Recently, the SOL community has been buzzing. A major whale suddenly staked 1.17 million SOL, which is worth about $148 million USD. The comment section is full of cheers—"Locking up tokens reduces selling pressure, so a rebound is imminent!" But wait, let's carefully analyze this logic.

Many people confuse "staking" with "buying," thinking that locking up tokens is equivalent to positive market sentiment. In reality, this is a classic case of being misled by data. To explain plainly: the essence of staking is "depositing tokens and locking them for a period," mainly to earn interest or stabilize the situation. But this is entirely different from "actual cash purchase."

Here's an analogy to make it clearer: If you deposit $1 million into a fixed deposit at a bank, that's staking— the money still belongs to you, just temporarily frozen, and you can withdraw it at maturity. But if you use that $1 million to buy property, that's a real purchase—actual capital sinking into an asset to support the market.

So, what does this 1.48 billion SOL staking by the whale mean? Simply put, they’ve locked their tokens, which on the surface reduces circulating supply. But the ownership of those 117 million SOL still remains with the whale. No new funds are entering the market to take over, and this doesn't change the current technical weakness of SOL.

Here's a more vivid analogy: a bookshelf that's about to collapse— the staff moves all the books into storage, making the shelf look clean on the surface, but the risk of collapse hasn't been addressed at all. Staking is exactly like that.