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⌐◪-◪ → Solana has stopped processing transactions for over 5 hours now due to a network outage as their engineers are desperately for a fix.

Solana is notorious for its network outages, this one being the first network outage in 282 days. At this point, one could argue that Solana isn’t even a blockchain because blockchains don’t go down.

I’ve gotta say, this is NOT a good look for Solana, their days of unreliability are not over yet. I’m glad I don’t have any exposure to that ecosystem.

I wonder if this will be the last straw for some Solana maxis and if it is, where will they go? Base, Cardano, Polygon — what do you think?

Bonus: 5 days ago Arthur Hayes said, “time to get back on the Solana Train”, which aged like milk. Meanwhile, Ethereum maxis be like.

⌐◪-◪ → Vitalik must be reading Specs because just a few hours after I endorsed Farcaster in yesterday’s issue, he did the same.

Coincidence, I think not.

Seriously though, it’s becoming increasingly obvious to me and everybody else that Farcaster is doing something different than every other attempt at decentralized social or basic Twitter clones.

Again, I strongly urge all of you check out the platform and secure your handle — use my invite link for access.

More specifically, make sure you check out Farcaster frames. They are seriously a next-level 0-1 innovation. Just look at adoption after Frames launched, the numbers don’t lie.

If you want to learn more, check out these quality resources from trusted friends of Specs:

• Zeneca on why farcaster is different

• Farcaster co-founder on how Frames work 

• Fellow CryptoPunk DCinvestor’s bullish take

⌐◪-◪ → Binance announced its plans to delist Monero later this month, causing XMR to plunge over 15%. While this might not be the most exciting headline, it’s actually pretty important for two reasons.

1. it’s a major loss in crypto’s battle for privacy

2. it’s a new, more compliant, tone from Binance

The increased control regulatory authorities have over crypto is a double-edged sword as it may help weed out bad actors, but also at the cost of our individual liberties, specifically our right to privacy and freedom to transact.

With that said, I have a “glass half full” mindset and believe there is no stopping crypto or its privacy-preserving technologies. One could argue that this delisting proves that Monero’s privacy-preserving tech is the real deal — that it’s “too private” for the powers that be.

To my fellow privacy warriors, we may have lost the battle, but not the war.

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