Everyone’s bullish on Solana... too bullish

Plus: Google’s building its own Layer-1 chain

Welcome

GM. We got more juice than a dusty orange at Burning Man. Stay refreshed.

On the menu today:

🍍 Solana's pumping.

🚀 Google's launching an L1.

🍋 Margin trading on OKX, scammers using Claude + more

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🍍 Market flavor today

Find out more about the Fear & Greed Index here.

Name		Price	24H	7D
Crypto Market Cap: $3.94T 0.81% (24H)
	Bitcoin BTC	$112,887.89	1.25%	0.31%
	Ethereum ETH	$4,558.48	-0.84%	7.34%
	XRP XRP	$3.00	0.34%	4.57%
	BNB BNB	$871.50	1.56%	3.48%
	Solana SOL	$213.79	3.90%	16.41%

Prices as of 10:00 AM EST. Click here to see live data.

Solana is enjoying a cheeky little breakout moment: it jumped above $211 for the first time since February, finally pushing past that stubborn resistance zone around $209 - $210 it's been struggling with.

For those of you who don't know: in trading terms, resistance is basically where sellers gang up and block further price gains.

So, when a crypto finally breaks through that level, it's kind of a big deal.

Solana price chart from BitDegree, 08-28

Source: BitDegree

And boy, are traders hyped about it.

According to Santiment, retail investors are posting about 6 bullish comments for every 1 bearish one on social media.

That's the most positive ratio we've seen in 11 weeks = everyone's feeling pretty optimistic about SOL rn.

Now, here's the thing about retail hype - it can be a double-edged sword. When regular investors get excited and start buying like crazy, the rally can burn out just as fast as it started.

Especially if there's no real substance backing up all the excitement - like institutions buying in, actual project growth, or the blockchain getting more widely adopted.

... Which is not really the case with Solana:

👉 Publicly traded companies now hold over $1.7B worth of SOL;

👉 Big investment firms like Pantera Capital and Galaxy Digital are raising billion-dollar funds to buy more SOL;

👉 On top of all that, Solana ETFs are probably coming soon - Bloomberg ETF analysts are giving it a whopping 95% chance of approval this year.

Bloomberg analyst odds of approval of crypto ETFs

Source: @JSeyff

So while retail hype might be driving the day-to-day price swings, there's actually some institutional muscle building a stronger foundation underneath.

And where does this leave Solana?

👉 Well, if it can power through $215 with conviction, analyst Quinten Francois thinks it could run toward $225 and potentially even $260.

👉 But if the momentum starts to fade, all that excitement could turn into fear. In that scenario, we might see prices tumble back to the $180 - $190 range, or even deeper down to support near $150.

Stay tuned 👀

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🥝 Memecoin harvest

Every chart here is a cry for help 🥲

Data as of 04:20 AM EST.

Check out these memecoins and plenty more here.

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🚀 Google's launching its own L1

Imagine an old-fashioned kinda guy. Y’know, the type that still reads actual newspapers, prefers cable TV over Netflix, and genuinely believes cash is superior to cards in every way.

That’d be my uncle Roy. And for the longest time ever, he simply refused to get a smartphone.

Which isn’t bad, but my boy used to study and memorize physical maps before going on road trips. Also nothing bad, but when you know how much easier GPS makes life, watching this felt borderline insane.

But Roy eventually gave in. Visit him today and you'll probably find him playing Candy Crush.

Meme about moms being obsessed with Candy Crush

Corporations are having their own Unc Roy moment with blockchain technology. After spending years being skeptical, they're now jumping in headfirst.

First, we had Stripe announce it's launching its own blockchain. Then Circle followed.

And now... drumroll please... Google Cloud's launching its own Layer-1 blockchain called the Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL).

(Quick side note: if you're wondering why they're building their own L1s instead of just using Ethereum L2 solutions, we actually broke that down here.)

According to Google Cloud's head of Web3 strategy, Rich Widmann, GCUL will feature built-in finance tools, a native commercial bank, on-chain money handling, and Python-based smart contracts.

Rich Widmann's post comparing Stripe, Circle, and Google Cloud's blockchains

Source: Rich Widmann

Now, none of these features are particularly groundbreaking on their own.

What is absolutely wild about this launch, though, is Google's massive reach. Here's the scale we're talking about:

👉 Google Cloud is the third-largest cloud provider on the planet;

👉 It serves heavyweight clients across finance, retail, healthcare, and AI - like PayPal, CME Group, and Deutsche Bank;

👉 This infrastructure handles workloads for literally billions of people every single day.

And here's the real kicker (which is where Widmann made a brilliant point): GCUL is designed as a neutral infrastructure layer.

Think about it: companies like Tether aren't gonna build on Circle's blockchain (competitive conflict), and companies like Adyen probably won't touch Stripe's platform (same reason).

But any financial institution can build with GCUL because Google isn't directly competing with them.