Month: February 2025

For Solana, these early months of 2025 are the best of times and the worst of times. FTX, the exchange that effectively brought it to its knees, its $450M hack signaling the nadir of the previous bear market, is long gone and its founder serving decades in jail. But the ghost of FTX lives on and in March it’s predicted to make a spectral reappearance, giving Solana traders the jitters and a horrible case of deja vu. The Solana community is fastening its seatbelts and bracing for turbulence as FTX, the bankrupt crypto exchange, prepares to unlock 11.2M SOL at the start of March. Priced at current rates, this $2 billion tranche, part of FTX’s post-collapse unwind, will hit the market via auction to repay creditors. The looming influx has sparked concerns about downward pressure on SOL’s price, with historical unlocks tied to FTX’s November 2022 fallout already rattling traders. The Calm Before the Storm For SOL holders, whose portfolios have already drawn down 30% in February, the looming unlock has reiterated the need to start thinking smarter. With pump.fun launches and trading bot volume both significantly down, early 2025 is proving a tricky period for Solana. While no one doubts that the network is going to break new ground this year, the ghost of FTX must first be banished once and for all. In practical terms, this means looking for strategies that can balance risk with the opportunity to generate sustainable yield, with liquid staking the obvious option. It’s a good time to be accumulating SOL, while it’s trading significantly below its ATH, and in xandSOL, holders might just have stumbled on the right strategy at the right time. Xandeum’s liquid staking solution, launched in late 2024, holds the promise of stability and opportunity in these choppy waters. xandSOL: Staking with Added Juice Xandeum debuted xandSOL in October as Solana’s first multi-validator liquid staking token. Most stalking protocols lock assets into a single validator, but xandSOL spreads staked SOL across multiple validators, enhancing decentralization and resilience. Built by Xandeum Labs, xandSOL leverages Solana’s proof-of-stake framework to deliver a high-yield staking option that’s looking more and more attractive as market uncertainty looms. For SOL holders looking to preserve and grow their capital, xandSOL makes a compelling proposition. During its Hyperdrive stage, active until the staking pool hits 30,000 SOL, early stakers earn 10x boosted XAND token rewards – XAND being the governance asset for the Xandeum DAO. The reward structure unfolds in four phases, transitioning from the high-yield kickoff to sustainable long-term incentives tied to staking duration and network participation. Holding XAND also grants voting power over Xandeum’s future development, including staking and storage initiatives. This blend of immediate gains and governance upside positions xandSOL as a proactive play for SOL holders looking to up their earnings without piling on risk. At a time when many Solana traders who were click-happy just weeks ago are rapidly derisking, it’s a move that makes a lot of sense. Of course there’s another benefit to participating in LST systems such as Xandeum: it lets you have your stake and eat it. The issuance of an LST representing the staked SOL provides an opportunity to earn additional rewards, such as through LP’ing or swapping LSTs for stables and reinvesting elsewhere. Liquid staking is never the endgame – it’s the starting point for everything that comes next onchain. Being Boring Beats Being Beaten In a market shadowed by FTX’s $2 billion SOL unlock, xandSOL’s appeal, at least at this point in time, is its risk-mitigation features. As a liquid staking token, it keeps assets accessible – users can trade or redeploy xandSOL without the lockups associated with direct staking – which is handy should it become necessary to make a rapid dash for the exits. Over and above this, Xandeum’s multi-validator design sidesteps the pitfalls of single-validator failures or exploits that might otherwise see stakers lose everything. It is, on a network known for its high risk environment, a very safe bet. Staking isn’t especially exciting compared to chasing the next 100x memecoin, but it’s much more sustainable. And at the end of the day, being boring beats being beaten – especially if boring delivers a comfy double-digit APY. This Isn’t Even Its Final Form One point we’ve yet to address is that liquid staking isn't even Xandeum’s primary objective. It’s an important part of its initial growth strategy, and it’s a DeFi vertical in which it’s arguably doing better than the incumbents, but the endgame for Xandeum is storage. With the launch of its mainnet, Xandeum will near its final form and the earning opportunities for stakers will further ramp up. That’s because xandSOL stakers will be able to tap into future Xandeum storage fees once its scalable storage layer launches, adding an additional revenue stream to buffer against broader market price swings. This trifecta of liquidity, diversification, and juiced yield make xandSOL a viable option as a strategic hedge. Xandeum’s scalable storage layer, incidentally, aims to solve Solana’s so-called blockchain storage trilemma by balancing scalability, random access, and smart contract compatibility. Integrated directly into Solana RPC nodes, this layer offloads data to a decentralized network of provider nodes (pNodes), enabling dapps to handle exabytes of data. Projects like Xandipedia, a decentralized Wikipedia envisioned in the Xandeum green paper, hint at the potential for data-rich web3 applications. The FTX unlock may prove temporarily bearish for Solana or it may prove bullish; it really depends on the broader market outlook and whether recipients are in the mood to send their windfall to the trenches or cash it straight into stables. Whatever their decision, xandSOL and Solana’s liquid staking sector at large have the potential to turn a spell of uncertainty into a chance for accumulation while taking risk off the table. For SOL holders, it’s a calculated step worth considering.