Jack Kubinec

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">subscribe</a>.



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Crypto’s most lucrative tech marriage appears headed for a divorce.



Presently, the Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun migrates tokens with sufficient liquidity to trade on Raydium, a Solana-based automated market maker. The so-called graduation mechanism has proven very profitable for Raydium: Pump.fun pools <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics/ray">accounted for</a> 36% of the DEX’s $154 million in 2024 swap revenue.



That looks set to change, as an amm.pump.fun URL recently went online, and an onchain sleuth <a href="https://x.com/trenchdiver101/status/1893814646718730393">posted</a> evidence that pump.fun was testing liquidity pools for its own AMM. Raydium’s token is down some 40% since Sunday as investors respond to a looming dent in the protocol’s revenue.



AMMs are easy enough to spin up in the open-source world of crypto, and pump.fun’s aspirations to create its own had been spinning around the Solana rumor mill for some time. By graduating memecoins to its own AMM, pump.fun would vertically integrate the token launch process — and potentially push its already-gaudy revenue figures even higher.&nbsp;



Pump.fun had at least one other potential suitor for its AMM needs. Ellipsis Labs contacted the launchpad about implementing Plasma, an AMM designed to limit sandwich attacks, two sources with knowledge of the matter told Blockworks. Pump.fun declined the offer.&nbsp;



Regardless, the in-house AMM launch feels like a pretty obvious move. Pump.fun apparently <a href="https://www.theblock.co/post/322122/pump-fun-planning-to-launch-a-token-in-the-future-x-spaces">plans</a> to launch a token, and having its own fee-collecting AMM could provide value accrual to that token. That likely may depend on whether hardcore memecoin traders deem the pump.fun AMM liquid enough to be worth their time.



On X yesterday, anonymous Raydium core contributor Infra warned that pump.fun would be making a “strategic miscalculation” launching its own AMM since Raydium provided the “liquidity that helped Pump tokens thrive.” It’s unclear how good of a look the world would get into any future pump.fun AMM. The memecoin launchpad is <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/having-fun-pump-fun">closed-source</a>, so it would be a slight change in direction if it releases a fully open-source AMM.



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Pump.fun said to be ditching Raydium, launching own AMM

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">subscribe</a>.



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Solana is in love with memecoins, and it just got a Valentine’s Day gift.



The Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun released a mobile app this morning, representing the viral platform’s first major update since it <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/pumpdotfun-suspends-livestream-feature">disabled livestreams</a> in November. It’s further confirmation that apps users can play with on their phones are becoming table stakes for crypto projects, roughly a month after Donald Trump embraced a mobile memecoin app for his <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/trump-memecoins-rock-solana">token launch</a>.



Perhaps true to form for a platform initially dubbed 4chan for memecoins, pump.fun mobile is a bit rough around the edges. The app’s onboarding process is quite smooth — I entered my email, and pump created a crypto wallet for me, courtesy of Privy — but I found it hard to land transactions without manually adjusting my priority fee and slippage.&nbsp;



By the time I got my transaction through on a dog-themed Valentine’s Day memecoin, early buyers had already nuked the chart to go invest in fresher tokens, and I was left holding a big bag of worthless dogwifrose.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcoOFc4I3lceVrDG41Y0T4fCJhJAWlAxf2u3Xli9Ikxt38hE_nYymGIsLoYaodAxSYlQRFmG_y-QuIfr6fRYWc-SIEWObsTw7YxOOe2STHlYVn41eylE982i2sjH731j3Slcg9xHA?key=tuvzs0i8J4eYRURHd5aQRSro" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Transactions failing as I tried to buy a memecoin called dogwifrose</figcaption></figure>



The app’s early users seem to be facing some of the same struggles. Pump.fun has a 2.5 star rating on Apple’s App Store and a 2.1 star rating on the Google Play Store (as a note, many of these reviews came before today’s public launch).&nbsp;



“Is it my internet or [is] the pumpfun app kinda slow,” one user asked on X.&nbsp;



Pump.fun going mobile doesn’t seem to be driving much new usage on day one. The platform has seen 27,000 token launches today, according to a Dune dashboard, which is currently down from a range of 48,000-54,000 daily token launches earlier this week.&nbsp;



Still, a mobile app is a longer-term play, and longtime readers of Lightspeed know that we have learned better than to bet against pump.fun’s continued success. A little more than a year after first launching, the platform has <a href="https://dune.com/adam_tehc/pumpfun">generated</a> around $548 million in revenue.  My gut tells me that to take the mantle from Moonshot — the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/jupiter-majority-stake-moonshot">Trump-favored and Jupiter-owned</a> mobile memecoin app — pump.fun will have to fix the mobile transaction landing woes, even if that means giving users slightly worse prices. Retail users hoping to hit a 100x trade likely wouldn’t be too rankled by a few extra percentage points of slippage if that means their transactions are actually making it to the blockchain.



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Pump.fun releases mobile app

David Canellis

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">subscribe</a>.



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Crypto’s “<a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ethereum-tech-vs-money">wartime</a>” shtick isn’t an exaggeration.&nbsp;



It’s brutal out here even in a bull market — as recently-pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht has apparently just found out.



As there are very real conflicts happening around the world right now, gaming might be the better analogy.&nbsp;



There are two major types of online multiplayer experience: player vs. player (PvP) — Street Fighter, StarCraft, CounterStrike — and player vs. environment (PvE) — Helldivers 2, Diablo 4, World of WarCraft.



Ulbricht (or at least whoever is in control of his Solana donation wallet) recently suffered a quintessential PvE experience in crypto:



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Someone sent the wallet 50% supply of a pump.fun coin, ROSS, worth $15 million.</li>



<li>The wallet moved to sell $12 million ROSS on Raydium but mispriced it after creating the wrong type of liquidity pool.</li>



<li>An MEV bot detected the arbitrage opportunity and intercepted trades, dumping the tokens via the existing liquidity pool for $600,000 and crashing the price by 90%.</li>



<li>Ulbricht’s donation wallet received nothing in return.</li>
</ul>



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Ross Ulbricht’s Solana donation address received 50% of the supply of ROSS (Ross Ulbricht Fund) from the developer last week. Ross tried to add single-sided liquidity to sell the coins off passively, but accidentally created a pool with Raydium CPMM (Constant-Product Market… <a href="https://t.co/LxoZMfdebb">pic.twitter.com/LxoZMfdebb</a>&mdash; Arkham (@arkham) <a href="https://twitter.com/arkham/status/1884976067452018844?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 30, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



It’s been characterized as a $12 million loss, but that isn’t really true. The tokens were free, so any cash generated from selling would’ve been pure profit.&nbsp;



The wallet still held 10% of the supply as of Thursday evening, currently worth about over $1 million.



And ok, the MEV bot is controlled by a real person. But considering this particular fumble was mostly due to a misconfigured liquidity pool, I’d say this incident was pure PvE.



Meanwhile, in an adjacent corner of crypto, there’s someone going all out on the PvP experience.



Coinbase director Conor Grogan earlier this week pointed to a single address responsible for launching around 18,000 different tokens via pump.fun.



Every day, the person controlling that address appears to “wake up and create on average ~a dozen of tokens an hour until they go to bed, and then do it again, every day. They&#8217;ve done this for months,” Grogan wrote on X, who commented it seems the launches are manual and not automated.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">To put it in perspective, this one guy created more crypto tokens by himself than the entirety of all crypto tokens in existence from 2009 when BTC went live, until January 2018&mdash; Conor (@jconorgrogan) <a href="https://twitter.com/jconorgrogan/status/1884986641116275084?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 30, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



The implication is that whoever controls the address is dumping the coins on whoever might buy them, rugging each time — total PvP behavior.



So far, the address has executed nearly 6.8 million trades with a 55.6% win rate, so they’re probably profitable.&nbsp;



It could also be they’re farming a potential future pump.fun airdrop, in which case the profits would be effectively compounded if they’re eligible.&nbsp;



You might not like it, but this is what peak crypto performance looks like in 2025.



On the other hand, it’s hard to blame Ulbricht, if it really is him controlling the wallet. When was arrested there were just 36 <a href="https://coinmarketcap.com/historical/20131001/">cryptocurrencies</a> and only 16 had a market cap over six figures.&nbsp;



Something tells me he’ll catch up quickly.



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Ross Ulbricht donation wallet enjoys perfect PvE moment

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">subscribe</a>.



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Here at Lightspeed, we’re not fans of measuring protocol success by the popular metrics of active addresses or total value locked.&nbsp;



Instead, fees can be a helpful measure for demand for different apps and services. Blockchain addresses and TVL are gameable, but fees are real funds that change hands to do something onchain, at least in theory. So, here are the top 10 Solana protocols this year by fees, based on DeFiLlama <a href="https://defillama.com/fees/chains/Solana">data</a> as of Dec. 27.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">1. Raydium — $648 million</h2>



It was a banner year for the Solana decentralized exchange, which tapped into the memecoin fever that infected the crypto world for much of 2024. <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-raydium-volume-growth">Some accused</a> the app of being a venue where memecoins could create fake volume to appear more legitimate, but the numbers tell a clear story. Raydium brought in quite a bit in fees.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">2. Jito — $633 million</h2>



Jito’s <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/jito-bundler-breaks">Jito-Solana client</a> made MEV modifications and became a go-to for many validators running Solana’s software. Jito <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics/sol?dashboard=sol-financial">takes</a> 5% of the MEV “tips” that users pay to transact on Solana — which grew to be a huge amount this year as memecoins raised demand to pay MEV tips and land transactions on the blockchain.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">3. Pump.fun — $308 million</h2>



In less than a year of existence, the memecoin launchpad pump.fun brought in more than $300 million in fees. Read that sentence again. If we learned anything this year, it’s that crypto users really really <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-pump-dot-fun-memecoin">like to speculate on tokens</a>.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">4. Photon — $248 million&nbsp;</h2>



The Solana trading platform Photon also rode the memecoin wave to the tune of a quarter billion dollars. Photon offers memecoin feeds that users can peruse, but its real calling card is speed. Photon <a href="https://x.com/tradewithPhoton/status/1749461331223499228">claims</a> its data comes in 15 times faster than DEX Screener’s, and it offers a “quick buy” function to reduce friction when trading.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">5. bloXroute — $136 million</h2>



This one was initially a bit of a head-scratcher for me, as I hadn’t heard bloXroute mentioned much in the context of Solana. The infrastructure company offers a blockchain distribution network and trader APIs that are largely marketed as a way for traders to land Solana transactions more quickly.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">6. Trojan — $121 million</h2>



Trojan offers a popular Telegram bot that lets users create a Solana wallet and buy and sell crypto all within the messaging app.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">7. BONKbot — $118 million</h2>



The team behind the popular Solana memecoin released BONKbot as a Telegram trading bot that indicated the bear market memecoin’s creators <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/bonkbot-volumes-rise">might have some technical chops</a> too.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">8. Marinade — $88 million</h2>



Marinade offers the third-largest Solana liquid staking token behind offerings from Jito and Binance. This year, it <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-stake-auction-marketplace">debuted “Marinade v2”</a> which brought an auction mechanism to its stake pool in hopes of raising yields and wooing institutions. Some <a href="https://solanafloor.com/news/solana-validators-concerned-marinades-stake-auction-marketplace">accused</a> Marinade of enabling sandwich attackers in the process.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">9. BullX — $85 million</h2>



BullX is another memecoin trading platform. It markets itself as offering the “fastest indexing,” which is the process of making blockchain data readable — and something <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sol-demand-cripples-coinbase-indexers">Coinbase has struggled with</a> in recent weeks.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">10. Kamino — $81 million</h2>



Kamino is a DeFi protocol that ballooned to over $2 billion in TVL in 2024. The app is popular for its borrow-lend feature, causing some to liken it to the Aave of Solana. Notably, Kamino was the home of most of the liquidity incentives <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/kamino-seeing-benefits-from-liquidity-incentives-on-pyusd">doled out</a> to try driving adoption for PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin on Solana.



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Tracking Solana’s top protocols by fees

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">subscribe</a>.



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I’m putting my crystal ball abilities to the test this year.&nbsp;



As we turn the page on 2024, here are five Solana predictions for 2025:



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">1. Elon Musk’s X will debut a native Solana token</h2>



<ol class="wp-block-list"></ol>



It’s time. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/crypto-faithfuls-await-elon-musks-blockchain-plans-for-twitter">crypto fans speculated</a> that the dogecoin-loving billionaire would integrate crypto into the social media platform. Those predictions have so far been <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/elon-musk-crypto-dogecoin">quashed by Musk</a>, but with the incoming Trump administration expected to loosen US crypto regulations and bring crypto-friendly voices to the table, I think an X token is finally on the way.&nbsp;



“Crypto Twitter” is still a vibrant community, so there would be demand for such a token, and Musk’s other companies are <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/tesla-keeps-holding-184m-worth-of-digital-assets-on-its-balance-sheet">known to hold crypto</a> on their balance sheets. X Premium users could pay for their subscriptions using the X token, which Musk could cheaply on- and off-ramp with help from his stablecoin <a href="https://cryptoslate.com/elon-musks-spacex-uses-stablecoins-to-hedge-against-foreign-exchange-risks/">buddies</a> over at Bridge. Solana has the high throughput and low transaction fees to make this all feasible.&nbsp;



To sweeten the deal, Solana Blinks could make ecommerce happen natively on X without users leaving the app — a feature from which TikTok recently found <a href="https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/2024/12/03/is-tiktok-an-emerging-e-commerce-behemoth">success</a>. If X wants to be an everything app, why wouldn’t that moniker extend to currency too?



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">2. Solana’s stablecoin market cap will quadruple</h2>



<ol start="2" class="wp-block-list"></ol>



Solana’s onchain volume and demand woke up in a major way in 2024, but stablecoins stayed sleepy. The blockchain currently houses roughly $5 billion in stables, which ranks it fifth among blockchains behind Ethereum, Tron, BSC, and Arbitrum, according to DeFiLlama.&nbsp;



This is partly because Solana transactions often don’t require stablecoin pairs for actions like memecoin trading, but stables can play an important role in other use cases like DePIN or payments. With <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/solana-stablecoin-infra-provider">startups like Perena</a> and Lulo focused on growing the Solana stablecoin pie and issuers like <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/paypal-pyusd-stablecoin-live-on-solana">PayPal</a> and <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sky-deploys-stablecoin-on-solana">Sky launching</a> on the chain, Solana could be primed for major growth in 2024.



I think Solana’s stablecoin market cap will cross $20 billion by the end of the year, which equates to a 4x increase from its current levels. That would still leave Solana far behind Ethereum, which holds some $110 billion in stablecoins at the moment.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">3. Solana ETFs will be approved but will underperform ETH</h2>



<ol start="3" class="wp-block-list"></ol>



Ok, time for some cold water: I’m not bullish on solana ETFs.&nbsp;



I think solana funds are likely to be approved this year as a Paul Atkins-led SEC takes a less stringent stance on defining cryptoassets as securities, but I don’t think SOL ETFs are likely to find all that much demand.&nbsp;



Crypto ETFs’ raison d&#8217;etre is giving investors regulated access to crypto within things like brokerage accounts. With bitcoin, this makes sense. Its “digital gold” narrative is sticky, it is by far the largest crypto, and curious boomers could be interested in allocating 1% of their portfolios to see where things go. Ether ETFs have done okay partly due to the novelty of the products, but it’s been a <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/eoy-ether-etf-check-in">little harder to sell</a> investors on them.&nbsp;



Solana is more degen and less boomer than either BTC or ETH. A lot of SOL buyers seem to be more likely to onboard via Phantom or Coinbase than with their retirement accounts. By the time SOL ETFs get approved, BTC/ETH combo, Litecoin, HBAR, and possibly XRP will all also have ETFs, Bloomberg’s James Seyffart <a href="https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1869064627591496170">said</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Look, all I’m saying is there’s a reason BlackRock and Fidelity are yet to file for SOL ETFs. ETH ETFs have <a href="https://sosovalue.com/assets/etf/us-btc-spot?from=moved">seen</a> $35 billion in inflows in their first five months of trading. I expect SOL ETFs will have fewer inflows over their first five months.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">4. Pump.fun won’t collect the most fees among memecoin platforms</h2>



<ol start="4" class="wp-block-list"></ol>



One of the most interesting stories to watch in Solanaland this year has been the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-pump-dot-fun-memecoin">unprecedented rise</a> of memecoin launchpad pump.fun. Since launching in early 2024, pump has already crossed $330 million in revenue. Multiple times, <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/moonshot-vertical-integration-memecoins">purportedly-better</a> versions of pump.fun have come out, but no one has been able to snatch the crown in the memecoin sector.



But all good things must end, and I think pump.fun will be passed by another app this year. Speculative platforms tend to have a short shelf life in crypto — just ask the investors who <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/business/opensea-13-billion-valuation-venture-funding.html">valued</a> OpenSea at $13.3 billion in 2022.&nbsp;



I think memecoins will continue to be a very large contributor to Solana’s onchain volumes this year, but I don’t think the majority of that volume will play out on pump.fun. If I had to guess, I’d say the heir apparent will be something AI-related.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">5. Solana will not experience a major outage</h2>



<ol start="5" class="wp-block-list"></ol>



Solana has experienced a <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/solana-downtime-post-mortem">number of outages</a> in its four-year lifetime. This might be naive of me, but I don’t think it will add another outage to that ledger in 2025.&nbsp;



This is a bold take because Firedancer, a fully unique Solana client, is set to <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-solana-firedancer-testnet">take its training wheels off</a> and greatly increase Solana’s throughput this year. This will create a lot of unseen potential risk vectors that could bring the chain down.&nbsp;



But Solana’s frequency of outages has fallen over the past two years, presumably as the network’s developers learned from previous mistakes. The Solana Labs spin-off Anza recently <a href="https://www.anza.xyz/blog/strengthening-solana-the-invalidator-team">created</a> an invalidator team meant to stress test the network. Plus, Jump’s Firedancer client took years to build, and the rollout has taken place over multiple phases.&nbsp;



What’s another outage-less 12 months?



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<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/daily">Blockworks Daily</a>: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">Empire</a>: Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/onthemargin">Forward Guidance</a>: Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/research">0xResearch</a>: Get alpha directly in your inbox — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">Lightspeed</a>: All things Solana, in your inbox, every day from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thedrop">The Drop</a>: The newsletter for crypto collectors and traders, covering games, tokens, apps, memes and more.</li>
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Lightspeed’s 5 predictions for Solana in 2025

Donovan Choy

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/research">subscribe</a>.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfbS8A6ezthyyEW2S-jKhIn51HU9VqCggiJ-pP3zgfzCEKT8aX1nUL9bKSdjZPvnfVVBFUhV0GfLuBUVQa2Hh3mCBnFsoItWkU_ya4eF9J8AtW0L3MkE-fjVgx9ez0i-_57S4C9?key=LCc_ReB50QZAdLzrgPrUVBTN" alt=""/></figure>



The <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ai-agent-crypto-innovation">AI agent frenzy</a> was <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-ai-bot-goat-memecoin">kickstarted</a> by GOAT. GOAT is a Solana memecoin that spawned <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/0xresearch-newsletter-goatse-memecoin">from an experiment</a> by creator Andy Ayrey when he pitted two Claude AI models in an endless debate. GOAT still sits today at a comfortable $404 million market cap, but no longer <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ai-new-favorite-memecoin">dominates</a> the mindshare it once did.



