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Howdy!

I just finished rewatching Season 1 of Severance last night. I don’t want to spoil things for the uninitiated, but my roommates and I were yelling at the TV at multiple points throughout the night. Peak television.

Today, we’ve got old ideas for Solana, Moonshot usage, and Solana token verification.

Old ideas find new life on Solana

The Solana X mob was awakened after Avara CEO Stani Kulechov accused the Solana DeFi project Kamino of copying Aave’s tech — on top of having a “half-baked” UI, among other things. 

Kulechov’s remarks set off a round of snipes on Crypto Twitter, but while his Kamino criticism may have been overplayed, his sentiment did touch on a real trend outside of the borrow-lend world. As Solana’s tech matures, some founders are starting new businesses based on old ideas that weren’t formerly feasible.

The chain’s fundamentals — sub-cent transaction fees, thousands of transactions per second, and a year of uninterrupted uptime — have created an environment where concepts that once struggled on other blockchains might now thrive.

“Revisiting things that didn’t work a few years ago is sometimes more valuable than imagining new ones,” Inversion Capital founder Santiago Santos wrote on X this week. 

On a forthcoming episode of the Lightspeed podcast, I asked Santos to name some ideas that deserve a second crack. His answer: crypto gaming and options protocols. Perpetual futures are obviously a successful business, he added, but onchain DeFi options less so.

Another old idea that may be breaking through is social trading, which has been a recurring theme in crypto for years — especially in the form of copy trading. Tensor’s social memecoin trading app Vector is already lapping the annualized revenue from its Solana NFT marketplace.

A couple weeks ago, Tensor’s co-founder told me Vector would succeed where other apps haven’t because of its sleek Robinhood-esque packaging and the inherently social nature of memecoins — for which Solana seems to have an insatiable appetite. 

On the institutional side of things, look at Sol Strategies: Tasked with turning around a flagging crypto holding company, new CEO Leah Wald took an eerily similar approach to the one pioneered for bitcoin by Michael Saylor with Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy). I’ve already predicted a few other MicroStrategy for Solana equivalents will come to market this year. 

Tech history shows that the winners aren’t necessarily the first movers but the best executors. Solana developers believe they’ve built the infrastructure for those second chances to succeed.

“The iPhone would be a perfect example as there were other attempts at smartphones before, but Apple came at the right time, right place,” Titan Exchange CEO Chris Chung said. “Hopefully Solana can provide the groundwork for some revolutionary ideas to take place as well.”

— Jack Kubinec

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Moonshot has a post-TRUMP hangover:

The easy-onboarding trading app was the Trump memecoin team’s go-to, and some cast its sudden ascent up the app store charts as a mass onboarding event for crypto.

But three weeks later, many of those traders haven’t stuck around — at least not on Moonshot. The app saw 4.6 million unique traders on Jan. 19, according to this Dune dashboard. Yesterday, that number was down to 109,000.

— Jack Kubinec

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could instantly tell whether a token or smart contract was actually linked to the brand it claims to represent? That’s the idea behind Solana proposal sRFC-35.

At the moment, there’s no standardized way for companies to prove ownership of a Solana address other than explicitly stating their involvement. But even then, scammers can easily launch lookalike tokens or fake contracts to mislead investors and exploit brand recognition, making it difficult for users and platforms to distinguish what’s real.

sRFC-35 proposes using DNS TXT records, or a solana.txt file hosted on a company’s website, to directly link blockchain addresses to verified domains. The result is that wallets, explorers and token lists would be able to quickly confirm whether a given address is officially associated with the entity it claims.

Takeaway: If this proposal gains traction, it could help clean up Solana’s trust landscape, making impersonation much harder. The key question is whether platforms will adopt it and enforce verification. If they do, it'll give users a seamless way to verify legitimacy without relying so much on gut instinct or endless DYOR.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero: