Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried calls solana's 17-hour outage sad and frustrating - and says a stablecoin ban would hurt the industry

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Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried calls solana's 17-hour outage sad and frustrating - and says a stablecoin ban would hurt the industry
Sam Bankman-Fried co-founded the crypto exchange FTX in 2019. FTX
  • Sam Bankman-Fried said the solana outage was sad and frustrating, speaking in a Bloomberg interview.
  • The hot token suffered a 17-hour outage last week, which solana put down to "resource exhaustion."
  • FTX CEO Bankman-Fried also weighed in on stablecoins, saying an outright ban would hurt the industry.
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Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has said the solana token's 17-hour network outage was sad and frustrating in a Bloomberg interview - but also said it's the natural result of a network growing so quickly.

The 29-year-old founder and CEO of the FTX crypto exchange also said a clampdown on stablecoins by US regulators could be damaging to the crypto industry, which uses them widely to trade tokens.

Solana's sol- one of the hottest tokens, which has been rising rapidly - stumbled last week after the blockchain network upon which it runs suffered an outage for more than 17 hours. The network was not able to cope with a surge in activity, a problem solana called "resource exhaustion."

Bankman-Fried has been a big supporter of solana and said in a Bloomberg interview published Sunday: "It's always sad when these happen, it's always frustrating."

Yet the crypto entrepreneur said: "What this is really focused on is as you try to massively scale up a blockchain, eventually you test its current limits."

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He added that he thinks the problem has now been solved. Solana has said it will publish a "detailed post-mortem" on the problems in the coming weeks.

Read more: A 29-year-old self-made billionaire who achieved daily returns of 10% on million-dollar crypto trades breaks down the 2 types of trading opportunities available in the $2 trillion market today - and shares why he is 'a huge fanboy of Solana' amid the rise of DeFi

Solana was down 12.5% on Monday and stood around 19% lower for the week, according to CoinGecko. Fellow "altcoins" cardano, binance coin and XRP were also sharply lower, along with bitcoin and ether.

Bankman-Fried also weighed in on the topic of stablecoins, after Bloomberg reported that the US Treasury is weighing up launching a close examination of the tokens. It could lead to a clampdown.

The crypto exchange boss said it would be sad to see an outright ban and that the industry would become less efficient should a crackdown occur. He said stablecoins "add a lot of value to the system and they make it easier to interact with everything."

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A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency that is pegged to a fiat currency, most often the dollar, and backed with assets such as dollars and Treasuries.

Yet regulators are concerned that stablecoins' links to other markets via their backing assets could be problematic during times of volatility.

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