🗞️ Tether Bails Out Drift, Seeker Dev Count Goes Parabolic, and Solana Crack $1.1T in Q1 Economic Activity
Crypto’s biggest company leads $150M Drift recovery plan
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What a brilliant turnaround. After a tough few weeks of DeFi despair and floundering markets, things are looking decidedly optimistic for the Solana ecosystem.
Tether has stepped forward as Drift’s unlikely knight in shining armor, promising to lead a $150M recovery plan to get Solana’s OG perp dex back on its feet.
Jump Crypto published hard data that Prop AMMs are better-than-cex, Solana recorded over $1 trillion in economic activity in Q1, and the SEC is breaking down regulatory barriers like it’s desperately trying to catch up with the rest of the world (it is).
Yes, a handful of airdrop farmers are sulking about a registration fee, but if anything, maybe that means things are finally back to normal?
And the Strait of Hormuz has been reopened…
Are we, dare I say it, so back?
Here’s everything you need to know 👇
After 15 gruelling days of silence following the loss of $285M of customer funds to an exploit, Drift Protocol has finally announced its recovery plan. Tether is the unexpected hero of this comeback story, leading a $150M effort to relaunch Drift and repay depositors.
Drift Protocol will relaunch under a newly restructured security regime, with all administrative functions overseen by a community-governed multisig made up of Solana ecosystem leaders. Users affected by the hack will receive a ‘recovery token’, representing the holder’s share in a recovery pool which will receive a “substantial portion” of protocol revenue.
Solana’s DeFi community has welcomed Tether with open arms, celebrating the stablecoin issuer’s efforts to revive Drift and make users whole. Tether’s involvement comes as Circle faces harsh criticism of its refusal to intercept stolen funds during the hack, a decision CEO Jeremy Allaire has since defended, citing it posed a “moral quandary”.
As a result, many users have sworn off $USDC entirely, opting to hold their capital with a stablecoin issuer who is arguably more aligned with the long-term interests of Solana DeFi.
The $SKR TGE might’ve been the best thing that ever happened to Solana Mobile. Since $SKR went live, the Seeker developer count has gone parabolic, rising 106% QoQ and flooding the Solana dApp Store with over 300 new applications.
Onchain data suggests that over 10,000 Seeker users are signing onchain transactions using their biometrics every day, an even higher number than during Seeker Season 1 prior to the first $SKR airdrop. Blockworks data suggests that Seeker-based swaps now represent over 2% of all Solana DEX volume, suggesting strong organic trading activity among users.
Paul Atkins’ SEC is fighting the good fight in the courtrooms and legal chambers of the United States. Just one month after publishing a progressive new crypto taxonomy that classifies $SOL as a “digital commodity”, the agency has given DeFi applications and wallet providers some regulatory breathing room.
Moving forward, applications, browser extensions, and software wallets are not required to register as broker-dealers, absolving them of many of the regulatory constraints and securities laws that could inhibit innovation.
The stance comes amidst renewed calls to get the CLARITY Act signed into law, which advocates argue needs to be done before the U.S. midterm elections to have any hope of passing.
Jump Crypto has publicly come forward as the operator of Solana’s leading prop AMM BisonFi, publishing a comprehensive report on the pAMM model’s design. Jump claims that prop AMMs give traders better prices than centralized exchanges in 99.3% of trades, empirically proving something the Solana manlets have known to be true for many months.
Beyond execution, prop AMMs are also dramatically outperforming exchanges in $SOL trading volume. Throughout March alone, leading pAMMs recorded higher SOL/USD trading volumes than Binance, Coinbase, OKX, and ByBit combined.
No, that’s not a typo. Solana just recorded $1.1T in quarterly economic activity, breaking the previous all-time high set in Q4, 2021. Surging in the face of declining markets, Solana’s economic activity growth is largely powered by its maturing stablecoin scene, which continues to hover new all-time highs in terms of supply and DEX volume share
Despite stablecoin expansion, network and application revenue are still far from their peaks. With the memecoin economy in decline, community members argue that Solana needs a top-tier perps DEX to stay competitive in the Layer-1 race.
It just wouldn’t be an airdrop if there weren’t a barrage of complaints from frustrated farmers, would it? This time, Solstice users are raging over a 0.075 $SOL registration fee being charged by a third-party infrastructure provider, which stands to earn over $9M if every eligible wallet wants to claim their $SLX allocation.
As it turns out, Solstice claims that only ~50k wallets of the 1.4M eligible to register actually deposited funds into the protocol. Beyond paying the costs of operating the airdrop, the registration fee also serves as an anti-sybil measure to filter out bots. After initial criticisms that the 7-day registration window was too short, Solstice has extended the deadline to April 24.
Honorable Mentions
Singapore Gulf Bank launches a native stablecoin mint-and-redeem service with no gas, mint, or bank fees
𝕏 launches CashTags - Solana-based partners include Jupiter, Helius, Birdeye, and Dialect
Phoenix Trade matches up to $5,000 in losses for affected Drift users
Pumpcade raises $5M with support from Jump, Foundation Capital
Tokenized stock volume hit new weekly all-time high of $163M
YCombinator settles $500k Totalis funding round on Solana for the first time ever
Arcium launches Agent Skills, enabling agents to build encrypted apps
TCG gacha spend on Solana surpassed $233.8M in Q1 2026
Jupiter Lend enables $SPYx, $QQQx, $NVDAx, and $TSLAx as collateral
DoubleZero Edge goes live in beta
PreStocks crosses $750M in total volume, launches tokenized Neuralink equity
Helium network records 3.5M daily users
Bloomberg’s James Seyffart Weighs In on Drift Exploit
Stat of the Week
State of Solana in a Tweet
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