FTX 2.0 reboot? Can Solana, whose on-chain data recovers, "recover its glory"?

Original source: Blocklike

"There are some indications that Solana may regain its former glory."

More than half a year after the collapse of FTX, news of the restart of FTX 2.0 came from the market, and the restart plan may have aroused the interest of large companies including Nasdaq, Ripple, and BlackRock. As some crypto companies that have failed have re-entered the market (such as the founders of 3AC and PayPal Finance have launched new products to the market), there are more and more discussions about whether FTX is expected to come back.

At the same time, Solana, an important member of the FTX "family", has also received widespread attention recently.

On the one hand, Solana co-founders have been very active in expressing their views on Solana recently, which has aroused discussion in the community. Whether it is becoming the Apple of encryption, or not afraid of pressure from emerging blockchain networks such as Scroll, Base, and Linea, or thinking that Ethereum can become Solana's L2 solution, these ideas show that Solana wants to regain Brilliant ambition.

On the other hand, hot events surrounding Solana continue to add heat to Solana.

• In April, the decentralized IoT wireless network Helium migrated to Solana, and SOL rose from $20 to $25;
• In May, the popularity of BRC-20 and Meme tokens kept Gas at a high level, and many users turned to Solana for transactions;
• In June, the US SEC classified tokens such as SOL as unregistered securities, which aroused the attention of the market and many people in the industry including Vitalik;

In addition, according to relevant data, in May, the number of daily active addresses of Solana reached a maximum of 490,000, which is almost the same as the number of 500,000 daily active addresses when FTX officially filed for bankruptcy on November 11 last year.

The public chain Solana, which was once highly expected by the market, collapsed after its biggest supporter FTX, the currency price plummeted, the TVL was greatly discounted, and many FTX-based projects in the ecology were hit hard, and the reputation almost plummeted.

A return to mainstream status is something Solana desperately wants to accomplish. So can Solana regain its glory?

From "all eyes" to "darkness"

As a public chain deeply bound to FTX, Solana was pushed to the forefront in the FTX event.

On the eve of the FTX collapse, the Solana Foundation was exposed to holding a large number of FTX-related tokens, including FTT worth approximately $107 million and SRM worth $83 million the day before FTX assets were frozen. This asset profoundly reveals the close relationship between Solana and FTX, and the voices of Solana's bad words come and go.

On November 11, 2022, with FTX officially filing for bankruptcy, Solana's reputation and ecology suffered heavy losses.

The Solana platform token SOL plummeted from $36.72 to more than a dozen dollars, and by the end of December 2022, SOL was even below $10, and the market share evaporated billions of dollars in just over a month.

As the first DEX on Solana, Serum occupies half of the DeFi liquidity on Solana. Due to the influence of FTX, the transaction volume and liquidity dropped to zero. Other FTX-based platforms and non-FTX-based platforms either encountered a liquidity crisis or were directly forced to close due to a shortage of funds.

Before the FTX crash, the TVL of nearly US$1 billion in the Solana ecosystem fell below US$300 million, and it has not exceeded US$300 million so far.

"Ethereum Killer", "Next Generation Blockchain", "High-Speed Public Chain", and "King of DeFi", these were all titles given to Solana by the market, which reflect the recognition of Solana's technology and ecology, and also the recognition of Solana The expectation of the rise of the new public chain. Before the FTX incident, Solana was facing a public relations crisis due to frequent downtime and large-scale asset theft, and the collapse of FTX directly brought Solana to the bottom.

The new public chain that was a big hit in the last cycle seems to no longer be the "darling" of major media and capital. The pattern of L1 new public chain has changed, and Solana was forced to fade out of the historical stage for a period of time.

Is Solana "dead"?

There are voices that Solana has lost its competitive position in the L1 public chain. Without a lot of outside attention and the halo of the past, Solana seems to be struggling today.

However, there are also many voices who believe that the most direct impact of the collapse of FTX on Solana lies in the price of SOL, which instead makes Solana "get rid of financial speculators" and return to real technology development.

Is Solana really "dead"?

The price of SOL rebounded, and the number of new addresses on the chain surged

According to the data of CMC on July 10, the price of SOL was 21.2 US dollars, ranking ninth in market value. Compared with the 9 US dollars during the FTX thunderstorm, the price has recovered a lot, with an increase of more than 130%.

