SOLANA

“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.”

“Now there is a warning, Drew. This is a bear flag. Technically, Drew, this is a bearish, slightly bearish chart here. This is, you know, 100% a rising wedge. And rising wedges, you know, they are bearish. But you could say it is almost a parallel range because this rising wedge is going into the year 2028.”

“We stake to turn the treasury into this productive asset. We make six to 7% on that treasury. If we do nothing else, 40% of our Solana is locked Solana that we bought at a roughly 15% discount. If you think of that as like OID on a bond and you put into a yield equivalent, we still get the six to 7% staking yield, but it effectively doubles that. So all in, we can increase our sole per share by 10% if we do nothing else. And then there is that accretive issuance which we did a $200,000,000 subsequent raise in July.”

“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.”

“They created this little Potemkin village... they had verifiable professional backgrounds, and were familiar with how Drift operated.”

“Today's topic is the Hollywood thriller backstory to the Drift Hack and the backlash against Circle.”

“OpenAI is poaching Coinbase execs as part of a broader trend of AI companies seeking talent from the crypto world who can navigate complex regulatory environments. These tech giants are looking for people who can bridge the gap between high-growth tech and decentralized rails. It shows that the future of AI and crypto is becoming increasingly intersectional.”

“The good news and the thing that is making me happy is that it these were generally OPSEC issues rather than, like, smart contract issues or program issues, and so, I do think that smart contracts are getting safer and safer to use. I think it's so nascent that we're in process of upgrading processes and protocols, and so there's a lot of talk, like, could circle have frozen USDC from the drift hack and things like that that I do think will improve over time.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I think this definitely legitimizes Bitcoin further as a treasury asset for a lot of these major public companies. So I think that we've been seeing it move this direction for a while now. I think there was kind of questions around what corporate accumulation would actually look like, but now I think that this is actually something that's going to set a pretty high floor on Bitcoin.”

“The SpaceX-Cursor $60 billion bombshell news shows that even outside of pure crypto, massive valuations are being driven by technological integration. We cover why the biggest opportunity in crypto might be hiding in plain sight while these massive deals are happening. This merger of space and coding infrastructure represents a new frontier for capital deployment.”

“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?”

“Silicon Valley based venture firms, Electric Capital and Goldman Sachs were the two largest buyers of Solana ETFs. Drew, let me just say that one more time. The second largest buyer of Solana ETFs, Goldman Sachs and Q4. What do you think about that? Now just launched in October.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If you're already holding SOL, of course, you gotta know you should be staking it right now. You can earn up to 6.5% in variable staking rewards on your SOL with no platform commission fee through December 31 this year. It's powered by Galaxy Digital.”

“Who are you allowing access to prospective customers at a conference? Who are you allowing to be in your booth representing your space?”

“The DeFi plays that I tested the waters on is not doing well, though, like they're mechanically useful DeFi applications within Solana, but the Solana DeFi value of these tokens is what's kind of been shocking, like Gito, Marinade, Camino. They all have gotten absolutely slaughtered over the last few months here.”

“What is interesting is how US centric Bitcoin is starting to become, right? So much of the Bitcoin mining is done in the US. So much of the institution, like the vast majority of the institution of Bitcoin, which is an increasingly growing part of the overall Bitcoin pie is held by US entities.”

“It was a long-term, at least six-month intelligence operation... it involved in-person crypto professionals interacting with the Drift team, building their confidence.”

“Cantor starts crypto firm with backing from Tether and SoftBank. As we dig into it, they’re gonna start with about 42,000 Bitcoins, so about $4 billion worth of Bitcoin. Already talking about raising convertible debt, going full micro-strategy. Jack Mollers, who is also the CEO of Strike, is going to be the CEO of this company.”

“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.”

“Long term collaborator of payment service provider configured and managed the validator node in house following six months of joint work with their engineering team at Tempo to integrate Visa's infrastructure directly into the blockchain. This isn't Visa, you know, letting in four dorks that look like they work for Doge carrying in their laptops. Visa sent their own dorks to go work with this blockchain.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Can you keep your values if you don’t win?”

“And so, obviously, MSTR is one of the most traded stocks, in The US. And so, they really are in this great position to continue to do this. And, yeah, we obviously have a very strong positive view of Bitcoin, and so I like their chances. ... Half the treasury model is this intelligent capital issuance, but half of it is being as visible as possible and having everybody know about your company and the ability to invest in it, and nobody does it better than Saylor.”

“Blockchain Capital is raising $700 million in fresh crypto funds while everyone else fights over the same two assets. This level of funding suggests a long-term belief in the infrastructure that is being built right now. It shows that despite market volatility, venture capital is still betting big on the future of this entire industry.”

“Stripe is a payment processing company. They handle credit cards, digital wallets, and they do 1,900,000,000,000 in payments. Stripe has a new blockchain. It's blockchain machine payments a k a. This is the preferred payment for AI. That is gonna be their strategy here.”

