Solana slides 10% on the week, underperforms Bitcoin and Ethereum

Solana has seen major declines that have led to an underperformance in comparison to other coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP. According to on-chain data, Sol has declined by almost 10% this week.

As per Coinglass, over the past 24 hours, market-wide liquidations exceeded $290 million, with highly leveraged and less liquid assets seeing sharper drawdowns. Solana derivatives contracts have accounted for $31.6 million worth of forced selling in the past day, compared to $68.5 million for Ethereum and $52.2 million for Bitcoin liquidations. 

As a result, Solana is trading at $213. 88, having dropped 2.46% in the last 24 hours. This is the most significant decline in comparison to the top ten coins by market cap, as all other coins have remained, with BNB experiencing the maximum decline of almost 1%.

The FUD of Solana investors 

Recent price changes in SOL show a tug-of-war between investors who want to take profits and investors who want to put money into the stock. SOL couldn’t break above the important Fibonacci level of $217.84. 

According to analysts, this failure and a MACD histogram reading of -0.077 show that momentum is weakening. There is a greater chance that the price will drop to the 20-day EMA of $206.51 or the 38.2% Fib at $200.97.

In addition, the daily active addresses score from Santiment shows that daily active addresses have been steadily going down since the middle of June and are now at 2.43 million. This indicates that demand for SOL’s blockchain usage is decreasing,  which is bad news for Solana’s price.

CryptoQuant data also shows that Solana is under a lot of selling pressure. On September 13, the Futures Taker CVD (Cumulative Volume Delta) for SOL went from being neutral to negative. Since then, the value has been slowly going down. This figure shows the difference between the total number of buy and sell orders over three months.

This can be seen in the whale’s behaviour. SOL worth $17.45M was moved to exchanges like Kraken and Binance on September 8. Also, on Sept 21, there were whale outflows of $836 million in SOL from exchanges. This trend has been linked to corrections in the past, like the 12% drop in July 2025.

Meanwhile, a $185K scam exploit on Solana wallets in early September, though minor in scale, has raised short-term concerns among retail investors.  

SOL’s bull catalysts

Institutional buyers have made an effort to offset some of SOL’s selling pressure. On Tuesday, Kazakhstan’s central bank launched a pilot project with a new stablecoin called Evo, pegged to the local fiat currency in collaboration with Solana and Mastercard.

As reported by Cryptopolitan earlier on Monday, Helius Medical Technologies, Inc. announced its first acquisition of SOL tokens as part of its digital asset treasury strategy. The company now holds more than 760,190 SOL at an average cost basis of $231. 

This brings its total SOL stake to approximately $167 million. It also revealed an excess of $335 million in cash reserves, which the company plans to allocate toward advancing its digital asset treasury strategy.

Growing partnerships and corporate settings are increasingly Solana-based treasuries, highlighting the rising adoption and wider acceptance. Furthermore, growing institutional interest further enhances its credibility and long-term adoption prospects.

The most significant near-term catalyst is the US SEC decision on Solana ETFs. Applications from Bitwise and 21Shares are due by October 16, 2025, while Franklin Templeton’s application has been pushed to November. Approval would replicate the inflows seen with Bitcoin and Ethereum  ETFs, potentially injecting billions into the asset.  

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