Howdy!

Sometimes I get sent news items that weren’t on my bingo card but make sense in retrospect. Today’s main item is in that category.

We’ve got pump.science’s partnership with Hedgehog Markets, a performance art volume bot, and a new Solana Improvement Document:

The hottest new betting market is mice motor skills

Market watchers have cast doubt on prediction markets’ ability to draw meaningful volumes after the presidential election. Enter: livestreams of drugged-up mice trying to balance on a rotating rod. 

The so-called DeSci platform pump.science announced a partnership with Solana-based prediction market Hedgehog Markets whereby users can place bets on the outcomes of longevity experiments on mice. It’s arguably a move in a more reputable direction for the speculative DeSci trend, which has drawn criticism for creating misaligned incentives. 

Decentralized science, or DeSci, has been around for some time in crypto, generally in the form of DAOs crowdfunding scientific experiments that otherwise wouldn’t get funded. Pump.science emerged in the past few months, borrowing its name and funding mechanism from the popular memecoin launchpad pump.fun. 

Researchers submit experiments focused on longevity, or the increasing of lifespans, to pump.science, and a corresponding token is listed on pump.fun. As the memecoin’s market cap increases, pump.science will run experiments testing the compound on increasingly-larger animals, ending with humans. The experiments are livestreamed, so investors can see whether the compound appears to be working. The project’s docs say chemical suppliers could eventually purchase the rights to the chemical interventions from the token holders, though it’s unclear how that would work, and obviously no experiments have gotten that far yet.

This is a wonky way to fund science by any standard, and pump.science has drawn its fair share of critics.

Gauntlet CEO and Robot Ventures partner Tarun Chitra, one of speculative DeSci’s loudest critics, called projects like pump.science “at best naive and at worst a predatory scam.”

With the Hedgehog Markets partnership, the rules of the pump.science game at least make a bit more sense. Mice will be injected with longevity compounds and then tested versus a control group on a rotarod, which is a rotating cylinder that can test mice motor skills. Users — brandishing data including how the compound performed in flies and what the mice’s names are, among other things — bet on which mice will perform best prior to the trials, which are then livestreamed. For Chitra at least, this could be a better road for DeSci.

Chitra said in a direct message that the lower potential returns offered by prediction markets compared to memecoins could limit the pool of bettors on DeSci prediction markets. “But philosophically, there's nothing that is scam-like about this — it just might be very hard to bootstrap, especially if you look at how long it took Polymarket.”

— Jack Kubinec

Solana stablecoin transfers went up very suddenly in late December:

Nearly $1 trillion in a day on Dec. 29 caught the eye of Blockworks Research’s Dan Smith, who traced the volume spike to a wash trading bot that was shuffling USDC around within single transactions. 

The bot’s creator is apparently Jarett Dunn, pump.fun’s onetime exploiter, who claimed to be doing “performance art” to undermine the merit of volume metrics. 

And that is why you should look before you leap when it comes to trusting onchain data.

— Jack Kubinec

The Solana Foundation has implemented SIMD-0215, a proposal to scale the network for billions of user accounts. Central to the plan is the Accounts Lattice Hash, which uses homomorphic hashing to update the total account state incrementally with each block, avoiding the need to recalculate everything from scratch. This approach replaces the previous Epoch Accounts Hash, which updated infrequently and with significant resource demands.

State bloat — where it becomes taxing for a growing Solana network to keep track of all its data — has been a looming problem for Solana. 

The Accounts Lattice Hash allows each block to reflect the entire account state efficiently, streamlining operations and preparing the network for large-scale growth. Validators and node operators will need to adapt, but the shift promises a more scalable and sustainable infrastructure.

Takeaway: For users, SIMD-0215 could mean a faster, more reliable network capable of handling massive scale without hiccups, as Solana positions itself to support increasingly complex and widespread applications.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Brian Smith, executive director of the Jito Foundation: