How To Buy Solana Coin (SOL) In The UK

Last Updated April 19th 2024

14 Min Read

A Beginner’s Guide to Buying and Trading Solana Cryptocurrency in the UK

If you’re based in the UK and wish to buy Solana crypto – the process is very simple. All you need to do is find a UK regulated exchange, deposit some funds, and decide how many Solana coins you want to buy.

There is a new hot term in the DeFi world right now - Solana. This coin has piqued the curiosity of many investors and is now the 6th largest digital coin in terms of market capitalization. Solana is not that popular outside the crypto community, but this cryptocurrency project has some unique attributes that can improve the way blockchain works and solve the problem of scalability in the crypto world. One of such issues that Solana aims to improve is to make transactions faster and throughput higher.

So, how does Solana actually work, and can it be considered a good investment at the moment? This article intends to answer these questions, find out what makes Solana unique, investigate it as a cryptocurrency for investment and discuss its price history and future price predictions.

We will also guide you on how to buy Solana coin in the UK and offer the best exchanges for trading Solana.

How To Buy In Solana In The UK – Quick Guide

To help you buy Solana coins as quickly as possible, we broke the process down into a few easy steps:

Step 1: Open an account with eToro – Head to eToro’s website and click join now to open a new account.
Step 2: Verification – By uploading essential documents that show proof of identity and home address, you will get your account verified in a short time.
Step 3: Deposit – Fund your new eToro account with a minimum of $10.
Step 4: Search for Solana on eToro – Search for SOL or Solana in the eToro crypto market.
Step 5: Buy SOL – Enter the amount of the worth of Solana you want to purchase in United States Dollars (USD), then click Open Trade.

That’s it! By following these easy steps, you can invest in Solana in The UK in less than 5 minutes.

Crypto asset investing is highly volatile and unregulated in some EU countries and the UK. No consumer protection. Tax on profits may apply.

Where To Buy Solana (SOL) In The UK

Are you searching for how to buy Solana in the UK? Well there are hundreds of crypto exchanges and brokers in the UK. This can make it hard to know which platform is right for you.

List of the best Exchanges to buy Solana in the UK:

Looking where to buy Solana in the UK right now? Below you will find 4 of the best brokers that allow you to buy Solana in the UK.

eToro - Best broker to buy Solana in the UK
Binance - Best exchange to buy Solana UK for asset diversity
Coinbase - Best exchange to buy Solana for beginners
OKEx - Best broker to buy Solana UK for low-cost

What Is Solana Coin (SOL)?

Clearly, one of the biggest problems of blockchain technology is its scalability. Or, in other words, its ability to grow and fit in with the increasing demand. The problem is that the more transactions occur in the blockchain, the better capacity it should handle. But along with the growth of the network, its transaction speed and confirmation times become more and more limited. In that matter, what the Solana project wants to solve is to fight against these limitations while keeping the blockchain secure.

Solana’s native token (SOL) launched recently in 2020, but its founders, Anatoly Yakovenko and Greg Fitzgerald have started to work on this project since 2017. Anatoly worked as a software engineer at Dropbox and Qualcomm but then left the company and partnered with his former colleague at Qualcomm, Greg, to build the Solana testnet, which they ultimately launched in 2018.

Solana is a smart contract-enabled cryptocurrency, like Ethereum, with a blockchain that relies on Proof of Stake and Proof of History consensus. So, to get a better idea of the technology behind Solanal, let’s take a closer look at these protocols to understand what makes Solana unique.

There is a Proof of Work protocol used by Bitcoin to validate its transactions, and it requires a tremendous amount of computer power. Unlike this, Proof of stake requires its users to hold a particular amount of their token to validate transactions and confirm a new block on the network. While this makes PoS more energy-efficient, there is a problem with the time required to validate the transactions and the sequence in which the validations occur.

And here, the Proof of history consensus comes to help. This mechanism allows Solana Network to create a historical record of all the transactions on its blockchain. All these transactions are recorded in sequence in which they took place before being validated by PoS. It also disables miners and bots to decide in which order the transactions are recorded on the network. This allows Solana nodes to verify transactions without the need to coordinate with the whole network.

Proof of history principle significantly improves the speed of the transactions on Solana’s blockchain. And, as such, the project boasts that it’s faster than Ethereum and can process almost 50,000 transactions per second while having the ability to further improve it and make it much faster.

Solana has its native token, SOL, which can be earned by validating transactions on the blockchain or running programs on it. SOL is also used to pay for the transaction fees, and the average transaction fee on Solana blockchains is 0.000005 SOL. Like Ethereum, this platform can also be used to build decentralized apps or dApps. So far, Solana has got many developers, including Raydium, Oxygen, Serum, etc.

Check Out: Could Solana Be a Millionaire Maker Coin?

Should You Buy Solana (SOL)?

Solana is a relatively new cryptocurrency project in the DeFi world, but it has already gained lots of popularity and invaded the hearts of many investors and developers. Many of the SOL fans already dubbed it as a potential "Ethereum killer"; however, it should be admitted that Ethereum is still the largest blockchains for building dApps.

Even though Solana kept its promises and made improvements in the speed and scalability of the transactions, the project still needs to include in its network more and more uses. That said, Solana already owns more than 250 projects in its ecosystem. Another good news is that the unconfirmed news that it recently got an investment of around $300-450 million. On June 9, Solana confirmed the statement saying that it raised a funding of $311 million while the funding round was held by Andreseen Howorwitz, one of the leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley.

Another positive thing about Solana is its price history and current price recovery after the last broad selloff in the crypto market. Solana started to trade its token in 2020 April and entered the market with a price of $0.75. It doubled in price in just 3-4 months and hit its all-time maximum of the year 2020, on August 31, when it was trading at $4.38. From April to the end of 2020, the Solana coin fluctuated between $1-3.

The project managed to get mainstream attention only in 2021 which has resulted in the 13th position in the list of cryptocurrencies according to their market capitalization. Since the beginning of the year, Solana SOL started to grow faster, and it hit an all-time high on May 18, 2021, rising to $55.91.

With the fall of the entire crypto market, Solana's price dropped again, reaching a minimum of $24.69. But the prices began to recover lately, and it again hit below $40 and was trading at $42 on June 6. SOL hit its current all-time high of $260 in November. At the time of writing, SOL is traded somewhere around $115 and is ranked 8th by market capitalization.

Read Also: Why Solana Is Going To Explode

How To Buy Solana (SOL) Online In The UK - A Step by Step Guide

This part of our guide introduces you to a step-by-step guide on how to buy, invest or trade Solana coin in the UK.

Find a UK Crypto Exchange that Supports Solana coin

As Solana is quite a new cryptocurrency project and has not yet gained too much prominence, not all the largest and most well-known crypto exchange platforms support it. However, it's expected that Solana will get listed on many popular crypto platforms in the near future, as the project promises to be very successful. For now, you can use these two exchanges to buy Solana coin in the UK.

Binance: Founded in 2017, this crypto exchange platform boasts of being the largest platform in trading volume. Binance accepts many cryptos that you can buy easily using USD, Euro, and other fiats. You can also purchase cryptos on Binance using many stablecoins, including Binance USD, Tether, True USD, etc. Binance also stands out with its comparatively low fees and easy-usable interface.

Huobi Global: Another large crypto exchange platform to use for buying SOL is Huobi. It has an extensive selection of hundreds of digital assets and promises to provide you secure and convenient trading services.

Register for an Online Account and Deposit Funds

Registering for an online account on a crypto exchange platform is usually a quick and easy process. In most cases, you need to provide your full name, create a passport and verify your account with your email.

Some crypto exchange platforms also require you to go through the complete verification process. In this phase, you need to provide some personal information and documentation such as a driver's license, a copy of your passport, etc. However, some others do not require this KYC process, including Huobi Global. Still, if you want to withdraw a large amount of crypto on Huobi, you need to verify your account.

The next step is to deposit some money into your account to make the purchases. Exchange platforms usually allow different payment methods including credit and debit card, bank account, PayPal, cash payments, etc.

Buy Solana coin

After you have verified your account and deposited funds on it, you can make a purchase. On the vast majority of crypto exchanges, you can make an instant purchase or use the tools that the exchange platform offers to get the number of cryptos you want at the near market rate.

Transfer Your Funds to a Cold Storage Wallet

The next big question you should take care of is where to store your cryptos after you make a purchase. Crypto exchange platforms are targeted by hackers sometimes, so they can steal your money if you keep them in your exchange wallet for a long time.

