Smashing success

Just after midnight, Bitcoin reached a fresh new all-time high of, per CoinGecko, $111,544. The startling lurch to never-before-seen loftiness is happening at time when U.S. Treasury bonds are losing their allure.

BTC as of 7:45 a.m. (EST) on Thursday had slightly pulled back to roughly $110,800. Possibly a new high will have been reached by the time we get to the finish line of this mid-morning blast.

An initial record-shattering surge to $109,565 came Wednesday just before 1 p.m. (EST). A few hours prior to that, BTC crossed above $109K, tiptoeing into unexplored lands, prompting CoinDesk to commemorate the passing of the "giddy level" hit January 20 shortly before the inauguration of President Trump. Some trades reportedly were stamped closer to $110K, said 99Bitcoins.

A monumental surge wasn't initially reflected in crypto's total market cap, which spent the early part of yesterday afternoon sideways, remaining $3.51T. Some tokens, such as dogwifhat (WIF), were spiking alongside the more gradually rising BTC as king crypto's market cap reached $2.16T, surpassing Amazon as the fifth-largest asset.

Brand new BTC ATHs were attained Wednesday night as BTC crossed $110K for the first time. In early trading hours in London, BTC hit $111,886.41, according to Coin Metrics.

BTC’s history-making movements have been driven by a mix of "positive momentum, growing optimism around U.S. crypto regulation and continued interest from institutional buyers,” said CoinShares' researcher James Butterfill.

Indeed, cryptocurrency has won support from big companies, funds, family offices and other important entities, including a sitting U.S. president who is set to host a dinner this evening for 220 memecoin investors.

Treasury yields spiked and stocks sold off as Wall Street smelled smoke coming from inside the not-frugal U.S. fiscal house. The S&P 500 fell 1.6% during Wednesday's regular-hours session. Investors, already rattled by Moody's downgrade of America's credit rating, are now acutely sensitive to the debt-and-deficit situation underscored by an expenditure-hiking, revenue-shrinking tax bill, one that early this morning advanced through the House on route to the Senate.

“I feel like the dam is finally starting to break a little bit, and there’s too many holes in the dike to put our fingers in,” Mitch Goldberg, president of ClientFirst Strategy, told CNBC.

Solana began the year on a Firedancer kick. You remember, Firedancer, the "independent validator client" being developed and tested out by Jump Crypto. It's a much-awaited upgrade that has been billed as dramatically transformative.

That's because (if it works) Solana supposedly would be able to process more than one million transactions per second (TPS), versus the current 3,000 TPS, while also improving network security. Anyhow, it's scheduled to go live ... at some point this year.

In the meantime, there's a bunch of other Solana developments clamoring for attention.

Solana Mobile on Wednesday announced that its second-generation mobile phone, the Solana Seeker, will ship worldwide starting in August, alongside the roll-out of a new "native ecosystem" token, SKR, meant to be purely aligned with the Solana Mobile platform and nothing else.

"Mobile users everywhere deserve a seamless, secure Web3 experience," Solana Mobile said in an X post touting an open-door policy to "more devices and more manufacturers" keen to become a part of this fledgling decentralized architecture/economy.

Solana Mobile's Emmett Hollyer told Decrypt the SKR token is designed to anchor a “future of a decentralized mobile platform” around the crypto phones.

Additionally, we've learned that Solana is now bracing for possibly a completely different totally transformative core upgrade that would, according to CoinDesk, replace its current technology stack with a redesigned consensus protocol built for near-instant finality. The new system, called Alpenglow, was unveiled earlier this week by infrastructure firm Anza, a spinout of Solana Labs.

According to Anza's researchers, per Cointelegraph, the new protocol (say hello to "Votor" and "Rotor" and good-bye to "Tower BFT" and "Proof-of-History") will reduce the time it takes for all nodes to agree on the network state; blocks would get finalized via one of two paths: in one round if four-fifths of the stake participates, or, if only three-fifths of the stake participates, in two rounds. Alas, the two voting modes are integrated, running concurrently. Oh. Okay.

But what about solving for network outages? Isn't that the core development priority on which the Solana community should be focused?

Cointelegraph, citing the Anza-led project’s white paper, noted that Solana switching to Alpenglow would help in that regard but wouldn’t be enough to completely fend off the kind of network outages endured over the past few years. "Solana currently only has one production-ready client, Agave, meaning any security vulnerability in Agave can disrupt the entire Solana network," Cointelegraph said.

However, that's where a new, independent validator client, Firedancer, could come into play: providing client diversification for the network.