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Welcome back to Lightspeed, located at the intersection of Solana and newsletters.

Today, we’ve got a high school’s Solana validator, SOL CME futures, and Blockdaemon’s new CPO:

Brooklyn teen deploys Solana node for his high school

Nick Manannikov just graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School. Sitting in a restaurant a stone’s throw from his new alma mater, Manannikov is somewhat surprised by this fact.

“Somehow” he graduated, Manannikov told me, but for most of the past year, the long-haired teen has been building a business running Solana RPCs and validators. It involved lots of work calls and business during the school week and, this being crypto, a number of flights to conferences, including two month-long stints at Salt Lake City’s mtnDAO.

But while Manannikov may not be remembered much for his presence in the classroom, he is leaving his high school something it didn’t have before — a dedicated Solana validator.

Manannikov’s crypto company Shark Labs helped BTHS’ crypto club launch the validator, which is meant to give students “hands-on experience with running the nodes.” The high school node oversees roughly 15,000 staked SOL.

Manannikov came to the US as a political refugee right before high school. His family was forced to flee Russia on two days’ notice after his father refused business demands made by figures with government connections, Manannikov told me. 

After moving to the US, Manannikov combined an interest in coding with a flair for making money. He and a couple friends ran bots on the Kick streaming platform to claim giveaways the app was running to boost usage. He also got into crypto, first through NFTs and later through memecoins.

After turning a hefty profit sniping a Solana NFT collection called “Deez Nuts,” Manannikov decided to parlay his earnings into launching an RPC business, which became known as Shark Node. The startup has been successful enough that Manannikov decided to pursue it full time in lieu of college. He shares an office space on Broadway, and the business is profitable, Manannikov told me.

In the fall, Shark Labs decided to start running Solana validators. To get the new business line off the ground, the company would need to get into the Solana Foundation Delegation Program, a grant-like program for smaller validators. They narrowly missed meeting with a Solana Foundation connection at Breakpoint, but Manannikov saw Solana Foundation executive director Dan Albert would be attending Solana Boston.

“​​I was like shit, I guess I got a hop in a bus, go there tomorrow, try to confront him in real life and be like…‘answer our telegram messages, please,’” Manannikov said.

Shark Labs got into the delegation program, and it has now gotten BTHS’ validator a delegation as well. Its validator-as-a-service model won’t stop in Brooklyn either: Manannikov just announced his company is partnering with 20 universities to launch dedicated Solana validators. These validators will charge no commission fees. 

There are “no limits” in crypto, Manannikov told me. “If you're good at what you do and you can actually execute on things, no one cares what your background is.”

— Jack Kubinec

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Here’s an interesting trend to follow:

As prospective issuers apparently gear up for the SEC to approve Solana ETFs, CME futures volume is spiking. 

Kaiko, which put together this chart, speculates that the higher volumes could be traders positioning themselves for a basis trade — where traders buy spot and short futures while profiting from the price difference.

— Jack Kubinec

Staking and node infrastructure provider Blockdaemon announced today that Alex Zinder will join as its new chief product officer.

The move is part of a broader effort to recenter product and compliance leadership in the US and capitalize on momentum from pending legislation, according to materials provided exclusively to Lightspeed.

Blockdaemon, which previously moved parts of its business abroad under regulatory pressure, is now launching a renewed domestic strategy under the internal banner: “Make America Stake Again.” CEO Konstantin Richter suggested that while staking remains a legal gray area, momentum is shifting rapidly.

“Our strategy around staking in the US is built around two pillars,” Richter told Blockworks. “Tokens and their associated tokenization and security mechanics will finally get regulatory oversight aimed at enabling widespread participation. And staking functionality and reward-mechanics evolution per token is too fast and complicated for seamless mass adoption.”

Zinder, who previously held product leadership roles at Reya Labs, Ledger and Nasdaq, is tasked with bringing coherence and scale to a rapidly growing product suite that spans staking infrastructure, MPC wallets and vaults, DeFi APIs and reporting tools.

His appointment follows a period of rapid expansion for Blockdaemon. In recent days, the company has launched Earn Stack (a toolkit for institutional-grade staking rewards) and acquired DeFi API platform expand.network to strengthen its cross-protocol data and automation capabilities.

With over $110 billion in digital assets secured for more than 400 institutional clients, Blockdaemon says it already works with most of the world’s top financial institutions. Still, the company sees room to grow, particularly in becoming the default staking and infrastructure partner for regulated institutions in the US.

Success over the next 12 months, Richter said, will be measured by the adoption of Blockdaemon’s wallet stack, including active wallet deployments across institutional clients, as well as expansion into L2 environments now being explored by major financial players.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Benedikt Schuppli, co-founder of Margarita Finance: