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Solana logo displayed on a phone screen and representation of cryptocurrencies are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on August 21, 2021.

Jakub Porzycki | NurPhoto | Getty Images

Solana was touted as the cryptocurrency that would challenge ether with an eco-friendlier approach, faster transaction speeds and more consistent costs.

Investors who made that bet had a miserable year. The token’s market cap collapsed from over $55 billion in January to barely above $3 billion at year-end.

Among Solana’s biggest problems in late 2022 was its close relationship to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who faces eight criminal fraud charges after his crypto exchange went bankrupt last month. The disgraced former crypto billionaire was one of Solana’s most public boosters, touting the advantages of the blockchain technology and investing over a half-billion dollars in Solana tokens.

“Sell me all you want,” Bankman-Fried told one skeptic in January 2021. “Then go f— off.”

Bankman-Fried’s companies held nearly $1.2 billion worth of the token and associated assets in June, according to documents reviewed by CoinDesk.

When FTX fell apart, investors bailed on Solana to the tune of about $8 billion. But in recent days, as the rest of the crypto world has been relatively quiet and prices stable, Solana has plummeted further.

Two of the biggest non-fungible token (NFT) projects built on Solana announced their migration off of Solana’s platform on Christmas Day. But the recent slides came after that news had already broken, making Solana’s recent slide something of a mystery.

In the last week, Solana has declined over 30%. Ether has held steady, shedding 1.7% in the same time period, while bitcoin has only dropped 1.2%. Among the 20 most-valuable cryptocurrencies tracked by CoinMarketCap, the next biggest loser over that stretch is Dogecoin, which has fallen 9%.

In just one hour of trading on Thursday, Solana slid 5.8%, bringing it to the lowest since early 2021, around the time that Bankman-Fried began to vocally offer his support for the project.

Solana has since come off the lows, with a market cap now crossing $3.5 billion. Its 24-hour trading volume is up over 200% on a relative basis.

During the crypto market’s heyday in 2021, Bankman-Fried was hardly alone in his bullishness.

Developers raved about Solana’s support for smart contracts, pieces of code that execute pre-programmed directives, as well as an innovative proof-of-history consensus mechanism.

Consensus mechanisms are how blockchain platforms assess the validity of an executed transaction, tracking who owns what and how well the system is working based on a consensus between multiple record-keeping computers called nodes.

Bitcoin uses a proof-of-work mechanism. Ethereum and rival Solana use proof-of-stake. Rather than relying on energy-intensive mining, proof-of-stake systems ask big users to offer up collateral, or stake, to become “validators.” Instead of solving for a cryptographic hash, as with bitcoin, proof-of-work validators verify transaction activity and maintain the blockchain’s “books,” in exchange for a proportional cut of transaction fees.

Solana’s supposed differentiating factor was augmenting proof-of-stake with proof-of-history — the ability to prove that a transaction happened at a particular moment.

Solana soared over the course of 2021, with a single token gaining 12,000% for the year and reaching $250 by November. Yet even before the collapse of FTX, Solana faced a series of public struggles, which challenged the protocol’s claim that it was a superior technology.

Much of Solana’s popularity was built around growing interest in NFTs. Serum, another exchange backed by Bankman-Fried, was built on Solana. When the calendar turned to 2022, Solana’s limitations started to become apparent.

Barely a month into the year, a network outage took Solana down for over 24 hours. Solana’s token fell from $141 to a low of a little over $94. In May, Solana experienced a seven-hour-long outage after NFT minting flooded validators and crashed the network.

A “record-breaking four million transactions [per second]” took out Solana and caused the price of its token to drop 7%, CoinTelegraph reported at the time, pushing it further into the red during the bruising onset of crypto winter.

Why Anatoly Yakovenko left traditional tech to co-found Solana

In June, another outage prompted a 12% drop. The hours of downtime came after validators stopped processing blocks, immobilizing Solana’s touted consensus mechanism and forcing a restart of the network.

The outages were concerning enough for a protocol that sought to upend ether’s dominance and assert itself as a stable, rapid platform. Solana was experiencing growing pains in public. The project was first built in 2020 and is a younger protocol than ether, which went live in 2015.

