On December 26, it was announced that two of the biggest altcoins are built. Apparently, in early December the DeGods team asked Solana for $5 million USD to remain on their blockchain, but the Solana team declined the offer.
Why they are leaving?
Unfortunately, Solana was one of the victims of the cryptocurrency market cap value. This was due to Solana possessing FTX assets totaling 3.24 million FTX Trading LTD common stock shares, 3.43 million FTT tokens, and 134.54 million SRM tokens at the time of FTX’s collapse. Although Solana possessed those assets, their value plummeted with the FTX collapse, which also affected SOL’s overall value.
Another negative factor was that the Sunny Aggregator altcoin, SUNNY, had a market cap of nearly $3.5 billion USD, as can be seen from the graph below taken from DefiLlama:
Sunny’s developers, Ian and Dylan Macalinao who are brothers, then used their platform to create 11 fake developer profiles that purported to be working on over a dozen projects on the platform, all of which used Saber. By doing so, they managed to inflate the price of Solana’s TVL by $7.5 billion USD. This process of a single creating multiple profiles in an attempt to take over an online system is known as a ‘Sybil attack.’ But the Macalinao’s Sybil attack proved successful and they were able to woo investors to their fake projects and to boost their own platform’s use and value. However, in August 2022, Coindesk exposed the brothers’ fake DeFi ecosystem, which further damaged Solana’s value. They then retired from their posts and have yet to be charged.
You can see the impact that these events had on Solana’s ecosystem, and therefore market cap value, in this 2-year price chart taken from yahoo!finance:
