Howdy!

That CoinDesk story on Movement was quite the read. Does anyone want to be a shadow co-founder for this newsletter?

Today, we’ve got a market update, pump.fun graduations, and Unto announcing the ThruVM:

Midweek markets: Come on, do something

Solana is stalled sideways, with the broader crypto market hitting some light turbulence. SOL is trading at $145.45 midweek, down 2.5% from last Wednesday and now drifting crabwise after a month-long rally that pushed it up nearly 30% from April lows. 

Despite the modest cooling of momentum, Solana continues to print usage at speed. Over the past 30 days, transaction fees have hit an annualized $432.9 million, with SOL burn running at an annualized $216.5 million pace.

Besides macro headwinds, we can probably trace some of the cautious price action to the looming FTX liquidation, where over 60% of the estate's onchain assets are in SOL. The first wave of creditor repayments is scheduled for May 30 — funded by prior asset sales, including FTX’s March SOL deals — which may still weigh on sentiment even if the tokens themselves are no longer in play. SOL's market cap has slipped to $75.3 billion, and while 24-hour volume remains strong at $3.49 billion, buyers can't seem to stop peeking over their shoulders.

The last round of FTX estate unlocks kicked off March 1 — right before a drawdown in SOL’s price, although there were obviously other factors involved. 

Bitcoin, meanwhile, had a little macro gut punch this morning. On Wednesday, BTC dropped to $92,910 after US GDP data showed a 0.3% contraction in Q1 — its first in three years. Analysts were quick to cite the sudden impact of Trump's revived tariff policy, with imports surging and dragging down the GDP print. Stocks sold off, recession chatter kicked up, and bitcoin dipped. As is tradition, the price rebounded within hours to $94,000, buoyed by strong spot demand and resilient ETF inflows, including over $3 billion in net new capital through April 29. 

Last weekend's Crossroads event in Istanbul allowed the Solana community to take stock of direction. It was a lot of builders comparing notes, investors checking pulse, and variant teams workshopping infrastructure that still has a shot at scaling mainstream demand — lots of honest conversations about payments, gaming, DePIN and the gaps that still need filling.

So far, though, the resulting confidence of those discussions has not translated into price. For now, conviction is expensive. The market is still frozen by what-ifs. What if the market prices in the FTX overhang? What if bitcoin fails to clear $96K and drags everything else with it? What if global retaliation hits US tech exports, and risk assets feel the heat? Once these questions have answers, folks will either step up or step aside. And that's when the market'll start moving again... ready or not.

— Jeffrey Albus

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Correction: The previous edition conflated the March FTX SOL sales with the upcoming May 30 creditor repayments in the earlier edition. The May event isn’t a new liquidation — it’s the distribution of already-liquidated funds from earlier asset sales.

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It got rough out there for pump.fun coins for a second:

The graduation rate — or the percentage of tokens that draw sufficient investment and migrate to a DEX — reached lows at under 0.8% per week in late February into March.

Around 1.6% of tokens graduated last week. The median graduation time for such tokens was eight minutes. Better get in fast, folks.

— Jack Kubinec

We got more details on Unto, the blockchain developer founded by an ex-Firedancer core developer. The company disclosed its $14.4 million seed round yesterday. 

Unto is the developer shop developing a blockchain named Thru, which will run on a novel virtual machine, the ThruVM. The software will be based on RISC-V, which is a popular open-source architecture for defining how software runs on hardware. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin just proposed replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine with a RISC-V-based VM, citing efficiency gains. 

RISC-V “allows application developers new and old to work with the programming languages they are already familiar with,” Thru wrote on X.

Thru also mentioned that it is building a new consensus mechanism rather than using proof-of-stake like many smart contract blockchains, including Solana. When we previously reported on this forthcoming new consensus mechanism, Unto and Thru co-founder Liam Heeger said PoS systems reward capital accumulation instead of network performance, and single-leader systems create undesirable monopolies on blockspace. 

Solana is working on implementing multiple concurrent leaders, which would help with the blockspace monopoly. We don’t know much about the rest of Thru’s secret sauce yet, but it seems the chain thinks it can outperform Solana.

— Jack Kubinec

A message from Jonathan Dockrell, co-founder and CEO of SkyTrade: