Solana Rebounds After Vitalik Buterin Says It 'Has A Bright Future'

Solana (SOL), the native token of the blockchain of the same name, found a respite in Vitalik Buterin, the crypto genius and co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain, when he made a positive comment about the ecosystem this week.

SOL has been bleeding out over the past weeks, especially following the controversial collapse of FTX, whose founder previously advertised the token.

After trading in triple digits last year and an all-time high price of $258.78 on Nov. 6, 2021, the token plunged below $10 per token this week, causing investors and traders to panic and dump their SOL holdings.

On Thursday, however, SOL saw a brief spike in its value when it moved away from the $8 level and traded at $10, which took place a few hours after Buterin praised the blockchain and made an optimistic comment about its future.

"Some smart people tell me there is an earnest smart developer community in Solana, and now that the awful opportunistic money people have been washed out, the chain has a bright future," the crypto genius said in a tweet, adding, "Hard for me to tell from outside, but I hope the community gets its fair chance to thrive."

For much of Thursday, Solana sat close to $9.44 and fell 13.2% a few hours later, but the price spiked 24.8% to $10.22 after Buterin's tweet.

Last month, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko noted that he would rather focus on "the technology and having people build something awesome that's decentralized" instead of the price action of the token and underlined that only a small portion of the projects built on Solana, or around 4%, has exposure to FTX.

"There's definitely more to Solana than FTX," the Solana co-founder said.

Solana nosedived over the past weeks mainly because of its strong association with Bankman-Fried, who previously said that it is an "underrated crypto."

But Bankman-Fried's tie to the blockchain is beyond bad PR since his companies purchased more than 58 million SOL tokens in aggregate, making up 15% of the ecosystem's circulating supply.

After the epic collapse of Bankman-Fried's empire, Solana, which was once pegged as a viable rival to Buterin's Ethereum, saw major crypto projects bail out on the blockchain, the latest of which was NFT Collections DeGods and Y00ts moving to Ethereum and Polygon, respectively.

After briefly staying at the $10 level, Solana was trading down 298% at $9.42 with a 24-hour volume of $1,053,606,162 as of 1:34 a.m. ET on Friday, according to the latest data from CoinMarketCap.