Solana's Total Value Locked Hits New High for 2023

By Mattis Meichler

Solana’s total value locked (TVL) reached $338.82 million this Monday, marking its highest since the start of the year, as per DefiLlama data.

TVL is a metric–arguably a crude one–for measuring how much money is sloshing around a network’s various DeFi apps.

Over the last 24 hours, SOL's TVL saw an increase of roughly 4.15%, jumping from $324.64 million on Sunday to $338.82 million by Monday. Pushing that rise, are popular Solana-based projects like Drift, marginfi, Solend, and others.

The network’s native SOL token has also reported its strongest week since mid-July. The token experienced a 29% rise over the past week and has surged 39.08% from its September low, per CoinGecko.

SOL is trading hands at $24.42 press time, indicating a 65% jump from its 2023 lowest price.

Still, these numbers remain a shadow of their peak during the bull market.

Solana's TVL had skyrocketed to just above $10 billion in November 2021 before plummeting. It bottomed out at $210 million in January 2023.

FTX estate and SOL liquidation

The latest recovery isn’t confirmed yet, though

Concerns arise about the possible effect on SOL's price after the FTX estate has been approved to sell its crypto holdings.

The estate is said to have about $1.2 billion in SOL. According to market analyst The Tie, of this amount, as much as 22 million SOL tokens (roughly valued at $400 million) are unlocked and can be sold.

This represents close to 4% of SOL's total supply.

Another 40 million to 44 million tokens, or approximately $860 million, are currently staked and another $17 million worth of SOL tokens are expected to be unlocked every month for the next four years.

Solana was amongst the projects that were the most severely hit by the FTX collapse.

The layer.1 blockchain and Bankman-Fried’s companies were heavily intertwined, as the Solana Fondation detailed in a blog post in November 2022.

The Foundation revealed it had around $1 million in cash or similar assets with FTX until November 6, 2022, before the platform halted customer withdrawals.

This represents less than 1% of its total funds.

The Solana Foundation owned roughly 3.24 million shares in FTX Trading LTD, as well as about 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.

Recommended News