All the money was gone and it came back again, and Solana was heavily in debt.
It is being sold at a very low price today, who would dare to take advantage of it and laugh at it?

1. FTX sells 41 million SOL. What is the unit price?

Although SBF is in jail, FTX's liquidation and reorganization team is still working and selling its locked 41 million SOL at a low price. How cheap? That's right: $64.#sbfwas crazy about recommending prison guards to invest in SOL in the prison. If he knew now that his team was selling $2 billion of SOL at $64, would he be pissed off?

2. Which institutions took advantage of this opportunity?

Back to the topic, if we calculate based on the SOL price of $188 when the news was exposed, the discount of $64 is as high as 66%, which means that if it is sold immediately, a direct profit of more than 290% can be made. However, in order not to immediately affect the market, the two parties have a lock-up agreement.

It is important to note here that the U.S. Bankruptcy Court ruled in mid-September last year that "FTX can sell up to $200 million in crypto assets per week with the help of Galaxy, or pledge and hedge its cryptocurrencies to repay creditors."

At present, nearly two-thirds of the 41 million SOLs have been sold, raising about $1.9 billion in liquidity for FTX. Sources revealed that the funds participating in the bidding for SOL include:

1. Galaxy Trading is one of the funds that raises funds from investors to bid for locked SOL. Investors can participate at a price of $64 per coin. The fund will charge a 1% management fee. BitGo is the custodian of SOL tokens.

2. Pantera also raised funds from investors to establish a fund to purchase locked SOL worth $250 million. Pantera plans to charge a management fee of 0.75% and a performance fee of 10%.

However, perhaps affected by the news, or perhaps dissatisfied with the increasing degree of control over Sol by institutions, the price of SOL continued to fluctuate downward this week.

3. How long is the lock-up period?
As for what many investors are concerned about, when will the SOL bought cheaply by institutions be unlocked?

According to Neptune Digital, which bought 26,964 SOL, 20% of the tokens will be unlocked in March 2025, and the remaining tokens will be unlocked linearly every month until 2028.

This means that for nearly a year, these institutions will not be able to sell their tokens, and it will take four years to fully unlock them.

However, since their entry cost is very low, will they choose to exit with profits or continue to hold on and wait for higher prices to be realized?

4. What is the relationship between SOL and FTX?

This can be traced back to the summer of DeFi in 2020. At that time, Solana was still unknown and was just one of many public chains trying to crack the "impossible triangle". However, FTX co-founder SBF discovered Solana. In addition to participating in multiple rounds of financing for Solana, he also chose to build a decentralized exchange Serum on Solana (this is the first decentralized exchange on Solana), and subsequently invested in multiple applications based on Solana, such as offline map Maps me, bulk broker Oxygen, Bonfida that fully taps Solana's potential, and Raydium that integrates multiple functions of AMM/mining/IDO.

This kind of recognition with real money has made everyone tie SBF to Solana. In the early days, some people even mistakenly thought that he was the founder of Solana.

The large number of tokens held by FTX, Alameda, and Solana caused SOL to plummet in half again and again on November 9, the day when FTX exploded.

5. Why did SOL embark on the path of debt repayment?

SBF was not drained of his own money by his own hands, but by his girlfriend. Before FTX, in November 2017, he set up a crypto quantitative trading fund, Alameda Research. Words like "quantitative trading" and "research" are obviously just fancy words. Alameda is essentially a cryptocurrency trading fund. He handed it over to his girlfriend Caroline Ellison to helm it.

SBF himself was responsible for secretly embezzling the "deposits" of a large number of cryptocurrency speculators on the FTX platform, and continuously "transfusing" Alameda with money for his girlfriend to speculate in cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, his girlfriend's cryptocurrency speculation skills were not good, and she lost a lot of money, and her positions were liquidated repeatedly, losing all the embezzled public funds.
Since he invested in SOL and held a large number of tokens, he naturally became a victim of debt repayment. The son naturally had to help repay the debt owed by his father.

Summary: For long-term investors, although the low-price debt repayment does have a certain impact, we still see SOL's ability to rise, as shown in the following statistics of SOL's first quarter data:

Solana Q1 Status Report:

1. The DEX transaction volume on the Sol chain increased by 319% month-on-month to an average of US$1.5 billion per day, the total volume exceeded 70 billion, and the DeFi TVL increased by 232% month-on-month to US$4.9 billion.

2. SOL chain projects raised $89.2 million in the first quarter, $2.5 million more than the total amount raised in 2023.

3. Solana’s monthly transaction fees hit an all-time high of $69 million in March.

3. Due to a legacy bug, the Sol network experienced its first outage in nearly a year, causing 75% of users to be unable to complete transactions.

4. Launched token extensions, which enable a set of configurable features for token issuers. So far, stablecoin issuers (including Paxos and GMO Trust) and crypto-native projects such as Photo Finish LIVE and Wen have adopted token extensions;

5. With the launch of the development store Anza and the growth organization Colosseum, the Solana ecosystem has made significant progress in further decentralization.

The data shows that SOL is rising strongly! And FTX's debt will be slowly consumed as it rises.

As in the past, the FTX crash dealt a major blow to the Solana ecosystem, causing the SOL token price to drop 97% from its peak.

Despite major crises, Solana persevered and rose from the ashes to become one of the recognized "Big Three" in the crypto world.

The strength of a currency is not determined by how high it reaches, but by how strong it is when it falls to the bottom.

I have worn out my golden armor through a hundred battles in the yellow sand, and I will not return until I have conquered Loulan. SOL, see you in the future!

#Solana #sol