Technology challenges are to be expected. Unfortunately for Solana, something else was brewing in the Bahamas.

The SEC called it “brazen” fraud. Bankman-Fried’s use of customer money at FTX to fund everything from trading and lending at his hedge fund, Alameda Research, to his lavish lifestyle in the Caribbean roiled the crypto markets. Bankman-Fried was released on a $250 million bond last week while he awaits trial for fraud and other criminal charges in the Southern District of New York.

Solana since November 2022, the month that FTX failed and filed for bankruptcy protection.

Solana lost more than 70% in total value in the weeks following FTX’s November bankruptcy filing. Investors fled from anything associated with Bankman-Fried, with prices for FTT (FTX’s native token), Solana, and Serum plunging dramatically.

Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko told Bloomberg that rather than focusing on price action, the public should remain focused on “having people build something awesome that’s decentralized.”

Yakovenko did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

FTT has fared the worst, losing practically all its value. But Solana has seen a continued flight in recent days, reflecting ongoing concerns about FTX contagion and skepticism about the long-term viability of its own protocol.

Developer flight is the most pressing concern. Solana’s raison d’etre was to solve bitcoin and ether’s struggle “to scale beyond 15 transactions per second worldwide,” according to developer documentation. But active developers on the platform have dropped to 67 from an October 2021 high of 159, according to Token Terminal.

Multicoin Capital, a cryptocurrency investment firm, has maintained a bullish stance on Solana. Even after the implosion of FTX, Multicoin continued to strike an optimistic tone about the suddenly beleaguered blockchain.

“We recognized that SOL was likely to underperform in the near term given the affiliation with SBF
and FTX; however, since the crisis began we’ve decided to hold the position based on a variety of factors,” Multicoin wrote in a message to partners obtained by CNBC.

Multicoin, and other prominent crypto voices, maintain that the fallout from FTX underscores the need for a return to basics for the crypto industry: A transition away from juggernaut centralized exchanges in favor of decentralized finance (DeFi) and self-custody.

What is DeFi, and could it upend finance as we know it?

An uptick in daily activity at now peerless Binance might suggest that many crypto enthusiasts have yet to take that missive to heart.

It’s unsurprising that Yakovenko continues to believe in Solana. Yet even Vitalik Buterin, the man behind ethereum, voiced his support for Solana on Thursday. “Hard for me to tell from outside, but I hope the community gets its fair chance to thrive,” Buterin wrote on Twitter.

Chris Burniske, a partner at a Web3 venture capital firm Placeholder, said he was “still longing” Solana in a Dec. 29 Twitter thread.

Crypto saw mass adoption thanks to centralized platforms like FTX, Crypto.com, and Binance. FTX splashed millions of dollars on stadium deals and naming rights. Crypto.com invested heavily in prominent ad campaigns. Even Binance announced a sponsorship tie-in with the Grammys.

2023 may prove a seminal year for defi, as crypto-curious investors look for safer ways to garner returns and custody their assets. Bitcoin was born out of the 2008 financial crisis. Now the cryptocurrency industry faces a test of its own.

“Lehman was not the end of the banking industry. Enron was not the end of the energy industry.
And FTX won’t be the end of the crypto industry,” Multicoin told investors.

– CNBC’s Ari Levy and MacKenzie Sigalos contributed to this report.

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Alibaba to launch AI-powered glasses creating a Chinese rival to Meta

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Alibaba to launch AI-powered glasses creating a Chinese rival to Meta

Alibaba announced plans to release a pair of smart glasses powered by its AI models. The Quark AI Glasses are Alibaba’s first foray into the smart glasses product category.

Alibaba

Alibaba on Monday unveiled a pair of smart glasses powered by its artificial intelligence models, marking the Chinese firm’s first foray into the product category.

The e-commerce giant said the Quark AI Glasses will be launched in China by the end of 2025 with hardware powered by the firm’s Qwen large language model and its advanced AI assistant called Quark.

The Hangzhou, headquartered company is one of the leaders in China’s AI space, aggressively launching new models with capabilities that compete with Western counterparts like OpenAI.

Many tech companies see wearables, specifically glasses, as the next frontier in computing alongside the smartphone. Quark, which was updated this year, is currently available as an app in China. Alibaba is stepping into the hardware game as a way to distribute the app more widely.

The Quark AI Glasses are Alibaba’s answer to Meta’s smart glasses that were designed in collaboration with Ray-Ban. The Chinese tech giant will also now compete with Chinese consumer electronics player Xiaomi who this year released its own AI glasses.

Why Meta and Snap think AR glasses will be the future of computing

Alibaba said its glasses will support hands-free calling, music streaming, real-time language translation, and meeting transcription. The glasses also feature a built-in camera.

Alibaba owns a range of different services in China from mapping to an online travel agent. Its affiliate company Ant Group also runs the widely-used Alipay mobile service. Alibaba said users will be able to use a navigation service via the glasses, pay with Alipay and compare prices on Taobao, its China e-commerce platform.

The firm has yet to release other details such as the price and technical specifications.

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Samsung Electronics signs $16.5 billion chip-supply contract in boost to foundry business; shares rise

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Samsung Electronics signs .5 billion chip-supply contract in boost to foundry business; shares rise

A Samsung flag flies outside the company office in Seoul, South Korea on February 05, 2024.

Chung Sung-jun | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Samsung Electronics has entered into a $16.5 billion contract for supplying semiconductors to a major company, a regulatory filing by the South Korean company showed Monday.  

The memory chipmaker, which did not name the counterparty, mentioned in its filing that the effective start date of the contract was July 26, 2024 — receipt of orders — and its end date was Dec. 31, 2033.

Samsung declined to comment on details regarding the counterparty.

The company said that details of the deal, including the name of the counterparty, will not be disclosed until the end of 2033, citing a request from the second party “to protect trade secrets,” according to a Google translation of the filing in Korean.

“Since the main contents of the contract have been not been disclosed due to the need to maintain business confidentiality, investors are advised to invest carefully considering the possibility of changes or termination of the contract,” the company said. Its shares were up nearly 3% in early trading.

Local South Korean media outlets have said that American chip firm Qualcomm could potentially place an order for Samsung’s 2 nanometer chips.

While Qualcomm is a possibility, given its potential 2 nanometer project with Samsung, Tesla seems the more probable customer, Ray Wang, research director of semiconductors, supply chain and emerging technology at The Futurum Group, told CNBC

Samsung’s foundry service manufactures chips based on designs provided by other companies. It is the second largest provider of foundry services globally, behind Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

The company said in April that it was aiming for its foundry business to start mass production of its next-generation 2 nanometer and secure major orders for the advanced product. In semiconductor technology, smaller nanometer sizes signify more compact transistor designs, which lead to greater processing power and efficiency.

Samsung, which is set to deliver earnings on Thursday, expects its second-quarter profit to more than halve. An analyst previously told CNBC that the disappointing forecast was due to weak orders for its foundry business and as the company has struggled to capture AI demand for its memory business.

The company has fallen behind competitors SK Hynix and Micron in high-bandwidth memory chips — an advanced type of memory used in AI chipsets.

SK Hynix, the leader in HBM, has become the main supplier of these chips to American AI behemoth Nvidia. While Samsung has reportedly been working to get the latest version of its HBM chips certified by Nvidia, a report from a local outlet suggests these plans have been pushed back to at least September.

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Tesla investors are growing wary of Elon Musk’s futuristic promises

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Tesla investors are growing wary of Elon Musk's futuristic promises

Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images

At Tesla, vehicle sales are slumping, profits are thinning and revenue from regulatory credit sales are poised to dry up due to Republican-led policy changes.

In the past, CEO Elon Musk’s futuristic promises have convinced investors to look past top and bottom line numbers.

Not now.

Following another fairly dismal earnings report this week, Musk told analysts on the call that Tesla’s electric vehicles will soon become driverless, making money for owners while they sleep. He also said Tesla’s robotaxi service, which the company recently started testing in a limited capacity in Austin, Texas, will expand to other states, with a goal of being able to reach half the U.S. population by year-end, “assuming we have regulatory approvals.”

It didn’t matter.

Tesla shares plummeted 8% on Thursday as investors focused on the immediate challenges facing the company, including the rapid rise of lower-cost EV competitors, particularly in China, and a political backlash against Musk that harmed Tesla’s brand in the U.S. and Europe.

Automotive sales declined 16% year-over-year in the second quarter for the EV maker, with weak sales numbers continuing in Europe and California. Musk said there could be a “few rough quarters” ahead because of the EV credits expiring and President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The stock bounced back some on Friday, gaining 3.5%, but still ended the week down and has now fallen 22% this year, the worst performance among tech’s megacaps. The Nasdaq rose 1% for the week and is up more than 9% in 2025, closing at a record on Friday.

“Look, we love robotaxis. And robots,” wrote analysts at Canaccord Genuity, who recommend buying Tesla’s stock, in a note after the earnings report. “Over time, Tesla is well positioned to benefit from these future-forward opportunities.”

The analysts, however, said that they’re focused on the profit and loss statement, writing: “But we love growth too, in the here and now. We need the P&L dynamics to turn.”

Analysts at Jefferies described the earnings update as “a bit dull.” And Goldman Sachs said Tesla’s robotaxi effort is “still small” with limited technical data points.

Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Canaccord Genuity's Gianarikas: We may have seen the bottom for Tesla, positive acceleration to come

Musk, who has previously called himself “pathologically optimistic,” has been able to sway shareholders and send the stock soaring at times with promises of self-driving cars, humanoid robots and more affordable EVs.

But after a decade of missed self-imposed deadlines on autonomous driving, Wall Street is watching Tesla fall behind Alphabet’s Waymo in the U.S. and Baidu’s Apollo Go in China.

In Tesla’s shareholder deck, the company said the second quarter marked the start of its “transition from leading the electric vehicle and renewable energy industries to also becoming a leader in AI, robotics and related services.” The company didn’t offer any new guidance for growth or profits for the year ahead.

Regulatory hurdles

Business Insider reported on Friday that Tesla told staff its robotaxi service could launch in the San Francisco Bay Area as soon as this weekend.

But Tesla hasn’t applied for permits that would be required to run a driverless ridehailing service in California, CNBC confirmed. The company would first need authorizations from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

The CPUC told CNBC on Friday, that under existing permits, Tesla can only operate a human-driven chartered vehicle service, not carry passengers in robotaxis.

Waymo driverless vehicles wait at a traffic light in Santa Monica, California, on May 30, 2025.

Daniel Cole | Reuters

On the earnings call, Musk and other Tesla execs claimed the company was working on regulatory approvals to launch in Nevada, Arizona, Florida and other markets, in addition to San Francisco, but offered no details about what would be required.

Within Austin, the company said its robotaxi service had driven 7,000 miles, and that Tesla has been restricting its robotaxis’ to roads with a speed limit of 40 miles per hour. The Austin service involves a small fleet of about 10 to 20 Model Y vehicles equipped with the company’s latest self-driving systems.

The Tesla robotaxis rely on remote supervision by employees in a customer service center, and a human safety supervisor in the front passenger seat, ready to intervene if needed.

Compare that to what Alphabet said on its second-quarter earnings call the same day as Tesla’s results.

“The Waymo Driver has now autonomously driven over 100 million miles on public roads, and the team is testing across more than 10 cities this year, including New York and Philadelphia,” Alphabet said. Meanwhile, Waymo has become significant enough that Alphabet added a category to its Other Bets revenue description in its latest quarterly filing.

“Revenues from Other Bets are generated primarily from the sale of autonomous transportation services, healthcare-related services and internet services,” the filing said. The Other Bets segment remains relatively small, with revenue coming in at $373 million in the quarter. 

Regardless of investor skepticism, Musk is more bullish than ever.

On Friday, the world’s richest person posted on his social network X that he thinks Tesla will someday be worth $20 trillion. On the earnings call earlier in the week, he said that when it comes to AI for cars and robots, “Tesla is actually much better than Google by far” and “much better than anyone at real world AI.”

CORRECTION: The Waymo Driver has now autonomously driven over 100 million miles on public roads, according to Alphabet. A previous version misstated the number of miles.

WATCH: Tough quarter for Tesla

Ex-Tesla Board Member: Tough quarter for the EV-maker

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