No doubt Solana has been dealt a heavy blow with the FTX / Alameda debacle . The SOL token plummeted from $ 35 to $ 11 and lost approximately two – thirds of it’s value over a 4 day period.
The Solana Foundation held 134.54M SRM tokens and 3.43M FTT tokens on the FTX exchange. These tokens were valued at a combined $ 190M the day before FTX was frozen. In addition the Foundation holds 3.24M common stock shares of FTX.
FTX had also purchased over 58M SOL tokens from the Foundation since 2020. Now it is unclear what will happen to those assets during bankruptcy proceedings.
There’s no denying FTX and Solana had deep financial ties and along with weak markets conditions this resulted in the huge sell off in SOL price.
Nobody could say that 2022 was a stellar year for Solana and it certainly did not prove to be an ” Ethereum killer ” . Solano had many performance problems in the last year and was unstable when used heavily. Every time there was a Solano outage the SOL price fluctuated and the network was criticized for it’s centralization.
Solana is down but is it out ?
Short term Solana is a risky investment. Taking a long term view I believe it is worth a second look and here’s why.
- Solana still has the fastest blockchain.
- New strategic initiatives Solana Pay and Solana Mobile.
- Partnership with Google.
- Continues to gain NFT market share.
- Low transaction fees.
- Scalability
- Has a low environmental impact.
- Strong developer activity.
On August 30 Helium Network announced plans to migrate it’s entire blockchain over to Solana citing fast speeds , scalability and the development potential. Helium Network could have chosen Ethereum or any other L1 blockchain but it picked Solana.
Helium Network currently has just under 1M hotspots deployed worldwide and now all that activity will be running on Solana.
Yes , the SOL token is in the dumps right now and the short term outlook is risky. Many people get amnesia but in 2018 Ethereum was down 97%. How many wish they they were holding a bag of ETH ? In 2026 how many will wish they were holding a bag of SOL ?