So, if you want to keep your crypto funds safe, you had better transfer them on hardware or a software wallet to keep them more secure. The hardware wallet is a physical device that you can buy and store your assets on it offline. In contrast, software wallets are just applications that you can usually get for free and transfer your coins on them. Some exchanges offer their wallet, including Binance wallet that is called a Trust Wallet.

Crypto asset investing is highly volatile and unregulated in some EU countries and the UK. No consumer protection. Tax on profits may apply.

How To Trade Solana (SOL) In The UK - A Step by Step Guide

Another option is to trade the Solana coin. In that aspect, the process remains largely the same, however, you might have to find a much more cost-effective platform that is also more suited for day trading activities. The following is a complete guide on how to trade Solana coin in the UK online.

Find an Online Trading Platform that Supports Solana coin

For short-term trading, the essential factor to consider is finding a platform that charges relatively low fees and operates quickly and easily. Unfortunately, you don't have a large selection of trading platforms that support Solana right now. So, you can start with Binance until other well-known platforms accept SOL trading.

Fund Your Account

To start, you need to go through a quick registration for a personal account and verification process. Then you need to choose a payment method and deposit some funds into your account to make a purchase.

Develop a Trading Strategy - Scalping/day trading/swing, etc

Developing a trading strategy is always a good idea if you want to make your trading process more organized. Some of the most famous strategies that you can adopt are day trading, scalping, and so on, which are considered active trading strategies. This means that you should always keep an eye on the market to act effectively.

In the case of passive strategies, you just buy and hold cryptos without the need to pay too much attention to market changes. You can also make a mix of already existing strategies and move according to that plan.

Start Trading Solana coin

When done with all these steps, you can start the trading process. However, if you are still undecided, you can go on and find more information about Solana to better understand its essence.

Solana (SOL) Pros and Cons

Here are some pros and cons of the Solana coin that will give a better understanding of the project.

Pros of Solana:

✅ It provided the promised benefits related to the speed and scalability of transitions.

✅ Attracted several investors and got a funding round made by Andreessen Horowitz.

✅ Almost 50,000 transactions per second happen in the Solana blockchain.

✅ If the project succeeds, it can bring breakthrough changes to the market.

Cons of Solana:

❌ It has rivals in the market, including Ethereum

❌ Still, it needs to attract many users to prove its protocol is trustable in terms of speed and scalability.

Read Also: Is Solana Worth Buying?

Is Solana Coin A Good Long-term Investment?

We already discussed that Solana is not just a copy of another cryptocurrency. It has lots of differences and promises to solve such problems in the cryptocurrency world as its scalability. So, if the Solana project can reach its goals, it can really be a good long-term investment.

Crypto prediction websites are mainly optimistic about Solana prices in the long term. Coinpedia forecast that SOL price can rise up to $23 in one year. According to Digital Coin Price, Solana could be trading at $30 by the end of 2023.

What Will The Solana (SOL) Be Worth In 2025?

According to cryptocurrency price predicting algorithms, Solana prices will see a significant rise by the year 2025. For example, Coinpedia predicts that Solana can reach $57 in 2025. Digital Coin Price foresees a price prediction equal to $50 in 2025.

Don't Miss: Solana Price Predictions

What’s The Purpose Of The Solana (SOL)?

Solana's primary purpose is to solve the problem of scalability, which is a big issue in the cryptocurrency market. It also provides users with a platform to build decentralized apps, as Ethereum does. But unlike Ethereum and other crypto projects, Solana uses unique parameters to lower the costs of the transactions on its platform so that retail investors can also use it.

Is Solana Coin Mining Profitable?

Solana’s SOL tokens cannot be mined like BTC or etc. However, you can take part in the Solana mining process by staking a certain amount of SOL coins you already have and don’t use at the moment. As a result, you will be rewarded with more SOL tokens.

Buying or Trading Solana (SOL) - Things To Take Into Consideration

In short, Solana promises to be a huge cryptocurrency project, and it is not created just for fun. Its founders, who have bright careers in the related fields, aim to solve the most fundamental problem in the DeFi world by improving the speed of transactions and their scalability. Solana is also an Ethereum-like smart contract enabled platform for building dApps, and it is sometimes referred to as "Ethereum Killer."

Still, Solana has to attract lots of users in order to be able to compete with such a large and established crypto platform like Ethereum. This can make Solana a good-long term investment. In these terms, the SOL token does not seem to be a speculative asset, so you can consider investing in this crypto too. If you want to do so, return to our guide section and follow it to learn how to buy Solana in the UK.