Howdy!

In non-Solana news, my colleague Katherine Ross and I just published an investigation into the power struggles and turbulence that have befallen Bitget’s layer-2, Morph. Check it out!

Today, we’ve got the SEC delaying its Grayscale Solana ETF decision, Raydium and Bonk’s buzzy partnership, and Arcium’s public testnet:

SEC not ready to decide on Grayscale Solana ETF

Investors are going to have to wait a bit longer for a Solana ETF.

In a filing earlier today, the SEC said it had not “reached any conclusions” on the NYSE’s 19b-4 filing to list Grayscale’s spot SOL ETF. This was an expected outcome: The SEC has 240 days from when it first acknowledges a 19b-4 filing to reach a final decision. In Grayscale’s case, that would set a final deadline sometime in October.

Like anyone with a deadline, the SEC appears likely to get closer to the due date before finishing its work.

The Polymarket odds for spot Solana ETFs’ approval in 2025 fell from 89% to 80% a little before 8:00 am ET. Interestingly, this trading swing came several hours before news aggregators started posting about the SEC filing. The ETF approval odds were back up to 82% at the time of publication. 

SOL was unaffected by the news and is up 5% on the day.

Spot Solana ETF filings began emerging in the waning months of the Biden presidency, where a Gary Gensler-led SEC reportedly rejected 19b-4 filings, which are filed by exchanges. Analysts portrayed the fact that Trump’s SEC acknowledged the filing for an ETF containing Solana — which the prior regime called a security — as newsworthy.

Trump has promised to make America the “crypto capital of the world.” Many believe a Solana ETF fits squarely into that vision — and SEC approval is only a matter of time.

The bigger question now, I suppose, is how popular spot SOL ETFs will wind up being. The Solana investment vehicle du jour is currently treasury plays like DeFi Development Corporation, which has already purchased more than $100 million in SOL a few weeks after launching. 

When I interviewed its new executives, the publicly traded real estate software company that now buys a ton of Solana said it sees the Strategy-like play as superior to ETFs. That’s partly because even if staked SOL ETFs gain regulatory approval — which is no guarantee — they would likely not be able to stake their entire balance and may also have to pay Coinbase validator fees. 

Multiple other companies have now followed Sol Strategies’ lead in trying to capture Michael Saylor’s bitcoin magic on Solana.

So while the SEC takes its time on deciding whether Solana ETFs should trade in the US, the investment landscape may be shifting beneath its feet.

— 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

Raydium’s new pump.fun competitor launchpad has finally found some traction:

LetsBonk, a launchpad built on top of LaunchLab and themed around the popular Solana memecoin, had more than 12,000 token launches yesterday, according to Dune Analytics data.

That was around half of the 23,000 launches on pump.fun. If it’s anything like past would-be pump.fun’s, LetsBonk’s usage will die soon — but it’s worth following nonetheless.

— Jack Kubinec

Arcium has created a public testnet demo for its onchain dark pool concept, bringing private, MEV-free trading to Solana. The idea is to let users place stealth orders without revealing intent, size, or direction, mitigating frontrunning and quote fading in real time.

Normally, large onchain trades are exposed to a whole host of problems like slippage and value extraction by bots. Arcium helps to solve that using secure multi-party computation (MPC) to match trades off-chain, and then settle them trustlessly onchain.

Takeaway: Arcium’s basically just concealing order details until execution. TradFi has done its own version of this for decades. In fact, dark pools handle nearly half of all US equity volume and are core to institutional trading strategy. This demo shows DeFi can absorb that same model, sans centralized gatekeepers.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Stepan Simkin, co-founder and CEO of Squads: