Ethereum VCs have EBOLA.
[Ethereum Bags Over Logic Affliction]
I'll explain how this highly contagious disease started and how you can vaccinate against it.
Mega Thread 🧵
CredAvenue becomes the fastest FinTech startup in India to join the Unicorn club in just 18 months🤯🦄
What’s CredAvenue, a billion-dollar Indian startup, probably you’ve never heard of!🤔
Let’s understand👇
An explainer Thread🧵🍿
VCs hate memecoins but I will explain why there’s no difference between memecoins and governance tokens.
Governance tokens are just memecoins dressed in a suit. Mega thread 🧵
Why tf hasn't anyone solved on-chain poker?
Why Poker?
— Immediate audience of crypto x poker with a sizeable ticket size as well; most whales have been poker players and most communities regularly host poker nights.
— Speculation finds immediate PMF in crypto; GTM shouldn’t be
CRED raised $251 Million at a Valuation of a whopping $4 Billion and becomes India's second-biggest FinTech after Paytm.
What makes it valued so much - is it a giant in making or a bubble?🤔
Let's decode👇
A Thread🧵
RWAs are hot on the EVM planet & touted as the next big theme in DeFi.💫
However, the RWA narrative is often overlooked in the Solana community.
So, I wrote an exhaustive article (18 min read) to dive deeper into the Solana RWA space and what’s ahead.
An overview 🧵+ essay👇
governance tokens are memecoins with a suit.
wrote my ramblings on the recent debate; particularly from a token distribution pov (hint: fair launch)
don't ask for a summary pls; kept it short and crisp — go read now or bookmark it for weekends👇
Open Financial Technologies raises $50 Million at a $1 Billion Valuation, and becomes the 100th Unicorn of India🦄🇮🇳
What’s Open? A Billion-dollar Neobank, you’ve probably never heard of!🤔
Let’s decode👇
6 months ago,
@_kanishq
and I shipped a simple bridging frontend over a weekend called 'The Solana Bridge' and forgot about it.
Today, we were surprised to learn that it has processed over $400K in volumes with 0 marketing push!
How?? Here's a small but crazy story 🧵
🚨Launching the latest “Solana DeFi Ecosystem Map” - ft. LIVE DeFi projects on Solana by category📈
👀 Stay tuned for a detailed essay on the State of Solana DeFi - meanwhile, shill what you are building👇
cc:
@inSitesh
@gizmothegizzer
Show us a more comprehensive payments ecosystem; we'll wait…😏
🚨 Launching the first of its kind, “Solana Payments Ecosystem Map” ft. LIVE projects by category⚡⇩
JUP has 40% for airdrops; while EIGEN has only 15% airdrops. Why?
Because 29.5% of Eigen is just for VCs and then they call Solana the "VC chain" lol
And yes, both are the top projects of this cycle in the Solana and Ethereum ecosystem respectively.
Since everyone's talking about Low Float/High FDV again –– Let's take the case of Ethereum darling, EigenLayer:
EigenLayer, arguably the biggest Ethereum protocol of this cycle, is a classic example.
The insiders (VCs and team) hold a sizeable chunk of 55%, with the initial
Imagine $140 million actually went into building consumer apps — you can literally fund 140 consumer seed rounds ($1 million). Remember you don’t need lot of capital to kickstart consumer apps until PMF.
Hope story doesn’t just give out incentives, attract mercenaries, and then
Heard of USDC?
The company behind USDC just raised $400 Million from one of the world's biggest traditional investors, BlackRock!💰
Why would such a traditional investor like BlackRock invest in USDC? What makes Circle so valued at ~$10-15 Billion?🤔
Let's understand👇🧵
9 months ago, we made this map [⇣] when no one was talking Solana DeFi. Today, everyone is!
Time to make a new map/graphic + guide (v2); catering huge influx of users; looking to discover the top Solana projects/dApps + farm airdrops.
Anyone missing/new projects? Pls, reply!🙏
Tokenized Securities [On-chain T-bills/ETFs] are going strong with over $220 Million Market Cap - almost all in the last 4-5 months!🔥
What's going on in the space - why it's booming, how it works, and what's ahead? 🧵⇩
Hiring is overly broken in crypto at this point.
→ Projects struggling to discover talent.
→ Talent, particularly freshers, struggling to get jobs.
Want to solve this at micro level. Potential solutions here?
SCOOP:
@eigen_labs
, the company behind
@eigenlayer
, circulated a list of its employees' wallet addresses to ecosystem projects that were preparing to airdrop tokens.
Some teams asked for the list.
At least one didn't.
@skesslr
&
@realdannynelson
report
Went through a tiring Visa process and 36 hour journey/4 airports to reach Amsterdam — would love to meet as many folks as possible and chat anything around Payments, RWAs, Stablecoins and DeFi!
Bonus: Giving a 10 min niche talk on “Researching the Solana Ecosystem” on 1st Nov🙂
🚨 Update: Going full-time in Web3🚀
From deploying 1st ETH smart contract in 2018 to observing from the sidelines for 3 years. Getting into
@SuperteamDAO
in 2021, not just revived my Web3 journey, but pushed me to build my own Web3 project!
Thread on my Web3 journey🧵👇
People often ask me, “Which city do you belong to and work from?”
While I don't have a concrete answer as I don’t belong to any city, but a more exotic location.
Here’s a small thread on what earning in $$ and working from an Indo-Bhutan🇮🇳🇧🇹 border town looks like! 👇🧵
Last week, wrote a super long article (30 mins :P), but if you want to get a gist of Solana DeFi in one go or just understand DeFi? Look no further!
The best part - simply scroll to your favorite DeFi sector and read that section right now!
Slice, a GenZ credit startup raised $220 Million at a whopping valuation of ~$1.2 Billion joining the unicorn club🦄💸.
Is
@sliceit_
really valued so much, or just the hype of credit cards?🤔
Let's decode👇
In the next few months, we will see clones of Solana projects on other chains. For eg. already seeing
— Pump/fun, but for Base
— Sanctum, but for Sui
— Phoenix, but for Monad
— Jito, but for Aptos
— Jupiter, but for Sui
— ORE, but for Sui
— Tensor, but for Aptos
Woah! Drift raised $23.5 million in a Series A round (and announced it at Breakpoint), and this went completely under the radar??
Was this intentional
@cindyleowtt
?
Tip to very early-stage projects –– Form a curated telegram group of early supporters from Day 1.
It should include:
- Angel/VCs/Investors
- Power Users (can pick from twitter as well)
- Devs who can build on top/integrate + do OSS contributions
- Content creators/KOLs (focus
Why the hell is the market valuing Parcl at $2.2 billion FDV? (as per Aevo pre-markets)
Fundamentals seem way off:
→ TVL: $103 million (vanity metric)
→ Daily volumes: $2-3 million (Lifetime volume is only ~$290 million; for context, Jupiter Perps is doing $400 in daily
In 1907, US Banking was collapsing with banks & trusts themselves going bankrupt, but there was one very rich man, 'JP Morgan' who came to save the economy. Fast forward to 2022, FTX's SBF is saving crypto.
What was the 1907 panic & how's SBF "modern JP Morgan"?🤔
A Thread🧵👇
Solana now has:
🇺🇸USD: USDC, USDT, USDP, UXD, USDH, USDY, ZUSD
🇪🇺EUR: EURC, EUROe
🇯🇵GYEN
🇨🇦QCAD
🇨🇭VCHF
🇹🇷bLira, 🇮🇸ISKT and 🇧🇷BRZ as well (some not that active)
Liquidity still not the best for most pairs, but one step closer to on-chain FX!
@gizmothegizzer
📢We are excited to announce the launch of our stablecoins
#GYEN
and
#ZUSD
on
@Solana
, marking a key milestone in our multi-chain development!
