With 2022 proving to be a tough year for the global cryptocurrency industry, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko believes some of the pain is because of US Federal Reserve’s ongoing rate hikes. But he is optimistic about an eventual return to crypto market growth.
Yakovenko reckons there are 12 to 18 months more of this brutal Fed rates going up. He also said that there is an end to it. Highlighting the last bear market, the Solana Labs co-founder said a lot of teams that built and focused on product-market fit, tried to build amazing products. And a lot of it succeeded in a dramatic way.
However, the crypto slump has been vicious. Since the start of 2022, the SOL token has been down 81%. Its network suffered three significant periods of downtime this year, including the latest outage last week. But Solana has also recorded and continues momentum despite the macro decline and technical hitches. Moreover, its NFT market is still growing amid the lower price of SOL tokens and the declining value of some collectibles. Solana has seen new projects steadily being built on the network. Yakovenko said Solana startups are raising funds at still pretty high valuations despite the crypto winter.
Furthermore, Solana is gearing up for the annual Breakpoint conference in Lisbon, Portugal in early November. Solana debuted its conference in 2021. Yakovenko highlighted the upcoming event as an opportunity to take stock of everything in the Solana ecosystem over the last year.
