_{Brought to you by:}

Howdy!

I’ll say it: The Solana community’s outrage over Base’s embrace of memecoining on Zora is performative and dumb. If Base is wrong for welcoming speculation…then so is Solana?

Today, we’ve got Solana’s alleged return to the cypherpunk, Coinbase’s Solana infrastructure, and an ICYMI:

Solana founders ‘returning to cypherpunk roots’: Colosseum’s Taylor

Colosseum is something like a hackathon organizer mixed with Y Combinator for Solana startups. I tend to view its hackathon entries as a proxy for what Solana builders are interested in, and I see its hackathon winners as a potential proxy for what Solana venture investors find valuable.

So this week on the Lightspeed podcast, I asked Colosseum co-founder Matty Taylor what he’s excited about from the organization’s newest hackathon, and his answer surprised me. 

“One of the things that we're most excited about is sort of a return to crypto cypherpunk roots,” Taylor said. He cited privacy preserving applications and new takes on DAOs as examples. 

Taylor said he’s seeing “high performing [Solana] founders” showing a lot of interest in private trading technology, citing former Colosseum winner Darklake — which is building a zero-knowledge enabled DEX — as one example. He’s also seen builders facilitating private payments on existing stablecoins. 

Solana developers do seem to be growing more interested in onchain privacy. The RPC provider Helius just unveiled confidential balances, a more private version of Solana’s existing token extensions. The testnet-phase encryption infrastructure network Arcium has also been buzzy of late. 

Privacy is cypherpunk, but it’s also a necessity for some institutions to come onchain, as large capital allocators tend to like keeping their financial activities opaque. 

Taylor also mentioned DAOs, the crypto-native governance structure that has so far proved tricky to execute. Colosseum was an early supporter of markets-based governance platform MetaDAO, and Taylor talked about a futarchy-enabled token launchpad where funds are escrowed and subject to decision markets for how they should be spent. 

That kind of service has been tried for things like NFT roadmaps in the past — so it’s unclear whether this attempt will catch on more broadly — but pretty much anything would be an improvement on the “one token, one vote” status quo.

“DAOs are really interesting again,” Taylor said.

Solana has been labeled a VC chain and has been criticized for centralization vis a vis 95% of the network’s stake currently running on the same validator client. It also — perhaps for the better — lacks some of the ideological bias toward more cypherpunk outcomes that its predecessor in Ethereum has.

So it would certainly be a noteworthy development if the pragmatic chain dominated by memecoin activity took a turn for the cypherpunk. It remains to be seen whether Colosseum and other investors will put their money where their mouth is.

— Jack Kubinec

P.S. Fill out our short audience survey and help us build a better Lightspeed. Thank you!

Brought to you by:

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.

Coinbase IBRL’ed:

Coinbase’s infrastructure struggled to keep pace with demand for Solana or its blockspace at times in recent months. The poor performance — paired with Coinbase directing users to use its Base layer-2 instead — made the exchange few friends in the Solana ecosystem.

But in a post yesterday, Coinbase revealed that after a number of technical improvements, it is processing Solana transactions more successfully. Three cheers for Coinbase! Now let’s talk about those validator commission rates…

— Jack Kubinec

ICYMI — Stories you may have missed from the Solanaverse this week:

• Coinbase Developer Platform wallets now have native Solana support, bringing enclave-backed key security and <500ms wallet creation to onchain developers. The idea is to remove key management entirely, making Coinbase's API wallets ideal for agents, bots and automation. Coinbase has also upgraded its Solana infrastructure to make it faster, more performant and increasingly reliable.

• Pudgy Penguins has launched a dedicated Solana validator in partnership with the Sol Strategies white-label validator program. The move is part of Pudgy Penguins' broader push to build an ecosystem aligned with user-friendly experiences.

• SendAI has released Solana Agent Kit v2, an update to its open-source framework for building LLM-powered Solana apps. V2 adds embedded wallet support, React Native compatibility, and a modular plugin system that cuts down on hallucinations by limiting agent tool access. With integrations like Turnkey and Privy, the new kit supports fine-grained rules, human-in-the-loop confirmations, and mobile-first development. Agentic workflows will be huge — and so far, Solana is at the front of the pack.

• Galaxy Research wants to reduce SOL inflation per its newly proposed governance method, Multiple Election Stake-Weight Aggregation (MESA). Instead of a binary vote, validators would select their preferred deflation rate from a preset menu, and the network would adopt the weighted average. The model aims to cut polarization and encourage truthfully expressed preferences while preserving the predictability of a fixed terminal curve.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Joe Doe, lead for Jupiter Pro: