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Welcome back to Lightspeed, the newsletter for Solana insights and analysis your Valentine’s Day date will definitely want to hear about.

Today, we’ve got pump.fun’s mobile app, SOL burn, and a weekly news roundup.

Pump.fun releases mobile app

Solana is in love with memecoins, and it just got a Valentine’s Day gift.

The Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun released a mobile app this morning, representing the viral platform’s first major update since it disabled livestreams in November. It’s further confirmation that apps users can play with on their phones are becoming table stakes for crypto projects, roughly a month after Donald Trump embraced a mobile memecoin app for his token launch.

Perhaps true to form for a platform initially dubbed 4chan for memecoins, pump.fun mobile is a bit rough around the edges. The app’s onboarding process is quite smooth — I entered my email, and pump created a crypto wallet for me, courtesy of Privy — but I found it hard to land transactions without manually adjusting my priority fee and slippage. 

By the time I got my transaction through on a dog-themed Valentine’s Day memecoin, early buyers had already nuked the chart to go invest in fresher tokens, and I was left holding a big bag of worthless dogwifrose.

The app’s early users seem to be facing some of the same struggles. Pump.fun has a 2.5 star rating on Apple’s App Store and a 2.1 star rating on the Google Play Store (as a note, many of these reviews came before today’s public launch). 

“Is it my internet or [is] the pumpfun app kinda slow,” one user asked on X. 

Pump.fun going mobile doesn’t seem to be driving much new usage on day one. The platform has seen 27,000 token launches today, according to a Dune dashboard, which is currently down from a range of 48,000-54,000 daily token launches earlier this week. 

Still, a mobile app is a longer-term play, and longtime readers of Lightspeed know that we have learned better than to bet against pump.fun’s continued success. A little more than a year after first launching, the platform has generated around $548 million in revenue. 

My gut tells me that to take the mantle from Moonshot — the Trump-favored and Jupiter-owned mobile memecoin app — pump.fun will have to fix the mobile transaction landing woes, even if that means giving users slightly worse prices. Retail users hoping to hit a 100x trade likely wouldn’t be too rankled by a few extra percentage points of slippage if that means their transactions are actually making it to the blockchain.

— Jack Kubinec

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So long, ultrasound Solana:

Solana was burning quite a bit of SOL during the post-election memecoin trading frenzy. That’s because 50% of optional priority fees users paid to try getting their transactions to land were burned.

Under SIMD-0096, priority fees are no longer burned, meaning Solana will be a bit more inflationary. ETH is still ultrasound (if also ultra-unimpressive price-wise) money.

— Jack Kubinec

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

• The SEC is now engaging with staking in ETPs, with Jito Labs and Multicoin Capital sitting down with regulators to discuss how it could work. The focus has long been on getting these products approved at all, so staking has only been a limited part of the conversation until now. Whether this leads to a real framework or just more regulatory limbo remains to be seen.

• Franklin Templeton is making moves on Solana, expanding its $295m tokenized money market fund (FOBXX) to the chain, launching BENJI on Solana and filing for a Franklin Solana Trust in Delaware — the same setup that preceded recent ETF filings. The firm, managing over $1.6 trillion, is signaling deeper blockchain integration, and Solana is now firmly in its playbook.

• Doodles, the Ethereum-based NFT mainstay, is diving into memecoins with $DOOD, choosing Solana as its playground. This shift feels like a full 180 from its McDonald's and Adidas era — maybe a sign it’s trying to get back to its roots. Is this a genius move or just another brand stretching itself thin for a trend?

• Aethir, a decentralized GPU-as-a-service provider, is expanding to Solana, integrating its cloud infrastructure with the network's high-speed ecosystem. You'll never hear a complaint from me about bringing more utility onchain. The move could offer scalable GPU power for AI, gaming, RWA and DeFi, aligning with Solana’s push into high-performance computing.

• Sendaifun has launched Create Solana Agent (CSA), an open-source CLI tool that lets developers build ChatGPT-style AI interfaces for more than 50 Solana actions. Powered by Langchain, Claude and Solana Agent Kit, CSA is designed for automating blockchain interactions — handling everything from DeFi ops to token transactions. Solana development has never been more accessible.

— Jeffrey Albus

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