Howdy!

I was going to joke that Solana’s Believe app is just a repackaging of the widely-decried Zora and “coin everything” trend on Base, but on further review, Believe is a bit different. I’m tough but fair.

Today, we’ve got a market update, $NOODLE’s rise and fall, and this Believe app everyone’s talking about:

Midweek Markets: Solana’s boot and rally

What a beautiful Wednesday. The sun is shining, the flowers are in bloom, and SOL (for a moment at least) was back above $180. How sweet it is.

After lagging behind its own fundamentals for months, Solana’s markets are finally playing catch-up. We've had a roughly 21% rally so far this week, with the asset reclaiming territory not seen since Q1, following a sudden spike in retail risk appetite.

Solana's total value locked (TVL) is up 52% month over month, now at $9.5b — about 23% short of its all-time high.

Data from deBridge shows that about $27.9m has moved from Ethereum to Solana in the past seven days, while $29.1m moved in the opposite direction. In other words, Solana posted net bridge outflows to Ethereum of roughly $1.2m over the week.

Of the arriving capital, though, much is landing in the throes of a memecoin supercycle that's retaken Solana's DEX ecosystem. $MOODENG is up 562%, $GOAT 190%, and $PNUT 158% on the week. DEX volume hit $9.8b on Sunday, the highest in three months, with memecoin trades accounting for ~30%. Interestingly, yesterday marked the first time that tokens launched via pump.fun accounted for less than half of launchpad-sourced memecoin volumes on Solana. Could this signal the start of a true “launchpad war” on the network, with challengers like BonkFun and Believe finally breaking through?

While Jupiter, Solana's flagship aggregator, had spiked to over 72% of all aggregator volume as recently as Monday, its share has since settled to around 55.5% at the time of publication. That's still more than 1inch, CowSwap, and OKX DEX combined.

But how much of that action is driven by bots? Photon, BullX, and Trojan alone have generated over $750m in revenue across Solana's DEXs, with full bot revenue over $1.03b. Memecoin pumps drive LP demand. LPs boost TVL. TVL boosts protocol rankings and surface area for trading. Bots swarm, DEX metrics rise and Solana appears super duper busy, even if little net-new capital is arriving.

This all works beautifully, until it doesn't.

But let's not catastrophize too heavily over inevitable(?) future nosedives. We're back in the good ol' days for now, with fee revenue rising (+108% over 30 days), aggregator usage off the charts, and ecosystem apps like Raydium, Jito, and Kamino nearing or surpassing local highs. Even amid falling stablecoin supply, internal network velocity has more than compensated.

Zooming out, the goings-on at macro aren't exactly hostile either. The S&P 500 has rebounded sharply since April and is now trading just under 5,900, buoyed by cooling inflation and renewed optimism over US-China trade dynamics. The dollar, meanwhile, has softened following lower-than-expected CPI data, easing pressure on risk assets. Bitcoin is holding above $103k, just 4.9% short of its all-time high.

Bottom line? Treasure these moments, friend. It's a rare week where equities, crypto and the broadest of macro sentiment all lean in the same direction.

— Jeffrey Albus

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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

Faux-equity in startups that trades like memecoins. What could go wrong!

App builder Alex Leiman on Monday deployed the NOODLE token on Believe, a buzzy utility-focused launchpad.

The token serves as a kind of bet on the virality of noodle.gg, a kind of slither.io clone that involves crypto. NOODLE quickly shot up to nearly $20 million in market capitalization but now is trading under $5 million.

— Jack Kubinec

Solana’s memecoin trenches have been reinvigorated this week due to the popularity of Believe, a rebrand of the former SocialFi app known as Clout. 

Solana’s daily REV, or fees and tips generated from trading demand, yesterday reached its highest point since February. 

Believe is an X-based memecoin launchpad. What differentiates it from, say, pump.fun is that Believe has its own app that only lists tokens launched by startup, app or project founders. 

Some popular examples on the app currently are Dupe, an online furniture shopping company, and CreatorBuddy, an AI with access to users’ social media content history. Anyone can buy these tokens and theoretically gain access to the upside of the underlying projects. 

Some are praising the app as a way for builders to access capital while sidestepping VCs, while others warn that founders may want to count the cost before courting memecoiners for a venture-like investment. 

This all sounds very ICO boom-y to me, but I guess there’s an argument to be made that Believe could help fund memecoin-like apps. The vibe coding era will make app or business creation much quicker, and memecoins could be a way to see which ideas resonate with the market. Still, as we saw with JELLYJELLY, buyer beware.

— Jack Kubinec

A message from Joseph Onorati, CEO of DeFi Development Corp.: