The new DeepSeek R1 model from China launched last week. If you’re into AI or even into technology more broadly, it was hard to miss the news. Everyone was talking about it. But it’s not just that. It’s the way everyone was talking about it. I was left with the impression that DeepSeek is going to drive a stake through the heart of OpenAI and Anthropic.
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Retard Finder Coin Posts 140% Jump Amid Musk Tie-Up Rumors | Meme Coins To Watch Today
The crypto market is facing massive volatility today, and amid this noise, some meme coins are able to pick up pace on recovery. One such coin is said to have ties with Tesla founder and US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk.
BeInCrypto has analyzed two other meme coins for investors to watch and note which direction they are taking.
Retard Finder Coin (RFC)
- Launch Date – March 2025
- Total Circulating Supply – 961.43 Million RFC
- Maximum Supply – 1 Billion RFC
- Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV) – $39.83 Million
RFC price surged by 141% over the past 24 hours, continuing its uptrend this week. The meme coin gained attention after Elon Musk’s interactions with its official X (formerly Twitter) page. This triggered a speculative surge in interest, helping RFC capitalize on the increased attention and rising market sentiment.
Musk’s indirect association with Retard Finder Coin has sparked speculation, although no direct evidence confirms his involvement. Despite this uncertainty, RFC’s price has risen to $0.040. If the speculation continues, the altcoin could see further gains, potentially reaching the $0.050 resistance level in the short term.
Despite its recent rise, RFC remains a meme coin with inherent volatility. The altcoin faces the risk of rapid selling by investors, which could lead to a quick price pullback. If this occurs, RFC might fall to $0.030 or even $0.020, making it crucial for investors to approach with caution.
Fartcoin (FARTCOIN)
- Launch Date – October 2024
- Total Circulating Supply – 999.99 Million FARTCOIN
- Maximum Supply – 1 Billion FARTCOIN
- Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV) – $588.26 Million
FARTCOIN saw a 32% rise in the last 24 hours, trading at $0.591. The meme coin is now nearing the resistance level of $0.600. If this momentum continues, FARTCOIN could break through this barrier and continue its upward movement, heading toward new highs in the coming sessions.
In the past, the $0.600 resistance has halted FARTCOIN’s rally, preventing further price gains. However, if the current bullish trend persists, FARTCOIN could overcome this barrier and rise toward $0.693. This level marks the next target for the altcoin, supported by positive market sentiment and strong investor interest.
If the resistance level proves too strong, FARTCOIN may experience a pullback. A failure to breach $0.600 could lead to a decline back to $0.417 or even lower, erasing recent gains. This scenario would invalidate the bullish outlook and extend the downtrend if selling pressure intensifies.
Mog Coin (MOG)
- Launch Date – July 2023
- Total Circulating Supply – 390.5 Trillion MOG
- Maximum Supply – 420 Trillion MOG
- Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV) – $135.64 Million
MOG price surged by 25% in the last 24 hours, providing relief after a steep 50% decline during March’s end. This recovery signals the potential for further growth as the meme coin attempts to regain momentum and distance itself from recent losses. The recent rise could lead to more positive movements.
At the time of writing, MOG is trading at $0.000000346, just below the key resistance level of $0.000000370. If it breaches this level, MOG could gain enough momentum to push toward $0.000000433. This breakthrough would mark a significant recovery and extend its upward trend further in the coming days.
However, if MOG fails to breach $0.000000370, the altcoin may experience a decline. The next major support lies at $0.000000273, and if this level is tested, it could wipe out recent gains. In such a scenario, the bullish outlook would be invalidated, signaling a continued struggle for the meme coin.
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Jito’s Brian Smith Explains Why JitoSOL is Becoming DeFi’s Go‑To Asset on Solana
Solana has emerged as a leader in blockchain infrastructure, attracting attention for both its speed and the breadth of its decentralized financial applications. As competition in the staking and MEV landscape intensifies, new solutions are charting the future of the validator economy.
BeInCrypto interviewed Brian Smith, Executive Director of Jito Foundation, during TOKEN2049 Dubai. Smith discussed Jito’s strategy, its place at the heart of Solana’s MEV infrastructure, and the pivotal choices underpinning its continued growth.
Smith oversees Jito’s products and governance, including its innovative liquid staking solution JitoSol, restaking initiatives, and MEV tooling. At the interview, he shared his views on decentralization, building trust, responsible MEV participation, and fostering institutional adoption to drive Solana’s DeFi ecosystem forward.
This conversation offers a close look at how Jito tackles network scalability, transparency, governance, and the introduction of disruptive primitives while focusing on sustainable value for the community.
Jito’s Role in the Solana Validator Economy and MEV Innovation
I think that Jito is just the core infrastructure for the economic engine of Solana. And you see this across a few products with the original kind of MEV product that was completely novel for Solana at the time.
Then also the leading stake pool, Jito Sol, that helps distribute staking rewards as well as MEV rewards to stakers, and now restaking, which is kind of a third layer on top. So as you see, just economic value flows across Solana, then Jito wants to be on the cutting edge of helping to power that in the most decentralized way possible.
Specifically on the MEV side, the product has worked quite well. It’s distributed over $1 billion in value to stakers and validators to help secure the network and a revenue stream that didn’t really exist when it was launched. And so personally, that’s been really, really interesting to see.
It has 95% of network adoption, but the Solana market is evolving quite rapidly, mostly in response to just how successful Solana has been. So volumes are consistently at all time highs. The most volume of any network in crypto, which is incredible.
And we see a lot of new technologies and new strategies being deployed on-chain. I personally think that it’s critical for Solana’s MEV infrastructure to stay ahead of that and continue to evolve. That looks like making the software more transparent so that everyone can kind of see how these transactions, specifically Jito executed or submitted transactions, are being prioritised.
And then also more attribution about what validators are doing. And so that’s really the critical idea, is just continuing to innovate on Solana and improving the transparency of the system while continuing to provide best in class rewards for all constituents on Solana.
JitoSOL and Liquid Staking: Differentiators, Growth, and DeFi Integration
JitoSol today is the largest LST on Solana by a decent share, with 17.5 million Sol, which is a little over $2.5 billion of TVL.
And I think it’s innovated in a few ways. It has best in class DeFi penetration in terms, there’s a lot of LSTs on Solana given its interesting market structure, but it’s quite fragmented. And so a lot of those are usable in some liquid staking protocol or some DeFi protocols, not others.
So JitoSol has by far the deepest liquidity, which is really critical given liquidity is one of the main benefits of LSTs. And then I also think it is just like the level of institutional preparation that has been in JitoSol. And so it has a system that autonomously does all of the delegation.
It is completely managed by the DAO in a trustless way. And so it has just much more resiliency, which is something that when we talk to institutional clients thinking about how they should allocate their stake, they’re really prioritising. So we think that there’s going to be a next wave of growth of holders of Solana that have historically used native staking that will be coming into liquid staking because of these attributes and choosing JitoSol for that.
I think JITO SOL should continue to grow as the number one asset in all of Solana DeFi.
So when new liquidity pairs are established on AMM, it should be paired with JITO SOL instead of SOL because you get that yield bearing aspect, which is just uniformly better. And so I think it will continue to grow its penetration. It’s the largest token in most DeFi protocols today.
And then I think the other thing is kind of how we merge the new institutional players I referenced earlier into liquid staking, specifically onboarding them instead of native staking and then moreover, getting them as users of Solana DeFi, which is really an opportunity to grow the market by many multiples.
Restaking: Capital Efficiency and Disruptive Potential
Restaking is a much, much more powerful primitive than people assume it is. There was a lot of conversation about how restaking would help with the Ethereum scaling roadmap that was done by EigenLayer and their very good work introducing the primitive. But it goes way beyond that.
