U.S. Treasury-Backed Tokens On Solana, Solana’s Year-In-Review & More

Welcome back!

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

• Solana Wrapped: Dive into Solana’s hottest news of 2023. 

• Satoshi’s Legacy: Phantom launches UX-centric Bitcoin wallet. 

• Never Too Late: Trezor rolls out support for Solana incl. SPL tokens.

This week’s intro will be short and sweet: We’re back! 😏

Click on any underlined heading/hyperlink to learn more.

Spotlight

Solana Wrapped

I spent the morning going through this year's newsletter editions. 

I'm not going to lie, I forgot and lost track of about half the things that happened and were launched on Solana in 2023.

So I thought it might be a good idea to write The Sleuth's Annual Recap — Solana's very own “Wrapped” if you will 😅

Let's dive right in!

January

• Sandstorm Hackathon: Solana’s first community hackathon takes place — these were some of the most notable submissions. 

• Real Estate Derivatives: Parcl goes live on Mainnet. Currently, the protocol only offers exposure to US markets, global markets will follow suit.

• Enhanced Security: OtterSec presents a novel framework for formally verifying Solana smart contracts, based on a Squads Protocol case study.

February 

• Furry Hack: Solana's next hackathon — Grizzlython — goes live and boasts $5+ million in prizes and seed funding. 

• Let’s Dance: Anatoly discusses Firedancer with Brian Armstrong on Coinbase’s “Around The Block” show.

• Safer Trading: Jupiter launches Token List API, which will run a continuous list of SPL tokens including on-chain metadata, actual market liquidity, data from developers, and community validation data.

March 

• On-Cain Privacy: Elusiv launches on Mainnet. The service enables full privacy on-chain in seconds, which allows users to send digital assets to any wallet without revealing their identity.

• Shifting Tides: The Render Network receives strong support among its users for a Solana migration.

• Mobile Developer Course: EasyA launches a smart contract deployment course for mobile, enabling developers to learn about Solana even when they are on the move.

April

• Real-World Assets: Homebase sells its first tokenised home on Solana in less than 2 weeks.

• Cross-Border Transactions: The Decaf Wallet now allows users to convert USDC to cash at MoneyGram in 75+ countries for 0 fees.

• Solana Resilience: While the Mad Lads mint brought conventional services such as Cloudflare to their knees, the Solana network a) didn't miss a step, b) held transaction costs low, and c) kept wash trading to a bare minimum

May 

• Hardware Wallets: In a podcast episode with Raoul Pal, Anatoly discusses the motivation behind Saga — one aspect of which was to integrate hardware wallets into smartphones.

• Solana Greed: More than 40,000 people were duped by the $GREED experiment. Key takeaway? Self custody is only valuable when paired with robust operational security. 

• Lite RPC: A lite RPC for Solana is released. This specialised microservice is designed to simplify transaction submissions, accelerate transaction confirmations, and improve scalability.

June

• Light Client: The Tinydancer light client for Solana goes live. Light clients provide an efficient way to interact with blockchains, offering improved accessibility, faster synchronisation, scalability, privacy, and decentralisation. 

• Parabolic Growth: DRiP airdrops 350,000 NFTs from The Faceless to its community — making this the largest generative PFP collection ever. The free airdrop leveraged Solana's state compression and cost less than $300 to execute.

• Ethereum Support: Vitalik voices his concern about the SEC's treatment of Solana, highlighting the need for decentralisation amidst the rise of a rapidly expanding centralised world.

July 

• Network Reliability: Syndica starts crafting a new Solana validator client written in Zig.

• Privacy Costs: Due to state compression, private transactions cost the same as regular transactions on Solana — approximately ~$0.0001.

• Multi-Language Support: Solana now allows for front-ends that enable developers to build in Rust, C, Python, Zig, and Solidity.

August 

• OPOS Hackathon: The latest community coding sprint — The Only Possible On Solana (OPOS) Hackathon — takes place. 

• e-Commerce: The Shopify integration of Solana Pay will not come as news to you. However, if you need a cheat sheet as to why this is so significant — we got you. 

• ZK-Swaps: Elusiv launches private token swaps, which help traders e.g. circumvent counterparty risk.

September 

• Going Into Hyperdrive: The Hyperdrive hackathon comes to life incl. Superteam locations in more than 19 countries. Here are the top 9 projects.

• 4D Chess: We discuss what Marques Brownlee, aka MKBHD, missed about Saga.

• Off-Ramps: Users who receive crypto via a link from TipLink can now use it to purchase gift cards in 50+ countries from 2,500+ retail providers.

October

• New Guide: Solana Starter Pack

• NFT Wines & Spirits: BAXUS — a marketplace that allows for the NFT-powered trading of wines and spirits — rolls out its offering to the public.

• New Update: Solana’s v1.16 update reaches a super-majority of validator adoption. One of the most exciting introductions: Confidential Transfers — basically a native privacy option for Solana-based assets, or “SPL tokens”, which further enhances the network's zero knowledge capabilities at the base layer.

November

• New Guide & Research Report: ERC-20 Tokens On Solana & Solana vs. Ethereum: Validators & Staking

• Solana Ordinals: Inscriptions are now live on Solana. Instead of storing NFT components on e.g. Arweave, inscription components are saved on chain and, therefore, have their own unique address instead of just an HTML link. 

• In-Wallet Bridge: Phantom releases its Cross-Chain Swapper, enabling users to effortlessly bridge tokens between Solana and Ethereum within their wallets.

December

• Trading Innovation: Starport (prev. Alexandria) releases its litepaper in which the team gives a deep dive into its multi-asset limit order station.

• Euro Stablecoin: Circle rolls out its Euro stablecoin — EURC — on Solana incl. near instant settlement and extremely low fees. 

• Charting Solana’s Future: Anatoly publishes his first 2 articles on his blog: “Multiple Concurrent Leaders” and “Asynchronous Execution”.

And that's a wrap. 

I don't know what 2024 holds in store for us, the only thing I know is that I’m amped-up!💥 

Chart Of The Week

News Bites

Satoshi’s Legacy: Phantom has expanded its multichain support from Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon to Bitcoin — allowing users to trade BTC, Ordinals, and BRC-20 tokens seamlessly.

Never Too Late: Last week I highlighted Ryder, Keystone, and GridPlus in light of Ledger's latest kerfuffle. Now, both the Trezor Model T and Trezor Safe 3 support SOL incl. all SPL tokens as well. 

Institutional Finance: Ondo Finance expands its U.S. Treasury-backed tokens — USDY and OUSG — to Solana in partnership with multiple DeFi protocols, which are planning to accept these as collateral.

Stablecoin Influx: Financial regulators have given Paxos the green light for its expansion to Solana, allowing for its first stablecoin issuance beyond Ethereum.

StakeNet Ignition: Jito announced a new UI for visualising validator history data, as well as the open-sourcing of its validator history repository.

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.}