Whale Crypto Selling SOL Coins, Solana Under Pressure

JAKARTA - The Solana coin crypto market (SOL) has again come under pressure after one of the major investors, known as the "whale", made massive sales of Solana's crypto asset (SOL). Since early 2024, the whale has released a SOL worth tens of millions of US dollars, which has had a significant impact on price movements in the market.

Based on data compiled by Lookonchain, a blockchain tracking platform, the first sale by whales took place on January 15, 2024. Over the next few weeks and months, the investor gradually sold a total of 614,000 SOLs with a value of around 89 million US dollars (Rp1,424 trillion) on a number of large crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, OKX, and Binance. These sales take place on average once per week, which is likely to be done to avoid too sharp price fluctuations in the market.

In a further analysis of the on-chain data, it can be seen that around 100,000 SOLs have been withdrawn from the staking platform in the last 30 days before finally being moved to the three crypto exchanges. This action shows that there is a planned strategy from the whale to reduce their ownership of Solana. At the time of writing, the price of SOL was at US$142.66 (Rp2,282,560).

Solana Is Under Pressure

Not only the sell-off by big investors, Solana is also under pressure from the outflow of institutional funds. The latest report from digital asset manager CoinShares reveals that the crypto investment product associated with Solana experienced the largest outflow of funds in its history, amounting to 39 million US dollars (Rp624 billion) in the last week. This happened in line with the sharp decline in the volume of memecoin trading, which became one of Solana's main pillars.

Meanwhile, investment products related to Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) actually recorded positive inflows in the same period. Bitcoin recorded an inflow of 42 million US dollars (Rp672 billion), while the short-Bitcoin ETF product experienced an outflow of 1 million US dollars (Rp16 billion) for the second week in a row.

Ethereum, although only recorded an entry flow of US$4.2 million (Rp67.2 billion) last week, showed more complex dynamics. Several new providers recorded an inflow of 104 million US dollars (Rp1.664 trillion), while Grayscale experienced an outflow of 118 million US dollars (Rp1.88 trillion).