Solana Foundation Lost Over $180 Million in Crypto on FTX

The Solana Foun­da­tion has released a fact sheet detail­ing the expo­sure it holds to FTX fol­low­ing its bankruptcy

The orga­ni­za­tion held over $180 mil­lion worth of cryp­to asset expo­sure to the com­pa­ny as of Novem­ber 6th, just before the exchange ceased pro­cess­ing withdrawals. 

FTT and SRM Holdings

Accord­ing to the foundation’s report (last updat­ed Mon­day), Solana held rough­ly $1 mil­lion in cash on FTX as of Novem­ber 6th. The non-prof­it said these funds were “neg­li­gi­ble” to its oper­a­tions, account­ing for less than 1% of its cash reserves. 

The orga­ni­za­tion lost far more in cryp­to assets, how­ev­er. Though no Solana (SOL) was held on FTX, rough­ly 3.43 mil­lion FTX (FTT) tokens and 134.54 mil­lion Serum (SRM) tokens belong­ing to the foun­da­tion are now trapped on the exchange.

In addi­tion, the group held 3.24 mil­lion shares of FTX com­mon stock.

Accord­ing to CoinGecko, FTT was trad­ing for over $22 as of that time, while SRM was worth rough­ly $0.8 each. Going by the foundation’s num­bers, that’s $75.46 mil­lion and $107.6 mil­lion of expo­sure to FTT and SRM respectively. 

FTT is FTX’s util­i­ty token that gave hold­ers reduced trad­ing fees on the plat­form. Mean­while, SRM is the gov­er­nance token for Serum – a scal­a­bil­i­ty-focused DEX pro­to­col launched by a con­sor­tium includ­ing FTX, Alame­da Research, and the Solana Foundation. 

Since FTX’s col­lapse, FTT has fall­en to just $1.32, while SRM trades for $0.32 as of Thursday. 

Even SOL has suf­fered major loss­es, falling below $15 this month, and well out of the top ten cryp­tocur­ren­cies by mar­ket cap. Last Novem­ber, SOL tapped its all-time high of $259 each. 

Despite these loss­es, Solana stat­ed that its net­work has not “expe­ri­enced any notable per­for­mance or uptime issues,” in the wake of the fall­out. The blockchain is known to have suf­fered mul­ti­ple out­ages in the past.

Wrapped Tokens on Solana

Sol­let Bit­coin – a tok­enized ver­sion of Bit­coin on Solana – lost its price peg to the pri­ma­ry cryp­tocur­ren­cy after FTX went bank­rupt. Though FTX was respon­si­ble for hold­ing the Bit­coin back­ing those tokens, bal­ance sheet rev­e­la­tions from Novem­ber 10th indi­cate that the exchange held zero Bit­coin on its asset side. 

The Solana Foun­da­tion claims to have held anoth­er $40 mil­lion in expo­sure to Sol­let-based assets, such as soBTC, as of that date. “The sta­tus of the under­ly­ing assets is unknown at this time,” it added. 

The non-prof­it not­ed that USDC and USDT on Solana are issued direct­ly by Cir­cle and Teth­er respec­tive­ly, and remain ful­ly pegged at this time.