While crypto leaders, such as Bitcoin BTC/USD and Ethereum ETH/USD, have remained fairly stable over the last month, Solana SOL/USD has continued to lose value — crossing the $10 mark for the first time in nearly two years.
According to CoinGecko, Solana reached a low of around $9.73 by the time of writing. SOL hasn’t been below the $10 mark since its initial rise in February 2021.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of FTX FTT/USD, had been a great supporter of Solana and an investor in SOL, which was valued around $37 leading up to the FTX collapse.
Solana stabilized in the first half of December and hung around the $13 mark. SOL is down 29% over the last 30 days.
Solana has been plagued with technical difficulties. In October, it had its fourth outage of 2022 in October when it stopped transactions due to a misconfigured node. This followed a series of partial outages most of January.
Scott Melker said in his blog post on The Wolf Den newsletter said: “One of the most damaging events for Solana was the discovery of fraudulent developer activity, known as the 'Master of Anons,' who was responsible for a significant portion of the coin’s total value locked (TVL). This revelation called into question the stability and integrity of the Solana network and further damaged investor confidence.”
NFT marketplace Magic Eden and DeFi wallet Phantom are going multi-chain, leaving the Solana ecosystem as their exclusive environment, Melker explained.
These changes and hardships have led to a 95.7% loss in its value.
The fiascos that hit centralized projects like FTX have not taken Solana out of the running, which Vitalik Buterin attributes to the greater drive toward decentralization.
In their annual summary, Solana pointed toward greater emphasis on self-custody, technical upgrades including more node operators, and code updates to promote greater speed in transactions.
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