Happy Wednesday, folks! Today we look at why Backpack and xStocks have different tokenized equity market structures on Solana, and how that shows up directly in execution cost. Markets stayed mixed, with the Solana ecosystem index up another 8.0% yesterday, though the gain traces to just two tokens, META and PUMP, rather than broad ecosystem strength.

Yesterday saw the Solana ecosystem index lead again at 8.0%, more than double the next best performing sector. Launchpad (3.2%), Bittensor Ecosystem (2.7%), AI (2.2%), and Perps (2.0%) filled out the top. Equities beat most of crypto, with the NASDAQ 100 up 3.0% and the S&P 500 up 1.9% against BTC’s 0.9%. Crypto Miners took the worst of it at -3.1%, with Ethereum Eco and Lending both at -2.0%.

The weekly picture shows how quickly leadership is turning over. Crypto Miners rank second at 15.1% even after yesterday’s drop, and DEXs, which sat second on the week on Monday, have given back all of those gains and are now down -1.1% . Lending is the week’s worst performer, down -10.0%, just ahead of Ethereum Eco at -9.8%. L1s are down -2.0% on the week and SOL trades near $73, down roughly -10% on the month.

The Solana index gain is narrower than it appears. META, up 46.6% on the week since its Upbit listing, and PUMP, up 22.9% and roughly a third of the index by weight, produced the entire 17.8% print between them. Seven of the eleven constituents fell, led by BP at -13.7% and BONK at -7.7%, and the median constituent is down -5.4%. Solana is up because of two tokens, not because the whole ecosystem is catching a bid.

Proposals to reduce issuance on both Solana and Ethereum emerged this week. Solana’s Double Disinflation proposal would double the annual disinflation rate from 15% to 30%, pulling the 1.5% terminal inflation floor forward to 2029 from 2032 and removing roughly 18.9M SOL of future issuance over six years. On Ethereum, EIP-8361 would burn a rising share of validator rewards to remove the incentive to stake beyond 50% of supply, zeroing net consensus issuance at that threshold and roughly halving today’s yield to about 1.1%. Both are drafts, and neither token appears to have priced in the proposals. 

— Jake Koch-Gallup

Solana Equities: Backpack vs xStocks

Backpack Securities and xStocks list overlapping tokenized US equities on Solana but their market structures differ sharply. Backpack clears mostly through prop AMMs quoting from market-maker inventory, while xStocks volume is concentrated mainly in public pools on Raydium and Orca. At first glance, trading volumes look comparable, with xStocks generating $2.43B versus $2.10B for Backpack from June 12 to July 30. However, SPYx alone accounted for $1.70B, or 70%, of xStocks volume and consisted largely of recycled pool activity; excluding it, comparable xStocks volume falls to $726M versus Backpack’s $2.10B. 

Most Backpack volume has cleared through prop AMMs every week since the SPCX listing, ranging from 66% to 74% and averaging about 71% over the last four full weeks. By comparison, prop AMMs accounted for roughly 33% of xStocks volume, though that figure was inflated by a single $284M week on AlphaQ and remained below 10% outside it. A redeemable, hedgeable instrument is what makes professional quoting rational, and it showed on day one: desks were posting two-sided $10k SPCX markets within hours of the June 12 listing rather than arriving over weeks.

The intraday data adds two qualifications. Prop AMMs quote continuously: Backpack's median weekday 30-minute slot is 69% prop-cleared (middle 80% of slots span 62% to 84%), and weekends still run a 64% median, with desks widening and skewing rather than withdrawing while the stock market is closed. The remainder, consisting of pool and order book flow, accounts for roughly one fifth to one third of most slots, and pool volume spikes around the cash open and close in a pattern consistent with arbitrage and hedging links to the underlying, so gross pool volume likely overstates how much flow actively chooses pools.

The flow itself is mostly pass-through. Roughly 68% of Solana tokenized-equity volume recycles, with 31% moving in and out within minutes (including atomic inside single transactions) and 34.5% within the same day, while directional positions held for longer periods account for 7.1%, and about a quarter of volume we could not classify. Meanwhile the holder count keeps climbing even as turnover cools, from 129K tokenholders in early May to 211K by late July, and $164M of purchase flow had sat unmatched for at least a week by the end of July. 

For matched order sizes, Backpack delivered consistently cheaper SPCX execution than xStocks. We compared fills between $100 and $500 against the prevailing NBBO during regular trading hours and Blue Ocean quotes overnight from June 12 to July 20. The analysis used different traders operating within the same time windows rather than routing the same order twice. xStocks cost approximately 2.4 to 2.5 bps more during regular hours and 2.8 to 2.9 bps more overnight. Backpack was cheaper on 22 of 25 qualifying regular hours dates and all 17 overnight dates, consistent with prop AMMs competing for flow around live reference prices. 

— Sam

How the Best Founders Think in Decades

Micky Malka, founder of Ribbit Capital (Revolut, Robinhood, Nubank, Coinbase), joined David Senra on his podcast to discuss his career. He bought his first Berkshire share at age 13 while living in Venezuela with money borrowed from his grandfather, who charged him interest.

In his mid-20s he invested his dot-com exit into Lemon Bank, which peaked near 7,000 locations and 50 million unbanked Brazilian customers before selling to Brazil's largest bank. Ribbit is his sixth company, and he runs it like a startup: group decisions, no partner assigned to a single company, shared calendars and inboxes. He says the best entrepreneurs never have to sell.

One in Twenty-Four

Carlos from Blockworks Research published One in Twenty-Four, quantifying crypto's base rate of success across the 1,972 tokens that first crossed $50M in circulating market cap between January 2020 and December 2025. Just 4.1% beat BTC, the median token lost 97%, and 73% fell at least 90%, typically within 13 months.

The asymmetry is gone: the 2020 class's median token later traded at 5.1x its entry price, while the median entrant since 2023 never closed above it. The rare winners cluster in exchange tokens, 15x over-represented among long-window BTC outperformers, with fee revenue routed to buybacks and burns as the shared trait.