Cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bank-man Fried (SBF), co-founder and CEO of popular digital asset trading platform FTX, has revealed he believes Solana ($SOL) is the “most underrated token right now” even as the network deals with an exploit that affected nearly 8,000 wallets.
In an interview with Fortune, SBF noted that Solana is the most underrated token “at least as of a month ago,” but stressed that his opinion is “not investment advice.” During his interview with Fortune, the 30-year-old CEO said that the recent Solana exploit that affected nearly 8,000 wallets “wasn’t a core blockchain problem” but instead it appears to have been “one app someone built was buggy.”
Notably, an investigation into the exploit, which siphoned both SOL and SPL tokens, including USDC, revealed that affected addresses were “at one point created, imported, or used in Slope mobile wallet applications.”
Solana is a high-performance blockchain founded by former Qualcomm, Intel, and Dropbox engineers that uses a delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) consensus algorithm. The network uses Proof-of-History to order transactions in a way that significantly improves its speed and throughput.
The network has experienced multiple outages over the past few months, which saw some investors question the network’s reliability and security. SBF noted that the network “had a lot of bad PR over a short period of time,” which he says it “sort of deserved.”
The CEO noted that technologically, Solana had a lot of improvements to make, but he believes it has already worked “through two-thirds” of its issues and will get through the other third in the near future.
It’s worth pointing out that SBF’s opinion isn’t entirely neutral, as the CEO has an interest on the Solana network. His trading firm Alameda Research has participated in a $314 million funding round for Solana Labs in June 2021, while he is also working on decentralized exchange Serum, built on top of the network.
To the CEO, Solana has been testing the “limits of what’s possible” and that’s when things start to break. He added:
Any blockchain would have broken if it tried to do what Solana had done, and this was a way for it to figure out what needed to be refined and what needed to be improved.
SBF added he wished Solana’s past validator issues had been resolved earlier, but added that as the project pushes its boundaries and finds what breaks it’s on the right path, as that’s “what blockchains should be trying to do right now in order to grow.”
As CryptoGlobe reported Solana Spaces, which was established with the help of the Solana Foundation, announced “the opening of the world’s first permanent physical retail, educational, and community space dedicated to Web3” in New York City
Solana Mobile, a subsidiary of Solana Labs, has earlier this year introduced Saga, a “flagship Android mobile phone with unique functionality and features tightly integrated with the Solana blockchain.”
In June, SBF notably signed the Giving Pledge, an initiative, started in 2010 by Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Melinda Gates, that encourages some of the world’s richest individuals, couples, and families to publicly declare that they will dedicate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes “either during their lifetime or in their will.”
The Giving Pledge “came to life following a series of conversations with philanthropists about how they could set a new standard of generosity among the ultra-wealthy.”
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