First to copy GOAT’s success was the AI agent <a href="https://app.virtuals.io/virtuals/68">Luna</a> (LUNA). It’s a busty anime girl chatbot that streams 24/7 on social media — need I say more? Chat with her, tip her with her own LUNA token (why does anyone do that?), or be like A16z-backed <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/story-protocol-ritual-ai-provenance">Story Protocol</a>: <a href="https://x.com/StoryProtocol/status/1870152680045215759">Hire</a> Luna for social media marketing.



The Luna virtual companion was launched on <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/crypto-welcomes-ai-overlords">Virtuals Protocol</a>, an “AI Agent launchpad” on Base that is the most recognizable brand name in this meta right now.



Formerly the PathDAO gaming guild, Virtuals took pump.fun’s <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-pumpdotfun-record-highs">successful formula</a> and applied it to AI agents. Launch an agent token, hit a <a href="https://whitepaper.virtuals.io/developer-documents/agent-creation#id-2.-bonding-curve-graduation-and-liquidity-provision">target market cap</a> on a bonding curve, and pair the agent&#8217;s token in a liquidity pool on Uniswap.&nbsp;



What Virtuals did differently, however — and what has gotten investor-types bullish on its token — was tying its native VIRTUALS token to the cost of launching agents and running inferences, as well as pairing it with agent tokens in a Uniswap liquidity pair (rather than SOL).



Within the Virtuals ecosystem, Luna faces competition for speculative capital from other similarly looking chatbots like <a href="https://app.virtuals.io/virtuals/2059">Airene</a>, or more “utility-based” agents like <a href="https://x.com/aixbt_agent">aixbt</a>, an agent that scrapes troves of social media data to surface trading alpha (aixbt is incidentally bullish on everything).



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true"><a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%24AIXBT&amp;src=ctag&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">$AIXBT</a> is now a $1 billion market cap project based on mindshare, and it still wouldn&#39;t be overpriced.<a href="https://twitter.com/aixbt_agent?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@aixbt_agent</a> has undeniably become the most influential entity in all crypto right now. From <a href="https://twitter.com/cookiedotfun?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@cookiedotfun</a> to <a href="https://twitter.com/_kaitoai?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@_kaitoai</a>, the signs are everywhere—this is a movement, not just… <a href="https://t.co/G4qAorXSVb">https://t.co/G4qAorXSVb</a> <a href="https://t.co/rg075ZYPTn">pic.twitter.com/rg075ZYPTn</a>&mdash; Diamond Hands Dig 👾 💎 (@DiamondHandsDig) <a href="https://twitter.com/DiamondHandsDig/status/1873263131428073903?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 29, 2024</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



Just as agents face competition, so too do the picks-and-shovels of agents. Besides Virtuals, a myriad of AI agent launchpads already exist, such as vvaifu.fun, Creator.Bid, MyShell.ai, <a href="https://x.com/jyu_eth/status/1873462146249752915">Zentients</a> and more.



Then we have the AI agent “frameworks.” These are simply code libraries that make it easy for devs to customize their agents and integrate them into the virtual Wild West.



The leading agent framework is <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/stanford-lab-ai16z-partnership">ai16z’s “Eliza,”</a> but there’s also Virtual’s <a href="https://game-lite.virtuals.io/">G.A.M.E</a> (Generative Autonomous Multimodal Entities), the Python-based ZerePy, the Solana-focused RIG, and more. And of course, each one of these frameworks has its own token that speculators are furiously aping into.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdNpAQz9ubgupjqpLyvNJY1AvFjOM6MgtRgc8aGj0xFuB5ALIGShG1B1UxDbd98BKURyVjS63ByvZT-NRzuvW4FPCzh0T_4_Vx4jWiXIw49jV1WgMUKDDf_mg4GZKmvIm3-TTL6XQ?key=LCc_ReB50QZAdLzrgPrUVBTN" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Source: <a href="https://x.com/MessariCrypto/status/1872658008863592946">Messari</a></figcaption></figure>



Finally, we have the AI investment DAOs. The idea is simple: Deposit SOL/ETH and receive a DAO token that lets you share in the “hedge fund’s” upside.



Ai16z was the first investment DAO to launch on Solana, now with an AUM of $23.4 million. People apparently really trust the investor acumen of AI agents. Presently, its native AI16Z token is <a href="https://www.daos.fun/HeLp6NuQkmYB4pYWo2zYs22mESHXPQYzXbB8n4V98jwC">valued</a> at an astounding $1.4 billion market cap.



Daos.world and VaderAI are two upcoming AI investment platforms on Base that have gained steam in the past week. At least <a href="https://x.com/NickDGarcia/status/1873389504796483613">six funds</a> have already emerged on both platforms, with about a collective million in capital raised.



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Making sense of the AI agent meta

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">subscribe</a>.



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Our internet is quickly being filled with automated slop.



Blockchains are destined for the same treatment.



It’s actually been happening for years. Take active address counts: In an entirely humanly-operated onchain world, active addresses would reflect the number of real users on any particular network.



That’s obviously not the case, as Blockworks Research and the 0xResearch newsletter <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/0xresearch-newsletter-evaluating-blockchain-metrics">have already shown</a>.&nbsp;



Bots, spammers, airdrop farmers and other code-controlled entities commonly wield thousands — and even tens of thousands — of addresses. By the raw numbers, those players tend to drown out individual users.



The active addresses metric really only says one thing about a network: how cheap it is to use (which makes spamming a breeze).&nbsp;



Take that logic one step further and questions arise over how much of DEX volumes on chains like Solana and Base are the result of wash trading.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXd4WktoyexaZFX4UsOJCMJsHpO0DqLL_lhjyUKE09W7Iu3WgUhC-k0SP-OoCAm-bwgYFuwvs8h7ZpBJVLVHRJEYS1ZXKCtDz0E7-AjSDv4VpS01-tNNeBMpvb4G5-X6E_VSYwMxkQ?key=HMbX2nZD-YkMWlQzbf4VU4IX" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Pump.fun’s cumulative active address count has swelled by ~4.5 million since the start of November</figcaption></figure>



Still, while Web2 struggles with its own transition into an AI-generated wasteland (check the <a href="https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-christmas-music/">mangled</a> robot Christmas tunes that targeted unaware YouTube users this year), crypto is taking a more holistic approach.



Embrace the slop. Make your own and tokenize it. Trade it.



Pump.fun arguably was the first to perfect that roadmap. Virtuals Protocol wants to run it back by allowing users to create their own AI agents complete with their own tokens.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcS2UfMmnXur4hk1Do7dcBT5u_FmYk8LsA5o9dGyeWOgiceOPqyGZAwHs8hD2KpXW4EYpTM2BHYEFCIyshCGDXoo41cdZHgYwMfQtCxKOj44Fy_xZd1gXRZ36w4W7WvJy2CJDLKag?key=HMbX2nZD-YkMWlQzbf4VU4IX" alt=""/></figure>



Almost 300 AI agents are now on Virtual Protocol’s leaderboard. More than 12,600 token pairs have been <a href="https://dune.com/0xludic/virtuals-overview">created</a> overall.



For now, Virtuals is still small relative to Pump.fun. We’ve had almost a full year of the latter, with daily volumes going from under $1 million to as much as $5.6 billion in November.



Virtuals’ AI agent launchpad has only been live since October, and its volume topped out at $24.5 million at the end of November.



For what it’s worth, Virtuals’ cumulative daily active address count has skyrocketed from under 1,000 to 96,000 since the launchpad went live.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXe2-Lw0fGdjBbyegRa_pO8M4hMqGheUANvjGciAIrdg15Sdj86GPy1SWMIGOiWUvXXDk3lKYvuuSxeD1AGflx80TOkA2MhwaRvfYamF9PhtuFU8VNC9wItk5ezS94qA5C5Chj0E0Q?key=HMbX2nZD-YkMWlQzbf4VU4IX" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Virtuals’ volume is back on the rise alongside its native token VIRTUAL — up 125% in the past month</figcaption></figure>



Of course, active address counts say very little about adoption from real users. Who knows how many of those new active addresses interacting with Virtuals were carbon-based lifeforms.



Where crypto is headed, I’m not sure it even matters.



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Crypto is welcoming its new AI overlords

Jeff Albus

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">subscribe</a>.



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What better way to celebrate the season than by diving into the holly-jolly madness of holiday memecoins?&nbsp;



Pump.fun has been brimming with festive chaos as degens deck the chain with memes and mayhem, so we thought we’d take a moment to unwrap a few of the highlights.



First up, the Santas. Purple is the color of the moment, and Santa is <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/9SDLazy9LtGqqVtP42pgpkGhe3hzCXyfmhSqkXrUpump">apparently</a> taking it in stride. Santa Paws (yes, a cat) appears to be attempting to <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/Ad2REW1U4Y4e4uk6NbKo3HTMVVWxiakardqeCixW5G5a">claw</a> its way to a comeback, while Santa Is Real and Santa Isn’t Real <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/BctT5QCB17dDThQHSc4SHkibmTpFjqpFNY5PMXgppump">duke</a> it <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/BnmT8S7tf4ugPbHQPQwMciebA37PRsmRLUFBe8yJpump">out</a> for festive dominance. Santa wif Hat, meanwhile, is <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/qWxddh85CHDErES6z9crApan64quFd5rdFvLJrApump">rocking</a> an alarming variety of headgear, from classic red to…let’s just call it “experimental.” And what’s this? Could it be a brigade of naked Santa variants storming the chain, ranging from <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/5BZbV7Medi8M9Uh9jhgDWmyvuhPWVcHhbiUHgL4Jpump">cheeky</a> to full-on yuletide <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/8VZgcDXipKiw9abo7xzBhkCBDayid9fdnNBJhM8tpump">nightmare fuel</a>? Aw thanks, frens…you really shouldn’t have.



New holidays are making their debuts too. Ever heard of <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/6Ny7MWJHsfUZjGXpGp6oBE7GbZiL2omoNsmcpM1Spump">Rizzmas</a>? <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/GWedrsv8XtWrULEBUpPGnD1kLVK4sCLpP6j7DC28pump">Hawktuahnukkah</a>? <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/7nh8Jt94taUKjaPS7whDMMhptJv7JuVxwBwVdaLjpump">Chrismahanukwanzaka</a>? Me neither, and yet here we are. Degens have made their wish lists <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/EUEqFFL5RSAcFesDDTKnaTdc8xr1FjeDHDcEsPGNpump">loud</a> and <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/4e6dMZqR6g35LZt6JRmNxmMv23obCY79ugyAH8tbpump">clear</a> with aspirational coins like “All I Want for Xmas is (1000X)” and “AllIWANTforXmasIsAMillionBucks.” Ho ho hodl. Oh, and the snowmen…my goodness, the snowmen. They’ve outdone themselves. Frosty the Dough Man — because nothing says “the season of giving” like <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/Gw6ma4qYuVVoh5nJwRyNe6RReQifhPAyb6FaCVEHpump">hoarding</a> bags of cash — is joined by the very <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/4k9312MFLHfesDKJsvBuav5V6PhLpNQnKJk4T75Epump">swol</a> Abdominal Snowman (you read that right), an alarmingly handsome-Squidward-esque <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/DqtMxZrb1xPaQ3c4i91KmuMd1Te2Unz66HBTYJ6ipump">Mewing</a> Snowman, and the ever popular extra <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/BGTD6zabrU8JJLVc4UqcjYLkVgL8YyKRohGNrFjCsLdX">thicc</a> Gyatt Snowman, among <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/F7JH44xQfPs68aanfMmkMmiTiP1wdkpJ2rGwMcrspump">many</a>, <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/7GsA6qpzN4betGAxKbLy9rQQyA93wbuYMKJi7HNUpump">many</a> <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/4zWYsX4H8zxqYePxinujqdfefNV6eggQRt2Gxokkpump">others</a>.



It only gets weirder. There are memecoins featuring <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/4R5V41w48QBQPZzsiC1rTY8suwR5QAN6okF4cGSSpump">homicidal</a> Christmas trees, an unfortunate P. Diddy <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/6YhZH5n535JQtvr2gtaSdG7d7CaG5LE8uhZyvtZpump">made</a> of gingerbread, Biden and Trump (both dressed as Santa) <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/Kd1LyKjL1FzC2753DL2xAchZ5H4CtR3axeiDacdpump">kissing</a> under the mistletoe, and a truly <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/JCDPZiVgphpcPTPCSqPcpcYf74kXpNCt6RKsLpdSpump">inexplicable</a> Jesus made of shrimp (called Shresus, obviously).



And then there’s the Grinch. Solana devs can’t get enough of Dr. Seuss’ <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/BaoNW4ydc7QBwCzdRNSumftiWoqo8PX3q3cahbLJpump">iconic</a> green grouch. Grinch Mona Lisa? <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/Gi7qCJZdwe6UDqvvuBqKdReFknAGgdWZfzERsecepump">Check</a>. Super Saiyan Grinch? <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/A5tpN8MvyKDkTysw8gd8cdziGsxTqhMLfBGGE8Jgpump">Why not</a>? Grinch Hawktuah? <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/8GVnJfdtw1wZqpsyWe75wueqVErtts3j1GXo36T3pump">Sure</a>. If it’s a meme, it’s minting. Finally, if the cold weather is keeping you from touching grass, don’t worry — you can always <a href="https://pump.fun/coin/EyfuBVZPrXEvpvc3fC4CTQ4xTgWfbHH8dLijaz22pump">Touch Snow</a>.



From all of us at Lightspeed: Happy holidays, Solana fam!



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Holiday memecoin mayhem!

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">subscribe</a>.



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The team behind the memecoin launchpad pump.fun began restricting UK users this morning.



The move came days after the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority tagged pump.fun as unauthorized. Most firms need the regulator’s approval to do finance-related business in the country. It&#8217;s apparently the platform&#8217;s first public restriction, despite facing past criticism for its fast-and-loose approach to moderation.



Notably, pump.fun — which allows users to launch Solana-based tokens for around $2 — <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/pumpdotfun-suspends-livestream-feature">took down</a> its livestreaming feature last week after a number of violent and disturbing streams went viral.



The site’s UK block doesn’t represent a ban per se, Shardspace co-founder Avaunt <a href="https://t.me/c/2346547958/380">said</a> in the Lightspeed Telegram chat. Rather, pump.fun likely never properly registered and complied with the UK’s crypto guidelines, and the regulator is just now holding it accountable.



Pump.fun has some apparent links to the UK. When the then-nascent platform was exploited by former contractor Jarett Dunn in May, he was <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/pump-dot-fun-exploiter-arrest-london">arrested in London</a>. Dunn, a notorious online troll, did make a seemingly-serious <a href="https://x.com/jarettdunn/status/1792219540060864549">claim</a> that pump.fun is linked to a UK-based entity called Baton Corporation.&nbsp;



“Pump is not legally based in the UK,” the platform’s pseudonymous founder alon told me in a text, but they declined to elaborate further.



Zooming out for a second though, it’s somewhat surprising a pump.fun restriction took this long in the first place. The UK is no crypto libertarian paradise — for example, prediction market favorite Polymarket is already unavailable there. The UK’s financial regulator <a href="https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-finds-crypto-ownership-continues-rise-it-delivers-plans-regulate-crypto#:~:text=In%20the%20first%20year%20of,websites%20and%20over%2050%20apps.">claims</a> to have taken down “over 900 scam crypto websites and over 50 apps” since October 2023.



“Thought IP [address] restrictions were pretty common in this industry lol not quite sure why [everyone is] freaking out,” Tom, anonymous contributor to Raydium, told me in a text.



Pump.fun has been the most popular app on Solana — and at times in all of crypto — for much of this year. With that popularity will inevitably come scrutiny, especially when users are beheading chickens on livestream in hopes of making a token’s price go up. If Gary Gensler’s SEC tenure were to continue past this year, it’s hard to imagine the SEC wouldn’t have taken some sort of action against pump.fun, too.



How the fallout from pump.fun’s livestream snafu settles will be something to watch. Perhaps regulators will be able to do what criticism or backlash never could — slow down a startup that has already <a href="https://dune.com/adam_tehc/pumpfun">generated</a> $283 million in revenue in its first year of existence.



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Pump.fun restricts access for UK users

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">subscribe</a>.



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The Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun faced backlash over the weekend after a number of violent and unsavory livestreams on the platform started making the rounds on social media. By Monday afternoon, its livestream feature had been temporarily deactivated.&nbsp;



The offending streams ranged from token launchers threatening to commit violent acts unless a coin’s price goes up to racist or disgusting content meant to create viral shock value and juice the token’s price. This all happened as pump.fun booked staggering $14.3 million in revenue on Saturday, according to a pump.fun dashboard, nearly tripling its previous high.&nbsp;



Pump.fun is no stranger to edgy content. The site has drawn comparisons to the anonymous forum site 4chan for its often-unhinged content and lax approach to moderation. Before this current wave of disturbing livestreams, pump.fun had a large number of racially insensitive or pornographic tokens, none of which are subject to content moderation.



But as disturbing livestreams went viral on X, pump.fun’s anonymous founder alon wrote that the platform would work to protect users from seeing “repulsive/dangerous content.” In a separate thread, alon <a href="https://x.com/a1lon9/status/1860036153249787911">said</a> pump had taken down a stream of a user threatening to shoot their dog unless a token’s market capitalization increased, noting that the platform has now <a href="https://x.com/a1lon9/status/1860653405837963528">taken</a> down “hundreds of streams.”



A little after 2:00 p.m., pump.fun disabled livestreams on the platform&nbsp;altogether. In a blog post shortly after, pump.fun cited “unprecedented growth” as the key challenge to content moderation before adding that livestreams would be paused “for an indefinite time period.”



This feels like an inflection point for a platform that has separated itself as the most viral application on Solana, booking nearly $250 million in revenue since launching. Largely on the back of memecoin activity emanating from pump.fun, Solana has seen <a href="https://x.com/smyyguy/status/1861038014253666417">record</a> demand for its blockspace, which in turn has lined the pockets of the validators who run the blockchain’s software.



