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Over the past few months, people involved in Solana DeFi have been asking questions about SolFi, a DEX that sprang up in November and almost immediately captured over 20% market share on swaps between stablecoins and SOL.



SolFi was able to quote better prices than competitors, but at least one business partner I spoke to didn’t know who was behind the new exchange before today. In general, few seemed to be in the loop as to how SolFi was achieving such good prices.



Today, Ellipsis Labs — a DeFi shop currently building an Ethereum layer-2 that uses Solana’s software called Atlas — publicly claimed credit for developing SolFi. 



In an announcement on X, Ellipsis Labs co-founder Eugene Chen said the DEX “came from our deep understanding of the market structure on Solana.” Prior to building Atlas, Ellipsis created an orderbook Solana DEX called Phoenix. 



SolFi has no frontend, but Chen added that the DEX had partnered with Jupiter Exchange to bring the product to retail traders. SolFi is one of 51 DEXs that are part of Jupiter’s swap aggregator, but it currently makes up for 25% of Jupiter volume — far more than any other DEX — according to a Dune dashboard. 



The Solana rumor mill tended to reason that SolFi’s creators had to be someone with roots in the network, and Ellipsis certainly seems to have the technical chops to fit the bill.



“The Ellipsis Labs team are some of the most talented SVM developers in the ecosystem. It should be no surprise, given what they’ve built with Phoenix and Atlas, that they’ve also been able to find success with SolFi,” Switchboard co-founder Chris Hermida said.



SolFi isn’t the only anonymous Solana DEX. Orbic and ZeroFi are other newer Solana DEXs that have commanded significant trading volumes without publicly disclosing who their developers are.







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Ellipsis Labs claims credit for mysterious top Solana DEX

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Forward Guidance has covered Mag 7 and automaker earnings. But let’s jump to Robinhood, which is looking to wade deeper into crypto.



The trading platform’s transaction revenues amounted to $583 million in Q1. Roughly 43% of that ($252 million) came from crypto trading.



The $252 million total is less than last quarter’s record crypto transaction revenue of $358 million, Robinhood reported — but up 100% year over year. 



It appears concerns around the health of Robinhood's user base after April's market selloff have dissipated. After all, Compass Point analysts Ed Engel and Joe Flynn noted that net deposits accelerated last month ($6.5 billion) and margin balances “fared OK” ($8.4 billion). 



“Equities trading is at a four-year high,” Robinhood CFO Jason Warnick said on yesterday’s earnings call. “Options are in the zone of an all-time high, and crypto trading is north of $8 billion.” 



Compass Point increased its HOOD price target to $64. Robinhood shares were trading for around $47 at 2 pm ET — down nearly 4% on the day.



Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said that while the company seeks to make itself less reliant on crypto transaction volumes, it also looks to diversify the crypto business itself.   



We’ll be watching for product news that might come out of Robinhood’s June crypto rendez-vous in France.  



“Regulatory ambiguity has deterred HOOD from launching staking in the US, as well as listing a wider range of tokens,” Engel and Flynn wrote in a note. “With the SEC moving faster than expected, we see a chance that Robinhood announces staking and new token listings at the June event.” 



Tenev called clarity on listing crypto asset securities “a big opportunity,” adding: “We're just in the early innings of having this technology permeate the financial system.” 



The CEO reiterated, too, that tokenizing

Robinhood eyes crypto diversification as trading strength persists

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Stocks were back in the green after Magnificent 7 giants Meta and Microsoft reported better-than-expected Q1 reports after the close yesterday. 



Following their respective earnings releases, shares of Microsoft gained as much as 7.8%, and Meta stock surged more than 5% in after-hours trading Wednesday night. At 2:15 pm ET Thursday, Meta was trading 5.2% higher, while Microsoft was up 9%. 



Meta reported earnings per share of $6.43 on revenue of $42.3 billion — coming in ahead of projections calling for $5.25 EPS on $36.4 billion in revenue. Executives also calmed investors by saying they’re not concerned about tariffs impacting ad revenue. 



“I think we’re well-positioned to weather the macroeconomic uncertainty,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday’s call. 



In a rare move this earnings season, Meta also provided some positive guidance, upping its intended capital spend. Most of that is earmarked for AI investments. 



Microsoft also beat on EPS and revenue. The company reported EPS of $3.46 on $70 billion in revenue vs. the expected $3.22 EPS on $68.4 billion in revenue. 



Microsoft, like Meta, will also continue its investments in AI. Capital expenditures for the first quarter came in at $16.7 billion, slightly higher than projections. 



Microsoft execs uttered the word “tariff” just once on yesterday’s call, which shareholders surely loved. 



Overall, it’s two solid reports. But economic conditions still pose a threat for both firms. 



