“The Bull Case For Solana” - Helius CEO | Market Bubble #8

Summary

• Ansem calls the Solana bottom: “Solana bottom is in,” with maybe one undercut of the ~$60 low in Q3, and a cycle target of $600 versus the prior $20→$297 run. His stated ladder is buys at ~58K BTC, $58 SOL and $55 HYPE for a “3 to 5x” by end of 2027. His thesis is that Solana graduates from a meme-coin chain to the L1 hosting breakout perps, consumer and tokenization apps — a bet that is hard to hold precisely “because we haven’t seen those products come out yet.”
• Mert of Helius describes a proposal that would accelerate SOL’s disinflation from six years to three to reach roughly 1.5% terminal inflation, alongside a possible activity-proportional burn and priority fees redirected to stakers. Stakers already combine inflation protection with Jito MEV tips and priority fees for “up to 9% yield on SOL,” while prop-MM microstructure is enabling “better prices globally than Binance for certain pairs.”
• The Pump.fun indictment is the episode’s sharpest alignment case study: $1B in revenue plus $1B raised in its ICO, “sitting on two billion,” and a promised 24% community airdrop (~$240M at the stated price) never delivered — while Hyperliquid gave ~30% of supply to users and TWAPs 99% of revenue into buybacks. Ansem argues a Pump airdrop could be this cycle’s Jito moment — the December 2023 “stimmy” that landed as SOL broke $30 — with the $240M going “straight to the trenches.”
• On Saylor, Ansem thinks the worst case is being pulled forward: MicroStrategy would not need to sell Bitcoin for another 6–7 months, Stretch payments can be delayed, and the real cliff is the convertible debt. Banks’s “triple dream bonus,” elaborated on-air by Ansem, is that the premium collapses, discounted BTC sales fund the national Bitcoin reserve via the U.S. Treasury, and MicroStrategy exits the picture. Trade posture: high-risk here, with a potential ~20% loss if wrong; non-active traders can wait for above $70K, around $72K.
• Mert’s answer on Hyperliquid reframes the competitive question: HL’s edge is not “closed-source binaries in Tokyo” but Jeff’s product execution and a colossal loyalty-building airdrop — so the question is whether Solana can enable apps that compete, and “it wasn’t yes last year… it is yes now.” Block times went from roughly 500ms to 394ms, with 200ms targeted, and prediction markets are his named live case study.
• Zcash gets a full FUD autopsy: the “outage” was block explorers using an unpatched node, infinite-mint claims fail on turnstiles capping supply near 16M, and the bug was found deliberately by a top-three Zcash researcher amid a pre-emptive audit effort. Mert outlines quantum-recovery, formal-verification and performance work; Ansem closes with a ZEC/BTC view of roughly 0.01 currently versus 0.1 making “a ton more sense.”
• The ideological spine is privacy as both scaling technology and a survival tool: “whatever you do on chain can and will be used against you,” blockchains are “the second amendment of the internet,” and UK device-level KYC plus Canada’s trucker de-banking are cited as proof of need. Helius is pursuing private transactions on Solana despite prosecution risk; the attorney general’s Tornado Cash de-prioritization memo is fragile — “when AOC is president, she can roll that back in 1 second.”
• Positioning color beyond crypto: Mert says he has seen “a big uptick” in people building on Solana over the past two months, a pattern he associates with a prior Solana run. Ansem is researching memory-related AI exposure — Micron, SanDisk, SK Hynix and Penguin Solutions — while also discussing Palo Alto and distressed overseas real estate. Banks reports that the new Fed chair, Warsh, is ending forward guidance; Ansem calls the resulting environment “the best time in history to be a trader.”

Deep dive

1. A burnt market, and the last bull standing

• Banks opens by noting Ansem looks like “the last man standing” on positive sentiment and jokes the true bottom signal would be Ansem doom-posting. Ansem’s tape read: Micron smashed earnings, up ~20% after hours, and Hyperliquid let Bull Penn users trade it 10x long/short after the 4:00 close — “great marketing for Hyperliquid… proving out crypto’s thesis in being able to trade anything, everything.”
• The bear side of the ledger: MicroStrategy breaking yearly lows and Stretch, the preferred product, “supposed to trade at 100,” sitting around 76. “We’re at a really, really, really important spot right now.”

2. The bottom call: SOL $60 to $600

• Ansem commits: “Solana bottom is in,” allowing that Q3 “may see slightly beneath” the ~$60 low — but on a 6-month-to-year-plus horizon buying here is a good trade. The precedent he leans on: 2023, when SOL traded at $8, then chopped between $15 and $20 and “nobody thought Solana was going to come back then.”
• The target that makes Banks sputter: the prior cycle ran from $20 to $297; this cycle “it can go from 60 to around like 600.” His earlier tweet laid out buys at ~58K BTC, $58 SOL and $55 HYPE for 3–5x by end of 2027.
• Why $600: the prior cycle was “primarily just a meme coin chain.” The bet now is stacked breakouts — a perps app competing with Hyperliquid, continued retail meme interest, and consumer apps such as Collector Crypt and Cards, which focuses on TCG trading. His caveat: “people don’t have a frame of reference for Solana enabling those breakout products, and that’s why it’s kind of hard for people to have that thesis right now.”

3. Banks’ pushback: “Solana memes are the new Ethereum NFTs”

• Banks, channeling TJR and Flipping Profits: the daily-runner trenching culture will not return — “I don’t think Solana’s running to $600 based on memes… how does it get bigger than Trump?” Ansem grants it is “a fair take” but disagrees: memes work every cycle — Doge in 2020 and 2021; TRUMP, BONK and PEPE last cycle.
• The resolution is not memes-or-nothing but two-fold: Pump.fun for low-cap launches and MetaDAO for aligning real businesses, equity and token incentives one-to-one. His Vegas frame: casinos bring revenue and customers to the city; Pump.fun brings revenue and retail chasing “1,000x and 10,000x” plays to the chain, while memes are “a gateway into those other things.”
• Both agree on the retail-onramp premise Banks states plainly: crypto runs again when “the mailman and the Uber driver” hear about somebody getting rich and believe — and actually have — a real chance themselves.

4. If Ansem ran Pump.fun: airdrop first, then liquidity, then kill the copycats

• The grievance: Pump.fun said roughly 24% of its token would go to the community, never airdropped it, made “a billion dollars in revenue,” raised “a billion dollars in their ICO,” and is “sitting on two billion” while still raking fees. At the stated price, the promised drop would be about $240M.
• Handed the keys, Ansem’s sequence: design the airdrop around web and mobile traders, coin creators and high-volume users, with tiers unlocking on forward activity; then incentivize deeper liquidity so buyers “can blast a lot into the chart without worrying about getting slipped”; then discourage copycat launches, which fragment attention and are “good for Pump.fun volume… but not good for traders.”
• His more inventive idea: recycle profits into trending charts venture-style, so the platform is aligned with its winners and teams are incentivized to build market cap knowing protocol buybacks could follow. He also suggests lowering the “super high” rake, possibly discounting fees for Pump stakers; “they really haven’t utilized the token at all.”
• The precedent for why it matters: the Jito airdrop in roughly December 2023 landed as SOL broke $30 — “that stimmy was great for people… right as everything started popping off on chain.” A Pump drop “is all going to go straight to the trenches.”

5. Why people love Hyperliquid and hate Pump.fun

• Ansem’s diagnosis: Hyperliquid was “100% community aligned from the very beginning” — roughly 30% of supply airdropped to core users with no advance timing and no lockups, followed by a TWAP buying back 99% of revenue, plus transparent communication on HIP-3, HIP-4 and the Assistance Fund. “Jeff has done a great job of continuously showing what his vision is.”
• Pump did the inverse: no airdrop, buybacks cut from roughly 90–100% to 50%, and no clear forward plans. TJR’s verdict from the boat: “Pump.fun was probably the biggest fumble of all time… they could have been one of the best projects of all time.”
• Ansem’s conclusion: “those are changeable things.” Because Pump is still buying back the token, the lower it goes, the higher the percentage it technically owns — “I’m just not sure when” it will respond to the community.

