What's up everybody! It's Thomas Bahamas and you are here for another episode of Solana Weekly. Welcome to the party, welcome to the bull market, welcome to Solana summer! I hope that you are listening in through Drip.haus because this podcast is now officially hosted there. You can subscribe, and get a weekly NFT delivered to your wallet with the entirety of this last week in the wonderful world of Solana. Still early and I'm testing out a couple ways to up the interaction, I'll be offering a Shout out to the biggest thanker of the week as well as episode show notes, and even the potential to offer paid adds. If you want to give a shout or shill your bag, lets do this.
Back to business, we've had a wild couple of weeks and we need to do a quick check in on where we are at in both the cycle and the year. The scene is set for the perfect bull market with easing regulations, etf's for btc and eth, unseen amounts of usage on Solana, and the leading presidential candidate is talking at a bitcoin conference and talking about backing the dollar with bitcoin.
Sol Price: 179.77 and on a tear, we ranged down to $120 and it was looking grim and of course the timeline went full bear mode with even Ansem calling for $80. But fear not manlets, we're pumping.
SOLETH: .05201- Up from .0428
SOLBTC: .0026790 - up from .00239
SOLD - 3.5 up from the low 3's.
Biggest price narratives:
Bitcoin and Eth have been ranging for quite a while Solana continues to have both the most usability and volatility. We've had two filings for a Solana ETF now, $250 mill minted in USDC and it's feeling like we have what we need to pump it. Firedancer news keeps coming out, with a couple other clients on the way and we will see just how much improvement to the network we can get. ,
Bitcoin has been getting violently dumped by the Germans in the billions, but they have unloaded the whole stack the BTC ETF buyers are buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth a day.
Quick check in on the year, we started out with Solana at ~100 and are up over 55% on the year.
If you want to do a little historical check, Jan 1 2023 we were at $10. So yea we've been eating the last 1.5 years.
Where we are at in the cycle seems like a turning point. Everyone, including the duck Don has flipped bullish. It feels like we're on full send mode and I don't know why anyone would be bearish at this point. Eth ETF comes next week, Solana will have an insane amount of announcements during and leading up to Breakpoint, the network has been crushing it with a ton of usage and also a ton of attention.
Helium - crushing the depin narrative with over 100k subscribers to it's cell phone service plan. Count me in for two of them, my main number is on Helium and it works great and I don't pay for coverage anymore. Even at $20/ month it's a steal, you get the T Mobile network when not connected to a hotspot, and support decentralized providers when in range. It's a win win win.
Solana Economic Zone - Argentina is doing it, they are opening a Solana city or opportunity zone in Argentina for the degens. This is through Forma and they released a fantastic video and I'm bullish AF on them. If you guys are listening, count me in. I'd love to visit this, drink some amazing Argentinian wine, eat some bistecca, and grow the Solana pie with our South American bros. I can only imagine the opportunities that this will create. I feel like all over South America there have been pushes for crypto, but there was never a way to actually do it in the way that they wanted. No one wants to transact in Bitcoin. Solana actually provides a way to bring payments, savings, and commerce in dollars or whatever currency they decide in a cheap and decentralized way.
Airdrop News: Yesterday we get Parcl's second installment of airdrops which got locked for a few months and on the 18th we get Cloud the much anticipated Sanctum drop with their allocation checker being live now. Seems like if you managed to stay up to date and play their games with their site you will be rewarded pretty heavily. They have really overthought this one and I am not sure I've read all the insane amount of content they've put out, but you can buy cheap Cloud ahead of time and lock it up for 6 months. Not sure I'm in for that, but I'm sure that it's going to be an impactful protocol for Solana. So I'll likely hold my airdrop and see how it goes.
Pump.fun revenue passing eth. Give the people what the want and they use it! Product market fit has been found on blockchains and it's memecoins baby.
Baxus and Blinks - bought a bottle of whiskey directly from twitter in like 15 seconds haha. Commerce has come to Twitter. This is going to get so crazy and I know that there was an NFT called Send that dropped 100k nfts direct on Twitter, then dropped a token on the buyers. This will be huge.