That’s what we’re most excited about on Solana: how versatile it is. So I think we’re going to see a lot of interesting work where restaking helps power new DeFi protocols on Solana, which are decentralised physical infrastructure and helps them go to market faster, launch better products.
And then we’re also seeing it as a way where other DeFi protocols on Solana are able to use it to improve their product’s resilience and then also provide utility to their native tokens via the restaking infrastructure.
So it just makes developers’ life much, much easier to use that as opposed to recreating similar infrastructure from scratch.
TipRouter, MEV Distribution, and Transparency
TipRouter was a way to decentralise Jito’s MEV infrastructure that has over a billion dollars in value distributed. It was previously in a permission to model where a single entity was saying exactly how all of this value should be distributed each epoch.
And that just presented a single point of failure and significant trust guarantees to Solana. As the usage and value in that protocol grew, it became suboptimal.
TipRouter was a way for any validator on Solana to participate in helping verify that this is distributed accurately. It’s done by a handful of third-party operators with over 250 million stake that are helping to do that. And it’s also evolved into a primitive that is used around something called priority fees, which are a different form of execution fees on Solana, where those can be distributed to stakers.
And so we see that it’s very flexible, and it’s really helping usher in a new era of how stakers and validators can receive their rewards for doing good work on Solana.
Balancing MEV Rewards and Solana’s Mission
I think JITO has always taken an extremely long-term view.
It only operates on Solana. And we have been building on Solana since 2021. And in 2023, when a lot of people thought Solana would die.
So we have a long term perspective. JITO will never be successful if Solana is not successful. So our vantage point is that JITO should always do what is best for Solana, and then find a way to provide the most value within that framework.
There’s a symbiotic relationship of providing these new mechanisms and giving the most possible rewards to Solana while continuing to fund the infrastructure that is required for this.
Encouraging Institutional Participation and Governance
JITO is the governance token of the JITO network. It controls core infrastructure across liquid staking, MEV on Solana.
Already today, we see significant participation from institutional players that include Coinbase, Blockworks, and a variety of other firms. And so the level of discourse there is quite significant.
And I think what the next step is, is really to kind of grow the level of participation from all of these parties that are, on a day-to-day basis, earning rewards from JITO and are critically impacted by that. So we can find the best balance between what is the right solution for JITO, what is the right solution for Solana, and how to move forward on key strategic questions.
User Behavior: Staking, Restaking, and DeFi Trends
I think what we’re seeing is a steady trend towards more liquid staking over native staking. It remains less than 10% of the total stake on Solana, which is quite low relative to what you see on most other networks.
And as the market continues to see the utility of liquid staking, we expect that to go up. And then the question is really kind of, how do we see additional yield on that? Should people be using DeFi? Should people be using restaking?
I think to date, the majority of assets are still used in DeFi, because that’s just more of a known primitive on Solana. So there are very good opportunities in providing liquidity with relatively safe yields on that.
And we see the lending market continues to grow on Solana. And then lastly is restaking, the incremental opportunities there for restakers on Jito Sol and other LSTs are quite strong, but really need to have the restaking ecosystem mature and continue growing. So that can support additional capital there, but we see a lot of excitement about those opportunities.
DAO Governance, Transparency, and Community Participation
I think JITO DAO is one of the most engaged and thoughtful DAOs in all of Solana.
And I’m really excited about how it has evolved since the token launched about a year and a half ago. And so what’s next is I think there are increasingly meaningful opportunities and key decisions. So today there is a major discussion around tokenomics for the JTO token, including how fees should be attributed.
We’ve seen some of the smartest investors in this space, including Multicoin Capital, North Island Ventures, and Pantera Capital, all of them weighing in on the distribution of fees.
So I think that JTO governance is going to have a very exciting 2025.
Restaking Competition and Jito’s Unique Approach
JTO restaking is kind of prioritising different things.
The goal from day one for me has been to provide real and sustainable yield to people participating in the restaking network. And so we’ve seen that the TVL on JTO restaking is smaller than some of the other peers. But the yield is actually much higher.
