Solana Tanks 16% Amid Ruthless Crypto Market Crash

Solana (SOL)—now valued at $86—has crashed by more than 16% during the last 24 hours and roughly 40% over the previous week, during what has been a brutal price crash for the broader crypto market. 

SOL's current price is now a full 68.3% shy of its all-time high of $259, set on November 6, 2021. 

Elsewhere in the crypto market, Bitcoin ($33,809) and Ethereum ($2,266) have fallen by 21% and 32%, respectively during the last week. 

What's causing Solana's price crash? 

In what has already been an extremely bearish start to the year for cryptocurrency prices, the Solana blockchain has also suffered high levels of network congestion. 

Per the Solana website, the network suffered a "partial outage" on January 21, 2022, and January 22, 2022. 

According to a tweet from Solana Status, a Twitter account monitoring activity on the network, "Solana mainnet beta [was] experiencing high levels of network congestion. This [was] related to issues previously identified that engineers have been working to improve and resolve." 

"Huge thanks to all the folks that debugged these issues over the last 48 hours," Anatoly Yakovenko, one of the network's co-founders, tweeted 18 hours ago. 

This, of course, is not the first time Solana has suffered network troubles. In September, the network went down for a total of 17 hours, causing the price of SOL to tumble by 16%. 

That outage, per Yakovenko, was caused by bots "flooding the network." 

Solana's fall from grace

The network's recent network troubles follow an extremely positive end to 2021 for the Ethereum rival. 

Solana began 2021 at the modest price of $1.52 and surged by a stunning 11,150% by December 2021. 

"At the beginning of 2021, Solana was virtually unknown to the wider crypto/blockchain community—the prevailing opinion at that time was that it would be nearly impossible to break Ethereum's network effect ad developer moat," Matthew Graham, CEO of Sino Global Capital and SOL investor previously told Decrypt. 

Since then, the token's price has done nothing but tumble.