Leaders in the Solana world largely cast memecoins either as a stress test for the network or as an emerging, if currently unserious, financial use case for memes. Even among those who oppose crypto being used for what is essentially gambling, it’s frowned upon to tell users or developers what they should or shouldn’t do with blockchain technology.&nbsp;



Multiple crypto posters shrugged off the pump.fun criticism, pointing out that every large social tech platform has had its warts with content moderation.&nbsp;



But as Solana and crypto hopes for a shift to the mainstream, some are calling for a reckoning with memecoins’ downsides.



“Pump Fun is going to become a massive reputational stain on the crypto industry, on par with FTX,” Chainlink community liaison Zach Rynes wrote on X. Tech lawyer Preston Byrne also pointed out that the platform “does a lot very incorrectly from a social media law” perspective.



Up until now, pump.fun’s playbook has largely been to <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-pump-dot-fun-memecoin">make light of criticism</a> through trolling. With livestreams disabled, it appears this particular round of backlash hit home. It remains to be seen whether this will make any difference for traders in the so-called memecoin trenches.



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Pump.fun suspends livestream feature amid backlash

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Charlie Munger once said: “Show me the incentives and I&#8217;ll show you the outcome.”



So if you’re launching a memecoin on pump.fun, your incentives are: reach a token market cap of $100k, upon which $17k of liquidity is deposited into the Raydium DEX to kickstart a trading pair.&nbsp;



Then, here are the outcomes: nudity, <a href="https://x.com/AltcoinGordon/status/1860627600097366129">stray gun shootings</a>, threats of <a href="https://x.com/beausecurity/status/1860859118124138610">suicide</a>, threats to harm <a href="https://x.com/maver_y/status/1860927674408943717">pets</a>, <a href="https://x.com/JoeyMooose/status/1860891432560545913">school</a> children, <a href="https://x.com/danielgothits/status/1860879008000295267">family</a> members and alleged stunts involving the <a href="https://x.com/crypto_bitlord7/status/1860611480871481766">consumption</a> of faeces in a dog cage.



This list just about sums up the banal grasps for attention in the world of memecoins. Thanks to pump.fun’s in-built <a href="https://x.com/pumpdotfun/status/1826754623354650939">livestream feature</a>, that race for attention to the bottom is being laid bare on full display.



Attention is the currency of memecoins, so it’s a somewhat unsurprising outcome.&nbsp;



This state of affairs has sent a call for regulation or a ban on the memecoin launcher trending across Twitter. Already, there are fake images of a <a href="https://x.com/arbitrumalex/status/1860895686239105288">Polymarket</a> predicting the odds of a pump.fun ban, and the <a href="https://x.com/Sartoshi0x/status/1860878433112207755">SEC</a> seizing the pump.fun website.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXe84IwqlZeT_-S2fnB-lVkBMMVacXlaSsD9RGUB4riKqhXpvZHtegdv8Zqqw4eZ6ryfy7sqWRDaNWQvebMbB2ISSBj5IY3Y0MrCCNzQHKoyatxmnkXIYY_0dR6qDrzIaiGy8wqKLw?key=Qn2QTSsT43W7zLeZrpL_r554" alt=""/></figure>



Over the weekend, pump.fun founder Alon <a href="https://x.com/a1lon9/status/1860036153249787911">acknowledged</a> the problem and claimed that the platform’s team of moderators are “working around the clock” to quash the “illicit content.” But given the rate of <a href="https://dune.com/jhackworth/pumpfun">thousands</a> of memecoins being deployed daily, that’s going to be easier said than done.



Realistically speaking though, what could a regulator do?



US regulators, for example, could pressure internet service providers to block the pump.fun DNS domain, but a VPN could easily skirt the ban.&nbsp;



As for the tokens themselves, they live on the Solana blockchain. Regulators could technically pressure validators to block the transactions the same way the US Treasury applied <a href="https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0916">sanctions</a> on <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ny-fed-tornado-cash-report">Tornado Cash</a> in 2022, which takes us down the MEV supply chain rabbit hole once again.



There’s an ironic parallel here to the longstanding problem facing Big Tech’s social media platforms. If illegal content is posted on Facebook, who should be held legally liable — the user or Facebook?



Within the US, free speech proponents have argued that <a href="https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230">Section 230</a> of the 1934 Communications Act legally protects platforms’ illicit user-generated content.



That logic, consistently applied, may shield pump.fun from regulatory pressure, though it will certainly not shield it from the forces of market competition.



Pump.fun’s success has already been mimicked dozens of times. There is makenow.meme on Solana, sun.pump on Tron, and “<a href="https://warpcast.com/proxystudio.eth/0xa01e9beb">Clanker</a>,” a kind of AI-powered equivalent of pump.fun on Base, through which memecoins can be deployed into a Uniswap v3 pool for free with a Farcaster tweet.



Clanker was launched slightly more than two weeks ago, and already has collected about <a href="https://x.com/dwr/status/1860499493239586828?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1860499493239586828%7Ctwgr%5E7ad59c570ca653d32722d42e71d64f8a42c8918b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmembers.delphidigital.io%2Ffeed%2Fclanker-bases-pump-fun">$4 million</a> in fee revenues, according to Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero.



But whether it’s the regulatory hammer or market competition, pump.fun has plenty of incentives to quickly nip such a problem in the bud.



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Pump.fun looks to self-regulate gory content

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Trendy new apps don’t tend to last long in crypto — except, apparently, for pump.fun.



After a tame September, memecoins have returned to prominence in recent days, with the Solana-based launchpad seemingly leading the way.



The app, which seemed past its heyday just weeks ago, has recorded 12 straight days of at least $900,000 in revenue, according to a Dune <a href="https://dune.com/adam_tehc/pumpfun">dashboard</a>. The last time it pulled that off was *checks notes* never. MOODENG, a pump.fun token based on a viral baby hippo from a zoo in Thailand, seemingly kicked off the recent memecoin rally, in which traders seem to be skipping out on traditional memes to trade pump.fun coins.



Kaito AI, which uses AI to analyze online sentiment, <a href="https://x.com/_kaitoai/status/1843195759434531250">said</a> Monday that memecoin mindshare is now at a yearly high. 



A majority of the 10 largest memecoins are down on the week, according to CoinGecko, while pump.fun had its most consistent week and a half of revenue yet — indicating that traders are passing up the likes of dogecoin and pepe in favor of pump.fun’s cute animal pictures du jour.



Crypto’s online hype machine has already kicked in. Murad Mahmudov, a longtime crypto public figure who’s shifted from bitcoin maximalism to memecoins, went <a href="https://x.com/MustStopMurad/status/1843014105273389405">viral</a> for a podcast segment explaining why memecoins will “Outperform Everything” in 2025. Su Zhu, most famously the co-founder of collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, <a href="https://x.com/zhusu/status/1842551529997504665">weighed</a> in that “[i]nstitutional allocation to memecoins is likely to be the story of q4 2024.” Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin <a href="https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1843260976206082216">said</a> he sold his MOODENG allocation and donated the proceeds to support anti-airborne disease technology.



And — stop me if you’ve heard this before — a rapper who’s a few years past her last top hit released a pump.fun memecoin.&nbsp;



Not everyone was feeling quite so upbeat.&nbsp;



“If you are finally joining the influencers that missed out and are just now joining memes in Q4, congrats, you are exit liquidity for everyone who was early,” wrote based16z, a popular crypto poster.



For anyone who’s been following over the past six months, it feels like crypto is stuck in something of a pump.fun Groundhog Day. The meme market pumps, similar players play similar roles in the online drama, and some industry watchers — myself being one of them — fall into believing that the pump.fun top is finally in.



But enough time has passed for crypto to wise up. Bet against pump.fun, which has already booked over $120 million in revenue roughly 10 months after launching, at your own peril.



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Pump.fun tops $900K revenue for 12 straight days

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Memecoins are entering a so-called “supercycle phase” — a fitting choice of words when you need to scream into the ears of unsuspecting investors that something of epic proportions is coming.



That’s the thesis of a somewhat viral <a href="https://youtu.be/6nqzwdGxTGc">Token2049</a> talk by Murad Mahmudov titled “The Memecoin Supercycle,” to which a growing contingent of Crypto Twitter seems to be subscribing.



Embrace memecoins, argues Mahmudov, because memecoins give you hope, fun, identity, a sense of belonging, emotional connection, a way to reduce loneliness and a way to engage in collective artistic expression and an imagined reality.



Let’s back up for a second here.



Based on <a href="https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/meme-token">CoinGecko</a>, the entire memecoin market is $53 billion, about 2.3% of the entire $2.3 trillion crypto market cap. <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-pump-dot-fun-memecoin">Pump.fun launched</a> in January 2024, and about <a href="https://dune.com/hashed_official/pumpdotfun">2.3</a> million memecoins have been created since then.



How many of these memecoins have been “successful” for investors?



Not many, is the answer. Based on August data by <a href="https://x.com/Adam_Tehc/status/1824994679265349802">@Adam_Tehc</a>, 64.7% of pump.fun traders on Solana lose money or breakeven at best. Only 3% make more than a thousand dollar profit, and a rare few of 0.0028% wallets are hitting the $1 million moonshot on memecoins.