Get ready for secure, seamless transactions starting next month on our platform. Learn more:
#stablecoin
My 2 cents to crypto builders — DON’T take any grants to start a project if you are really serious about taking your project 100x.
Think of grants as salary equivalents. Grants just make your project shortsighted and put unnecessary product constraints in the early stages.
It’s time for Bitcoin 🤝 Solana –– the
#1
and
#3
to team up!
BTC -> Capital
SOL -> Fast Execution Layer
Win-Win for both!
Here's why everyone is calling for "Bitcoin x Solana", the current state of the ecosystem, and what's next🧵👇
🧠 Cross-Chain Thesis: One of the best case studies of apps leveraging the Solana bridging gold rush is undoubtedly
@phantom
via their cross-chain swapper — achieving $13 million+ in volume with 7k+ unique users in just 2 weeks! 🔥
The best part is the seamless UX — no need to
At this point, I am in literal awe of Phantom's excellent execution of Go-To-Market:
- Biggest Crypto Consumer App (Many know it as a "Memecoin App") –– 7 million monthly active users
- Top 5/10 apps in multiple categories across multiple geographies on App/Play stores.
- Best
A Tier-1 VC-funded Jupiter-like protocol on Solana might be launching their token and no one is talking about them on CT.
As always, alpha is in the long form :P
1/1 Art scenes on Solana are among the most vibrant, yet they remain one of the least talked-about sectors. They truly deserve their own story.
🚨 Introducing the "State of 1/1 Art Market on Solana" essay, a first-of-a-kind analysis!
High-level overview thread + essay 🧵👇
Have been using
@FlashTrade_
and genuinely feel it has a solid chance to be the
#1
perp DEX on Solana. Here's what I love:
1) Beautiful UI and Intuitive UX; all interactions are 🧈
2) No slippage and instant filling of orders (thanks to the peer-to-pool model)
3) FLP –– it's
SVM is here to stay and is ready to explode as a standard.
Over 25 teams are already building for the SVM narrative! 🔥
Don't miss this wave; read this article now to stay ahead of the curve.
Holy shit – this blew up. Thanks for all the love on this one!
ngl, it was challenging to stitch together 5-6 random pointers into a themed article/thread while plugging Solana.
I'm always a bit anxious about such controversial rants, but to my surprise, everyone, including the
In the last 1 month, talked to 15+ protocols migrating/expanding from Ethereum to Solana — who reached out for ecosystem GTM help.
Everyone is shit scared about Ethereum fragmentation. Never felt so bearish about Ethereum.
Outside Solana, I think TON has a high potential to become the memecoin chain on the back of a massive distribution (~900M users)
Study PMF of Telegram bots x Memecoins.
Telegram will use memecoins as a GTM for TON (who knows they end up creating a category eg. emojicoin)
Solana Hackerhouse Bengaluru was truly special — went from being an attendee in 2022 to giving 4 talks/workshops/panels in 2024, thanks to
@superteam
.
Best part; many folks have started to recognize me IRL; thanks to Twitter.
We all grew up along with the Solana Ecosystem 🙏
Here’s cool UX case study using compressed NFTs:
1) 100k+ subscribers were dropped card packs via
@drip_haus
2) Each pack had 3 cards representing popular crypto characters like Vitalik
3) This pack was automatically revealed via “Tap to reveal” experience inside the
Devcon (12-15 Nov, Thailand) can be a good venue/timing for the next Solana ecosystem conference/side event –– I'd love for it to be small cozy consumer-themed, which is likely to be a hot narrative by then.
Wild thought: Solana dApps should double down on Bitcoin!🤔
BTC -> Not Usable, but has huge Capital
SOL -> Usable, but lacks Capital
Here's how Solana can potentially leverage BTC to attract more capital/activity🧵👇
Imagine a Crypto founder, who raised $2 Million in USDC and kept in FTX, lost that. Again raised $2 Million in Fiat, fighting for 2 months with VCs in bear market and kept it in Silicon Valley Bank, only to lose it again😶🌫️
With most FinTechs burning huge amounts of investors' money, to acquire users and then ultimately do lending. CredAvenue's model is definitely a refresher!
Can CredAvenue inspire the next-gen of FinTechs?🏦
P.S - If you found this insightful, please ReTweet the first tweet :)
Polymarket (Prediction Markets on Polygon) has been doing insane volumes lately and will continue to grow due to a happening year ahead.
Anyone building this on Solana, where this can be completely onchain with CLOBs, whereas Polymarket uses a Hybrid Order book with an off-chain
Let's say you are given –– $10 million and 2 Months.
You have to beat
@pumpdotfun
's huge network effects & become
#1
memecoin launchpad.
How would you do it?
It can involve any features, GTM strategies, marketing, or a combination.
(ofc, if you even think it's possible lol)
Finance just became more accessible.
@Librecap
on Solana lets you invest in alternative assets like private credit funds with $10k, not $250k+ — all from your phone.
This is finance for everyone 🧵
WazirX's daily volume is down from the peak of $566M to just $2.8M (down by ~202X)
While taxes were being taken as a positive note by exchanges, it has badly affected their volumes, hence revenues + bear market.
“We pay only USDC or USDT”
Want to earn & get paid crypto💰
But clueless on how to accept crypto and convert that into INR?🤔🇮🇳
What’s a wallet address & how to go about it?
A beginner gyaan thread on accepting crypto payments for Indians🧵👇
In less than 2 months, PayPal’s PYUSD growth to $240 million+ and its emergence as the third-largest stablecoin on Solana is amazing:
— Over $145 million is held in
@KaminoFinance
Lend alone. Thanks to incentives by PayPal, yields are quite attractive for anyone to swap their
Solana L2s Infra have now started raising funds; expect some announcements soon (maybe next week as well)
Go read this, if you still haven't –– for all the alpha on Solana L2s/Appchains.
RWAs are still in their infancy, and adoption won't happen suddenly, unlike other DeFi categories.
RWAs will continue to expand in two primary directions:
- More Assets
- More Markets (starting with strong and friendly jurisdictions like Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Singapore)
Looking to build anything DeFi for the Solana Hackathon (Radar)?
Go read the top ideas/themes to build –– plenty of $$ funding available + huge gaps still in Solana DeFi
(wrote 5 months back; still super relevant)
cc:
@ColosseumOrg
@superteam
In the past 1 year, I have written 7 'State of the Ecosystem' articles/reports spanning across 40k+ words with 30k+ reads.
Here's a thread of all the top Solana ecosystem articles 👇 🧵
Contrary to popular belief, Solana already has rollups! But much more app-specific and completely abstracted for a user.
Eg.
@getcode
, a micro-payments app on Solana uses pseudo-rollup structure!
It creates intents for all transactions and employs a sequencer which settles on
Some quick stats on BONKbot:
- 300K+ users
- $5.2 billion in cumulative volumes
- charges 1% fees (~$52 million in fees); 10% of which burns BONK
- Peak trading volume ~$250 million
- Still does ~$30 million daily volumes (more than L1s like Aptos)
Finally landed in Bengaluru after 2.5 years for the Solana HackerHouse and here till Sunday.
FinTech/Web3 folks in Hackerhouse or in general, let's catchup!🚀
DM or 👋
2021 was the year of Indian FinTech:
12 Unicorns🦄, $9+ Bn💰 raised which accounted for ~1/3rd of total investments in all startups.🤯
Let’s have a look at highlights of FinTech 2021 and what’s next for FinTech 2022?👇
Key FinTech trends thread🧵
Entered the Solana Ecosystem, when SOL was above $200 — after 2 years of dabbling around, SOL is finally back! 🫡
Still $35 away from my first SOL investment though 🫠
Wrote a super long article (30 mins :P), but if you want to get a gist of Solana DeFi in one go or even just understand DeFi in general? Look no further!
The best part - Simply scroll to your favorite DeFi theme and read that section 'right now'!