October 21, 2025

Welcome to the Meridian Update, your daily on-chain report. Today, we cover the competition (kind of). Let’s dive in.

A Solana founder and Claude, building together

As of publishing, there were two contributors to “percolator” on GitHub. For those unfamiliar, GitHub is like a Google Drive for software engineering.

One contributor was Anatoly Yakovenko, one of the founders of the Solana network. The Solana network is a common topic of conversation here on the Meridian Update. The Solana network can process a lot of transactions, so real people, call them retail traders or everyday consumers, buy and sell tokens on the Solana network. You can see some of the assets people buy in the Solana Index, which is build and maintained by our friends at Meridian Research.

The other contributor was Claude. You have almost certainly heard of ChatGPT, the chatbot and app from OpenAI. Claude is also a chatbot and app. It is also the sort of parent brand name of the large language models (LLMs) from Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor.

We thought that was fun. A Solana founder and his LLM coding assistant, together publishing side projects for the world to see.

Crypto Twitter thought it was more than fun. Not because of the Claude thing, that’s less what people cared about. They cared about what a Solana founder (with Claude’s help) might be up to. And what is it?

“A sharded perpetual exchange protocol for Solana, implementing the design from plan.md.”

We have discussed perpetual futures (perps) before. Hyperliquid is its own blockchain network that people in 2025 have been using to trade perps. We have heard people complain that the Solana network is not great for trading perps and that Hyperliquid is better. Might it be that a Solana founder and Claude are going to change this?

Something to keep an eye on. Or not, if you don’t care about perps.

Once upon(ly) a time there was a podcast…

…and that podcast was called UpOnly. It last published to the Apple Podcasts app on December 1, 2022. You can do the math. It’s been a while.

It was a podcast that many people in the on-chain world knew about. It had many illustrious guests. It also was presented by FTX, and had many people from the FTX orbit as guests. It also had some other interesting characters of the early 2020s on-chain world as guests. Some of the FTX and interesting character guests went on to prison for a short time and/or had their operations collapse.

You may vaguely remember FTX from FTX Arena, the former name of the basketball arena the Miami Heat call home. You might also vaguely remember FTX from the reason the Miami Heat no longer play at an arena called FTX Arena (it’s now called the Kaseya Center). In short, FTX went bankrupt in November of 2022. Later, its founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and many other key FTX employees were found or pleaded, respectively, guilty to defrauding customers and related charges.

Why are we talking about this financial markets history? Because UpOnly was a podcast presented by FTX. It stopped releasing new shows in December of 2022. You can do the math.

But why are we talking about UpOnly?

Its host tweeted this in May:

“OK I am no longer the decision maker on if Up Only returns. 

The power is now stored within this NFT that I just minted. When the NFT is burned, the podcast will restart. 

Until then, please leave me alone.”

But why are we talking about UpOnly now? Because Coinbase’s CEO tweeted this:

“Just burnt the NFT. Your move @UpOnlyTV @Cobie @ledgerstatus.”

As a reminder, Coinbase is a company that exists off-chain, as in it is a publicly traded company listed on NASDAQ, to build things for and related to the on-chain world. Many people have heard of it as an app for buying Bitcoin. Sounds like it is also a supporter of the UpOnly podcast, as they spent $25M to bring it back.

So here’s a question for everyone. If a podcast was popular, had some well-respected guests on it, and had some later-imprisoned guests on it, do you go on the podcast? Perhaps you could ask Vince Young and Patrick Mahomes for both perspectives.

That’s a wrap

A Solana founder is coding with Claude. And a once-popular podcast with a mix of illustrious and infamous guests is back?

Think we missed something today? Email email@meridianupdate.com.