Solana, one of the biggest cryptocurrencies in the market, is reaching significant milestones in 2023. The Total Value Locked (TVL) on the Solana network has reached $338.82 million on Monday (2nd). That’s over R$1.7 billion. This marks the highest value since the beginning of the year, according to data from the DeFi Llama platform.
TVL is a metric used to measure how much money is being moved in the various DeFi (decentralized finance) applications on a network.
In the past 24 hours, SOL’s TVL has increased by about 4.15%, jumping from $324.64 million on Sunday to $338.82 million on Monday. This increase is driven by popular projects based on the Solana network, such as Drift, marginfi, Solend, and others.
The native token of the network, SOL, also had its strongest week since mid-July, with a 29% increase in the last week and a jump of 39.08% from its September low, according to CoinGecko.
However, these numbers are still below the peak reached during the bull market. For example, in November 2021, the Solana TVL soared to just over $10 billion before plummeting to $210 million in January 2023.
But this more recent recovery is not yet confirmed. There are concerns about the possible effect on the price of SOL following the approval to sell FTX assets.
It is estimated that FTX has around $1.2 billion worth of SOL. According to market analyst The Tie, of this amount, up to 22 million SOL tokens (worth approximately $400 million) are unlocked and can be sold. This represents about 4% of the total SOL supply.
Another 40 to 44 million tokens, or around $860 million, are currently locked in staking, and another $17 million in SOL tokens are expected to be unlocked monthly over the next four years.
Solana was one of the projects most affected by the collapse of FTX. The Layer 1 blockchain and Sam Bankman-Fried’s companies, the former CEO of the exchange, were heavily interconnected, as detailed by the Solana Foundation in a blog post in November 2022.
The Foundation revealed that it had about $1 million in cash or similar assets in FTX until November 6, 2022, before the platform halted customer withdrawals. This amount represents less than 1% of its total funds.
The Solana Foundation owned around 3.24 million shares in FTX Trading LTD, as well as around 3.43 million FTT tokens and 134.54 million SRM tokens from Project Serum, a decentralized exchange on Solana launched by Bankman-Fried in 2020.