Is Solana Dead? The Truth Behind the FUD

The crypto market sentiment is a fickle beast – even if everything seems to be going fine for now, check in the next day and, chances are, the mood in the room has made a complete U-turn. And it seems like, this time around, it’s the Solana community’s turn to get the blues. If all those “Is Solana dead?” rumours have been getting to you, here comes the intervention!

As the 6th most valuable cryptocurrency (as of writing this) based on its price and the trading volume on leading exchanges like Binance and Kraken, Solana definitely seems like one of those tokens that are simply too big to fail at this point. But could recurring network outages, competition with other cryptocurrencies, and the dwindling crypto community’s confidence really be enough to spell its doom?

Probably not just yet – but go ahead and dig into this comprehensive lowdown to get the full picture on the facts!

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Solana’s Success Story: How Did it Become one of the Top-Tier Blockchains?

Whether or not the question “Is Solana dead?” has any merit, no one can deny that this blockchain’s genesis and rise to fame are some of the most famous crypto success stories. So, how was Solana born in the first place – and what made it special?

The Beginnings

It all started in 2017 with Anatoly Yakovenko, a Ukrainian-born engineer working in San Diego to solve a very specific problem plaguing the blockchain technology landscape at the time. “Traditional” networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum all suffered from slow transaction speed caused by sequential block processing and the nature of their Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism.

In November that same year, he published a whitepaper, introducing “Proof of History” – not just another consensus mechanism but a whole new paradigm that would create the foundation for an upcoming Solana blockchain, capable of processing up to 65,000 transactions per second without sacrificing decentralization.

Considering that, at the time, Ethereum could only manage 15 TPS and Bitcoin an even more measly 7 TPS,^[1] this seemed impossible – but Yakovenko and the other three Solana co-founders (Greg Fitzgerald, Stephen Akridge, and Raj Gokal) went on to beat the odds and deliver exactly that.

I’ll delve deeper into Solana’s architecture and the details of its Proof-of-History consensus later on, but for now, let me jump straight to the practical implications. In a nutshell, all these technological breakthroughs meant that Solana was able to have much lower transaction fees and higher scalability, making it an attractive new option for developers and, in turn, crypto enthusiasts.

Just to give you some reference for scale: according to the data from 21Shares Research, as of May 2025, the average gas fee of Solana was $0.03 compared to Ethereum’s $3.05, and Solana’s average block confirmation time was around 0.44 seconds, next to Ethereum’s ~12 seconds. With these metrics, it’s no wonder our network in question got dubbed “Ethereum’s killer”!

2020 – 2022: The Golden Age

While Ethereum is, obviously, still alive and well, Solana’s popularity did surge to some incredible heights within a few years of its launch in 2020. In 2021, the SOL price climbed from ~$1.8 at the beginning of the year to ~$236 in November – a staggering 13,011% growth.

The ecosystem was growing exponentially, as well; many developers migrated from Ethereum, while a lot of new projects were launching exclusively on Solana. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) like Solana Monkey sold for millions, with secondary sales hitting $500 million between August and November 2021.

The period between 2020 and 2022 could easily be called Solana’s “Golden Age”. This chapter of the blockchain's history saw the launch of some of the most popular Solana-based dApps, such as the Magic Eden NFT marketplace, Serum DEX, and Star Atlas, a Solana-based MMO. By 2022, Solana’s ecosystem was home to over 5,100 projects.

The network’s growth wasn’t purely organic, however. In 2021, the Solana Foundation launched Solana Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on funding and accelerating the blockchain’s growth. Our network in question also attracted other high-profile investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Alameda Research.

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Is Solana Dead? Recent Struggles Explained

If the first few years of Solana’s existence were so successful by most blockchains’ standards, you’d probably ask – what happened later that made so many people proclaim that “Solana is dead”?

As it turns out, while this handwringing is mostly blown out of proportion, over the next few years, the blockchain did experience… well, if not quite “death by a thousand cuts”, then at least a noticeable decline and the loss of confidence from a lot of fans.

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FTX Collapse

The start of the troubles could be pinned down to one particular event: the FTX collapse. Founded in 2019, FTX was one of the biggest crypto exchanges at the time. It had close ties to Solana, thanks to the FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was one of its major financial backers (alongside Alameda Research, another one of his companies).

Together, FTX and Alameda held $982 million in SOL tokens. FTX’s bankruptcy in November 2022 and the resulting sell-out caused the SOL price to plummet 40% in a single day, dropping from $258 to under $15 by year’s end. In addition, Solana’s market cap fell from $75 billion to $3 billion.

A number of leading crypto exchanges, including KuCoin and OKX, suspended USDT and USDC deposits on Solana or even delisted them entirely.

It came as a major shock to the ecosystem as a whole, too: during the fallout, there was a substantial exodus of Solana developers, and many Solana-based startups that had been dependent on grants or investments from FTX had to put their projects on hold.

Network Outages & Security Issues

While some amount of disruption is inevitable in decentralized structures like blockchains, they didn’t exactly help Solana’s image. Between 2020 and 2025, the blockchain experienced 8 separate outage incidents. Here’s a quick overview of what they looked like and what caused them:

Table: Major Solana outages

Of course, when it comes to issues like that, there’s always a silver lining: some of the outages resulted in network upgrades and improvements to prevent the same problem from happening again (for example, the Candy Machine Spam case was instrumental in prioritizing memory use improvements in Solana v1.10).

Still, during the rock bottom moments, such as the Large Block Overwhelms Turbine that knocked the network out for nearly 19 hours, a lot of people were probably asking, “Is Solana dead?”

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Rug Pulls & Pump-and-Dumps

Crypto scams are the bane of pretty much every blockchain, especially when it comes to meme coins: their viral potential tends to attract bad actors who orchestrate a price surge by aggressively buying the coin, only to dump it off and leave the unlucky enthusiasts holding the bags. Even if the answer to the question, “Is SOL dead?” is negative, the same can’t be said for many Solana-based coins.

Thanks to its blazing-fast transactions, low fees, and an active community, Solana is one of the most popular blockchains for meme tokens, especially with the rise of beginner-friendly launchpads like Pump.fun. This platform alone has launched over 7 million meme coins (as of March 2025), even if you only count the ones with at least 5 trades.

With these numbers, it’s no surprise that many of them end up attracting speculators and join the ever-growing pile of pump-and-dump scams. According to the data from Solidus Labs, out of the above-mentioned 7 million Solana meme tokens, only 97,000 maintain liquidity above $1,000, while the remaining 98.6% collapse shortly after launch.

Rug pulls are another quintessential plight, and Solana is no exception here. The same company found that, out of 361,00 liquidity pools on Raydium (one of the biggest Solana DEXs), approximately 93% showed telltale signs of “soft rug pulls”, where liquidity was abruptly withdrawn, severely impacting the token price.

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No Need to Panic: Why SOL Isn’t Going Anywhere Soon

And now it’s time to put the brakes on the doom-and-gloom narrative. If you’re wondering, “Is Solana dead after all?”, here’s my verdict: the rumours of its demise were greatly exaggerated. There are plenty of reasons why Solana is not only far from deathbed but is actually doing just fine, all things considered.

Robust Architecture

Even all this time after its official launch in 2020, Solana’s underlying architecture still holds up as a reliable foundation that could support scaling and development for years to come. Is Solana dead if its infrastructural foundation is still up and running? Most people would say not!

I mentioned its groundbreaking Proof-of-History consensus earlier, but what Solana actually employs is a hybrid protocol of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and Proof-of-History (PoH). PoH was originally derived from PoS. Its foundation rests on the idea that, instead of trusting timestamps given on a block, you could prove that a transaction occurred at a specific time before and after an action.

Here’s how it works. A validator takes an input (like a transaction) and runs it through a verifiable delay function (VDF) repeatedly. The resulting output acts as a timestamp for the transaction. Anyone can verify the order and timing of transactions without asking the whole network, which means transactions get processed much faster.

PoH isn’t the blockchain’s only strength, though. Here are the other pillars of Solana’s architecture:

• Tower BTF. A mechanism that improves the network’s responsiveness by allowing validators to vote on the state of the ledger.
• Turbine. This block propagation technique breaks data into smaller packets, allowing fast and scalable communication across validators.
• Gulf Stream. A transaction forwarding protocol that pushes unconfirmed transactions to validators in advance, reducing confirmation times and mempool congestion.
• Sealevel. A mechanism that allows Solana’s multiple smart contracts to run simultaneously, unlike Ethereum’s sequential execution.
• Pipelining. A transaction processing mechanism where different stages of validation are handled by separate hardware units, boosting throughput.
• Cloudbreak. Solana’s scalable account database, designed for high-speed concurrent reads and writes across the network.

At this point, it’s safe to say that Solana’s underlying technology has stood the test of time, despite a few hiccups here and there.

Active Network Development & Scaling Improvements

Of course, an efficient architecture alone doesn’t preclude crypto enthusiasts asking, “Is SOL really dead?” But it’s much harder to make that claim if, even years after launch, the network is still in active development.

Remember the 65,000 TPS milestone I mentioned earlier? As impressive as it was, compared to networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum, it wasn’t the final ceiling. Over the years, the network has managed to reach 80,000, and in August 2025, it became the first major blockchain to hit 100,000 TPS during the mainnet stress test.

And that’s not all. In July 2025, Solana also boosted its block capacity by 20%. This has some pretty wide-ranging implications: more compute units per block means more complex transactions can be included without hitting the block’s computational limit. The developers recently announced that they’re planning to upgrade the block capacity even further to 100 CUs.

Even if this improvement comes with some trade-offs (namely, the increase in resource requirements for validators), it could be game-changing for more advanced dApps and use cases like DEXs, restaking protocols, and the NFT minting process.

Last but not least, even the dreaded outage issue is becoming less relevant: according to a Solana Ecosystem Report (H1 2025) by Helius, Solana has achieved over 15 months of continuous uptime from February 2024 to July 2025 – its longest streak since launch!

