Oh, boy has Solana been through the wringer over the last week or so. While more often than not a project bring it upon itself that is not really the case here. Solana itself has continued to perform and really build out a much better blockchain than it had just a couple of months ago but what caused its issues is how Alameda Research and FTX were early investors in it and held a ton of SOL while also being huge proponents of it. Of course, this bankruptcy also hit right when $1 billion SOL unlocked from staking an event called Epoch 370.
Building upon those issues you then had a couple of crypto platforms (Binance and Crypto.com in particular) stop allowing transactions on their platform in USDC and USDT due to the FTX uncertainty. This might have been due to some heads up though as USDT issuer Tether a few days later completed a $1 billion chain swap meaning it moved $1 billion in USDT on Solana to Ethereum. With the collapse of SOLs price, I would expect there was a ton of excess and with record withdrawals occurring in the crypto space, Ethereum most likely had a need for more liquidity.
Now not all of the news has been bad and there have been a few rays of sunlight peaking through. One of the biggest things that really could have dealt a death blow to Solana was if the Helium blockchain/mining community pulled out of its plan to merge Helium into the Solana blockchain. However, even when given the opportunity Helium has maintained its move to Solana which is a huge sign of faith that the turbulence will die down.
While that in itself is a huge reason to celebrate and have faith there has been recent NFT news that paints Solana's NFT ecosystem in a fantastic light. Ethereum and Solana are the two blockchains with the largest number of NFT collections and given that it is a crypto winter one would expect to see the prices for all these NFTs to continue to decrease. Even though Ethereum is more or less treading water according to various NFT monitoring protocols Solana is the one that is continuing to increase in both sales (in USD), number of transactions, and even the number of buyers! Given all of the bad news that is out there, this is extremely encouraging to see especially with the number in the green across all metrics!
Solana is still going to have to go through a long long grind to try and get back to where it once was something that could be impossible for them if we are being frank about it. However, when it had every reason in the world to collapse and projects to flee the blockchain remained strong and united. To me, this means that Solana is not going anywhere anytime soon. Developer activity still remains in good shape and the users are there as well.
Please know I am not a financial advisor and make sure you do your own research! If you enjoyed this article and would like to support me further below are a few referral links that if you used when signing up I would appreciate it! Also, follow me on Twitter @Cje95_
Fold App
Offers daily wheel spins to win free sats daily! If you sign up for Fold with my link here you will get 20,000 sats for free!
Robinhood
Robinhood is offering a great signup deal if you use my link here where we will both be awarded free stock. All that you have to do is sign up and connect your bank account for the award! With commission-free crypto trading and the ability to set limit orders, it is a great hybrid offering in my opinion! Not to forget the addition of wallets and the ability to send and receive crypto!
Unstoppable Domains
Sign up using my link here and get a free $10 credit towards your first $40+ purchase!
SMiles
If you are like me and walk to work every day this app rewards your walking with Sats! So far I have earned over 7,000 sats in just a couple of months walking to work! Here is my link!
