Money has to work differently in an agent economy:
✦ Store of value → network sustainability: an asset tied to the security and economic coordination of the network it supports ✦ Medium of exchange → settlement asset: value clearing with finality, cheap enough for sub-cent, machine-frequency transactions ✦ Unit of account → bonding standard: a slashable commitment a stranger can post
One more function has no classical analog: a metering unit, fine-grained enough to price inference by the token and compute by the call. Closer to electricity by the kWh.
The full AI money thesis: https://t.co/gs34FM0kd5
This week sovereign wealth-backed capital came onchain, retail giants opened Solana to 8M+ households, and tokenized asset volume smashed another all-time high.
Here's everything that shipped:
📰 Headline News
- Morgan Stanley made Solana available to eligible E*TRADE clients, opening access across 8.7 million households
- @Mubadala Capital’s Alternative Solutions Fund went live on Solana via @KAIO_xyz
- @tryramp opened 24/7 stablecoin accounts and payments settling on Solana
📰 Launches
- Intel tokenized stock ($INTC) went live via @Backpack Securities and @sunrise
- @jtx_trade opened its unified trading surface for majors, memes, and RWAs to everyone
- @LayerZero_Core and @KeetaNetwork brought tokenized bank deposits to Solana
- @MetaMask activated gasless Solana swaps, covering gas fees for trades over $200
- @Lexur launched in public beta, aggregating Solana perps across Pacifica, Jupiter, Bullet, and more
- @dopplerprotocol went live on Solana Mainnet
- @hylo_so shipped xBTC, bringing liquidation-resistant 3x BTC exposure onchain
- @Bulletxyz launched 24/7 trading with up to 10x leverage for metals, oil, and chipmakers
- @trydapital debuted Dapital, a social trading network for RWAs, memes, and tokens
- @altitude introduced Altitude Accounting to automate transaction classification
- @Thea_AI launched AI inference routing and settlement on Solana
- @RyderWallet added native SOL staking on Ryder One via @Meria_Finance and @yieldxyz
- @CandyDigital enabled true self-custody for digital collectibles on Solana
- @meleemarkets unveiled Parimutuel Market Maker (PMM) design for permissionless prediction markets
- @Pumpfun introduced BOOST mode to reinject post-migration liquidity into token buybacks and burns
- @risedotrich enabled cross-chain swaps to Solana powered by @deloraprotocol
- @Beezie went live with zero-recycled-slab claw machine collectibles
- @BananaZoneApp shipped Paid Play for @solanamobile users with real rewards
- @streamflow_fi enabled NFT locking for time-bound collectible custody
- @backyard_fi kicked off Backyard BBQ: Season 0 for yield rewards
- @cleopetrafun launched Thesis Index to trade macro theses via prediction market baskets
- @flint_trade_ launched streamlined liquidity quoting for Solana market makers
- @tapmapfun launched Treasure Hunt for local business check-ins and rewards
- @machinedotfun, @codecopenflow, and @peaq opened applications for The Foundry, a Physical AI accelerator
- @TryNoahAI opened waitlists for Noah Accelerate to support Solana builders
- @magicblock and @SuperteamMY opened applications for their VIP builder program
- @fairdotclub partnered with @LaFamilia_so to expand private capital formation
📰 Milestones
- Tokenized-asset trading volume on Solana reached a record $5.8B in Q2, up 114% QoQ
- @byreal_io surpassed $4B in total trading volume
- @kamino’s OnRe Market passed $200M in total market size
- @humafinance PST crossed $200M market cap
- @ExponentFinance crossed $120M TVL
- @usdgo_official crossed $1B in circulating supply in 5 months
- @Beezie reached $2M in total volume across 5965 claw pulls
- Solana consumer card top-ups reached a record $94.32M in a single month in Q2
- @fomo logged 17.4K active daily traders executing on Solana
If you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, please share it with an RT.
Artwork by @Suffoca 🔥
This week sovereign wealth-backed capital came onchain, retail giants opened Solana to 8M+ households, and tokenized asset volume smashed another all-time high.
Here's everything that shipped:
📰 Headline News
- Morgan Stanley made Solana available to eligible E*TRADE clients, opening access across 8.7 million households
- @Mubadala Capital’s Alternative Solutions Fund went live on Solana via @KAIO_xyz
- @tryramp opened 24/7 stablecoin accounts and payments settling on Solana
📰 Launches
- Intel tokenized stock ($INTC) went live via @Backpack Securities and @sunrise
- @jtx_trade opened its unified trading surface for majors, memes, and RWAs to everyone
- @LayerZero_Core and @KeetaNetwork brought tokenized bank deposits to Solana
- @MetaMask activated gasless Solana swaps, covering gas fees for trades over $200
- @Lexur launched in public beta, aggregating Solana perps across Pacifica, Jupiter, Bullet, and more
- @dopplerprotocol went live on Solana Mainnet
- @hylo_so shipped xBTC, bringing liquidation-resistant 3x BTC exposure onchain
- @Bulletxyz launched 24/7 trading with up to 10x leverage for metals, oil, and chipmakers
- @trydapital debuted Dapital, a social trading network for RWAs, memes, and tokens
- @altitude introduced Altitude Accounting to automate transaction classification
- @Thea_AI launched AI inference routing and settlement on Solana
- @RyderWallet added native SOL staking on Ryder One via @Meria_Finance and @yieldxyz
- @CandyDigital enabled true self-custody for digital collectibles on Solana
- @meleemarkets unveiled Parimutuel Market Maker (PMM) design for permissionless prediction markets
- @Pumpfun introduced BOOST mode to reinject post-migration liquidity into token buybacks and burns
- @risedotrich enabled cross-chain swaps to Solana powered by @deloraprotocol
- @Beezie went live with zero-recycled-slab claw machine collectibles
- @BananaZoneApp shipped Paid Play for @solanamobile users with real rewards
- @streamflow_fi enabled NFT locking for time-bound collectible custody
- @backyard_fi kicked off Backyard BBQ: Season 0 for yield rewards
- @cleopetrafun launched Thesis Index to trade macro theses via prediction market baskets
- @flint_trade_ launched streamlined liquidity quoting for Solana market makers
- @tapmapfun launched Treasure Hunt for local business check-ins and rewards
- @machinedotfun, @codecopenflow, and @peaq opened applications for The Foundry, a Physical AI accelerator
- @TryNoahAI opened waitlists for Noah Accelerate to support Solana builders
- @magicblock and @SuperteamMY opened applications for their VIP builder program
- @fairdotclub partnered with @LaFamilia_so to expand private capital formation
📰 Milestones
- Tokenized-asset trading volume on Solana reached a record $5.8B in Q2, up 114% QoQ
- @byreal_io surpassed $4B in total trading volume
- @kamino’s OnRe Market passed $200M in total market size
- @humafinance PST crossed $200M market cap
- @ExponentFinance crossed $120M TVL
- @usdgo_official crossed $1B in circulating supply in 5 months
- @Beezie reached $2M in total volume across 5965 claw pulls
- Solana consumer card top-ups reached a record $94.32M in a single month in Q2
- @fomo logged 17.4K active daily traders executing on Solana
If you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, please share it with an RT.
Artwork by @Suffoca 🔥
The @near_intents $ZEC volume shows how liquidity on RHEA Dex on @NEARProtocol is effectively leveraged by parties (solvers) to support $ZEC trade.
RHEA - NEAR Intents for $NEAR & $ZEC
Jupiter COO @kashdhanda on the unique thing about Solana:
"Solana is the network that keeps getting better, and it's one of the few networks that actually does that. There's a focus on practical value and what actually works."
"A lot of the conversations are, 'How do we increase bandwidth? How do we reduce latency?' Those are the things that really matter."
"Applications on Solana do the majority of application revenue across any ecosystem, because the focus is on supporting builders, supporting companies and supporting real businesses."
The industry is calling for open AI infrastructure.
Open weights and models are essential, but still only one layer of the stack.
Truly sovereign AI infrastructure needs to verify the whole flow, from prompt to model to hardware, and ensure it's encrypted end-to-end.
And open rails. Agents need an open settlement layer to transact across assets and markets freely, but confidentially, so they're not broadcasting their movements and sensitive user data.
"Sovereign AI" is a multi-dimensional challenge across the whole stack that involves inference, settlement, privacy, and verifiability. NEAR is building that stack holistically through the combination of the protocol, NEAR Intents, and NEAR AI, and is designed to support any closed or open model, and any payment ramp.
The age of AI can be one of prosperity indeed if the infrastructure, the full infrastructure, is open.
Mert on why Solana is a global Silicon Valley:
“It's the most usable, scalable and battle-tested chain with the highest concentration of products, startups and talent”
Users can deposit euros into a crypto wallet via SEPA Instant, receive EURe stablecoins against those euros, then deposit into near.com.
On https://t.co/YBUSFVdjxE, your euros become usable: hold EURe in your account and transact across 30+ chains.
NEAR published its full roadmap, and a few lines in it are much bigger than they look. My picks:
Dynamic Resharding (underway). The chain splits its own shards when they get heavy: no fork, no governance vote. Testnet already did it unattended last week.
P256 signing, NEP-256 (underway). That's the curve inside your phone's secure chip and passkeys. Transactions approved with Face ID, no seed phrase anywhere.
TEE Enforcement + Application Framework (Q3). Confidential execution stops being a product and becomes a platform primitive: any contract can run inside secure hardware.
Single-Block Cross-Shard Transactions (Q4). Every sharding whitepaper promises this, nobody has shipped it. Cross-shard value settling in the same block it started in.
SPICE (Q4). Consensus separated from execution, so ordering finalizes without waiting for computation. This is the next big throughput unlock.
Last week I wrote that Ethereum's new roadmap describes a chain that already exists. This is what that chain's own roadmap looks like: the future tense is mostly gone.
Crypto Watchlist for the week ahead:
$JUP - Jupiter will launch the private beta of GUM, its new everything exchange, on July 6
$NEAR - Near Protocol will host a livestream called "The Big Reveal" on July 7
$LIT - Tokenized stocks on Lighter are expected to launch next week
$JTO - Jito is rumored to launch JTX, a new perps DEX on Solana, in mid-July
$ZEC - Some good news for Zcash is coming next week, according to Mert
$BERA - Berachain's PoL Next, its biggest upgrade since mainnet launch, goes live on July 7
$ETHFI - EtherFi just requested Aave DAO to create a dedicated Aave V4 instance hub for its EtherFi Cash product
If you enjoyed reading this, a like and a repost would be appreciated🫡
Ethereum's new roadmap is NEAR's old roadmap.
Vitalik just published the Lean Ethereum strawmap: "almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced" over the next three to four years. Point by point, it lands on decisions NEAR shipped years ago.
Quantum safety, now marked urgent: NEAR shipped post-quantum ML-DSA keys on testnet last week. I added one to my own account, it took one command.
New state types where nodes store only a fraction of everything, with Vitalik's open question "why do they store that 1% and why are they willing to serve it": NEAR answered that at genesis in 2020 with sharded state, protocol-assigned validators and storage staking. It's been running for six years. This week the testnet went further and split its heaviest shard in two by itself, no fork, no human.
EVM demoted to "a compiler-level feature" while the protocol only sees RISC-V, which Vitalik calls his ideal but "still far away": that's Wasm plus Aurora, live on NEAR since 2021. Decoupled block production and finality: Doomslug, 2020. Shorter slot times: NEAR runs 600ms blocks.
To be fair, the ZK half of the plan - recursive STARKs, first-class privacy - is genuinely Ethereum's own path.
The rest is NEAR's changelog with a 2029 delivery date.
ALTCOINS MAKE YOU RICH 💰
But...
Easy money is not coming back for Altcoins
5X on $LINK
10X on $ONDO
20X on $TAO
30X on $QUBIC
40X on $KAS
Those times are now over because we have reached saturation.
But that doesn't mean you cannot make money in Altcoins anymore.
> The chart says it clearly.
Altcoin market cap already went through its explosive phase, where capital kept flowing in and almost every project benefited regardless of quality.
That phase creates the illusion that making money is easy, because it actually is during expansion.
The top is slowly forming a resistance here and that is the region we should be playing in right now.
> But that phase always has a limit.
Now we are sitting closer to a saturation zone, where the market is no longer expanding freely.
Capital isn’t disappearing and it is becoming selective. That’s why price action feels slower, rotations feel tighter, and most projects struggle to break out.
> This current dip is important.
Because it creates a liquidity gap, and historically, these gaps don’t stay unfilled.
They get filled by the next wave of capital, but that capital doesn’t spread evenly like before and it concentrates.
And when it does, it flows into projects that can actually hold attention, users, and revenue.
A NEAR founder is drafting a proposal to make NEAR a FIXED SUPPLY coin. No more inflation, a hard cap, the thing that made Bitcoin Bitcoin.
Right now NEAR prints about 2.4% new tokens a year to pay validators/stakers, a quiet tax on every holder. FIXED SUPPLY ENDS THAT. The coins that exist become all the coins there will ever be.
The usual catch is that this inflation is what pays for security. NEAR barely needs it, because the cryptography does the heavy lifting. With SPICE, the upcoming upgrade that splits ordering transactions from computing them, one node executes a state transition and publishes a proof, and everyone else just checks that proof. a single honest prover keeps the chain correct, and a fake proof gets rejected on sight. You can't cheat math, so you don't need inflation to keep the network safe.
So who pays validators without inflation? real revenue does. NEAR already earns serious fees from Intents and apps, more than enough to pay validators a flat, predictable reward, even fixed in dollar terms, for keeping high-uptime infrastructure online. it stays permissionless: anyone can run one, and the pay comes from real usage, not from any foundation's goodwill.
+Bitcoin capped supply but tied its security to a reward that shrinks toward zero. NEAR can cap supply and pay for security out of real usage instead.
near:native , the soundest money thesis in crypto, on a chain that actually gets used.
NEW LAUNCH
near.com is bringing euros onchain.
This new on-ramp enables EU users to move euros from their bank accounts onchain and trade across crypto markets using their own wallets.
🧵
4 months ago we said NEAR's revenue would do the talking, not just the roadmap.
Then: a thesis and a fee switch.
Now: $36+ million in total fees generated, $22+ billion all-time Intent volume, and $28+ million in NEAR Intents Confidential TVL.
"No matter who you are or where you are, a kid in Bangladesh, Estonia, wherever. If you have an idea, we want you to come to Solana and bring it to the entire world"
– @mert, CEO of @Helius on @MarketBubble