Nearly $1 billion of solana is set to be unstaked in 24 hours

Quick Take

  • Solana (SOL) worth nearly $1 billion will be available to be unlocked on Wednesday.
  • This represents 13% of the coin’s circulating supply.
  • This will be the second-largest token unlock of solana in terms of the number of coins being unstaked by validators.

Solana validators are scheduled to unlock 49.6 million SOL ($945 million) when the current epoch ends in less than 24 hours time. Representing 13% of the coin's supply, it's the second-largest volume of tokens to be unlocked in any Solana epoch and it is coming amid a time of considerable tumult in the crypto market.

An epoch refers to a number of slots (like blocks) on the chain and takes around two to three days. Data from Solana Compass shows that Epoch 370, the current Solana network epoch, is set to end at around 8.30 AM UTC on Nov. 10. Solana epochs refer to a time period, usually two days, when validators lock in their stake on the network. Validators can choose to unlock their stake at the end of each epoch.

The website's dashboard currently shows over 47 million sol tokens scheduled to be unlocked by validators. This number has increased from 18 million in the space of a few hours. The increase likely indicates that more validators are choosing to remove their staked tokens from the network.

In contrast, only 1.8 million sol ($36 million) is scheduled to be staked at the end of the current epoch.

RELATED INDICES

Solana (SOL) is down 36% today. Image: Coingecko.

The tokens scheduled for removal from the Solana stake represents 13% of the coin's total supply. Solana's token price is currently down 30% from $23 to $19 in the last 24-hour trading period. It remains to be seen what impact the token unlocks will have on the sol price action.

Solana’s current downward slide is part of a larger market selloff triggered by the FTX collapse. Bitcoin is currently down to its lowest price in two years with ether dropping 20% from $1,425 to $1,188 in the last 24 hours. The total crypto market capitalization has also slipped below the $1 trillion mark and is currently at $901 billion.

Update: This article's headline has been updated to say "unstaked" instead of "unlocked."


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About Author

Osato is a news reporter at The Block as part of the crypto ecosystems team that focuses on DAO governance, staking, blockchain layers, and DeFi. He was previously a news reporter at Cointelegraph. Based in Lagos, Nigeria, he enjoys crosswords, poker, and attempting to beat his Scrabble high score. Follow him on Twitter at @OsatoNomayo.