Next on the docket are Amazon and Apple, scheduled to post earnings this afternoon. Nvidia, the last of the Mag 7 to report, is scheduled to release on May 28.







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Meta, Microsoft earnings beat send stocks higher

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This week is one of the biggest we’ve had in a while for economic data releases.



In the spirit of all this data, let’s run through some charts and takeaways. 



JOLTS report



On Tuesday we received the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report. It was a mixed one.



On one side, we saw job openings miss to the downside and begin to roll over after a few months of positive surprises:







On the other side, we saw the quits rate actually increase, hinting at increased confidence in the jobs market by individuals willing to quit their jobs and find something better elsewhere: 







It’s pretty rare to see these two prints diverge. I think we’ll need to see the jobs report on Friday to get a cleaner read on the direction of the labor market, which is a key driver of the Fed’s reaction function. 



GDP print



As mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, we received the first look at Q1’s GDP print, which was also quite mixed. The topline number of -0.3% quarter over quarter hid some interesting insights:



The big driver was net exports crashing lower, primarily due to a huge increase in imports. That mechanically lowers GDP growth. 







However, looking at the more important components of GDP, consumption held up decently, and investment actually surged!







This hints at something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, which is that tariffs could be creating a mirage in the hard data. This mirage creates the appearance of a strong economy because of all the tariff frontrunning that occurs from both consumers and businesses trying to buy goods before the tariffs truly begin. 



Core PCE print



We also got the Core Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) print, which came in at 0% month over month (vs. consensus expectations of 0.1%)!







This kind of data shines a light on how, if it weren’t for the fear of

Unpacking a big week for US economic data

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Crypto accelerator Alliance DAO has announced its latest cohort of 20 startups: the ALL14. They received over 1,700 applications this time around. 



Accepted startups will join the three-month accelerator to further build their businesses. The first two weeks are in-person, and the remaining weeks occur remotely.



Typically, accelerators offer connections, networking and guidance in exchange for some equity in the startup that is accelerated. This accelerator includes lectures, one-to-one mentorship, weekly check–ins and a demo day.



Alliance DAO, formerly known as DeFi Alliance, counts other founders, lawyers, liquidity providers and auditors among its members.



“We only require a $450k investment in your company (at unparalleled, founder-friendly terms). We've learned that our best performing teams actually do want us to have skin-in-the-game,” the group’s website states.



Alliance says its median startup raises $3.5 million after the program. VCs like Paradigm, Dragonfly, and Multicoin have invested in Alliance-accelerated startups in the past.



About the cohort



Solana and Ethereum were the most-used chains by startups that applied to ALL14, and Base was the most-used L2.



35% of admitted teams are focused on AI, while 30% are focused on stablecoin innovations, a sign that both are continuing to trend in the startup world.



Alliance’s latest cohort offers an interesting glimpse into the future of crypto, AI, and where things might go from here.



Whet your appetite with some of these names:




Slop Club 



Poof



Wootzapp




Some of the teams’ pedigrees are pretty impressive, though. Think founders that are also Stanford engineers, have had stints at billion-dollar firms, or have worked at prior startups with top Silicon Valley investors before starting their new thing. 



A list of the crypto-focused:




8020 (Moonshot for Asia)



Zabio

Alliance DAO unveils cohort of startups for 3-month accelerator

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Worldcoin — usable via the World mobile app — is finally launching in the US and making a big splash with a slew of big integrations.



World cofounder and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman briefly took the stage during the live event Wednesday night and declared: “I am a very proud American.” 



Thanks for that, Sam.



Orbs in America



US residents can now get their irises scanned to claim some WLD tokens as part of an ongoing airdrop. Iris-scanning Orbs are being set up in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville and San Francisco to start (sorry, New Yorkers). 



Those in the US who pre-registered for World have also been airdropped 150 WLD, which is about $150.



The for-profit firm Tools for Humanity is the developer of World, and the nonprofit World Foundation is behind the Worldcoin token.



TFH’s goal is to “verify” as many humans as possible and get people set up with World IDs so that humans can discern between AI or bot accounts and real human-run accounts. Users can get verified World IDs by getting their irises scanned by a metallic Orb (if this sounds dystopian to you, you’re not wrong).



The next step in this vision is the Orb Mini, revealed Wednesday night. It looks like an eyephone with Apple Vision sockets on the back, if you ask me:




NEW: the Orb Mini can scan to verify humans for the World Network pic.twitter.com/LbnuzU8OlO— The Drop (@thedropnft) May 1, 2025




The Orb Mini’s main purpose is to make scanning people’s irises easier, but at some point, it’s expected to also serve as a point-of-sale terminal.



“We tried everything not to build a hardware device,” said Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania on developing the Orb concept. He also noted the company has spent “millions” on developing the Orbs.



