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Howdy!

Happy Friday. Few human beings learned as much about bond markets as I did this week.

Today, we’ve got Solana’s sticky stablecoin supply, pump.fun revenue streams, and an ICYMI:

Solana stablecoins have been ‘stickier than anticipated’

When Donald Trump paired his Solana memecoin with USDC, the Solana network’s stablecoin supply predictably shot upwards — creating 306 days of supply growth over a long weekend, as we put it in this newsletter.

Although much of this supply growth stemmed from a memecoin that had about 48 hours of relevance, Solana’s stablecoin supply is still near its all-time high. On Feb. 11, Solana had $12.4 billion in stables. Today, it has $12.1 billion.

“Definitely it has been stickier than anticipated,” Blockworks Research analyst Carlos Gonzalez Campo said of Solana’s stablecoin supply when I asked him about it on the Lightspeed podcast this week.

The stablecoin supply growth means Solana’s liquidity is deeper now, Gonzalez Campo said, noting the stickiness could be partly a result of bear market conditions where users are swapping out of riskier tokens to hold stablecoins on Solana apps instead. He also noted how USDC borrows on Solana money market Kamino are around all-time highs, which he interpreted as meaning investors are leveraging up on long SOL exposure following its recent price slide.

Solana is also seeing an accelerating number of new stablecoin brands joining the network. One such example is USDG, a new stablecoin from Paxos with backing from partners including Robinhood, Galaxy Digital and Standard Chartered. The token has a little over $100 million in supply on Solana.

There’s also the stablecoin infrastructure platform M^0 which launched on Solana on Tuesday, we reported exclusively. Two new stablecoins from the stablecoin banking outfit Kast are first on the agenda.

USDC and USDT work pretty well as non yield-bearing stablecoins, and some have wondered whether new stablecoins are necessary. I made the case a couple times this week that Solana likely does want to change its stablecoin supply makeup from the current 76% USDC. Circle’s S1 filing revealed that 50% of revenue from the Treasurys backing USDC go to Coinbase, which operates a Solana competitor in the Ethereum layer-2, Base. Why wouldn’t Solana try to find a similarly cushy setup?

“I think your thought process is right, but you're skipping a step,” Blockworks Research head of data Dan Smith said in response to this point on our Lightspeed podcast roundup episode. Stablecoin distribution comes from applications, so “I think it skips the chain and goes to the app layer,” Smith said.

— Jack

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Goodbye, graduations. Hello, PumpSwap:

Blockworks Research data shows how pump.fun is essentially betting that revenue derived from its PumpSwap AMM can replace the loss of its graduation mechanism, which used to pocket pump.fun 6 SOL per popular memecoin. 

So far, AMM fees account for proportionately less revenue than graduation fees once did, but the figures are close enough that the bet looks like it could pay off.

— Jack

ICYMI — Stories you may have missed from Solanaland this week

• Pump.fun has re-launched live streaming to all users months after yanking the feature due to chaotic, unsupervised streams — some featuring threats of self-harm if token prices didn't moon. This time, the rollout includes formal moderation guidelines, a case-by-case content policy, and a public appeals process. Surely nothing more could go wrong.

• Helium is celebrating a landmark win after the SEC dismissed with prejudice its claims that Nova Labs sold unregistered securities. The decision affirmed that distributing HNT, IOT and MOBILE tokens through the Helium Network does not violate securities law. It's a big moment for DePIN, clearing legal fog around token-powered infrastructure and drawing a hard line under the case: The SEC can not bring these charges again.

• Janover dives $9.6 million deep into Solana following its first move under a new digital asset treasury policy, staking its position and signaling plans to run validators as part of a long-term commitment to the ecosystem. According to the company, this follows a $42 million financing round and reflects a strategy to offer investors exposure to Solana through public markets.

• Grayscale just put Jupiter, Pyth and Helium on its Assets Under Consideration list, flagging them for possible inclusion in future investment products. Pyth has already graduated to a full trust, while Grayscale has filed to convert its Solana Trust into a spot ETF. The institutional appetite for Solana-aligned bets is rising, and Grayscale is hungry.

• OpenZeppelin has open-sourced its Solana Relayers in alpha, allowing devs to sponsor transactions without SOL, accept fees in any token, and plug-in key management tools. That means apps can now abstract away wallet friction entirely; no more asking users to hold SOL to interact. It's a crunchy shift for onboarding, especially for normie-facing apps, and it could grease the rails for the next generation of Solana-native consumer products.

— Jeff

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