Howdy!

Time to pack up the laptop and sail off into Memorial Day weekend, folks. Abosh!

But first, we’ve got some thoughts on DePIN tokenomics, a limited TRUMP dump, and an ICYMI from this week:

Pipe Network aims to be ‘ruthless’ about tokenomics

I hosted Permissionless Labs CEO David Rhodus on the Lightspeed podcast this week, and he gave me an overview of Pipe Network, the company’s forthcoming content delivery network (CDN) that’s being built on Solana. 

His pitch made some intuitive sense: CDNs — which temporarily store online content on servers around the world to get closer to end-users — haven’t seen much innovation in 25 years. Pipe could let content be stored even closer to users, which would make their content load faster. 

But outside of the product itself, what made an impression on me was the disciplined approach Rhodus described for his DePIN project. 

Rhodus said Pipe will be “ruthless” about tokenomics. 

“We’re emitting tokens when useful work is done,” Rhodus said. “While we want a lot of nodes, we also want to coordinate them into areas that customers will find useful.” This could look like focusing on business deals where Pipe supplements existing CDN infrastructure in low-performing areas and presumably uses its token to incentivize node operation in those areas.

DePIN is hailed as one of Solana’s most useful business sectors, but the bottom line has proven tricky for these companies so far. 

Businesses like Helium and Hivemapper promise to wrest power from legacy infrastructure providers and give control to everyday people, but noble as that goal may be, the economics don't always make a ton of sense. 

A Messari report from the end of 2024 found that 350 DePIN tokens had a collective $50 billion in market capitalization. However, this class of startups has struggled to find mass market adoption and justify that collective valuation. 

That’s partly why Rhodus advised potential founders to “go as long as possible” before adding crypto elements to a business.

“Don't focus on crypto at all until you've got users and revenue,” Rhodus said.

The days of simply plugging in some kind of mining device and getting lucrative token rewards regardless of a node’s value to the larger network may need to end if the DePIN sector is going to mature past hype and create sustainable businesses.

— Jack Kubinec

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In six weeks, the people building crypto’s backbone will be in one place.

Permissionless IV isn’t for panels full of fluff — it’s for engineers, founders and researchers pushing real code, systems and primitives into production.

On stage this June:

• Peter Todd (OpenTimestamps) — building verifiable proof into Bitcoin’s DNA

• Alex Blania (Tools for Humanity) — scaling biometric identity for onchain access

• Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Protocol) — bridging AI x crypto with real infrastructure

Infra, identity, trust, scalability — it’s all on the table.

And the ones driving it? Already booked for Brooklyn.

June 24-26 | Brooklyn, NY

The TRUMP dinner came and went without much intrigue, and some investors sold off their tokens.

TRUMP is down 15.1% over the past 24 hours. That’s not ideal for holders, but the token is a long way from wiping out its post-Trump dinner announcement gains.

Now that we know Trump is willing to take action on behalf of this token, the bigger risk becomes the significant amount of the supply his team could sell at any time.

— Jack Kubinec

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

• Farcaster has now integrated Solana, bringing native wallet support, instant token swaps and Mini App functionality into its social layer. This is a turning point for consumer apps on Solana, making smoother onboarding, native wallets and social context-driven token discovery the new default. 

• Doodles is set to launch a new protocol on Solana called DreamNet this summer. According to the team, it will allow fans to co-create story worlds using AI agents. 

• Lumo Labs dropped LumoKit v1.0.0, calling it the fastest open-source Python AI toolkit for Solana. It's backed by massive model and dataset releases, including the 70B-parameter Lumo-70B-Instruct and the 95k+ QA-pair Lumo-Novel-DS-Instruct. It includes native support for Ollama and Hugging Face.

• Gavel launched on Solana, offering teams a sniper-and-sandwich-resistant way to raise capital and launch tokens entirely onchain. Built by Ellipsis Labs, the mechanism includes a fair public sale with equal pricing for all participants, followed by a transient AMM that bootstraps liquidity without exposing users to MEV attacks. 

• Solana Mobile teased TEEPIN, a decentralized architecture combining secure hardware, platform verification and a Guardian network to power the next generation of Web3 phones. Solana Mobile also announced SKR, a native asset for its open mobile ecosystem, and an Aug. 4 shipping date for the Seeker device.

• Centrifuge has brought tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) to Solana with full DeFi composability. Its deRWA tokens — starting with deJTRSY (short-term US Treasurys) — are freely tradable, yield-bearing and now live across Raydium, Kamino and Lulo.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Kash Dhanda, cat herder at Jupiter: