Solana Hack Sees Coin’s Popularity Drop With Investors

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Last Updated on 8 August 2022 by CryptoTips.eu

Jeroen Kok

Jeroen is one of the lead copywriters on Cryptotips.eu and discusses all recent events in the crypto market. This includes news updates, but also price analyzes and more. He developed his passion for cryptocurrency during the bull run in 2017. He has learned a lot since then. The combination of cryptocurrency and creative writing is perfect for Jeroen and an excellent way to share his knowledge with a wide audience. Find me on LinkedIn / [email protected]
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Solana, the once promising new crypto coin developed by former Qualcomm software developer Anatoly Yakovenko, was hailed as a possible ‘Ethereum-killer’ when launched back in 2020.

At it’s height, it stood at the fifth most popular coin by market capitalization ranking on the coinmarketcap website.

As it has been plagued by hacks and scandals, it has lost some of it’s spark. So what happened?

Advertentie.

California

Solana is a cryptocurrency that was designed to work similarly to and improve upon Ethereum (the second most popular crypto coin after Bitcoin). The coin was named after a small Southern Californian coastal city and is the brainchild of Anatoly Yakovenko, who formerly worked at Qualcomm.

Together with a group of other former Qualcomm employees, he launched Solana in 2020 to try and challenge and improve upon the blockchain network of Ethereum. For a while that worked perfectly, and the popularity of Solana rose.

As it was plagued by hacks, the popularity of the coin dropped and it’s now about to lose its place in the top ten of most popular crypto coins. As Wall Street only has eye for the first ten coins mostly, this could have serious consequences.

9% loss

At a certain point this week, Solana lost about 9% in value as a result of the latest hack that led to several wallets being drained of funds.

This Wednesday, as reported both by the Washington Post and the Guardian newspapers even, thousands of solana wallets saw their funds disappear. Solana’s official Twitter account admitted that “approximately 7,767 wallets have been affected.”

They then added:

Engineers from multiple ecosystems, with the help of several security firms, are investigating drained wallets on solana. There is no evidence hardware wallets are impacted.

However, the most damning news for Solana is that crypto analysts believe that this mass hack could signal a fundamental issue with the Solana blockchain, which would make it less inviting for future investment.

Underrated coin

One person who does continue to believe in Solana is crypto savant (and billionaire investor) Sam Bankman-Fried. In an exclusive interview with Fortune this week, he claims that Solana is currently the most underrated coin.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out.