A top executive at Solana (SOL) says that the Ethereum (ETH) competitor is getting back on its feet after the collapse of FTX.
Austin Federa, who is in charge of strategy and communications at the Solana Foundation, says that the new Dogecoin (DOGE) competitor Bonk (BONK) is building a strong community because there are more active addresses on the Solana smart contract platform.
“The last half of this year has been a tough one for the global crypto community and for some users on Solana as well. I think when you’re looking at BONK you’re looking at people having fun with blockchain again. It’s a meme coin that got airdropped to people, to thousands and thousands of wallets on the ecosystem, and it’s something that the community has galvanized behind and been able to dig into and really find a lot of fun in it.
Memes are fun. But memes are also a proxy for community. And one of the utilities of crypto that’s often overlooked is that it is a system for galvanizing community. And so the excitement around BONK is on one level, yes, it’s a meme, yes, it doesn’t actually specifically do something, but it is a token of community and especially after an ecosystem that’s been through a rough few months.”
At the time of writing, the price of BONK is $0.00000135.
Alameda Research, which was the trading branch of FTX and held a lot of SOL, and its parent company both went bankrupt last year, leaving the future of SOL unclear. This caused the price of SOL to drop by a huge amount.
SOL dropped from $36.72 in November 2022 to $9.60 in December, which is a 74% drop. It has since gotten better, and at the time this was written, it was being sold for $23.27.
Federa says that the Solana blockchain project is stronger now than it was before the FTX collapse.
“If you look at the beginning of November, a lot of the headlines were doom and gloom for the Solana network. And what we’ve really seen since then, we’re about what two months out from that initial news is active addresses are up more people are using the network than were before. There are actually more validators on the network than before FTX collapsed.
We’ve seen the community and developers all around the world really come together and replace the parts of the ecosystem that had FTX involvement and then expand from there. If you look at active addresses each day, Solana is higher than all other blockchains at this point.”
