About the editor: Spencer Noon is an independent crypto investor. Looking to get in touch? DM him on Telegram or reply to this email and say hi 👋

This Issue Is Powered By Polygon 💜. Be sure to check out the new hyper-scalable DeFi hub emerging on Polygon zkEVM.

“Community Strength” has long been one of my favorite fundamental indicators of crypto network health.

We can quantify some aspects of this indicator, as many community personas are observable onchain. For example, we can measure a network’s developer community by looking at how many accounts are deploying smart contracts and at what rate. Or its end user community, by looking at how accounts are transacting on a network.

We can also pull in measurements from offchain sources, such as inspecting GitHub or viewing social media activity. The composite of these metrics usually provides a decent proxy for community strength.

However, there are some dimensions to community strength that in my opinion are simply impossible to quantify. Instead, you just know it when you see it.

As I tweeted about earlier this week, that is exactly what happened for me as we were pulling this Solana Mega Issue together. After announcing it to our analyst community on Monday, dozens of Solana community members hit me up—not just to contribute themselves, but to recommend other high-quality analysts too.

The end result? 23 total submissions, the most-ever in OurNetwork’s nearly 4 year history.

I find it to be quite notable that so many people in the SOL ecosystem were rallying around each other, particularly during the depths of this crypto bear market. And while this information will never make it onchain, it’s one of the purest signs of community strength I’ve seen in a while.

Now go grab some coffee and enjoy this week’s issue. It’s time to get yourself back up to speed on Solana.

—Spencer Noon 🕛

• Solana DAUs averaged ~190k in September 2023, down from Q1 2023 highs of ~347k DAUs. Transaction counts have also come down from a peak of ~26M in April 2023 to ~15.4M in September 2023. However, while Solana DAUs and Transactions have come down YTD, average monthly fees have stayed consistent throughout the year and have ranged from ~$1.0M (June) to ~$1.4M (August). Solana has also seen a rebound in TVL in Q3 2023 and recently reached ~$335M in September 2023, up from lows of ~$210M in Q1 2023.

• One major highlight in the Solana ecosystem in 2023 has been stablecoin volumes, arguably one of the most important categories in all of crypto. While overall DAUs and transaction volume on the network has trended downwards in Q3 2023 after a resurgence in user activity during Q2 2023, stablecoin volumes have remained consistent during that period at ~$1.5B. This is an indication that onchain users feel comfortable parking their stablecoins on the network, likely with the intention of deploying them into applications and NFTs over time. Interestingly, Solana has also seen minimal stablecoin outflows throughout the year, particularly in Q2 and Q3 which saw ~96k in daily inflows and ~290k in daily outflows, respectively.

• Finally, similar to the other major smart contract platforms in crypto, Developer Activity on Solana has declined over 2023, with ~160 core developers being active in the past week vs. ~540 at the beginning of the year. While New Contracts Deployed and New Contract Deployers have also come down, the remaining developers have remained largely resilient during the crypto bear market with ~60 new contracts deployed per week in September 2023.

• Following an 80% decline in weekly volume since January 2023 (1.3M SOL a week), the overall Solana NFT market has held stable for the last three months - particularly in the number of traders and collections traded. The fight between two NFT marketplace giants, Magic Eden and Tensorswap, continues to heat up with each holding roughly 50% market share. Magic Eden started 2023 with 98% market share.

• On Ethereum, there has been a lot of competition through cutting royalties. Solana marketplaces enforce royalties and compete on maker/taker fees instead. Magic Eden started the year with 0.4% maker and 1.4% taker fees, but due to Tensorswap AMM maker fees, they started giving makers a 0.4% rebate.

• Putting the Solana marketplace into perspective, if we place it next to the Ethereum ecosystem then Solana now makes up 8% of weekly NFT trading volume. Solana did $4M in volume last week (9/25), Ethereum did $77M with Polygon next at $1.2M.

• There are 100 collections with over 1000 SOL in volume in the last 30 days; many are newly deployed (less than 6 months old). Royalties on most collections sit around 5%, and each collection has at least 1000 traders.

• NFT minting volume has taken off due to "compressed NFTs" which allow you to mint 1 million NFTs for approximately $110. This has led to close to 60 million cNFTs minted since March 2023. A lot of this is driven by the Helium network, but also has become more used in communities with collections like Tensorians.

• Similarly, the number of collectors has increased rapidly as well. About 500k wallets are minting every week now - there is debate on how many of these are real wallets, and estimates sit at around 10-15%.

• Over the past year there have been around 1.34B Total MEV arbitrage transactions across the Solana Network. Only 3.35% of these arb transactions were successful while the majority of these arb attempts failed. This past month, there were 25M total arb transactions, with a 5.53% success rate for there arbitrages.

• In terms of MEV total Arb profits in USD, over the past year there has been more than $15M in profit. The majority of successful MEV transactions by tokens include: USDC (68%), SOL (21%), USDT (4%), and mSOL (3%). The MEV Profit / Block is around $0.23 for the past year.

• The top 10 signers accounted for around 50.16% of total successful MEV transactions (around 22.6M transactions signed). The top signer in this case accounted for around 25% of these MEV transactions.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: The top MEV transaction over the past year earned more than $246K in a single MEV transaction, involving USDC, UXP, and swapping back to USDC on a Raydium pool.

• From 2021 to now, Solana's NFTs have accounted for 5-13% of secondary market sales, marking its growing impact. While Ethereum has led this space, a 2022 decline in weekly buyers and volume is noticeable. Within Solana, MagicEden was the top NFT marketplace in early 2022. However, the platform's once-unassailable market share has started to wane as newcomers enter the space. Notably, Tensor HQ has emerged as MagicEden's most formidable competitor, capturing a staggering 40% of the market share.

• In May 2023, Tensor HQ introduced sales of compressed NFTs, commonly referred to as cNFTs. What is remarkable about this development is the traction these cNFTs have gained in a short span of time. cNFTs have accounted for an astounding 20-65% of total sales on the Tensor platform.

• Tensor HQ's buyer demographics reveal an intriguing mix, illustrating the platform's broad appeal. Half of Tensor's user base has spent under $500, signaling accessibility for casual buyers and newcomers to the NFT space. On the opposite end, 200 wallets have invested over $100,000.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This transaction exemplifies a paradigm shift in NFT trading, marked by the purchase of a compressed NFT (cNFT) on Tensor's marketplace for less than 1% of a Solana (SOL) token. This ultra-affordable transaction showcases the burgeoning trend of low-cost NFTs. But why does this matter? It signals a democratization of the digital asset space, making NFTs more accessible than ever. Moreover, it casts the spotlight on Solana's low transaction fees enabling this new trading ecosystem to flourish.

• The battle for NFT market share on Solana resides between two marketplaces, MagicEden and Tensor. Tensor's incentivized airdrops and MagicEden's loyalty program are both strategies that each marketplace has adopted to attract and retain traders. Since 2023, the cumulative SOL volume generated by loyal ME users has been substantially higher than Tensor (40% vs. 13%). Despite having a lower proportion of loyal users compared to Tensor, MagicEden only users were able to generate more volume compared to their competitor.

• Dual-marketplace users can either start with MagicEden or Tensor first and move on to trade on the other marketplace. This analysis identifies the dates where the users interacts with a new marketplace and determine their user type. The seasonal airdrop program run by Tensor has also lost its impact on pulling more MagicEden users. The number of daily users moving from MagicEden -> Tensor has declined from ~250 daily in Season 3 to ~140 daily in Season 3. Meanwhile, the number of users moving from Tensor to MagicEden has remained constant, at around 40+ a day.

• Retail trades contribute to a substantial portion of Magic Eden volume. The image groups transactions on ME by the trader's all-time NFT transaction volume on Solana. The share of transaction volume on ME generated by whales (users spending >10k SOL on NFTs) has risen from ~10% to 20% from September. Likewise, we see the share of retail volume (users spending <100 SOL on NFTs) has risen from ~10% to 15% for mid-size traders.

• Access Protocol offers a new way for creators to monetize and connect with their audiences on-chain. Instead of a traditional subscription (paying e.g. $9.99 per month), subscribers lock ACS tokens to a specific creator's pool to gain access to premium content. Creators earn rewards proportional to the amount of ACS staked in their pool. Today, Access is used by The Block, Coingecko, and many smaller independent creators. There are now 227,073 subscribers (=wallets with >=1 subscription) on Access.

• Access Protocol launched with 7 creators. In the last 8 months, Access has added 36 new creators, totaling 43. Creator onboarding is ramping up significantly, with more than half of creators onboarded since August.

• Since August Daily Active Users have been averaging between 1,000 and 2,000, peaking at over 9,000 on July 15th. Note: this data is only inclusive of on-chain actions (creating a subscription or claiming rewards). Existing users accessing content are not included.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: In this transaction, a user locked 10,823,396 ACS to a creator pool where the minimum to gain access to content was 1,000 ACS (=11,000x). Across all subscribers, only 41% subscribe at the minimum subscription level for creators. An astounding 20% of subscribers lock more than double the minimum subscription requirement. This is promising data that proves consumers are willing to contribute more value to their preferred creators.

• Genopets is a mobile game that motivates players to live an active lifestyle. A Web3 Tamagotchi you take care of by taking care of yourself. Their Crafting and Habitat management programs enable players to convert Energy earned from their steps to KI Token used to mint in-game items like crystals, boosts, and augment semi-fungible tokens (SFTs) used in the game. Since August 2022, Genopets players have minted more than 2M assets for the game, >500k of which were created verifiably random on-chain in the past 4 months alone.

• Genopets contracts have consistently been in the top 3 most active contracts by daily active signers on the Solana network. In their Habitat Management program, thousands of unique signers daily convert energy from their steps to the KI Token.

• The Genopets crafting program is built on a Solana program that executes verifiably random on-chain actions. This gotcha system has resulted in more than 500k items minted by Genopets players in the last 4 months.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This transaction, demonstrates the Genopets in-app purchase marketplace where players will spend fiat in app to buy items on Web3 marketplaces. Credits players buy using fiat with in-app purchases convert to USDC in a single transaction to purchase an SFT on-chain and burn it into the game for player use, all in one atomic transaction. This is completely invisible to the mobile app user and allows the web3 rails to power the app’s game economy without the player needing any crypto knowledge or wallet.

• Star Atlas is a space exploration game built on Solana. On Sept. 21 2023, Star Atlas launched Sage Labs, an early access, 2D browser-based game. Since its launch Sage Labs has attracted strong user interest, and hit 10.31M transactions since launch.

• Sage Labs users have been averaging close to ~1k txs/day, with ~20% of them submitted through Phantom's Auto-Confirm feature, which is Phantom's new beta feature to submit transactions and signed messages without triggering an approval dialog (approval pop-up).

• Sage Labs users performed an average of 71 txs & spend 54 mins playing per auto-confirm session. Based on a 51 min median session, the median Sage user is getting ~5mins more playtime per session compared to non auto-confirm users.

• Mad Lads are the first collectible xNFT; in practice, clicking your Mad Lad inside of Backpack launches a token-gated decentralized app. Mad Lads were set to mint on 4/20 inside of the Backpack wallet; however, due to heavy demand and DDOS attacks, the mint was delayed by 24 hours. Over the course of the mint, more than 1 billion requests were made to the Backpack API. This is a testament to the community building and marketing efforts ahead of the mint.

• Within a day of the mint, Mad Lads traded $8M+ over 10k transactions and became the most heavily traded collection across all blockchains. This volume was fueled by large sales of rare Skulls and Lassies (highest sale was $80k). Ultimately, this chart exhibits the unprecedented interest and attention that Mad Lads brought to the Solana blockchain, as a product-driven project.

• A month after launching, the Mad Lads Solana validator reached $10M in staked SOL. This demonstrates that passionate NFT communities can be aligned to help secure and decentralize the network

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: In order to avoid bots from minting the majority of the Mad Lads, a honeypot was created, such that the automated bots ended up minting fake NFTs. This transaction shows the final round of reimbursements from the Mad Lads honeypot account to wallets run by bots trying mint. The honeypot was successful in ensuring that real people were able to mint the Mad Lads. Nevertheless, bots continue to impact the industry.

• Photo Finish™ LIVE is a Solana game, boasting thousands of virtual horse owners who have collectively spent millions in USDC deposits used for racehorse purchases and entry fees, making it one of the most thriving and dynamic Web3 ecosystems of all time. Since launch in April of 2023, players have purchased racehorses for a combined total of $2.64M, spent nearly $987k on breeding fees, and spent an additional $2.44M on race entry fees.

• The Photo Finish™ economy is backed by an in-game virtual currency called $DERBY that is backed by USDC. The growth in USDC deposits through the month of September was nearly exponential, reaching over $1.7M in total deposits.

• With impressive growth across every aspect of the ecosystem from sales to racing to wagering, the game has seen impressive revenue jumps compared to previous seasons. Season 7 saw 152k of platform fees generated, growing from 100k in Season 6 and 48k in Season 5.

• Since launching in July, Marinade's new Native staking product has reached 2.5M SOL stake. Built with institutional investors in mind, Native is a first-of-its-kind product that delegates a staker's SOL to 100+ top validators in one click, but without any smart contract interaction. While early SOL investors with locked SOL are not eligible to use liquid staking, they can access Marinade Native. Through January 1st, stakers can also earn MNDE incentives on top of their SOL staking rewards.

• mSOL is the first liquid staking token on Solana and has surpassed 75,000 wallets. mSOL is Solana's largest stake pool, representing 5.5M SOL staked. Lido's stSOL, which has the second most wallets (31,476), has voted to sunset operations on Solana, so other Solana LSTs should benefit.

• MNDE is the governance token of Marinade that is a fair-launch with no VC allocation, has been widely distributed across the ecosystem in two years of being on the market. 88 holders have more than 250k MNDE tokens, while there are 3.21k accounts with less than 1,000 tokens.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Marinade features a "Directed Stake" feature that enables stakers to vote for validators with either mSOL or locked MNDE tokens. The Step Validator chose to take its self-staked SOL and stake it to Marinade and vote for their validator using directed stake. mSOL votes account for 20% of the overall Marinade stake pool, so the ratio resulted in Step receiving over 1.6 SOL per 1 SOL directed to them (396,000 SOL staked and directed = 643,000 staked to the Step Validator).

• JitoSOL is Solana’s first liquid staking token to include rewards from revenue associated with MEV extraction. Over the year from Oct 24, 2022, to Oct 4, 2023, JitoSOL experienced hypergrowth with its TVL growing at an average rate of 12.7% weekly. The consistent and exponential increase, peaking at around 2.43M SOL by Sep 25, 2023, underscores JitoSOL's rapidly expanding presence as a dominant liquid staking protocol. As of today Jito is the second largest protocol on Solana by TVL.

• JitoSOL has attracted over 2.9M SOL deposits, with stake account deposits adding another 382k. Despite these significant inflows, only 194k SOL and 682k from stake accounts have been withdrawn, underscoring JitoSOL's compelling growth and strong user retention over the past year.

• As of October 4, 2023, JitoSOL's strong integration within the Solana DeFi landscape is evident, with 36% of its TVL actively deployed across various DeFi protocols including Marginfi, Drift, Orca, Kamino, and Raydium. The remaining 64% is in wallets.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Upon adding support for JitoSOL in April 2023, the JitoSOL deposits in the Marginfi lending protocol saw an immediate increase in TVL to the allocated max capacity, highlighting strong user adoption. Subsequent step increases in TVL starting in July 2023 can be attributed to Marginfi expanding the cap for JitoSOL deposits, suggesting continued robust user demand. This is evidence that widespread adoption of Liquid Staking Tokens such as JitoSOL and a thriving Solana DeFi ecosystem go hand in hand.

• Orca is a spot trading DEX on Solana that uses a concentrated liquidity AMM structure. Since Orca’s concentrated liquidity product launched in early 2022, liquidity providers (LPs) have earned $20M+ in trading fees.

• 23k unique wallet addresses have created concentrated liquidity positions on Orca, creating a total of over 515k positions. While many of these LPs create positions using Orca’s UI, advanced traders can also create strategies that generate positions using Orca’s SDK.

• Since inception, more than $24B of trading activity has gone through Orca’s concentrated liquidity pools. This volume is diversified across major pairs like SOL/USDC, pegged pairs like liquid staking tokens, and ecosystem tokens from projects across Solana, giving LPs and traders alike a wide range of options.

• MarginFi, a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol on Solana, has witnessed rapid growth in its niche since introducing its mrgn points mechanism in early July. TVL rapidly reached $24M+ from $3M+ in 70 days, growing over 650%. In comparison, other protocols Mango, Solend, Port finance, and Larix had growth of 83%, 31%, 6%, and -17% respectively. MarginFi’s TVL currently fluctuates between $25M and $22M. The current TVL is $22.7M, making it the second top lending protocol on Solana by TVL.

• MarginFi's TVL is reliable and remarkable due to its asset distribution. Over 30% is in stablecoins and 60% in 5 diverse liquid staking assets. Solend, MarginFi’s competitor, has 60% in mSOL and 16% in stablecoins.

• MarginFi's rapid growth is not limited to TVL. Daily active users (DAU) surged from around 50 to 500, and the platform has maintained user engagement, with an average of 257 DAUs in the past month, ranking MarginFi fourth among DeFi protocols on Solana.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: In the past 30 days, SolScan recorded 12,033,179 transactions interacting with the MarginFi V2 program. A total of 2,360 unique users executed these transactions with a impressive 99.53% success rate.

• Drift Protocol is a perpetual futures decentralized exchange (DEX) on Solana. Drift has recently crossed over $1B in trading volume across its perpetual futures and spot markets, which includes markets for BTC, ETH, SOL and 20+ other altcoins. Majority (>60%) of Drift's volume is concentrated on trading SOL-PERP and BTC-PERP, with spikes in altcoin volume when altcoins are surging. Drift has accommodated >4.2M trades over the year and now has ~$5M in open interest (value of open perpetual positions).

• Total value locked in Drift has surged past it’s all-time-high set in 2022 with over $20M USDC equivalent of TVL. Over 45% of TVL comes from using LSTs (mSOL, jitoSOL) as collateral to trade perps, allowing users to earn yield while trading.

• Drift's monthly active users soared by 1,000% from 366 users in November 2022 to 3,600 users by August 2023. Nearly half engage in 1-3 trades daily, showcasing a prevalence of low-frequency retail traders in the platform, with only 2% of users categorized as high-frequency with 50+ daily trades.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: This wallet “Hexkq” has netted over $560K in profits over the past week, mainly from their long position on SOL, in which they started to fill from a price of approximately $19, while the current price of SOL at the time of writing is $24. This shows the abundance of smart degenerate traders who trade large positions on Drift and testifies the robust performance of its liquidity trifecta (decentralised orderbook (DLOB), Just-In-Time (JIT) auction, AMM).

• Zeta stands as the world's fastest fully on-chain perps exchange, built by traders, for traders. With a truly decentralized orderbook, it offers unmatched speed, prices and transparency, pushing the boundaries of modern-day blockchain technology. The recent v2 platform launch, marked by the innovative Mad Wars event in collaboration with Mad Lads, attracted over 2k new wallets to bring Zeta to a cumulative 5.99k users, demonstrating Zeta's escalating popularity and robust user engagement in the trading community.

• Leveraging Solana's capacity, Zeta processed over 24.3M transactions last week, bringing it to 1B across its lifetime (five times that of Uniswap). With just 5k SOL in all-time gas fees and a transaction failure rate below 1% thanks to Solana's local fee markets upgrade, Zeta exemplifies efficiency and scalability.

• Zeta, leveraging its CLOB, offers superior trade execution and price discovery versus AMM pricing models. With $200k liquidity within a 10 bps spread, it's the most efficient DeFi venue for trading SOL perps, offering 20x leverage and tight perps liquidity for optimal fills.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: A Zeta trader is able to place 10 orders in a single transaction by requesting additional compute units (instruction #1) and utilising Solana’s account lookup table feature. By first cancelling all his market orders (instruction #3) and then placing them, he is able to atomically replace all his price quotes meaning that he will never place one side and not the other. This strategy, which also amortizes costs, gets us closer to the performance of a CEX but on a public blockchain.

• Phoenix is a fully on-chain limit orderbook DEX that allows users to efficiently trade their favorite assets with low fees and a new level of transparency. Phoenix is efficiently fully on-chain, enabled by Solana's high speed and low costs. Since its beta launch in February 2023, Phoenix has processed $403M in volume.

• The Phoenix user base continues to grow, with 36,326 cumulative users. One of Phoenix's unique features is that trade balances don't need to wait for withdrawal, which leads to a better user experience for traders.

• Phoenix's market makers compete to provide the most competitive on-chain prices, leading to better prices for users. These sophisticated market makers are sustainably profitable—unlike AMM liquidity providers. During the four month period of June 4th, 2023, to October 4th, 2023, market makers on Phoenix profited over $100k.

• BlazeStake, a Solana stake pool protocol by the Solana Foundation, enhances Solana's decentralization. Stake SOL, earn bSOL tokens with compounding APY-backed rewards. Instant or delayed SOL withdrawal. BlazeStake spreads stake, optimizing rewards. After SolBlaze's Twitter airdrop announcement in late July, over 1.6K staking transactions marked July 31st. 2.29k staking transactions occurred in September, and 950 users interacted with SolBlaze.

• SolBlaze sits at $10.2M TVL milestone in October, growing rapidly in Solana ecosystem, especially in Liquid Staking.

• The BLZE airdrop started on August 17th, distributing over 2.5 billion $BLZE tokens to 20.2k SolBlaze users. Staking more $SOL and utilizing $bSOL in DeFi increases your score and airdrop share.

• Solflare launched the Solana Snap which allows all MetaMask users to store Solana-based tokens & NFTs, bridge from EVM to SOL and connect to any Solana app. The Solana Snap by Solflare is the third most downloaded Snap out of all Snaps. Over $800k has been bridged from EVM to Solana since its launch three weeks ago.

• Solflare grew from 150k to 250k monthly active users from June to August. September shows a slow decline with the number of active users hovering around 250k.

• In June, Solflare introduced the Solflare Validator, which became the fastest-growing Validator on Solana, garnering $95M SOL in stake within just three months. Users stake around 20% of all circulating SOL (worth $2B) with Solflare. Every month approximately 1M SOL gets staked/unstaked with Solflare.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: Binance relied on Solflare as their trusted wallet for staking SOL since 2021. When Solflare introduced the Solflare Validator, Binance staked 2M SOL with it.

• Backpack is an open, programmable wallet that runs decentralized apps called xNFTs. Like any other application operating system, Backpack has a set of developer frameworks and APIs associated with it, allowing anyone to build their own xNFT apps without permission. An xNFT can be a game, an NFT gallery, or a crypto price tracker - anything that can be written with executable code. During a limited-time challenge, the Moongame xNFT was installed more than 2000 times over the course of 4 days.

