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Happy Friday, Lightspeed readers. Today, we’re zooming in on the moat of Collector Crypt and considering whether or not the MetaMask token is real.

The moat of Collector Crypt

Most crypto products don’t have moats.

The Pump memecoin launchpad, for instance, has been briefly destabilized by competitors in different periods this year, as seen in the below Blockworks Research chart.

This moatless aspect of memecoin launchpads is what leads Blockworks Research’ Ryan Connor to believe that Pump simply cannot migrate off Solana to its own L1 chain.

In the lending sector, one might expect moats to hold under the “liquidity begets liquidity” logic. Yet, history has proven that moats and first-mover advantages may be overstated — Compound was overtaken by Aave and is itself today subject to attack from newer entrants like Morpho, Spark and Euler carving out its own market niches.

Bridges and DEXs arguably have the least moat-protected products. Both typically do not own any frontend relationship with a user, and are abstracted away by aggregator applications. Even aggregators themselves can be abstracted by a meta-aggregator, as I wrote about in yesterday’s edition of Lightspeed.

One way to establish a moat is if your business depends on some hard-to-replicate supply chain built on real-world BD relationships. 

That roughly describes Collector Crypt’s advantage, a RWA trading card app on Solana that we’ve looked at previously on Lightspeed.

Collector Crypt makes most of its money from its “Gacha” lottery feature, where users pay for a chance at a rare card lottery draw. Users get to keep the cards they pulled at a cost of 10% below eBay market price, or sell it back at ~85% of the market price.

These are attractive + EV economics for users, but it means Collector Crypt would be a failing business if it were paying full market price for cards.

It only works because Collector has relationships with wholesale card dealers that allow them to pick up these cards in bulk at a discount.

Our competitors “are not going to be able to compete with us because we have been working on our physical infrastructure side, our relationships, our competitive moats on card acquisition and pricing,” Collector Crypt’s CEO Tuomas Holmberg explained on a Lightspeed podcast.

So while a competitor could fork Collector Crypt’s codebase and mint up thousands of NFTs that claim to represent rare Pokemon cards, it’s the team’s real-world BD relationships that give them durability.

Now, that sounds like a nifty moat to me.

MetaMask MASK token

The MetaMask token must be one of the most long-anticipated tokens in the history of this industry.

I’m old enough to remember a time when Consensys was teasing an imminent MASK airdrop (note the date on the following tweet!).

That airdrop never came.

MetaMask has been slow to integrate new blockchain networks — Solana was only integrated in May this year, and BTC integration is still pending. That has prompted most EVM users to move on to competing wallets.

The orange area on the Dune chart below shows MetaMask’s declining market share of transfer volumes, dated to the end of May 2025.

It’s almost as if MetaMask doesn’t want to compete.

But MASK “may come sooner than you would expect right now,” Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin noted on a recent podcast from The Block.

That remark has reignited new interest for airdrop farmers. Expect MetaMask swap volumes to climb in the coming weeks.

All in anticipation of an airdrop that may or may not actually arrive this time round.

When they say “crypto is best at incentivizing behavior,” the MetaMask case study might be the textbook example.

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 these meta-defining voices on where things stand and where they’re headed.

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

📅 October 13-15 | London

New Solana DATs

This week saw the announcement of two new Solana digital asset treasuries.

The first is Solmate, formed via the rebrand of Brera Holdings PLC (BREA), a European footclub owner listed on Nasdaq. Led by ex-Kraken chief legal officer Marco Santori, the company is backed by a $300 million oversubscribed PIPE led by Abu Dhabi’s Pulsar Group, Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest and the Solana Foundation.

The second is Helius Medical Technologies (not to be confused with the Solana RPC provider of the same name), which announced yesterday the closure of a $500 million private placement offering of common stock, with an additional $750 million available to be raised via stapled warrants. Helius’ raise is led by Pantera Capital and Summer Capital with participating investors including Big Brain Holdings, Avenir, SinoHope, FalconX, Arrington Capital, Animoca Brands, Aspen Digital, Borderless, Laser Digital, HashKey Capital and Republic Digital.