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I spent much of last week running between conference venues and side events during Solana Accelerate in New York City.
Conferences tend to be announcement-heavy affairs, and Accelerate didn’t disappoint, bringing major updates on Solana’s core infrastructure, Solana’s phone startup and tokenized equities.
And as I pointed out last week, change is in the air. Competition is heating up, and formerly-hyped areas of Solana’s ecosystem are starting to lose their luster.
To elucidate some of that potential change, here are four big questions I have after Accelerate.
1. What’s the deal with Firedancer?
Jump released Frankendancer, a halfway version of Firedancer that makes some performance improvements to the existing Solana client, last September. It began rolling out Jito bundle support — allowing validators to more efficiently MEV — earlier this year.
Today, Frankendancer commands just 6% of Solana’s total stake (that proportion is up slightly from around 5% last week). This from-scratch Solana client project has been talked about in hallowed terms for years, but for one reason or another, most validators aren’t currently using Frankendancer.
One Accelerate attendee mused to me that Jump and Solana may have hyped up Firedancer too much, too soon, and perhaps building and rolling the software out more quietly would have been the better move.
Frankendancer’s key catalyst could be financial incentives: The client’s developer announced a stake delegation program similar to what the Solana Foundation offers during Accelerate.
2. Has Kraken become the Solana-favored exchange?
One major news item from Accelerate was Kraken’s launch of xStocks, tokenized equities — including Apple, Tesla and Nvidia — that will trade on Solana.
It’s an interesting development in international investors’ ability to invest in US stocks, but more interesting was the decision to launch on Solana. Kraken has an in-house layer-2 blockchain named Ink, which would have been a natural fit for the new product, but I think the exchange sees business upside in Solanaland.
As a US-based exchange operating in Coinbase’s shadow, Kraken may spy opportunities in the former exchange’s sometimes-contentious relationship with the Solana community, which has expressed consternation over Coinbase’s penchant for nudging users to use its layer-2, Base.
Solana is the hottest blockchain ecosystem of the moment, so becoming the favored exchange for Solana investors could prove lucrative for Kraken. In the past few months, the exchange has brought back staking for US users, parked some of its own money in a Solana treasury vehicle and now will launch tokenized equities on Solana. Kraken appears to be well on its way.
3. What’s the thinking behind the SKR token?
The Solana Labs-supported mobile phone startup Solana Mobile made three big announcements at Accelerate, which were:
- A) the Seeker phone will ship in August
- B) with a new decentralized architecture to rival Android and iOS, and
- C) it will have a token with the ticker SKR.
I found this last announcement somewhat surprising. As an entity with some presence in a New York City office, I’m sure Solana Labs has to be reasonably careful with compliance — and launching tokens can create legal headaches. Just look at some of the fallout from when the SEC deemed SOL a security.
My guess is that Solana Labs — which currently develops companies including Solana Mobile — thinks a friendlier legal environment can shield SKR from too much scrutiny, and it knows token incentives drove a chunk of the demand around the last Solana phone.
Disrupting the App Store duopoly, as Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko likes to say, will be no easy task. Maybe SKR will make things a bit easier.
4. Is the Trump-crypto marriage growing strained?
Leadership at the newly-formed Solana Policy Institute was visible in and around Accelerate, as Solana looks to grow its political footprint. To that end, there’s one political post from the conference that caught my eye.
“Congressman @RitchieTorres just got cheers from the crowd at Solana Accelerate for saying ‘We should not be selling access to Congress or the White House,’” the journalist Veronica Irwin, formerly of Unchained, wrote on X last week.