6. The Saylor endgame: sacrifice, discount, Treasury

• Ansem’s read on Bitcoin’s weakness: it is largely Saylor-attributed and the fear is being pulled forward — in the worst case “he wouldn’t need to sell Bitcoin for like another 6 months or 7 months.” Stretch has about $10B outstanding; its payments can be delayed. The real problem is when convertible debt converts below its strike and he must buy it back. Banks, not TJR, floats the idea that Saylor might sacrifice Stretch rather than sell BTC; Ansem agrees the structure permits delayed payments.
• Banks’s quoted best case, elaborated on-air by Ansem: the MicroStrategy premium collapses, it can no longer sell shares for cash, runs out of runway in roughly six months, and is “forced to sell Bitcoin to someone else at a discount… and then MicroStrategy is out of the picture.” The “triple dream bonus” is selling it to the U.S. Treasury to fund the national Bitcoin reserve — buying Saylor’s stated ~$55B stack at a discount. The “markets are known to never let anyone too dumb get too rich” line comes from Wrong User.
• Positioning discipline: Ansem was bearish at the first $60K test in June and thought $40K was possible. Here is “a high-risk spot” where being wrong means “minus 20% pretty quickly,” so non-active traders can wait for confirmation above $70K, around $72K.

7. Interlude: $100K on Portugal and a quant’s World Cup

• Forensic, last week’s guest, hit his Germany/Côte d’Ivoire pick and earned a trip to a game; his new idea is Portugal to win Group K at 1.9x or Portugal to win the match, with the market later around 50–53%. He argues Colombia “send it” and Portugal’s midfield could open up against an attacking team. Banks’s local knowledge counters: Miami is effectively “a home game” for Colombia.
• Banks escalates: “$100,000 on Portugal to win” — and if it hits, Forensic goes to the World Cup finals. Side picks include Senegal to score in the first half (~1.4x) and Belgium to score in the first half or score three in the match (~1.9x), with Doku’s availability a consideration.

8. Mert’s frame: the tech-sentiment disconnect, again

• Mert’s core dichotomy: for the last two cycles there has been “a huge disconnect between what the chain was technologically capable of doing versus what people thought of the chain — which is kind of weird because fundamentally these are technologies. When you press the button, it better fucking work.” He was bullish into the FTX collapse because it removed the SBF excuse; instead the market declared Solana “dead forever” — then it was “the only chain that could handle the mass amount of activity” when the cycle returned.
• Today rhymes: sentiment is blurred by macro, wars, a possible stock bubble and Saylor, while “the chain actually works insanely well” — little problems that “would have bitten us in the ass even 8 months ago” are gone.
• The under-appreciated proof point: prop-AMM microstructure on Solana is “enabling literally better fills than Binance on spot” — “Solana is a few thousand nodes and can give you better prices globally than Binance for certain pairs,” unthinkable in 2022, and unlike systems controlled by Coinbase or Arbitrum, permissionless.

9. SOL’s monetary rewrite: accelerated issuance decline, possible burn, 9% yield

• Mert describes a Helius proposal — “100% going to pass” — that doubles the pace of SOL’s disinflation, reaching the roughly 1.5% terminal rate in three years instead of six. He also discusses a new activity-proportional burn mechanism and a possible change routing validator priority fees back to stakers. “Holding SOL all of a sudden looks much different.”
• He untangles the old supply FUD: the market-cap inflation people criticized was not necessarily money printing, but largely the unlocking of tokens from older rounds; most of those unlocks had already reached the market. 2024’s “ETH maxi accounts” said the large unlock would send SOL to zero — “obviously it actually just went up instead.”
• The staker math: inflation-protected staking plus Jito MEV tips plus priority fees — “you can get up to 9% yield on SOL just by staking it,” according to Mert. This addresses Banks’s framing that Hyperliquid’s buybacks accrue directly to HYPE while SOL is inflationary.

10. Portfolios: gun to the head, and why Mert will not pair-trade

• The exchange never resolves a three-asset portfolio for Mert. When Ansem asks for three five-year crypto holds, Mert guesses that the first two Ansem has in mind are SOL and Zcash and guesses NEAR for the third. Ansem says he is torn between HYPE and NEAR, leaning toward NEAR as the riskier, higher-upside bet.
• On SOL versus HYPE, Mert says he would hold both rather than choose one. Hyperliquid has proved itself with one singular application, but HyperEVM has underperformed; Solana is better suited to hosting many applications at once. The divergence is sentiment — HL euphoric, SOL deeply unpopular — while Ansem notes SOL outperformed nearly everything in each of the prior two cycles until Hyperliquid came along.
• Mert’s broader point is that Solana can host a perps competitor alongside Pump.fun, Collector Crypt and other consumer applications, whereas Hyperliquid does not currently have the same infrastructure breadth.

11. Zcash: the FUD autopsy and the roadmap

• The “outage” that five or six news outlets tweeted never happened: block explorers ran “an old unpatched node” and showed wrong data — “I can just go on Solana’s block explorer and say it hasn’t produced a block. That doesn’t mean Solana’s down.”
• Ansem answers the infinite-mint theory with three points: price rising against supposed infinite selling, the shielded pool growing, and turnstiles that cap supply “around 16 million Zcash, not even 21.” He says the security issue was deliberately surfaced by a top-three Zcash researcher amid a coordinated ramp-up of audits and formal verification. Mithos and the newest GPC audit found nothing, according to Ansem.
• Mert’s roadmap includes formal verification of the current pool with two more efforts in parallel, a quantum-recoverable new pool, full quantum-proofing “within the year,” and performance toward “a few hundred TPS,” which he calls remarkable for a proof-of-work store-of-value chain. Adoption depends on shared belief and real need; he cites Swiss banks becoming less neutral during the Russia–Ukraine conflict and de-banking people.
• On the hate itself, Ansem compares the reaction to “incels” hating women online: people “hate on the good coins that are actually performing to convince themselves it’s actually a bad coin.” He points out that Zcash was up roughly 600% year to date in the discussion. Banks says the outage story gained traction because people missed the trade; Ansem adds that many tokenless traders who lost money now treat everything as a scam.

12. Trenches as MMORPG: the PvP/PvE split

• Mert’s framing of memes: “I call it Web3 gaming” — social games where people buy and sell against one another while creating memes. Banks, who says he founded FaZe Clan, confirms from experience: living with Frank DeGods, Threadguy and others, the trading room “sounded literally like a professional gaming team practicing… comms, pairing,” and “there’s a direct correlation between Fortnite pros and people who perform well in the trenches.”
• Mert’s counterweight: not everything is PvP — “it’s not an accident most of the big fund managers are ex-poker pros” — and privacy is a positive-sum example. When Ansem first discussed Zcash at $18, privacy “was literally deemed dead”; now NEAR is adding confidential transfers, Base has added private transactions, and Ansem says he is adding private transactions to Solana.

13. Helius and the “global Silicon Valley” thesis

• Mert describes Helius as a Solana-exclusive infrastructure provider: “no matter what app you use on Solana, you probably use us to some extent.” It has helped Pump.fun, Axiom and other applications through traffic spikes. His job description: “the offensive lineman in football. You get none of the glory, but if the quarterback gets sacked you get all the blame.”
• His answer to what Solana should focus on is neither perps nor one vertical: make Solana “a global Silicon Valley for entrepreneurs” — the kid from Bangladesh or Estonia with an idea comes to Solana, focuses on product and PMF, “and then we take care of the rest. We take care of the physics.”
• His examples of major companies that started on Solana include Phantom, Magic Eden, Axiom, Jupiter and Public. He concedes Banks’s pricing objection — there is no clean “trade perps, buy back token” loop — but reframes blockchains as economies: “the economy that has the most usage, the most GDP… fundamentally has the most optionality going forward.” He says he expects it to go up 10x, while noting his lawyer will not let him say that as advice.
• Mert agrees with Banks’s Apple comparison: Solana is vertically integrated and gives builders access to users with Solana addresses, avoiding fragmented L2 incentives.

