content and personal branding agency for crypto founders and executives.
When he isn't reading charts, Sam is usually at the gym or watching One Piece, a series he maintains has better tokenomics than most altcoins.
