Solana News This Week — ChangeHero Digest

The crypto market just hit reset in spectacular fashion. Solana slipped below $84 — a level not seen since January 2024 — in a brutal 7% drop over the past 24 hours. That's just the start. According to Sherwood News, XRP plummeted nearly 19% to $1.24, Dogecoin fell 10% to $0.09, and Chainlink sank below $8.40, erasing all gains since October 2023. The broader crypto market capitalization shed 7.5% in a single day to $2.35 trillion — down 46.6% from the $4.4 trillion all-time high set in October 2025. Over 305,000 traders were liquidated, and the damage totaled $1.46 billion, data from CoinGlass reveals. It's a clean, brutal reminder that crypto volatility isn't theoretical. It's here, and it's expensive.

What's Behind the Sell-Off?

The sell-off didn't come out of nowhere. Devin Ryan attributes the downswing to an October sell-off that triggered cascading liquidations, compounded by macro headwinds like geopolitical conflicts, government shutdown concerns, and uncertainty over a new Federal Reserve chair. In other words, it's not just crypto being crypto — it's crypto responding to real-world uncertainty.

Ryan also pointed out that bitcoin's correlation with the rest of the crypto ecosystem remains strong, with both bitcoin and altcoins undergoing steep declines together. He expects that correlation to break down over the next one to two years as the market matures. For now, though, the volatility reflects market-structure issues and uncertainty about bitcoin's price direction. Bitcoin fell 24% over seven days to trade around $63,708, while Ethereum dropped nearly 34% to $1,867 — its lowest level since last May.

The important detail here is that the sell-off isn't isolated to one or two assets. It's systemic. When bitcoin sneezes, altcoins catch pneumonia. That tight correlation means investors can't easily diversify their way out of risk within the crypto ecosystem.

Solana's Identity Crisis — and Its Potential Solution

Here's where things get interesting. In the middle of this chaos, Solana Foundation President Lily Liu dropped a manifesto of sorts. In a post on X, she argued that blockchains should refocus on finance as their original purpose. She rejected the narratives framing blockchains as a general replacement for the modern internet and wrote: "Blockchains have always been and always will be tech for finance."

Liu criticized efforts to push blockchains into gaming and broad "web3" consumer narratives as marketing-led rather than genuine market creation. She took aim at the idea that simply placing existing applications on a blockchain — the "read, write, own" pitch — would automatically create value. Instead, she argued that meaningful adoption requires creating entirely new financial markets, describing financialization and open capital markets as crypto's core value proposition.

This isn't just philosophical musing. It's a strategic pivot. Liu's comments come at a time when institutional interest remains strong, with traditional financial firms continuing to explore tokenization, onchain settlement, and payments rails, as CoinDesk notes. The implication is clear: if Solana can double down on what it does best — fast, cheap, scalable financial infrastructure — it can survive the speculative hangover and emerge as a serious player in global finance.

On that note, Standard Chartered recently cut its end-2026 SOL price target to $250 from $310, but raised its longer-term forecasts significantly. The bank expects Solana to hit $400 by end-2027, $700 by end-2028, $1,200 by end-2029, and $2,000 in 2030. The reasoning? Standard Chartered says Solana is evolving into a dominant rail for micropayments and stablecoin transactions, with stablecoins on Solana turning over two to three times faster than those on Ethereum. Solana's median gas fee is roughly $0.0007, compared to Base's $0.015. That's a meaningful cost advantage, and it matters for high-frequency use cases.

Meanwhile, Sharps Technology partnered with BitGo Bank & Trust to expand its Solana digital asset treasury strategy, including qualified custody, staking validator services, and OTC trading. The firm has adopted a digital asset treasury strategy focused on accumulating SOL. In other words, institutions are betting on Solana's infrastructure, not just its token price.

Treasury Carnage and Leadership Shakeups

The sell-off has left major digital asset treasuries nursing deep losses. Artemis data shows more than $25 billion in unrealized losses across tracked treasuries. Strategy holds about $9.2 billion in unrealized losses on its bitcoin purchases. BitMine Immersion Technologies is down about $8.4 billion on its Ethereum purchases. Even firms holding Solana have sizable unrealized losses — around $1 billion for Solana treasury firm Forward Industries.