A Thriving Ecosystem

Every crypto enthusiast knows that blockchain networks live and die by their community. And the good news is that, despite the FUD, Solana’s scene is still just as active and thriving. Here are just a few facts to lift your spirits if you’ve been affected by the “Is SOL crypto dead?” crowd, courtesy of the above-mentioned report:

Hopefully, these stats can put your fears at rest and put the question, “Is Solana dead?” back in the drawer for now! Even the crypto market sentiment for Solana is still firmly on the green side, hovering at 85% (as of August 22, 2025).

Holding Its Own Against Bitcoin & Ethereum

It can’t really be helped: any cryptocurrency that becomes valuable enough to stand the test of time and reach the price heights above the $50 mark will inevitably be compared to the OG crypto giants.

Is SOL crypto dead if it no longer sits at the top of the “Most Valuable Cryptocurrencies” table just below Bitcoin and Ethereum? Of course not – but still, it’s definitely a useful benchmark, especially given the fact that the market movements of these two coins often tag many other altcoins along.

At first glance, it seems like BTC and ETH both had a similar price dip between the second half of 2022 and the beginning of 2024 as SOL did, confirming the above-mentioned tendency. Those claiming that “Solana is dead” might as well have said the same about Bitcoin and Ethereum.

When you zoom in more, though, it becomes clear that, out of the three of those, SOL is still the most volatile. As of 2025, Bitcoin’s annual volatility is approximately 65%^[2] (with a cumulative return of 70% from 2021 to 2024). Ethereum displays higher volatility at around 85% and a return of 120%, while Solana takes the number spot with its volatility of 130% and a cumulative return of 300%.

However, after adjusting for risk, there were no significant differences in the performance of the three cryptocurrencies. Which ultimately means that, instead of being inferior to Bitcoin and Ethereum, Solana could actually be a great complementary asset in a portfolio that already includes the other two, as it helps balance out the risk and return ratio.

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An Upcoming Rally?

Finally, let’s take a look at Solana’s more recent market performance and where it’s likely to go from there. If the 2022-2024 dip was bad enough to have people asking, “Is SOL really dead?” (even though the price was still hovering between $20 and $25, which didn’t come close to the all-time low of $0.5052 back in 2020), did Solana manage to climb out of that pit?

It certainly did! At the end of 2023, the coin already started showing signs of recovery, breaking the $50 threshold in November – and by the first quarter of 2024, it reached $197. From that point, the trajectory went sideways and continued in a very jagged line, with plenty of ups and downs, but January 2025 saw a new all-time high of $291.37.

It was the subsequent plunge that renewed all those “Is Solana dead?” talks. By April 2025, the SOL price was barely above $100. But since then, it took a more hopeful turn again, and there’s some indication that this might have been a pullback preceding an upcoming rally.

Jonathan Carter, a crypto market technician on X, drew attention to a promising structure on Solana’s chart, pointing out that its price is currently retesting the upper boundary of a long-formed Ascending Triangle, finding firmer ground while gradually settling against resistance.

According to his observations, Solana’s daily structure displays obvious resistance zones around the $180 – $185 levels, which have capped price advances several times throughout the year. A bounce from the region could clear the path for SOL to reclaim higher targets at $205 and $225, setting up an eventual run toward $268.

In his projections, Carter claims that the presence of the 100-day Moving Average (MA) just below current levels gives more confirmation for a potential bullish reversal. Even though SOL remains range–bound between $165 and $190, the tightening structure of the Ascending Triangle hints that a breakout might be coming.

How to Survive the FUD? Best Tips for Solana Investors

Now that the verdict on the “Is Solana dead?” debate is more or less clear, it’s time for some practical advice. Even if rationally, you know that this altcoin isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, being exposed to a relentless stream of fearmongering could get anyone down. With that in mind, here are some tips on how to resist the pessimistic narrative and get through this rough patch:

That’s about it! If you take this advice to heart, what might seem like a sinking ship during moments of panic would soon start to feel like just another bump in the rocky road; after all, volatility and uncertainty are pretty much an inseparable part of the crypto experience, and getting through the bad times is practically a rite of passage at this point.

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Conclusions

Is Solana dead for real? At this point, the answer is – decidedly not! Just like any other blockchain, it’s had good and bad years, and it’s certainly not free of the common issues plaguing most of its competitors, such as rug pulls, pump-and-dump schemes, and network outages. But, as of writing this, Solana’s ecosystem and market performance are on a growing trend, with some evidence of a potential rally.

That said, it never hurts to get a reality check and re-evaluate your approach to crypto. If the Solana FUD got you down, it might be time to lay off the negative news for a bit, do some research on which Solana projects are worth investing in, and diversify your portfolio to avoid the worst-case scenario.

The content published on this website is not aimed to give any kind of financial, investment, trading, or any other form of advice. BitDegree.org does not endorse or suggest you to buy, sell or hold any kind of cryptocurrency. Before making financial investment decisions, do consult your financial advisor.

Scientific References

1. Zhao C., Zhang S., Wang T., Liew S. C.: 'Bodyless block propagation: TPS fully scalable blockchain with pre-validation';

2. Syafrida I., Prashayuniar A. H.: 'Comparative Performance Analysis Of Bitcoin, Ethereum, And Solana In The Crypto Market'.