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.