<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcQsSuXzpMETIbsynFe0NTEsuMEbiGiZdkCfchgztgK8rJM-Jtj_oNpqJMPhdGLVSuN0hfBuI553uhmlmV0ri6xMSmisy4EiBbwqztU1rn-bgNXqUyvO8LTke-stE1KC3w5yJbgB1-lQTe2ux8SdYv5NK_d?key=mfn73cL5xdusnrfBtAxlGg" alt="" style="width:551px;height:auto"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Source: <a href="https://x.com/crypto__kermit/status/1825109763966787894/photo/1">@crypto__kermit via Twitter</a></figcaption></figure>



Part of the argument for “why memecoins” is because the VC-backed altcoin alternatives are terrible.&nbsp;



There’s admittedly a grain of truth there. Most VC-backed tokens have seen a down-only chart from their CEX listings, they’re rid with <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/0xresearch-newsletter-eigen-tokens-transparency">fishy insider investor tokenomics</a> and many of their products haven’t panned out (about 18% of crypto companies that <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-solana-venture-capital">raised in 2022</a> have shut down, according to <a href="https://x.com/reganbozman/status/1841218868787978255">Lattice Fund</a>).



But the solution, I think, is to get these things right rather than dive headfirst into memecoins and throw the baby out with the bath water.



Recall that the history of the internet for instance, is littered with dead companies that collectively raised billions of dollars. In her <a href="https://www.amazon.sg/Bull-History-Boom-Bust-1982-2004/dp/0060564148">recollection</a> of the dot-com bubble, journalist Maggie Mahar estimated that by February 2002 — two years after the peak of the bubble — about 100 million investors lost ~$5 trillion in the stock market.&nbsp;



Today, the internet is indispensable. Suffice to say, we did not arrive there by doubling down on speculative use cases.



Memecoins do not pretend to try to create a socially innovative product, and that has been wrapped up in a marketing spin to be portrayed as a kind of investor advantage.



But failed crypto projects at the very least net socially important lessons and knowledge that is being taken and applied forward in the industry.&nbsp;



We know that algorithmic stablecoins are probably not a good idea, given the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/one-year-since-terra">spectacular collapse of Terra</a>.



We know from the meager improvements in costs from decentralized storage solutions like Filecoin (relative to centralized competitors like AWS) that data is not likely to be the breakout use case for DePIN.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXf5c3ldVjEXVZsXdevlFQ7S2h2m-XsBHthqJYVBqfYz9-bl5RwlD1FCdyoX0ltr_i6sB8LfkygdG4CoLjO9MinHk3IhHhjPhUWcXhWuYbix8xUPHv0Wn50g8gRWKh_x1homGvC9Tl5q31nj_yHE0xce_EfQ?key=mfn73cL5xdusnrfBtAxlGg" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Source: <a href="https://x.com/dunleavy89/status/1833167137633866157">MV Global</a></figcaption></figure>



We know that from the downfall of Axie Infinity, the next wave of blockchain-based games are not likely to be based on play-to-earn mechanics.



The point here, really, is that we don’t know the exact recipes for what will and won’t work until entrepreneurs (and, unfortunately, many hoaxsters along the way) give it a go. That is — after all — the whole point of a permissionless market: to allow an archipelago of experiments to flourish simultaneously.



If memecoins do indeed see a “supercycle,” it does beg the giant question of: So what? What has the blockchain industry proved to themselves, as well as outsiders and regulators, aside from the perennial need that people gamble?



Crypto wasn’t designed to make you rich. If that happens along the way, congratulations! But crypto was here to set you free.



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Who cares about a memecoin supercycle?

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Howdy!



As brat summer recedes from view, I wanted to open my reporter’s notebook and give you all a glimpse into some Solana-related threads I’m interested in following over the next few months.



Here, in no particular order, are six questions that I think are worth keeping an eye on:



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Six Solana questions defining the rest of 2024</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Has pump.fun really run out of road?</h3>



Solana’s <a href="https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/solana">price</a>, DeFi <a href="https://dune.com/obchakevich_research/sunpump-vs-pumpfun-compared">volumes</a> and validator <a href="https://dune.com/21co/solana-key-metrics">revenue</a> have all stumbled in the past couple weeks, and conventional wisdom seems to be casting blame on declining interest in memecoins. For better or worse, memecoins — particularly ones traded through the launchpad pump.fun — have been behind much of Solana’s boom in onchain volume over the past several months.&nbsp;



But, the thinking goes, the longshot odds of memecoins paying dividends, paired with a Justin Sun-backed competitor to pump.fun on the Tron blockchain, have left Solana’s memecoin ecosystem in a vulnerable state. It is undeniable that pump.fun’s revenue and number of token launches have fallen noticeably <a href="https://dune.com/adam_tehc/pumpfun">below</a> their May, June and July levels.&nbsp;



I have my doubts about this story, however. In its downtrodden state, pump.fun is still booking $300,000-$400,000 in daily revenue, and so-called Sun Pump is seeing a <a href="https://dune.com/obchakevich_research/sunpump-vs-pumpfun-compared">fraction</a> of its transaction volume. Pump.fun’s success as a business should not be undersold, even if the poor saps are only on track for $120 million in annual revenue (instead of $200 million). You could think about pump.fun’s relevance this way: When pump.fun was first coming out, it would sometimes be lumped into <a href="https://www.theblock.co/post/293128/fantasy-top-and-pump-fun-break-into-top-ten-crypto-protocols-by-fees-generated">headlines</a> alongside Fantasy.top. When’s the last time you heard anything about Fantasy.top?



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">How strongly-held are the SEC’s beliefs?</h3>



The suddenness of SOL ETF applications may only have been matched by the speed of their demise.&nbsp;



Things seemed full-steam ahead for potential <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/vaneck-files-for-solana-etf">spot Solana ETF issuers VanEck</a> and 21Shares until the Cboe exchange suddenly removed 19b-4 forms from its website. The removal of the 19b-4, which must be approved by the SEC for ETFs to trade, came after the SEC privately reiterated its belief that SOL is a security, The Block <a href="https://www.theblock.co/post/311937/sec-talks-etf-issuers-concerns-solana-security-source">reported</a>. If SOL was outright declared a security, it’s generally assumed that it would become difficult for US-based investors to actually buy the asset.&nbsp;



Granted, this isn’t a change of heart from the SEC, which is still publicly alleging in its Coinbase lawsuit <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sec-didnt-say-sol-isnt-a-security">that SOL is a security</a>. But as the US presidential election nears and the very-public FTX fiasco recedes from view, I’m curious to see whether political tides cause any shifts in the SEC’s stance.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Who will win the restaking race?</h3>



Ethereum restaking bloomed to become a several-billion dollar sector in the past year. With Solana’s continued growth in mindshare relative to Ethereum, it only made sense that we would see teams try to launch similar infrastructure on Solana.



Jito and Solayer appear to be the two serious contenders in becoming the EigenLayer of Solana. <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/solayer-solana-restaking-platform-live">Solayer got its platform to mainnet</a> first, while <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/jito-releases-code-for-solana-restaking-network">Jito has open-sourced its code</a> (I’ve also been told semi-recently that the project expects Jito Restaking to <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-jito-restaking-solana">launch by the end of the year</a>).



So far, Solayer only boasts a little more than 30,000 restakers delegating roughly $30 million worth in restaked assets. It also only has an initial four AVSs live to use the restaking service, so it’s still early innings.&nbsp;



I bet we’ll see more Solana restaking announcements soon, particularly as pertains to what I <a href="https://x.com/whosknave/status/1823785407928053890">call</a> the restaking arms race: These platforms need protocols to build on top of them. Which one can draw a more vaunted lineup?



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Will Firedancer go to mainnet?</h3>



It’s been years since Jump Crypto started working on the Firedancer Solana client — which is written in C, rather than Rust — and will supposedly be much more performant than the Agave and Jito-Solana clients that are currently on offer.&nbsp;



Having multiple clients <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sec-didnt-say-sol-isnt-a-security">will make Solana more decentralized</a> and eliminate risks that stem from having essentially one validator client at the moment (Jito-Solana is very similar to the Agave client). Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has also <a href="https://thedefiant.io/news/blockchains/anatoly-yakovenko-previews-solana-post-firedancer">said</a> he’ll stop saying Solana is in mainnet-beta once Firedancer ships.



The client is <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/solana-eyes-2025-firedancer-rollout-depin-activity-surges">reportedly</a> slated for a 2025 release, but the lead-up could be a big deal too: In a best-case scenario, this could look similar to the excitement the Ethereum community ginned up around its 2022 “Merge” to proof-of-stake.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">How will Solana’s new DAOs work?</h3>



Native token airdrop season appears to have wound down for the moment, leaving several projects sitting on large treasuries while figuring out how these tokens are to be used — which in many cases seems to be for governance.



Some projects, like Jito, are already forging ahead with Ethereum-like DAOs using “one token one vote” governance. Drift is toying with <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/metadao-is-making-markets-into-its-government">MetaDAO’s futarchy model</a> for market-based governance, but it also has a more traditional DAO.&nbsp;



In general, I’d be curious to see whether the Solana ecosystem will innovate past the status quo for Ethereum DAOs, which, as anyone who’s followed or participated in them will tell you, aren’t the most functional of organizations. Or, since DAOs are widely unpopular and present potential legal risks, will Solana projects eschew them altogether?



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">What’s Solana’s next narrative?</h3>



Blockchain ecosystems need convincing narratives to tell investors and developers what their purposes are. A lack of clear narratives can lead to grumpiness and internecine conflict, which is arguably something we’re seeing play out in the Ethereum world right now with its squabbles over <a href="https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1827583576751181961">DeFi</a> and foundation <a href="https://x.com/gphummer/status/1828265674315350277">spending</a>.



