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Tariffs. Fear. Bitcoin, SOL and ETH all down to start the week. But one macro-proof coin stands above them all. Congrats on the 17% price gain over the past 24 hours, Fartcoin.

Today, we’ve got Pipe Network’s Solana snapshots, Jupiter fees, and a new “Strategy of Solana”:

Pipe Network cuts Solana sync time by 30% for some validators

Pipe Network, a decentralized infrastructure project from Permissionless Labs, is publicly spotlighting its verifiable access to Solana snapshots through its decentralized CDN in a new case study. According to internal performance benchmarks provided to Lightspeed, usage points to 30% faster node initialization and far lower infrastructure costs.

Pipe also reports handling approximately 100 TB of snapshot traffic daily, 700 TB weekly, and around 3 PB per month. For context, Solana node operators collectively share an estimated 7–14 PB of snapshot data monthly to help validators and RPC nodes bootstrap. So, the contribution from Pipe is a weighty share of the network's overall bandwidth burden.

It’s an interesting early look at the returns from a techy new DePIN startup on Solana. Pipe disclosed a $10 million funding round led by Multicoin Capital in the fall.

For anyone who doesn't know, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are distributed systems of servers that deliver mass volumes of content quickly and reliably by caching data closer to where it's needed. In Pipe's case, it acts as a high-speed delivery network specifically for snapshots of Solana's ledger, which basically show the state of all the network’s accounts at a given point in time. Validators use these snapshots to restore state quickly after outages, updates or desynchronization events, enabling nodes to catch up with the network and rejoin consensus without full reprocessing.

Solana needs this because the size and frequency of snapshot downloads have far outpaced the capacity of traditional community-run endpoints. Pipe's CDN maintains uptime more effectively by making sure that validators can draw down critical data without waiting on slow or overloaded sources.

Solana snapshots tend to be massive. We're talking an order of magnitude in the hundreds of gigabytes. The kind of scale you'd expect from full-resolution 4K video libraries or major enterprise backups, except it's happening regularly on a live network. 

And yet, in the past, users usually downloaded this data from a modest set of validator-hosted endpoints or community-run servers. As the network's ledger continues to grow, those download speeds have slowed, and availability has become patchy. There just aren't enough reliable, high-bandwidth sources from which to get these snapshots. That scarcity leads to validators stuck in sync purgatory, which degrades performance for everyone.

Pipe Network's solution was to host Solana snapshots on a high-availability CDN designed for bandwidth-intensive applications. Operators can grab snapshots via Pipe's Web UI or JSON API and integrate them directly into their validator or RPC setup. Snapshots come in full and incremental formats. Fetching the latest snapshot can be automated, and setup, they say, is minimal.

Pipe also bakes in ways to verify network data in addition to hosting it. "We verify data integrity using Merkle tree proofs," Pipe Network core contributor David Rhodus told Lightspeed. "When a node serves data, clients can request a Merkle proof to confirm it matches the expected Merkle root. We also run random Merkle proof audits, as well as spot checks to ensure nodes actually have the cached data they're reporting."

For node operators, the best part might be the price. There isn't one.

"This is currently being offered as a public good funded by the Pipe Foundation for the betterment of the Solana node operator experience," Rhodus said.

— Jeffrey Albus

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Here comes Jupiter: 

Marc Arjoon from Blockworks Research pointed out that Solana’s DEX aggregator/aspiring everything app had more fees on Sunday than Ethereum, pump.fun, Tron, and Solana combined.

That’s the top three blockchains by REV and the biggest crypto app of the past year. Not a bad day for Jupiter.

— Jack Kubinec

Sir, a second “MicroStrategy of Solana” has hit the newswires.

A group of ex-Kraken employees acquired a majority stake in Janover, which is a publicly traded real estate company. These guys have no interest in commercial rental properties, however. They bought the company with the aim of rebranding to DeFi Development Corporation and buying Solana while looking into acquiring Solana validator operations as well.

This is the same playbook being run by Sol Strategies, which is itself a Solana version of Michael Saylor’s bitcoin buying strategy.

Janover/DeFi Development Corp. does have one differentiating factor in that its shares are already listed on the Nasdaq, a distinction Sol Strategies is still seeking. JNVR’s shares — which had been in the gutter for years prior to today — have climbed some 690% today. 

It also will have some cash to spend. The firm raised $42 million in an offering of convertible notes and warrants from Pantera Capital, Kraken, Arrington Capital, Protagonist, The Norstar Group, Third Party Ventures, and Trammell Venture Partners, according to a press release.

— Jack Kubinec

A message from Nick Chicago, CEO of CFX: