_{Brought to you by:}

Howdy!

It’s a historic day for Lightspeed as we’re delivering this newsletter at 4:00 pm ET for the first time ever. I know change can be scary, but we’ll make it through this together.

Today, we have a short edition featuring a Solana stablecoin startup and the legal fallout from Caitlyn Jenner’s memecoin catastrophe:

Meet Perena

When I talk to Solana ecosystem people, I’ll sometimes ask what new projects they’ve been hearing about. One such project that’s been catching apparent buzz is Perena, a stablecoin infrastructure protocol.

Perena is built on the premise that as stablecoins proliferate, liquidity could fragment, and stablecoins aren’t useful if they aren’t liquid. The platform offers a Solana-based stablecoin liquidity pool, and it plans to offer an asset-backed stablecoin in the future.

The project was founded by Anna Yuan, who started the Solana Foundation’s stablecoin arm during her two plus years at the non-profit. While working at the foundation, Yuan began to see that new stablecoin issuers would mint a lot of tokens but would have limited integrations, and users consequently weren’t able to benefit from stablecoins in the real world. 

She cited Ondo as an example — the tokenized US Treasury stablecoin has over $100 million in supply but only 3,500 holders, according to SolScan.

I asked Yuan about the commonly cited claim in crypto that stablecoins have pulled off the difficult task of finding product-market fit, or satisfying the needs of an existing market.

“I don’t agree,” Yuan said, adding that liquidity begets PMF, and most stablecoins simply aren’t liquid enough to be useful. She added that the real-world need for things like money transfers in emerging markets will help stablecoins “get there.”

Perena is currently in closed beta, but the platform’s main feature will initially be a multi-stablecoin liquidity pool which uses a liquidity provider token called USD* that represents a piece of a seed pool containing Tether, Circle, and PayPal USD. In simpler terms, the liquidity pool model should make it easier to issue stablecoins, since smaller coins can access the liquidity from the well-capitalized seed pool.

The concept has raised to-be-announced seed funds, and Yuan’s deep links in Solana helped her tap into the ecosystem’s very-active angel investor community. Yuan said she decided to start raising funds on a Thursday, and by late Friday, she already had a couple dozen angel investors on board. Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal are both noteworthy backers. 

At the end of our call, Yuan and I got chatting about how Solana’s stablecoin market capitalization can meaningfully grow. The network currently accounts for just 2% of all stables, according to DeFiLlama.

Yuan gave an interesting answer: Solana PayFi could grow the economy for people taking their paycheck in stablecoins. She estimated 2,000 people currently take their full-time salary in Solana stablecoins. That number could certainly get a lot bigger.

— Jack Kubinec

Brought to you by:

Renaud Partners is the premier go-to-market consulting firm for early-stage Solana teams.

We’ve been deeply involved in the community since 2021, supporting some of the best known projects in the ecosystem.

We help teams with their go-to-market, brand positioning, social and PR, and fundraising strategy.

We also work across other ecosystems including Monad, Base and TON.

If you're a team looking to expedite your marketing success, let’s talk: [email protected] or @rockin_renaud on telegram.

Caitlyn Jenner is being sued for securities fraud. In a filing on Wednesday, investors alleged that her memecoin, JENNER, was deceptively marketed and mishandled, leading to significant investor losses. When Jenner launched her memecoin project on Solana back in May with a tweet proclaiming, “It’s not a scam,” the coin quickly climbed to a $43 million market cap. Optimism surrounding the asset didn’t last long, however.

Shortly thereafter, Jenner publicly denounced her adviser, Sahil Arora — an alleged serial memecoin scammer believed to have orchestrated a number of shady celebrity token deals. Claiming she had been “scammed BIG TIME,” Jenner pivoted to a new version of JENNER — this time on Ethereum. The move added to the confusion, as the original Solana-based token continued to lose value while the influencer briefly promoted both iterations.

Six months later, the resulting fallout has materialized into a class-action lawsuit. The plaintiffs argue that JENNER functioned as an unregistered security and that Jenner’s social media hype — framing the token as an investment opportunity — was both misleading and manipulative.

For many on crypto twitter, the consequences seem inevitable. @andrealabate quipped, "$JENNER investors realizing they didn’t just buy the dip… they bought the lawsuit." Others, like @Devan86559, believe it may be a necessary turning point, stating: “Honestly, it’s about time influencers face accountability.” @LumosLeap noted, “The line between legit and risky coins is getting blurrier. This could be the start of a big shift in how crypto is marketed,” while @jahman0217 opined “Maybe now we'll see stricter rules on promoting these coins.” User @jessecogo chimed in with a victory lap: “I wrote in July [that] lawyers said this would happen, and Iggy Azalea—whose token is down 65%—dragged me for it.”

As Caitlyn Jenner faces mounting legal scrutiny, the case raises broader questions about the regulation of celebrity-endorsed crypto projects and the responsibilities influencers bear when promoting speculative assets. Whatever the outcome, it may set a precedent for how memecoins and their backers are treated under securities law moving forward.

— Jeffrey Albus

Brought to you by:

Renaud Partners is the premier go-to-market consulting firm for early-stage Solana teams.

We’ve been deeply involved in the community since 2021, supporting some of the best known projects in the ecosystem.

We help teams with their go-to-market, brand positioning, social and PR, and fundraising strategy.

We also work across other ecosystems including Monad, Base and TON.

If you're a team looking to expedite your marketing success, let’s talk: [email protected] or @rockin_renaud on telegram.