Brought to you by:

Howdy!

New goal for 2025: Coining a term. I don’t really care what it is, I just want a term to call my own. Perhaps I’ll come up with a catch-all phrase for the endless “podcast growth experts” flooding my LinkedIn DMs.

Today, we’ve got SIMD-0096 and its discontents, Jupiter Perps liquidations, and Atlas’ testnet launch:

Solana validator revenue is about to jump, but stakers might miss out

Solana’s validators are about to see a major income bump, but the protocol lacks a way for them to share the wealth with their stakers. 

In May, Solana validators passed a proposal to send 100% of priority fees — which are extra funds users can pay for a better chance of landing their transactions — to validators. The proposal’s implementation now seems imminent, but some are calling for Solana to pump the brakes until validators are able to share the extra fees with stakers. 

Validators, who run Solana’s software and create blocks in the Solana blockchain, currently receive half of SOL-denominated priority fees, and the other half is burned, or effectively removed from circulation. This leads some validators to strike side deals with users, since a user paying 75% of the priority fee directly to the validator outside of the Solana protocol would benefit both parties, for instance.

Named SIMD-0096, the May proposal aims to end these side deals. But Solana lacks an in-protocol way for validators to share priority fees with stakers — who delegate their SOL to validators for a share of the validator rewards — so the increased SOL inflation would essentially benefit validators at the expense of everyone else. 

Some Solana developers have argued that SIMD-0096 could incentivize priority fee spoofing, or validators artificially raising priority fees to take home more rewards. Still, the change is being implemented.

Solana priority fees totaled some $240 million in January, according to Blockworks Research. Implementing SIMD-0096 would have increased Solana’s real economic value, a Blockworks Research metric for blockchain value accrual, by roughly 22% last month.

A newer proposal, SIMD-0123, would give validators the ability to directly share priority fees with stakers. As things stand, this proposal has little chance of being implemented by the time SIMD-0096 goes into effect, Solana Foundation validator relations lead Tim Garcia said on X. 

Some are calling for the network to only approve both proposals together so that stakers can share in the windfall. If these calls aren’t heeded, then stakers will have to rely on the goodwill of validators passing along extra rewards until SIMD-0123 is enabled.

“[V]alidators are only overcompensated if they do not share back the rewards ([H]elius will share back for example),” Mert Mumtaz, CEO of the largest Solana validator in Helius, said in a text.

Solana infrastructure shop Jito also offers a way to distribute priority fees via TipRouter, a piece of software built for Jito’s restaking protocol that distributes validator rewards.

— Jack Kubinec

P.S. Fill out our short audience survey and help us build a better Lightspeed. Thank you!

Brought to you by:

BONKBets is a fully permissionless sports book built in partnership with Lucky Dragon Tail on Solana.

You can bet with BONK, SOL, or USDC and earn BONKbets Points on every bet, win or lose and get up to 10% cashback on your net losses for the month of February.

Make two $10 bets on any game before March 1 2025 to get a free third $10 bet. Exclusions apply. Not available in all jurisdictions.

Jupiter Perps saw some pretty significant liquidations over the weekend:

This graph from the onchain risk manager Chaos Labs shows the quick rise in liquidations as markets nuked on tariff news. SOL was the hardest hit.

All told, Chaos says its price oracles processed over $600 million in liquidations on Jupiter Perps from Feb. 1-3. The systems all held up. Hopefully the traders are doing alright, too.

— Jack Kubinec

The perks of generality are undeniable — flexibility, wide adoption, broader use cases and a larger developer pool, to name a few. But on the downside, latency tends to increase, transaction ordering becomes chaotic, and high-value trades persistently get stuck behind low-priority spam.

Enter: Atlas, a layer-2 that runs on a custom Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) execution layer while settling on Ethereum. It’s built for verifiable finance, taking Solana’s high-speed architecture and applying it to a chain optimized for market-making, trading and structured financial products.

Atlas devs say the network is engineered for speed, priority transactions and structured data, ensuring instant finality and eliminating delays for high-value trades — without extra developer workarounds. rpcX, its custom data retrieval system, pre-parses blockchain data at the node level, delivering clean JSON for frontends — no extra processing, no wasted cycles. 

Takeaway: Atlas isn’t trying to do everything, it just wants to be right for finance. By refining Solana’s speed and merging it with Ethereum settlement, it’s making a bet that a purpose-built approach will outperform general-purpose blockchains — and its testnet is live now.

— Jeffrey Albus

Permissionless IV is where ideas get stress-tested and shipped. No fluff, no filler — just code, collaboration, and pushing the limits of what’s possible. Whether you’re deep in the weeds of protocol design, launching something new, or breaking shit to make it better, Brooklyn is where it all goes down…

Oh, and if you're a developer joining the hackathon? Your ticket is on us!
Get in the room.

📅 June 22–26 | Brooklyn, NY

A message from Arunkumar Krishnakumar, head of institutional growth at Marinade Finance: