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Ethereum's biggest lending market froze this month and the chain that bailed it out is still priced like a mid-curve punchline. While the rest of the industry is busy packaging someone else's recipe for retail, Solana quietly absorbed a competitor's crisis, earned a nation-state stablecoin, and shipped quantum-ready code that Google's own AI team is citing in their research.

Five days before Accelerate Miami, the gap between what's being built and what's being priced is the entire newsletter.

If you're pulling up to Miami for Accelerate and still converting to fiat like it's 2021, you’re losing aura points by the second. KAST is primary sponsor of the Solana Spaces pop-up bringing access to 150M+ merchants. 20%+ off for KAST users at the activation.

Come prepared or stay cooked.

Chef’s Kiss
Sharmini

April 18. KelpDAO bridge exploit drains 152,577 rsETH. Aave eats up to $230M in bad debt. Ethereum's lending market locks up like a walk-in during the dinner rush. The response: DeFi United, a cross ecosystem recovery campaign that raised $300M from Aave DAO, Arbitrum, Mantle, Ether.fi, Lido, Kelp, Golem Foundation and others.

Then Lily Liu moved.

Solana Foundation Chair lent USDT directly to Aave. AAVE launched on Solana via Sunrise DeFi that weekend. V3 deployment signaled next. She showed up with a checkbook when the restaurant next door was on fire and bought the lease.

Same month, Naval launched USVC. Table 5 just sent back the "VC for Everyone" special, and the receipts are looking a little burnt. $500 entry, SEC-stamped, and a basket of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI.

Except 44% of the fund is deployed, more than half is sitting in cash, and retail is paying 2.5% annually on all of it. He also dropped a podcast this week titled "Pure software Is uninvestable"...while selling you a basket of pure software companies. Naval out here playing the simulation like a pro while the rest of us are just trying to get +1000 aura points for owning a fraction of the bots that'll eventually take our jobs.

And let’s not forget the quantum play. Two weeks ago we wrote about the clock moving from 2035 to 2029. Solana’s two biggest dev teams: Anza and Jump Crypto (the team behind Firedancer), both independently picked the same upgrade to keep the chain from getting gagged by quantum computers. It's called Falcon, and the sauce is already sitting on GitHub.

But here’s the real back-of-house confidential: Blueshift has had a quantum-proof vault live on Solana for over two years. Even the Google Quantum AI team is glazing them, calling it "one of the few quantum-resistant primitives shipped and in use" in their latest whitepaper. It’s giving two years ahead of the largest tech conglomerate on earth energy.

Then there's Confidential Balances which are now live on mainnet. Transactions visible, amounts hidden. The receipt exists but the bill is sealed. Auditors get in, spectators don't. PayPal's already building PYUSD on the standard. TradFi spent decades glazing "privacy" and calling crypto too naked for serious money, but the timeline just shifted.

Talking about timeline shifts…Monday: Israel approved BILS. First regulated shekel stablecoin. Built on Solana. Full regulatory approval after two years in a supervised sandbox.

While Naval's packaging exit liquidity, someone's actually cooking. And the kitchen smells like Solana.

We're not pretending this kitchen doesn't have rats.

North Korean hackers. Durable nonces weaponized. The security conversation is far from over. But the builders walking into Accelerate Miami on Monday aren't looking for exit liquidity.

ICYMI, Johnny and Amol break down culture and how everything starts there.

Talking about culture…Accelerate Miami. Monday. May 5th. Solana Spaces is pulling up KAST as primary sponsor.

We're bringing brand new items to the table, plus a surprise presale for a highly sought after item from some friends…the pop-up will be the first IRL shot at securing these before they hit anywhere else.

Add us to your contacts or stay hungry.