Solana (SOL), once a praised contender for Ethereum, is now down 96% form ATH. Maybe, Solana is the popular kid who peaked in high school and settled down getting paid $8 an hour. Because, that’s exactly where it’s hovering at the time of writing this article. Here’s a surprising fact, Solana peaked at an all-time high of $260 in November 2021 and is now trading below its initial first day of ICO. Would it be fair to say that Solana was merely a concept of what could be like the Tesla Roadster or the Line City in Saudi Arabia. And in this day and age, concepts sell better than functioning products, they go up and up and up in value and crash like the spaghetti western protagonists. Nonetheless, this is no philosophical reflection on the nature of modern life and the subsequent products that turn the wheel of economy. And that’s why I put a question mark at the end of the title, these question marks are life savers for journalists to preserve their integrity in case they were morbidly wrong.

For the first time, a crypto exchange is delisting Solana (SOL) and its products from their platform. This is bad news for the already struggling digital asset that used to have strong ties with FTX.

Solana (SOL), Fast and Loose

According to crypto journalist Colin Wu, crypto exchange Matrixport will delist Solana and its associates on December 30th. While nobody has even heard of Matrixport, the news sent SOL down yet another steep correction of 13%. On top of that, the exchange has also said they will not launch any of their products in the future.

“Matrixport, the asset management platform founded by Jihan Wu, announced that it will delist SOL and SOL-U dual-currency investment products on December 30, and will not launch new Solana products in the future.”

In the meantime, Vitalik Buterin took on Twitter to give the Solana team some words of encouragement. Buterin believes that “the awful opportunistic money” is now purged from SOL and the future is awesome and stuff!

Recently, critics have been mocking the Solana Phone for being a gimmicky rebranded phone with aimless emphasis on web3. It would be fair to say Solana (SOL) has not been making the wisest decision in 2021 and they do actually play a significant part in their demise.

However, it is terrifying how they could attract heavy investments from investment giants like Grayscale.

The Domino Effect?

As you can tell by the question mark, I am not certain whether delisting Solana from exchanges can be a trend. Yet, the plunge for Solana is part of the bearish Domino-like collapse taking place in the crypto market. Solana had strong ties with FTX, but that’s not all they had to pay for. Essentially, SOL took momentum with the rise of NFTs for having a fast and cheap blockchain to complete NFT transactions. During the NFT boom, the Solana blockchain gained massive traction since other networks had higher transaction fees. With that, SOL had strong rallies coming one after another.

However, consistent network outages began to push Solana down and create fear among investors. On top of that, both Web3 and NFTs have significantly lost popularity in the past couple of months. These two were the big categories that Solana was investing in.

Despite all that, it seems unlikely for SOL to have a quick and short-term recovery as it is now associated with high-risk assets such as Shiba Inu.

According to Arthur Hayes, Solana may still have a chance to bounce back despite being a “shitcoin”. But his reasoning is not something everyone can agree with.