Solana Founders Scramble To Move Past FTX's Stain on Their Token (bloomberg.com) 36
Solana, the blockchain network once championed by Sam Bankman-Fried, is drawing intense scrutiny as industry watchers wonder whether its former close ties to the disgraced crypto mogul and his now-defunct FTX empire will jeopardize its future. From a report: Its founders are doing everything they can to break that connection. The price of Solana's crypto token, SOL, has plummeted 96% from its all-time high of $260 in November 2021 to about $10, hurt first by a year-long crypto rout that engulfed the whole market and then again by FTX's fall. SOL dropped as much as 12% on Wednesday alone on concern large holders are offloading the token, which is used as the base cryptocurrency for financial transactions on the blockchain.
Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, the startup that developed the blockchain, said in an interview earlier this month that he doesn't usually comment on price, and that the focus instead should be on "the technology and having people build something awesome that's decentralized." But the collapse of FTX is having an impact -- both personal and professional -- on Solana and its founders. And the token's drop can be seen as an expression of waning confidence in the whole platform, which at its peak sported a market value of almost $80 billion and is now a tiny fraction of that.
Yakovenko said roughly 4% of teams building projects on Solana now were acutely affected by FTX's collapse. Some platforms had funds custodied on the crypto exchange. About 80% of teams on Solana's blockchain had no exposure at all to FTX, Yakovenko said, referring to survey data, adding that he was connecting severely impacted founders with investors who could potentially provide emergency capital. "There's definitely more to Solana than FTX," Yakovenko said. Still, the network's longstanding ties to FTX and Alameda Research, the crypto trading firm co-founded by Bankman-Fried, may make it hard for some to move past the association. The two firms helped support Solana by purchasing SOL tokens in bulk from the Solana Foundation, the nonprofit that helps support the blockchain. Alameda also bought large quantities of SOL from Solana Labs. [...] Alameda and FTX's venture arm also invested in multiple projects that operated on Solana, while FTX built its own projects on the network, including the decentralized finance platform Serum. These types of efforts, from an industry leader with substantial influence in the market, helped introduce Solana to many crypto users, Gokal said.
Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, the startup that developed the blockchain, said in an interview earlier this month that he doesn't usually comment on price, and that the focus instead should be on "the technology and having people build something awesome that's decentralized." But the collapse of FTX is having an impact -- both personal and professional -- on Solana and its founders. And the token's drop can be seen as an expression of waning confidence in the whole platform, which at its peak sported a market value of almost $80 billion and is now a tiny fraction of that.
Yakovenko said roughly 4% of teams building projects on Solana now were acutely affected by FTX's collapse. Some platforms had funds custodied on the crypto exchange. About 80% of teams on Solana's blockchain had no exposure at all to FTX, Yakovenko said, referring to survey data, adding that he was connecting severely impacted founders with investors who could potentially provide emergency capital. "There's definitely more to Solana than FTX," Yakovenko said. Still, the network's longstanding ties to FTX and Alameda Research, the crypto trading firm co-founded by Bankman-Fried, may make it hard for some to move past the association. The two firms helped support Solana by purchasing SOL tokens in bulk from the Solana Foundation, the nonprofit that helps support the blockchain. Alameda also bought large quantities of SOL from Solana Labs. [...] Alameda and FTX's venture arm also invested in multiple projects that operated on Solana, while FTX built its own projects on the network, including the decentralized finance platform Serum. These types of efforts, from an industry leader with substantial influence in the market, helped introduce Solana to many crypto users, Gokal said.
Crypto, where real money gets converted to nothing (Score:2)
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To anyone still in crypto...you were warned.
Hey - they are only down 96 percent - this will pass. Maybe they can pick up some of those awesome Trump Trading cards and catapult back into profit. Snicker.
Sir that is a categorical lie (Score:3)
Re: Sir that is a categorical lie (Score:2)
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With crypto real money also gets converted into drugs, human trafficking and terrorism.
And don't forget the conversion into heat generated from video cards! I suppose that's at least kind of useful in cold climates though ;)
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And don't forget the conversion into heat generated from video cards! I suppose that's at least kind of useful in cold climates though ;)
Space heater mining rigs [heatbit.com] are a thing.
Buy Popcorn Stock (Score:2)
The grift that's a gift.
Solana is the future! (Score:2)
Decentralized (Score:4, Informative)
having people build something awesome that's decentralized
He says that but I don't think he understands that being the sole custodian of a proprietary blockchain makes it quite central.
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More than that, if one fraudster gets rugpulled by another guy and that causes your company's singular "decentralized" product to lose 96% of it's value while also sublimating a 9-digit sum of real world money in the process, I don't think you can call any of this bullshit "decentralized."
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So we should start focusing on mastodon, Far more useful than crypto. Especially since yesterday's crash of large portions of Twitter yesterday because Musk, in a cost-cutting move, yanked the serves in one location. [techcrunch.com]
Twitter has resolved an issue that caused a widespread outage earlier Wednesday (Pacific time), according to web monitoring tool DownDetector. The site acted up weirdly for over five hours for many users. Our original story follows.
If Twitter isn’t loading fine for you, you’re not alone. Tens of thousands of users are complaining that they are unable to access the Elon Musk-owned social network, seeing scores of strange error messages instead. Some are being greeted with a blank page while others are getting signed out of the service for no apparent reason, they said. Many users also said they were unable to see their replies, respond to tweets or follow trending topics.
