š What Happened This Week in Crypto? Lavina Checkinā in From the Beach
Politifi just got mogged...
Every single time I opened CT over the past week, a brand new Solana-related development popped on my feed. Right from fundamental upgrades and fundraises to product filings and novel feature rollouts, all boxes were checked. So, without beating around the bush, letās dive right in.
āļø ZK Compression
First and foremost, Light Protocol and Helius Labs unveiled āZK compressionā to scale Solana apps. This basically allows devs to store certain types of data using Solana's cheap ledger space instead of its expensive account space.Ā
The launchers claimed that ZK compression directly scales the L1. L2s arenāt even a part of the equation.
Devs can build and scale everything on Solana without stepping out of its ecosystem. Consider this: The cost to airdrop 1 million tokens to users comes up to $260k today. With ZK compression, devs will get to save a huge chunk of pocket money. Precisely, only $50 will have to be incurred, making the deed 5200x cheaper.
This obviously didnāt bode well with the Ethereum community. Itās mind bogglingly annoying as well as predictable how every single Ethereum maxi canāt digest Solana developments. Itās almost like the last semblance of prestige in them does not want to give away that air of superiority. Whiny crybabies.Ā
An Ethereum community member took a dig at the Solana guys for lying and sensationalizing the reveal. Anatoly Yakovenko grilled him.
The ZKsync founder went on to mockingly argue that āThe whole monolithic Solana thesis is gone at once. Impressive.ā In the very same tweet, he put Ethereum on a pedestal and claimed that ZKsync has been āquietly building asynchronously composable ZK future for Ethereum.ā
š° The $60 milly fundraise
Moving on, it rained money within the Solana ecosystem this week. Colosseum - the recently launched startup accelerator that orchestrates hackathons - raised $60 million for a fund to invest in early-stage projects.Ā
The fund was, obviously, oversubscribed. Regardless, itās gonna focus on pre-seed investments in startups from the winners of Solana hackathons.
šŖ Jupiterās upgrade
Jupiter announced a new upgrade for swaps. In the words of the pseudonymous founderĀ Meow, this release will fire all cylinders along the lines of āinstant routing, the very tricky slippage/MEV problem, managing the insane explosion of new tokens and the strict list as a major bottleneck for verification.ā
Learn more:
š£ Solana ETF
The ETF hype is far from fizzling out. After Bitcoin and Ether, Solana is undeniably the next eligible bachelor waiting in queue to get its own products listed on bourses. VanEck filed for the first-ever Solana ETF in the US this week. Interestingly, Canadaās 3iQ filed for a similar product a few days back.
Well well well, the ETH comparison was again slid in. VanEck's head of digital assets research, Matthew Sigel, said that the firm filed for a Solana ETF because the blockchain acts as a ācompetitorā to Ethereum with a āunique combination of scalability, speed, and low costs."
The classification debate was also addressed and Sigel underlined that SOL is a commodity, not a security. Looks like he took āBe the elephant you wish to see in the roomā too seriously. Speculating a potential launch timeline, Bloombergās Seyffart noted,
āThis only has a shot to launch sometime in 2025 if we have a new admin in the White House and SEC. Even then not guaranteed.ā
According to market maker GCRās estimates, āSolana may increase 1.4x under the bear flows scenario, 3.4x under the baseline scenario, and 8.9x under the blue sky scenario.ā
While pretty much everyone from the crypto community rejoiced about the filing, critics like CoinClapper didnāt shy away from asserting,Ā
āThis is pretty much the worst-case scenario for the SEC - this is exactly why the ETH etf should have been denied and ETH classified as a security. Now, thousands of crypto companies will go for an ETF down the road. Truly a nightmare for the SEC.ā
š Blinks & Actions
Revolutionary would be the right word to sum up these two newly launched features. This is literally the way to onboard masses into our crazy lil sleepless, addictive world. Solana legit found the right product-market fit, merged Web2 with Web3, and fostered chain abstraction with their banger blinks and actions release. Truly a superpower.
Learn more about Blinks & Actions here
š§āš¦³ BODEN sinks
The first official debate of the season between Tremp and Boden took place last night. The current president stumbled, fumbled, gasped for breath, failed to prove his energy and stamina, and gave irrelevant answers.
Midway through the debate, the Boden campaign told reporters that the president was suffering from a cold in an attempt to explain his āraspyā voice. I didnāt catch the debate live, but BBC outrightly claimed that āsome of his answers were nonsensical.ā
Similar to his āshe no loss, she no sell Solana, she denied. Her freedom can always be securedā assertion, he blabbered even during last nightās debate. Like Trump exclaimed, āI really donāt know what he said at the end of that sentence, and I donāt think he did, either.ā
Bidenās ex-comms director outrightly claimed that "There's no two ways about it, that was not a good debate for Joe Biden."
Solana mem ecoin Jeo Boden [BODEN] is down 34% on the daily as I write this.Ā
Tremp-related coins didnāt pump-pump to make up for daily losses, but a few did reflect green values on the hourly. Even though Tremp did perform better than Boden, he went on to make several claims that were not supported by facts.
Mogged, indeed š«µš¹
š The number talk
Also, the hat stays on. WIF claimed back $2 and made its way back to the top 50 list yet again. The cat didnāt stay behind. It also ended up pouncing by over 103.7% over the past week to become one of the top meme coin gainers.
The fundamental side of the sword has also been getting sharper. The aggregate market cap of top Solana DePIN projects climbed above the $4 billion mark. Solana also surpassed $400 billion in lifetime DEX volume. Its ecosystem boasts 20 million traders, and it has fostered around 1.59 billion swaps to date.
š
And finallyā¦
Thatās pretty much it for this week. Off I got to relish another sunset, this time from Indonesia. I shall see yāall again within a fortnight, hopefully with another ICC trophy in my kitty.
Until then, keep chanting,
āLong live Soylana!ā
