Howdy!

I have this dream of writing an article about liquid funds which salvaged flailing portfolios by purchasing Fartcoin, which has been up-only the past month. If this describes you or someone you know, my DMs are open.

Today, we’ve got Solana’s stock CTO and pump.fun sniper stats:

Solana is CTO’ing stocks

There’s a refrain in crypto these days that while many in the industry expected crypto to become more like traditional finance over time, TradFi has actually just become more like crypto.

Zeitgeisty stocks can trade more like memecoins than based on any sort of price-to-earnings ratio. Robinhood offers sports betting. The president of the United States cryptically encouraged investors to buy on social media before a tariff slowdown sent public markets rocketing.

And here’s a new piece of crypto culture to add to the traditional financial world: community takeovers. The CTO happens when a crypto project’s leadership steps away or is no longer cutting it, and its public backers step in to revive its fortunes. Sam Bankman-Fried was once granted control of the SushiSwap multisig, for instance, and a more recent example came when the X profile “BuzzlamicJihad” added hundreds of millions to Aptos’ market cap by repeatedly posting: “Aptos looking good here.”

The TradFi version of a CTO comes from investors buying up niche publicly-listed stocks and announcing a crypto treasury strategy — leading the price to pump. Janover Inc. (now DeFi Development Corporation) did so recently after buying a real estate company and issuing convertible bonds to raise capital and buy Solana.

Yesterday, crypto-native market maker and investor GSR announced it had led a private placement into Nasdaq-listed Upexi alongside a group of other crypto investors. The funds were meant to back a Solana-based treasury strategy. Like DeFi Dev Corp, Upexi is relatively new to crypto. It went from selling Disney-branded products at BJ’s Wholesale Club to strategically investing in crypto via holding companies over the past year. Both stock prices surged by hundreds of percent following their crypto treasury and investment announcements. 

In crypto, it’s easier to CTO a microcap memecoin than a blue-chip token, and the stock market CTO’ers seem to have learned this. Upexi had a market capitalization of $3.65 million at the end of last year, and Janover’s was $6.87 million. Both could likely have been flirting with forced delisting from the Nasdaq due to poor financial performance. Instead, the crypto saviors stepped in and offered US investors a regulated wrapper in which to gain Solana exposure.

Many have expressed doubts about the longevity of Michael Saylor’s bitcoin-buying spree at Strategy, but for the time being, the stock is a success story. And while SOL ETFs await approval, Solana folks want in on the action.

“Michael Saylor and his team pioneered some extremely capital efficient accrual mechanisms — I'm excited to see GSR through Upexi attempt to bring this mechanism to assets other than bitcoin,” DoubleZero co-founder Austin Federa, who participated in the Upexi placement alongside GSR, said in a direct message.

— Jack Kubinec

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251,842

That’s how much SOL DeFi Development Corporation has accumulated in its first two weeks, according to a press release from this morning. That’s worth some $36 million at current prices. DDC/Janover raised $42 million via convertible debt to buy SOL.

Interestingly, DeFi Development Corp has nearly already caught up to its predecessor in Sol Strategies as far as holdings go: Sol Strategies had 267,151 SOL as of April 7. The Canadian holding company does have a considerable lead in SOL staking, as it has acquired multiple staking operators and is the staking provider for 3iQ’s Solana staking ETF. DeFi Development Corp is still looking to get its staking operation off the ground, though it does have some of Kraken’s stake waiting in the wings.

With GSR leading a $100 million private placement into Upexi, the newest Solana-buying stock has the dry powder to surpass both these competitors as far as SOL holdings.

— Jack Kubinec

A recent report from Pine Analytics laid out the sobering reality of pump.fun. Despite 15,000 SOL in realized profits across more than 10,400 deployers, around 50% of all pump.fun memecoin launches were sniped — often by wallets provably funded by the asset's deployer.

If you want to know how that happens, your phrase of the day is "same-block sniping." There is no global mempool on Solana. So, a wallet that wants to buy a token in the same block it's launched would require privileged infrastructure or advanced coordination in order to succeed. Pine Analytics tracked provable SOL transfers from deployers to sniper wallets, revealing...drumroll...a repeatable pattern of automated, insider-style launches.

The majority of these wallets all follow the same basic playbook: Buy instantly, sell within 60 seconds and exit clean. Most deployers fund multiple wallets to fake demand, sell into it and vanish. Surprise, surprise, we're all just engineered exit liquidity. Sniping is pretty lucrative for the snipers, though: Pine Analytics found that 87% of snipes proved to be profitable trades.

Takeaway: Insiders are gaming memecoin launches at scale. Who in the world could ever have guessed? Developers should have designed frontends with better heuristics, real-time warnings and behavioral risk flags before this became Solana's norm. Instead, the invisible hand of engineered extraction has been playing retail traders for far too long. A reasonable solution would be coordinated frontend defenses and a shift toward a transparency-first launch design. Wee bit late, though, yeah?

— Jeffrey Albus

We just hosted Miller Whitehouse-Levine, CEO of the Solana Policy Institute. When this Solana-focused DC non-profit came out at the beginning of the month, I had lots of questions, so it was fun to pick Miller’s brain about what this thing intends to be — and why both he and Blockchain Association CEO Kristin Smith are leaving quality crypto policy jobs to launch a new organization. 

We talk all things US crypto policy, Trump’s impact on the industry, and how the institute plans to advocate for Solana in Washington.