Solana Week: 200ms Slots Arrive and Alpenglow Gets a Date

Last week was not great for Solana from a price action perspective, but it was a big one from a technical perspective. SOL closed Sunday 4th October at $121.58 and slid to around $105 by Monday 12th and Tuesday 13th October. Solana lost 8.43% over the 5th to 11th October week, and about 13% by Monday’s close. US spot ETFs saw their first outflow week after 14 straight weeks of inflows. SkyAI sold roughly half of its SOL. 200 millisecond slot times became a reality, and Anza set a date for the release of Alpenglow.

Monday 5th October: SOL starts down

SOL opened at $121.38 on Monday, 5th October and traded as high as $122.02, which was the high for the week. It closed at $120.79, down 0.64% for the day. The low for the day was $118.98. Net outflows for US spot SOL ETFs were $9.2M. Bitwise SOL ETF (BSOL) saw the most outflows at $7.1M with Fidelity SOL ETF (FSOL) losing $2.1M for the day.

Tuesday 6th October: flat

SOL traded sideways on Tuesday and closed at $120.72, down 0.06% for the day in a range of $118.96 to $121.96. Grayscale’s GSOL lost $3.7M for the day. The Solana Foundation announced @solana/web3.js v3, a rebuild on Kit with a new wallet adapter, and Circle’s USDC Bridge added Solana.

Wednesday 7th October: starts to slide

SOL opened at $120.65 on Wednesday and closed at $116.29, down 3.67% for the day. The low for the day was $115.30. Net outflows for BSOL were $4.8M for the day. VanEck VSOL paid its first cash distribution from staking, at $964,960. Triton One published an Alpenglow integrator guide for RPC, gRPC and indexing.

Thursday 8th October: big drop

SOL lost 5.79% to $109.56 for the day. It opened at $116.20, and the high for the day was $116.78. The low for the day was $105.87, which was the low for the week. ETFs lost $3.5M overall: BSOL lost $5.3M, and Morgan Stanley’s MSOL saw net inflows of $1.8M. Securitize launched 12 U.S. equities on Solana as 1:1-backed security entitlements.

Friday 9th October: 200ms slots go live

SOL ended the day at $109.14, a 0.38% loss from yesterday, staying above Thursday’s low in a range of $108.49 to $111.95. ETFs lost $3.8M (BSOL). The 200ms slot time went live on the mainnet at epoch 1053 (about 14:42 UTC). The weekly ETF total was -$25.0M (Farside) / -$24.8M (SoSoValue/The Block), with outflows on all five days.

Saturday 10th October: small bounce

SOL went up 0.84% to $110.06. The first full epoch at the 200ms target averaged 218.3ms and lasted 26.2 hours. The CEO of Anza, Brennan Watt, floated an idea to increase the block compute limit from 50M to 100M CUs, in five steps. This is a very early-stage proposal on GitHub, not a formal one yet.

Sunday 11th October: weekly close

SOL went up 1.15% to $111.32. For the 5 - 11 October week, it ended -8.43% from last Sunday’s closing price ($121.58), with a high of $122.02 (on Monday) and a low of $105.87 (on Thursday).

Monday 12th October: SkyAI sells

SOL went down 5.04% to $105.72 (from the open price of $111.32, to the high of $113.30 and the low of $105.42). SkyAI said it sold around 1 million SOL, which is roughly half of its treasury, to fund a planned $3.00 cash tender offer. SkyAI also rejected Forward Industries’ takeover offer. Negative ETF flows and SkyAI’s sale were reported as reasons for the dip. ETFs lost $0.7M (VSOL).

Tuesday 13th October: new low, Alpenglow date

SOL opened at $105.74, dipped to $102.00 (the lowest of the period), and came back up towards $107, with a high for the day of $108.97. ETFs lost $1.0M (BSOL). Anza announced Alpenglow going live on Solana’s mainnet-beta on Wednesday 21 Oct at about 14:50 UTC.

ETF flows (Farside)

Net flows for 5 to 9 October were -$25.0M (-9.2, -3.7, -4.8, -3.5, -3.8), the first negative week after 14 straight weeks of inflows. Adding 12 and 13 October (-$0.7M and -$1.0M) takes the total to -$26.7M. Bitwise’s BSOL accounted for about $21M of the week’s outflow.

The five largest SOL ETFs by size (US spot funds, ranked by assets)

Bitwise BSOL (about $1.2B): 11,024,159.91 SOL (9 Oct - 99% staked)

Fidelity FSOL (about $221.9M)

Grayscale GSOL (about $198.5M)

Morgan Stanley MSOL (about $54.9M)

VanEck VSOL (about $22.6M, 207,727 SOL (12 Oct)).

US spot SOL ETF assets were about $1.73B on 9 Oct, from a record high of $1.96B on 25 Sep. Cumulative net inflows are about $1.58B.

The five largest Solana treasury companies by SOL held

Forward Industries (FWDI): 8,501,298 SOL (30 Sep)

DeFi Development Corp (DFDV): about 2.59M SOL and equivalents (2,586,282, 12 Oct update, +22,070 in the week).

Upexi (UPXI): about 2.34M SOL (30 Jun year-end, reported 17 Sep)

Solana Company (HSDT): about 2.3M SOL (24 Sep)

Sharps Technology (STSS): about 2.0M SOL

SkyAI was the fourth largest at about 2M SOL before its sale. It says about half remains, so it is now out of the top 5.

Software and network updates

Alpenglow, mainnet 21 Oct (~14:50 UTC): replacement of TowerBFT with Votor, reduces finality from about 12.8 secs to about 150ms, and increases stake fault tolerance to 40%. Rotor is not yet scheduled.

Wallets and users need no action, programs need no action.

Validator requirements: an Agave 4.3.0-based client, at least 0.8 SOL above the rent-exempt minimum in the vote account for the Validator Admission Ticket. Firedancer and Frankendancer are not supported during migration.

Jito: will put all mainnet BAM nodes in Maintenance Mode before activation (BAM secures ~37% of stake). FrankenBAM and FireBAM operators should switch to an Agave build.

200ms slot time: Live since 9th Oct (epoch 1053).

Developer tools: @solana/web3.js v3 (6th Oct), Jupiter Swap API opt-in v1 transaction support (7th Oct).

What it means

The pullback was mostly forced selling (ETF outflows, SkyAI, long liquidations), not weakness in the network. The network is shipping! Faster slots now, and Alpenglow next week. ETF outflows were small (~$25M) against large assets ($1.73B). Treasuries kept buying: Forward Industries (~949K SOL in its fiscal Q4) and DFDV (~22K SOL in a week). SkyAI sold ~1M SOL to fund a tender offer requiring the SOL price to stay above $100.

Sources: Investing.com, CoinGecko, Farside, The Block, TokenPost, Solana Compass, Bitwise, VanEck, Forward Industries and DeFi Development press releases, Upexi and Solana Company releases, AMBCrypto, TradingKey.