SOL rebounded from Thursday’s low of $8.19 and retook the $9.50 range where it had been trading for much of the day. But the token is still 96% below all-time highs near $260, in part because of sellers dumping the “Sam coin” alleged fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried once loudly boosted.
“Some smart people tell me there is an earnest smart developer community in Solana, and now that the awful opportunistic money people have been washed out, the chain has a bright future,” Buterin tweeted shortly before SOL’s Thursday recovery began.
Some smart people tell me there is an earnest smart developer community in Solana, and now that the awful opportunistic money people have been washed out, the chain has a bright future.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 29, 2022
Hard for me to tell from outside, but I hope the community gets its fair chance to thrive🦾🦾
SOL has lost 20% in just one week. It is trading in the single digits for the first time since February 2021.
“Hard for me to tell from outside, but I hope the community gets its fair chance to thrive,” he said of Solana’s developers, who are building a decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem to rival Ethereum – the DeFi market leader.
Some on Crypto Twitter are pointing out that SOL’s 2021-2022 chart mimics the boom-bust pattern set by ETH in 2018 and 2019, when ETH fell 95% from its heights above $1,200. ETH weathered another boom-bust cycle and has settled in the $1,200 range again.
A friend also shared this SOL overlapped on ETH chart from 2017 to present idk about you, but SOL pullback lookin like ETH pullback in 2018 👀 pic.twitter.com/8CqOuyhJv5
— CryptoApe 🔗🔺️⚛🥝🍔 (@CryptoApe0) December 29, 2022
For SOL to recover it will likely have to shake off its association with Bankman-Fried, who invested heavily in SOL and supported Solana projects with FTX venture deals and market-making from Alameda Research. The twin companies’ implosions triggered an exodus of capital from Solana DeFi; and its trading protocols continue to suffer from insufficient liquidity.
