The estate belonging to the now-defunct crypto exchange FTX was just spotted staking over $144 million worth of Ethereum (ETH) rival Solana (SOL) as the firm’s bankruptcy process unfolds.
According to blockchain explorer SolanaFM, the address associated with FTX and its trading arm Alameda Research created a new stake of 5,546,217.04 SOL tokens.
Analysis from pseudonymous on-chain researcher Ashpool suggests FTX subsequently staked all of the tokens through Figment, a digital asset staking service built for institutions. According to Figment, Robinhood, Binance.US and Anchorage Digital also stake through the platform.
On Solana, stakers are currently earning roughly 7% APY (annual percentage yield), depending on the staking platform, and rewards are distributed every two or three days.
The FTX estate already holds approximately $1 billion worth of Solana, but much of it is locked up until 2028 as part of its vesting schedule agreement.
Solana co-creator Anatoly Yakovenko said last month that if he had the power, he would prefer if FTX’s SOL tokens were given directly to the failed exchange’s customers as part of a compensation plan.
“My wish would be to distribute the SOL to all the FTX customers directly. Probably the least worst outcome for everyone…
And getting it distributed to 5 million users would benefit the network over the long term. Win-win in my honest opinion…
Seems like it would have been a much faster process and with less legal overhead if everything was just evenly split across all the users and let each user do what they will.”
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