🪐 Solana Spaces

Howdy!

I have a hypothesis that crypto culture — after years of being pretty ho-hum if we’re honest — is going to get fun again this summer. Today’s main item shows a piece of that.

Today, we’ve got the Solana Spaces reboot, DeFi Development Corp on the podcast, and Jupiter’s proposed DAO alliance with Huma:

Solana Spaces comes back to life in NYC

Starting in June of 2022, Solana Spaces operated a brick and mortar store for Solana-branded merchandise and user onboarding in New York’s Hudson Yards development. The venture’s biggest financial backer was FTX, and it along with a second store in Miami folded in early 2023 following the exchange’s implosion.

This week at Solana’s Accelerate conference, Solana Spaces returned as a pop-up store with a new core team. The project doesn’t have FTX backing, but the reboot began with a very 2025 source of funding — a memecoin. 

Solana Spaces season 2 has more limited ambitions than the original, running pop-up stores for crypto merchandise alongside crypto conferences. For the faithful who descended on the New York pop-up, there was a general sense of pleasant surprise that a memecoin team pulled off a brick-and-mortar store activation.

The lower east side pop-up was bustling with crypto natives on Tuesday morning. Merch was on sale from a variety of Solana-based projects and NFT collections. I purchased a mug and checked out by paying with stablecoins from the Phantom app on my iPhone. 

When another customer came up to check out, Amol Gharte — a Solana Spaces core team member who was working the register — didn’t have the item’s price handy and joked that he could make one up.

“It’s all made up anyway,” the customer responded, and Gharte and I shrugged and nodded our heads at the vague declaration. A second customer stepped up to pay but somewhat sheepishly pulled out a credit card, explaining that he wanted to get credit card points from the purchase.

A fan of the old Hudson Yards store launched a memecoin called STORE in January which briefly eclipsed $12 million in market capitalization, according to DEX Screener data. Some early buyers of the token — which is now closer to $3 million in market cap — came together to try and revive Solana Spaces, Gharte told me. He added that the Solana Spaces team hasn’t sold its tokens and has self-imposed a vesting period.

The project is partly self-funded but has also inked sponsorship deals and received grant funding from the Solana Foundation, Gharte said.

The vision for Solana Spaces is to continue running pop-ups during crypto conferences, where Spaces gives crypto teams a place to sell their merchandise, and Solana Spaces collects 20% of the profit, Gharte said. He estimated 70% of sales volume is paid with credit cards compared to 30% in stablecoins.

I found Vibhu Norby, who was founder and CEO of the original Solana Spaces before building a Jupiter-acquired NFT app named DRiP, steaming a cloth banner in the back of the store. He told me he was “skeptical” when he saw a memecoin community crop up around reviving his deprecated business, but he gave the team some initial capital, support and introductions, and he hoped they could figure it out.

Norby told me he was initially drawn to starting Solana Spaces by a belief that blockchain communities can form network states, a Balaji Srinivasan-coined term for digital communities forming their own real-world communities. Norby added that in crypto, traditional identity markers tend to be replaced by things like profile pictures or merchandise. 

“To me, there is a higher meaning to it. It’s not just a merch shop. Here you come and you find your home, and you walk away with a piece of that,” Norby said.

— Jack Kubinec

In six weeks, the people building crypto’s backbone will be in one place.

Permissionless IV isn’t for panels full of fluff — it’s for engineers, founders and researchers pushing real code, systems and primitives into production.

• Peter Todd (OpenTimestamps) — building verifiable proof into Bitcoin’s DNA

• Alex Blania (Tools for Humanity) — scaling biometric identity for onchain access

• Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Protocol) — bridging AI x crypto with real infrastructure

Infra, identity, trust, scalability — it’s all on the table. And the ones driving it? Already booked for Brooklyn.

A lot of people asked for this episode: I hosted Dan Kang, head of investor relations at DeFi Development Corp. In pretty short order, a number of Solana treasury companies a la MicroStrategy for Solana have launched. DeFi Dev Corp. has perhaps been the team to beat, accruing over $100 million worth of SOL in around 2 months. I asked Dan about the treasury model and whether the business can be sustainable in the long run. 

— Jack Kubinec

The stablecoins and payments network Huma Finance has proposed a first-of-its-kind DAO alliance with Jupiter Exchange. Its plan involves a $250K treasury swap, a presale exclusively for $JUP stakers at a $75M FDV, and a full-stack community activation to help Huma’s launch become a defining moment for DeFi on Solana. Jupiter DAO members would get early access to real-world yield, while Huma commits to building long term with the community.

According to Jupiter’s resident “cat-herder,” Kash Dhanda: “Huma as a product delivers real value for real people in the real world. [...] If the Jupiter community can help support Huma's growth, it’ll serve as a beacon to other high-quality projects to collab with Jup DAO as well.”

Takeaway: If you’re staking $JUP, this is a chance to get in early on a project that already powers billions in global payments — and at a steep discount before anyone else. It would be a rare alignment between two teams betting on real-world use cases, sustainable yield, and long-term on-chain value. Voting is live from May 18 through May 22.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Ian Unsworth, co-founder of Kairos Research: