Adedapo Adesanya
By Adedapo Adesanya
As the cryptocurrency market continues to face serious headwinds, Solana (SOL), one of the most recognised tokens in the industry, has now fallen below $10.
As of the time of this report, the token was trading at $9.52 after losing 21.3 per cent in the last seven days.
The crypto has also lost 94 per cent for the year after crashing 70 per cent since the collapse of FTX in November.
Solana, which was once praised as a viable rival to the second-most popular crypto, Ethereum, has dropped 4.7 per cent in the last 24 hours, far below the all-time high of $259.99 reached in November 2021.
The latest decline comes as more crypto projects bail on the Solana ecosystem. On Monday, CoinDesk reported that two of the Solana blockchain’s top NFT collections, DeGods and Y00ts, will migrate to Ethereum and Polygon, respectively.
Solana’s decline follows years of support and investment from embattled FTX founder, Mr Sam Bankman-Fried, and his subsidiaries.
In 2021, Solana Labs raised $314.2 million and received substantial backing from Alameda Research. The firm also had the token as its second-largest investment.
Later, Mr Bankman-Fried also began building a decentralized exchange called Serum using the Solana blockchain.
In November, the Solana Foundation team released a blog post explaining the financial ties between the token and Mr Bankman-Fried’s empire. FTX and Alameda had purchased over 50.5 million Solana tokens — now worth about $500 million — that would remain “locked” until 2028.
Also, Solana Foundation had roughly $1 million in cash or assets on the FTX platform as of November 6, when the exchange had to pause customer withdrawals due to liquidity shortages.
