Unconfirmed: SOL Is Up 3,800% YTD. Could It Eventually Displace Ethereum?

**Laura Shin** (0:00)
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Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unconfirmed, the show that reveals how the market names in crypto are reacting to the week's top headlines and gets the inside scoop on what they see on the horizon. I'm your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto six years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes, I was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the August 20th, 2021 episode of Unconfirmed. The Unchained newsletter has switched from a weekly news recap to a daily email. Each morning, you'll get four to five quick headlines, a crypto meme or two, and a few recommended reads. Head to unchainedpodcast.com, and the sign up for the newsletter is right on the homepage.
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Today's guest is Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital. Welcome, Kyle.

**Kyle Samani** (2:09)
Hey, Laura. Good to be back on the show.

**Laura Shin** (2:11)
Nice to have you.
So Solana has been on quite a terror this past week. It's now ranked 10th by market cap and the price of the token is up to about $70 at the time of recording. And that's up from $1.50 at the start of the year, up from $23 a month ago and up from $43 a week ago. So what happened?

**Kyle Samani** (2:32)
Yeah. I think this has been kind of a culmination of a lot of things happening.
The slot ecosystem, as it's starting around the beginning of the year, you really started to get together and take off. You had, in addition to Serum, Mango launched, Saber launched, Mercurial, Marinade, a whole bunch of these other things have launched.

**Laura Shin** (2:55)
So the only one I knew was Mango and the Dex or Serum, obviously. Yeah. Why don't you just maybe describe what those are?

**Kyle Samani** (3:01)
Yeah. So these are all various kinds of DeFi protocols that I mentioned. Saber is like a way to trade stablecoins. It's kind of like Curve Finance from Ethereum. Mercurial is a competitor. There's a whole bunch of Borlend protocols now like Solend and there's probably four or five more. And so what I think has happened in the last nine months or so has been that a lot of these teams started raising money starting about nine months ago and building and deploying. And then this past week, last week, two kind of I think really important milestones happened and I didn't foresee them happening kind of next to each other. But Mango did their fundraise.
So Mango is a margin trading and perpetual derivatives trading thing built on top of Serum. And Mango was one of the very first things to launch on top of Solana.
And they've been iterating and the product is actually very, very good. And it's kind of like DYDX, but actually I think it is already more functional than the DYDX in terms of what it can do. And they did a token sale and they sold off 5% of the total Mango tokens. The team kept 5% and then the remaining 90% were kept for the DAO.
The really interesting structure, the Mango team has been very publicly anti VC. We've known them and spoken to them for a while, but we had no allocation. They did an auction and over $500 million went into the contract and ultimately the auction cleared at $70 million.
And so at 5% of the tokens, that's a $1.4 billion valuation.
And I think that really opened up a lot of people's eyes of, hey, you have a brand new contract. People are aping into this. Like this is what Ethereum, I remember last summer, people were like, they throw a contract down and then $100 million would appear in the contract within a day or two. And that happened on Solana last week. And then this Degen Apes NFT drop happened, I think it was Friday night or Saturday night. And it seems like 50, 100,000 people tried to get out onto this thing. This lot of blockchain actually kept running perfectly, but the front end to mince the Apes kept going down. They couldn't keep the servers online, but they ended up, they did launch the Apes and everything ultimately worked out.