14. Physics, incentives, and the price-insensitive SOL buyer

• Mert’s investment framework has two checks: physics — “are there fundamentally unsolvable problems that will fuck me in a year” — and incentives, meaning an aligned flywheel rather than fragmentation. In crypto, he says, this lets people participate like activist investors without a hostile takeover.
• His most novel demand-side argument: HFT firms on Solana must hold SOL to gain an edge through stake-weighted quality of service, storage fees, block-building and transaction landing. He compares this with TradFi firms spending heavily on microwave towers and shortening cables by a centimeter. That creates “a buying profile for a customer that’s entirely price-insensitive.”
• Ansem adds that Citadel is coming on-chain and has job postings; Jane Street and other global trading firms may likewise need SOL exposure as they enter on-chain markets.

15. Can Solana beat Hyperliquid? Wrong question — and the answer changed this year

• Mert’s self-described unpopular opinion: Hyperliquid’s perps dominance is not primarily technical — “people nerd out… closed-source binaries in Tokyo, co-located. I don’t think that’s at all the reason.” He credits Jeff’s product focus and a colossal airdrop that built a loyal user base. Maker-speed issues are solvable; he says Eugene and Jerry from Phoenix can address them.
• The right question is whether Solana can enable competing apps, and here Mert marks a change of state: “It wasn’t yes last year, by the way. It is yes now” — the chain is finally deterministic enough. The engineering was holistic, like building a Ferrari engine and then discovering the tires and cooling system fail. He credits Firedancer, Jito and Anza, including Alessandro’s performance work, with taking block times from roughly 500ms to 394ms and toward 200ms.
• The live experiment he names is prediction markets: Hyperliquid’s new binary-outcome markets are arriving as Solana also enables prediction-market applications. “This will be a good case study to see which approach actually bears better.” Ansem’s aside: “everybody’s competing on perps and prediction markets.”

16. AI kills the chewing-glass tradeoff

• Mert’s “left-curve answer”: AI collapses the ease-versus-performance tradeoff — Ruby-easy versus C++-fast — so “now you can write extremely performant code in English,” potentially opening Solana to developers once barred by its complexity. Solana’s program model also lets builders compose with battle-tested contracts.
• From his “crypto is about to enter the space age” argument: smart contracts were built to Web2 SaaS standards, but “if you write bad code on a smart contract, you just lost $100 million.” Formal-verification tools can improve trust and expose poorly written contracts. His timeline hedge is “not in the next four months, but in the next year and a half to two years.”
• His example of current risk: “there’s no rate limits on any DeFi protocol right now,” so a hack could theoretically drain $1B. He says AI and formal verification should help address this over time.

17. Privacy as scaling technology — and the legal fog around building it

• Mert’s two models of privacy: for Zcash it is “the thing that enables a better store of value” through fungibility, seizure resistance, censorship resistance and no surprises; for finance it is a scaling technology because institutions will not do payroll, neobanking or dark pools on transparent rails.
• He cites Canto as a privacy-enabled chain closing large BD deals and calls it fundamentally a Web2 database. He also points to Squads’ Altitude banking product: “you can’t just do payroll in a completely transparent way.” His everyday example: “I don’t want my barista to see that I’m getting hair-transplant treatments in Istanbul.”
• The risk around private transactions is that developers have been charged for writing open-source code that breaks the link between sender and recipient, including conspiracy to commit money laundering, sanctions evasion and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business. “It’s a very unsexy problem, which is why we’re taking a shot at it.”
• The discussion says the attorney general’s Tornado Cash de-prioritization memo is fragile — “when AOC is president, she can roll that back in 1 second” — while possible privacy provisions in the CLARITY Act could provide clearer rules. The episode also presents Zcash’s separate miners, clients and wallets as making it harder to target one operator.

18. The dystopia file, and “the second amendment of the internet”

• The UK segment leaves Banks stunned: the discussion says users may need device-level KYC — passport, ID or credit card — alongside app-level KYC and possible age verification for VPNs, creating “this giant golden pot of personally identifiable information.” Banks says it sounds like a Black Mirror episode and that he would be short the UK if he could.
• Ansem adds Canada: during the trucker protests, he says the government went door-to-door to take Bitcoin ledgers, freeze protesters’ banks and freeze relatives’ banks. He calls it legally improper but enabled by emergency powers.
• Ansem’s irony: “it’s a great irony that cryptographic money doesn’t actually use cryptography,” and crypto is poor for crime because “whatever you do on chain can and will be used against you.”
• His affirmative case is the episode’s strongest line: blockchains are “the second amendment of the internet” — a way to own assets and information across borders without permission, trade SpaceX with an internet connection, use private money without a Swiss bank and participate in free markets. He frames this through Thiel’s “definite optimism”: building “the machinery of freedom,” starting companies and taking risk rather than merely assuming things will improve.

