On December 1, 2021, Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, made a bold statement, “SOL (Solana SOL 0.83%) is about to usher in a huge payout, because every billionaire in the world is calling me and SBF.” The unstoppable SOL at the time was around $230.
But who would have imagined that after a year, the price of this high-performance public chain “very popular with billionaires” and its token SOL could drop below $10, and the lowest fell to $8, a drop of more than 95% .
After Kyle’s tweet, which is comparable to Do Kwon’s “You size is not size”. The crypto winter is coming, and with the successive thunderstorms of Terra (Luna) ecology and Three Arrow Capital (3AC), market panic continues to spread. In the end, under the combined forces of internal and external factors, another supporter behind Solana, who was also the most powerful supporter in the industry at the time, also fell—FTX declared bankruptcy.
The bankruptcy of FTX and Alameda seriously affected the entire ecology of Solana. Not only did the Solana Foundation suffer a loss of more than $180 million in encrypted assets. It directly destroyed Serum, an important underlying protocol of the Solana DeFi ecosystem. This cornerstone protocol was quickly declared invalid because important permissions existed on the FTX side.
Affected by this series of “destructive” events, Solana’s TVL (Total Value Locked) also fell from the BTC -0.16%-miner-fee-revenue-signals-start-of-bull-market/">bull market high of 10 billion to about 200 million US dollars.
The community was wailing, and the SOL token fell all the way. It seems that Solana has been “powerless”.
Confidence and Turnaround
Five days after the SOL token dropped to $8, Ethereum ETH 0.15% founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted,
Some smart people tell me there is an earnest smart developer community in Solana, and now that the awful opportunistic money people have been washed out, the chain has a bright future.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 29, 2022
Hard for me to tell from outside, but I hope the community gets its fair chance to thrive🦾🦾
Vitalik’s words seemed to be a reassurance, and SOL tokens rose accordingly. The panic in the Solana community was eased in the ensuing streak.
Not only in times of crisis, Vitalik specifically mentioned Solana in a Twitter AMA at the end of June 2023.
The one comment I'll make is that I feel bad that @solana and other projects are getting hit in this way. They don't deserve it, and if ethereum ends up "winning" through all other blockchains getting kicked off exchanges, that's not an honorable way to win, and in the long term…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) June 30, 2023
In addition to Vitalik, Chris Burniske of Placeholder was also a major supporter during Solana’s collapse. On December 11, 2022, Chris said that Solana and Cosmos ATOM 1.19% were the two ecologies he was most concerned about besides Ethereum.
In addition to continuing to wave the flag for Solana on Twitter. In a February 2023 interview with Bankless, Chris Burniske directly stated that Solana is undervalued and has investment potential similar to ETH.
In March, Placeholder also led the investment in Tensor, an NFT trading platform on the Solana chain. Through strategies similar to Blur pending orders and transaction mining, the platform has now occupied more than 40% of the Solana NFT market. NFT marketplace Magic Eden.
New Developments Within the Solana Ecosystem
Despite many controversies, Solana’s mobile phone Saga was successfully launched in April 2023.
Rollbit, a gambling platform released on the Solana chain, will usher in rapid growth in 2023. Although no specific operating data has been obtained, as of the publication, its token RLB has increased by more than 28 times during the year.
Solana introduces state compaction. According to officials, the cost of minting 1 million NFTs has been reduced to about $110.
Solana’s on-chain data performance is also good. According to data from Artemis, an on-chain data platform, the number of daily active addresses on the Solana chain has remained above 200,000.
After the collapse of FTX and the collapse of SOL, what new changes will Solana have in 2023?
Although the DeFi ecology on the Solana chain has not yet recovered, the data of Solana NFT in early 2023 is second only to Ethereum, and has recently been affected by Bitcoin NFT and dropped to second place.
In July 2023, Superteam hosted the Solana Ecological Community Conference, attended by Solana co-founder Raj Gokal and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. The conference updated Solana’s latest progress and projects, and more than 2,000 community users participated. Not only that, Solana also had a new Chinese community in May, and began to synchronize a series of key events of Solana.
Facing Solana, who is not like before, has the momentum to sweep the world, and returns to the public’s attention in a low-key manner. Perhaps, as Mable, the former partner of Multicoin Capital, mentioned in the podcast “Solana’s Ups and Downs: Many Chances and a Little Inevitability”, Solana has a high probability that it will not die, but it will not live in the original way.
