Solana Weekly

What’s up everybody! This is Thomas Bahamas and you are here for episode number 30 of Solana Weekly. Here to drop some alpha on what's going on and where we're going. Where we are going is up and I’m hoping this trend continues. We’ve finally got a positive narrative leading to positive price action and hot damn it’s about time. It seems like all the regulatory pressure is being followed by tradfi making their move.

In this episode I cover:

Solana Price and relative strength. (It's up!)

Solana Outperformance in NFT's + Defi highlighting Drift and Tensor.

Bit Dudes.

SMB Gen 3 drop dates.

The start of Solana Summer.

What’s up everybody! This is Thomas Bahamas and you are here for episode number 29 of Solana Weekly. Here to drop some alpha on what's going on and where we're going. I apologize for the terrible audio last week, let’s see how much better this one is. I think the theme of this week is FUD! With the timeline down bad and the vibes even more down bad, the SEC calling Sol a security, bags being dumped, we’ve achieved max fud. I think it’s a good time to take a look at our convictions, and then make sure that our risk profile is in line with how we think things will play out.

Sol Price: $14.95 - down a total of 27% from 20.68, we’re down bad. We took a hit and it’s a direct response from the SEC actions. Whether it’s big firms not willing to hold riskier assets, or market makers not willing to stay in the market, we had a massive sell off across major alts. I believe $5 billion of value was wiped in a few hours. The majority were the assets labelled securities in the Coinbase and Binance lawsuits which makes sense.

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sol Eth: From .01107 down to .00859 which is down 22.39%. We are seeing Eth move from an alt coin to a major. It will likely not be called a security and this should have positive effects across the board, but we are seeing why that is important. It held it’s value really well, while we see the dip. There is more upside with Solana, but there is more risk and we see that on the downside.

Sol BTC: .0005755 down a total of 24.58% and is not great. Will this chart ever turn around? I don’t know, I keep calling for it, but we continue to go down. My guess is BTC might actually have a pump before Sol, so it might be a good time to have a bag. I don’t like it, but it might be the way.

From last week we continue to see the SEC and Binance and Coinbase fight publicly. The difference that I’m hearing is that Coinbase is in a much stronger position. They will likely have some large fines to pay and will continue to operate. They also continue to have the tokens deemed securities listed on their exchange. While Binance has much more serious allegations against it, from comingling funds to supporting terrorist funds, they have a bigger fight on their hands and they will be shutting their doors to the US.

Flight to BTC - many projects up and leaving Sol for BTC, I think it’s dumb. The experience is so terrible that it might feel fun at first, but it’s really not.

XRP - The Ripple case is upon us and everyone seems to think it is one of the last things that can save us. They released some Hinman files, and all it appears to have is discussion on how ETH wasn’t deemed a security a few years ago. Everyone wants an easy solution out of this, and I just don’t think there is one. Ripple is literally the worst example of a cryptocurrency and rallying behind it feels like a sham. It’s basically a token that allowed the founders to dump it on retail and take billions off the table from it. They have bot army’s, and have a warchest from dumping on retails for as long as they’ve been around. Their use case: settlement of funds. EVERY crytpocurrency does this! It’s bagholders that got rekt and are hoping for a way out. The absolute worse case scenario for Solana is turning into bagholders without any real use cases. It is my opinion that we’re building so many use cases right now this will never happen, but still.

There is a bill to fire Gensler, and I’m all for it, I wouldn’t bet on it passing though.

Sol Beach bum with another banger thread on value accrual:

https://twitter.com/solbeachbum/status/1668600382547718146?s=46&t=uc83EyjkPaOcRgJ63RUtbg

It’s funny, because you can take the value prop of any big crypto, Ethereum in this example, and play that out with Sol. The value proposition of Ethereum isn’t unique, it can apply to much more, and a more useful chain could get more value out of it using their own models for appraising value.

CPI came it at 4%, under expectations which is great, and the stock market got a rally. Crypto did not.

Overall the outlook really isn’t great for the short term. It’s time to prep for the worst, but position yourself to take advantage of mismatches you see in the market. While the price of Sol has dipped, NFT prices haven’t shifted at all. If you have stables around, you can buy into blue chips for a 30% + discount. I didn’t even really bring up NFT’s because it’s not where my mind is at, their value is tied to the value of Solana. I’m still convinced that we see Solana go higher and now is the time that our conviction gets tested. Solana is for the users and is the only blockchain you can actually use right now at a reasonable price and speed. Stay safe out there and let’s stack some cheap coins while we can. Think long term, leverage isn’t needed, but conviction is.

What’s up everybody! This is Thomas Bahamas and you are here for episode number 28 of Solana Weekly. Here to drop some alpha on what's going on and where we're going. I think the theme of this week is holy s**t, the SEC is coming for crypto. Full force attack with them bringing up charges against Binance and then Coinbase. It's time to be careful with your coins folks and we will plan on digging into this more. Let's move to Solana and check out the volatility:

Sol Price: 20.23 - down a total of 2% from 20.68, and it’s all over the place, so much volatility I can’t even get the price right because it keeps changing. We’re getting hit with the FUD from all angles, with the SEC calling SOL a security, and now we got Jim Cramer calling it a counterfeit coin. We stay bullish long term, but it’s all over the place right now. Breaking: had to delay this because Sol dipped almost two dollars to $18.50 while I was trying to record and had to hit that long button. Pls recover, looks like it’s starting to and we’re back at 19.

Sol Eth: .01039 down from .01107 which is down 6%. Was listening to DonAlt give a breakdown and he is basically saying all you need is Eth, it’s the only coin showing strength in the market and looks good vs BTC. If you look at the chart it has held up well and as we see Sol couldn’t hold on as well.

Sol BTC: .0007253, down from .0007631 down a total of 5%.

Overall the markets tanked and recovered pretty quickly. The news cycle lasted super quick as usual and rather than let the lawsuits get in the way we saw Coinbase go on the offense start tweeting their side of the story out. I'm not sure that was what did it or if people just saw a dip and went for it, but I'm glad we recovered and the volatility is back. Kind of feels like it’s just hanging on and people are degening.

Let’s get into the news of the day.

Seems like the entire Solana twitter ecosystem including me is shadowbanned, so that’s interesting.

The turtles were doing some new launch and the whole contract was compromised, and turtles were on the loose! I think it’s under control now, but gotta be careful out there.

Zero monke business continues to moon, around 30 sol now, the Bitcoin ordinal project he did is over 4 Bitcoin, so it is still free. Crazy to see the price differences haha.

It also appears that Bern and Token 22 was integrated into Jupiter and we got a +90% wick from it. That other exchange Fluxbeam was bad and no one wanted to use it.

The SEC started off with a Binance lawsuit on Monday, and yesterday even went as far as to seek a temporary restraining order to freeze Binance US assets. Kind of insane they are going this far. With this enforcement action we are seeing a run on the bank on their exchange. Only problem is that as a crypto exchange they hold all the reserves and are doing just fine.

The core of what they are going after is that they were accused of running an unregistered exchange, unregistered broker dealer, and settlement of those assets. Of course they included Solana in this which we are not happy about, as well as ADA, Matic, FIL, SAN, AXS, CHZ, FLOW, ICP, NEAR, VGX, DASH, NEXO.

My favorite part of this is that in 2018 they had a Binance employee say we are running a fking unlicenced securities exchange in the USA bro. Upon further reflection of this it was taken out of context and the compliance officer was actually making a joke and pretending to give an opinion of the SEC. It’s interesting to see the way that the SEC is approaching this because they aren’t just enforcing this in the courts, they are making their case in public with the court of public opinion. Is it the last ditch effort to get people while FTX and all the other class of 2022 scams are fresh on everyone’s minds? Probably.

Next day they go after Coinbase. The same type of charges and also bringing up their staking program. They also call Solana a security as well as other tokens. Notably both of these avoid Eth.

Overall take: We kind of knew this was coming, but damn. It's pretty intense. My first reaction was that this is bs and the SEC is overstepping, which it sounds like they are, but also there seems to be serious problems with Binance and there were no real differences between us and .com and they were actively allowing us residents on their platform and trading against them.

I'm glad the coins came back and we're pumping, but it almost seems like an all out war on crypto at this point. Coinbase has been the most compliant company in Crypto for years and often times made a lot less money because of it. So if they go down there is no real hope for crypto. They are standing up and taking the fight back to them and it at least appears as if they have a good case and we can get some sort of regulatory clarity out of it. It's hard to comply with rules that aren't clear and Coinbase has been toeing that line since it started. I have a soft spot for Coinbase because it was one of the only options in 2016 when I was just learning about crypto, and also I'm a huge fan of Brian Armstrong. We need America to allow innovation in business and to just shut down a massive growth opportunity seems like a losing bet.

I think we're seeing the tide shift in the public, we have two presidential candidates that have actively stated they are pro crypto and anti CBDC. The current administration stands for so many things that are just against what we need that there its not going to sustain.

I think this isn't the end of the fud, it always seems like it's over at the bottom and lets just hope that's where we are at.

I still think the political climate will end up being extremely bullish leading into the election year. The current administration must print money to make the economy look better to try to win the next election, while that's just going to be kindling to the fire on the opposition.

With that I'd like to say we keep our eyes on the prize and add to the long term stack. Get your coins off exchanges and self custody them.

I think the bullish side of this is that there are solutions popping up that do just that. I had a call with Ottr Finance and they solve for this. They are a self custodied Solana wallet at the core, but have so much more packed in it, it's like the coolest version of Venmo.

They offer an on and off ramp to your bank account.

They offer staking, buying different tokens, sending money p2p, sending crypto as a gift a lot like tiplink, you can have money deposited through direct deposit from your work (benefit here is it shows up quicker in your Ottr acct than bank account and you don’t have a crypto buying history in your main bank acct.)

Y axis podcast is live, the man, the myth Tristan is back from a podcast hiatus and interviewed Armani for a banger of a comeback. Forgot how good he was at this.

He released it onto twitter as a video and that seems to be the new platform for podcasts after Tucker Carlson released his first episode of Tucker on Twitter with over 30 million views instantly.

Lastly I’m going to finish with a crypto concept I just heard and haven’t heard in a while. Triple entry accounting.

Cryptocurrencies employ this system through their underlying blockchain technology. Every transaction on the blockchain involves an exchange between two parties (the double-entry) and is then confirmed and sealed into the blockchain, providing a non-disputable and transparent record (the triple-entry).

So essentially the block explorers that we all use like solscan, solanafm and etherscan are actually a crucial piece of infrastructure that show the competitive advantage of a crypto transaction vs a fiat transaction. Don’t believe me, you can look on Venmo at your dumb friends that publish their transactions in the feed and you’ll see a couple of their transactions. If you know their wallet address, you could see every single transaction back to when that account was created. This is a type of transparency that it unseen and is what protects us. None of this government protection has anywhere near as much protection as the block explorers do. All we need to do is use them, we just need to get everyone flipping jpegs to understand that’s just an entry to this beautiful web 3 we are building.

That’s it for this week, thank you for joining and hope to see you and some friends next week.

What’s up everyone! Coming in hot with episode 27 of Solana Weekly and we are here to talk about what’s going on in Solana from the perspective of a user. Hope you all had a great Memorial Day Weekend, cause I sure did. We’ve got another fun week with a bunch of action in NFT’s, some airdrops, dog coin pumps, some volatility in the whole crypto market and I’m here to shed some perspective on what’s going on and see where we are going.

Price:

Solana: Sitting at $20.68 with an increase in 8.27% overall in the week. I swear it looked like it was breaking through this range and I was and remain super bullish. Solana is getting hard to avoid when you talk about crypto and has been nonstop delivering. Yea there is a large entity dumping Solana, but there is sell pressure on every coin.

SolEth: Sitting at .01107 and we have an increase of 3.5 percent on the week. This was looking real good and Solana was breaking out. It just couldn’t keep going, but I think it’s the start of a break through.

SolBTC: Sitting at .007631 with an increase of 4.6% on the week. Showing some strength. Is the end of this down only chart upon us? I sure hope so. The best part about this was that BTC was looking super bullish too, both showed strength, SOL outperformed.

Today is the release of BERN - a Bonkearn token thats a new dog coin. Highly anticipated, airdropped to Bonk holders and has taken up most of my time this morning.

What we know:

New token standard - 6.9% fee burning when selling. Forced hodl tokenomics.

Can only trade on a weird dex FluxBeam and I had a bunch of failed transactions this morning.

Some big sales of early holders.

I'm bullish overall and holding for a while.

It crushed my Bonk position, round tripped some solid gains. However this actually burns Bonk so it should be positive for the Bonk bags.

Meme coin season has gotten so out of hand, that this seems like a solid one that's creating some new use cases and tech on Solana.

IF we were to compare this to what's going on with Eth, this is real use cases where Ethereum folks are just sending Eth to people that posted an eth address promising nothing in return. I don't get it.

More of my bags talk:

SMB back over 200, moved to xNFT, Gen 3 teasers are looking solid and looking to be released early next month. Soon.

MadLads - holding steady, pumped and it seemed like the massive wall of AMM's was breached and sitting at 84.

ZMB - The Zero Monkey Business derivative project by uharefat or something like that is pumppping. All hand drawn, unique, tons of art respectors like them. I own some, they are pumping because he did the Ordinal Maxi Business project on Bitcoin and it's almost a 2 bitcoin floor. Cheaper access to the ZMB, sweeping and over 10 sol floor.

I got a Clayno! With my Saga i got a free mint and minted a sick charcoal clayno. Very excited about it, seeing mixed reactions on the timeline. On one hand i could dump it and pay for the phone, on the other hand I want to support the team that is making sick art, and promoting the solana ecosystem with this drop. I hold.

Famous Foxes holding steady at just below 60, seeing tons of action with their nft lending protocol citrus.

Also been dabbling in Sol City Poker's poker tables and I like what i've seen so far. Deposit USDC and you can play in a few seconds. The tables dont seem botted or filled with sharks either. Good vibe, and fun.

Asset dash launched their NFT and it sold out super quick, and I'm actually pretty bullish on Sol NFT's launching. We've got SMB Gen 3, we've also got Tensor's nft coming out which is art by Zenom, and he's also advising on SMB's so it's his time.

Some fun thoughts:

A Solana Weekly podcasts that looks at an hourly chart is hilarious.

Our corner in this space is small. There is finance, there is crypto, there is bitcoin, eth, then there is solana. Bitcoin is digital gold, Eth is programmable money, Solana is a blockchain built to be used. There isn't even a tagline or a single use case. Yes lightspeed, but we're still seeing what exactly a superfast, highly programmable blockchain can build. Some of the most exciting are what I try to highlight. Bonk being distributed to over 450k wallets is something that can't happen at a feasible cost anywhere else. We have a freaking phone that stores our private seeds within the hardware. We have our very own Dapp store that doesn't charge 30% like apple and has crypto native applications in it. There are compressed nft's that you can mint a million for 10 bucks, not sure the exact application of this many, but you can do it. i had an idea that you could distribute text books this way, teacher compiles data that they want students to read, distributes them as a compressed nft. Get's rid of cost. Maybe have people pirate them first until it's big enough.

I think Tensor is actually one of the better examples of this. Two developers from Canada took on a Silicon Valley Unicorn Magic Eden and are winning the battle. Yes they took ideas from Blur, but what they were able to build is so much more than Blur, it's an exchange that exemplifies the speed, the programmability, and is unique in every way. I'm continuously blown away, every time I want something else it's there or it's a setting I didn't turn on.

But what we are seeing is the big swings that Solana is taking in the space. Some of the biggest problems are being tackled and that is what keeps me coming back.

Hope you enjoyed this episode of Solana Weekly, if you’re liking this show, I’d love a review on any podcast platform or even a DM telling me what you want to hear. This is Thomas Bahamas, and I hope you can get into that Bahamas mindset and ride this wave.

What’s up everyone! This is Thomas Bahamas and you are here for Solana Weekly episode 26!

Solana Price - $19.10, down 7.7% from last week and looking like it wants lower. I’m going to get deep into why this is and why the sell pressure won’t stop anytime soon.

SolEth - Sitting at .01069, down 7.5% from last week. Eth not looking strong, but Sol looking weaker.

SolBTC - .0007293 - which is a decrease of 5.5%, Sol is not performing well and holding up to the rest of the market.

Why is Sol dumping you’re probably asking? Well we have major bagholders dumping.

https://twitter.com/solanobahn/status/1660465899995025408 Here’s a thread worth reading by SolanoBahn.

But in summary we have a super old wallet somewhat connected to FTX/Alameda that is dumping the f out of Sol. They had 17 million Sol and have dumped 7 million Sol of it so far. This is likely the “Wintermute Dumper” that has been TWAPing out of their position for months. They are the reason we haven’t had breakouts and it looks like the buyers at 20 have exhausted their willingness to defend it. Now we break down below support and they still have 10 million Sol to fire at us. Not great.

So short term it’s not looking great, my guess is we hit 17, bounce, then hit 13 in the short term. But all is not lost!

We’ve got a long term massive bull case for Solana thread, one that I haven’t really seen.

https://twitter.com/solbeachbum/status/1660604668332896258

Sol Beach Bum coming out with that fire. On it’s current path this puts Solana price up 100x in 10 years, moving to a deflationary currency, a store of value, and TPS over 200k. Rarely do we see predictions like this backed up by data, and I feel like he did a good job of putting those projections together. What this means for us, is to watch out with leverage, stack your Sol’s while you can, be in it for the long term, and that Sol’s price will be stunted in the short term. Once you know this, it will set you free.

Metaplex drama - starting to tax NFT mint’s at .01 Sol per. Community up in arms.

MadLads catching a pump and I’m here for it.

Asset Dash’s Vanta NFT just dropped and sold out in minutes, good sign that there is still demand for good mints, I just haven’t seen that many.

Chat GPT coming to Solana.

NFT Fi is still exploding, people are stacking that Sol this way, still think it’s generally useless and a net negative.

FTX 2.0 gaining some steam.

Ledger - everyone is pissed at it for adding an OPTIONAL social recovery plan. Good idea and probably needed if we want secure storage for normies, but pissing off us cypherpunks.

BTC NFT’s are pumping and HGE is moving ABC over.

Drift is killing it, added mSOL as a collateral option and have 6400 mSol deposited currently.

What it all means: I don’t think we are out of the weeds with sol and sol NFT’s just yet. The plan is to dca during dips for the next few months. If we get under 15 we stack hard. We are in an era where the protocol of Solana has immense value and is hitting its stride while the value of its token will be suppressed for the short term. I don’t think Solana summer will be the Solana token mooning. I think it will be opening up access to all markets on Solana. I think NFT’s get sorted out with Metaplex capitulating or a new standard being introduced. All this leads to more transactions, more users, better use cases and strengthens Solana’s value proposition.

While beach bum’s 10 year outlook seems pretty high, I can see it happening. That’s a 100x from now. That’s $2000 Solana and 500 Solana makes you a millionaire.

We must simply look at the big picture, not waste our time playing games we can’t win. Adapt, overcome, thrive.

Stay healthy friends,

* Solana Price Update: Sitting at $20.70, only down a tiny bit from 21 last week. Range is tightening, high of 21.50, low of just under 20. Fees like we’re coiling and ready for a big push up.

* Both SolEth and SolBTC are basically even as well. It seems like we are just in a bit of a lull in crypto here.

* Dudas and 6th Man Ventures announcing 100 million dollar fund.

* Best protocols: Drift, Dialect, Solcial.

* Proof of stake and history.

* Regulation.

* NFT’s - mostly meh, Madlads Merch, Vibe Knights.

* Attention economy and rage against the community.

* Famous Fox Federation checks all the boxes.

* SMB holds the attention.

* Bonk hit a bottom maybe and starting a come back?

* Purpose and Meaning of crypto.

* FTX 2.0 and the derug.

* The importance of staking your Solana.

* Validated podcast with Drift was excellent.

* Check us out on Google podcasts too for the saga folks!

What’s up everyone! Welcome to Solana Weekly Episode 24. This is Thomas Bahamas and I want to thank you all for joining in on the fun. I skipped last week and need to apologize, I was recovering from the flu and every attempt to record turn into a coughing fit. Gotta give a shoutout to ItsLloyd on Twitter for keeping me honest. Feeling better now, and we’re so f-ing back, and I’m going to hit you with two weeks of alpha in one. I’ve realized that a lot of podcasts seem to qualify the host with credentials, so I’ll attempt a brief elevator pitch of sorts. I’ve been tinkering around on Solana the last two years, Eth and Bitcoin before that and I have a background working in account management and UX/UI at a B2B SaaS company. So a lot of my takes are centered around the unique experience that Solana can provide and tie in some fun that I’ve been having. Solana seems to be the only blockchain that actually focuses on this and crushes it, so I think that’s the reason that it’s so sticky for me.

* Solana Price Update: Sitting at $20.99, down a total of 1.7% in two weeks. Some might say it’s more stable than most stablecoins, but this chart is looking pretty bad. We went up past resistance into the 23’s for a little but, but it rejected and haven’t really turned it around. We’re just kind of hanging out on support while Bitcoin and Eth look ready to dump. I’m hoping we hold steady, but my analytical mind is saying we’ll likely hit a dip here. I will be a buyer under $20 for sure.

* Solana vs. Ethereum: Down to .01122 with a minor decrease on the week so small we don’t even need to go into it. But I’m seeing the narratives starting to shift on Eth with the transaction fees spiking. Eth L1 fees have hit highs of like $250, while L2’s have seen $50. Not sustainable, and what we are seeing is basically an advertisement for a blockchain that settles at the speed of light for a fraction of a penny.

* Solana vs. Bitcoin: Sitting at .00076 which is a small increase of a couple percent. I remain bullish on this chart. I remain bullish on Bitcoin and even more bullish on Solana outperforming it. So I’m keeping a bag of both, while more heavily weighted to Solana until further notice. I’m also seeing our favorite VC’s Jump teasing a BTC product for what I’m hoping is on Solana through their bridge Wormhole. People have been calling for it.

* Solana News: Fire Dancer teasing 1 million transactions per second and doing incredible work reworking the Solana client. I saw that Toly mentioned the third client will likely be AI taking both sets of software and creating a third. Insane. But Firedancer is the path forward and will be what get’s Solana out of it’s Beta stage. I’m pumped for the redundancy client and that this will basically remove downtime based on bugs. If there’s a bug in one client, you simply use the other. This is the immediate benefit, but the efficiency increases in the code base and structure will be what leads to unlocking speeds that are unheard of. I hopped on a Solana team call, they opened it up to everyone and it was amazing. They had Armani talk MadLads and give details about his mint, they talked development and it was sick that they were able to allow everyone to join in. Excited for the next one to be quite honest.

* Solana Mobile is a hit, I believe they sold out of the initial batch and have now opened up sales to Europe. I need to do more testing, but it’s a sick phone. I am now comfortable with most things Android, and the UI for crypto is literally a game changer. Crypto native phones are a game changer. The dapp store is a game changer. This is huge and I’m loving all the attention it’s getting. I have been starting to think that rather than complain about your privacy being taken, you should do something about it and Saga is literally doing that. I also am embarrassed by how hard it is to change everything over from my iPhone. I have my iphone stand I put my watch and phone on at night, during the day I have my Apple Air pods and use the case while working to prop it up a little bit, and I have a magnetized holder for my iPhone in my car. I’m still using it as a second phone, but want to make the switch.

* Helium has officially migrated to Solana and has released their Mobile 5g service. I don’t really know how it works, but I’m on the second wave of beta’s and will let you know when I know more. I want to run my own node, but I don’t think I live in a dense enough town for it to make sense. Still I’m going to research this. I think this is crazy because I remember researching setting up a node years ago when Helium first came out. The idea is awesome and they should be able to open up a lot of cool capabilities and I get a free month of service for buying a Saga.

* I finally got to sport my new Mad Lad PFP of my dapper lad smoking a cigar with red background. Kind of pumped about it.

* Sui launched and it seems like they are not quite getting the pump they were looking for. Real low float with a low percentage of coins on the market, with tons of lock ups coming out in a few months. I know there was a bunch of issues with their NFT marketplace for the Fuddies NFT launch, but I think it’s doing really well still. They are trying to take marketshare from Solana and they’ll get some, but I don’t see it long term. They are trying to fake the amount of TPS they calculate by not using a signature as one transaction, so we’ll see how this ends. But for now it has been pretty uneventful, and I actually find this bullish. The network should get some time to stabilize and grow. I might look to accumulate a little and think it’s important to test out other blockchains.

* Solana has faced a lot of criticism and I would say has made it through the one of the biggest storms it could. It launched in a bear, it pumped, it dumped, it survived FTX, and is strong af because of this, SUI needs to prove itself out.

* Macro turmoil: Feds raised rates another 25 bps and immediately after we saw another bank start to fail. We’re seeing some crazy things goin on and it’s kind of what a lot of Bitcoiners have been talking about for years. The White House is talking about putting a stop to short selling on Banks while small regional banks fail and JP Morgan acquires more and more market share. I don’t know where this ends, but it’s worth bringing up because these crypto economies that we are building are outside the system. The current administration is attacking crypto at every stop, a 30% tax on btc mining was just proposed, on ramps and off ramps are being attacked, exchanges are being attacked. If you’re in this game, you have to know what you’re up against and protect it. We self custody and watch out for scams and bad links for airdrops, but now we also have to play hot potato with any on or off ramp and exchange. We’re seeing Coinbase take a stand against the SEC by suing them for answers and opening up an offshore shop. If you are still here after the last year of blow ups, we probably have more coming and we gotta stay vigilant. Within this lies a lot of risk, but also a lot of upside. Solana stands to gain a lot, and is the only blockchain that I would consider usable at scale right now. So there is a bullish case here through all the mess, but we have to survive the mess to get there.

* Memecoins, memecoins everywhere. Everyone is making generational wealth and I only made one sol flipping Wawa. I uh, am not a memecoin trader so I didn’t get in. This started with Pepe going insane on Eth. Which led to Solana releasing a bunch of crap. We had king, guac, chips, Carl, and a bunch of other ones. It’s insanely cheap to create an SPL token on Solana, and some influencers are capitalizing on that. Mixed feelings on this one. On one hand it’s a great advertisement for how far Solana has come as far as tooling, scaling, low gas fees, and quick transactions, but on the other a bunch of people got fomo and are getting absolutely dumped on.

* Couple more thoughts on memecoins: As you go down the risk curve you also go down the iq curve. It’s mainly pump and dump and you gotta get in and out.

This took a ton of liquidity from NFT’s, and even from Bonk. I think it has mostly passed and I hope we made it out alive.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

* Gas wars proving out Solana’s use case. Eth gas has been up to $250, and even Bitcoin has been showing really high fees. The mempools for these transactions are backed the f**k up. They are too congested, you have to pay a fat priority fee in order to do anything onchain in Eth. Because of people trading so much Pepe coin on chain. It’s hilarious and tragic at the same time.

Solana’s gas remains unbothered, moisturized, flourishing at .00001. They have the scaling solution live. L2’s aren’t ready, it’s still been up to $50 for transactions there. Solana crushing it. We had the same problems with mints slamming the blockchain and what the team did was create a hot spot for priority fees. Where if specific block space is being sought after (like a mint) there are localized priority fees to those specific transactions related to that contract. So the mint would have a higher transaction cost, you could set the priority fee higher and get to the transaction quicker. The fees don’t get high though, it’s more like .0001.

I love this solution, it outprices actors that are using bots because it prices them out and allows us normies to pay slightly more and get what we want.

* I’ve been using Chat GPT for asking dumb questions that I have about Solana and it’s architecture and it’s so valuable.

Example: I came from Bitcoin where each token has an address, a UTXO, it’s an unspent transaction. So I was wondering if solana did the same thing. I asked chatgpt and learned all about the account based model that Solana and Ethereum use. Where there is no UTXO to track tokens and their movement. You just know how many tokens you have in a wallet and movements between the wallets.

Anyways I think that the massive tech barrier between users and developers can be lowered through this type of education.

* New Podcasts on Solana and the rise of good media. So I mentioned that the quality of media has 100x’d and I meant it.

The Unlayered pod is a new one that dropped and is great. Phantom does a great pod. I quit listening to Solana made easy because it’s too much and I’m not going to waste all my time worrying about the next flip. I’m not a trader and I continue to think that finding quality projects and holding for a while with size is the way.

* Phantom- released their multichain wallet. Kind of sick, but they did it and it impacted their core product. The wallet is slow af. If you’re using a ledger as you should be it takes forever. They actually degraded performance of the best performing wallet in order to bring Eth and Polygon users to their platform.

Nobody asked for this. The target audience is DeGods and y00ts and there is no way they should release a product that impacts performance for sol.

Terrible product decision and I’m hoping they fix it.

That was a lot, two weeks in crypto is about a year in the web 2 world so we had a lot to cover. I hope you enjoyed these couple weeks and had some fun trading around. It’s funny to think about, but I didn’t even bring up NFT’s which is like the core of this pod and Solana. But we’re seeing pullbacks across the board as liquidity flowed elsewhere. I’m hoping that changes and we buy the dip and stack some foxes in the meantime.

This is Thomas Bahamas, and thank you all for joining in!

What’s up everyone! Welcome to Solana Weekly Episode 23. This is Thomas Bahamas and I want to thank you all for joining in on the fun. This has turned into one of my favorite parts of the week and I can’t wait to dive into what’s been going on in Solana. We’re still attempting a space on Twitter and we’ll see how it goes. I’ve been consuming a ton of Solana content and want to start with expressing that this is a user experience based Solana podcast where I talk about my journey and views. I can’t keep up with everything in a week, I’m not on the Solana team or any team working in the space, I’m just out here having fun on the fun chain and chatting about it. But it really does seem like all the part are setting up for a killer Solana Summer. The Mad Lads kicked off a mint and the whole space has been electric ever since. I’m liking where this is heading and let’s jump into it.

