Jack Kubinec

1 week ago | blockworks.co | Jack Kubinec

When Donald Trump paired his Solana memecoin with USDC, the Solana network's stablecoin supply predictably shot upwards - creating 306 days of supply growth over a long weekend, as we put it in this newsletter. Although much of this supply growth stemmed from a memecoin that had about 48 hours of relevance, Solana's stablecoin supply is still near its all-time high. On February 11, Solana had $12.4 billion in stables. Today, it has $12.1 billion.

2 weeks ago | blockworks.co | Jack Kubinec

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, . More than a half decade into DeFi, the sector is still somewhat of a wild west beset by elevated risk, unpredictable yields and the occasional crisis. Mary Gooneratne, co-founder of Solana DeFi startup Loopscale, wants to give blockchain borrow-lend a facelift. "A lot of those [existing DeFi] architectures were designed kind of as a function of Ethereum's constraints," Gooneratne said in an interview.

2 weeks ago | blockworks.co | Jack Kubinec

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.

2 weeks ago | blockworks.co | Jack Kubinec

XNET, a Solana-based project building a decentralized network of Wi-Fi hotspots, has partnered with US telecom giant AT&T. The collaboration will enable AT&T to offload mobile data traffic onto XNET's network, the team told Lightspeed exclusively. XNET sells Wi-Fi hotspots that businesses and public spaces can deploy in exchange for XNET token rewards. Together, the patchwork of hotspots makes up a distributed wireless network.

2 weeks ago | blockworks.co | Jack Kubinec

It's been three weeks since Solana's validators failed to pass SIMD-0228, a governance proposal that aimed to shift Solana's issuance to a market-based mechanism and reduce inflation in the process. But while validators - who earn their keep partly from Solana inflation - voted the measure down, issuance still doesn't feel like a settled question.