FTX repayments loom over Solana

Macro headwinds muddy Solana’s bullish narrative

article-image

CryptoFX/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks

share

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


Solana is stalled sideways, with the broader crypto market hitting some light turbulence. SOL is trading at $145.45 midweek, down 2.5% from last Wednesday and now drifting crabwise after a month-long rally that pushed it up nearly 30% from April lows. 

Despite the modest cooling of momentum, Solana continues to print usage at speed. Over the past 30 days, transaction fees have hit an annualized $432.9 million, with SOL burn running at an annualized $216.5 million pace.

Besides macro headwinds, we can probably trace some of the cautious price action to the looming FTX liquidation, where over 60% of the estate’s onchain assets are in SOL. The first wave of creditor repayments is scheduled for May 30 — funded by prior asset sales, including FTX’s March SOL deals — which may still weigh on sentiment even if the tokens themselves are no longer in play. SOL’s market cap has slipped to $75.3 billion, and while 24-hour volume remains strong at $3.49 billion, buyers can’t seem to stop peeking over their shoulders.

The last round of FTX estate unlocks kicked off March 1 — right before a drawdown in SOL’s price, although there were obviously other factors involved

Bitcoin, meanwhile, had a little gut punch this morning due to macro. On Wednesday, BTC dropped to $92,910 after US GDP data showed a 0.3% contraction in Q1 — its first in three years. Analysts were quick to cite the sudden impact of Trump’s revived tariff policy, with imports surging and dragging down the GDP print. Stocks sold off, recession chatter kicked up, and bitcoin dipped. As is tradition, the price rebounded within hours to $94,000, buoyed by strong spot demand and resilient ETF inflows, including over $3 billion in net new capital through April 29. 

Last weekend’s Crossroads event in Istanbul allowed the Solana community to take stock of direction. It was a lot of builders comparing notes, investors checking pulse, and variant teams workshopping infrastructure that still has a shot at scaling mainstream demand — lots of honest conversations about payments, gaming, DePIN and the gaps that still need filling.

So far, though, the resulting confidence of those discussions has not translated into price. For now, conviction is expensive. The market is still frozen by what-ifs. What if the market prices in the FTX overhang? What if bitcoin fails to clear $96K and drags everything else with it? What if global retaliation hits US tech exports, and risk assets feel the heat? 

Once these questions have answers, folks will either step up or step aside. And that’s when the market’ll start moving again…ready or not.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

recent research

Unlocked by Template (7).png

Research

Union’s improvements upon Tendermint consensus through CometBLS, coupled with ZK proving through Galois, allow for a broadly scalable, cost efficient, and low latency IBC implementation that is feasibly scalable across every existing blockchain, virtual machine and runtime. The implementation offers modular crosschain interoperability without the need for trusted intermediaries.  

article-image

Long before Ordinals, bitcoin gambling site SatoshiDice was blamed for spamming the chain

article-image

Néstor Palao spoke to Blockworks about the trends he’s seeing in crypto projects

article-image

Axiom merges Solana memecoins with Hyperliquid perps

article-image

Sponsored

Technology alone isn’t enough. It’s about how we introduce it, how we guide users through it, and how we make it feel like second nature.

article-image

The crypto industry is still best known for manufacturing tokens, not value

article-image

Some GOP members have indicated they will hold out on passing a bill that doesn’t include some key provisions