Can Solana stay afloat without SBF and FTX?

Solana is widely regarded as the personal project of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). He single-handedly set a floor price of $3 before one of the most spectacular bull runs in crypto history to $267.

SBF now faces decades to life in prison.

SBF-connected insiders purchased hundreds of millions of SOL below $0.26. As far back as April 2018, Solana’s founders sold 15% of SOL’s initial supply to private investors at $0.04. These rounds excluded public investors, of course, who had to wait to purchase SOL when it began trading on exchanges north of $2.80 on August 11, 2020.

Read more: Jump Crypto forced to save Solana with $320M bailout of its own company

SBF believed he was so rich by January 2021 that he offered to buy an unlimited quantity of SOL at $3. For a few months, that bet appeared brilliant; within 11 months, SOL hit an all-time high of $267.

• FTX took over $600 million worth of SOL into bankruptcy.
• During the week when FTX declared bankruptcy, the price of SOL declined 60%.
• Today — even after doubling last month — SOL still trades 90% lower than its peak.

SBF is now under house arrest and many of his colleagues turned state’s evidence. With SBF’s fraudulent empire in bankruptcy, famously centralized Solana has had to find other ways to remake itself.

Solana’s insiders turned off their blockchain entirely at least a dozen times in 2022. Now, its goals are more rudimentary: keep the blockchain running.

Positive headlines for Solana post-SBF

• Last week, Solana announced that its dApp Store will be integrated with its mobile phone, Saga.
• Jump Crypto President Kanav Kariya confirmed plans to build an open-source validator client called Firedancer on Solana and optimize it for high-frequency trading.
• Kin — previously charged by the SEC — released a middleware development platform, Kinetic, on the Solana platform.
• Solana-supporting Phantom wallet says it thwarted more than 18,000 attacks and blocked a malicious website that stole NFTs from tech entrepreneur Kevin Rose.
• Marinade Finance announced plans to increase total value locked (TVL) by 40 million SOL on January 24, through an incentive tied to its native staking token, mSOL.

It hasn’t only been smooth sailing

• On January 26, Solana-based DeFi app Friktion announced a sunset of its platform and urged users to withdraw their assets.
• Decentralized gaming marketplace Fractal showed signs of moving away from Solana-based assets and emphasized support for a Solana competitor, Polygon, on January 24.
• Solana’s Remote Procedure Call endpoints went down on January 8 due to a Solana Validator client error, whose endpoints enable apps to connect to Solana’s blockchain.

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