In a tweet, Musk said the firm has rolled out “significant backend server architecture changes” and that it should result in Twitter feeling “faster.”
Twitter also showed “rate-exceeding limit” to some users on Wednesday (Pacific time), suggesting its servers weren’t able to cope up with the incoming requests. The hashtag #TwitterDown is trending on the platform.
The outage, which appears to be affecting international users in the U.K., Canada, Germany, Italy and India, began at about 4 p.m. Pacific time. Third-party web monitoring services including NetBlocks and DownDetector confirmed receiving reports from users. DownDetector said the vast majority of complaints suggest that Twitter is largely facing an issue on desktop.
Many are also unable to access TweetDeck, a power users-focused service from Twitter. NetBlocks additionally added that the “widespread” incident is not related to “country-level internet disruptions or filtering.”
Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in late October. He has sought to cut Twitter’s expenses by eliminating thousands of employees, many of whom worked to maintain the service’s infrastructure. Musk has also focused on making the Twitter experience faster for users by removing bloat code from the service.
The service was operational “even after I disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks,” Musk tweeted on December 24. Earlier this month, Twitter briefly blocked traffic from about 30 mobile carriers, mainly in the Asia-Pacific region, as part of an attempt to rid Twitter of spam, Platformer reported.
What an idiot. And this is the guy who says that even after he steps down as CEO, he'll still be in charge of servers and software ... hahahahaha.
Somebody needs to put a molly switch with a key lock on every server - and hide the key from him.
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He was stupid enough to pull the plug on a bunch of servers "to increase efficiency", which yesterday resulted in large parts of twitter going down.
I don't think he's smart enough to file a pre-packaged bankruptcy before December 31st, but it's obvious at this point twitter is fatally wounded.
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What's really funny is that he's asking employees to volunteer to deliver teslas before the end of the year so he can make the year-end numbers.
So you just KNOW those year-end numbers are not going to be all that great.
Maybe he should set an example, stop tweeting, and deliver a few Teslas? Except that if he's pulled over, he'll lose his license because he's now pretty much always impaired. Of course, if his claims that Teslas have FSD were true, he could have the cars deliver themselves.
But this lea
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The term "decentralized" is not used as to imply any actual characteristic or function here. It is used as a common, meaningless advertising term, intended to signal "great" and trigger "fear of missing out" if you do not buy. Same as "light", "new formula", "new and improved quality", etc. Whenever you see these showing up, chances are the product got worse and may not have been good in the first place.
Blockchain has outlived any claims of usefulness (Score:5, Interesting)
As a programmer, I still do not understand why so many people think these inefficient databases provide any real utility?
Another engineer has a documentary coming out on Jan 1 [youtube.com] that talks about this. Why isn't the media asking tough questions? Why are the people hyping this "new tech" not actual tech people?
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First point: yes. Second point: I don't think so. Refer to my .sig. What could well be is that modern people are a lot more careless in recognizing and handling risks.
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As a programmer, I still do not understand why so many people think these inefficient databases provide any real utility?
Holy crap, I thought I was the only weirdo who didn't quite get it.
The problem I kept coming back to is that database entries are only really valuable if they represent a commitment to do something. A concert ticket represents admission to an event, a dollar value in a bank represents a monetary transaction, and video game assets represents an inventory of cosmetic and functional items used during the duration of the game.
Thus, whether it's on a blockchain, in an Oracle database, or a paper printout, it onl
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As a programmer, I still do not understand why so many people think these inefficient databases provide any real utility?
So, while I do like the concept of decentralized databases, I simply haven't been able to come up with a use case where centralized databases are the problem in need of being solved...and Finance is certainly not the field that lends itself to "test in production", yet here we are.
I think this is the thing.
At the start, the blockchain was a new concept and like any new concept there was the potential for a lot of other unrealized applications, so people started looking for those applications.
Problem is, after a few years, people haven't found any new uses. The closest is smart contracts, but the biggest issue with traditional contracts is lawyers exploiting loopholes. No one wants to risk real money on a contract implemented in software where the loopholes can be actual software bugs
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Indeed. The reason it is non-tech people hyping this and the media is clueless is simply because the hypers and the media are not very smart.
A Stain on 'The Blockchain'. (Score:2)
Blockchains, here today and gone tomorrow (with your money).
Appropriate name (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)ve never seen a crypto token as appropriately named as SOL. They should all be variants thereof.
SOL? (Score:2)
Shit Out of Luck? Sounds about right.
Blockchain does have use cases (Score:2)
I understand all the schadenfreude. However, let me remind everyone that there are genuine use cases for blockchain. One example: in countries without a trustworthy banking system, people have use Bitcoin&Co as a means of payment, and as a means of putting their money out of the reach of their corrupt governments.
Originally, many of us hoped that crypto currencies could apply pressure to all governments, to reign in abusive monetary policies. That didn't happen, but that doesn't negate the remaining u
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... countries with a trustworthy banking system ...
Citation needed.
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Au contraire. Crapcoins do not work for that. They can just seize your phone and hit you with that $5 wrench in order to get your money. And they can readily tell who has crapcoins, because Internet surveillance and enforced proxying is easy if everything is corrupt already. You probably do not understand how bad things have to be for a banking system not being trustworthy anymore.
Try again. Crapcoins are worse than useless.