And it doesn’t come from token emissions. It comes from sustainable fee generation.
So I think that will continue to be a focus on sustainable yield. And then I think the other focus is on powering different consumer DeFi apps. So as I said earlier, not about scaling Solana or L2s, because that’s not something that is a priority for Solana right now.
Leadership Decisions and Lessons for Protocol Builders
So, the most controversial decision I was involved in was Jito Labs’ decision to deprecate the mempool, a product that wasn’t native to Solana but was part of Jito’s initial MEV stack.
And that enabled people to see pending transactions comparable to what you can see in Ethereum. The end product was that this led to a lot of front-running of user trades on Solana. And with 95% of the stake, it was virtually every trade that could be front-run.
And Jito Labs elected to terminate its hosted mempool. That was a tough decision because it had a negative impact on Jito Labs’ revenue, as well as the revenue attributed to everyone on the MEV stack. But I think it was still ultimately the right decision.
Because if users are getting better execution on a centralised exchange compared to trading on DeFi, then they will continue to use a centralised exchange. My vision is Nasdaq on-chain on Solana, and we need best execution there. And so it was really about prioritising long term health of Solana over short term metrics and potential controversy in the market.
Brian Smith Shares His Final Thoughts
Solana has been number one in economic value generated of real fees for any crypto network over the last six months. That appears to be on pace to continue.
It is just extremely exciting to see that it is now larger than many of the EVM competitors that were kind of unforeseen when I first joined Solana. And the momentum in the ecosystem is overwhelming. And so really excited for how Solana is headed and what that means for users of the network.
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Faculty Group and Ghaf Capital Announce Strategic Merger to Launch Web3 Powerhouse, Ghaf Group
In a landmark move, Faculty Group and Ghaf Capital today announced their merger to form Ghaf Group, a vertically integrated Web3 advisory business. This strategic union leverages Faculty Group’s full-stack Web3 execution capabilities alongside Ghaf Capital’s elite access to capital markets, sovereign networks, and strategic enterprise relationships across the MENA region and beyond.
With operations spanning capital allocation, product development, token advisory, liquidity management and marketing, Ghaf Group is uniquely positioned to drive the next wave of blockchain and Web3 growth. The new entity unites over 100 experts across eight subsidiaries under a single, scalable platform committed to delivering institutional-grade solutions and unlocking long-term value across the Web3 economy.
James Childs, newly appointed CEO of Ghaf Group, commented: “This merger is not just an evolution, it’s an inflexion point. Faculty Group has always focused on high-conviction execution in Web3. Now, as Ghaf Group, we bring together global delivery capability with regional strategic access to capital, creating a new category of partner for protocols, corporates, and governments alike.”
Feras Al Sadek, Chairman of Ghaf Group, added: “We’re combining best-in-class infrastructure with unparalleled strategic reach. Ghaf Group will be the trusted bridge between East and West, unlocking capital and capability at scale. This is a defining moment for Web3, and we’re just getting started.”
The group’s new visual identity, rooted in the symbolism of the resilient Ghaf tree native to the UAE, reflects a commitment to strength, longevity, and organic growth. Ghaf Group is already in advanced discussions with sovereign entities, institutional investors, and emerging protocols as it builds out a robust pipeline for 2025 and beyond.
Looking ahead, Ghaf Group will accelerate its footprint across MENA and Asia, explore strategic acquisitions, and begin laying the groundwork for a potential UAE-based IPO, positioning itself as a publicly accountable and globally trusted vehicle for Web3 advancement.
About Ghaf Group
Ghaf Group is a global Web3 venture platform formed through the merger of Faculty Group and Ghaf Capital. The firm provides integrated services across advisory, token design, venture capital, market-making, marketing, and blockchain development. With strong roots in the Middle East and a global vision, Ghaf Group partners with ambitious founders, forward-looking institutions, and sovereign stakeholders to catalyse the next era of decentralised innovation.
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