Ideas
Solana over Ethereum L2s for apps
Clay chose to focus Colosseum primarily on Solana and does not see that changing soon. He argues Solana's higher performance, higher throughput, and lower fees make it the right infrastructure if crypto is moving from the infrastructure era to the application era, where apps need to scale to millions of users. He also points to Solana's resilient developer culture after FTX and says building on a monolithic chain avoids the developer apprehension, counterparty risk, and technical overhead of choosing among Ethereum L2s such as Base, Optimism, and Arbitrum.
Solana over Ethereum L2s for apps
Clay chose to focus Colosseum primarily on Solana and does not see that changing soon. He argues Solana's higher performance, higher throughput, and lower fees make it the right infrastructure if crypto is moving from the infrastructure era to the application era, where apps need to scale to millions of users. He also points to Solana's resilient developer culture after FTX and says building on a monolithic chain avoids the developer apprehension, counterparty risk, and technical overhead of choosing among Ethereum L2s such as Base, Optimism, and Arbitrum.
Stablecoin payments and commerce renaissance
Clay is personally excited about payments and stablecoins. He sees a renaissance in stablecoins and commerce because stablecoins reduce intermediaries, lower costs, improve global access, and enable new agentic commerce where agents pay for APIs or tools in cents. He also notes stablecoins have a net interest income kicker and are a natural extension of how the payments layer will be conducted.
Stablecoins pressure traditional bank deposits
Longer term, Clay sees stablecoins as great for consumers but bad for financial institutions. By making money movement more seamless and reducing the friction of moving deposits, stablecoins reduce the stickiness of traditional bank deposits and pressure incumbents to provide better service at lower cost. Regulatory moats may delay the shift, but he frames the longer-term direction as negative for traditional deposit franchises.
Ore is top Solana revenue app
Ore came through Colosseum's first hackathon in January 2024. It initially used a proof-of-work mechanism settling to Solana and even stress-tested the network. The founder then pivoted the mining experience into a consumer proof-of-stake tile game where users allocate SOL to earn ORE, and it has become one of the top revenue-generating applications on Solana. It is also one of Colosseum's first investments and went through several product iterations.
MetaDAO futarchy aligns token-holder incentives
MetaDAO is one of Colosseum's first investments. It uses futarchy, putting critical decisions to decision markets settled in USDC rather than simply relying on token-holder votes. Clay argues this aligns token issuance with token-holder rights, creates a single economic unit instead of a broken dual token/equity structure, adds token-holder protections, and forces founders to act like public-market CEOs. MetaDAO's own launch platform proposal passed governance and has been positive EV, and Colosseum created the STAMP vehicle to let companies take dilutive capital before launching on MetaDAO.
Unruggable competes with Ledger on Solana
Unruggable was the grand prize winner of the most recent hackathon. It is building a Solana-specific hardware wallet and companion app, positioning itself against Ledger. Clay highlights it as an example of a team that used hackathons repeatedly, as it was a four-time participant, which fits Colosseum's preference for high-agency founders who refactor and prove product hypotheses over multiple events.
This Delphi Digital video, published January 19, 2026,
features Clay Robbins
discussing SOL, Ethereum L2s, STABLECOINS, Traditional financial institutions, ORE, METADAO, Unruggable.
7 trade ideas extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.
Speakers:
Clay Robbins
· Tickers:
SOL,
Ethereum L2s,
STABLECOINS,
Traditional financial institutions,
ORE,
METADAO,
Unruggable