According to The Block data, Solana's daily active addresses rose again in May. On May 17, the number of active addresses on Solana reached 493.1 K, an increase of nearly 55% compared with the lowest number of daily active addresses in the first half of the year.

It is worth noting that the number of new addresses on the Solana chain also ushered in a significant surge in May, with a maximum increase of more than 300,000 addresses.

Some analysts believe that the surge in the number of Solana addresses in May is related to the rise of meme coins and BRC-20. The popularity of meme coins and BRC-20 has led to high gas fees on the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, which has prompted many users to turn to Solana, which has lower Gas and faster speeds for transactions.

The number of developers remains at the forefront

For a public chain, the number of developers is one of the important indicators of its popularity, and it is also an important part of promoting ecological development. The good features of the Rust language and the high performance of Solana are still attractive to developers.

Although some developers chose to "flee" after the FTX thunderstorm, the number of active developers on the overall chain is still relatively stable and remains at the forefront.

According to the latest data from developerreport.com, the number of monthly active developers of Solana ranked fourth on June 1, reaching 363, which still has certain advantages compared with other public chains. In addition, looking at the warehouse with the most followers under Solana on Github, the number of contributors reached 455, while the warehouses with the most followers of Polkadot, Polygon, and Avalanche had 261, 51, and 82 contributors respectively.

Source: developerreport.com

Liquid Staking outperforms

With the popularity of the liquid staking track, there has also been an upsurge of liquid staking in the Solana ecosystem, which has brought Solana back into the mainstream market attention recently. According to data from StakingRewards on July 10, SOL is currently the second largest pledged asset, with a pledged market value of more than $8.3 billion and a pledge rate of 69.64%.

NFT sales entered Top 3

According to Cryptoslam data, Solana NFT sales in the past 30 days are second only to Ethereum and Bitcoin NFT data, ranking third, higher than the fourth Polygon NFT sales in the past 30 days by about 40 million US dollars.

Some opportunities and challenges

At present, both L1 and L2 are facing fierce competition, and Solana is also "stepping up" to attract users and developers:

• In early April, Solana announced a new method of storing data called "state compression" to significantly reduce storage costs. According to the official introduction, this method can be used to store any type of data on the chain, and the first use is to compress NFT. Users can mint 1 million NFTs for about $110.
• On April 13th, Solana Mobile Saga launched, trying to gain more crypto users with Web3-centric Android smartphones.
• Continue to hold Solana Hacker House events in multiple cities to embrace more developers from all over the world and enhance the value of the Solana chain itself. Solana Hacker House landed in Taipei in May, and this event will also go to Hong Kong in November.
• Launch the "NFT Showdown" competition to promote the development of the NFT ecosystem.
• Introduced a $10 million grant program for AI-focused projects based on Solana.

Additionally, community optimism for Solana appears to be increasing. KOL @CryptoKaleo with nearly 600,000 followers on Twitter recently expressed his views on Solana. He believes that Solana's continuous build after the collapse of FTX may allow Solana to return to its level before the bankruptcy of FTX in the next development . This point of view has also won the support of some users.

These are Solana's opportunities, but it still faces challenges.

Facing the rapid expansion of other public chains, Solana still needs to take more measures to expand its ecology. In addition, the crisis of trust caused by the collapse of FTX still exists. Strengthening the connection with the community and enhancing community confidence are also the directions that Solana needs to focus on.

Can the ambition be realized

Solana co-founder Raj Gokal said not long ago that Solana has the potential to become the Apple of encryption, and its goal is to achieve 10 to 100 times growth through small business and infrastructure partnerships.

Raj believes that the advent of the iPhone took Apple nearly a decade of research time, and that Apple's application ecosystem has reached today's level. Everything started with "unremitting attention to simple interactions that must run perfectly", which is also the core of Solana's core engineering and ecosystem. focus. This analogy seems to express that Solana's silence is actually settling down, which is quite a tendency to "suffocate the silence".

In addition, with the launch of the new products of the founders of Three Arrows Capital and PayPal Finance, the concept of "bankruptcy restart" is receiving widespread attention from the crypto community. If FTX 2.0 is restarted, it will undoubtedly gain interest from users and institutions again, and FTX projects led by Solana may once again take this opportunity to regain their former aura.