Howdy!

I got around to watching Mountainhead last night. It was fine, but I think Jesse Armstrong’s writing style caters better to the nepo babies of Succession than to tech oligarchs. Rating: 6/10.

Today, we’ve got some pump.fun takes, a bullish week for a small-cap coin, and an ICYMI from Solana land:

Pump.fun may have loftier goals than building an L1

Earlier this week, Blockworks first reported that pump.fun has plans to raise $1 billion at a $4 billion valuation via a token sale. The potential b-nut would add to a likely already sizable war chest for the memecoin launchpad, which has generated over $700 million in revenue since launching last year. Some have speculated that the fresh funds could go toward the rollout of a pump.fun blockchain, which would capture some of the trading fees that currently go to Solana.  

In this week’s Lightspeed podcast roundup, Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz said launching a layer-1 without taking any other swings at growing pump’s business would do little else but increase the business’ take rate, which is another way of saying increase its profit margins. Mumtaz thinks this would be money poorly spent.

“​​Do you think that they would raise a billion dollars if what they cared about was increasing their margins from, let's say, 80% to 85%?,” Mumtaz mused. “If I'm their VC, I'm going to say, ‘What the fuck are you doing? That's extremely boring.’”

Rather, the Solana infrastructure CEO said, pump.fun’s fresh billion could de-risk new moonshot ideas to diversify the core business — which is lucrative but obviously quite captive to the whims of memecoin traders. (In fairness, a world does exist where pump.fun both develops new business lines and grows its margins on a new L1, but we’ll leave that aside for now).

That’s the big question for pump.fun: Can it find a second pitch? Pump could try to take the same path as Jupiter, which went on an acquisition spree, adding a memecoin frontend, NFTs, lending and more after coming to dominate the Solana swap market. 

“Historically what you've seen in crypto M&A is that it has kind of lacked discipline,” Blockworks Research head of research Ryan Connor said on this point. “Seeing what pump does purchase and if it's synergistic to the business is going to be pretty critical.” Connor added that pump may have to deal with significant legal costs if it tries to expand its reach more globally.

If pump.fun tries to internally develop its next big idea, streaming may be the top contender. The platform brought back livestreaming earlier this year after facing content moderation issues in an earlier version. It has tried to create something akin to Twitch with memecoins on this latest iteration, notably onboarding the anonymous trader gainzy, who has gone viral for irreverent rants in between pulls from a vape. 

Whatever it looks like, my podcast guests seemed to think pump.fun’s next move would involve something more inspired than creating yet another L1.

“I think a much more attractive proposition is: ‘Look, we're literally going to redefine how crypto and media interact, right? We're going to look at the entertainment and social aspects of this business and really take big shots and go for the next 10 to 100x,’” Mumtaz said.

— Jack Kubinec

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The Permissionless IV agenda is live. And the people who matter are on it.

• Bryan Pellegrino is making cross-chain composability real at LayerZero.

• Alex Blania is scaling World ID and building onchain access rails.

• Zano Sherwani is deep in the MEV stack, making it usable — not extractive.

• Henri Stern is rewriting how crypto handles identity and UX at the protocol layer.

June 24-26 | Brooklyn, NY

Here’s a somewhat unexpected chart:

ZEX, the native token of the Solana network extension perps project Bullet (formerly Zeta), popped 9% amid a bearish week for most cryptos.

The project shipped its testnet in March, so perhaps the price action reflects some traders’ alpha on a mainnet launch.

— Jack Kubinec

ICYMI — Stories you may have missed from Solana land this week

• Maple Finance returned to Solana with the launch of syrupUSDC, a liquid yield-bearing stablecoin deployed via Chainlink’s CCIP. Backed by $30m in onchain liquidity and $500k in phased incentives, syrupUSDC is now live on Kamino and Orca, with integrations across Kamino's Lend, Multiply and Liquidity products. Within 24 hours, 35m syrupUSDC entered circulation, including 14m in Kamino Multiply alone.

• Raydium announced its LaunchLab Incentive Program to reward both traders and token creators with daily and weekly RAY payouts. The new structure includes a daily trader leaderboard, a weekly 50k RAY raffle that rolls over unclaimed prizes, and ongoing incentives for token creators. Wash trading is penalized using wallet scoring tied to pre-migration volume, giving the rewards program a more merit-based edge.

• Solana Foundation is enforcing new minimum software versions on Testnet to maintain eligibility for its Delegation Program. By Testnet epoch 795, all participating nodes must upgrade to either Agave v2.2.15 or Firedancer v0.503.20214. The move pushes validator nodes to align with the latest performance and security standards, especially as Firedancer advances in public testing.

• Tapestry released the Solana Starter Kit, an open-source template giving developers a plug-and-play stack for building production-ready Solana apps. It includes wallet authentication, social graph infrastructure, portfolio views, token swaps and enterprise-grade RPC. Designed for ease of use and speed, the kit comes pre-wired with API support, a full environment setup and integrated docs.

• Sendaifun similarly introduced the Solana App Kit, a mobile-first development framework for building crypto apps on iOS and Android in “under 15 minutes.” Built on React Native with modular architecture, the kit features plug-and-play integrations with Solana protocols like Jupiter, Raydium and pump.fun, native wallet auth, real-time RPC via Helius, LLM-compatible dev tooling via Cursor and more.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Ben Nadereski, co-founder and CEO of Solstice Labs: