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Today’s main item is about stablecoins, which are not real world assets. Dream bigger. RWAs should be stuff like mineral rights, uranium, or catalytic converters. Real tangible things.

Today, we’ve got an exclusive on a stablecoin platform, Photon fees, and an Orca governance proposal:

Stablecoin infrastructure platform M^0 expands to Solana

M^0, an EVM protocol for stablecoin coordination, has expanded to Solana, the team told Lightspeed exclusively.

M^0’s (pronounced Em-Zero) first Solana user will be Kast, a platform offering banking-like services with stablecoins. The move comes as various and sundry actors bring new stablecoins to market, and M^0 hopes to unify the increasingly fragmented sector.

At a basic level, M^0 offers a stablecoin “building block” called $M — a kind of vanilla stable backed by US T-bills. Clients who want to launch their stablecoin effectively wrap $M and can customize things like yield or custody. 

$M’s first user was the Cosmos ecosystem app Noble, which made use of the infrastructure when launching the yield-bearing USDN stablecoin. It also paired with RWA stablecoin outfit Usual to launch UsualM.

M^0’s latest partner in Kast plans to offer two Solana stablecoins: a payments and a savings one. The tokens, the names of which have not been finalized, will eventually be able to be swapped for other $M stablecoins on Solana and bridged to other ecosystems via Wormhole.

To my mind, the M^0 model sounds a bit like white label stablecoins — a concept Kast has also made use of through its Solana validator partnership with Kiln. And white label stablecoins make a lot of sense, given how everyone from the Wyoming state government to President Trump-backed World Liberty Financial wants to have a stablecoin.

In an interview, M^0 chief strategy officer Joao Reginatto said “a couple of other companies” will be leveraging $M to build stablecoins on Solana.

But despite all the buzz, the stablecoin landscape remains pretty duopolistic. 76% of all stablecoins on Solana are Circle’s USDC, and another 18% are Tether’s USDT, according to DeFiLlama. M^0’s clients will hope to unseat Circle — and Solana might hope one of them can do so.

Among Solana’s chief competitors is Base, which is operated by Coinbase, the latter of which has a revenue sharing agreement with Circle.

“Solana perhaps doesn't see with very good eyes the widespread use of USDC on Solana” given how some of USDC’s revenue filters back down to Coinbase, Reginatto said.

— Jack Kubinec

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Look out below, Photon: 

As memecoin interest has waned in recent weeks, Solana-based trading bots — which facilitate easier, faster trading and are popular among traders — have lost a big chunk of their demand.

Fees generated by the popular bot Photon are testing lows not seen since September, according to a Dune dashboard.

— Jack Kubinec

A new Orca governance proposal seeks to put $27m toward a sweeping plan that remaps incentives, burns 25m tokens and launches a new staking layer called xORCA.

The proposal would redirect 20% of protocol fees toward open-market ORCA buybacks and funnel them into the xORCA Pool. There, holders would stake ORCA in exchange for liquid, yield-accruing xORCA.

The community would govern 30% of fees, while the dev team receives a one-time USDC grant to scale operations and build out xORCA. Basically, the proposal wants to turn protocol fees into a flywheel that rewards long-term alignment.

So far, responses indicate a divide between folks who see the plan as a practical alignment of incentives and others who fear it concentrates too much power and funding in the hands of the core team.

The bottom line is that the complete transfer of the USDC treasury without guarantees on team spending, clearer accountability, reporting or phased disbursements is a big ask.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Alex Fung, co-founder of Chakra Labs: