Solana Memecoins On Wall Street, Building AI Apps Powered By Solana & More

Welcome back!

This is J264G and this week I’ve got these titbits for you:

• ZK Network: Introducing Arcium, a parallelised confidential computing network.

• Solana AI: Exploring Kuzco and how to build AI apps powered by Solana.

• Meme Street: VanEck launches memecoin index incl. WIF & BONK. 

While Jamie Dimon does the rounds fudding crypto, his bank has been buying Bitcoin ETFs — fascinating behaviour 🤔

Seems as if more and more people are calling out TradFi and governments for their wishy-washy conduct; the jig might finally be up ⬇️

Now, let’s jump right into this week’s newsletter!

Click on any underlined heading/hyperlink to learn more.

Spotlight

Eastbound

Last week, one of the largest Solana events took place in Istanbul, Turkey: Crossroads.

Here's the scoresheet: 

• 3,000 attendees 

• 50+ speakers 

• 2 days

As you may know, the Solana ecosystem runs in-person events such as Breakpoint, Hacker Houses, and Superteam meetups. Most of these events, however, are driven by the Solana Foundation. Crossroads, on the other hand, was ideated and run by community members themselves. 

While online marketing is invaluable in today's global marketplace, in-person events — regardless whether they are spun up by the Solana Foundation or the community — are pivotal. 

Mainly, that's because crypto is still an emerging technology.

And for emerging technologies, especially those that disrupt traditional practices, in-person onboarding and education are crucial to adoption as they're essential for overcoming resistance to change and for fostering a knowledgeable user base.

Also, face-to-face interactions bring about trust and credibility. Presenting a product or service in person allows crypto projects to establish a human connection, answer questions in real time, and address concerns directly.

Additionally, in-person events allow Solana projects to showcase their competitive advantages in a live setting. This can help differentiate their offerings from EVM competitors in a way that might not be as impactful through other mediums.

So why am I writing all this? 

Because we're missing low-hanging fruits when it comes to in-person events: APAC in general, and Indonesia and the Philippines in particular.

Indonesia has the fourth-largest population in the world, right after the US, while the Philippines takes up the 13th place when it comes to population count. Moreover, the average age in the US is 39 years, while it's 29 in Indonesia and 25 in the Philippines — one reason why the smartphone adoption rate in these countries is increasingly accelerating. But most importantly, the Philippines and Indonesia are ranked 6th and 7th respectively in the Global Crypto Adoption Index by Chainalysis.

All these factors make Indonesia, the Philippines, and APAC a fertile ground for Solana teams to onboard news users in droves — yet I don't see many in-person Solana events taking place here. 

Having said that, APAC is not just a region ripe for onboarding, it also has an ecosystem in place that can bring innovative products and services to market that can propel crypto forward. 

Last week, I mentioned Ripe, a QR-code enabled app to pay merchants with USDC in Southeast Asia. But the real killer app would be WeChat or LINE with a USDC or Jupiter integration. Maybe infuse that with pump.fun and BONKbot — the opportunities are endless!

It might be time to head East and bring larger community-powered in-person events to APAC. As such, Solana Summit might just be the ignition we need 💥

Chart Of The Week

News Bites

ZK Network: The team behind Elusiv just announced their new venture: Arcium. Basically, it's a parallelised confidential computing network that provides developers with a trustless and configurable framework to run encrypted computations.

Solana AI: We previously explored Kuzco, a distributed GPU cluster for LLM inference on Solana. The project allows anyone with a GPU to get paid for serving inference requests for models such as Llama and Phi, or build apps such as the one below.

Mobile Adoption: Upon purchase, Chapter 2, the next mobile device from Solana Mobile, comes with a pre-order token. The circulating supply of this pre-order token has reached ~140,000, highlighting that Chapter 2 purchases will significantly outperform those of Saga. If you'd like to order a Chapter 2 device, make sure to secure one here.

Node Innovations: If you'd like to dive into all things infrastructure and keep your finger on the pulse of Solana's node innovations, make sure to take a look at High TPS Client and the Go SVM.

Meme Street: VanEck has launched a memecoin index, which includes the Solana tokens dogwifhat (WIF) and BONK. The memecoin supercycle might just become a thing after all 🤷🏻‍♀️

Caught In 4K

Weekly Take

Keks & Giggles

And that's a wrap!

If you'd like to reach me, respond to this newsletter or reach out to me on 𝕏.

Talk soon!

J264G

_{DISCLAIMER
None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research. Lastly, please be advised that we discuss products and services from our partners from which our team members may hold tokens/equity.}