Solana is extremely ‘underrated’, says FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried

Solana (SOL/USD) is enormously underrated as a cryptocurrency project, even with its hiccups – including the latest exploit on one of the ecosystem apps. That’s what crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried sums of the Layer1 blockchain platform in comments shared with Fortune in an interview.

Speaking to the publication before the hack that’s been narrowed to an exploit on the wallet app Slope, the FTX CEO dubbed Solana the “most underrated” cryptocurrency token.

And referencing the reported Slope exploit and how that appeared to spiral into suggestions of a broader Solana weakness, Bankman-Fried said:

This is a good example of how something can be under-rated… a random dAPP gets compromised and it’s blamed on the underlying blockchain. (To be clear, no core or internal infra had any issues! It was just a single third-party application some people used…)”

Solana can only improve – SBF

Solana, a smart contract platform conceptualised in 2017, officially went live in March 2020 and has grown rapidly as one of the key Ethereum challengers. However, despite seeing a huge leap in terms of decentralised applications (dApps), NFTs and the overall Web3 ecosystem, one of its many flaws has been network outages. These have encouraged sceptics, especially around network security and reliability.

SBF, as Bankman-Fried is popularly known, acknowledges this as a bad period in the blockchain’s roadmap – which he also thinks may have been “deserved.” Nevertheless, he is bullish on Solana’s future, telling Fortune:

Technologically, it had a lot of shit to work through. But, I think it has already worked through two-thirds of that. I think it will get through the other third.”

The FTX chief also thinks it’s only beneficial for Solana if it continues to “test the limits” with further developments, noting that this is the best way to find out “what’s possible [and] what breaks.”

According to him, what Solana has achieved over the past few years could break any other blockchain. The setbacks are therefore only going to help the network improve its products and services.

The SOL token traded around $39.10 on Thursday morning, about 3% down over the week.

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