For the past several months, memecoins drove a rise in SOL’s price and onchain metrics. Professional investors grew more <a href="https://www.gsr.io/reports/is-solana-eft-next/">bullish</a> on the token, <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/lightspeed-newsletter-spot-solana-etf-filing">issuers filed for SOL ETFs</a> and Solana clawed itself out of the hole caused by FTX’s deep integration with the ecosystem.&nbsp;



But if memecoins and ETFs were to become dead in the water, it’s currently unclear what the next narrative pivot might be. In any event, there are a few testing grounds where these narratives might form: Colosseum’s Radar hackathon, Solana Labs’ second incubator cohort and most importantly, the Solana Breakpoint conference.



I asked Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz this question on a recent <a href="https://x.com/Lightspeedpodhq/status/1830967779970695349">episode</a> of the Lightspeed podcast, and he seemed unperturbed.&nbsp;



He distilled his thoughts later in an X post: “[S]olana&#8217;s narrative is simple: simple, fast, cheap place to build cool shit,” he <a href="https://x.com/0xMert_/status/1828993250545545445">wrote</a>.&nbsp;



— Jack Kubinec



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Zero In&nbsp;</h2>



The memecoin launchpad pump.fun recently passed $100 million in revenue, according to a Dune <a href="https://dune.com/adam_tehc/pumpfun">dashboard</a>.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdNuES7JbOyhmHSRgpefUYSMvm5P5iX9ciUSX1wOAJS5R9SBPrvkn2ZNuhILweCwDW5hGD5Ikv8vqIhpftrml4oLUaZkOzLYe98Dx8J019X0_qGk0GuJ2hSZ_MAzxoTHsbJwd8YBCrAofgttMBifgxyTsS7?key=ROEkojjD1oxtbr8CoYioIw" alt=""/></figure>



Pump.fun <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/having-fun-pump-fun">makes its money</a> on swap fees and Raydium seeding. Even with its revenue recently stalling a bit, pump.fun achieved this milestone remarkably quickly. As a reminder, the platform launched in January.&nbsp;



Alliance DAO’s Qiao Wang wrote on X that he asked AI chatbots if there has “ever been a startup in history that went from conception to $100m revenue in half a year.” No one could give him an answer, Wang said, adding: “imagine if more web2 founders heard this extraordinary story. they’d pivot from ai to crypto tmrw.”



— Jack Kubinec



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Pulse</h2>



Smart contracts&#8230;who needs &#8217;em? Not you, according to Helius’ Mert Mumtaz. On Sunday, he <a href="https://x.com/0xMert_/status/1830142290268156377">posted</a> a late-night thread on X explaining “Solana has a program-based model vs. an interface model — meaning you can leverage a ton of existing programs to write client code only.” In other words, you can handle NFTs, tokens, transactions, token-gating, minting, bots and more using just Javascript, without ever touching Rust or deploying a smart contract.



Pushing back, @ajki76 <a href="https://x.com/ajki76/status/1830285318802792694">challenged</a>, “So, what are they building onchain, considering you said &#8216;most cases don&#8217;t require building programs at all?’” Mert <a href="https://x.com/0xMert_/status/1830285451019898940">clarified</a>, “The smart contract already exists and is onchain — I’m saying you can use the existing ones without needing to create a new one.”



@kind3r.sol <a href="https://x.com/GDamigeana/status/1830189432411988293">confirmed</a> that this aligns with their experience: “I&#8217;ve been doing this for the past 2.5 years. Just deployed my first 3 lines of code Rust program a couple of weeks back out of necessity. But 99.99% of the interactions you can do by using existing (mostly open source) programs and compose their instructions in a single transaction.”



It&#8217;s a question of efficiency vs. creativity. Why burn time writing complex smart contracts when you can just as easily stand on the shoulders of existing onchain programs? Though as @DanMulligann rightly <a href="https://x.com/DanMulligann/status/1830400065799688468">asked</a>, “but does that encourage any sort of innovation or more of the same shit?”



— Jeffrey Albus



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">One Good DM</h2>



A message from Matty Taylor, co-founder of Colosseum:


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcIIw6OId3Xlrtbx1fKuWzzTJJfFpkJpVLDeyh4IBMJIwONaiRn8XzJ1u-hDy0S9W8bMhfyOVOFA_vZJnu8awMuh4auxfQKxGurupu_jt4rvKOPM9KTVhCdht3KsnKY0uplL415zMolchVQ-3U6m_mamN5H?key=ROEkojjD1oxtbr8CoYioIw" alt=""/></figure></div>


.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



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<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/daily">Blockworks Daily</a>: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">Empire</a>: Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/onthemargin">Forward Guidance</a>: Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin.</li>



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6 key Solana developments to keep an eye on

Today, enjoy the Lightspeed newsletter on Blockworks.co. Tomorrow, get the news delivered directly to your inbox. <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Subscribe to the Lightspeed newsletter</a>.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



Howdy!



A heartfelt thank you to all the Gen-Zers who showed up to defend my subject line choice on social media yesterday. A certain Blockworks co-founder asked me to explain what “skibidi gyatt ohio” is on a Zoom call yesterday, which was definitely not on my 2024 bingo card.



We are not serious people. Anyways:



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Solana dev platform blinks.gg spikes on pump.fun</h2>



Things were going well for blinks.gg co-founder Amir Banihashem. After spending years working on a Solana developer tool that struggled to gain traction, he appeared to be catching his break.&nbsp;



Dialect and the Solana Foundation had released an embedded Solana transaction flow for X called blinks, and Banihashem realized his visual programming platform — named Space Operator — could be used to create the blink widgets.&nbsp;



He uploaded a <a href="https://x.com/blinks_gg/status/1824558439407948214">video</a> of himself creating a Blink with the “no code” builder in under two minutes that drew over 120,000 views. Shortly thereafter, Banihashem listed a blinks.gg token on pump.fun — a move he characterized to me as making the project “community driven.” Banihashem said he owns 2.5% of the token, and blinks.gg has <a href="https://x.com/blinks_gg/status/1827232238179914220">said</a> it will share revenue from the platform with holders of its token and NFTs.



The unusual software go-to-market strategy drew the attention of a developer relations engineer at Solana client developer Anza named Rex St. John, who cast doubt on the project to his more than 100,000 X followers. Banihashem then did a livestream where he used blinks.gg to create a “Rex” NFT collection in an attempt to demonstrate the project’s authenticity.&nbsp;



Thousands tuned into the live stream, Banihashem said, but the NFT collection crashed after just 16 mints — doing little to prove the project wasn’t a scam.&nbsp;



“Remember this is version 0.2,” a confused-looking Banihashem said on the <a href="https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1jMKgBWYXbgxL">stream</a>. “It’s just a fucking baby.”



St. John and blinks.gg have since <a href="https://x.com/rexstjohn/status/1827382355532902513">settled</a> the misunderstanding, and blinks.gg’s pump.fun-based GTM strategy appears to be gathering steam. The token’s price has climbed over 100% in the past 24 hours with nearly $2 million in trading volume, according to DEX Screener. Its Telegram chat has added 500 users over the past couple of days, <a href="https://t.me/blinks_gg_group/129573">according</a> to a channel admin.



Is the community there for a novel software platform or only to make a quick buck? Time will tell.



Space Operator was meant to be a Solana equivalent for a visual design software popular with architects called Grasshopper (Banihashem has an architecture degree and previously founded an apartment rental startup in Boston). Despite a Solana Foundation grant and years of work for an idea hatched in 2021, Space Operator’s learning curve was just a bit too steep, and it never took off, Banihashem told me.



Now, with a pump.fun token and the simplicity of Blinks, blinks.gg already has six times the number of X followers as Space Operator.



In our interview, Banihashem didn’t seem to have a super firm idea where blinks.gg would go.&nbsp;



“We’re just going one step at a time,” he concluded when I asked him how the platform would make money.&nbsp;



He seemed more enamored with the kinds of new possibilities his platform could create. Banihashem likened Space Operator to lego blocks that let token or NFT creators build without the guidelines that launchpads require. He added that there is still some work to be done in making Solana’s global computer as easy to access as a personal computer. What if creators could sync files to Solana as easily as they can upload files to Google Drive, for instance?



Blinks.gg’s team of three developers now has a lot of hype for a platform that still has some warts. It will be interesting to watch whether the pump.fun go to market will prove to be prescient or ill-advised.



— Jack Kubinec



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Zero In</h2>



Just a few days after launch, Drift’s new Bet prediction market is having a huge volume day:&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="901" height="406" src="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-52.png" alt="" class="wp-image-91171" srcset="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-52.png?w=901 901w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-52.png?w=300 300w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-52.png?w=768 768w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-52.png?w=428 428w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-52.png?w=470 470w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-52.png?w=389 389w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-52.png?w=80 80w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 901px) 100vw, 901px" /></figure>



More than $20 million has been bet on Bet today, which bests Polymarket, according to a Dune <a href="https://dune.com/bigz/drift-bet">dashboard</a>. It’s unclear what exactly drove the volume spike, and it’s also worth noting that only 630 bets have been placed today — meaning the average bet has been over $30,000. Most of this betting volume appears to have gone to the US presidential election popular vote market.&nbsp;



That market is boosted for five times the typical amount of Drift loyalty points, called FUEL.&nbsp;



It’s a notable infusion of liquidity, but Polymarket has still seen ten times the number of bettors today, so I’m not quite ready to hand Bet the prediction market crown. Drift did not return a request for comment on where the betting volume came from by press time.



