Howdy!

A friend texted me his ZORA airdrop this morning: $0.03 worth, which cost him $0.10 to claim. Sounds like fun!

Today, we’ve got a midweek market update, the TRUMP Trump dinner, and Solana treasury strategies:

Midweek markets: Jupiter ascending

Solana is up. At $151.30, $SOL is back at monthly highs, reversing an oh-so-steep early April dip. It's pretty well outperforming broader crypto markets, which aren't doing too badly themselves as they ride a wave of short squeezes, ETF inflows, and a sudden softening of trade war rhetoric. 

Some ecosystem tokens caught the bullish wave too, including Jupiter’s JUP, which is up 25% on the week.

Yesterday, a report from Blockworks Research laid out all the ways in which Jupiter is becoming irreplaceable. Jupiter now commands 95% of DEX aggregator volume and 80% of perpetuals trading on Solana. It generates north of $280 million in annualized revenue and still trades at one of the lowest P/S ratios in DeFi.

Since launching in 2021 as a swap router, Jupiter has made no secret of its intent to become Solana's super-app: home to perps, its own launchpad, a mobile wallet, a memecoin terminal, and more recently, NFT integrations via its DRiP Haus acquisition. Its liquidity index fund, JLP, is now the third-largest TVL pool on Solana — behind only Jito and Kamino. Its recent API upgrades (here's looking at you, Ultra Mode) are quietly reshaping user behavior. I mean, come on. It's pulling in $5–10 million in optional monthly fees.

Jupiter's routing upgrades (Juno), cross-chain testnet (Jupnet) and rapid-fire acquisitions (SolanaFM, Coinhall, SonarWatch, Ultimate Wallet, Moonshot) signal a protocol building not just liquidity, but full-stack control. It's a surgical level of vertical integration rarely seen: data, analytics, interface and distribution, all consolidated under a single roof. Its treasury is buying back JUP at speed; so far, they're over $20 million repurchased in under two months.

Risks worth watching mostly deal with looming token unlocks. The Jupiter team took heat recently-ish over its compensation and governance transparency. Plus, competition sharpens when winners emerge — Kamino, Titan and Drift aren't going quietly. But the moat Jupiter is digging is deep, and it's doing it without relying on mercenary incentives. Ultra Mode usage is on the ascent. Aggregator dominance is stable. Perps volumes remain consistently above $25 billion per month.

While macro flows, ETF optimism and geopolitical thawing may have sparked the week's rally, Jupiter has helped things along by scaffolding Solana's commercial core.

— Jeffrey Albus

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Have you ever sent a billion dollar tweet?

Donald Trump’s memecoin added $1 billion to its market capitalization after its X page posted that the token’s top holders will be invited to a private dinner with the president of the United States.

The surge wiped out a month and a half of losses for the joke token. Last week in this newsletter, I wrote that the strongest investment thesis for TRUMP is that it might get a spot in Trump’s daily litany of Truth Social posts. Turns out his dinner plans are also up for grabs!

— Jack Kubinec

Investors have been opening up the checkbook for Solana treasury acquisition stocks this week.

This morning, Sol Strategies said it secured a convertible note facility with ATW Partners. The headline figure for the loan is $500 million, although only $20 million of that is being doled out in an initial tranche around May 1. The other $480 million is contingent on certain conditions.

That follows Upexi disclosing a $100 million private placement led by GSR for a Solana treasury strategy and DeFi Development Corporation raising $42 million in convertible notes for the same thing.

So basically, public companies are about to buy and stake a ton of SOL. This type of thing can definitely help the demand side for a token. A JPMorgan report said 28% of last year’s crypto capital inflows came from MicroStrategy. However, you could also imagine max pain in the bitcoin market if Strategy’s stock collapses. 

While the three Solana treasury companies are similar at first blush, Sol Strategies chief technology officer Max Kaplan said Sol Strategies isn’t just playing the Michael Saylor game of keeping stock price higher than net asset value.

“SOL Strategies is not a NAV play like others. We’ve said it before — and we’ll keep saying it. SOL Strategies is a tech company. We build infrastructure for Solana,” Kaplan wrote on X, referring to the company’s validators and validator infrastructure.

— Jack Kubinec

A message from Bartosz Lipinski, CEO of Cube Exchange: