last bear market, SOL bled all the way to $8. shit was brutal.
FTX had blown up. major downtime. the chain was still young. every day the question was the same:
"will this thing ever come back?"
but if you stuck around, you saw developers chewing glass and continuing to build. that's what ultimately mattered.
today, Solana is down bad from ATHs and somehow it's hard not to feel optimistic.
Backpack bringing equities onchain.
JTX around the corner.
perps finally onchain.
inflation reduction and value accrual proposals.
privacy initiatives (@HeliusPrivacy)
even vintage @blknoiz06 and @mert are back bullposting on the timeline.
the network has come a long way since $8. incredible setup at $70.
take a chance.
🥪 The Stablecoin Sandwich: because businesses shouldn't have to study the underlying tech to benefit from it.
Fiat in, fiat out, with stablecoin settlement speeds in between.
The Sphere dashboard just got a refresh. ✨
Streamlined onboarding, a step-based Transfer flow, and a dedicated Offloader Wallets page.
Full details in the changelog: https://t.co/DUtwTu0EGz
Last year, we were at a dinner, where a UHNW individual worth >$10B and the lead for a large fund was dining with us.
An existing investor had introduced us, and told me to pitch him at dinner.
“His English isn’t great, but pitch him.”
I spent the next 30-45 minutes describing our business at a very high level, being careful to speak slowly and simply.
He kept nodding along, and at one point ordered dessert in reasonably good English.
I described our traction, and got a smile. I thought it was going surprisingly well. Dinner lasted several hours, and we had several drinks and desserts together, with the occasional “Yes!”.
Before he departed, he gave me a handshake and a bear hug.
I later learned he literally did not speak a word of English (beyond “Yes!”) and the Greek yogurt he had ordered off the menu.
Correspondent banking plays hot potato across borders. Variable routes, variable fees, variable timing.
Sphere uses stablecoins to streamline the messy middle for businesses.
Domestic settlement on each end + stablecoins between = cross-border payments cut from days to minutes.
SF probably has some of the highest talent/capital density in the world, but increasingly the least unique alpha. The most interesting new ideas of this decade will come from the places that the really smart MIT or Waterloo new grad would never think to reside in.
We're growing the customer ops team at SpherePay!
This role is the connective tissue between us and our users, owning the full customer lifecycle from onboarding to ongoing support for fintechs and institutions moving money across borders
US-based + Portuguese fluency required
When money moves slower than shipments, markets never form.
@0xdirichlet on how correspondent banking gaps quietly kill trade corridors before they take shape, and what opens up when settlement is measured in minutes instead of weeks.