What Does the Future Hold for Solana in 2023?
Solana has been one of the most volatile cryptocurrencies in the past six months. Despite this, it remains a top-10 asset by market cap in the crypto sphere. This indicates that investors and holders still trust Solana, which is sometimes called the “Ethereum killer” by some of its enthusiasts. Heading into 2023, SOL was hovering around the $10 support zone, already in the grips of a downtrend that stretched back to November 2021 when SOL was trading at $200. Just as investors began anticipating further losses across the crypto-market in January, Bitcoin began to climb past $17k and shifted the shorter-term sentiment to bullish. Solana benefited massively from this shift and recorded gains of 175% in 21 days. The most bullish scenario of 2023, according to AMBCrypto’s prediction bot, could see SOL valued at $75.5. However, it is possible to obtain some guesses from ChatGPT, a powerful tool for learning that has been trained on a vast array of topics, on what the future might hold if it is given an idea of what the present and recent past have been like. Based on transaction fees and transaction speeds, ChatGPT seems to think Solana will be an Ethereum killer. However, we are yet to inform it of the challenges that Solana and SOL investors have faced in recent months.
FTX, Where the Freefall Began
Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX, was one of the most vocal proponents of the Solana network. However, the SEC has charged him with defrauding the equity investors of FTX and commingling FTX customer funds with Alameda’s to make undisclosed venture investments. He faces more than 100 years in jail if convicted on all counts. Not only has the reputation of Solana taken a hit, but the foundation also sold a significant amount of SOL to FTX Trading and Alameda Research. This amounted to 58.08 million SOL, or 11% of the circulating supply at the time FTX filed for bankruptcy. It was valued at close to $1.1 billion at that time. As expected, the price of Solana nosedived in November and declined by 45% from November 11 to 31 December, falling from $18.08 to $8. With rumors of FTX’s insolvency circulating from November 5, SOL had already lost 50% the previous week when it had been trading near the $38 mark. This took SOL’s total losses from 5 November 2022 to 31 December 2022 to 79.4%.
SOL Gained by 180% in January and February 2023, Exceeding All Expectations
From 1 January to 20 February, Solana gained by 179.88% on the price charts and rallied from $9.69 to $27.12. This explosive rally has been credited partially to Bonk, a meme coin introduced within the Solana ecosystem modeled after Shiba Inu. When fed with on-chain data as well as price action in recent months, the jailbroken version of ChatGPT was able to muster an opinion on the performance of Solana in Q2 2023. The network has faced troublesome outages in recent months, and investor confidence will likely be strongly shaken. When forced to make a guess about Solana’s price in June, ChatGPT said, “The $25 prediction might not be too far off the mark in the weeks to come, especially if Bitcoin bulls can push BTC above the $29.2k mark
