Howdy!

Congratulations to the NY Liberty for capturing their first-ever WNBA title last night. I’m a little miffed that the team won the championship in my first season following them, because now I’ll be bamboozled into thinking they can do it every year.

Anyways:

‘Solana Boston’ conference meets at MIT

A block north of the Charles River and on the sixth floor of MIT’s media lab, Solana investors, founders, and community members were handed Red Sox-themed t-shirts and sipped Dunkin’ coffee during “Solana Boston,” the latest in crypto’s never-ending conference cycle.

This particular conference was much less ambitious than its predecessor in Solana Breakpoint. The venue consisted of two rooms for talks connected by a networking space. The most talked-about speaker seemed to be John Deaton, the crypto-friendly lawyer challenging Elizabeth Warren for her senate seat. There was also a voting-focused afterparty sponsored by the Coinbase-started advocacy organization Stand With Crypto.

I had conversations with multiple founders creating Solana-native apps outside the realm of memecoin trading. This perhaps gives some credence to the theory that after a prolonged stretch of building seemingly endless technological infrastructure for blockchains to use, crypto may finally be entering an era of usable apps chasing broad adoption.

But what the conference highlighted most of all for me was an effort to court students from highly-regarded schools like MIT following the industry’s high-profile PR debacles of the past couple years and the allure of other fields like artificial intelligence.

Jake Lynch, one of the event’s organizers, told me that of the 250 registrants for Solana Boston, 90 described themselves as students. Boston University, Northeastern, Boston College, MIT, and Dartmouth were the five schools with the highest representation, Lynch added.

But when I met one current MIT student and one recent graduate, the pair seemed underwhelmed by their peers’ interest in crypto. Many of the school’s undergraduates are infatuated with AI, they said, and there seem to only be a few students in each graduating class who want to work in crypto.

A search of MIT’s course catalog for this semester turned up just a few crypto-related results, mostly in the business school, while I found more than a dozen AI-related classes. 

As for the crypto industry, Lynch said he thinks there are too few entry level jobs in an industry that has a “massive learning curve” and called for “better funnels” to bring in new graduates.

Crypto likes to eschew credentialism, but for better or worse, a lot of the tech industry’s whiz kids end up graduating from a short list of well-resourced universities. (Crypto’s very own Sam Bankman-Fried famously went to Stanford, after all.)

College kids, especially at elite universities, are likely to be drawn by what’s getting buzz from their professors and peers. For now, that seems to be AI. 

Perhaps Solana, with its intangible advantage in coolness, can insert itself — and crypto — into the bright Gen-Z coder’s brain once again.

— Jack Kubinec

There goes another all-time high:

Solana’s real economic value, a Blockworks Research metric that measures the fees and tips a blockchain generates, saw its biggest week ever by far last week. Solana’s REV was some $36 million from last Monday until today, topping the previous high of $27 million from over the summer.

The jump in REV came predominantly from priority fees and Jito tips, indicating that users are willing to shell out more assets to have transactions included in blocks. It’s a promising indicator in Solana’s bet that it can generate meaningful income despite charging very low fees.

— Jack Kubinec

Over the weekend, crypto investigator ZachXBT accused influencer @0xjaypeg of lying repeatedly about receiving and selling tokens for the promotion of a memecoin. According to Zach, Jaypeg agreed to promote a Solana memecoin in exchange for 2% of the supply, which amounted to roughly $2.2K.

After the project sent his payment, Jaypeg allegedly deleted the message with his wallet address and claimed he never received the tokens. Blockchain records, however, suggest otherwise, and Zach noted that the evidence clearly links Jaypeg to the transaction.

Jaypeg then claimed that screenshots shared by the project team were fake. He argued that he was being blackmailed by the team, saying, "send us 2k or else we put you on blast on Twitter." The community remained skeptical, especially after the memecoin creators released a screen recording of their Telegram chat with Jaypeg, which appeared to support their claims.

Jaypeg eventually issued an apology, stating that he had provided a random address which he did not control, and that some unknown entity ended up dumping the tokens. He allegedly panicked when the situation escalated, leading him to falsely claim the screenshots were photoshopped. However, this too appears to have been a lie, as further blockchain analysis linked the wallet in question to one of his own.

The social response was swift and critical. @SkylineETH said, "99% of what you see on CT is fake. fake ROI screenshots, bullshit stories, flexing things which they don’t even own. Pathetic." @LevendiPro balked, “all for $2.2k??? jhezus christ, these kids think that kind of money goes far these days?” Others pointed out the flawed strategy behind Jaypeg's apology. @cozypront commented, “Only crazy part is lying the apology tbh… if you do, at least don’t lie again.” Others suggested that a more straightforward confession might have been better received, as @chardyfag remarked, “bro… if jay was just like ‘yeah i scammed the scammers and what’ people would prob be like yeah f**k it.”

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Jake Lynch, investor at L1D AG: