Inside the relationship between Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Solana

by Arthur · December 29, 2022

Sam Bankman-Fried was a big fan of Solana, the layer-1 blockchain that bills itself as a faster alternative to Ethereum’s network.
He supported projects on the ecosystem, and his companies raised huge sums of the blockchain’s original token, also called Solana (SOL).
The altcoin has crashed 96% from a record high in November 2021, wiping out tens of billions in market capitalization.

Sam Bankman-Fried was a big fan of Solana, the layer-1 blockchain that bills itself as a faster alternative to Ethereum’s network.

The disgraced former crypto mogul backed projects in the ecosystem, and his firms raised huge sums of the blockchain’s original token, also called Solana (SOL).

But the altcoin has crashed 46% since Bankman-Fried’s FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11 and is down 96% from its November 2021 record high, according to Messari on Thursday. Once with a market cap of nearly $80 billion, it is now just $3.4 billion.

Here are some of the bonds that the FTX founder and Solana built.

Bankman-Fried, who now faces multiple fraud charges, previously told Fortune that Solana could become critical infrastructure for the future of digital assets.

“They were clearly the most serious [layer 1] we spoke with about continuing to scale their blockchain and expand their capabilities,” he said in an email.

He started Serum, a decentralized exchange built on the blockchain, and also invested in several projects built on Solana’s network.

Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund Alameda Research and crypto exchange FTX bought large sums of SOL tokens from the Solana Foundation, the non-profit organization that supports the blockchain, and Solana Labs, the blockchain’s developer.

The transactions between the two firms and the Solana Foundation along with Solana Labs included 58 million SOL tokens, which is worth $543 million based on the cryptocurrency’s current price.

“I’m still trying to figure out what I perceive him to be and like what actually happened,” Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana Labs, told Bloomberg at Bankman-Fried. “It just feels really, really jarring.”

For its part, Solana Foundation had about $1 million of its cash or cash equivalents on FTX.com when the trading platform stopped processing customer withdrawals in early November, according to a blog post. It is less than 1% of the foundation’s cash or cash equivalents, and there was no SOL depository on the stock exchange.

Solana co-founder Raj Gokal said the organization does not know how FTX and Alameda’s assets will be handled during the bankruptcy proceedings, adding that “there is no impact on the security of the network from things like the concentration of SOL tokens on Alameda’s balance sheet.”

But after FTX’s fall, popular projects built on Solana like y00ts and DeGods decided to leave their network for Polygon and Ethereum. That’s despite about 80% of the projects on Solana’s blockchain having zero exposure to FTX, Yakovenko told Bloomberg.

“There’s definitely more to Solana than FTX,” he said.

Gokal believes the controversy surrounding Solana and Bankman-Fried’s bankrupt firms will eventually die down. “Crypto has a pretty short memory,” he said.