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Howdy!

Pump.fun just announced an overhaul to its mobile app, which gave a small indication as to the app’s future growth plans, a frequent topic of discussion in this newsletter.

Today, we’ve got some post-Permissionless thoughts, Frankendancer performance, and an ICYMI from this week in Solana:

4 Solana thoughts after Permissionless IV

Blockworks’ Permissionless conference wrapped up last night in Brooklyn. The event was held in Industry City, a repurposed cluster of old shipping and manufacturing warehouses. Each of the parallel structures seemed to have their own people, energy, and topics of conversation inside, and my thoughts following the conference are similarly disjunct. It’s hard to nail down an overall “vibe” from Permissionless, but I was left with a few strong (if random) impressions.

In honor of the fourth Permissionless, here are four loosely Solana-related thoughts following the conference:

1. Crypto builders think the tech is ready for prime time

In a live Lightspeed podcast episode recorded at the conference, Inversion Capital founder Santiago Roel Santos had this to say: “If you hear anyone in this conference say that the UI/UX in crypto is worse than Web2, run away. That’s a scammer that doesn’t know [what] he’s talking about. He probably hasn’t used a crypto product … I would go so far as saying the UI/UX in crypto is smoother.” 

Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz added that crypto infrastructure has reached the level of “true enterprise consumer” apps in the past six months.

If the tech is so great, the question then becomes why crypto is yet to have its ChatGPT or iPhone-level breakthrough. My guests on the podcast had some thoughts — and I’m sure executives at Robinhood and Stripe do, too. 

2. Traditional tech and finance want in

Speaking of Robinhood and Stripe, I heard whispers that the crypto M&A market is still active behind the scenes. Basically, some traditional firms seem to be looking at Stripe’s acquisitions of Bridge and Privy — as well as the number of other crypto deals that have happened this year — and feeling FOMO.

The problem is, there isn’t exactly an endless supply of attractive crypto firms there for the taking. 

The scarcity shows in the price tags on these deals. Coinbase dropped $2.9 billion on Deribit. It’s unknown how much Stripe just spent on wallet infrastructure provider Privy, but it probably didn’t come cheap — and follows Stripe’s earlier $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge.

We’ll have to wait and see how much, if any, of this inbound M&A happens in Solana land. It’s been pretty quiet on that front since Backpack shelled out for FTX EU.

3. Solana’s power center is shifting

By all accounts, there wasn’t a whole lot happening on Solana in the post-FTX doldrums. A few core teams stuck out the bear market, and it wasn’t a particularly competitive environment. Solana teams will talk today about bonding through those difficult months.

Today, that narrative has flipped, and a couple people I spoke to had the sense that the Solana Foundation is playing a less active role than it once did and letting the competitive environment play out instead.

One emerging giant seems to be Jupiter, which still accounts for over 80% of aggregator volume on Solana. It owns the space where most users are actually performing swaps, and Jupiter also has Solana’s most-used perps platform. Add to that a new lending product, and Jupiter seems to have a lot of pull.

4. DeFi needs a lot of work

Some very honest conversations are happening about the state of DeFi. Last week, I hosted Max Resnick, lead economist at the Solana developer shop Anza, on Lightspeed. We discussed how Solana’s technical plumbing can make key functions like tight price spreads unprofitable. Resnick thinks multiple concurrent leaders as well as the recent trend of proprietary DEXs can help fix this.

At Permissionless, I caught up with Eugene Chen, the co-founder of Ellipsis Labs, which is building one such prop DEX. He and I spoke about how a lot of Solana’s current order flow is toxic, or bad for users.

There doesn’t seem to be a consensus opinion on how exactly Solana’s market structure should evolve over time, but for those discouraged by a lack of candid discussion in some parts of the industry about crypto’s shortcomings, the conversations surrounding Solana’s flaws are a promising sign.

— Jack Kubinec

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More data on Frankendancer:

Kairos Research co-founder Ian Unsworth charted out his validator’s performance — measured by compute units per block — against the average across all validators. 

As you can see, the Kairos validator started to noticeably outperform other validators a few epochs ago — which was right when it switched from Agave to Frankendancer. Unsworth also noted that Kairos upgraded its hardware before it began running Frankendancer, so the outperformance is also machine-related.

— Jack Kubinec

• The US Federal Reserve is removing “reputational risk” from its bank exam manuals. By replacing subjective reputation metrics with explicit financial risk assessments, the Fed, alongside the OCC and FDIC, is working to reduce de-banking friction for digital asset firms. While banks can still weigh reputational factors internally, this marks a regulatory shift toward clarity, neutrality, and consistent treatment of crypto within the US banking framework.

• MagicBlock dropped Magicnet, the next phase in its mission to bring real-time performance to Solana through ephemeral rollups and ultra-low-latency runtimes. After months of quietly powering whitelisted projects with sub-50ms response times, MagicBlock has now opened integration to all builders. The project introduces self-serve access and third-party nodes, preparing the ecosystem for a fully permissionless validator set. And FYI, all the galaxy brain stuff aside, more projects need to launch using reskinned vintage cereal commercials. Amazing.

• Grass revealed Grasshopper, its first hardware device for the Solana-based Grass Network. The plug-and-play device is said to passively share unused internet to help route traffic and gather public web data, strengthening the decentralized network while staying online 24/7. With limited supply and growing demand for bandwidth-based protocols, Grasshopper positions itself as both an on-ramp to passive income and a building block for the future of decentralized infrastructure.

• Marinade Finance is going on the offensive against sandwiching validators with a revamped strategy that includes bond slashing, reputation gating, and systemic deterrents. Sparked by GhostLogs and Hanabi's deep-dive into predatory MEV, Marinade is now making malicious validators pay for the cost of their own removal from SAM (Stake Auction Marketplace). A new reputation system will also throttle initial stake allocations, giving ethical validators a fairer shot and building a cleaner path to sustainable yield.

• SOL Strategies introduced its Strategic Ecosystem Reserve with a debut acquisition of 52K+ JTO tokens. The team, already running over 3.7M SOL across validators like Laine, Orangefin, and Cogent, has begun channeling validator revenue into direct support for ecosystem-critical projects — starting with Jito's MEV and staking innovations.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Max Kaplan, chief technology officer at Sol Strategies: