Sam Bankman-Fried-Backed Solana Nosedives 94%, Currently Trading At Single-Digit Price

The chaos that Sam Bankman-Fried and his crypto empire brought into the crypto space continues to wreak havoc even after sending multiple businesses to file for bankruptcy. Now, Solana - the token heavily backed by the founder of FTX - has nosedived 94%, and after trading in triple digits over the past year, is currently trading at just a single digit.

Solana (SOL) hit a new low Wednesday when it traded below $10, a price that the token first saw when it was just trying to ascend in February 2021.

Early Wednesday, Solana traded $9.90 and continues to bleed out, with large traders and whales now attempting to dump the token after losing hope for a price rebound anytime soon.

But what happened to Solana, which was once pegged as a viable rival to Ethereum, the second-most popular and largest crypto by market capitalization?

Martin Lee, Nansen's data analyst, thinks the market's confidence in Solana's future may have been impacted by its close association with Bankman-Fried.

The recent plummet in price took place after major crypto projects bailed out on the Solana ecosystem, with top NFT collections DeGods leaving for Ethereum and Y00ts for Polygon.

"General confidence in Solana's future has taken a hit given its close connection with SBF," Lee told Bloomberg.

While technical issues are a common worry among doubters, the biggest cloud that glooms Solana's future is the epic fall from the grace of its major advocate, Bankman-Fried.

Last year, Solana Labs raised $314.2 million and received significant support from Alameda Research, a hedge fund and crypto trading firm founded by Bankman-Fried.

Later in 2021, Bankman-Fried started building Serum, a decentralized exchange that uses Solana Blockchain. In the summer of 2022, Bankman-Fried called Solana the most underrated cryptocurrency, seemingly endorsing the token.

But, beyond speculations, numbers don't lie and a closer look at Solana's performance since the disgraceful collapse of FTX says it all. SOL crashed to 70% following the collapse of FTX and shed 94% of its value since the start of the year.

While it is safe to say that all other major assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum plummeted this year, compared to Solana, BTC and ETH nosedived 76% from their respective all-time highs while SOL lost 96% of its all-time high value.

From a peak price of $258.78 on Nov. 6, 2021, SOL's value was reduced to under $10.

As of 11:09 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Solana was trading down 9.70% at $9.72 with a 24-hour volume of $490,935,202, according to the latest data from CoinMarketCap.