What new changes does Solana have in 2023 after FTX?

Author: Rhythm BlockBeats

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

Who would have thought that a year later, this "high-performance public chain favored by billionaires" would see its token SOL drop below $10, hitting a low of $8, a decline of over 95%.

Following Kyle's tweet, which was comparable to Do Kwon's "Your size is not size," the crypto winter arrived. With the collapse of the Terra (Luna) ecosystem and Three Arrows Capital (3AC), market panic continued to spread. Ultimately, under the combined pressure of various internal and external factors, another powerful supporter behind Solana, who was also one of the most influential figures in the industry at the time, fell—FTX announced bankruptcy.

The bankruptcy of FTX and Alameda severely impacted the entire Solana ecosystem. Not only did the Solana Foundation suffer over $180 million in crypto asset losses, but it also directly destroyed the important underlying protocol Serum in the Solana DeFi ecosystem. Because critical permissions were held by FTX, this foundational protocol quickly announced its invalidation.

As a result of this series of "devastating" events, Solana's TVL (Total Value Locked) plummeted from a bull market peak of $10 billion to around $200 million.

The community was in despair, and the SOL token continued to decline, seemingly leaving Solana "unable to turn the tide."

Confidence and Turning Point

On the fifth day after the SOL token dropped to $8, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted,

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

It's hard for me to judge from the outside, but I hope the community gets a fair opportunity to develop."

Vitalik's words seemed to serve as a reassurance, and the SOL token responded by rising. The panic within the Solana community was alleviated by the subsequent continuous price increases.

Not only during the crisis, but Vitalik also specifically mentioned Solana during a Twitter AMA at the end of June 2023. In response to Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang's question about "thoughts on U.S. cryptocurrency policy?", Vitalik replied,

"I feel sad that Solana and other projects are being hit this way. It shouldn't be like this. If Ethereum ultimately 'wins' by pushing all other blockchains off exchanges, that's not a glorious way to win, and in the long run, it may not even be a victory.

Especially since the real competition isn't other chains, but the rapidly expanding centralized world that is pressing on us as we speak.

I wish all good projects a fair outcome."

In addition to Vitalik, Chris Burniske from Placeholder was also a major supporter during Solana's collapse. On December 11, 2022, Chris stated that Solana and Cosmos were the two ecosystems he was most focused on besides Ethereum.

In addition to continuously advocating for Solana on Twitter, in an interview with Bankless in February 2023, Chris Burniske directly stated that Solana was undervalued and had investment potential similar to ETH.

In March, Placeholder also led the investment in Tensor, an NFT trading platform on the Solana chain, which has captured over 40% of the trading volume in the Solana NFT market through strategies similar to Blur's order placement and trading mining, even surpassing Magic Eden, the largest NFT market on Solana at one point.

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

Despite facing numerous controversies, Solana's phone, Saga, successfully launched in April 2023.

The betting platform Rollbit, launched on the Solana chain, experienced rapid growth in 2023. Although specific operational data was not available, by the time of writing, its token RLB had increased more than 28 times this year.

Solana introduced state compression. The official statement indicated that the cost of minting 1 million NFTs was reduced to about $110.

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

Although the DeFi ecosystem on the Solana chain has not yet recovered, the data for Solana NFTs at the beginning of 2023 was second only to Ethereum, and recently, influenced by Bitcoin NFTs, it has dropped to second place.

In July 2023, Superteam held a Solana ecosystem community conference, attended by Solana co-founder Raj Gokal and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. The conference updated the latest developments and projects of Solana, with over 2,000 community users participating. Moreover, in May, Solana also established a new Chinese community to synchronize a series of key events related to Solana.

Facing a Solana that has returned to the public eye in a low-key manner, lacking the sweeping momentum of the past, it may be as former Multicoin Capital partner Mable mentioned in the podcast "The Rise and Fall of Solana: Many Coincidences and a Little Necessity," that Solana is unlikely to die, but it will not live in the same way as before.