• NFT projects may go to market as xNFTs. Sporting Labs launched a fully featured fantasy league xNFT which included the minting experience, the staking process, and the leaderboard in one place. This open-source xNFT has been installed over 2000 times, and continues to draw in new users.

• Promotions offered through xNFTs can help drive new long-term users. Asset Dash, a portfolio tracker and deal aggregator, recently offered all Backpack users an exclusive deal which led to roughly 2000 xNFT installations over the course of 4 days. This has led to thousands of new Asset Dash users.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: aBackpack recently launched the first collectible xNFT collection, Mad Lads, whose public mint took place within Backpack. To combat bots, a honeypot was created, such that the automated bots ended up minting fake NFTs. The transaction above shows the final round of reimbursements from the Mad Lads honeypot account to wallets run by bots trying mint. The honeypot was successful in ensuring that real people were able to mint the Mad Lads. Nevertheless, bots continue to impact the NFT industry.

• Squads is the leading multisig on Solana, with 11k+ multisigs created and adopted by the largest teams to secure their treasuries and programs. It is built on top of Squads Protocol, which was the first program on Solana to be formally verified and has an immutable version (v3) that has been audited multiple times. In terms of treasuries deposited, Squads’ TVL has been sticky and gradually increasing each week, reaching over $450M.

• Squads' major use case is program management, helping Solana protocols in securely updating their programs, with close to 75 program upgrades executed through Squads each month. Over 180 programs from leading projects such as Raydium, Helium, Jupiter, Marginfi, Drift and more are delegated to Squads.

• Squads is the third top Solana program used for holding JitoSOL, a leading liquid staked SOL protocol, with currently over 146k JitoSOL deposited across Squads multisigs. Squads offers a secure platform for Solana teams that have treasuries and want to earn yield on their SOL exposure.

• Light Protocol is a ZK Layer on Solana. Originally built as a private token transfer network, its latest Testnet release (v3) allows developers to build Solana programs with arbitrary private state and execution. Active feature development focuses on Light v3. However, Light v1 has also seen steady growth over the last year, reaching $2.7M in total shielded volume and peaking at 1.000 SOL per day on August 14.

• In the last months, the core team shipped Syscalls for Light v3 that add ZK primitives directly into the Solana runtime. One of them is the Alt-bn128 Syscall. It makes ZK-SNARK proof verification on Solana 500x more efficient, enabling ZK transactions to settle on the L1 in 400ms (1 Solana block).

• In August, Light added a Poseidon Syscall. Poseidon is a ZK-friendly hash function, and the Syscall makes it 2000x cheaper to execute on Solana. All Private Solana Programs leverage the Syscalls and generic account compression. Early POCs include private swap and token streaming programs.

• Coinflow offers web3 companies a way to accept traditional payments and lets users convert crypto to FIAT in their bank. Unique to Coinflow, users can buy items directly from a smart contract, like NFTs, without first getting liquid crypto. This boosts conversions and streamlines the user journey. Their volume is up 500% MoM (totally over 250k USDC monthly), with 40+ clients embedding their system. Coinflow also allows instant crypto-to-US bank transfers via RTP.

• Consumers want instant payouts. Coinflow’s Withdraw product is proving this, as 80% of users paid fees for accelerated withdraws in September, a rate that Coinflow has maintained for multiple months.

• In September, Coinfow passed the threshold of over 5,000 unique customers initiating transactions, with a 190% MoM increase of unique card checkout customers.

💦🔬 Tx-Level Alpha: A user bought an NBA preseason ticket, tokenized as an NFT via XP, using their Coinflow balance from a credit card transaction. Coinflow lets users buy on-chain items without needing to onramp tokens or pay gas fees. This breakthrough means non-crypto users can leverage blockchain benefits without technicalities or complex KYC, enhancing conversion and widening user reach in blockchain apps.

Quick Links: Disclosures