Solana Weekly: #23 - We're So Fking Back
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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.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thomasbahamas.substack.com)