Solana Bear That SBF Dunked On With $3 Offer Gets the Last Laugh

https://decrypt.co/115237/solana-bear-sbf-dunked-on-last-laugh

Back in January 2021, when Solana was a relatively new blockchain network and Sam Bankman-Fried wasn’t quite the mythical crypto figure he’d soon become, the FTX founder publicly antagonized a trader who was bearish on Solana’s prospects.

“I’ll buy as much SOL [as] you have, right now, at $3,” Bankman-Fried tweeted at the pseudonymous CoinMamba, following a lengthy back-and-forth about bets on its future price. “Sell me all you want. Then go fuck off.”

The tweet became legendary in crypto. But now, following the collapse of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried's bankruptcy, the tables have turned.

“Karma is a bitch, isn’t it?” CoinMamba wrote on November 8, quote-tweeting SBF’s famed January 2021 tweet.

On November 11, when Bloomberg estimated SBF’s post-FTX-bankruptcy net worth at just $3, CoinMamba tweeted, “I'll buy everything you have, right now, at $3. Sell me all you want. Then go fuck off.”

Although some Crypto Twitter users have correctly pointed out that SOL is still worth well more than $3 today, others have praised CoinMamba for eventually getting the last laugh in the dispute—and for their reputation ultimately outlasting SBF’s in the crypto space.

What a difference a year makes.

After the initial exchange between SBF and CoinMamba, SOL went on to surge about 87x in price, reaching a peak of $260 at the apex of the crypto market bull run in November 2021. CoinMamba had been mocked by the Solana faithful for the SBF showdown and SOL’s propulsive rise thereafter, and the theatrics helped turn Bankman-Fried into what appeared to be one of crypto’s savviest investors.

That facade has since faded. FTX filed for bankruptcy earlier this month after a bank run resulted in a liquidity crisis, Bankman-Fried’s personal wealth is estimated to be about zero (down from $26 billion), and Solana is bleeding out faster than most other major cryptocurrencies.

SOL hit a low of $11.40 this afternoon, per data from CoinGecko—the lowest price seen for Solana’s coin since February 2021. It’s down almost 7% over the last 24 hours at a current price of about $11.70.

Over the last two weeks, SOL has shed 65% of its value, with its decline apparently exacerbated by close ties to FTX and SBF, as well as fears over Solana’s DeFi ecosystem including the SBF-founded decentralized exchange (DEX), Project Serum. Bitcoin is down 24% in that same span, by comparison, with Ethereum down 30%.

And while it may have seemed unthinkable a year ago, Solana is now down 96% from its all-time high price and not far from a single-digit value in U.S. dollars. Its continued decline would cause considerable pain to Solana builders and investors alike—but also further validate CoinMamba’s long-held bearish stance towards that ecosystem.

By the way: SBF told Decrypt in September 2021 that nobody (including CoinMamba) ever took him up on the $3 offer to buy up their Solana holdings. SBF’s proclamation seemed like a masterful bet for quite a while, but at this point, it’s hard to tell how much longer that’ll be true.