Howdy!

It seems anyone who’s anyone in crypto has an alt X account these days. We’re living through the rise of the unaligned anons.

Today, we’ve got SolFi’s true identity, Solana’s DEX wars, and DeCharge’s Helio integration:

Ellipsis Labs claims credit for mysterious top Solana DEX

Over the past few months, people involved in Solana DeFi have been asking questions about SolFi, a DEX that sprang up in November and almost immediately captured over 20% market share on swaps between stablecoins and SOL.

SolFi was able to quote better prices than competitors, but at least one business partner I spoke to didn’t know who was behind the new exchange before today. In general, few seemed to be in the loop as to how SolFi was achieving such good prices.

Today, Ellipsis Labs — a DeFi shop currently building an Ethereum layer-2 that uses Solana’s software called Atlas— publicly claimed credit for developing SolFi. 

In an announcement on X, Ellipsis Labs co-founder Eugene Chen said the DEX “came from our deep understanding of the market structure on Solana.” Prior to building Atlas, Ellipsis created an orderbook Solana DEX called Phoenix. 

SolFi has no frontend, but Chen added that the DEX had partnered with Jupiter Exchange to bring the product to retail traders. SolFi is one of 51 DEXs that are part of Jupiter’s swap aggregator, but it currently makes up for 25% of Jupiter volume — far more than any other DEX — according to a Dune dashboard. 

The Solana rumor mill tended to reason that SolFi’s creators had to be someone with roots in the network, and Ellipsis certainly seems to have the technical chops to fit the bill.

“The Ellipsis Labs team are some of the most talented SVM developers in the ecosystem. It should be no surprise given what they’ve built with Phoenix and Atlas that they’ve also been able to find success with SolFi,” Switchboard co-founder Chris Hermida said.

SolFi isn’t the only anonymous Solana DEX. Orbic and ZeroFi are other newer Solana DEXs that have commanded significant trading volumes without publicly disclosing who their developers are.

— Jack Kubinec

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What’s remarkable is how SolFi became a heavyweight practically overnight:

Chen’s post today implied SolFi launched Nov. 1, 2024. By the week of Nov. 18, it was already up to 28.5% of SOL-USD volume.

I should also note, SolFi isn’t as dominant for long-tail assets on Solana. Meteora accounts for around 50% of all volume for “project tokens,” as defined by Blockworks Research.

— Jack Kubinec

It's neat to see the proliferation of DePINs in real time.

Recently, Helio was integrated with EV charging network DeCharge to enable crypto-native checkout. DeCharge is a Colosseum-backed Solana startup working to build a decentralized electric vehicle (EV) charging network.

Anyone can buy and host a 7KW charger and earn from usage fees and network-based zk rewards, with total control over hardware, data and revenue. This new integration lets users purchase the hardware directly with Solana and EVM assets through a custom Helio checkout flow, going fully onchain from day one — no bank account and no fiat required.

Takeaway: The experiment here isn't whether people will host hardware for tokens (because they definitely will). DeCharge is less testing the demand for decentralized EV infrastructure and more working to determine the social durability of peer-to-peer logistics.

Whether or not the long tail of crypto users is willing to take on the role of infrastructure landlord: maintaining uptime, troubleshooting edge cases, chasing off erroneously parked gas vehicles, and hoping that enough drivers plug-in to make it all pencil out.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Anna Yuan, co-founder of Perena: