Howdy!

Ripple reportedly tried to get SOL into the strategic crypto reserve to legitimize its own inclusion. Charles Hoskinson was left out of the crypto summit. Tucker Carlson interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried. I’m tired boss.

Today, we’ve got new details about Unto Labs, SIMD-0096’s effects on inflation, and Multicoin’s Jito report:

Unto wants to 10x Solana’s performance — but no promises

Liam Heeger spent two years as a core engineer for Firedancer, the high-performance Solana client being written from scratch by Jump. In January, Heeger announced he had left Jump to create his own layer-1 blockchain called Unto. The next day, news broke that Jump was suing Heeger for violating his non-compete agreement by working on a new high-performance blockchain.

Jump and Heeger settled the case in late February, so I was finally able to catch up with Heeger and get more details on Unto. In short, the layer-1 will architect a new virtual machine to try and improve on Solana’s performance by an order of magnitude.

“We tend to agree with [Multicoin Capital managing partner] Kyle Samani. Incremental performance improvements don't matter,” Unto co-founder Will Yoo said. “So we're gonna need a 10x to be relevant.”

Heeger agreed, but added that he’s “not making any promises.”

Heeger helped push Solana’s virtual machine closer to its limits with Firedancer, but he isn’t building on the SVM partly because Solana “made a lot of design choices that they pivoted on really quickly,” he said. Unto plans to spend a lot of time designing the blockchain before beginning the coding process so that it can avoid some of these same forced pivots.

For that, Unto will likely have to raise more cash at some point. The San Francisco-based startup raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Framework Ventures. Jump’s lawsuit says the raise came at a $50 million valuation. 

Heeger didn’t get too specific on how Unto’s new VM might look, but he said it won’t use either traditional proof-of-work or proof-of-stake for consensus. The chain will use a globally distributed validator set, so it will appear similarly to PoS — which is what Ethereum and Solana use for consensus — but Heeger aims to create something different.

“The key issue with proof-of-stake is that it incentivizes operators purely on increasing and maintaining their stake rather than the performance of the network and being an effective operator,” Heeger said.

Heeger also pointed out that in single leader based networks like Ethereum and Solana, the leader has a monopoly on blockspace for as long as they are producing a block. This is undesirable, and competition among block producers would lead to a better user experience, he added.

In any event, it doesn’t sound like Unto plans to do much media and BD in the near future. Over talking numbers or hiring KOLs, the layer-1 is looking to hire additional engineers and wants to prioritize getting some version of its virtual machine in front of people. 

“The roadmap is we want to ship stuff,” Heeger said.

— Jack Kubinec

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Why are SIMD-0228 proponents concerned about inflation?

Part of the reason why is that inflation has been on the rise since SIMD-0096 was implemented in early February.

Solana stopped burning half of its priority fees with the new feature, which made an immediate impact on inflation. SOL inflation has increased from a little over 3% to nearly 5% since the beginning of February, as this Blockworks Research graphic shows.

— Jack Kubinec

Investment firm Multicoin Capital recently released a deep dive into Jito, the MEV giant underpinning Solana’s validator economy. The report found that Jito has quietly entrenched itself as the default MEV layer for the entire network. 

Jito solves the problem of inefficient transaction inclusion by optimizing how Solana’s validators process and order transactions, maximizing rewards while reducing congestion. Over 94% of Solana’s stake runs on Jito’s client, meaning nearly all validators are aligned with its profit-maximizing strategies. That’s a bonkers level of dominance for something that isn’t mandatory.

But the real game might be restaking. JitoSOL holders can already re-stake their assets, compounding yield opportunities. If Solana’s restaking narrative catches fire (again), Jito’s model could become the backbone of the next DeFi wave, so suggests Multicoin.

Takeaway: Jito is the tollbooth on Solana’s economic highway. On one hand, that means more rewards for those in the system. On the other, its dominance could reshape power dynamics in ways that aren’t fully clear yet. Validators and stakers are thriving under Jito’s model as of late, but the long game will be about whether control consolidates or stays decentralized.

— Jeffrey Albus

For Builders Who Don’t Just Talk — They Ship.

This conference is for the engineers, founders, and devs building the next cycle’s backbone. If you’re scaling infra, rewriting DeFi, or experimenting with new primitives, Permissionless IV is where you stress-test your vision.

Speaker applications? Open.
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June 22-26 | Brooklyn, NY

A message from Carlos Gonzalez Campo, analyst at Blockworks Research: