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By Will McCurdy
Solana. Image: Shutterstock
The price of embattled cryptocurrency Solana (SOL) has shot up by over 11% over the past 24 hours, per CoinGecko. The New Year price bump has seen the cryptocurrency reclaim $11 after several days trading below double-digits.
The news follows a show of support from Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, who tweeted last week that “smart people” have told him there is an “earnest smart developer community in Solana,” and that the chain has “a bright future” now that “the awful opportunistic money people have been washed out.” Buterin added that he hopes the Solana community “gets its fair chance to thrive.”
However, Solana’s New Year pump hasn’t canceled out the battering the would-be “Ethereum killer” has taken over recent months.
The cryptocurrency is down nearly 20% in the past month and has lost over 95% of its value since reaching an all-time high of nearly $260 in November 2021.
SOL slid from fifth place on the list of largest cryptocurrencies by market cap in November 2022 to 19th at the time of writing; earlier this month it briefly slipped out of the top 20.
Contagion from the collapse of crypto exchange FTX likely accounts for a large part of Solana’s recent price woes; in November the Solana Foundation shared details of its financial entanglement with the now-bankrupt exchange and its sister firm Alameda Research.
Solana has had a year of amazing growth—but also multiple network outages. Co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko joined Dan Roberts and Stacy Elliott on the gm podcast to talk about the outages, what's next for Solana at its upcoming Breakpoint event, how it competes with Ethereum, how long he expects the bear market to last, what's happening with NFTs on Solana, and much more. Watch Episode 20 of the gm podcast and make sure to subscribe on Apple or Spotify.
FTX’s sister hedge fund Alameda Research was invested in 17 total Solana projects, worth about $3.26 billion in total, per data from DeFi Llama.
In addition, several large-scale projects have announced plans to abandon the Solana ecosystem in recent months.
DeGods, a popular NFTs collection that utilizes the Solana network, is set to migrate to the Ethereum ecosystem in the first quarter of this year.
In addition, another popular NFT project, yOOts, is set to move to Polygon, an Ethereum-based Layer-1 network.
