Lightspeed

Michael Mark Antonio, Head of DeFi at Galaxy Digital, bridges DeFi to institutions. Matt Hogan, CIO at Bitwise, brings ETF and institutional capital flow expertise. David Lawant, Head of Research at Anchorage Digital, offers custody and prime-broker perspective. They discuss TradFi-crypto convergence, ETFs reshaping price formation, DeFi origins and UX/regulatory hurdles, market structure shifts, and institutional flows changing Bitcoin dynamics.

Nick Ducoff, Head of Institutional Growth at the Solana Foundation and former VC, discusses the rise of tokenized real-world assets and internet capital markets. He talks about why institutions favor public blockchains, tooling and regulatory gaps, and concrete opportunities in real estate, municipal bonds, stablecoins, and onchain equities.

Lucas Bruder, co-founder of Jito Labs and lead on BAM, builds privacy-preserving, verifiable block builders for Solana. He discusses BAM’s TEEs and plugin model. Short-term ACE plugins, MCP’s effect on proposer dynamics, stake-driven adoption, slot-time reductions, and JitoSOL’s ETF work round out the conversation.

MacBrennan Peet, founder of Project 0 and Solana DeFi builder, explains a DeFi-native prime brokerage that unifies margin, credit, and risk across venues. He discusses unified balances and cross-venue borrowing. He explores automated on-chain strategies, flash-swap rebalances, and Project 0 Pay for spending without selling crypto.

Sam Schubert, a Blockworks researcher who led the Solana block-building investigation, and Carlos, a Blockworks Solana analyst, unpack the Jito BAM vs Harmonic clash. They discuss block packing, transaction ordering, MEV and fee impacts. They examine validator client shifts, MCP/Alpenglow protocol fixes, and the future move toward application-controlled execution.

Kristin Smith, president of the Solana Policy Institute and longtime crypto policy advocate, discusses U.S. regulatory shifts and her move to focused Solana advocacy. She covers the Genius Act’s market effects, the CLARITY Act’s Senate hurdles, DeFi and developer protections, market-structure priorities, and the path to durable regulatory clarity for institutional adoption.

Carlos, a Solana-focused researcher known for data-driven on-chain notes, explores Solana’s recent on-chain performance and upcoming network upgrades. He breaks down client competition between Jito BAM and Harmonic, market structure impacts on perps and block-building, Prop AMM profitability versus volume, and MetaDAO’s move toward uncapped ICOs and permissionless scaling.

Tristan Frizza, co-founder of Bullet and ex-Zeta Markets engineer, builds a next-gen Solana perpetuals exchange. He discusses rebuilding after Solana congestion, a rollup-style network-extension design, Celestia for data availability, ZK proving for verifiable execution, sub-millisecond Rust-native matching, maker protections versus taker bots, launch strategy and token migration.

Ian Unsworth, a researcher at Kairos Research who analyzes market dynamics and token mechanics. Conversation covers market volatility and onchain performance during stress. They dig into chain fee dynamics, app-specific monetization and bot activity. Discussion also explores AI agents interacting with crypto rails and Pump.fun’s revenue, buybacks, and long-term value-capture questions.

Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu, President of Jupiter and on-chain finance leader, discusses transforming Jupiter into an on-chain super app. He covers the shift from CeFi to on-chain trading, mobile-first onboarding, omni-chain execution, Jupiter’s payment stack and cards, and stablecoin/product strategies. Short, forward-looking conversation on scaling decentralized trading and mainstream adoption.