19. Founder advice: don’t generate ideas, notice gaps — and the tokenization question

• Mert’s advice to would-be Solana founders: idea-generation sessions produce “the thousandth launchpad that beats Pump.fun because it does fee shares differently.” Instead, observe real life — such as a merchant taking QR payments to avoid a fee — prototype with AI, and find “demand from like 10 serious people.” “Entrepreneurship is about knowledge asymmetries… become the person that notices problems, and the ideas are literally everywhere.” The unfakeable test is PMF: “you can fake P&Ls, you can fake volumes, but you cannot fake PMF.”
• On tokenizing early, Mert asks Ansem to answer. Ansem says tokenization too early can make price a drag on product focus and can turn apparent product support into airdrop farming. Where coordination matters, however, tokens can align users and are “much cleaner than equity.”
• Ansem says 99.9% of tokens are currently scams, but expects more token-equity one-to-one structures after the CLARITY Act and clearer regulation. Banks adds that HYPE showed this model can work, while warning that early token incentives can dilute the PMF signal.

20. The angel book, the builder signal, and what might be built instead

• The leading indicator Mert drops almost in passing: “I’ve seen a big uptick in people building on Solana in the past 2 months,” and the only other time he recalls seeing that was before a major Solana run. The ideas include confidential auctions for tokenized-equity price discovery, ZK work, prediction-market hedging and options; FOMO and Audius have also raised rounds.
• Ansem’s non-invested example is Hylo, a decentralized Solana stablecoin backed by overcollateralized staked SOL — “you don’t want all your stables to be completely centralized” — with an xSOL token offering roughly 3x SOL exposure without liquidation under its structure.
• Asked what he would build instead of Helius, the discussion names a “Swiss vault for the internet” for high-six-to-eight-figure self-custody and a privacy protocol. The latter is described as the remaining piece needed for crypto’s vision; the speaker says he does not want to have built “the best surveillance infrastructure known to man.”
• Mert’s background is Coinbase development, work at fintechs and three of Canada’s five largest banks, BlackBerry’s BBM cloud, and a double major in mathematics and satellite communications engineering.

21. Macro volatility, stock picks, and the closing theses

• Banks reports that the new Fed chair, Warsh, will end forward guidance and respond to markets in real time. Combined with Trump’s deal-making, Banks calls this “the best time in history to be a trader.” Ansem answers Banks’s forex-perps question: forex already uses very high leverage, sometimes up to 1,000x at traditional brokers, and could become a larger Hyperliquid opportunity if liquidity expands.
• Banks’s AI trade has rotated “from hyperscalers to the memory players” — Micron, SanDisk, SK Hynix and Penguin Solutions, which he is researching but has not bought. He cites memory as a bottleneck for AI and mentions CXL.
• Ansem, not Mert, discusses loading up on Palo Alto Networks after identifying AI as a security problem. He also mentions obscure or distressed opportunities such as Abu Dhabi real estate and energy stocks, and Ukrainian and Russian real estate tied to a possible future peace deal.
• Ansem’s closing SOL thesis is that the most performant, cheapest chain is where builders and retail converge; if stablecoin payments, AI and AI agents grow, on-chain value transfer “only goes up and to the right.” He adds that crypto could benefit from proving human activity in an AI-saturated information environment.
• His ZEC close: Zcash shares Bitcoin’s memetic store-of-value appeal but is private and quantum-resistant. “When a ton of smart people solve hard technological problems and the only thing missing is attention, those typically are the best trades.” He suggests ZEC/BTC could move from roughly 0.01 toward 0.1. Banks supplies the “not financial advice, but come on” response.