Jup releasing their active staking rewards - 60 million worth and going strong.
We had a small NFT pump, potential or an anomaly?
Someone swept a milly worth of Madlads, tons of Tensorians, and it lifted the entire market. It was the shred of hope we were all waiting for. I bought some NFT's and it felt great, it was so much fun to buy an jpeg and see the price go up. Memecoins are still pumping, but it seems like there is still hope for our jpegs. I have been thinking for a while that the bottom is near, it's been brutal for all our nft's.
Defi news - Lulo is crushing, Sanctum's airdrop is looking juicy and we are all holding our breath until we hear more, and we even have Paypal juicing lending rates at Kamino. I saw 40% plus interest rates for lending and additional Kamino points. They are here to stay and I think the issue with their launch was that they are a Token Extension that isn't natively accepted across all defi, this is changing and I like this development.
Politics - related to US. One of my thesis' was that we would see the current administration cut rates and pump the economy up leading into the election. There is some stats where the incumbent president has never won an election in a recession, so historically they do whatever they can to pump the economy before.
But we aren't really seeing that, Biden's future is unsure and it doesn't look great. Trump has avoided an assassination and has decided to fully endorse both bitcoin and a VP JD Vance that is a millenial, crypto friendly, and owns 6 figures of BTC. It's basically a crypto friendly president at this point and it's going to get silly. With Sol ETF applications getting sent in, Eric Balchunas the ETF whisperer, said that there's a super low probability of anything being accepted, but if Trump get's elected it will all change.
Blockchains and marketing.
Dot - came out that it's paying millions for shillers, no one really uses it or cosmos, but people sure pretend to love them.
This leads me to how should an L1 market itself? Monad is kind of in the spotlight right now. It seems like everyone is fully invested in early seed rounds for it, or they are thinking they will get some sort of allocation for being active in the discord or twitter. So you have investors looking to dump combined with retail begging for allocations that they will likely dump. This doesn't really build culture lmao. I don't really know what would at this point, but it seems like it's a really hard and multi billion dollar question. Monad very well could be the Solana for EVM maxis, or it could be another Avax that has better tech and kind of sits on the side. It kind of depends right? There isn't really a wave for them to surf. Solana was the Alt L1 trade and benefited from the overall structure of the market. Eth got too expensive to do defi or NFT's on after defi summer, so it moved to Solana, Avax, and Luna. The Soluvax trade. People had made heaps of money during defi summer and were paid to bridge to Avax which brought a lot of money over. Solana also benefited from this and I think all of the early tokens fell victim to trying to appeal to this crowd. They offered insane yields on all defi, but this was only because the tokens were garbage and Alameda was farming and dumping them. The emissions were so high you could see a high yield, but the token would go directly to 0. So it turned into a game of hot potato.
There was a lot of rugs and all the tech was still pretty early, but the narrative held up, and I think that Solana was ultimately the victor of the Alt L1 trade. Why it was the victor is probably for a lot of reasons, but the narrative kind of ended there, and the reasons for bridging were still solid. NFT's absolutely crushed on Solana and the greatest NFT action, markets, and ecosystem was built. With millions of people buying millions of NFT's. That a lot of us still hold, and a lot of communities that have stood the test of insane bear markets and dips and criticism.
When FTX fully rugged, there were still so many of us that we (royal we, not me) built our own damn dog coin and injected liquidity back into the markets. We lived through the struggle and now have a pretty good reason to stick around.
You can't package that up and sell it for any other blockchain. The trials and tribulations that every part of the ecosystem went through are impossible to recreate. The users, the builders, the Solana team, and the blockchain saw usage and were tested in ways that can't be replicated. We recovered and now have something that is incredibly resilient.
It's going to take a lot more than the promise of some coins to get people people bridging and that's why we simply hold and stake our Solana and have as much fun as we can on the fun chain.
Thank you all for joining in, hit me up with suggestions or any inquiries, dm's open on thomasbahamasfi.
Let's grab the bull by the horns and get that bag.
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