What are the new changes for Solana in 2023, following FTX?

On December 1, 2021, Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, made a bold statement that "SOL (Solana) is about to see huge buy orders because every billionaire in the world is calling me and SBF." At that time, SOL was unstoppable and priced at around $230.

But who would have thought that after a year, the price of SOL, the token of this "high-performance public chain highly sought after by billionaires," could fall below $10, dropping to a low of $8, with a decline of over 95%.

After Kyle's tweet, which is comparable to Do Kwon's "You size is not size", the crypto winter has arrived. With the successive explosions of Terra's ecosystem (Luna) and Three Arrow Capital (3AC), market panic continues to spread. Finally, under the multiple forces of internal and external factors, another powerful supporter behind Solana, FTX, also fell - announcing bankruptcy.

FTX and Alameda's bankruptcy has seriously affected the entire Solana ecosystem. Not only did it cause the Solana Foundation to suffer losses of more than $180 million in cryptocurrency assets, but it also directly destroyed the important underlying protocol Serum of the Solana DeFi ecosystem. Because of the important permissions held by FTX, this cornerstone protocol was quickly declared invalid.

Due to a series of "catastrophic" events, Solana's TVL (Total Value Locked) has dropped from a bull market high of 10 billion to around 200 million US dollars.

The community is in mourning, and the SOL token has been falling all the way, it seems that Solana is already "beyond redemption".

Confidence and Opportunity

After the SOL token fell to $8 on the fifth day, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted a tweet.

Some smart people told me that Solana has a sincere and intelligent developer community, and now those terrible opportunistic funds have been washed away. This chain has a bright future.

I find it difficult to judge from the outside, but I hope the community can have a fair opportunity for development.

Vitalik's words seem to have become a reassuring pill, and the SOL token has risen in response. The panic in the Solana community has been alleviated in the subsequent continuous rise.

Not only in times of crisis, Vitalik also specifically mentioned Solana in a Twitter AMA at the end of June 2023. When responding to a question from Matt Huang, co-founder of Paradigm, about 'what do you think of US cryptocurrency policy?', Vitalik answered,

I am saddened by the way Solana and other projects have been affected. This should not have happened. If Ethereum ultimately 'wins' by being kicked off all other blockchains from trading platforms, it is not a glorious victory and may not even be a victory in the long run.

Especially so, because the real competition is not from other chains, but from the rapidly expanding centralized world that is putting pressure on us as we speak.

I wish all good projects can achieve fair results.

Other than Vitalik, Chris Burniske from Placeholder was also a major supporter during the Solana crash. On December 11, 2022, Chris stated that Solana and Cosmos are the two ecosystems he is most interested in, aside from Ethereum.

Other than continuously cheering for Solana on Twitter, in an interview with Bankless in February 2023, 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 blockchain. The platform currently holds over 40% of the trading volume share in the Solana NFT market through strategies such as Blur orders and transaction mining, and even surpassed Magic Eden, the largest NFT market on Solana, at one point.

Not only external support and investment, but there are also new developments within the Solana ecosystem

Although facing many controversies, Solana's mobile phone Saga successfully launched in April 2023.

Rollbit, a spinach platform launched on the Solana blockchain, experienced rapid growth in 2023. Although specific operational data has not been obtained, as of the time of writing, its token RLB has increased by more than 28 times in the past year.

Solana has launched state compression. The official statement indicates that the cost of minting 1 million NFTs has been reduced to approximately $110.

The on-chain data performance of Solana is also impressive. According to the data from on-chain data platform Artemis, the number of daily active addresses on Solana's chain has remained above 200,000.

Although the DeFi ecosystem on the Solana blockchain has not yet recovered, the data for Solana NFTs in early 2023 is second only to Ethereum, and recently dropped to second place due to the influence of Bitcoin NFTs.

In July 2023, the Solana ecosystem community conference hosted by Superteam ended successfully, updating the latest progress and projects of Solana. More than 2,000 community users participated in the conference. In addition, in May, Solana also gained a new Chinese community, which began to synchronize a series of key events of Solana.

Facing Solana, which no longer has the momentum to sweep across the world as before and has returned to the public's attention in a low-key manner. Perhaps, as Mable, former partner of Multicoin Capital, mentioned in the podcast "Solana's ups and downs: many accidents and a few inevitabilities", Solana is probably not going to die, but it won't survive in the same way as before.

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