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Solana Price Rebounds as Ethereum's Buterin Tweets Support
But the “Sam coin” is still down nearly 95% this year.
By Danny Nelson
Updated Dec 31, 2022, 12:30 p.m. Published Dec 30, 2022, 2:04 a.m.
Solana’s native token SOL erased most of Thursday’s 15% fall after Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted support for the blockchain most battered by FTX’s implosion.
SOL rebounded from Thursday’s low of $8.19 and retook the $9.50 range where it had been trading for much of the day. But the token is still 96% below all-time highs near $260, in part because of sellers dumping the “Sam coin” alleged fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried once loudly boosted.
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“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,” Buterin tweeted shortly before SOL’s Thursday recovery began.
SOL has lost 20% in just one week. It is trading in the single digits for the first time since February 2021.
“Hard for me to tell from outside, but I hope the community gets its fair chance to thrive,” he said of Solana’s developers, who are building a decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem to rival Ethereum – the DeFi market leader.
Some on Crypto Twitter are pointing out that SOL’s 2021-2022 chart mimics the boom-bust pattern set by ETH in 2018 and 2019, when ETH fell 95% from its heights above $1,200. ETH weathered another boom-bust cycle and has settled in the $1,200 range again.
A friend also shared this SOL overlapped on ETH chart from 2017 to present idk about you, but SOL pullback lookin like ETH pullback in 2018 👀 pic.twitter.com/8CqOuyhJv5
— CryptoApe 🔗🔺️⚛🥝🍔 (@CryptoApe0) December 29, 2022
For SOL to recover it will likely have to shake off its association with Bankman-Fried, who invested heavily in SOL and supported Solana projects with FTX venture deals and market-making from Alameda Research. The twin companies’ implosions triggered an exodus of capital from Solana DeFi; and its trading protocols continue to suffer from insufficient liquidity.
Read more: Why Solana Was Decimated by Bankman-Fried’s Downfall
Bankman-Fried’s impact on SOL is more than just bad PR, however. His companies bought over 58 million SOL tokens in aggregate – 15% of the current circulating supply. Though it's unclear how much SOL the now-bankrupt companies still control, the liquidation of those assets could further depress SOL’s market.
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