Happy Birthday, Solana bull race
SOL was worth around $22 just a year ago. By the end of 2023, it had almost doubled. By Christmas day, it crossed $120 — a price appreciation of over 400% in less than three months. The chart reached $200 twice in March. But SOL has been oscillating between $150 and $200 over the last six-month period.
According to CoinGecko, the asset was valued at $155 as of press time. This represents a 606% rise from a year earlier.
Solana’s downtrend ended with its chief perpetrator — former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried — on trial for fraud. The market began to rise as it realized that the FTX estate sale of SOL would not be as disastrous as many feared. Still, the general consensus was that Solana might not be able shake off its FTX ties so quickly.
“Solana Is Down 15% Since Hitting a 14-Month High. Is the Rally Over?,” SOL was priced at around $40, according to one headline.
Airdrops of tokens began to dominate Solana as the Bankman-Fried circus faded away. Multiple Solana-based DeFi protocols — most notably Jupiter and Jito — distributed new native tokens to their users. Airdrop farming (or moving assets around to increase one’s allocation) helped boost the assets of Solana DeFi Protocols in March, for the first since early 2022. According to DeFiLlama, Solana DeFi currently holds assets worth over $6 billion.
For the bull run’s third act — one we’re very much still in the middle of — SOL rode a wave of excitement surrounding memecoins. Pump.fun was a new launchpad which allowed anyone to launch a memecoin by paying a few dollars in SOL. The platform, which was launched in 2013, has already generated $130,000,000 worth of revenue.
As with many things in crypto, Solana’s bull run has involved a heavy dose of unseriousness — “free money” There were many speculative pictures of pets. Price trends such as Solana can’t continue forever. We could be looking back on Solana 500% in a year. Those who had the timing right were able make life-changing amounts of money.
Klaus Wenzel was a Lightspeed Reader who attended Permissionless III last week. He paid for his trip with the profits he made from an SOL investment he made in October. Wenzel, who told me via direct message that he paid his bills by staking his SOL rewards last October, said he did so.
“Now I can scroll Twitter, listen to Blockworks podcasts and research crypto full time. Life has never been better,” Wenzel said.
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