Alameda/FTX Unstakes $20.6M in SOL

Highlights

An address tied to Alameda Research and FTX's bankruptcy estate unstaked 202,710 SOL, worth about $20.62 million, on September 12.
The tokens moved into wallets linked to the estate's ongoing creditor-repayment process, per on-chain trackers.
The estate has repeated this pattern in tranches of roughly 190,000-200,000 SOL every few weeks since early 2026.
Alameda-linked wallets are estimated to still hold around 3.5 million SOL, worth roughly $300 million at current prices.

Another slice of what remains of Alameda Research's Solana treasury has moved out of staking and into the machinery of FTX's bankruptcy estate. On-chain trackers at Onchain Lens flagged an address linked to Alameda/FTX unstaking 202,710 SOL — worth approximately $20.62 million at current prices — with the tokens landing in wallets tied to the estate's staking and repayment infrastructure.

The move is unremarkable in isolation but fits a pattern that has repeated with some regularity since early 2026. FTX's bankruptcy estate has periodically redeemed SOL staking positions in tranches of roughly 190,000 to 200,000 tokens, cycling the proceeds toward the pool of assets used to fund creditor distributions. Prior unstaking events include roughly 198,425 SOL (about $16 million) in April 2026 and approximately 197,000 SOL (about $17 million) in mid-March, alongside earlier tranches of 192,000 and 196,611 SOL.

Solana has been one of the more actively managed corners of the FTX estate's remaining crypto holdings, thanks in part to the token's staking yield — Alameda's SOL was largely parked in validator staking contracts rather than sitting idle, meaning each redemption first requires unstaking before the tokens can be distributed or sold. That unstaking step is precisely what on-chain trackers pick up first, often days before the tokens actually change hands or reach an exchange. The pattern has drawn extra scrutiny given SOL's own price trajectory this year — the token has been trending toward its first “mini golden cross” since 2025, a backdrop that makes large holders' staking and unstaking moves more closely watched than usual.

Even after this transfer, Alameda-linked wallets are estimated to still hold around 3.5 million SOL — worth roughly $300 million at SOL's current price near $101 — meaning the estate has considerably more Solana left to work through. Over the course of the bankruptcy process, the estate has moved more than $1 billion worth of SOL value out of staking contracts and into liquid wallets, a scale that reflects just how large Alameda's Solana position was at the time of FTX's 2022 collapse. At its peak, the estate's SOL holdings were estimated at roughly 55.8 million tokens — nearly 10% of Solana's total supply at the time — making Alameda one of the largest single holders the network has ever had. Measured against that original stack, the roughly 3.5 million SOL still on hand represents a small fraction of what the estate once controlled, underscoring how far the multi-year unwind has already progressed even as individual transfers like Tuesday's continue to trickle out.

The estate's approach — small, repeated tranches rather than a single bulk liquidation — appears designed to limit market impact on SOL's price, spreading unstaking events across weeks and months rather than moving the full position at once. For a token like Solana, where large concentrated holders can move price meaningfully on thin order books, that gradual approach has likely spared SOL some of the downward pressure a faster wind-down might have caused.

Court-supervised repayment of FTX creditors has been running for more than two years, with billions of dollars in claims still working their way through distribution. Each incremental SOL movement — however routine it may look on its own — is another data point in that long-running process, and a reminder that Alameda's original Solana stack, once one of the largest single holdings of the token anywhere, is still being unwound piece by piece rather than resolved in one final transaction.

The distinction between unstaking and selling also matters for anyone reading these reports as a direct signal of sell pressure. Unstaking simply moves tokens from a locked, yield-bearing state into a liquid wallet — it says nothing on its own about whether or when those tokens hit an exchange order book. Historically, the estate has taken its time between the two steps, sometimes holding unstaked SOL in wallets for days or weeks before any onward movement is detected, which is part of why individual unstaking events like this one tend to draw attention from on-chain trackers without necessarily moving SOL's price in the moment. That's especially true at a time when Solana's on-chain transaction volume has been hitting records, giving the network far deeper liquidity to absorb large transfers than it had earlier in the bankruptcy process.