The Orb Mini as a point-of-sale would mean you could buy items using just your eyeballs, and the Orb would deduct the

Sam Altman’s Worldcoin gets new Orb Mini and US launch

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Privacy on the blockchain is a nice idea, but it’s hard to build.



Applications like Railgun on Ethereum enable that today, but it’s computationally expensive. You could opt for a chain like Monero, but it lacks smart-contract programmability.



So the holy grail of onchain privacy looks a little like this: opt-in privacy, native smart-contract programmability and, ideally, a bridge into the EVM world of DeFi. All while keeping the protocol decentralized.



The Aztec team may be closest to cracking that code.



Enter Aztec Network, a zk rollup built on Ethereum (not to be confused with Aztec Connect, which was sunset in 2023). The public testnet launches today.



By leveraging zero-knowledge technology, user balances and transactions on the L2 are encrypted to ensure privacy around details such as the sender, recipient or the transaction itself.



Aztec’s programmability is enabled by Noir, the company’s Rust-like language for zero-knowledge circuits. Noir lets developers write smart contracts that can perform shielded loans or private voting without needing to learn cryptography.



"Developers can use Aztec to build dapps with privacy features that seamlessly blend with Ethereum's existing infrastructure, and they won't need to struggle implementing complex cryptography,” said Aztec Network co-founder Zachary Williamson in a press release.



Aztec’s differentiation



Unlike most L2s (one exception is Arbitrum’s WASM), Aztec makes some significant modifications to the chain’s execution layer.



Public transactions on Aztec are executed through its custom Aztec Virtual Machine (AVM). Private transactions, however, are offloaded to a client-side environment known as the Private eXecution Environment. PXE is used to generate proofs and run smart contract logic privately.



Transaction proofs are then aggregated into single proofs for Ethereum

ZK rollup Aztec launches testnet today

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Thirty-two years ago this week, in May 1993, WIRED released its second-ever print edition featuring three legendary cypherpunks on the cover: Tim May, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore.



Steven Levy’s piece, “Crypto Rebels,” handily documents the genesis of the Cypherpunk movement, starting almost two decades earlier in 1975, when Whitfield Diffie led the creation of public-key cryptography alongside Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle.



Until then, the US government codebreakers had dominated cryptography through the National Security Agency (NSA). Cryptographic tools were considered weapons under the Arms Regulation law, “right alongside tanks and bomber planes,” Levy wrote.



The act of giving regular citizens access to “military-grade” privacy tech like public-key cryptography — which would allow information to be stored trustlessly and sent securely over unsecure networks — was then a brave act of defiance for personal liberty. A fight against government tyranny.



Public-key cryptography would go on to be a cornerstone of the modern internet, protecting emails, bank accounts, website interactions, many other online matters, and, of course, everyone’s bitcoin.



Or as late The Codebreakers author David Kahn wrote, public-key cryptography was the “most revolutionary new concept in the field since…the Renaissance.” 



Satoshi, is that you?



Around the same time, MIT scientists Rivest, Shamir and Adleman developed a separate public-key method, RSA, which had far greater potential than the government-created Data Encryption Standard, which didn’t use public keys at all.



WIRED’s article also detailed the plight of cryptographer Phil Zimmermann in the wake of his invention of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) — a mighty, free alternative to RSA that utilized RSA patented technology without permission.



Zimmermann went to great lengths to build

Crypto in 1993: WIRED cover story on Cypherpunks turns 32

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It’s been a busy week for VC raises, and some of the projects have caught heat around social media for being infra plays. 



Like Unto Labs, for example. 



“We definitely got bucketed into the whole ‘another L1, oh no’ [discourse]. We felt a little sad about that, but we’ll just have to prove it. Because, in some ways, it’s true,” cofounder Will Yoo told me. 



But both Yoo and cofounder Liam Heeger said they’re up to the challenge because they’ve both “done this before,” whereas other teams haven’t “built systems that are supposed to perform at extremely high levels of scale.” 



“We love Solana and we think they’re going to be an incredible competitor. We’d be honored to compete with them,” Yoo said. They’ll be “ripping” out the Solana virtual machine with Thru, and they argue that they won’t be competing with Jump’s Solana client — something that’s literally held up in court. 



Heeger is ex-Jump Crypto, but he didn’t leave without making some waves. Jump filed a suit against Heeger after he departed Firedancer to start Unto with Yoo. The case was dismissed in February, and the two told me that they had a term sheet from Electric Capital, which led their seed round, the next day. 



They wouldn’t comment further on the litigation.



The $14.4 million rounds are a combined pre-seed and seed raises. Framework Ventures led their pre-seed. 



The capital will go towards building out the core infrastructure on Thru and the ecosystem around it, which they expect to be “capital-intensive, but because [Thru’s] going first-party rather than third-party, we believe we can be capital-efficient.”



The two, in Thru’s manifesto, argued that blockchains “have lost their way.”



“Thru's consensus scales through competition, not accumulation. Operators earn their spot with uptime, throughput, and by relentlessly

How Unto plans to compete with Solana

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“It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”



— William Stanley Jevons




When people hoped that more efficient steam engines would help conserve England’s limited reserves of coal, William Jevons warned of just the opposite: Greater efficiency, he predicted, would lead to even greater consumption. 



He was right, of course, and his prediction became known as the Jevons paradox, which is often invoked whenever efficiency gains inspire people to use more of something.



When cars got more fuel-efficient, people drove more; when lightbulbs got more efficient, people installed more of them; when HVAC got more efficient, people built bigger houses.



But these are better described as examples of a “rebound effect,” where some, but not all, of the expected savings from efficiency are offset by increased usage.



It wasn’t until the digital revolution that the Jevons paradox truly came into its own: As fast as Moore’s law has decreased the cost of computing, our use of computers has increased even faster.



As a result, things like semiconductors and cloud computing — where costs are in perpetual decline — have been both great businesses and great investments.  



The current craze for investing in AI is similarly predicated on more efficient GPUs enabling a disproportionately large expansion of usage.



Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is confident that it will: “Jevons paradox strikes again,” he posted on X in response to investors briefly worrying that the advent of DeepSeek would reduce demand for both GPUs and cloud services. 



So far, he seems to be right — the efficiency gains from DeepSeek and other more efficient LLMs seem to have been more than offset by increased demand. 



But any investor in either airline or

What crypto investors can learn from Jevons paradox

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Solana is stalled sideways, with the broader crypto market hitting some light turbulence. SOL is trading at $145.45 midweek, down 2.5% from last Wednesday and now drifting crabwise after a month-long rally that pushed it up nearly 30% from April lows. 



Despite the modest cooling of momentum, Solana continues to print usage at speed. Over the past 30 days, transaction fees have hit an annualized $432.9 million, with SOL burn running at an annualized $216.5 million pace.



Besides macro headwinds, we can probably trace some of the cautious price action to the looming FTX liquidation, where over 60% of the estate's onchain assets are in SOL. The first wave of creditor repayments is scheduled for May 30 — funded by prior asset sales, including FTX’s March SOL deals — which may still weigh on sentiment even if the tokens themselves are no longer in play. SOL's market cap has slipped to $75.3 billion, and while 24-hour volume remains strong at $3.49 billion, buyers can't seem to stop peeking over their shoulders.



The last round of FTX estate unlocks kicked off March 1 — right before a drawdown in SOL’s price, although there were obviously other factors involved. 



Bitcoin, meanwhile, had a little gut punch this morning due to macro. On Wednesday, BTC dropped to $92,910 after US GDP data showed a 0.3% contraction in Q1 — its first in three years. Analysts were quick to cite the sudden impact of Trump's revived tariff policy, with imports surging and dragging down the GDP print. Stocks sold off, recession chatter kicked up, and bitcoin dipped. As is tradition, the price rebounded within hours to $94,000, buoyed by strong spot demand and resilient ETF inflows, including over $3 billion in net new capital through April 29. 



Last weekend's Crossroads event in Istanbul allowed the Solana community to take stock of direction. It was a lot of builders comparing

FTX repayments loom over Solana

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We have a more specific date on when Galaxy Digital intends to (finally) go public in the US. And speaking of crypto-related equities, Grayscale’s launched a new ETF.



First, on Galaxy: The firm is eyeing May 16 for its Nasdaq listing. We reported earlier this month that the SEC “declared effective” the company’s registration statement to do so. There’s still that shareholder meeting to approve the move on May 9.



Galaxy shares have traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange since 2020 and will continue to do so “for a period of time” if and when the Nasdaq listing is finalized, the company says. The new listing will “enable us to attract a broader investor base,” CEO Mike Novogratz said in a statement. 



It would seem he’s right given financial pros like to see cash flows, balance sheets, etc. — things bitcoin alone doesn’t offer. And as noted before we’re keeping an eye on the other segment players looking to soon go public (looking at you, Circle and eToro).



On to the Grayscale update, the firm has launched an ETF that invests in companies adopting bitcoin as a treasury asset. Galaxy’s TSX-listed shares are actually the fund’s seventh-largest holding out of the gate. Its top two holdings are Strategy and Tesla, with ~27% and ~17% positions, respectively. 



Bitwise launched a similar product in March. That one, too, skews heavily toward MSTR (also at nearly 27%) but opts for Marathon Digital and Riot Platforms as its next-biggest holdings (~11% and ~9%). Less than 2% of the fund’s assets currently go toward Tesla. 



That Bitwise offering has just $5 million in AUM after nearly two months on the market; still, these funds’ investable universes are expected to grow quickly. We’ll see what kind of impact that has on the demand for them.







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