Howdy!

A sign of the times: Kraken announced this morning it will support tokenized equities trading on Solana instead of its own layer-2 blockchain.

Today, we’ve got my reflections from Accelerate, limited Frankendancer uptake, and Canary Capital’s Marinade Solana staking ETF:

Solana Accelerate Day 1: Challenging assumptions

As the Solana community descended on Pier 36 in New York for the Accelerate conference, the feeling in the air was one of reset expectations.

Propositions about Solana’s tech and investment prospects that seemed like consensus just six months ago have now gone out of style. 

For one, there’s the muted impact of Firedancer. The Jump-developed client was once spoken of in quasi-religious terms by Solana fans. The software’s launch was going to let Solana hit one million transactions per second — a nice and round, if meaningless, figure. 

A partial Firedancer implementation called Frankendancer is live but so far has struggled to gain adoption. Just 5% of Solana stake currently runs on the client. Firedancer is launching a stake delegation program similar to what the Solana Foundation offers for Agave, perhaps in hopes of growing its slice of the pie.

Jump’s head of R&D Kevin Bowers gave a talk to kick off Accelerate, but it was overshadowed by a talk from a different client developer: On Monday, Anza’s head of research Roger Wattenhofer gave a talk announcing Alpenglow, a major overhaul of Solana’s consensus protocol that could greatly reduce Solana’s latency. 

In short, some in Solana’s validator community are finding, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, that the client they’ve been dreaming of has been here the whole time in Agave. 

I ran into Anza’s lead economist, Max Resnick, at Accelerate. He said the developer shop had to spend time pruning and ironing out bugs in the original Solana client’s code — longtime readers will remember last April, when it became difficult to land transactions on the network at all — before it could test out more frontier ideas like Alpenglow.

It also used to seem obvious to many in Solana land that ETF approval was going to prove a major tailwind for the asset. That no longer seems to necessarily be the case, as MicroStrategy-like companies make major SOL treasury purchases. 

Some investors made a lot of money by taking a non-consensus bet on SOL following the FTX collapse. Now as the Solana network looks more consensus than before, conventional wisdom within the ecosystem is starting to be turned on its head.

— Jack Kubinec

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In six weeks, the people building crypto’s backbone will be in one place.

Permissionless IV isn’t for panels full of fluff — it’s for engineers, founders and researchers pushing real code, systems and primitives into production.

On stage this June:

• Peter Todd (OpenTimestamps) — building verifiable proof into Bitcoin’s DNA

• Alex Blania (Tools for Humanity) — scaling biometric identity for onchain access

• Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Protocol) — bridging AI x crypto with real infrastructure

Infra, identity, trust, scalability — it’s all on the table.

And the ones driving it? Already booked for Brooklyn.

June 24-26 | Brooklyn, NY

Here’s an interesting chart that doesn’t get talked about much:

A few months ago, I chalked limited Frankendancer adoption up to a lack of ways for validators to capture MEV. But that excuse is a bit of a moot point now that Jito bundles are live on the client.

It’s not entirely clear to me why so few validators are running Frankendancer, but this lack of adoption will be a trend to watch going forward.

— Jack Kubinec

Canary Capital’s proposed Solana ETF crowned Marinade Select as its exclusive staking provider yesterday. Among other things, it marks the first time a US-based ETF includes Solana staking. Marinade Select curates KYC-verified validators, works to ban MEV abuse and runs on SOC 2-compliant infrastructure. It's tailor-fit for compliance-heavy institutional use, in other words. What we end up with is a native, non-custodial staking layer that (presumably) meets Wall Street’s standards at last.

The truth is that Canary’s ETF is a bit of a legal and operational minefield. US regulators demand real-world accountability, anti-MEV guarantees and verifiable validator behavior. By outsourcing the heavy lift of validator selection to a curated, KYC’d set with signed agreements and transparent performance, Canary can offer staking rewards without compromising on trust or control. It’s the first real blueprint for making staking work inside TradFi rails — and if it sticks, it won’t be the last.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Hadley Stern, chief commercial officer at Marinade: