This episode features BlockWorks co-founder Michael Apolito with Carlos from BlockWorks Research and DeFi Pancakes, co-founder and CTO at Titan Exchange.

The conversation covers the recent $200+ million Drift exploit through North Korean social engineering, Titan's new Dart product for on-chain routing, and evolving market structure on Solana.

Discussion includes security practices following the exploit, prop AMM competition, tokenized asset trading growth, and Solana Foundation's ecosystem support strategy.

Drift's $200M Social Engineering Attack

North Korean operatives spent six months building professional relationships with Drift team members, posing as legitimate market makers to gain access through Telegram communications and code sharing.

"North Korea spent a lot of time and money doing this. And obviously, it paid off. And I expect that currently there are probably other operations going on that we don't know about yet" - Pancakes

Solana Foundation responded with Stride program providing ongoing operational security and 24/7 threat monitoring for protocols above $10 million TVL, plus formal verification funding for $100+ million protocols.

Simple security filter emerged: asking contacts to criticize North Korean leadership, as operatives cannot comply with such requests due to their constraints.

Titan's Dart: On-Chain Dynamic Routing

Dart (Dynamic Allocation in Real Time) performs on-chain routing at execution time, dynamically allocating across prop AMMs to achieve best execution rather than using stale off-chain quotes.

"With this advent of Prop AMMs and the sheer competition, you're seeing tens to hundreds of Oracle updates per slot. So it, you know, definitely by the time you come execute, it's stale" - Pancakes

Dart charges one basis point fee to protect market makers from toxic flow while enabling positive slippage on certain pairs, beating Binance spreads on SOL/USDC.

"I expect that on-chain routing, I think every big aggregator, I think we'll start doing on-chain routing. I think Jupiter, OKX, I think they're seeing the data" - Pancakes

Prop AMM Competition and Market Structure

SOL/USDC trading described as "straight-up battleground" with Bison, Klein, and Tesera leading, while Humidify and ZeroFi quote consistently across multiple pairs.

Stablecoin swaps achieved sub-0.1 basis point median slippage with AlphaQ leading volume, making Solana competitive with centralized exchanges for stable trading.

Prop AMMs expanding into pre-stock trading for private companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX despite lack of traditional arbitrage opportunities.

Q1 2025 marked first quarter since late 2023 where meme coins weren't top two trading categories, with SOL/USD first and stablecoin swaps second.

Tokenized Assets and Trading Growth

Tokenized equity volume grew from low single-digit millions in August to 30-40 million daily by early 2025, driven primarily by public equities rather than commodities.

Pre-stock trading spiked during events like U.S. Department of Defense cutting ties with Anthropic, providing speculation venues unavailable elsewhere.

"You could have just created a meme coin called Anthropic and it would be kind of the same thing. So, I don't know how they're getting to the like fair value of it" - Carlos

Solana Foundation Ecosystem Strategy

Foundation's security initiatives and verified token list development seen as positive collective goods, addressing bias concerns with Jupiter's current token verification process.

Phoenix versus Bulk competition highlights tension between on-chain native solutions and sidecar approaches for perpetual trading infrastructure.

"I think it doesn't look good if Solana can't scale and support perps. I think, right, we're here and we built NASDAQ on-chain" - Pancakes

Validator revenue sharing models emerging as competitive strategy, similar to historical Jito adoption patterns during post-FTX recovery period.

Resources Mentioned

The Emotionally Intelligent Team Building Collaborative Groups that Outperform the Rest

odcast. For this week's roundup, I am joined by frequent guest or co-host Carlos for the Blockworks Research team, as well as we're joined by DeFi Pancakes, co-founder and CTO at Titan or Titan Exchan