After Kyle’s article “You size is not size” which is comparable to Do Kwon’s, the crypto winter came. With the collapse of Terra (Luna) ecosystem and Three Arrow Capital (3AC), market panic continued to spread. Finally, under the combined force of internal and external factors, another supporter behind Solana, who was also the most powerful supporter in the industry at the time, also fell - FTX declared bankruptcy.

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

But who would have thought that after a year, the price of the SOL token of this high-performance public chain "popular among billionaires" would fall below $10, falling to as low as $8, a drop of more than 95%.

After Kyle’s article “You size is not size” which is comparable to Do Kwon’s, the crypto winter came. With the collapse of Terra (Luna) ecosystem and Three Arrow Capital (3AC), market panic continued to spread. Finally, under the combined force of internal and external factors, another supporter behind Solana, who was also the most powerful supporter in the industry at the time, also fell - FTX declared bankruptcy.

The bankruptcy of FTX and Alameda has seriously affected the entire Solana ecosystem. Not only did the Solana Foundation suffer a loss of more than $180 million in crypto assets, but it also directly destroyed Serum, an important underlying protocol of the Solana DeFi ecosystem. Because FTX had important permissions, this cornerstone protocol was soon declared invalid.

Affected by this series of "devastating" events, Solana's TVL (Total Value Locked) has also fallen from 10 billion at the peak of the bull market to around 200 million US dollars.

The community was wailing, and the SOL token continued to fall. It seemed that Solana was "unable to recover."

Confidence and Turnaround

Five days after the SOL token dropped to $8, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted,

“Some smart people told me that Solana has a genuine community of smart developers, that the horrible opportunistic funds have now been laundered, and that the chain has a bright future.

It’s hard for me to judge from the outside, but I want the community to have a fair chance to thrive.”

Vitalik's words seemed to be a reassurance, and the SOL token rose accordingly. The panic of the Solana community was alleviated in the subsequent continuous rise.

Not only in times of crisis, Vitalik specifically mentioned Solana in a Twitter AMA at the end of June 2023. In response to Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang’s question “What do you think of the US cryptocurrency policy?”, Vitalik replied,

“I’m sad that Solana and other projects are being hit this way. It shouldn’t be this way. If Ethereum ends up “winning” by having all other blockchains kicked off trading desks, it’s not an honorable way to win, and may not even be a win in the long run.

This is especially true because the real competition is not other chains, but the rapidly expanding centralized world that is pressing down on us as we speak.

I wish all good projects a fair outcome.”

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

In addition to continuing to cheer for Solana on Twitter. In an interview with Bankless in February 2023, Chris Burniske directly stated that Solana is undervalued and has similar investment potential as ETH.

In March, Placeholder also led the investment in Tensor, an NFT trading platform on the Solana chain. Through strategies similar to Blur's order placement and transaction mining, the platform currently accounts for more than 40% of the trading volume in the Solana NFT market, and once surpassed Magic Eden, the largest NFT market on Solana.

Not only does it receive support and investment from the outside, but there are also new developments within the Solana ecosystem.

Despite much controversy, Solana's mobile phone Saga was successfully launched in April 2023.

Rollbit, a gambling platform launched on the Solana chain, has experienced rapid growth in 2023. Although specific operating data has not been obtained, as of the time of writing, its token RLB has increased more than 28 times this year.

Solana launches state compression. Officials say the cost of minting 1 million NFTs has dropped to about $110.

Solana's on-chain data performance is also good. According to data from the on-chain data platform Artemis, the number of daily active addresses on the Solana chain has remained above 200,000.

Although the DeFi ecosystem on the Solana chain has not yet recovered, Solana NFT data was second only to Ethereum in early 2023. Recently, it has dropped to second place due to the influence of Bitcoin NFT.

In July 2023, Superteam held the Solana Ecosystem Community Conference, attended by Solana co-founder Raj Gokal and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. The conference updated Solana's latest progress and projects, with more than 2,000 community users participating. Not only that, in May, Solana also had a new Chinese community and began to synchronize a series of Solana's key events.

Solana, which no longer has the momentum to sweep the world, has returned to the public eye in a low-key manner. Perhaps, as Mable, a former partner of Multicoin Capital, mentioned in the podcast "The Rise and Fall of Solana: A Lot of Accidents and a Little Inevitability", Solana is unlikely to die, but it will not live in the same way as before.