Solana Market Cap Shrinks Below Litecoin in Protracted Descent

The market cap of the favored proof-of-stake blockchain, Solana, slipped under that of the OG proof-of-work blockchain, Litecoin, in response to Coingecko.

Once dubbed the “Ethereum Killer,” Solana’s SOL token started 2022 buying and selling at $178.89, with a market capitalization of $55.09 billion in January 2022. Then got here crypto winter, the merge that noticed Ethereum—the as soon as proof-of-work blockchain—change to proof-of-stake, and the fallout from the collapse of cryptocurrency change FTX. Now, SOL is at present buying and selling at $11.91 with a present market cap of $4.32 billion, a 94.9% drop for the 12 months.

Solana is a proof-of-stake layer-1 blockchain that permits builders to create decentralized purposes, or dapps, and non-fungible tokens, higher often called NFTs.

Contrast this with Litecoin, which started 2022 buying and selling at $151.09 with a market capitalization of $10.47 billion. Fast ahead to November 22, 2022, and Litecoin is buying and selling at $69.36 with a market cap of $4.97 billion, a drop of 69.1%.

Solana’s newest downturn started with the collapse of FTX. On November 14, days after FTX filed for Chapter 11 chapter safety, consideration turned to the Solana Foundation publicity to the failed change—together with roughly $1 million in money or money equivalents on FTX.com as of November 6, when FTX.com ceased to course of withdrawals.

“This is lower than 1% of Solana Foundation’s money or money equivalents and as such, the influence on Solana Foundation operations is negligible,” the Solana Foundation famous in a post.

But FTX held a substantial quantity of SOL on the time of its collapse: $982 million value of SOL on November 10, in response to Forbes and the Financial Times.

“We’re undecided how a lot buyer SOL was on FTX,” Solana Foundation’s head of communications, Austin Federa, instructed Decrypt. “But the Foundation had lower than $1 million on FTX, Solana Labs had nothing.”

FTX, together with its founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, has lengthy been related to Solana, having participated in a $314 million fundraise by Solana Labs by means of Alameda Research.

Undeterred by the present downturn, the Solana group nonetheless rallies across the embattled blockchain and token. “Community resolve has been actually sturdy, it is a pleasure to look at,” Federa stated.

“We launched in 2020 after markets crashed and the world went into lockdown—chewing glass is in our DNA, and we’ll get by means of collectively,” tweeted Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko on November 9, 2022.

In a case of “not getting old nicely,” a tweet by the previous billionaire has come again to hang-out Bankman-Fried. On January 2021, he pledged to purchase an investor’s whole SOL place when Solana was at $3 per coin. “Sell me all you need. Then go fuck off,” he stated.

Nearly two years later, with FTX token FTT buying and selling at $1.30 as of this writing, that investor—who goes by @CoinMamba on Twitter—had the final chortle.