Howdy!

I have been looking forward to receiving a media copy of the Seeker for some time, and man, it did not disappoint. I got to play a game called “Dino with a Gun” and call it work!

Today, we’ve got my Solana Seeker review, a new dark DEX, and Solana’s hottest new lending protocol:

Seeker review: Solana Mobile heard the critics

Shortly after the Solana Saga debuted in 2023, the popular tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, otherwise known as MKBHD, released a video titled “This is a Crypto Phone. Don’t Buy It.” Brownlee complained to his 20 million YouTube subscribers about the Saga’s mediocre specs, high price and overly niche crypto features. 

Brownlee followed that video with another, naming the Solana Saga the biggest smartphone bust of 2023, which caused Solana Labs to joke that it had released an award-winning phone.

In creating the Solana Seeker, Solana Mobile seems to have taken its critics seriously, either reversing course or making significant upgrades on the Saga’s weak points. Overall, Solana Mobile seems to have exorcised its Saga demons to deliver a very solid new phone in the Seeker.

My first impression of the Seeker was how light the phone is. I was unable to determine its exact weight, but the Seeker felt noticeably lighter than my co-worker’s iPhone. This was the first piece of evidence that Solana took its critics seriously, after the Saga was widely panned for being too heavy.

The portability may also be useful because many of the Seeker’s 150,000 putative buyers may use it as a second phone, but that’s by no means an indictment on the Seeker’s quality.

In a soon-to-be-released Lightspeed podcast episode, Solana Mobile general manager Emmett Hollyer told me the phone’s lightness also partly came from a recognition that the Seeker may be widely used as a second phone, so it should be extra portable. And sure, many of the phone’s 150,000 putative buyers will likely use the Seeker as a backup crypto phone, but that’s by no means an indictment on the Seeker’s quality.

In general, the Seeker performs about as well as you could hope for a $500 phone in 2025. The battery life and display are quite solid. The camera is good but not spectacular. The Mediatek Dimensity 7300 chip isn’t top of the line, and the phone did feel a bit hot in my hands after a bout of heavy usage, but the Seeker generally does everything I want it to do without lag or bugs.

Like its predecessor, the Seeker comes with a built-in “seed vault,” which is basically a very secure way to store crypto wallet keys. The phone comes with a native wallet that’s integrated with the seed vault and can be fingerprint-protected, so a thief wouldn’t be able to access it (unless, of course, they stole your finger as well). The wallet has a stocks tab where non-US users can purchase xStocks, a new tokenized stock product on Solana. 

The Seeker has the Google Play store and features the return of the Solana-native dApp Store. The dApp store has expanded notably from 2023, when it featured fewer than two dozen apps. Now the store has well over 100 apps, some of which are only available on the dApp store. Not all dApp Store apps are created equal — the now-defunct Mango Markets has a (seemingly non-functional) app listed, for instance — but Solana Mobile granted some of the best ones primary real estate as featured apps.

Caitlin Cook, who works in growth at one of these featured apps in Moonwalk, stressed that becoming a Seeker launch partner was not a paid partnership, and Solana wanted to organically spotlight the new consumer crypto app. 

“In terms of the process, getting listed on the Solana dApp store was a light lift for us. Since we already had a live Android app, it only took a few quick tweaks. From what I’ve seen more broadly, the Solana Mobile team has done a great job encouraging teams to move beyond browser-based UX and embrace mobile-native experiences in prep for the Seeker launch, and making the process for doing so smooth and painless,” Cook said.

One segment of Seeker buyers may receive the phone with disappointment, however, because after 24 hours of using the phone, crypto token airdrops are still yet to magically appear in my wallet. Airdrops — particularly of BONK tokens — were a major driver of what commercial success the Solana Saga did see, but a core contributor at BONK confirmed to me that the memecoin project does not currently have any Saga-like airdrops planned for Seeker users.

The speculative saving grace for the Seeker may be the forthcoming SKR token, which Solana Mobile vaguely said will flow “directly to builders and users,” per a slide deck shared with Blockworks.

It’s unclear to me whether Solana Mobile will keep releasing phones after the Seeker, or if it will pivot its focus to onboarding more devices to its newly unveiled TEEPIN mobile architecture. But either way, Solana Mobile deserves credit for delivering a serious, grown-up smartphone. Put another way, I don’t see any unwelcome awards in the Seeker’s future.

— 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

Two new entrants in the DEX space are making waves this week:

The first is HumidFi, which cleared about $411m in trading volumes in the last day, second only to Raydium. The second is GoonFi, which processed $6.2m. Both DEXs surfaced sometime around mid-June.

The majority of HumidFi's volumes are coming from SOL-stablecoin pairs, or about 33% of the entire Solana DEX market, per Blockworks Research data.

Both HumidFi and GoonFi are what are referred to as prop AMMs, or dark AMMs (see also Ellipsis Labs’ SolFi). No frontend UI, no marketing, just plugged into a DEX aggregator on the backend smoothly wiring your trades.

They’re called prop AMMs because they’re typically capitalized by a single proprietary market maker. Since capital inventory is internally managed, they can quote materially tighter spreads for users compared to LPs on traditional pooled AMMs that need to provide a fatter liquidity buffer. 

Order flow is routed to them through a DEX aggregator like Jupiter, so users are unaware which DEX venue ultimately executes their swap.

— Donovan Choy

The private beta of Fluid went live on Solana today.

Built in collaboration with Jupiter, Fluid (previously Instadapp) looks to bring the same bundled DEX and money market product that debuted on Ethereum late last year.

Here are two stats that illustrate Fluid’s dominance in the EVM world:

Fluid has generated $16.5b in volumes in the last month, putting it ahead of OG protocols, like Curve and Balancer, which have been in the game for a long time.

For stablecoin swap volumes alone, Fluid has ~50% market share, ahead of Uniswap at 30%.

It’s impressive considering Fluid has only been around a mere nine months. Native Solana DEXs should probably be worried.

— Donovan Choy