“And then on the other side of the credibility is, can we bring in substantial amounts of capital? This is a masterful play and obviously, they're much smaller than MicroStrategy. But this is the most single credible play and I think what is really interesting is that this might cause premium compression for the entire space, right?”

“Chet, yesterday, disco fam, you guys, we are here. We were calling this yesterday. We pulled up the liquidity cluster, if you guys recall. Now I haven't hit refresh on this, but yesterday, we talked about $73,500. Highlighted it, gave you the reasons, gave you the rationale. I said, we must wick below this range. Why? The liquidation heat map is calling for it.”

“So there's two things I want to point out and then move on to a bit more macro and where this does fit in context. First is that this company's sole strategy is raises 500 million in convertible notes issuance to buy Solana tokens. Just putting it on your radar, there's another company actually in Canada that's doing this with Ethereum.”

“Solana quietly did $198 billion in DEX volume last month, outpacing centralized exchanges with tighter spreads than Binance. Lets break down why the smart money might be looking at the wrong chart, and whether the biggest opportunity in crypto is hiding in plain sight. This indicates a massive shift in where liquidity is actually living on-chain.”

“He noted that 50% of the ETF assets held by these 13F firms, making a more serious investor base. So half of all the Solana ETF flows are held by these 13F filing firms, meaning entities with more than $100 million. This is smart money accumulating Solana.”

“I would just like to offer my opinion is that if I had everyone else's money to invest with that I had stolen and I was given access to every VC investment, I would also put $200,000 into literally everything, complete spray and pray, and look like a genius down the road. Nobody's listing the hundreds of things that they invested in that did not go up, And this was not his money, and he had no risk. So that's why he's in jail.”

“Prop AMMs are largely unique to Solana. It has to do with the underlying, architecture of Solana's blockchain, but they're basically a new type of AMM where they don't use these public liquidity pools. They're more actively managed by professional market makers, and they can actually provide better spreads than going to a centralized exchange like Binance. And so because of this better, fill orders and user experience, you're seeing, a lot of traders on Solana actually gravitate toward these prop AMMs.”

“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.”

“Kevin O'Leary is calling for $200K per Bitcoin, which reflects a broader sentiment among institutional investors who see the current price as a significant discount. But while everyone fights over the same two assets, we need to look at whether the biggest opportunity is actually hiding in plain sight. The narrative has shifted from pure skepticism to competitive institutional accumulation.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Can you keep your values if you don’t win?”

“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.”

“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.”

“That's my favorite one when you dumb people down to the, you know, mentality of, like, a goldfish. Like, the intelligence of a goldfish, you just say nothing's better marketing than a for an asset than higher prices of that asset. It's true. It should work in the opposite way, but, yeah, and crypto, generally how it works. The best meme. You know, like, the line for Bitcoin at 126 and the line for Bitcoin at 60. It's so true.”

“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.”

“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.”

“MicroStrategy scooped up nearly 52,000 BTC in April alone, Morgan Stanley keeps buying, Kevin O'Leary is calling for $200K, and Blockchain Capital is raising $700 million in fresh crypto funds. But while everyone fights over the same two assets, the smart money might be looking at the wrong chart. It is clear that the biggest institutions are no longer just dipping their toes; they are diving into the deep end.”

“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.”

“To put it in perspective, Eric Balchunas, ETF analyst from Bloomberg, estimated one year flows could be about 5,000,000,000. Now some of those flows will obviously come from other ETFs because this is the lowest cost product on the market. Some of those flows would be new flows that would have went into other ETFs, but some of them will be brand new. So I do think that this is a big signaling issue. It increases the ability for folks to get their hands on Bitcoin, but I also do think it represents a new material source of demand over the medium to long term.”

“Bitcoin showing some interesting signs of pumpiness right now. Kind of came in and alerting over $70K. Now, it's been a hectic market open here. So I definitely do acknowledge that. But there's a lot of volatility on. It's kind of a trader's best friend in this market. And I kind of joked about us pumping off of the conflict news.”

“Everything we do, we wanna make sure we're doing it in partnership with our clients in our network. To me, they care less about the network. They care less about the clients. I think they care more about the government, Drew. They don't wanna do something just to see the next administration roll everything back.”

“We cover the SpaceX-Cursor $60 billion bombshell, FTX's $3 billion mistake, OpenAI poaching Coinbase execs, and whether the biggest opportunity in crypto is hiding in plain sight. There's a $3 billion mistake tied back to the FTX collapse that highlights just how poorly those assets were handled during the bankruptcy process. It's a sobering reminder of past incompetence.”

“And so what's really exciting today is, you know, we've gotten to the point where we have US clients, you know, two banks in The US, LeadBank and Cross River, you know, who are now onboarded and are starting to settle their transactions in USDC over the Solana blockchain. So really excited to continue to grow the momentum we have, with stablecoin settlement across our network.”

“They were able to essentially get those signatures weeks in advance of the actual attack... using durable nonces, something of Solana.”

“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.”