Menu #17: Experiments to Infrastructure

Solana
Freakonomics
Web3 Dinner Club: 25th June
Bitcoin Miners Pivot
Brand Spice
Chef’s Note

This is The Menu: the UK Web3 operator’s weekly briefing.

What founders, investors, and builders are actually discussing behind closed doors.

The industry is starting to look less like a series of disconnected experiments and more like a system finding its shape.

In this issue:

Signal, served weekly.

The dinner club is proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

A multi-award-winning London storytelling studio building the brands of the future in AI, blockchain, and emerging technologies.

Best known for the $100m expansion to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, The Mutant Cartel World.

If you’re a startup or scale-up building a brand and looking for real go-to-market impact from those who have repeatedly built unicorns and category kings as VCs and founders... ask for an intro at the table.

Its native cryptocurrency is SOL, which is used to pay transaction fees, support staking and help secure the network.

Solana was launched in 2020 by Solana Labs, founded by Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal.

A Layer 1 is the base blockchain itself, like Ethereum, Bitcoin or Solana. Other apps and services can be built on top of it.

Proof of stake is the system used to help secure the network. Instead of using energy-intensive mining, validators lock up, or “stake”, tokens to help process transactions and protect the blockchain.

The Gatekeepers Let Solana In

The TradFi gatekeepers just flipped the lights on. NYSE-listed Solana ETFs and tokenised U.S. equities routed into Solana DeFi have turned a years-long debate into an active market experiment, and institutional capital is already walking through the door.

Market snapshot:

What builders should care about: 2 quick takeaways:

Dinner discussion prompt:
“If TradFi money can enter DeFi through regulated ETPs and tokenised equities, which middlemen lose their rent first: custodians, prime brokers, or exchanges?”

Freakonomics is one of those books that reminds you how useful a good question can be.

On the surface, it is a book about odd subjects.

Cheating teachers, Drug dealers living with their mothers, real estate agents,
Crime rates, swimming pools, and sumo wrestlers.

But underneath all of that, it is really a book about incentives.

Why do people behave the way they do?
What do they say they value?
And what do their actions actually reveal?

That is why it remains useful for founders, as building a business is full of assumptions.

You assume customers want what they say they want.
You assume your pricing makes sense.
You assume your team is motivated by the same things you are.
You assume the market understands your product.
You assume activity equals progress.

We generally find that the truth is somewhere else, so why not look for the hidden incentives behind behaviour?

Not the polite explanation. Not the obvious story. Not the version that sounds good in a pitch deck.

The real reasons.

If users are not adopting your product, the problem may not be education.
It may be incentives.

If partners are slow to move, the issue may not be interest. It may be risk.
If investors are not engaging, the product may not be the problem. The timing, market signal or commercial story may be.
If a community looks active but does not convert, maybe the incentives reward noise rather than commitment.

The best founders are often not the ones with the loudest answers; they are the ones who ask better questions.

Freakonomics is not a perfect book. Some of its arguments have been challenged over time, and its style is deliberately provocative.
But this is where we see part of the value.
It teaches you to be suspicious of easy explanations.
It reminds you that data can reveal things opinion misses.

And it shows that the world is usually more complicated, more interesting and more incentive-driven than it first appears.

W3DC:
Founders are under constant pressure to make decisions quickly. But Freakonomics is a useful reminder that stepping back and asking a slightly different question can reveal what is really driving behaviour.

Sometimes the reward is not in having a better answer but in finding the better question.

A curated, seated dinner for a small group of builders working in crypto, AI, and frontier tech.

One table. No pitches. No panels. No ego contests.

Just the kind of conversation that doesn't show up in your LinkedIn feed. The relationships that move capital, talent, and ideas in Web3 don't start at conferences.

They start at a handful of dinners with the same people, repeated over time.
Seats are limited by design.

Proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

Bitcoin miners may be becoming unlikely winners in the AI infrastructure race.

The reason is simple.

Power.

As Google and Blackstone move ahead with a new AI cloud venture, the pressure on data centre capacity is becoming clearer. AI does not just need chips, capital and models. It needs huge amounts of grid-connected electricity.

For years, mining companies built their businesses around securing cheap power, large sites, cooling infrastructure and industrial-scale energy management. Those same assets now look useful to AI companies trying to build or lease high-performance computing capacity.

According to Bernstein analysis reported in the market, Bitcoin miners control more than 27GW of planned power capacity across the US. The industry has also announced more than $90bn of AI-related contracts covering around 3.7GW of capacity.

That explains why miners such as Cipher, IREN, Riot, Core Scientific and Hut 8 are increasingly being discussed less as pure Bitcoin miners and more as power-rich infrastructure companies.

The shift is not risk-free.

AI data centres require different equipment, customer relationships, capital expenditure, cooling and operational standards. A mining site does not automatically become an AI campus overnight.

But the strategic logic is clear.

Bitcoin mining is exposed to hash rate, energy prices, Bitcoin price cycles and halving economics. AI infrastructure may offer longer-term contracted revenue, deeper-pocketed customers and a different valuation story.

So the question is changing.

From: How much Bitcoin can a miner produce?
To: Who controls the power, land and infrastructure needed for the next computing buildout?

W3DC:
The AI boom is turning electricity into strategic leverage. Bitcoin miners spent years building around power. Now that same infrastructure may give them a new role in the AI economy.

Crypto yield exists!

That may sound obvious inside Web3, but we found this report useful because it puts numbers around how retail users are engaging with it.

The headline is simple: yield is being used, but mostly through centralised platforms.

The report estimates that 20–36 million people use staking or earn products on centralised exchanges, compared with only 0.5–0.7 million users in DeFi.

Why such a gap?

It suggests mainstream users are not rejecting yield. They are choosing the version that feels familiar, simple and easier to trust.

The report also shows retail users are cautious. Over 60% typically hold crypto for less than a year, and 6% APY appears to be the point where yield starts to become interesting.

But yield alone is not enough.

Users care about flexible withdrawals, no lock-ups, security, protection, plain language and clear access to funds.

In other words, trust and liquidity rank above simply chasing the highest return.

W3DC:
Crypto yield is no longer theoretical. Millions are already using it, but adoption is being driven less by decentralisation and more by trust, access and usability.

Tokenised funds just took another step out of the lab.

Allfunds Blockchain is expanding the distribution of tokenised funds to Solana.

The difference here is Allfunds is not a crypto-native startup testing a concept. It connects more than 3,300 asset managers and financial institutions, with close to €1.8 trillion in assets under administration.

So this is not just “funds on Solana”.

We are seeing the bridges between traditional fund distribution and public blockchain infrastructure being built.

In plain English, asset managers can keep familiar institutional workflows while opening up new blockchain-based distribution channels.

For fund managers, that could mean new routes to market.

For Web3, it brings regulated financial products closer to on-chain liquidity.

The future may not be TradFi versus DeFi.

It may be both of them operating inside the same financial architecture.

Until next time