Early Solana Firedancer, Bill Maher wrong about crypto, and more.

An early version of Firedancer goes live on the Solana mainnet

According to Jump Crypto's Chief Science Officer, Kevin Bowers, an early version of Firedancer's independent verification client, Frankendasser, made it to Solana's mainnet.

Roughly 1% of the Solana network's “life assurance” share comes from Frankenders, Bowers' presentation showed.

Leap Crypto is the blockchain infrastructure company behind Solana's verified clients.

Validating clients like FireDancer play a critical role in processing transactions and building blocks on Solana's nearly $70 billion network.

Touted as an advanced solution to QUIC – the Google-developed data transfer protocol – Solana was unable to process transactions when network traffic increased.

Bowers said FireDancer is currently on Solana's testnet.

However, another Solana contributor said at the same conference that FireDancer is already on the Solana mainnet – but in “silent mode”.

The non-voting status essentially means it cannot build blocks or participate in consensus — one of the main roles of a blockchain validator, Cardano fan and X user “ItsDave_ADA” said.

“I understand there is a need for customer differentiation and I really like their efforts to improve this, but this is marketing that forgets to mention that the authenticator is missing 60-70% of the core role.”

“[This] It is strange because it is supposed to be a superior customer,” he added.

Pendle Token is up 25% after Arthur Hayes sold $1.5 million.

The Pendle token rallied more than 25% shortly after Arthur Hayes confirmed that crypto-focused family office fund Maelstrom had sold more than 392,000 Pendle tokens – worth $1.56 million.

Hayes sparked controversy late last week when he was seen bragging about the project's potential at the Token2049 conference.

Blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain revealed that $PENDLE was bet to $10 on Twitter 9 days ago.

But the sale was only made to make some profit, Hayes explained in a Sept. 21 X post.

“Even after the reduction, it is one of our biggest positions. We still fully believe that $PENDLE will be the leader in #crypto interest rate derivatives. We plan to profit from their success.”

Hayes, who serves as Maelstrom's chief investment officer, said the fund will use the money to fund “special situations” — something observers can get a hint of by tracking the fund's wallets.

Just 24 hours after Hayes confirmed the sale of Maelstrom, PENDLE has surged 25.2% to $4.36 — though it has cooled to $4.06, CoinGecko data shows.

According to Hayes at Token2049, Pendle is a decentralized interest rate market that allows users to block accumulated returns of up to 9% on Bitcoin.

However, Hayes isn't sure if that's attractive enough to convince US Treasury holders to “get out quickly to earn 5.5%,” given the various smart contract risks that often plague decentralized finance protocols.

Bill Maher shares misinformation about crypto on national television.

American TV talk show host Bill Maher “Real Time with Bill Maher” – made a lot of misconceptions about who uses cryptocurrencies and how much power is spent on mining.

“All the progress we're making in green energy is being absorbed by crypto,” he said in a September 21 post.

Mahder says 8% of electricity consumption is spent on crypto mining, which is comparable to putting 15 million gas-powered cars back on the road.

“So when we take them out to go electric, crypto eats them all up and goes the other way,” said Maher, who regularly refers to bitcoin and other cryptos as “Ponzi schemes.”

However, the United States Energy Information Administration estimates that crypto mining represents between 0.6 and 2.3% of US electricity consumption.

The TV talk show host also said that crypto is “fully used by criminals” trying to evade US regulators.

However, blockchain forensics firm TRM Labs has revealed that the share of illegal crypto funds will be 0.63% in 2023.

Maher's comments ignore the acceptance of crypto in the institutional space – namely the currencies traded on the spot Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), which began after dozens of back-and-forth discussions between the US and the US securities regulator and ETF issuers.

However, Maher acknowledged why many people are “afraid of big government these days,” citing Canada's response to truck protests in January 2022.

“Canada freezes a lot of those people's assets, that's scary, isn't it,” Maher asked.

“They hit a button and you have no money because your politics were different.”

Infinex has now raised $58M for its new consumer app with Patron NFTs

Infinex has now raised nearly $58 million in the sale of Petron's non-sniffing tokens to several venture capital firms, industry leaders and community members.

NFT Sales aims to drive community interest in Infinex's vision to provide a non-custodial and unified UX layer across all blockchains and decentralized financial applications.

Participants in the sale of Patron NFT are Wintermute Ventures, Framework Ventures, Near Foundation, Synthetix, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko and Ethereum Foundation Researcher Tim Beiko, Infinex stated in a September 22 post.

87.5% of the total “early access” NFT supply was depleted in Waves 1 and 2.

Infinex confirmed Wave 3 is now open until September 23 at 11:59 pm UTC. Immediately after that, Wave 4 – the final stage of the NFT sale – will begin for 24 hours.

A total of 37,124 Patron NFTs were sold, according to Infinex data.

Patron NFTs come in three tiers, priced at $5,000, $3,000, or $1,250, with the latter NFT locked for 12 months from the date of distribution, meaning they are not transferable until you gradually unlock them.

Following the “launch period”, Infinex plans to roll out several features that will bring it to “equilibrium” with centralized cryptocurrency exchanges.

Among these features are protection, spot trading, margin, loans, perps, options, staking, NFTs, launchpads and product farms.

Related: Samurai Wallet Forks To ‘Ashigaru' Open Source Project

Infinex was launched by Cain Warwick – founder of synthetic asset distribution platform Syntex – in mid-2023.

Warwick Infinex hopes to replace centralized cryptocurrency exchanges as the first and main point of contact for new users.

Over the past decade and a half, each new wave of users has come on board through CEX. This cycle, we want you to land on the chain first. If we succeed, Infinex will prove that OnChain is far better, cheaper and more secure than SeFi, Infinex said on its website.

Other news

A US judge has fined a New York man $36 million for defrauding crypto investors by promising huge returns and using the money to fund his lavish lifestyle. William Koo Ichioka must pay $31 million in restitution to victims and $5 million in civil penalties.

India's Supreme Court has regained control of his official YouTube account shortly after it was hacked by crypto scammers selling fake XRP investments. Hackers changed the name of the channel to resemble Ripple and deleted all previously uploaded content.

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