New Year, New Solana: Battered SOL Beats Top 50 Crypto By Far

Other top coins so far in the new year include OKB, exchange OKX’s utility coin, which was up 13% as of Tuesday morning, and Flow blockchain’s native FLOW coin

article-image

Vladimir Kazakov/Shutterstock.com modified by Blockworks

share

As crypto investors start to parse out their trading strategies for 2023 and attempt to recuperate losses from last year, Solana is emerging as an early winner. 

Solana’s native token SOL, one of the so-called “Sam Coins” backed by now disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, is already up more than 20% in 2023, as of data pulled at 10 am ET. The token ended last year 94% lower against the dollar. 

While only less than three days in, Solana has positioned itself as the best performing top-50 token of 2023 so far. As of Tuesday at 10 am ET, SOL was trading over $13, according to data

Toward the end of 2022, SOL hit single digits for the first time in two years, dropping below 10% and shedding 75% since FTX’s collapse. 

Bankman-Fried was a main backer of the smart contracts-focused protocol Solana. FTX had purchased more than 58 million SOL tokens from the Solana Foundation and Solana Labs starting in August 2020, according to the now-bankrupt exchange. 

FTX-affiliated Alameda Research reportedly held about $1.2 billion in SOL tokens ahead of the crippling bank run on FTX, which led to its bankruptcy.

Other top coins so far include OKB, exchange OKX’s utility coin, which was up 13% as of Tuesday morning, and Flow blockchain’s native FLOW coin, which had rallied similarly over the previous three days. 

Even with some promising early numbers, traders keen to bounce back after a year of losses should keep an eye on global macroeconomic data, which have proven to influence token prices, analysts warn. 

“While the crypto industry has plenty of things to worry about right now, investors should pay close attention to changes in interest rates over the coming months,” research analysts from Kaiko wrote in a note Tuesday. “Macro could very well be the single biggest market catalyst in 2023.” 

Leading the pack for the worst performing top-50 coins are LEO, Bitfinex’s utility token, which has lost more than 3% in 2023, and BitTorrent’s BTT, which is down about 1.6%.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

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

Research Report Templates (8).png

Research

Meta-aggregators like Titan and Kamino Swap improve price execution for users, making the Solana swapping landscape more competitive. Jupiter has incorporated meta-aggregation features into its latest routing engine to keep users on its front end (own the user, own the flow). At large, teams are treating swaps as a commoditized complement, offering incredibly cheap or free swaps to own the end-user and increase demand for high-margin product offerings (multi-product DeFi). On another note, the divergence in the concentration of aggregator volume between DEXs suggests increased specialization at the DEX layer by asset type.

article-image

Many community banks and credit unions feel like they missed the fintech craze — and they don’t want to miss stablecoins

article-image

BlackRock COO Rob Goldstein noted that the firm had been looking into crypto since 2017

article-image

With the June FOMC meeting coming up, the Fed remains unlikely to cut interest rates. Is this the right move?

article-image

The crypto-optional shooter is expected to release on Steam in a few weeks

article-image

The new airdrop campaign reaches 50,000 users, setting the stage for Spark’s 10-year token distribution