18 May 2025

$75K, 3 Founders, 1 Shot: Solana Pitch Moment

Spotlight on TOLY (Anatoly Yakovenko) as a judge or central figure - The Coinomist

What happens when you tokenize a Solana co-founder’s time and auction it off? On May 6, we’ll find out — live.

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If you're going to pitch your startup, doing it in front of Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, isn’t a bad place to start. But on May 6, it’s not just a pitch — it’s a spectacle.

Three Web3 founders will get 10 minutes each to present their ideas to Yakovenko — and the entire Solana ecosystem — after collectively bidding $75,000 for the privilege. 

Hosted on time.fun, the event represents more than a mere startup showcase; it's a live experiment in attention economics, fueled by the novel concept of tokenized time and the support of a highly influential communities.

Why You Should Care

This is not a conventional demo day; it represents a novel format pioneered by time.fun, a SocialFi platform that treats time as a monetizable asset. Built on Base, time.fun enables creators to tokenize their time in minutes, offering them for sale to their fans and followers, who can then utilize minutes to schedule meetings, send messages, or just speculate on value.

In this case, Yakovenko offered 15-minute slots of his time for auction. The bidding process generated a total frenzy valued at $1.2 million, ultimately resulting in $75,000 in winning bids from three founders, with the proceeds being donated to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. 

Now, three winners will present their startups live — in public, on-chain, and in full view of crypto Twitter.

The event is a signal of where things are headed: 

  • attention as capital, 
  • reputation as currency, 
  • influence as infrastructure.

The post-rally buzz is fading fast — CoinGecko’s latest report dives into altcoin losses, shifting DEX trends, and the market’s new mood. We unpack the cool-down in our latest opinion piece!

The Founders and Their Big Bets

1. Lume (@lumefiapp)
Founder: SV (@svmovingfwd)
Tagline: “DeFi so smooth even a Lamport could stake itself while sipping caviar.”

Lume is a non-custodial wallet that strips DeFi down to its essentials — no jargon, no clunky UX, just simple staking and swapping built for mass adoption. It’s designed to onboard the next wave of users who don’t care about gas fees or LP tokens — they just want something that works. SV, formerly with Sonic and Input Output, says he’s building “DeFi for my dad.” It’s both a joke and a vision.

2. Hedgie (@MyHedgie)
Team: @QxAstra
Tagline: “Decentralized hedge funds. Find your quant.”

Hedgie isn’t live yet, but it’s gunning for one of the oldest institutions in finance: hedge funds. The product aims to let users allocate capital to algorithmic strategies, managed by pseudonymous quants on-chain. Think social trading meets DeFi meets fund-of-funds. With no token (yet) and an early-stage team, it’s the dark horse of the event — but one that could attract curious capital if the pitch hits.

Stylized logo for Hedgie — The Coinomist
Hedgie, one of the startups pitching at the time.fun x Solana event, positions itself as a platform for decentralized hedge funds. Source: X

3. Lux.gg (@lux_gg_official)
Founder: Tino (@tin0d0)
Tagline: “The multiplayer internet.”

Lux is the most built-out of the three, with a roadmap, browser extension, token economy ($LUX), and mini-games already live. The idea? A multiplayer layer for the web — avatars, live presence, games, and synchronized browsing all woven into your existing internet experience. It’s Discord meets Habbo meets Solana. Lux already boasts a 16K-strong community and is aiming to turn browsing into a shared, tokenized experience.

Time as the Ultimate Asset

At the center of all this is $TOLY, a token representing Yakovenko’s time. It trades on time.fun using a bonding curve, and after the recent bidding war, it’s up nearly 40%, hovering around $16 with a $1.5M market cap. What started as a meme is quickly becoming a micro-economy — one where “influence coins” represent real access.

Anatoly Yakovenko turned a radical idea into one of the fastest blockchains in the world. Discover how the founder of Solana is reshaping the future of crypto in our latest Personalities feature!

As time.fun’s builder @0xKawz explained, the platform rewards both creators and their fans: revenue is split between trading, redeeming, and holding time. This allows influencers to monetize while still leaving space for speculation and social clout — a creator fee flywheel in motion.

In just two months since launch, time.fun has attracted over 32,000 users and seen $210 million in volume. According to co-founder Pedro, creators have earned $615K, with $390K donated and $80K in $TOLY minutes already burned — and the biggest updates are still to come.

Clocking Into a New Era

Crypto has consistently challenged traditional notions of value—its definition, exchange mechanisms, and governance. 

With time.fun, we observe a novel iteration: 

  • the tokenization of social capital, 
  • the auctioning of time, 
  • the monetization of attention.

May 6 event transcends a simple pitch; it serves as a crucial test case for the dynamics that emerge when developers, tokens, and community converge within a defined timeframe.

Stay tuned.

Solana’s hiring spree is turning heads — and it all started with a meme. Recruiters reveal how top talent is rushing into crypto’s hottest ecosystem in our latest lifestyle piece!

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