Howdy!

It’s a beautiful Wednesday to be fearful while everyone else is greedy.

Today we’ve got Maple’s stablecoin coming to Drift, Solana’s $200 threshold, and onchain private company equity:

Exclusive: Maple and Drift team up on capital efficiency

Lightspeed has exclusively learned that Maple — one of Solana's largest onchain asset managers — is bringing its yield-bearing syrupUSDC stablecoin into perpetual futures markets operated by Drift, Solana's flagship perps DEX.

Drift, known for its deep onchain liquidity and capital-efficient margins, will accept syrupUSDC as margin collateral, allowing traders to earn a 7-8% APY on their margin while trading.

This will be the first time the exchange has allowed a collateral asset to serve dual purposes, earning yield while backing positions — sweetened by $100,000 in incentives and an initial $50 million cap.

One of Solana's biggest wins is that its DeFi ecosystem can move at the speed of centralized markets. It doesn't matter how advanced your strategies are or how complex your positions get.

The network's speed means traders can rebalance instantly, while staying entirely onchain. That's more than competing ecosystems like Ethereum can often promise without high fees or serious latency.

Often, though, the very need for collateral means capital ends up sitting idle as margin, earning nothing while waiting for trades to play out. That leads to higher opportunity costs, less capital efficiency and slower compounding for active traders.

But because users can now post syrupUSDC as margin on Drift, those same dollars can both secure your trades and earn passive income. Traders will be able to offset funding costs, free up cash flow and keep capital productive without changing their trading style.

More capital will flow into Solana's onchain perps market, which also means Drift's open interest should climb, and we're more likely to see syrupUSDC adoption spread across more protocols.

syrupUSDC is backed by Maple's institutional lending pools and earns a steady yield from over-collateralized loans. Drift's cross-collateral system treats it like USDC for margin purposes, but allows the yield stream to keep running while positions are open.

Together, they're working to make your money multitask, cutting out the dead time it would otherwise spend doing nothing.

— Jeffrey Albus

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

It’s the summer of DATs and Solana has arrived at the party. 

But when October rolls around, everyone will be looking to DAS: London to hear from leaders of the DAT space about where things stand and where they’re headed.

Get your ticket today with promo code: LIGHT100 for £100 off

📅 October 13-15 | London

The bull market just won’t quit: 

Solana climbed above $200 this morning — a psychologically significant level it’s had difficulty recapturing following a wildly bullish January. 

Still, some of that excitement may be tempered by the even greater recent success of ETH, which is a stone’s throw away from a new all-time high.

— Jack Kubinec

Solana wants to be a home for all financial assets, even assets that don’t yet exist.

One trend I’m watching this summer is the rise of onchain vehicles for investors to get access to equity in private companies. There was Robinhood’s OpenAI stock gaffe at its Cannes speech announcing its new chain, of course, but a number of these initiatives are taking place on Solana as well.

There’s Republic, which unveiled so-called mirror tokens meant to track the value of privately-held companies. Then you have PreStocks, which says it’s backed by Republic but also argues its product is superior to mirror tokens. And then I’ve seen Earlybird, which lets users long or short the valuations of private companies.

All of this ties in with a broader trend where retail investors are paying large premiums to get access to highly sought after SpaceX or OpenAI stock. The special purpose vehicles that claim to provide exposure to this equity have been the object of some scrutiny, so please do your own research.

But it seems to me that Solana and private company equity investments have a sort of ideological overlap in attempting to broaden access to finance. Onchain SPVs for private equity will be a trend to watch.

— Jack Kubinec

A message from Serj Korj, founder of deplay.fun: