In May 2025 we saw SOL, the native token of Solana, drop 10% which brought the price down to $167 the first time in a week that we had seen such a low price. That price fall is a reflection of the fact that there is growing worry about a coming June to August release of 600 million SOL tokens into the market, also the decline of memecoins’ popularity and at the same time validators’ issues with increased MEV which is the maximum extractable value. Many fear the SOL token unlock will further affect prices.
The token unlock is for 2.4% of the circulating SOL supply and is related to tokens from the FTX/Alameda estate. Market players believe that this will increase selling pressure which we saw in March 2025 when the unlock of 11.2 million SOL tokens took place which in turn saw a 22% drop in price in the following weeks. This supply shock at the same time is playing out with a slow down in Solana based memecoins like TRUMP and FARTCOIN which had weekly drops of 20-24% and saw reduced speculative capital inflows and ecosystem liquidity, all related to a previous unlocking event.
Sol Price Is Under The Pressure Of MEV And Technology Issues
Along with issues of token unlocks, in the case of Solana we also see large scale MEV issues. We have validators which are reordering transactions to generate arbitrage for themselves at the retail trader’s expense which in turn is a very large issue daily. Also unlike Ethereum which has better solutions in place for this, in Solana very open environment encourages these types of exploits which in turn put additional down pressure on the price of SOL and complicates the token unlocking process.
SOL saw a resistance at $185 technical level which was supported by the 200 day exponential moving average. At that level we saw a chain of liquidations which in turn caused the price to drop. We had reports of $240 million in long position liquidations across exchanges which contributed to the sell off. Also despite very strong fundamental numbers which include $94.8 billion in monthly decentralised exchange (DEX) volume the market sentiment turned bearish under this pressure, hinting at further risks from the recent unlock.
Solana’s Ecosystem Is At A Crossroads With Token Unlocking
Despite fluctuation, Solana still is a leading blockchain with $11B in total value locked (TVL) and strong DEX action which has surpassed Ethereum’s monthly volumes. However growth is in a few protocols which in turn is creating system risk. The current token unlock and associated MEV and memecoin declines present an important test for Solana’s ecosystem health.
Analysts say that in the short term we may see SOL trade in a range between $158 support and $183 resistance, which will only be broken by a move above $210 to return to bearish trends. While in the long term we have BlackRock’s possible Solana ETF and Visa’s USDC pilots to look forward to which are very positive, at present Solana has to work through these near term issues and structural issues, including the latest SOL token unlock.
