Howdy!

Happy Friday, manlets.

Today, we’ve got Jito making apps richer, Solana’s REV bottom, and an ICYMI from this week in Solana:

Jito’s BAM upgrade set to make Solana apps richer

It’s been a week and a half since Jito announced BAM, Solana’s most significant transaction processing upgrade ever.

In my view, much of the public messaging surrounding the upgrade has focused on BAM’s privacy-preserving use of TEEs and ability to give apps better control over transaction execution. What hasn’t been covered quite as much, which both of my guests on the Lightspeed podcast spoke about this week, is how BAM plans to create additional revenue for Solana apps.

BAM plugins are programmable interfaces that apps can use to control how transactions are sequenced. One potential example could be taker speed bumps, a spread-tightening mechanism that the perps DEX Hyperliquid has deployed to great effect.

These plugins will also come with some “TBD fee model,” Jito Labs CEO Lucas Bruder told me, meaning applications can start generating revenue from the sequencing of transactions through BAM. This value is currently being captured by takers or arbitrageurs in the market, Bruder added.

If BAM works as advertised, plugins could provide applications with a hefty payday.

“What I think we’ll see is applications earning multiples more than validators and stakers,” Blockworks Research Analyst Carlos Gonzalez Campo said.

While Crypto Twitter will probably be none too happy to see more revenue flowing to the likes of Pump.fun, keeping applications happy is important if Solana wants to be the internet’s financial ledger. One of Ethereum’s most successful apps in Uniswap recently created its own layer-2 chain in Unichain, thereby internalizing more value relative to its home chain. And without changes to how value is shared, Solana’s popular apps may someday find it prudent to do the same. 

Bruder hopes Solana apps will send this new revenue source back to their native tokens.

“Hopefully [apps] share those fees with the token holders and we'll see a mass repricing of Solana DeFi,” Bruder said.

— Jack Kubinec

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Is the bottom in on Solana REV?

After a few weeks of decline, the tips and fees paid to transact on Solana showed signs of life as PUMP ICO’d, and LetsBonk.fun grabbed the launchpad mantle.

That REV is still a ways away from the halcyon days of January and February, however.

— Jack Kubinec

ICYMI — Stories you may have missed from Solana land this week

• Canary, Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, Grayscale, VanEck and 21Shares have all filed updated S-1s for spot Solana ETFs, signaling a coordinated push from nearly every issuer in the pipeline.

• Frontrun created Wallet History, a tool that lets users trace every wallet mentioned on Crypto Twitter — making it easier to verify activity tied to public figures. Part of its Solana-focused Chrome extension, the tool also includes 40k+ labeled wallets, alt wallet detection and real-time insights directly in your feed.

• SEC Chair Paul Atkins announced “Project Crypto,” a full-scale initiative to move US markets onchain, with new SEC rules incoming for tokenization, staking, airdrops, custody and asset classification — while opening legal space for dapps and DeFi protocols to operate onshore.

• Sleepagotchi, a sleep-to-earn wellness app on Solana, is now live on iOS and Android for a three-week preview (July 29-Aug. 19). Users earn vSLEEP based on sleep patterns before the app goes offline for TGE prep.

• Helium turns six today, marking its growth from a scrappy Hotspot experiment to the world’s largest people-powered network. The third halving also took effect, cutting HNT emissions in half — impacting proof-of-coverage rewards, but leaving data transfer earnings untouched.

• Moonit, in collaboration with 9GAG’s Memeland, has launched Meme Money Markets — yet another direct competitor to Pump.fun. The protocol uses AI to automatically tokenize viral internet memes the moment they cross a viral threshold. Built on Solana, it mints new meme tokens daily with no dev allocations or insider bundles.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Rebecca Rettig, chief legal officer at Jito Labs: