Howdy!

White smoke just emerged from the Sistine Chapel to herald a new pope — and in a way, a new edition of Lightspeed.

Today, we’ve got Opening Bell’s launch, Solana taking Ethereum’s stablecoins, and the latest from Marinade:

‘Nasdaq on Solana’ vision sees progress with Opening Bell launch

Superstate, the tokenization startup co-founded by DeFi OG Robert Leshner, announced a new stock tokenization product on Solana and Ethereum this morning.

Named “Opening Bell,” the platform allows companies to natively issue shares onchain — a notable innovation for tokenized public equities. The Solana-focused holding company Sol Strategies became the platform’s first participant.

Many in Solana were quick to celebrate the news, because in its early days, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko would sometimes liken the network to Nasdaq on the blockchain. Today, Yakovenko penned a rare blog post alongside Anza lead economist Max Resnick outlining how Solana’s path to creating a decentralized Nasdaq runs through the implementation of multiple concurrent leaders, where different validators can create blocks at the same time.   

The concept of tokenized stocks isn’t new: I could give you a token in exchange for your Tesla stock, and there it is. Besides potential regulatory red flags, the issue with this kind of thing is that your token would trade in a less liquid environment than the original stock did. If you tried trading it on DEXs, you could get stuck with stale prices compared to what’s available on stock exchanges.

What seems to set Superstate apart is its SEC-registered transfer agent that performs the issuance and redemption of shares or dividends on behalf of companies. Onchain equity issued this way can move around the world more efficiently, and maybe even be used as collateral in DeFi. Users must go through KYC checks before accessing shares on Opening Bell.

Superstate points out another interesting use case: “Up-listing,” where non-public companies can issue shares on a crypto-native market before trying to achieve listing on the Nasdaq or NYSE. In a Telegram message, Leshner told me Superstate can’t make it easier for companies to go public, but he believes that the “up-listing” process will become popular nonetheless. 

To see why this may be the case, consider a hypothetical: Sol Strategies is currently awaiting approval to trade on the Nasdaq. If its shares gin up a lot of interest on Opening Bell, perhaps that could make regulators more assured in approving and investment bankers more excited about underwriting US-based Sol Strategies stock. 

“[We’re] proud to be the first public company working hard to take this step,” Sol Strategies CEO Leah Wald said. “Tokenizing shares is more than a technology upgrade — it’s about aligning with the next generation of market infrastructure and investor expectations.”

— Jack Kubinec

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Solana is stealing stablecoin market share from Ethereum and its L2s:

This chart posted by Volmex CEO Cole Kennelly shows that despite recent gains in Solana stablecoin market capitalization, Ethereum and its L2s remain far ahead.

However, Solana is peeling away market share from EVM land, a trend that has accelerated in 2025.

— Jack Kubinec

Marinade Finance is having a good week. Gone are the days of waiting two days to unlock one’s SOL. The beta launch of Instant Unstake lets users exit native staking instantly, without smart contracts, wrapped tokens or protocol lockups. Though it’s capped beta liquidity per epoch, this'll set a new standard for flexibility in native staking, so says Marinade.

Meanwhile, Marinade governance is heating up, with MIP-11 and MIP-8.1 now open for voting. MIP-11 proposes redirecting 40% of Stake Auction Marketplace (SAM) performance fees to open-market MNDE buybacks, adding long-missing utility and buy pressure to the governance token. At the same time, MIP-8.1 aims to retire Marinade's delayed unstake ticket system in favor of direct stake accounts, with a modest 0.1% fee to protect DAO reserves.

Takeaway: Instant Unstake could erode the need for LSTs in some use cases, especially for users wary of smart contract risk. The shift toward MNDE buybacks could mark a turning point for a governance token that had largely been sidelined. Both MIP-11 and MIP-8.1 sit at a comfortable 99.9% in favor at the time of writing, with less than two hours left to vote.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Max Resnick, lead economist at Anza: