Howdy!

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but Lightspeed is also a podcast. Every Friday from now on, I’ll be bringing you the most interesting angles and takes you may have missed on the Lightspeed pod.

Today, we have the scaling wars, ai16z atrophying, and a Friday news dump:

Scaling is in the eye of the beholder

Solana tends to get touchy about scaling. Since day one, the network’s pitch has been a layer-1 blockchain using novel technology to run faster and cheaper than other layer-1s on offer. 

So it’s no surprise that when Base announced a new feature called FlashBlocks would bring its “effective block times” down to 200 ms — or half the length it takes Solana to create new blocks — Solana followers were quick to point out the somewhat-faulty logic. FlashBlocks are sub-blocks that allow for early confirmation times, but Base’s full block times will still be two seconds. Solana has a feature called shreds which operates similarly to FlashBlocks, but its full block times are 400 ms. 

The whole ordeal is a bit melodramatic, but it highlights something that often doesn’t get across in blockchain scaling conversations, which is that most of this stuff is basically made up anyways.

When Base’s creator Jesse Pollak gets on X to say that Base is about to be “2x faster than” Solana, he reveals nothing about how he’s measuring speed, or why that would matter for Base’s developers and users. Likewise when Firedancer developers say the Solana client can process one million transactions per second in a test environment — it’s a nice sounding number that would almost certainly hit snags in the real world. 

Even if Firedancer could run that fast, it would be of little import: Solana is currently processing roughly 1,000 user TPS. 

On the Lightspeed podcast this week, my co-host Mert Mumtaz got talking with NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin about scaling. Polosukhin and fellow NEAR developer Bowen Wang said the blockchain will soon bring its block times down to 400 ms, and its blockchain shards — part of a scaling technique known as “sharding” — can handle 10,000-20,000 TPS each. 

So if NEAR is so scalable, Mumtaz asked, then why is no one talking about it?

“Everybody now comes out and says they're scaling, [and] everybody throws a number out from a marketing perspective, [and] as Solana saw, until you actually put real pressure on the system, you don't actually know how it's going to behave,” Polosukhin said.

The more important question, in Polosukhin’s view: “What are the use cases that people are actually using blockchain for right now?”

200 ms block times sound nice. One million TPS sounds nice. But if blockchains want to be more than intellectually stimulating engineering problems with no underlying value, then use cases are the much more important conversation to be having.

— Jack Kubinec

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Remember ai16z?

The darling of AI agents on Solana raced to over $2.5 billion in market capitalization around the new year, and it’s fallen under $500 million in the two months since. 

The platform’s founder is also posting on X that despite their apparent villainy, he misses the so-called LA Vape Cabal. Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened, I guess.

— Jack Kubinec

ICYMI — Stories you may have missed from Solanaland this week

• Phantom has acquired SimpleHash, marking the wallet provider’s third acquisition in eight months. Phantom seems to be banking on this integration to bring real-time price tracking, NFT metadata updates and improved spam protection to millions of users. SimpleHash’s existing standalone service will sunset on March 27, with users advised to transition to Phantom’s ecosystem. According to SimpleHash co-founder Olly Wilson, the move will allow Phantom to scale its technology and push the boundaries of crypto data accessibility.

• Pyth Network launched Insights Hub, an open-source dashboard to bring real-time insights to DeFi price data across chains. This could be a dream come true for traders and developers, who can now gain deep visibility into price feeds, publisher performance and market intelligence. Builders and institutions will be able to verify data integrity with real-time analytics, feed rankings and adoption metrics, marking a new standard for DeFi transparency.

• Gotbit CEO Alex Andryunin was extradited to the US following his arrest in Portugal. The FBI charged Gotbit and other firms with market manipulation, including insider trading and pump-and-dump schemes. Reports suggest that Gotbit engaged in wash trading to artificially inflate token volumes, misleading investors. Solana-based memecoins were among those affected.

• Coinbase is taking a victory lap following the SEC's agreement to dismiss its enforcement case against the company, pending commissioner approval. In 2023, the commission accused Coinbase of operating as an unregistered securities exchange and broker. Among the 13 tokens identified by the SEC as unregistered securities was Solana (SOL) — a classification the Solana Foundation has consistently denied. The dismissal may very well impact the regulatory landscape for SOL and other assets, influencing their classification and trading on centralized platforms.

• Wormhole has introduced Wormhole Settlement, a suite of intents protocols designed to enable rapid multichain transfers at an institutional scale. The new framework integrates three key protocols: the Liquidity Layer for capital efficiency, Mayan Swift for rapid onchain auctions, and MCTP for enhanced composability with Circle’s CCTP. The tl;dr version is: Developers can now facilitate seamless, decentralized asset transfers across Solana, Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum and more — eliminating the need for centralized exchanges or OTC desks.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Azeem Khan, co-founder of Morph: