Over $900 million Solana to be unlocked in 24 hours; Will SOL crash further?

When the current epoch finishes in under 24 hours, Solana (SOL) validators are expected to release a total of 50.7 million SOL, equivalent to over $940 million, at the time of publication.

It is the second-largest number of tokens to be unlocked in any Solana timeframe, and it comes at a time when the cryptocurrency market is experiencing significant volatility.

In particular, Solana Compass data indicates that the Solana network Epoch 370 will unlock 50,792,762 SOL( 14.2% of Solana’s total supply).

Solana epochs

According to Solana Compass data, Epoch 370, the current Solana network epoch, will finish at 8.30 AM UTC on November 10. Solana epochs are two days during which validators secure their stake in the network. Validators have the option of unlocking their stake after each epoch. 

The website dashboard now displays approximately 50.7 million SOL tokens due to be unlocked by validators (deactivating stake). This figure has risen from 18 million in a matter of hours. The spike is most likely due to more validators opting to withdraw their staked tokens from the network. In comparison, only 1.8 million sol is scheduled to be staked at the end of the current epoch.

Solana price chart

The tokens planned for removal from the Solana stake account for 13% of the entire supply of the cryptocurrency. Solana’s token price has dropped 31% in the previous 24 hours.

As things stand, Solana is trading at $18.41, down 31.41% in the last 24 hours and a further 42.25% across the previous seven days, according to data retrieved by Finbold from CoinMarketCap.

The present decline in Solana is part of a $100 billion market sell-off prompted by the FTX meltdown. Currently, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) is at its lowest level in the last two years, while Ethereum (ETH) has dropped 20% in the past 24 hours.

Elsewhere, FTX’s SOL reserve, a cryptocurrency that traditionally had strong backing from FTX’s founder Bankman-Fried, seems to have been the target of severe selling activity.

It remains to be seen how the token unlocks will affect the price of SOL. Notably, Solana has been the second-worst performer of the day, only behind FTX Token (FTT) in losses (68%).

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