BUILD ON SOLANA

“Jito is the largest liquid staking protocol in Solana and we're kind of view ourselves as the economic growth engine for Solana. So we have a liquid staking protocol, and then we also build a validator client, which basically tries to optimize the transaction ordering on the network.”

“Figur's been at, sort of the RWA, intersection of of TradFi and credit origination since 2018. You know, we set out to really rebuild capital markets, but doing so, on chain. And so, you know, we're vertically integrated across the whole stack from credit origination, mostly known for tokenizing HELOCs, on chain. Done about 22,000,000,000, of those to date. We structure the cash flows, and then we also distribute, across TradFi and DeFi.”

“I think we always wanted to get here to have something like quality assets that people can simply hold on chain, self custody, or, you know, borrow land loop, which is, like, kind of, like, a a similar way of tranching it, you know, getting the senior trash or the junior trash by lending or by looping it. We always wanted to have this, but the the assets were never there. So we always had native, crypto, so ETH and Bitcoin, and stable coins.”

“And so that helps us triage the top part that we want to review first. And from the 2,000 or so submissions that we get each hackathon, we distill that down to about 150 that we then go and interview. Each project gets two sets of team members' eyeballs on them. We have mentors, founders, other investors in the ecosystem that represent a judging panel that evaluates those projects from that subset of 150, and then that gets cut down to about 40 that are considered for category winners down to honorable mentions for the non-dilutive prize money, and then we distill it down to about 10 to 15 that we invest in at that 250k check size and then bring into the accelerator program.”

“What we observed with Prime is when you have something that is sustainable and that scale, it takes a bit of time, but people start trusting it and then they realize they can do useful things. People with that want to earn yield, they can rely on it. So this was always the promise of defy composable money, but there were no pieces to compose with.”

“Camino was born about three years ago, kind of out of a of a need to serve some of the stable coins, in Solana. It's you initially, it was, an LP, protocol to to tokenize LPs, and then it once we realized that, actually, the bottle end was not well served or did fit all the needs, we decided to build our own bottle end as well. The reason why it was all created was to serve DeFi and Solana because we thought the blockchain will, create a lot of economic activity, which is what is happening now.”

“But there's this weird dynamic on chain, which is I can just issue a utility token to fund my project. And so like what role does debt actually play? And I guess my view would be it largely has been supply and demand for leverage. And so credit cycles on chain, they don't necessarily follow sort of credit cycles in the TradFi world.”

“I think we always wanted to get here to have something like quality assets that people can simply hold on chain, self-custody, or, you know, borrow land loop, which is like kind of like a simple way of tranching it, you know, getting the senior trash or the junior trash by lending or by looping it.”

“Typically, the cycle starts at the beginning of 2023, so kind of at the after we saw almost a year long bear market that played out over 2022, eventually that flipped and we had bottomed. Then we went through wealth distribution. That's the part of the cycle where you want to be, you know, leaning a little bit more risk off, you know, looking to to build cash positions.”

“Think we kind of all looked at the past few years, and we thought low risk DeFi is a thing. And, everyone's happy to earning a two and a half percent or 3% forever, and I just simply don't believe it. Or maybe Solana is more higher risk appetite in general and is more keen to get, you know, 12% yield. We found that people are extremely interested in getting this this extra yield as long as they understand the asset.”

“How many hoops do you have to hop through to do that? Send them your driver's license and all this information, and there's a whole KYC process, and they limit you on how much you can purchase per day until you pass these different verifications levels and all this other stuff. It's like, what are we doing here?”

“We've done a lot of work on, Bitcoin market structure, cost basis, you know, holdings, things like that across different cohorts to understand where we're at in that sort of top buyers rotating coins to sort of long term, you know, stronger hands. And that's, you know, we're we've seen some of that play out. This typically takes about a year to play out.”

“Over the past six to nine months on Solana, the markets and the activity have just gotten so good. There's a lot of smart engineers working on exchanges and things like that. They're just so good that it's actually much cheaper to buy Solana on Solana.”

“It becomes very clear over the course of a conversation, whether someone is looking to us for validation that their idea has merit, versus basically not caring and being like, I'm going to will this idea into the world, whether or not you guys agree with me or not. I do think that really lobbing in these sort of grenades that pierce the veil of like someone's confidence and seeing that their ability to kind of take that in, but, you know, answer the question constructively, I think is, is, you know, the thing that we see a good bit of.”

“I think everyone was really focused on L2s and scaling through that method and some other methods, and Solana was just like, we think we can synchronize this entire state machine on one network versus many different networks. I started looking at the code and everything and just I was like, oh, this is a very cool network.”

“There was never really, like, exogenous quality sustainable yield. And I think the first the first glimpse of that was Athena, last year or two years ago when we had, like, exogenous yield that was not due to, you know, like, leverage against Bitcoin. It was, to some extent, leverage because it was, still driven by the funding fees, but it was somewhat upon exogenous yield. And what we observe with Prime is when you have something that is sustainable, and can sustain sustainable and at scale, it takes a bit of time, but people start trusting it.”

“There was a company called Orr that came through. Hardhat Chat is an Anon developer that built Orr. It was a store of value that was built on top of Solana. They basically used a proof of work mechanism, but then settled to Solana. And throughout the hackathon, it actually broke Solana or was very close to breaking Solana. And so we saw this and we were like, this is one of the coolest things we've seen in a long time. Ultimately, what Hardhat landed on was like, it actually isn't proof of work, it's gamifying the experience around mining. So he actually created a consumer application that does that. And now that's one of the top revenue generating applications on Solana.”

“The other thing that they taught me that is still true with what we do day to day is they frame every investment memo in what is the 10x case and what's the 100x case. Meaning the 10x case is, hey, with these dollars, you believe there's a 10x value. And usually that's around a single particular product hypothesis. And then the 100x case is like, what is the unreasonable thing that could happen with this company that in retrospect is going to be perfectly reasonable.”

“I was talking to everyone at BrainPoint that this is going to be really good and big in Solana. Because we always wanted this and we finally have it. And I think although we live in this permissionless 24-7 world, it's still fine and some people still lose money and things break.”

“I think that the impact of AI and, you know, vibe coding and all of that is like, it certainly democratizes the ability to express an idea in code, and that puts a little bit more emphasis for us, again, on the individual behind that. But also, importantly, it really creates an emphasis on the execution of that idea. Because, like, I think at least the current subset of tools that people have at their disposal is quite good at getting from, like, zero to one. But then to take that to something that is, like, maintainable production-level code over the long term and, like, has a product that is truly differentiated, that's, like, the magic.”

“Sub three, though, is sort of like... Yeah, is like the, I guess, gold standard for when you cross over to kind of doing something special in the marathon. And for me, it's like just a natural extension of a lot of the endurance training that I've done. And it's funny, like, I've done a bunch of different endurance events, but had, up until this past year, never done a marathon. And when my old boss from Slow, Sam Lessin, found out that that was the case, he publicly on his podcast, like, challenged me to run a sub three marathon. And so, yeah, I put, you know, a great training block in. And just, you know, the most important thing, honestly, is like showing up to the race healthy and getting to the starting line. Because a lot of folks overtrain, they get injured, and then, you know, wheels fall off.”

“MetaDao is another one that has sort of wandered through the idea of being amazed under the umbrella of these different types of companies that can be governed, but this concept of futarchy, where decision markets rather than one token or one share, one vote govern sort of the direction a corporation can take. It's, for whatever reason, just because the world is weird, aligned very closely with the founder type that we like, where in order to have a token from essentially day one with your company, you have to be essentially a public market CEO where you're communicating, hey, here's what we're doing, here's why we're doing it and kind of managing the expectations of a market, but as a like pre-seed or seed stage company.”

“The thing that's changed, at least within Coliseum, is for us to be, I think that we've like, oriented more and more towards the individuals rather than the ideas. Because at the end of the day, the ideas are pretty pliable in terms of a direction a product can take. And I think early on we may be overindexed on having to have the perfect marriage of the two. And that led to like the biggest disagreement because we were not arguing over the person, but we were arguing over the idea that they had and the merits that are associated with that.”

“If all the money is in the market and the the sentiment is is still on the side of we're not going into a bear market, that's a pretty interesting indicator to tell you that everybody's deployed. Right? Everybody if if someone's saying that we're going higher, they're in the market. Right? They've already deployed.”

“I think they've already increased capacity by 50% this year, and then they want to double it, and then I think it's just going to continue doubling probably twice a year. So it's just going to keep getting better and better and better and cheaper and faster.”

“We recently, in the last cohort, rented an office in San Francisco for two weeks of the Accelerator. And the feedback at the end of that was, hey, guys, do you have somewhere where we can just stay longer? And we looked around, like, well, we only have this for two weeks. And so, that then precipitated, hey, we need to actually go and get an office so that, you know, not only can we have people stay longer than the program itself, but I think, too, in starting something by yourself, right, or with one other person, and especially if you two are remote at the outset, like, it's a pretty lonely endeavor.”

“You want to do it well, you want to inform people about the token, what does it do, what are the risks, what is the yield coming from, be as transparent as possible, try to curate as much as possible. Because that's how you build a user base that appreciates those things, that invites other people, trusts you, etc.”

“We peaked out, you know, October, and we're now six months into this kind of bear market cycle. And we've been in this wealth destruction zone, going back. Really, this we we didn't have wealth destruction confirmed until really kind of earlier this year.”

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