Michael Saylor, Strategy's founder, posted on X: "1. Buy Bitcoin. 2. Don't sell Bitcoin." It's a defiant stance, but on Myriad, odds that Strategy will sell some of its 713,502 BTC sometime this year rose to around 32%. That's not an overwhelming probability, but it's not negligible either.

In a sign of the times, Multicoin Managing Partner Kyle Samani is stepping back from the crypto-focused venture capital firm he co-founded. Tushar Jain said Samani is shifting focus beyond crypto into areas like AI, longevity, and robotics. Samani co-founded the SOL-backed digital asset treasury firm Forward and will remain its chairman. He also met with the SEC Crypto Task Force as part of a group discussing staking ETFs. It's not a full exit, but it's a signal that even the most bullish crypto VCs are hedging their bets.

Derivatives Point to More Pain

The derivatives markets are flashing red. A newly created wallet deposited $4 million in USDC into Hyperliquid and opened a 3x leveraged SOL short. That's a big, confident bet that Solana has further to fall. Meanwhile, Binance top trader data showed about 82% long accounts versus 18% short accounts on SOL, with a long-to-short ratio above 4.5. That's a crowded trade — and crowded trades tend to unwind painfully.

SOL open interest fell about 4.37% to roughly $6.19 billion. Liquidation data showed about $3.59 million in long liquidations versus about $733,000 in short liquidations. The longs are getting squeezed, and the shorts are having a field day.

On prediction markets, Myriad's "BTC's Next Move: Pump to $84K or Dump to $55K?" market opened February 5 and had $978 in volume. In early trading, users gave 68% odds to a dump toward $55,000. For Ethereum, Myriad's "Ethereum's Next Move: Pump to $3,000 or Dump to $1,500?" market opened February 2 and had $7.75K in volume. Myriad predictors put the odds of an ETH dump to $1,500 at about 71%. The crowd is betting on more downside, and the crowd is usually late — but not always wrong.

The Ethereum Layer-2 Reckoning

While Solana's leaders are refocusing on finance, Ethereum's roadmap is undergoing its own existential shift. Vitalik Buterin has signaled a desire to double down on Ethereum's layer-1 scaling roadmap. This pivot shifts emphasis away from a layer-2-centric approach that has dominated Ethereum's strategy in recent years. It's a blunt reality check: layer-2s were supposed to scale Ethereum, but they've also fragmented liquidity and diluted Ethereum's value capture. Now, Buterin is forcing layer-2s to grow up and stand on their own.

This matters for Solana because it clarifies the competitive landscape. If Ethereum is pulling back from its layer-2 bet, Solana's integrated, monolithic architecture starts to look more appealing. Building on Solana means building on one chain, one community, one liquidity pool. No fragmentation, no cross-chain bridge headaches. That's a selling point.

The Bottom Line

Solana is at a crossroads. The price action is brutal, the derivatives are bearish, and the broader crypto market is in full retreat. But beneath the noise, something more durable is taking shape. Lily Liu's call to refocus on finance isn't just rhetoric — it's a recognition that crypto's speculative phase is over and its infrastructure phase is just beginning. Solana's speed, cost advantage, and institutional momentum position it to thrive in a world where blockchains compete on utility, not hype.

The near-term outlook is uncertain. Standard Chartered's revised target of $250 by end-2026 feels cautious but reasonable. The long-term targets — $400 by 2027, $2,000 by 2030 — depend on Solana executing on its financial infrastructure vision and capturing meaningful stablecoin and payments volume. The fact that institutions like Sharps Technology are doubling down on Solana custody and staking suggests the smart money is looking past the current drawdown.

Here's the critical insight: Solana's fate won't be determined by short-term price volatility or meme coin presales. It will be determined by whether it can become the default rails for global finance — the network that powers micropayments, stablecoin settlements, and tokenized assets at scale. If it succeeds, the current sell-off will look like a buying opportunity. If it fails, the long-term targets are fantasy. The next 12 months will tell us which path we're on.