Solana’s Venice is Loading

Last Friday we wrote about why Solana L1Solana is a high-performance blockchain for fast and affordable transactions.View Profile” class=”stubHighlight”> Solana is the venue with the most momentum right now.

That was before the weekend, when Ansem commandeered his own token and started handing it to anyone who engaged with him online. Now there’s reason to watch both SOL and the wider ecosystem, as fresh capital starts sloshing around the chain.

Will SOL Keep Outperforming? on Bankless

SOL outperformed everything in crypto today. Here’s why Solana’s bull case is improving.

How long it stays parked in ANSEM is the open question. Some of it will inevitably leak out as the token climbs, rotating to other venues or to names flying under the radar. 

To me, one of those is Arcium (ARX).

A week off its TGE, ARX checks several fundamental boxes. The confidential compute network behind it is anything but proven, so treat what follows less as a call and more as a checklist: the traits that make a young token worth a look, and the ones that should give you pause. 

What Arcium Actually Is

Arcium is a decentralized compute network that lets applications run computations on encrypted data.

Those operations could involve private payments, confidential DeFi, private trading logic, or AI working with sensitive inputs. In practice, an app keeps owning the user experience while offshoring the encrypted computation to Arcium’s network, which is what makes the private features possible.

Umbra, a growing “incognito” wallet, uses Arcium to this end. 

When a user deposits USDC into Umbra, their funds move into an onchain pool while their balance is represented through an encrypted account. When they later withdraw or transfer, Arcium’s MPC network verifies they have enough balance without revealing it to any network participants.

I mentioned Arcium could work for AI but, until recently, that was a read-through from this broader architecture. If it can help apps compute over encrypted financial data, the same idea should apply to AI systems working with sensitive prompts, files, or proprietary inputs.

But, last Friday Arcium unveiled Blackthorn, an initiative built specifically for that: confidential AI for encrypted inference and training, where prompts, files, model weights, and outputs stay encrypted from the cloud provider, the infrastructure operator, and Arcium itself.