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Hello!
We’re in the worst sporting month of the year – especially with the US out of the America’s Cup – and it’s gotten so bad I’ve started watching the Tour de France. Congratulations to Mark Cavendish on his record. I really should go touch some grass.
Now here’s the story of the person who bought Solana for $0.04 per token:
Q&A: True Confessions of Solana’s First Venture Capitalist
Edith Yeung was an early stage investor at 500 Startups when she met Anatoly Yakovenko, who pitched her an idea for a fast, cheap blockchain that would become Solana. She watched Solana’s early days unfold and made an incredibly profitable venture investment along the way. Read on for an excerpt from my conversation with Edith.
Comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Jack: How did you meet Anatoly?
Edith: Anatoly and I actually met through a friend. His name is David. I can’t even make this shit up — David played water polo with Anatoly. I can barely swim, so the fact that someone can play polo underwater, I think, is crazy. David knew I was really into crypto, so he was like, “Hey, you should meet this guy, Anatoly.”
When he pitched me Solana, first of all, it wasn’t even called Solana. It was called Loom. He basically said proof-of-work doesn’t really work. It can never be fast. You can’t make a horse go as fast as a car. You just have to build it from scratch, and I just felt like his thinking and ideas were pretty fresh. But at the same time, he didn’t really have anything, not even a white paper. So it was purely the trust and faith of the founder when we invested.
[After launching, the Solana team] The number of people grew from one to four to a whole bunch, and eventually our office manager just said, “You guys have too many people. We need to kick you out immediately.” [Solana co-founder Raj Gokal] Basically, we were told we needed a new space. I found them a space on One Hawthorne Lane. It’s walking distance from where I am now. It’s right next to the Gold Club, the strip club across the street. They stayed there right up until Covid, and now they’re on a better street.Jack: What did people think of Solana in his early days in San Francisco?
Edith: A lot of investors just shrugged it off, and basically from mid-2018 to early 2019, it was a bear market, so if I remember correctly, Solana was valued at $15 million to $20 million. That was it. And most people didn’t want to invest in it.
There are people who really pulled it out [of the first round] because it was such a bad market and they didn’t want to get involved – and that’s a lot of people who are active in the crypto space at all. They just didn’t see that “there was going to be another Ethereum.”
Jack: What was your initial investment in Solana?
Edith: It was $250,000 at $0.04. [per SOL token]and that was the seed round. My fund was very small, it was a $10 million fund, so when $0.04 grew to $14.25, it already grew my fund 7 times.
But having said that, we waited about two years to get to the point where the token actually launched, which is common, the same thing even for IPO type companies. Then it started trading, and so my LPs who were backing me were like, what is this thing? Because most of the people who were backing me had no idea what cryptocurrency was.
At the beginning of 2021, I gave tokens to my partners and basically told them, “Look, you may not understand what this is, but please trust me and hold on to these for as long as you can, and please don’t sell them.”
After that, Solana went up to, I think, $260. Some of the LPs were like, “What the hell?” And I was just like, “You’re welcome.” And that was it.
Jack: The big thing people point out about the early days of Solana was that FTX came in and launched the Serum decentralized exchange. What was FTX’s involvement in Solana before the crash?
Edith: Sam [Bankman-Fried] was actually the one who picked Solana as the one he wanted to build Serum on. They were looking for, “Can we find an alternative to Ethereum [for traders]?
When Serum launched, it was super popular because FTX was obviously promoting it, but more importantly, it was a fantastic opportunity for Solana to showcase the fact that [it is] fast enough for DEX. […] The FTX team was very supportive of Solana and really made them visible in the DeFi ecosystem early on, but of course it didn’t last long.
Jack: Do you still have these original tokens?
Edith: Yes, of course, and I am very grateful.
I love investing in people and for me they truly are the investment of a lifetime.
— Jack the Cuban
Zero in
Magic Eden’s Solana NFT Market Share Continues to Grow:
According to 21co’s Dune dashboard, Magic Eden has held 90-95% of the combined trading volume between itself and competitor Tensor for much of the last month. Tensor saw over 75% of the combined volume in January, but Magic Eden has since taken over and solidified its lead.
— Jack the Cuban
Pulse
Helium recently announced that it is expanding beyond its mission to decentralized wireless communications to create a larger decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN). Traditionally, the infrastructure landscape has been dominated by expensive centralized networks. According to Helium, these traditional players have been hindering scalability and innovation for years, especially in segments such as asset tracking, cellular solutions, disaster detection, and other wireless-enabled solutions.
Helium has outlined its intention to create a more efficient and scalable infrastructure through its Network of Networks initiative. The protocol intends to use its global presence and community to support new decentralized networks for computing, storage, mobility, and more.
On X, community member @hansaFL suggested that Helium could introduce a Proof of Location (PoL) network. He highlights how Helium’s access points can verify the location of devices, increasing trust and utility in the DePIN space. According to Hansa, “before Helium, there was no way to prove location — GPS was too easy to fool.”
Community members responded with a variety of predictions. @Sunbasher suggested capabilities like bandwidth or compute, while @BloodReaver suggested it could be Wi-Fi related. @ke6jjj explained that any new network would require a community vote, highlighting the collaborative nature of the Helium expansion.
— Jeffrey Albus
One good DM
Message from Edith Yeungone of the first investors in Solana:
