Solana Weekly #24 - Two Weeks of Alpha In One Show?
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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! 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)