— Jack Kubinec



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Pulse</h2>



If you’re still waiting for <a href="https://x.com/3orovik/status/1828613764804988953">Solana Summer</a>, you might want to check your <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lk7xwlDkZ4M">calendar</a>. We’re less than a month away from autumn — starting September 22nd, to be exact — and it’s becoming increasingly clear that this much-hyped &#8220;season&#8221; has not been the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYdRWC6MCgM">sunshine-filled rally</a> many had hoped for.



As @expensive_io <a href="https://x.com/expensive_io/status/1828055076142981480">put it</a>, “Solana Summer 2024 transformed $SOL into a stablecoin.” Ouch.



To be fair though, crypto is a <a href="https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanets/immersive/strange-new-worlds/">weird planet</a>. It never seems to have autumns or springs. It’s either a scorching summer or a freezing winter. Even so, I think it might be time for us to start workshopping a new name for whenever line-go-up.



@TheCryptoGuy210 <a href="https://x.com/TheCryptoGuy210/status/1828615146693935262">suggests</a>, “More like Solana Fall.” I get what you&#8217;re saying, but no thank you, sire. &#8220;Fall&#8221; is a bad vibe (unless, of course, we&#8217;re planning on falling upwards?) @PuppaCoin <a href="https://x.com/PuppaCoin/status/1828643863096942633">suggested</a>, “SOLANA SEPTEMBER MAYBE?” Nice try, Puppa. But you know September is still part of Summer, right? And anyways, just shoot me now if the (alleged, but also definitely going to happen) bull run only lasts one single month.



Jupiter Exchange’s @SolJakey may have had the best idea. He <a href="https://x.com/SolJakey/status/1824154273862783265">posted</a>, “SOLANA SUMMER was a myth. It’s the SOLANA cycle.” Strong. Only foreseeable problem with that is the potential trademark overlap with the concatenated rave/gym monstrosity known as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoBBRXRTDQc">SoulCycle</a>. Don&#8217;t worry though, they&#8217;ll never catch us on those stationary bikes.



Maybe the real Solana Summer was the friends we made along the way. Or maybe… it’s still out there, hiding just beyond the horizon. CUE THEME SONG, ROLL CREDITS.



— Jeffrey Albus



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">One Good DM</h2>



A message from Diogo Costa, head of marketing at Renzo:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="562" height="854" src="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-53.png" alt="" class="wp-image-91172" srcset="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-53.png?w=562 562w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-53.png?w=197 197w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-53.png?w=169 169w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-53.png?w=172 172w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-53.png?w=144 144w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-53.png?w=53 53w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 562px) 100vw, 562px" /></figure>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/daily">Blockworks Daily</a>: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">Empire</a>: Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/onthemargin">Forward Guidance</a>: Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin.</li>



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Blinks.gg is using a pump.fun token to springboard a developer platform

Michael McSweeney

Today, enjoy the Lightspeed newsletter on Blockworks.co. Tomorrow, get the news delivered directly to your inbox.&nbsp;<a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Subscribe to the Lightspeed newsletter</a>.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



Howdy!



The &#8220;Grimace&#8221; token allegedly put out by McDonald&#8217;s turned out to be a scam, unfortunately.



If you’re having a tough week, just remember that somewhere out there is a wallet holding tens of thousands of DJT, RTR, and now GRIMACE tokens. Anyways:



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Magic Eden announces token, expansion beyond NFTs</h2>



Magic Eden’s newly-created foundation confirmed a forthcoming airdrop for its ME token this morning — but the whole thing felt like a marketing ploy for the new branded wallet.&nbsp;



There’s not yet public information on when the airdrop will happen, how it’s being distributed, or if and when Magic Eden will take a “snapshot” of users’ Diamonds holdings to divvy up the token. Magic Eden Foundation director Matt Szenics declined to comment on distribution and tokenomics when I reached out, saying more info would come at a “later time.”



What we do know is that the token can only be claimed in the Magic Eden wallet — and users are being not-so-subtly <a href="https://x.com/ElizabethOls0n/status/1826624705476133176">encouraged</a> to download it.&nbsp;



In a press release, the Magic Eden Foundation <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/me-foundation-announces-me-to-be-adopted-by-magic-eden-as-its-official-ecosystem-token-302228210.html">said</a> the token would “incentivize people to use the open source protocols adopted by ME Foundation” — seemingly a reference to the smart contracts undergirding Magic Eden, <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/nft-marketplace-user-rewards-program">which the foundation now owns</a>.



We’ve more or less known a Magic Eden token was coming since January, when the platform introduced a points program to track users’ loyalty. Turning points into token allocations has become the most popular way to carry out airdrops — and has spawned a cottage industry for “points farmers.”



NFT Price Floor founder Nicolas Lallement told me he thinks Magic Eden using its token generation event (TGE) as a way to boost wallet downloads is a “smart play.” He added that Magic Eden’s wallet and token releases are part of a broader “vertical integration” trend among large platforms — Uniswap, with its native token, wallet, and mobile app, is another example.



(I’m sad to say, I got personally suckered into Magic Eden’s wallet advertisement — I just added the wallet to my browser extensions this morning.)



In any event, there’s a more interesting development lurking beneath the TGE announcement: In multiple press interviews, Magic Eden said it has broader ambitions than just NFTs, and the new wallet will allow for token swaps.&nbsp;



Magic Eden CEO Jack Lu told me Magic Eden is still primarily an NFT platform, but the app needs to “skate where the puck is going” to onboard new crypto users.&nbsp;



To read between the lines a bit: NFTs just aren’t what they once were, and any retail-focused crypto app needs to reckon with the dominance of memecoins during this current market cycle.&nbsp;



Or you could look at it this way: Magic Eden is the largest NFT platform by trading volume, <a href="https://www.nftpulse.org/marketplaces">according</a> to NFT Pulse, and it’s going to start allowing users to trade tokens. It’s hard to imagine Pump.fun has plans to add NFT trading.&nbsp;



— Jack Kubinec



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Zero In</h2>



Crypto trivia of the day: Can you identify this price chart?



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1600" height="958" src="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-41.png" alt="" class="wp-image-90826" srcset="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-41.png?w=1600 1600w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-41.png?w=300 300w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-41.png?w=1024 1024w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-41.png?w=768 768w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-41.png?w=1536 1536w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-41.png?w=428 428w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-41.png?w=436 436w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-41.png?w=366 366w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-41.png?w=80 80w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px" /></figure>



This particular August bloodbath belongs to ORE, the proof-of-work currency that resumed mining on Solana earlier this month. From the start, some users complained that there wasn’t enough reason to hold onto mined ORE, and sure enough, miners appear to be dumping it.&nbsp;



This makes it less worthwhile to mine ORE since you have to spend a bit of SOL to land transactions, a fact that miners seem to be coming to grips with: Active miners have <a href="https://flipsidecrypto.xyz/zpencer/ore-mining-stats-Netn7P">dropped</a> by thousands over the past two weeks, according to a Flipside dashboard.



Still, the currency’s developer Hardhat Chad has spun off a company meant to develop use cases for ORE, including a game that we spoke about on the <a href="https://x.com/Lightspeedpodhq/status/1824839840677912843">Lightspeed podcast recently</a>. We’ll have to see whether use cases can reverse ORE’s fortunes.&nbsp;



— Jack Kubinec



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The Pulse</h2>



It’s the Elon Musk/Pump.fun crossover event you (probably) didn’t know you were looking for.



Fun fact, apparently: Turns out that Noland Arbaugh of Neuralink fame <a href="https://x.com/ModdedQuad/status/1826476644946891153/photo/1">might be</a> a Pump.fun fan —&nbsp;or, at least, he visited the site and kept his browser tab open.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Come and join me, we may learn something. Maybe someone can teach me how to keep less than 50 tabs open. <a href="https://twitter.com/petersonacademy?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@petersonacademy</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jordanbpeterson</a> <a href="https://t.co/NPAyBBy6xx">pic.twitter.com/NPAyBBy6xx</a>&mdash; Noland Arbaugh (@ModdedQuad) <a href="https://twitter.com/ModdedQuad/status/1826476644946891153?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 22, 2024</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



As reported by Wired earlier this year, Arbaugh is the first user of Neuralink, the Elon Musk-backed brain implant startup. Arbaugh suffered a serious spinal injury in 2016, leaving him paralyzed.



But the implant has allowed him to perform multiple functions via Neuralink’s computer interface. As he told the publication: “I’m constantly multitasking when I’m in sessions or when I’m playing around. I’ll throw on an audiobook or throw something on my TV and then play a game at the same time. It takes very little brain power. What I’m thinking the whole time is just where I want the cursor to go.”



I guess we can add Pump.fun to that list.



Lightspeed’s intrepid reporter Jack is out there <a href="https://x.com/whosknave/status/1826611997057925542">asking the real questions</a>, but for now we’re left with the tantalizing possibility that memecoin trading is the true use case for the human/machine interface.&nbsp;



As expected, Crypto Twitter dove on Arbaugh’s post. His replies are full of calls to buy their preferred sh*tcoin and suggestions that he launch his own token. Naturally, they wanted to know what he’s buying (if at all).



User wahndo perhaps summed up the mood best: “he’s just like me for real.”&nbsp;



— Michael McSweeney



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">One Good DM</h2>



A message from Brandon Tucker, core contributor at GolfN:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="566" height="766" src="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-42.png" alt="" class="wp-image-90827" srcset="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-42.png?w=566 566w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-42.png?w=222 222w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-42.png?w=190 190w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-42.png?w=193 193w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-42.png?w=162 162w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-42.png?w=59 59w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 566px) 100vw, 566px" /></figure>



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