SOL’d Out?

Sam Bankman-Fried owns both the FTX exchange, as well as Alameda Research. After the Luna/UST blow-up, Alameda was in as much trouble as 3AC, Celsius, Voyager and Block-Fi. Because Alameda, Voyager, and Block-fi all had a large position in FTT, Sam tried to bail them out to prevent them from liquidating their FTT positions, which would have tanked the FTT price. (There are many more variables and complications but this is the short version.) Unfortunately, these companies all held large positions in other tokens associated with SBF as well, like SOL.

As the owner of both FTX and Alameda Research, Sam Bankman-Fried may not have walked away unscathed from the events surrounding the Terra collapse in May. As 3AC, Voyager and Celsius began to liquidate holdings when things began to crumble, SBF’s interventions (sometimes successful, sometimes not) might not have been purely out of altruism. As a large holder of SOL, SBF  may have acted to prevent its price from suffering through the otherwise unavoidable liquidations 3AC and the like were facing.

But SOL isn’t in the clear just yet. With some big unlocks coming up, people are getting nervous.

• Solana validators have to stake their tokens in time periods called epochs, each of which lasts two days. This means unstaking SOL isn’t immediate.
• According to analytics company thetie.io, epoch 370 ended Wednesday at 8:51 AM GMT. Almost 29 million SOL were unstaked in epoch 370, representing 5.42% of the total circulating supply.  This decreased the staked SOL supply by 7.62%.
• There is also an unlock approaching in the upcoming week for the core team allocation that will add another 2.5 million SOL to the market.

Solscan shows a decrease in the number of voting accounts by more than 1000 accounts on Nov 2, the only time such a large drop has occurred. It also shows that on Nov 9, there were more than 510,000 active wallets and just two days later the number of active wallets is only 71,775. Actually, most of the data represented there show a huge variance between the end of September and now.

As a developing story, this information is only just beginning to paint a complete picture. While we remain dedicated to bringing readers the latest updates, the most important steps to take right now should be focused on capital preservation.