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I don’t watch a whole lot of non-sports TV, but I must say I’m pretty optimistic after watching the pilot of the new Batman spinoff, “The Penguin.”

Anything Batman usually rocks, and this series has the added benefit of being funny and getting into the politics of the Gotham City mob scene. Check back on Friday to hear whether episode 2 holds up. In the meantime:

3 big questions I have after Solana Breakpoint

Solana Breakpoint wrapped up over the weekend, ending the most illuminating couple of days Solanaland has seen in some time. The conference has been hyped for months, and on the content side, it delivered.

We got details on Solana Mobile’s new phone, Firedancer’s testnet phase, Jupiter’s mobile app, and even Iggy Azalea’s new crypto-native online casino. 

Several threads outlined the litany of announcements that came out of Breakpoint. But for today’s edition, I’m going to dive into three questions I’m left with as Solana’s biggest conference recedes from view:

How much longer will we be talking about memecoins?

Breakpoint had no shortage of announcements, but relatively few seemed to pertain to one of Solana’s biggest current usage drivers. It’s almost boring to repeat at this point, but memecoins drive a lot of Solana’s economic value.

The dearth of memecoin talk may be for vibes-based reasons: Products in payments, stablecoins, or gaming feel more tangible, and projects would want to use their time onstage to pitch something futuristic-seeming rather than speculation on pictures of dogs. 

But it could also speak to memecoin fatigue. Some industry participants did their best to make meaning of memecoins closer to the beginning of this market cycle, but this can only go so far, and memecoins generally continue to be unserious. I’d venture to bet that people whose livelihood is building on Solana want the network to come to be more than a casino with cheap transaction fees.

How do the institutions feel about Solana’s SEC problems?

A few interesting institutional announcements popped up at Breakpoint — Franklin Templeton plans to launch a money market fund on Solana, SG-Forge added Solana support for its MiCA-compliant Euro stablecoin, and Citi said it will “explore opportunities with Solana,” to name a few.

This is unsurprising given some of the Solana Foundation’s efforts to court institutions, but there’s also an elephant in the room: The SEC actively views SOL as a security based on its ongoing Coinbase suit, and risk-averse institutions would likely ditch Solana if the SEC started accusing ecosystem participants of dealing in unregistered securities. 

This is especially noteworthy given how the SEC seemingly gave Solana’s biggest rival in Ethereum the pass when it approved spot ETH ETFs earlier this year. Common industry knowledge holds that SOL’s fate could be largely decided by the coming presidential election, with Donald Trump expected to install a more crypto-friendly regulatory regime, but I’d be curious what some of these institutions are thinking internally. Are they serious about Solana, or is it all just marketing bluster?

How big of a deal is Firedancer actually?

At long last, we got some tangible news on the much-hyped Solana validator client Firedancer during Breakpoint, as the project announced Firedancer was on testnet, and its hybrid “Frankendancer” was on mainnet in a non-voting capacity.

For more on the potential significance of Firedancer, check out my coverage here. But there have also been some Firedancer contrarians arguing that the client isn’t as noteworthy as advertised. One ETH ecosystem poster argued that a more performant client would up Solana validators’ cost to handle the increased bandwidth, and they might not be able to handle the load. 

And a Solana ecosystem source told me previously that users may not really notice the rollout of Firedancer, since its improvements will be in the order of milliseconds faster. 

It will be some time before the full Firedancer sees mainnet. In the meantime, Firedancer fans will hope they’re not Waiting for Godot.

— Jack Kubinec

Blockworks and the Solana Foundation are hosting Solana Founders Summit at Permissionless. Join a curated group of ~60 Solana industry leaders and founders for a day of workshops and off-the-record conversations.

There goes the TRON memecoin narrative:

SunPump, a poor pump.fun facsimile recently deployed on the Justin Sun-linked TRON blockchain, was briefly blamed for slumping pump.fun revenues. Pump.fun may be having revenue problems, but as this chart shows, it won’t be because SunPump peeled its business away.

As I’ve said before, pump.fun has the market pretty well cornered on 4chan-like memecoin launchpads. It’s booked a significant amount of revenue in under a year, and would-be competitors like Moonshot and Meme Royale have so far mostly failed to pry away pump.fun users. SunPump looks primed to join that graveyard.

— Jack Kubinec

Monday Opinion: Point-of-stale

Solana users, bless their enthusiastic hearts, seem ready to anoint every new product and feature as a game-changer, even when they’re... well, not.

Case in point: a recently demoed point-of-sale (POS) system that integrates Solana with Square terminals, presented by Jon Wong, Solana Foundation’s head of engineering. Cue the fanfare, yes? But let’s slow down for a second, Maurice. Because you don't have to be a crypto OG to realize we’ve been here before. Like, many, many times.

Almost every chain has its own point of sale systems and infrastructure. Bitcoin POS systems have existed since at least 2012. One of the first dedicated machines was the Casascius POS system, which used VeriFone card terminals to print Bitcoin QR codes and process payments over a centralized server. BitPay’s POS infrastructure has been widely used for basically eons, as was GoCoin before it.

NOWPayments has offered a POS that integrates over 300 crypto assets for at least half a decade. GoCrypto and CoinGate handle point-of-sale for Bitcoin, Ethereum and other EVM chains. COTI does payment processing for Cardano. Hedera might soon have NomidPay. There's also GetCode, and PocketPay, and xMoney, and Coinify, and Flexa, and Triple A… you get the picture. We've been doing this whole crypto thing for almost 16 years now. You do realize that, right Solana people?

And yet, here we are. Hype has a way of blinding folks when they’re new to the space and haven’t seen these ideas come and go before. @joyweb3x called it “Legendary.” @DefiiMike went with “Game changing.” @thevictorwu declared, "The future is here!" @forbesjack456 said, "This is mind-blowing." According to @x5oulfly, "This is truly next-level thinking." @connan_james sagely referred to it as "an Apple moment."

Frankly, the entire concept of a POS system in crypto is a little backwards. The whole reason Bitcoin — and crypto in general — exists is to do away with clunky, centralized middleman systems like POS machines. One person creates a tx request, the other scans a QR code and clicks send — done. But let’s humor the crowd and assume we're attempting to spare your local cashier the pain of needing to understand how a wallet works.

As @DoomOperator points out, this new POS (like almost all that have come before it) requires, "Too many steps, a lot of friction—we need it to be seamless with trad finance rails." Others lamented the lack of tap-and-go features as seen in products like Apple Pay, meaning QR codes are still in play. Meanwhile, @propa_surf added, “Why would I pay with crypto…just a pain because of taxes and price swings atm.”

While it’s great to see new users excited, the novelty here isn’t what Solana has built — it’s that Solana people seem to think they’re always the first and best to do it. Our ecosystem is growing, and that’s something to celebrate. But showing up to the party 10+ years late with a basic, already-proven concept wrapped in a fresh Solana bow is, frankly, rather cringe. As @ajki76 puts it, “To get the Solana community excited, all you need is a shiny new wheel reinvented.”

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Hardhat Chad, developer of ORE: