Solana Faces Challenges Amid Meme Coin Volatility and FTX Unlock Event

Solana (SOL), an established blockchain platform celebrated for its high throughput and low transaction costs, has been encountering significant challenges of late.

The emergence of meme coins—especially the highly contentious rug pull associated with the LIBRA token—has only compounded investor concerns regarding SOL’s overall health. As a direct consequence, Solana’s price has been declining, and it is now down by 10% just over the past week, with a stunning 40% extraction from its zenith in January.

This recent drop is part of a larger trend affecting decentralized exchanges (DEXs), which are seeing weakened trading volumes. Solana’s main DEX, Raydium, demonstrated a large 47% decrease in activity just last week. These two trends are not good for Solana—which is also struggling to recover from the bearish sentiment that has plagued the whole crypto market for the last couple of months—because they show not only that Solana’s DEXs are losing traders, but also that Solana itself is losing traders.

Solana’s troubles could soon deepen with the scheduled unlocking of 11.2 million SOL tokens on March 1, 2025. These tokens were sold off during the FTX bankruptcy auction and have since been acquired by large investors like Galaxy, Pantera, and Figure. Could those tokens coming back to market in a few years have a serious impact on SOL’s price? The folks at CoinMarketCap seem to think so and have included this potential scenario in the “causes of concern” part of Solana’s narrative.

The 11.2 million SOL that are set to be unlocked have a current market value of around $2.06 billion. This is a massive amount of coins to suddenly introduce into the market, and it’s a safe bet that the people who bought the SOL at the FTX auction will be looking to sell. And sell they might, considering the current SOL price is half of what it was back in September. Still, the 11.2 million SOL hitting the market will have some immediate effects that are definitely not positive for the SOL price in the short term.

After FTX declared bankruptcy, it auctioned off 41 million SOL tokens. Who actually bought those tokens, and at what prices, gives us a small glimpse into market sentiment:

1. The largest buyer that emerged was Galaxy, obtaining a massive 25.52 million SOL at an average price of $64. This purchase has already played out quite nicely for them, with Galaxy now sitting on a 187% return rate on their investment.

2. Buyers like Pantera secured 13.67 million SOL at an auction price of $95. With a return rate of 93%, these buyers are also in the black, but their gains aren’t quite as sizable as those racked up by Galaxy.

3. At $102 per token, Figure and other buyers acquired 1.8 million SOL. Their current return rate is 80%, which, while still profitable, is lower than the return rate of Galaxy and Pantera’s investors.

FTX 破产拍卖的 1120 万枚 $SOL 将在 03/01 解锁，价值 20.6 亿美金