Some AI of the monkey’s celebrating for you:

* Solana Price Update: Sitting at $21.37, down a total of 9% on the week. This chart doesn’t look the best, and earlier today we looked like we were about to send until we dropped from 23 to 21. That’s about a 10% drop and it happened immediately. Hsaka Trades tweeted out that there was an alert for a US gov wallet moving funds and Jump Trading dumped everything immediately. The kicker is that it was a false alarm. So we’re heading back Is this true? I don’t really know, but it would line up. They seem to be the biggest player still in Solana from what I know and they can move markets. Hate to see it and hoping for a recovery. As I said in the intro, the vibes for Solana have been crazy all week and I’m waiting for price to catch up.

* Solana vs. Ethereum: Down to .01145 with a 2.8% decrease on the week. Small decrease, whole market looked pretty dumpy until this morning really. I sold some Eth for Sol because I just see such a disparity right now in the market. Eth transactions are $50 and Solana transactions aren’t even a penny. Hard to justify paying that anymore.

* Solana vs. Bitcoin: Sitting at .0007501 which is an decrease of 5%. I’m still super bullish on this chart even though we keep going down lol. I’m seeing more alignment and calls for BTC and WBTC on Solana, and a marketplace for trading wrapped ordinals on Solana. I’m 100% in on this and think that Solana would make a killer L2 for BTC.

* Mad Lads mint - a beautiful disaster. They minted in their Backpack wallet and overall it was a sick experience. That was super delayed due to ddos attacks. But to the wallet - solana hummed on at normal speeds and handled it perfectly. Mint was unique because it was in the wallet, you minted a rug and went to the xnft to find your actual lad. So much to say about this, but it was effectively a mass advertisement for backpack and it worked. Love backpack now, the art for mad lads slaps as well and has been performing like crazy. Up over 10x from mint and doesn’t look like it’s slowing down. I actually swapped my pfp to a mad lad and went to Twitter jail for a week while my profile is under review. This is funny because I actually swapped that nft for another sicker one, so I’m currently pulling a milady tactic where I don’t own my pfp.

* Tensor - absolutely crushing it. They are doing no fees for the lads and have officially flipped magic Eden. It’s insane. Their product is so freaking good though. Everything about their platform is superior to magic Eden and they deserve this. The volume is also insane, mad lads was the most traded nft project of ALL NFT’s, yes that includes eth NFT’s too. It’s big and it’s the example of a great product at the right time. Magic Eden seems to be clapping back by hiring another intern that shitposts, I like it and missed the war bucks s**t posting.  But they haven’t been focusing on Sol and can’t keep up at this point.

* Solana phone! I got mine yesterday and unboxed it super hard. It’s sick. I hate android and have to relearn everything, but it’s worth it for this phone. It’s a punk rock feel of a phone where it just seems like a lot of love and tinkering went into it.

Drawbacks : it’s long skinny and heavy, but i just need to get used to it and turn off all these damn notifications.

* The fun chain thesis: Solana is the fun chain because of everything you can do on it right now. It's built for users, you can do a bunch of cool s**t on chain, and they are building out a ton of cool new things and use cases. Historically blockchains have been primarily built for contrarians and doomers in Bitcoin, and an extremely complicated and intertwining web of complex ideas going no where in Ethereum. Don't believe me? Listen to a Bitcoin space and you'll hear how modern finance is doomed. Listen to an episode of Bankless and you'll hear about ultrasound money that costs $50 for a transaction, but burns some of the supply and causes the supply to be deflationary, making it a big bonus. Solana is simple, it's one layer, that can process transactions simultaneously across the world incredibly fast and cheap. I want to hate on Bitcoin for being boomers and doomers, but in reality they have established themselves on a global level. They’ve fought the fight and earned a spot at the table. I don’t really know where Solana will fit in if you look at it through that lens. Maybe it doesn’t have to, but I am really liking the idea of Solana hosting more Bitcoin on chain, and having something like a wrapped Ordinals market for trading assets that are on Bitcoin. There’s something there, I’m starting to step away from the daily spaces and all the mints and try to look at the bigger picture. I’m just getting more and more convinced that a blockchain that works and scales as it can will keep on crushing and bring us that Solana Summer!

Thanks all and I’ll catch you next week.

What’s up everyone! Welcome to Solana Weekly Episode 22. This is Thomas Bahamas and I want to thank you all for joining in on the fun. This has turned into one of my favorite parts of the week and I can’t wait to dive into what’s been going on in Solana. I’m testing out a new way of doin this where I go live on Twitter for a space. My team decided that I needed to create a Twitter profile (@solanaweeklypod) for the pod to separate from my terrible twitter posts. (There is no team.) I figured it would be a good time to test out how this amazing technology works and nobody follows that account yet so I’m hoping no one joins and messes up the flow. If they do, we adapt, overcome, improvise, and download the audio and release as normal. (Update: my Airpods spazzed out so I’m not releasing space.) But we have another great show for you guys, we’ve got the mint of the year coming up today with the Mad Lads, prices remain up, memecoin season came and might be ending, SMB IP is getting transferred and we go over how I fumbled the bag by trying out a raffle.

* Solana Price Update: A review of the current price of Solana and its performance over the past week. Sitting at $23.37, down a total of 1.39% after breaking out of it’s range last week it just couldn’t get out of the resistance right below 26. I thought it was going to send, but the selling pressure has been to high around that level. I’ve also been reading that Wintermute has been absolutely dumping the hell out of Solana. They had something like a million Solana and have been offloading to recoup. Not ideal, how long will they continue this? We’ll see. Narrative is there, we will overcome. We saw a massive dip last night, hope it stops.

* Solana vs. Ethereum: Down to .01178 with a 4.5% decrease on the week. This was looking really good, but Sol took a dive against the market.

* Solana vs. Bitcoin: Sitting at .0007997 which is an decrease of 1.6%. I’m still super bullish on this chart. The White Wolf shared this chart on Twitter saying it’s the generational bottom. It’s not happening now, but this is a chart I’m keeping my eye on.

* NFT Happenings: On to what the fun chain does best. Biggest news is Mad Lad’s is dropping today for whitelist and tomorrow for public. It’s going to be huge. Everyone in NFT’s, not just Solana NFT’s is pumped. It’s the best advertisement for the Backpack wallet I could imagine, a hyped mint. We’ll see how it goes, but I’m minting two and freaking pumped. I think this is going to be a pivotal moment for Solana NFT’s with the release of xNFT’s to everyone. Executable NFT’s directly in the wallet. These are basically dApps that you can buy and trade and execute in a secure environment. So I’m pumped and I’m excited to see the expansion of NFT’s into more than just pfp’s.

* An example of XNFT’s and the amazing utility of quacking is in the newly released xnft of Crypto Duck Punkz. If you download their xnft you can view all your ducks in it and make them quek! It’s hilarious, but I think it’s also a good demo of the product. Ducks are still doing great, meme’s are hopping, giveaways in discord, useless staking also.

* SMB IP is in route to Monke DAO, not exactly sure when the release will be, but the deal has been done and I’m waiting on a Nom post to send my SMB to the moon. This is huge, I can’t imagine a better ending to this story and I’m very pleased that the owner is a top notch DAO rather than a borderline scammer.

* The Heist minted yesterday and it was a banger, I skipped it, but the game is live as of today and it looks like people are having a blast playing it.

* The Chads are minting tomorrow as well, I don’t know too much, they are funny on Twitter, I’m minting.

* I also decided to test out a Famous Fox Raffle and dove right in. I wanted to sell a TFF and a Degen Ape above floor, I watched a bunch of other raffles on Famous Foxes go above floor so I said f it and went for it. TLDR, it didn’t go well. Both went just under floor and I would consider it a massive failure. I assumed there was risk ahead of time and figured that the move was +ev overall, but I felt like an idiot for bit.

* Solana Phone purchases are live and I got one baby! Ship out on 4/20 and I’m pumped about it. They are doing a whole slough of rewards and bonuses. They sent out cards to everyone and if it made a good poker hand you got a discount, I got four of a kind and they took $50 off. We are also getting some $ on Magic Eden, and a free mint for a new collection of Claynosaurs. I think I’m going to come out ahead on this one, but I’m also just so pumped with the possibilities here.

* Helium merge to Solana is also live as of today. Helium is running on Solana and I get one free month of service from Helium with my phone. So I have no idea how to use it, but I’m going to figure it out. But I’m bullish on other protocols doing their own research and finding what they need in Solana.

* Bonk is performing super strong and I think it’s going to outperform Solana in the near future because of the organic ownership and fun it creates. We’re seeing Dogecoin pump again, and I can’t even get myself to buy any, there isn’t anything that it is better at than Bonk other than it has Elon’s heart and soul behind it.

* Regulation news: we saw a hearing yesterday with Gary Gensler on the stand and legislators had time to question him. He sounded like an absolute idiot, dodging yes and no questions and did not really have anything of substance to say other than crypto is non compliant with the laws and banks failed because of it. He was chair when FTX went down and is using his press releases as a form of regulation. No clarity and the companies that are trying to be in compliance get no direction. What we did see is the Republican’s come together and rally against him. Legislation was introduced to remove him because of his incompetence and his pushing out of innovation out of the US. Again we see the right is rallying behind crypto and I’m having a hard time not seeing this trend continue. Bullish on the new Trump collection selling out another 45k pieces.

* Closing Thoughts: I think we are in a pivotal moment in Solana history this week. We are getting the first crypto native phone that you can run on a crypto native 5g network, and we are seeing novel use cases for cryptocurrency based on the unique properties of Solana. I couldn’t be more bullish on the Solana narrative as I am right now and I hope that this energy continues. We are also seeing the crypto narratives in general being proved out in congress as we speak. We are seeing a shift in the right direction, or at the very least getting started.

Let’s have a great rest of the week and thank you for joining in on the fun.

What’s up everyone! Welcome to Solana Weekly Episode 21. This is Thomas Bahamas and I want to thank you all for joining in. We’ve got Solana breaking out of it’s price range and the community is teaming up to rally against the disinformation campaign against Solana.

More at thomasbahamas.substack.com