GM HEARTLAND |
I hate the way that you pump, the way that you dump, the way that you shill… |
—El Prof, Muhammed & Chad |
TOKEN | PRICE CHANGE | PRICE |
|---|---|---|
Solana ($SOL) | -14.68% | $168.37 |
Helium ($HNT) | -9.26% | $3.43 |
Pyth ($PYTH) | +1.26% | $0.21 |
Save ($SLND) | -0.62% | $0.29 |
(Price changes reflect past 7 days as of 2.18.25)
Well, not to blow our own vuvuzela, but our pivot to utility came at the perfect time.
The mood of the week has been blowback to key opinion leaders (KOLs) who have spent much of the bull cycle trumpeting the speculative meme projects they were investing into their large follower bases to sell for a profit. All textbook insider trading schemas, openly admitted to by the LA Vape Cabal and other current “darlings” of the Solana shitcoin casino.
Chief among these KOLs: Argentinian President Javier Milei. The world leader is facing a federal probe for his role in promoting and allegedly launching $LIBRA. No, not that $LIBRA — Facebook’s defunt token from last cycle, IYKYK. (What’s Zuckerberg batting these days? .201?) Also an abject failure, this $LIBRA was developed with the help of the now-infamous Hayden Davis, who rugged most of Twitter with coin. Its market cap went from $2.6B to $0.8B in less than an hour of the token’s launch, and now sits at a dismal $300M.
All of this degenerate news that we said was finally being purged from our weekly writing is the very evidence the wider space may be pivoting toward utility too.
So what does real utility look like? We’ve spent plenty of time discussing Helium, the clearest protocol-as-a-service value proposition around. (Even Big Telecom is bought in.) And we’ve also touched on how memecoins have been leveraged by brands like Iggy Azalea and Pudgy Penguins to monetize fan communities in new ways.
But to understand the full potential of crypto utility, let’s first take a step back and talk about the state of the technology, its parts, and the implications. Web3 technology largely consists of decentralized communications protocols with varying degrees of auditable logs for transactions related to using the protocol.
Bitcoin, the most famous of these protocol, is a digital money transfer service. It leverages complex math, distributed processing and storage, and defined hard limits on scarcity, in order to ensure the integrity of the system without having a bank running the books in the middle.
That idea inspired Ethereum to build the World Computer, a blockchain protocol focused on bringing the transparent audibility of the financial ledger to other systems reliant on account-keeping — think video games, social and streaming platforms, or business software. Much of Ethereum’s ecosystem has focused on the financialization of different assets on the Layer-2 (read: middle-men) blockchains, in order to meet the cost-related challenges of scaling the network.
Then, there is Solana, which has iterated on the original concept of a world computer to build what it calls a real-time state machine: a database that can read and write transactions at the speed at which users are generating them. This blockchain protocol is 100-1000x faster than Ethereum, with a demonstrated track record of getting faster and more distributed over time.
With artificial general intelligence (AGI) potentially on the horizon, unique and verified datasets are the moats necessary to build the AI companies of the future. Solana not only scales to onboard consumers, but to license their data to the future of AI agents.
There are a lot of smoke and mirrors in the web3 spaces. Rather than doomscrolling X for the next cool (KOL?) thing, we’d recommend the unsexy and TradFi-coded process of due diligence. Do your research into each new project and prioritize those with an understanding of data and its importance to shaping intelligence systems in their domain. This will continue to be the differentiating force between projects that succeed here long-term, and those that go the way of the $LIBRA(s).
To that end, the dePIN projects building on Solana understand that securing the data on a Layer-1 — and doing so cheaply — is an incredibly important piece to scaling their unit economics in the future. And that’s why this publication continues to shout that transactions per second (TPS) is king when it comes to evaluating the protocols themselves.
—El Prof
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In the early days of fintech, startups like Brex and Mercury gained traction by offering streamlined banking solutions to startups and small businesses. But much like early web2 banking platforms, these services often replicated traditional models with little innovation beyond the user interface.
Now, a new wave of fintech disruptors is emerging — not with a bang, but a meow.
Meow started as a crypto yield platform, but it is quickly scaling toward a powerhouse in business banking. Unlike legacy fintech that relies on traditional infrastructure, Meow is designed for agility, giving businesses instant access to high-yield Treasury bills (T-bills), FDIC-insured checking accounts, and even venture debt solutions.
At its core, Meow enables businesses to put their idle cash to work without the complexity of hiring a corporate treasurer. The platform’s key offerings include:
T-bill investments: Businesses can park cash in government-backed securities, earning safe, high yields previously accessible only to large corporations.
High-interest checking accounts: Through partnerships with traditional banks, Meow offers businesses up to $125M in FDIC insurance.
Venture debt & founder mortgages: Startups can access funding through Meow’s marketplace, where banks and private credit firms bid on financing opportunities.
Meow’s efficiency-driven model took on fresh luster when Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed in March 2023. Amid the banking crisis, startups and small businesses rushed to find alternative cash management solutions. Within a month, Meow secured $500M in deposits, proving that businesses were actively seeking a more agile, tech-driven banking solution.
Meow wasn’t always an heir apparent to that title though. It launched in 2021 as a crypto lender. ICYMI, those weren’t exactly the “winners” of that particular bull cycle. But the following year, as major players like TerraUSD and Three Arrows Capital collapsed, Meow’s founders made a bold decision — returning customer funds and pivoting away from the volatile crypto lending space.
But while it has stripped away some of the volatility, the web3 ethos remains part and parcel with Meow’s operations. Its automation-heavy and efficiency-first approach mirrors the decentralization movement in crypto, where smart contracts replace middlemen and minimize operational overhead. While fintech giants continue to burn cash on high marketing budgets and bloated headcounts, Meow is busy proving out a viable alternative.
Much like how DeFi challenged traditional finance, Meow is challenging outdated banking models by offering businesses:
Full autonomy over their financial strategy without complex corporate treasury teams.
Access to institutional-grade financial tools without legacy banking bureaucracy.
A lean, transparent, and technology-driven approach to managing corporate capital.
The future of business banking isn’t just about offering higher yields. It’s about redefining efficiency, transparency, and control. With Meow’s relentless focus on innovation, this future is already here. I am there already. Be there too.
—Muhammed
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