Solana price prediction: 1.56 million SOL must move after the validator incident

On Solana, staked coins have to move even though not a single one of them was stolen. According to data cited by the industry outlet Unchained, around 1.56 million SOL were delegated on October 28 to the validator run by the Solflare wallet, which has stopped generating rewards after a key incident at a staking service provider. Solflare has now extended the deadline for switching to a new validator to November 30, and the SOL price stood at $92.99 on Tuesday evening, November 3.

What is established: on October 26 and 27, unknown parties used operating keys from five Solana validators and, by the calculation of analytics firm Bitquery, withdrew assets worth around $135,000; users' delegated balances were left untouched. Our assessment follows further below. For the price, the incident is a footnote. For anyone staking SOL, it is a reminder that the choice of validator carries a risk of its own.

Where the price could head over a horizon of months is covered in our Solana price prediction. This piece is about the coming days and weeks: what exactly happened at the validators, why staking income can stop without a single coin being lost, which chart levels matter now and what investors in Germany need to consider for tax purposes when moving their delegation.

Solana validator incident: what happened on October 26 and 27

A validator is a computer that produces new blocks on the Solana blockchain, checks the blocks of others and supports consensus with its vote. For every vote it pays a small fee from an account of its own, the so-called vote account. Anyone running a validator manages several keys for this: one for the machine's identity, one for voting and one that can withdraw funds from the vote account.

These operating keys were precisely the target. According to an analysis by Bitquery dated October 29, reported by Coinpaper, the attacker used keys belonging to five validators, including those of Solflare, Blockdaemon and Astraeus. On October 27, four validators stopped voting at the same time. Within three minutes, assets worth around 1,188 SOL flowed into a single wallet; Bitquery puts the total at 1,343 SOL. The largest share was 637 JitoSOL, a liquid staking token that Bitquery values at around 833 SOL.

The money trail shows how professionally the outflow was organized. The attacker swapped JitoSOL into SOL, moved the assets to the Ethereum blockchain via the Bridgers and Chainflip services and on October 28 deposited around 57 ETH into the Tornado Cash mixer. According to Bitquery, the first deposits there came less than nine minutes after the first withdrawal across the bridge.

On the cause, Blockdaemon published a forensic update on October 30. As described by Coinpaper, the keys dated from 2020 to 2022 and sat as a local copy on a former employee's company device; the company said it found no sign of an intrusion into its current validator infrastructure. How the attacker obtained the copy remains unclear as things stand.

Delegated staking explained: why the staked SOL are not gone

Anyone staking SOL through a wallet does not hand the coins over to the validator. The SOL sit in a separate stake account that only the owner controls with their private key. Delegating simply means that the stake account points to a particular validator and gives it voting weight. In return, the owner receives a share of the rewards the validator earns in every epoch. On Solana, an epoch lasts about two days.

A validator's keys therefore cannot drain a stake account. Solflare put it this way on X on October 27: "Your SOL is safe," adding that user funds had not been touched. Bitquery likewise found no indication that money from customers' stake accounts flowed into the attacker's wallets. What the attacker could drain were the operators' own accounts, including the vote accounts that pay the fees for voting.

That is exactly where the damage lies for delegators. A validator with an empty vote account can no longer vote, and a validator that does not vote earns no rewards. The staked SOL remain fully intact; they simply earn nothing for as long as they are delegated to that validator. A summary of validator discussions by the operator Chainflow also states that the attacker was able to change the withdrawal authority of the affected validators, in which case a validator cannot simply keep running with new keys. We have not found this point confirmed by a primary source, but it would explain why Solflare is setting up an entirely new validator.

1.56 million SOL without income: Solflare extends the move to November 30

Solflare has set up a replacement validator and offers the move directly in its app. Initially, November 1 was the cut-off date for reimbursing missed rewards. According to a report by Parameter on November 3, the wallet has since extended the deadline: "You now have until November 30 to move your stake to the new Solflare validator." Anyone who moves by then will have the rewards for the period from October 26 to November 1 reimbursed.

At the same time, Solflare warns of scammers who could exploit the move: the migration runs exclusively through the app, and the company will never send anyone a direct message or a link. That is the single most important practical sentence of the whole incident. After every known security incident, fake reimbursement pages appear that ask for the seed phrase or request a signature for a supposed refund.

Co-founder Vidor also declared a so-called bunker mode on X on November 1: access to infrastructure and code is locked down, every change requires multiple approvals, and nothing new gets in. "It slows us down and I’m fine with that," he wrote. For customers, this means that new features at Solflare are unlikely in the coming weeks.

SOL price at $93: what has changed since November 2

In our Solana analysis of November 2, the price stood at $92.78, and the 200-day line at $88.86 was the level expected to decide the next direction. SOL has not reached that line since. The low came on Monday at $90.71 on Kraken, just under two dollars above it, and on Tuesday evening SOL traded slightly higher again at $92.99. In euro terms, that was €83.13 at the same time.

