SOLUSDT

SOL has been forming a Bull Pennant following its 14,200% year-to-date price rally.

Solana (SOL) price technicals suggest SOL can hit $275 in the coming sessions.

The upside outlook for the world's sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization comes as it consolidates inside a range that appears like a Bull Pennant.

In detail, Bull Pennants are bullish continuation indicators that form as the price consolidates inside a Symmetrical Triangle-like structure following a strong move upside.

The consolidation trend accompanies declining volumes, reflecting on the trend's underlying weakness.

And, as the price approached the apex—the point where the Pennant's trendlines converge, it tends to undergo a breakout to the upside, with the bull target at length equal to the height of the previous uptrend, i.e., Flagpole.

Solana's flagpole height is roughly $125. That said, a breakout move at the Pennant's apex (at around $150) puts SOL en route to $275.

SOL/BTC pair also gains despite Bitcoin at $60K 

Solana's prospects of hitting $275 come amid an overall price boom across the crypto market.

However, SOL price also rallied by 8% against Bitcoin (BTC) in the past two days in part due to its listing o South Korea's top crypto exchange Upbit.

Related: Solana chart 'bull flag' eyes $250 despite SOL price down 40% since last week

Overall, SOL has been one of the best performing altcoins in 2021, with its year-to-date profits at 8,500%. SOL traded at a record high of $216 in early September.

Institutional inflows boost SOL price

Despite Bitcoin currently in the limelight, Solana's price likely also received a boost from institutional capital via dedicated investment funds, according to a report from CoinShares published earlier this week.

"Digital asset investment products saw inflows 500 totaling US$226 million, bringing the 8 week run of inflows to US$638 million," CoinShares noted, adding:

"It was a mixed picture in other altcoins with recent favorites Solana (US$12.5 million) and Cardano (US$3 million) continuing to see inflows, suggesting the focus hasn’t entirely switched to Bitcoin.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

Meanwhile, the SOL's latest downside move forms a classic bullish continuation structure, with a profit target above $250.

Solana (SOL) price extended its slide on Sept. 17 as a major network outage over the past week — pointing to heightened security risks — hit traders' confidence.

The SOL/USD exchange rate fell up to 13.27% to its intraday low of $133.53 in a corrective trend that began after it topped out near $221.38 on Sept 9. As a result, SOL's price has almost crashed by 40% since its all-time high last week, despite more than tripling their value in the past 30 days.

Outage hurts SOL price

Solana backers tout its layer-1 blockchain solutions as a direct competitor to Ethereum. That is mainly due to its potential to ensure higher speed and lower transactions costs than the world's leading smart contracts platform.

However, on Sept. 14, Solana suffered a denial-of-service disruption, wherein a spike in transaction load — of up to 400,000 per second — overwhelmed its network. As a result, Solana's mainnet beta suffered 18-hours of instability, forcing decentralized applications (dApps) working atop its blockchain to become unusable.

1/ Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS. These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) September 14, 2021

The root cause of the issue was reportedly a decentralized exchange, Raydium. On it, bots attempted to buy SOL tokens and, as a result, flooded the network with up to 400,000 transactions per second. On the other hand, Solana validators failed to prioritize transactions, causing a chain split. 

SOL/USD rates fell up to 19.17% to $137.15 on Sept. 14, only to rebound sharply later to close the day at a 6.47% loss. Nonetheless, the sell-off continued in the next sessions, driven by fears that Solana is more centralized than its top rival Ethereum.

Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Ethereum and another rival blockchain network Polkadot, pointed that Solana functions with an "exclusive and closed set of servers," which somewhat increases its network's speed but comes at the cost of lower decentralization.

The comments appeared as Ethereum successfully withstood against the same attack.

Lol, WTF is going on today? $sol goes offline for a few hours#arbitrum goes down for almost an hour#ethereum got attacked (unsuccessfully)

— Lark Davis (@TheCryptoLark) September 15, 2021

In a tweet issued Thursday, Solana promised to take more proactive steps against potential hacking attempts. The foundation also announced that it would publish a "detailed post-mortem" analysis in the coming weeks.

Bull flag e

SOL/USD expects to resume its prevailing bullish momentum despite the price correction as it paints a classic technical structure with an upside outlook.

Related: BTC takes aim at $50K; Solana goes down; Is ETH ‘sound money’? | Watch The Market Report w/ Charlie Burton

Dubbed Bull Flag, the pattern forms when the price consolidate lower in a descending channel (FLAG) following a strong move upward (FLAGPOLE). Ultimately, the price breaks above the channel's upper trendline, typically rising by as much as the Flagpole's height.

Solana's recent price action has led it to form a similar Bull Flag pattern. As a result, its next attempt to break above the Channel's upper trendline could lead its price as high as the flagpole's height, which comes to be around $107.

As a result, SOL/USD could reach $250.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.