Howdy!

Please extend a warm Lightspeed welcome to Donovan Choy, who is joining us as a writer after a fruitful several months with the 0xResearch newsletter. Expect to see his byline a lot more in this newsletter from now on!

Today, we’ve got exclusive Phantom acquisition news, Base passing Solana in memecoin token creation, and GEOD burn:

Phantom acquires Solana trading terminal Solsniper

Phantom has acquired the Solana trading and analytics platform Solsniper, Blockworks has learned exclusively. Phantom declined to disclose the deal terms.

Solsniper is one of a raft of platforms that provide advanced features and tracking tools for memecoin traders. Solsniper’s web app will continue to operate as a standalone platform, and Solsniper’s team, led by co-founder and CEO Max Zhuang, will join Phantom.

While Phantom cut its teeth as a crypto wallet, the acquisition perhaps signals the well-funded platform’s plans to deepen its trading capabilities, especially after Phantom began offering perpetual futures trading by way of Hyperliquid.

Solana’s memecoin craze has been lucrative for token creation platforms like Pump.fun and LetsBonk, but it has also been quite profitable for the picks and shovels that facilitate the discovery, tracking and trading of those memecoins.

DEX Screener, which offers popular trending token lists, made $2.9 million in the past month just by charging memecoin projects to update their token information, Solana onchain analyst adam_tehc noted recently.

Over time, popular trading venues have begun integrating these picks and shovels-like services. Jupiter and Pump.fun both offer in-house trading terminals. With the Solsniper acquisition, Phantom may be poised to do the same, although it has not yet made announcements on that front.

“We see a wide variety of experience levels in crypto today, from new folks to professional traders. This acquisition helps Phantom provide more advanced tools that grow with the user’s expertise. Solsniper has done a great job of building a platform, and we’re excited to bring Phantom’s distribution and infrastructure into the product,” Phantom head of corporate development Joe Wadcan said.

Sweetening the deal further, Solsniper also offers a Telegram trading bot, which is a popular product among some memecoin traders.

Picks and shovels may be valuable to trading platforms because value often flows to the venues and platforms where users actually are. This is why memecoin industry watchers tend to be bullish on Axiom, which is attempting to win end users while staying agnostic to specific networks or platforms.

By acquiring Solsniper, Phantom could take a segment of its users who currently leave the wallet app to go track, trade, or discover memecoins somewhere else and bring them back in-platform. 

Phantom’s acquisition plans likely will not end with Solsniper.

“As we build the next evolution of Phantom, we expect to aggressively pursue acquisitions to expand our product surface area and build the leading consumer finance platform,” Phantom co-founder and CEO Brandon Millman said in a blog post.

— Jack Kubinec

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Institutional DeFi has crossed the chasm from dream to reality and Ethena is leading the charge. $USDe has seen a $3.1B inflow over the last 3 weeks, outpacing all Bitcoin ETFs combined.

Guy Young joins the DAS: London lineup this Oct 13-15 to break down the value proposition of institutional DeFi.

Get your ticket today with promo code: LIGHT100 for £100 off

📅 October 13-15 | London

Solana vs. Base memecoins:

For the first week ever since March 2024, Solana’s share of memecoin tokens created fell lower than Base’s. About 191k tokens were created on Solana, against 333k on Base — largely thanks to the recent surge of Zora.

In absolute terms, though, weekly tokens created on Solana still remain relatively consistent around the 200k mark, suggesting that trader activity on Base may be largely net, new incremental demand rather than a shift from Solana.

Moreover, Solana’s memecoin trading volume is still much larger — about $5.4b weekly against a mere $182m on Base.

— Donovan Choy

When you’re exploring a new city as a tourist, centimeter-level GPS precision isn’t necessary. But if you’re a real estate developer mapping construction land, a farmer watering crops, or Waymo finetuning your autonomous driving routes, then centimeter-level accuracy is essential. That’s where real-time kinematic (RTK) networks come in.

Delivering that precision is GEODNET, a RTK network on Solana and one of DePIN’s rare successes. The GEOD token was originally launched on Polygon but bridged to Solana via Wormhole in October 2024. 

GEOD is seeing a surge in burn rate — about 1.7m GEOD ($249k) burned in the last month, per Blockworks Research data.

The above chart shows the burn rate representing about 51% of new GEOD issuance in the last week. Assuming $4m ARRs, that’s a hefty 74% of revenues being funneled into a token buyback and burn program.

— Donovan Choy

A message from Joe Wadcan, head of corporate development at Phantom: