Solana Price(SOL)

Data from the Solana ($SOL) blockchain has revealed that a large whale is facing a potential liquidation of around $52 million worth of the cryptocurrency as its price tumbles over the collapse of the popular cryptocurrency trading platform FTX.According to popular crypto journalist Colin Wu, a Solana whale is in liquidation and currently has over 2.4 million SOL in collateral backing a 44.87 million USDC debt. With the price of Solana rapidly plunging, the whale’s forced sale could lead to further downside. Solana Whale (3oSE9CtGMQeAdtkm2U3ENhEpkFMfvrckJMA8QwVsuRbE) is in liquidation and currently has 2,450,418.5 SOL (worth over $51 million) in collateral and 44,871,609.6 USDC in debt. However, Solana is currently facing congestion due to the update of the oracle. pic.twitter.com/qJKMViJeQK— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) November 9, 2022 Wu noted that Solana is “currently facing congestion due to the update of the oracle,” which means that the whale hasn’t yet been liquidated on the decentralized finance (DeFi) lending platform Solend.Solana lost over 55% of its value over the past seven days as panic-selling has taken over the cryptocurrency. SOL’s seven-day implied volatility, a measure of expected price turbulence in the short term- skyrocketed to an annualized 270%. Its 30-day implied volatility has surged to 190%, compared to Bitcoin’s 95%.Solana’s price is believed to be dropping as FTX’s sister company Alameda Research liquidates its SOL holdings. FTX collapsed over a liquidity crisis earlier this week as a Binance announcement noting it would sell all of its FTT token holdings triggered a bank run on the exchange, which did not have enough to meet customer demands and is said to have used users’ assets to fund risky investments.Binance dropped out of the FTX deal, citing concerns surrounding the exchange’s business practices and investigations by US financial regulators. FTX’s CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, told investors on Wednesday that the firm needed up to $8 billion after a bank run saw it halt withdrawals.Venture Capital firm Sequoia Capital, which invested $150 million in both FTX and FTX.US, has marked the value of its investment down to zero. The VC firm defended it conducted adequate due diligence at the time of investment, saying then FTX was a profitable company that had around $1 billion of revenue and $270 million of operating income.Reuters has reported that Sam Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda Research, suffered a series of losses from deals, and that Bankman-Fried transferred at least $4 billion in FTX funds secured by assets including FTT and shares in trading platform Robinhood Markets to support it.A portion of these assets were customers’ deposits. A reportedly leaked Slack message from Bankman-Fried has revealed he plans to “do right by customers.”

A record 31 million of the Solana blockhain’s SOL tokens were unstaked Thursday from the blockchain’s security mechanism, a day after crypto analysts warned that some investors might be seeking to redeem their holdings as the price of the digital assets tanked. But the price of SOL surged in digital-asset markets after the Solana Foundation, which supports development on the blockchain, said it would postpone a plan to unstake some 28.5 million tokens. A total of 63 million SOL was previously ready to be unstaked at the conclusion of the Solana blockchain’s “epoch 370” staking lockup period, according to a statement from the Solana Foundation on Thursday. The foundation had tweeted late Wednesday that about 28.5 million SOL tokens scheduled to be unstaked had been re-staked due to a policy change of cloud service provider Hetzner on Nov. 2. Those tokens are owned by the Solana Foundation’s treasury and had been staked as part of a delegation program, according to the tweet. “While 28.5M SOL was in the process of being unstaked during this epoch, the plan to unstake has now been postponed, and all 28.5M SOL have now been re-staked,” according to the tweet thread. The FTX connection The SOL price fall appeared to be tied to speculation surrounding this week's drama involving the rapid deterioration of erstwhile billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire, including the FTX exchange and Alameda Research trading firm. Riyad Carey, research analyst at crypto data firm Kaiko, told CoinDesk on Monday that SOL is Alameda's second-largest holding, and it also holds significant amounts of SOL ecosystem tokens including MAPS and OXY. The speculation was Alameda might need to dump its SOL tokens to raise liquidity. SOL’s price recently rose 18% to around $17 after plunging as low as $12 in the past 24 hours. (Crypto markets were broadly higher; the CoinDesk Market Index jumped 11%.) Solana didn’t specify the exact change of the data center provider that caused the restaking action, after a request for comment from CoinDesk. Hetzner didn’t immediately return for comment as of press time. A new Solana staking epoch An “epoch” on the Solana blockchain refers to the time period when staking rewards are earned and then issued. Validators will lock in their stake on the blockchain during this period, which takes about two days, and can choose to unlock the tokens once the epoch is over. The new epoch period, known as 371, started Thursday morning, with currently around 660,000 SOL tokens, worth more than $11 million, already scheduled to unstake after the lock-in period ends, according to Solana Compass. Eliézer Ndinga, director of research at crypto investment products firm 21.co, said that some operational indicators of the Solana blockchain, such as user adoption, still look healthy. The number of applications built on top and the retention rate of the developers is also “a testament” to the ecosystem's overall health, Ndinga said. “I believe that there is nothing that is structurally damaging for the Solana adoption itself,” he told CoinDesk. “Solana should come up stronger as long as, of course," [it remains].

Will Solana’s unstake plan result in a drop in SOL’s value?A large number of SOL validators have stopped staking 29.2 million SOL in preparation for withdrawal within the next few hours. This is the second-largest volume of tokens unlocked in SOL’s history amid the post-FTX crisis of the entire crypto market.Source: Solana CompassHowever, according to the Solana Foundation, Hetzner fired a large number of SOL’s independent validators on November 2. In order to restake to validators working in alternate regions, the foundation started the process of unstaking the 28.5 million SOL allocated to those validators as part of the foundation’s Delegation Program, which went into force at epoch 370.The decision to unstake has since been delayed, and all 28.5 million SOL have been re-staked. …in order to restake to validators operating in alternative locations, which took effect at epoch 370. While 28.5M SOL was in the process of being unstaked during this epoch, the plan to unstake has now been postponed, and all 28.5M SOL have now been re-staked.— Solana Foundation (@SolanaFndn) November 9, 2022 At the time of writing, SOL is trading at $15.SOL daily chart. Source: Coincu