What is new is the security picture. On Monday, Binance's freeze on Solana withdrawals after the October 29 hack was still weighing on the market; the exchange has since gradually reopened withdrawals over the Solana network. The price slide of October 29, when SOL fell from $102.33 to $95.40 in a single day, coincides with that hack and not with the validator incident, which began two days earlier.

We described the link with fund flows this morning in our piece on the outflows from Solana ETFs. Little had changed by the evening: the pressure comes from capital flows, not from the technology.

Solana chart: 200-day line at $88.86, 50-day line at $108.79

The levels are derived from daily closing prices on Kraken. The 20-day moving average stands at $101.33, the 50-day at $108.79 and the 100-day at $98.36. A moving average is the mean of closing prices over a fixed period; it smooths out daily swings and shows whether a trend is holding. SOL is therefore below three of the four lines, with only the long 200-day line at $88.86 still beneath it.

On the upside, the zone around $98 to $100 is the first hurdle. The 100-day line runs there, and the price sat there until October 28 before dropping almost seven percent in one day. Only a daily close above $100 would call the downward move since late October into question. The 20-day line at $101.33 sits just above and reinforces this hurdle.

On the downside, the 200-day line remains the most important level. If SOL breaks below it on a daily closing basis, there is little support until the $84 to $88 zone: SOL closed there between August 20 and 22, before the price turned higher in September. Below that lies the area around $70 to $75, where the price moved for almost six weeks from early July to mid-August; the low came on August 1 at $70.54.

Security wave since the Binance hack: why the validator incident barely moves the price

The incident falls in a week in which the industry is processing several attacks at once: the Binance hack of October 29, a reported data leak at Keystone and the withdrawal halt at Mercado Bitcoin. Measured against these, the damage at the Solana validators is small. Around $135,000, set against a recent daily trading volume of roughly $2.5 billion that CoinGecko shows for SOL, is not supply that noticeably weighs on the market.

More important is what the incident was not. The protocol itself worked: the blockchain kept running, no block was lost and no stake account was drained. What was hit was the operational side of individual validators, that is, the question of how carefully a provider handles old keys. For the price, such a mishap usually counts for less than a day of outflows from the spot ETFs.

Staking rewards and the holding period: the tax side for investors in Germany

In Germany, staking rewards count as other income under Section 22 No. 3 of the Income Tax Act (EStG). They are valued in euros on the day they are received, and they remain tax-free as long as all income of this kind stays below the exemption limit of €256 for the year in total. If the limit is exceeded by even one euro, the entire amount becomes taxable. The Federal Ministry of Finance guidance (BMF letter) does not explicitly address how a later reimbursement of missed rewards by Solflare should be classified; anyone receiving such a payment should record it separately with its date and euro value.

Moving the delegation itself is not a sale. The SOL stay in the same stake account or move to a new stake account belonging to the same owner, and nothing is exchanged. The one-year holding period for the staked coins therefore keeps running, and according to the BMF letter of March 6, 2025, staking does not extend it to ten years either. Whether the holding period itself will survive is politically open; we track the state of the debate on our page on the crypto holding period reform.

A gap in income, incidentally, carries no tax disadvantage: anyone who received no rewards for a week has nothing to tax for that week. What matters is that records remain complete, so that income after the move is cleanly assigned to the correct day.

Our assessment: an operational risk, not a protocol flaw

Our assessment: the validator incident changes little about the price direction over the next few weeks. The evidence is clear: around $135,000 in damage, no stolen user balances and no interruption of the blockchain. What remains decisive for SOL is the distance to the 200-day line at $88.86 and whether the spot ETFs report inflows again. As long as the price closes below the $98 to $100 zone, a further test of the 200-day line is more likely than a quick recovery.

Against this view: the long line itself is still rising, and security news has tended to ease in recent days since Binance began reopening withdrawals. A close above $100 would quickly turn the picture around. The incident also exposes a weakness that goes beyond Solflare: many delegators choose their validator once and never look again. None of this is a recommendation to buy or sell. Cryptocurrencies can fall all the way to a total loss.

Solana staking after the validator incident: there is time until November 30

1. Look up your validator: Open your wallet and check which validator your SOL are delegated to. If you use Solflare, move only within the updated app and ignore any message containing a link. If you want to switch provider entirely, you will find a selection among the staking platforms compared.
2. Keep your keys safe: The incident involved old keys on a forgotten device. The same principle applies to your own SOL: seed phrase offline, larger amounts on a device used only for storage. Which devices support Solana is shown in our hardware wallet comparison.
3. Set price alerts: Create alerts at $88.86 for the 200-day line and at $100 for the upper hurdle. Buy SOL only from a provider with MiCA authorization; the regulated crypto exchanges offer a selection.

(As of November 3, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)