Howdy!

Pump.fun creator revenue sharing has arrived. I’m curious to see how this changes user behavior on the platform (if at all). More on that below.

Today, we’ve got Nirvana Labs’ fundraise, Solana’s growing app revenue, and DeFiTuna’s token launch:

Exclusive: Cloud startup Nirvana Labs raises $6M seed extension

Blockchains store a ton of data, and the bloat is only growing bigger.

A little over a year ago, Nirvana Labs released its cloud offering. It promised a crypto-tailored computing service that could undercut Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud — the industry computing incumbents — on price.

Now, Nirvana has raised an additional $6 million in seed extension funding co-led by Jump Crypto and Crucible Capital, Lightspeed has learned exclusively. RW3 Ventures, Castle Island, and Hash3 VC all also participated in the round, which brought Nirvana Labs’ total funding to $11.8 million.

Some blockchain node operators use cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud because the services make it possible to use servers and storage without housing their own physical hardware. This reliance on the internet giants for computing resources creates some centralization risks, however, and it can also prove costly for crypto operators — especially on a high-throughput chain like Solana.

“[A] single Solana Archive Node is 700TB — that's an insane amount of storage,” Crucible Capital founder and general partner Meltem Demirors said in a text message. “AWS and Google Cloud own 80%+ of this market today which makes no sense because one month of NVME storage on AWS costs almost as much as just buying the hardware outright.”

Nirvana makes use of bare metal infrastructure where each server houses a single client, as opposed to traditional cloud providers which pool computing resources. Nirvana also boasts CPUs optimized for demanding workloads — like those faced by blockchain operators — and data center diversity that could make blockchains more resilient against things like outages.

The crypto cloud service can also be much cheaper than AWS or Google Cloud because Nirvana leases hardware directly from data centers and co-locates storage, which removes middlemen, Demirors said.

Demand for Nirvana’s services tends to come from infrastructure and tooling providers like BitGo and Fireblocks, as well as protocol foundations like Avalanche and Berachain, Demirors told me. Nirvana is also planning to work as a frontend to help organizations deploy on the internet filtering startup DoubleZero. 

In a press release, Nirvana Labs said its revenue has grown by 26x since January 2024, and the cloud service now handles more than 2,000 terabytes of blockchain data. 

Following the round, Demirors will join Nirvana Labs’ board, where she will be joined by Nirvana’s CEO and chief technology officer, a representative from RW3 Ventures, and a final “independent,” likely to be an industry executive, Demirors said.

— Jack Kubinec

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A Month and a Half Out. The Most Important Builders in Crypto Are Headed to Brooklyn.

Permissionless IV is for the people, the teams shipping at the core of crypto’s next phase. Infra, stable primitives, real-world products.

Some of the world class founders and builders joining us in June:

• Keone Hon (Monad) pushing parallelized performance

• Guy Young (Ethena) redefining synthetic dollars

• Hayden Adams (Uniswap) still shipping at scale

• Uma Roy (Succinct) making ZK actually usable
  

June 24-26 | Brooklyn, NY

Solana app revenue is quietly on the upswing:

Last week marked the network’s fifth straight week of app revenue growth — a roughly 81% increase since the first week of April.

One major growth driver seems to be the trading app Axiom, which has seen its weekly revenue more than triple — from $4 million to $12.7 million — from the first week of April to last week.

— Jack Kubinec

DeFiTuna, a Solana-native CLMM protocol, wrapped the snapshot for its upcoming token generation event on Saturday.

In a post on X, the team said it will distribute tokens to those who interacted with DeFiTuna between Dec. 14, 2024, and May 10, 2025 — a window it believes reflects genuine, product-first usage rather than speculative positioning.

The platform also stated that the token will not come with governance rights in what appears to be a deliberate rejection of the idea that users should control the protocols they use through token-weighted votes. Though a common tactic, governance-by-token models have often led to vote capture by whales, short-termism and issues with mercenary capital dictating protocol direction. No dice, says the tuna.

Instead, the team says its token will grant holders a proportional claim on protocol revenue, distributed onchain to those who stake. This includes revenue from current products and future profit-generating primitives as-yet undisclosed.

Takeaway: By skipping governance and tying the token directly to protocol revenue, DeFiTuna turns ownership back toward utility vs. ideology. Users probably won't miss the votes (since, let's be honest, most would never utilize them anyway), but one suspects they will notice the payouts.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Alon Cohen, co-founder of pump.fun: