Howdy!

Congrats to Hyperliquid: Mike Novogratz shilling your product on television is something that can only end well.

Today, we’ve got Jito Foundation’s new head of governance, Ryan Connor on whether we should all Believe, and a Solana news roundup:

Meet Jito Foundation’s new head of governance

Continuing a string of recent hires, Jito Foundation has appointed Nick Almond as its head of governance, Lightspeed has learned exclusively.

An academic by training, Almond comes to Jito following a stint as CEO of the DAO-focused R&D shop Factory Labs. In comments shared with me, Almond said he hopes to steer Jito’s DAO clear of some common pitfalls that have befallen these organizations by “cautiously expanding” what the DAO tries to do.

Jito is Solana’s most important infrastructure project. Its Jito-Solana client, which adds revenue-boosting MEV modifications to the original Solana Labs client, is run by 96% of Solana stake.

Jito has a labs entity, which develops software, and a foundation entity, which tries to grow Jito’s ecosystem of products and oversees the Jito DAO. Both sides have been staffing up recently: Jito Labs brought on veteran DeFi-focused lawyer Rebecca Rettig as its chief legal officer in January, and Jito Foundation made Jane Street veteran Thomas Uhm its chief commercial officer in April. 

The headcount growth likely has something to do with Jito’s central positioning to benefit from Solana’s uptick in network usage. A majority of Solana’s REV, a Blockworks Research metric for value accrual to blockchains, comes from Jito tips that users pay to get transactions included in Solana blocks. 

Jito also boasts perhaps Solana’s most advanced DAO, which has a lucrative revenue source vis-à-vis its 2.7% cut of those Jito tips. To put that in perspective, Jito tips were on pace to total roughly $1.5 billion this year at the end of April. 2.7% of that number would put Jito DAO at roughly $40 million in annual revenue.

Almond said Jito DAO’s “high potential” drew him to the role. I asked him about the favored governance mechanism among Solana governance nerds in futarchy, which he said still needs to “prove itself as an effective decision-making mechanism.”

Probably the first question Almond will need to answer in his new role will surround value accrual for the JTO token, which Jito launched in 2023 but does not yet directly benefit from Jito revenue. Almond moderated multiple live streams on JTO’s tokenomics before joining Jito Foundation.

“Fee switches, yield boosting mechanisms and buybacks have all been discussed heavily,” Almond said. “It’s going to be up to the DAO which direction we take very soon. I’d like to see one of and potentially more of the above all implemented as quickly as possible.”

— 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

I brought Blockworks Research head of research Ryan Connor on the pod to chat about Believe, the new token launchpad that is either the next phase of online capital formation or a class action lawyer’s dream — depending on how you look at it.

We chat about the new launchpad’s sudden ascent, whether the developer funding focus is illegal/unethical/all of the above, and what Believe illustrates about crypto consumer behavior.

— Jack Kubinec

• Lyft is now a customer of Bee Maps, the Solana-powered mapping service built atop Hivemapper's decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN). The company is looking to sharpen its mapping capabilities and accelerate its push toward autonomy by tapping into Bee Maps' crowdsourced, real-time street-level data. The partnership bears out the growing shift from static, top-down maps to live, community-fed spatial intelligence.

• BONK partnered with Nasdaq-listed DeFi Dev Corp to launch Solana's first validator run jointly by a memecoin and a public company. DeFi Dev Corp will operate the node, sharing validator rewards with BONK while boosting its own SOL-per-share metric. For BONK, the move strengthens BONKSOL adoption and validator coverage, opening a path for memecoins to play more of a role in decentralized infrastructure.

• Poof has launched its vibe coding open beta, letting anyone spin up Solana apps with nothing but a text prompt — no code required. Examples so far include tipping chatrooms, token launchpads and games that reward you in SOL. We've seen a few of these frontends that turn natural language into live dapps, complete with contracts. This one's really gaining some traction this week, though.

• Phantom created PSOL, its own Liquid Staking Token (LST) for Solana, allowing users to earn staking rewards without giving up liquidity. With a few taps, directly from within the wallet, anyone can mint PSOL and start earning. Looks to be unavailable to UK users for now, though, FYI.

• VanEck introduced $VBILL, its first tokenized US Treasury fund, bringing short-term Treasurys onchain across Solana, Ethereum, Avalanche and BNB Chain. Built with Securitize and made interoperable by Wormhole, VBILL gives institutions access to 24/7 USDC-based subscriptions and real-time settlement via Agora's AUSD. Assets are custodied by State Street with pricing powered by RedStone oracles.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Brian Smith, executive director of the Jito Foundation: