Just caught wind of something pretty interesting happening in the Solana ecosystem. Back in mid-2024, Mable Jiang made a significant move by stepping down from her CGO role at FSL (Stepn's parent company) to launch Trends, a social protocol that's genuinely trying to rethink how value and information flow together on-chain.

What caught my attention is the caliber of backing this got. We're talking Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Lily Liu from the Solana Foundation, Jupiter's founders, Bryan Pellegrino from LayerZero—basically a who's who of actual builders in the space. Even Su Zhu, the Multicoin Capital crew, and Magic Eden's Zhuoxun Yin threw their weight behind it. That's not random noise; these are people who actually understand what's broken.

Mable's thesis here is pretty solid. She distilled three core principles from years of working on crypto adoption: first, real Web3 innovation always comes with drastically lower costs for moving value around; second, tokens are becoming information containers, and they're merging with social platforms whether we like it or not; third, on-chain transaction costs keep dropping, and social use cases are finally ready for that infrastructure.

The play is clever too. Trends is starting as an on-chain curation layer for X, essentially building a reputation and value system on top of what people are already doing. Eventually they're eyeing TikTok-style open content, but the real endgame is a fully on-chain social protocol where capital itself coordinates what rises and what doesn't.

Mable Jiang coming from Multicoin Capital before Stepn means she's seen both sides—the venture perspective and the product execution side. This isn't some random founder trying to build the next Twitter clone. It's someone who's been thinking about information finance for years finally getting the pieces to align. Definitely one to watch as this develops.