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Howdy!

Shameless plug: Katherine Ross and I were locked in over the past few days and published a pretty interesting inside scoop on what’s happening over at Movement Labs. If you have more tips/information about Movement, here’s my Signal.

Today, we’ve got a midweek market update, Raydium’s gross profit, and my notebook from Solana Institutional Day:

Midweek markets: SOL surges, ETH lags

Solana looks surprisingly bullish, considering the broader crypto market continues to flirt with bearish stagnation. 

We've seen SOL surge around 30% compared to the US dollar over the past seven days (and up 20% against ETH, reaching its highest-ever weekly close on the SOL/ETH pair). Solana also just reclaimed the #1 spot in seven-day DEX volume, edging out Ethereum with a peak near $130b.

That's the highest we've seen since early January. And yet, network fees have plunged 97% since the start of the year, and total DEX volume is down 93% from Q1 highs. Paradoxical at a glance, perhaps, but easily explained by one word: compression.

Solana's network throughput remains unmatched, but thanks to the fee market rollback, that scale doesn't translate to protocol revenue. In fact, Network REV (transaction fees + tips) has flatlined at sub-$50m weekly levels after peaking above $200m in January. This disconnect between usage and earnings may limit sustainable economic value for validators (unless we rebalance staking dynamics or fee incentives.)

However, we've seen a modest rebound on the application revenue side — especially from DePIN and DeFi. Total transaction activity also remains robust, hovering near 585 million weekly transactions.

Stablecoins are also a big deal this week. Circle minted another $250m USDC on Solana, pushing the total monthly transfer volume of stables above $12b. That's yet another all-time high. This trend suggests folks increasingly view Solana as the rails for dollar-based settlement, even with markets looking bearish.

And unlike previous cycles, this stablecoin growth appears sticky. The supply curve has steepened without the volatility-driven reversals seen on other chains.

We also have a pretty hefty milestone today, as we mark the launch of multiple spot Solana ETFs in Canada, approved by the OSC. These funds include staking and will offer yield exposure to institutions for the first time. While early US-based futures ETFs like SOLZ saw tepid demand (~$5m AUM), Canada's move could be different.

The Canadian ETFs arrive during a moment of broader macro uncertainty. Coinbase's institutional report warns of a crypto winter and weak VC inflows but maintains that a Q3 rebound is likely. In that light, Solana's performance may reflect early positioning for the next leg rather than a frothy overextension.

While BTC trades sideways around $85k amid ETF outflows and macro jitters, Solana is showing signs of narrative independence. At the time of publication, the price of SOL hovers around $127.70, a 24% rise over the past week.

— Jeffrey Albus

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Zenrock is a permissionless, decentralized custody network backed by 1RoundTable Partners, 10T, Maven11, and Spartan.

Live on Jupiter, $ROCK is the native token for transactions within the Zenrock ecosystem and secures Zenrock’s decentralized custody network. The first application launching on Zenrock is zenBTC — yield-bearing Bitcoin on Solana.

zenBTC will be live in April 2025.

Raydium released its pump.fun clone LaunchLab today, and it will hope the new product can help turn around its gross profit figures:

Here are Raydium’s five worst weeks profit-wise since the beginning of 2024: April 7-13, 2025; September 2-8, 2024; February 19-25, 2024; March 31-April 6, 2025; and June 10-16, 2024. 

The attentive reader will note that the past two weeks both ranked in Raydium’s top five worst weeks over that time span. Here’s to hoping folks keep clicking, I guess.

— Jack Kubinec

Sights and sounds from Solana Institutional Day

Yesterday, I grabbed some Caprese sandwiches and La Croix and settled in for Solana Institutional Day at the blockchain foundation’s New York City office.

The event had many of the usual suspects: Christine Moy, head of digital assets at Apollo Global Management, spoke, as did Jito’s new chief legal officer Rebecca Rettig. From what I saw, there was a general hope that institutional interest in crypto could finally morph into something more significant than a marketing play.

“I hope the next two years are where we catch our velocity and really make this work,” Moy said during her talk. Candidly, I didn’t catch much of the other programmed content because I got busy finishing up a story about a certain crypto project’s internal investigation.

During the networking sessions, one event organizer told me the institutional day drew attendees from prospective Solana ETF issuers to multiple big banks and consulting firms. For some, there was a sense that the event was too heavy on Solana-native developers and investors and too light on new capital allocators who could bring institutional money to Solana. Nevertheless, the pitch was clear: Solana is the fast, cheap blockchain fit for serious financial services — popular narratives be damned.

“Don’t ask why memecoins happened. Ask why memecoins happened on Solana,” one attendee said.

— Jack Kubinec

A message from Carlos Gonzalez Campo, analyst at Blockworks Research