Howdy!

I was in the bathroom of a dive bar on Friday night when I opened up X and realized that I was missing the TRUMP trade of the century. But you can’t put a price on sharing a beer with your buddies, so I can live with it. 

Today we’ve got Solana’s stablecoin supply, an REV god candle, and AI tools.

Solana stablecoin supply up 57% after Trump memecoin launch

The first crypto president did a very crypto thing. 

Donald Trump launched a memecoin on Friday night, creating arguably the largest trading demand spike ever in crypto. Solana apps and infrastructure buckled and sometimes broke as the network processed $39 billion in DEX trading volume on Sunday alone, blowing past its prior daily high of $10 billion, according to Blockworks Research. 

Some were quick to cast Trump’s first memecoin foray as a means to onboard masses of new users into crypto, although that seems like wishful thinking. The token is already down 40% from its Sunday high, and there’s no indication that the project has any purpose apart from gambling.

Still, there was one Trumpcoin development I think could have longer-term implications — an overnight surge in Solana’s stablecoin supply. The Solana network housed around $6.1 billion stablecoins on Friday, per Blockworks Research data. Yesterday, Solana held $9.6 billion in stables. That’s $3.5 billion in new stablecoins, amounting to a 57% increase, in just three days. 

To put this in perspective, Solana added its last $3.5 billion in stablecoins over a period stretching from March 17, 2024 until Friday. The network packed 306 days of stablecoin growth into a long weekend. 

The TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins minted by America’s leading couple were paired with Circle’s USDC stablecoin, meaning traders had to buy the tokens with USDC, Blockworks Research data lead Dan Smith said. This put tons of upward price pressure on Solana-native USDC, so arbitrageurs likely bridged stablecoins over to essentially sell dollars for a little over a dollar.

Historically, stablecoin supply tends to be sticky. It’s been a while since the 2021 halcyon days of Ethereum DeFi, but the layer-1 still holds some $113 billion in stablecoins, more than 11 times Solana’s supply.

In addition to providing liquidity for memecoins, stables can be used for real-world stuff like remittances, payments, or onchain banking. That’s perhaps why a large number of Solana founders called payments and stablecoins the network’s most underrated sectors in our anonymous poll.

So was the TRUMP memecoin — 80% of which is held by insiders — a shameless cash grab? Likely yes, but that doesn’t mean it can’t bring positive knock-on effects to Solana.

— Jack Kubinec

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Look out, it’s a real economic value god candle:

Solana’s REV, a metric that measures the tips and fees Solana processes, reached an all-time high of $56 billion on Sunday, beating the previous record by more than double.

That’s a daily figure that makes Solana’s REV from a year ago seem like a rounding error. It’s a good week to be a Solana validator collecting those tips and fees.

— Jack Kubinec

No coding chops? No problem, suggests Helius Labs — so long as you're willing to guide your favorite AI companion through Solana's plentiful quirks. While AI holds enormous promise for app development, it often seems to stumble when faced with Solana’s unconventional architecture. Without guidance, even tools like Github's Copilot tend to produce code that looks workable on the surface, but falls apart in execution — mismanaging accounts, introducing inefficiencies, ignoring key architectural constraints, etc etc.

The fix? Rethinking how AI approaches Solana from the ground up and being intentional in how would-be devs structure their prompts.

For instance, Solana’s runtime is designed to process multiple transactions simultaneously, contradicting the sequential transaction handling logic many AI tools assume. Helius suggests that devs need to tailor prompts to explicitly describe transaction dependencies and account locking mechanisms to effectively account for this.

Likewise, PDAs — or program-derived addresses — demand validation techniques that include strict ownership checks and the careful handling of seeds. Generic AI models often fail to differentiate between standard addresses and PDAs, leading to logical errors or security vulnerabilities in their output.

Devs also need to prioritize the minimization of compute unit consumption by bundling operations efficiently and avoiding unnecessary serialization, all while adhering to Solana’s runtime constraints. Existing tools are certainly capable of writing code that accounts for this, but only if you ask them to.

Takeaway: AI is as close to magic as any technology we’ve ever had, but (at least for now) it still needs human input and guidance to be useful and safe. Especially when dealing with something as sensitive as people’s money, teaching AI to navigate Solana’s unique challenges is critical. But with the right care and oversight, AI can transform app development on Solana and beyond, opening up possibilities we’re only beginning to imagine.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Ian Unsworth, co-founder of Kairos Research: