coindesk.com
Crypto markets slid a nominal 0.8% in the past 24 hours as broader equity markets grappled with renewed coronavirus fears stemming from China.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index and Japan’s Nikkei 225 had shed 1% as of Asian afternoon hours on Thursday, while the Shanghai Composite fell 0.44%. Stocks fell amid weakened risk appetite on one of the final trading days of the year, as per Bloomberg.
However, the bearish sentiment did not seem to impact crypto majors, with bitcoin, ether and several other major tokens such as polkadot (DOT), binance coin (BNB), and xrp (XRP) seeing nominal change.
Solana (SOL), however, dropped as much as 10% in the past 24 hours, adding to a 20% slide over the past week. Selling pressure on the tokens came due to their close links to disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who currently faces charges of fraud and misappropriation of client funds.
Since 2020, Bankman-Fried has acted as a major proponent of the Solana ecosystem, launching the decentralized exchange Serum on the then-upstart network and investing heavily in ecosystem projects.
Apart from prices, the value locked on Solana-based applications has declined some 98% since November last year, DeFiLlama data shows. Steep falls in Solana’s metrics came after Terra’s implosion in May, a market-wide drop in July, and after Bankman-Fried's FTX problems first came to light early last month.
As such, alternative currencies outside the top 20 tokens by market capitalization saw slight changes as well, save for toncoin (TON) and luna classic (LUNC) which declined 5% and 7% over the past 24 hours.
Meanwhile, premarket futures for the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500 inched some 0.5% higher at writing time, pointing to possible gains after the U.S. market opens on Thursday.