Solana (SOL) is currently trading at $174.50, down 6.8% from Friday. This follows a Bloomberg report on Friday that revealed the bankruptcy administrators of FTX offloaded between $1.6 billion to $1.9 billion worth of locked SOL to firms including Galaxy Trading—an arm of Galaxy Digital Holdings—and Pantera Capital.
Also read: FTX and Alameda wallets deposit over $24 million in Ether to Coinbase, ETH price at risk of decline
In the report, Bloomberg stated that Galaxy Trading and Pantera Capital were part of the recipients of the FTX SOL sale, which saw each token selling for $64 - a whopping 67% discount - people who knew the matter revealed. The people who refused to reveal their identity confirmed earlier rumors that Galaxy Trading and Pantera were raising money to buy large Solana holdings.
One of the sources said Galaxy Digital raised about $620 million from investors to purchase the locked SOL tokens. Bloomberg also reported that Pantera had raised $250 million for the SOL purchase.
Read more: Solana meme-coin frenzy pushes network activity, TVL to two-year highs
This comes after earlier reports that the defunct exchange had already started selling 41 million locked SOL to investors. Neptune Digital is one of the firms to disclose its purchase of the discounted SOL tokens publicly. The purchased SOL tokens will be staked in addition to their yields and will be available for trading to investors in four years.
These sales come after the sentencing of former FTX boss Sam Bankman-Fried, who received a 25-year prison sentence on March 28 for his role in the exchange’s collapse.
In related news, Solana has been experiencing downtime since Thursday after several transactions failed on its network. This may be because of the increased activity meme coin trading has brought to its network.