Howdy!

One year ago today, we sent out the first edition of the Lightspeed newsletter. 

As we celebrate Lightspeed turning one, we want to take a moment to thank our readers. You’re the reason we do this, and it means a lot that some of you take a moment of your day to tune into our little ruminations on Solana. 

Today, we’ve got a market update, Lightspeed’s most-read articles, and Solana Mobile’s token:

No blastoff yet for Solana

Keep your hands and arms inside the rocket ship for the duration of our flight, ladies and gents.

Bitcoin surged to a new all-time high of $109,400 today, just nine days after the US and China reached a 90-day trade truce, cooling off global jitters. That's a rather major macro signal, yeah?

The sort of crypto bellwether that deserves front-row attention, especially because SOL has held steady across a choppy weekly chart instead of ripping in tandem. That says something about current flows and investor focus, methinks.

Solana's price is essentially unchanged on the week, sitting at $167.34 (-0.3%) with a volatile but range-bound seven-day chart.

BTC's breakout, meanwhile, caps a pretty remarkable macro pivot. Just six weeks ago, reciprocal tariff threats from el presidente de los Estados Unidos rattled the US equity markets. Now, with a temporary trade deal in effect, traditional markets are stabilizing and capital is flowing back into high-beta assets.

Bitcoin, the ultimate crypto liquidity sponge, has responded promptly, pushing past its December 2024 highs to confirm a fresh leg higher. But while the biggest of dogs rallies on macro clarity, Solana's setup remains more idiosyncratic. 

The network remains a hive of activity, with daily active addresses rebounding above five million, and over 30,000 new tokens launching per day. DEX volumes remain anchored by serious flows, with SOL-USDC still the top traded pair and Raydium and Jupiter handling the bulk of liquidity.

Meanwhile, liquid staking tokens like mSOL and jitoSOL continue gaining TVL, and reverted transactions (failed txs) — often seen as noise — are increasingly concentrated among mid-sized wallets. To my eyes, though, that's a decent sign of rising speculative experimentation rather than any dysfunction.

Staking yields on Solana remain high (7.82% APY), and over 65% of the supply is staked, including almost $2b through Marinade. And don't forget to toss in that we're looking at around $5b weekly DEX volume, immaculate stablecoin transfer strength and progress within the network's ever-maturing validator ecosystem.

What I'm getting at is that Solana seems to be consolidating a different kind of high: regulatory progress, institutional trust and infrastructural maturity. Will the price of SOL have its turn? Sure. Probably. Something something, altseason. Don't quote me.

But for now, the network continues to sugar ball its metrics, waiting its turn, with eyes mostly on BTC's next move to $120k (Please? Thanks.) and beyond.

— Jeffrey Albus

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In six weeks, the people building crypto’s backbone will be in one place.

Permissionless IV isn’t for panels full of fluff — it’s for engineers, founders and researchers pushing real code, systems and primitives into production.

On stage this June:

• Peter Todd (OpenTimestamps) — building verifiable proof into Bitcoin’s DNA

• Alex Blania (Tools for Humanity) — scaling biometric identity for onchain access

• Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Protocol) — bridging AI x crypto with real infrastructure

Infra, identity, trust, scalability — it’s all on the table.

And the ones driving it? Already booked for Brooklyn.

June 24-26 | Brooklyn, NY

While we’re breaking the fourth wall, I’m trying something a little different for today’s numbers section. Here are the Top 5 Lightspeed main item articles from the past year by page views:

1. Raydium is launching its own version of pump.fun

2. A publicly-traded holding company is all-in on Solana

3. Lightspeed's 5 predictions for Solana in 2025

4. Solana to weigh possible SOL inflation cut

5. Solana’s second phone is nearly here — and so are the airdrops

What was your favorite Lightspeed edition from this year? Shoot us an email to let us know.

— Jack Kubinec

Solana Mobile made some long-awaited announcements about the forthcoming Seeker phone this morning. 

The phones are beginning to ship on Aug. 4, and the company unveiled a new decentralized mobile architecture called TEEPIN. But what was most interesting, to me at least, was SKR — the newly-announced Solana Mobile native token.

Solana Mobile is a Solana Labs-developed company, so SKR will become a kind of second Solana Labs token following, obviously, SOL. There is nuance here, of course — Solana Labs no longer develops the core protocol, having shuffled that job over to Anza — but still, I’m surprised a Solana Labs-affiliated company was allowed to release a token. 

SKR is meant to power “economy, incentives and ownership across the ecosystem,” according to a Solana Mobile X post.

I would guess Solana Mobile has seen the ability of token incentives to drive adoption on crypto protocols, and it thinks SKR can help it convince users to try the Seeker in a world where most people already have a smartphone. 

And in my view, that bet may pay off: Token airdrops were a major driver behind the first phone’s popularity. Let’s just hope the Solana Mobile team chooses its SKR market makers wisely.

— Jack Kubinec

A message from early Lightspeed subscriber, Jack’s mom: