Everyone Kevin Rose here. Welcome to another episode of Modern Finance here. We cover all the latest Financial products. That means cryptocurrency in a tease defy Robo investing and even some traditional Financial hacks as well. Now if you haven't heard, we have a new show on the network. It's called proof. And while this show covers some in Ft content on proof. We cover the entire nft landscape. That means we're interviewing artists.
Ders and Industry experts to help you better understand this really fast. Moving space to subscribe head on over to proof dot x. Y z that's the domain and we have all the links you need their today's shows with Anatole who is the co-founder and CEO of Solana. If you've been with me for a while, you'll remember my interview with Anatoly a few years back. So it should come as no surprise. That continue to be a huge fan of his work and I'm still very bullish on Solana and we cover a ton today. We discussed the ride.
Is of Solana to a top-10 cryptocurrency by market cap. The Solana hackathon investors that are flooding into back. New Solana projects, how aetherium, smart contracts can now be run on Solana the potential for dedicated hardware and chips to speed up the network even more not that it needs it, but it was still a really interesting conversation. New pooling, that helps even further, decentralize Solana, and the explosion of n of T. Zon Solana. So a ton to get into. Let's jump into it. This is Anatoly.
By co-founder and CEO Kevin roles in his guests are not registered investment. Advisors. All opinions are Kevin's and his guests alone. Nothing discussed. Today should be relied upon for investment decisions. Nor is it investment advice? This show is solely for information and entertainment purposes.
Only. Please work directly with an investment
professional.
So Anatoly man, it has been a minute since you were on the podcast. Yeah. Thanks for coming back
on for sure that the ads and the probably about a
minute. Yeah, I would say, you know last time we chatted so much has changed man the explosion of Solana and seeing the growth has been so impressive to watch from the outside would
of to jump into just the latest because I you know, when we did the podcast couple years ago, we were just talking about how this would technically function, things worked very well and now you have a whole kind of like ecosystem. That's forming around what you've built. What can you give us a quick like recap. The last couple months, like what's been happening?
So the the project so we had Solano summer hackathon, which was posted met this funny. It's hard for me, too.
Everybody thinking under the met and we had an overwhelming number of registrations 13,000, over 13,000 and 350 teams
forms.
And we saw, we start, we kind of knew that something special was happening because we saw teams kind of go to market with like an MVP and responding even before the hackathon
was over. Hmm, that like that basically,
you know, teams that got into this and started.
Building. They were like already thinking beyond the hackathon. They're like, okay. I have a product. There's investors banging on my door, that will not give us money. And so that was pretty crazy to watch. And one of the team's Mega markets. I don't know. They actually came back at them before they were in a more mature product. And they went into this, like full go-to-market was slaughtered out and everything else and they built this Innovative auction mechanic where I don't, I'm sure
Saw this, they allowed investors to bit arbitrary amount of dollars for a fixed number of tokens. The first 24 hours and then second 24 hours, anybody can withdraw their bed and therefore lower the price for everyone else. And everyone got the same price at the end. But in that run up you saw over half of the u.s. DC and Solana going to this smart contracts over 530 million. And last time, the amount of USD CN Solana was around 700 million. So that's a bit more.
During that process. We went over the 1 billion Mark of USD. See it's pretty, pretty crazy. And it, you know, I I've never seen anything like
that
before. So that's been pretty wild to see.
Yeah, I would say that I would Echo exactly what you said and then I was, you know, a judge on the the hackathon and I saw some of the projects and I remember thinking like, why should I saw a phantom before the hackathon started or right around there?
Wallet for Solana. And I was like, oh man, this is a sick wallet. And so I reached out to the founders. I was like, hey, let's jump on a call and they're like, oh we're sand insanely oversubscribed and I'm like, oh my God, like there's real investor money flowing in not in just terms of speculation and buying coins and all that stuff. But just, you know, backing the ecosystem which which is a very strong signal of a healthy and growing ecosystem. So it's cool to see that. It seems like that's
has been the case with just a ton of projects now.
Yeah, some of the funds that we have talked to, that have passed the nurse started, telling us that they're seeing more deals for teams building on Solana, then other theoria, so that's, that's says anything to you the right now. This is I think the most important part is the, finding those folks that want to, you know, put their job. Raise money to build a product, you know, give product Market fit users because the space. Like even though I don't know.
The outside if you're not crypto, it seems like it's maybe it's getting huge right. Maybe it's too big but it's nowhere near the point where you can have a like a Salesforce team that's going to financial institutions and selling them defy or crimped. Alright, but it's just that just doesn't
exist. Like we're pretty
product definition in a lot of cases. So it's very much startup driven. It's very small teams, you know for start-up in Silicon Valley to
As multi-million dollars, that gets a maybe like 18 months of Runway, if they're, you know, hire five people and them gross, you know, go group build and grow as fast as they can. So these are very like, you know, risky seed level stage deals, but it's really important that these happened. Because those are the folks that will do whatever it takes to build a product and get users. And a big company just really can't even, you know, can't take those risks and can't really do it.
Yeah,
well, how do you position slot on your mind? Obviously, you're like a top 10 by market cap, cryptocurrency. So, you're you now, cemented, in terms of, like one of the major players in the space. So many people on crypto Twitter and I don't know that this is a good thing or bad thing or you would agree or disagree with this, but they want to make it out to be, I don't know, but a holy war but definitely some type of like little ethereum versus Lana War, you know, where people get into these heated debates about which one is better and we're which
Cases and what are the trade-offs security-wise? Like, what how are you think about this? Is this a kind of winner-take-all in the in the app and the DAP and kind of smart contract world. Is it, is it something where there will always be a place for ethereum. So I'm like an open source
maximalist. I grew up in the 90s or remember Lennox being sued by SEO and that that whole mass and like the fight for the GPL, right? Like the fight for a right to code. So for Less
Yeah, and I strongly believe that if you have people that are coding for fun on the weekend on something that thing is available. So there's no like he's Killers. So I'm going to beneath killer because there's just too many people having fun building and that that's awesome. I think we're getting to a point where they're, you know, obviously not as many people but a very rapidly growing. Number of people are just having fun building Solana and um, so on so that that to me is awesome. This is
I can open source person's dream to build like that kind of community. That's just having fun. Working on hard problems and and sharing ideas. The crypto Twitter, that kind of the East killer narrative can be good. If it's really forcing us to Define our terms and language succinctly, where the security trade-offs and like the how things are defined our get to a point where we can start, kind of building like a cop.
Common language for the stuff, right? So it's obvious for people coming into the space. What something is? So this is kind of part of the process. I don't know like culture. I
guess
it is fine. If it's competitive right? It's fine. If it's like us versus them. In reality of no one can kill anyone else because it's a bunch of Open Source communities. Building cool shit for fun. So it's interesting how this process is going
forward. Yeah. It is interesting. I I'm trying to wrap my head around it. I often wonder if it'll just be you know, engineers.
Say, in some sense, like there's a certain block chains that are better for for certain use cases, and you as a user, you'll have a wallet that most likely will interface with multiple block chains. And it'll be one of those things where you're just using an app. Like when I go and check, you know, my Gmail, I don't consider. Is it on an old, my sequel back in. Or is it on redis? Or is it on Oracle or Zone? Some Google big table thing? I don't think about any of that on the back end.
I just think about I'm using an application. I wonder if it doesn't eventually get extract like kind of, that's the blockchain is in the background more. Do you think that'll be the case?
I don't, I think in the maybe in the near short-term. I think this is kind of like, I think, cryptography and the City of people being empowered with it, like to sign things and see the truth of that activity is a very powerful tool and I think
The place where all these people get together, and I'll sign stuff and share that state. If that thing starts getting to a hundred two hundred, three hundred million people, that's going to have these outside Network effects that are quite unpredictable right now, like right now, like we have this magic tool like we figured out cement, but the only thing we're building with it or bricks because we only know how to build houses that are bricks, right? You need somebody to look at a bird cage and then realize out why don't we like build a steel frame of them filter?
Thing to the sky, right? Like that, that hasn't happened yet. And it's just unpredictable, right? Like so I don't know, right? Like it's really hard to tell from a product perspective. Why do I care about which blocks? And it uses it, if you think of it in terms of database, but if you think of it, in terms of shared State, shared Financial State, Network effects of, you know, a hundred million people coordinating dollars seamlessly, right? Like instantly around the world, is that
Owing to be potentially like kind of fall into one place because it's easier to do it that way, right? You know, I don't know, right? Like these are like unknown unknowns that are exciting. How things are going to play out in the next five years.
Yeah. It's interesting. It's kind of, it's going to be fun to watch this all unfold. One of the things that I've, you know, anyone that interacts with Salon in any meaningful way, whether its buying in of tea or just sending some sold to someone else or really anything will notice
The most obvious thing which is just how performant it is, and I'm curious, you know, with that performance, you enable and unlock things that it can only be done on Solana. What have you seen that? You believe to be? I mean, obviously, having an order book. That's a, that's a no-brainer that can only be done on Solana. What are other high-performance things that you're seeing being built on Solana? That just couldn't be done anywhere else.
We see a lot of the things that you've seen on a theory of, you know, and fda's. And like those platforms just kind of rapidly build out on Solana and the number of users that are able to participate in these platforms on chain. So full-on chain options, like, everything is totally on the layer one, without any off chain mechanics. It's just much larger, you know, Thirty forty thousand people can come together and I'll bid unlike one and ft drop or something like that. And these are just early days, right? So imagine there's
Million people that are in crypto now that can all coordinate on chain for anything, right? Like the men those numbers become three to four million people in one job. And this is where I think we may not need new ideas. We may just need to take ideas that just been. There's a million white papers for every idea of what the crypto can and can't do find the right ones and then scale up to a hundred million people. That's really like, I think maybe the stage that we're in there right now.
Hmm, so so it's basically taking some, I mean,
Since you could take a lot of the centralized products out there that require performance and just move them on chain, onto something like Solana,
what would be transformative right as fully unchanged banks? No overdraft fees, no account, fees and Fields, that are defy yields four to eight percent right in life. And that big delivery to Consumers, like, everyday people, you know, across the world. I think that that is a very simple idea, right? Does it require a lot of code? Does it require a lot of smart contracts? It?
Really just about how do I build a product that has that user experience? It can scale to very large number of people and the impact of that would be astronomical, right? Like all of a sudden you have completely transformed. The banking industry and like one with one app.
Yeah. That be amazing. I think that that's the promise of defy in many ways. But, you know, with, with high, gas fees and any time you try to move or do anything all that.
Especially on lower lower accounts, like most people don't have, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars that they're moving around. They're moving around hundreds of dollars. And if you get hit with, you know, a $50 fee to move around a few hundred dollars. That's like kind of a non-starter for for that promise of that totally decentralized Finance. So I can see how Salon would be the perfect use case for that is is anyone building that?
Not that like, I think there's a couple teams working on this but not in like a stage where, like, I could say, okay, they're ready to go next week, you guys
Stuff barracks, right? And like this is what I'm dying to see. Like, I want to get a, get us to that point that there are like five or six teams that have that vision of, let's take the best of crypto. Make a really great user experience and scale it out to as many people as we can. So that, you know, one of the second a half maybe end of the year. I like, are we, are we at that point in the industry, which is a really exciting point. I think far more exciting to me than, you know, two or three years ago.
Go. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm curious that the Tweet you had said a few weeks ago about there being evm, you know, etherium compatibility on Solana was really exciting like that. That could be huge for developers. Can you do? That's a third-party team working on that, though? Because that correct that's not something that's coming out of it. Can you explain that that project a bit?
Yeah. So neon is think of it as like sun Microsystems release.
And everybody thought that you're going to build your code once and running everywhere. Turned out more complicated than that, but there was an exciting virtual machine called Java but with a bunch of Innovations, which is competing with windows. So they did a lot of respects.
He was pretty slow, though wasn't Javas pretty slow back in the day. I remember this was first versions of
java, and from my perspective. It's always always love. So so evm is a, is a
Port of the hearing virtual machine Sputnik, the to be precise as a Solano smart contract for somebody. That's an engineer. It's really just retargeting gvim. That's that project from Linux x86 to Solano ppf doing a bunch of work because we're not like a posix or unix-style operating system. It's more like into better to us with a lot of weird constraints so that took a lot of work, but what you get is almost like jaw bone Windows, right? You now have a new environment.
For new kinds of programs that can be executed and it's a lot of reasons to do that is because the theorem has a language that has been adopted by D Phi, right across the theory of an oldie p.m. Compatible chance, the smart contracts that have been bulletproof, you know, by hundreds of audits it just by being alive. So long without getting cocked that they're really well trusted for that, use case. So being able to leverage that and and now executed
Alana is pretty exciting. And I think really important.
Yeah, I mean, that's crazy. So what you're basically saying is any popular ethereum project that has has all these audits has its history. They can essentially move it over and have the execution engine take place on Solana. So that means they get the performance of Solana even though they're using solidity. Code. Is that the right way to think of
it? Yeah. Yeah. So the a lot of
Went into building. Yeah, it's pretty sophisticated Port. So it's leveraging. The parallelism. That's a lot of provides. So transactions, that actually executed it the way it works. Is you have metal mask, it science. It's a theory, a message, the transaction, you're submitting to a theory about that's passed to a worker, the call it a proxy that interprets. What are the states on Solana? That this extreme transaction is going to need when we execute the virtual machine and not
Mapping theorem transactions that don't touch the same state and actually move forward in parallel. And if this cerium transaction requires more resources than it's available in a single so on a transaction you can actually get it to continue because the intermediate state is temporarily saved that sort of thing succeeds. So you end up kind of like with a limitless evm. Like it can span multiple Salata blocks. It can run very large transactions that take quite a while to
So it kind of has a very very different gas limits of behaviors that any other EDM chain or any other smart contract on Solana itself. So you may like we may end up in a world where something like serum, which is a such a limit order. Book is incredibly performance, sensitive needs to be as fast as cheap as possible, that is almost like a driver. And then there is an API that is high level user, you know, kind of with a ton of
of abstractions that's running in EDM, that can, you know, go talk to serum and that, that relationship between the programs inside the VM and programs inside the same environment. I didn't want to call it native environment, but running, you know, as rust programs is very similar to how a driver or Java bindings called windows. Apis, that is trustless. It's just goes, stepping from one and, you know, one way to interpret state to another way.
Interpret state. So it's it is like a full operating system, you know, I spent my career building operating systems like Qualcomm. So I'm pretty excited to have to for us to have gotten. There was always part of the vision. We want to build an operating system, that could be very much Financial, that can scale that single instance, to hundreds of millions of users. But a true ask that can run arbitrary
code. Yeah. That is awesome. Is it in production now? Like are you seeing this actually out there?
Yeah.
It's um, tested of net. So you could go play around with it. It's in this kind of audit phase of the project. So it kind of everything's downhill from here, truffle metal mask, those kinds of things that work, like, out-of-the-box more or less, you know, since its new. There might be a few hiccups here and there, but these are like engineering problems that computer science problems.
Wow, crazy. So what do you expect to see? Like if you had to look in your crystal ball for the next, you know, six months to a year with this enabled, or we going to see big projects moving over?
This is where I think if they're inverses, Solana narrative is going to start to break down because if the ramps to design there's actually an awesome podcast with me a dog crap is 1/8 to dab that we argued to the death about like whether you should be optimizing for security was kind of like a straw man argument, but a really good debate which showed the clear differences between how we approach. That's the ship resistance and how a theory approaches security. What's
Interesting about this that these are almost Toronto, efficient symbiotic systems, especially the easy to case, where the only execution that's really happening on. The theorem is checking fraud proofs. So it needs an execution layer. It needs some other networks to go execute and ensure that users can get their messages in cheaply and quickly that finality and the execution environment is established bubbly. So there's a world where you can write a smart contract that defines what kind of fraud back.
Assumes. You want to execute in your execution environment and all of those instances are just instances of neon on Solana. You pick it, pick and choose your adventure of what you want your teeth to execution, layer to look like. And it's all running at Solano. So that this is really, like, execution versus settlement, but, you know, maybe right. Like, who knows, who knows. So, these things will play out and I'm really excited about that possibility.
Yeah, that is just awesome. When you think about Solana where it is today, you know, how far you've taken it all the tooling that you have in place. Like, what's the six-month or 12-month roadmap look like for you all from a kind of core development standpoint like where the black guys are the areas where you need to put in a little additional time and effort to fully flesh out at the protocol level.
What exciting to us is like in the last six months, really three months. I would say, we realize that we're kind of out of the
Coarse side. We have our out of the fire driven development
phase. We can actually
do like maybe one wonders Lisa had planning.
Yeah, probably just sleeping better at night a
little bit. Yeah. Well, my job has gotten more complicated so not as much for me, but for at least the core Engineers, they think that they're sleeping. So what we really building is, it's an easy problem because our job is to look at what the hardware does.
How amazing folks have Samsung and Vidya cetera have have improved those systems, you know, every two years with every release and just make sure the software gets out of the way. Like, how do we ensure that like, when SSD capacity doubles, when the, you know, parallel I/O Ops to access the, the SSD storage doubles? That Solana also doubles, right? That scales exactly the same way and it's a bunch of algorithm, you know, like engineering problems.
Not something like again, not a computer science problem, Bunch engineering work. You got to look at, you know, memory analyze, you know, loops and stuff like that. And look at throughput of like events across network, cards discs, maybe XDP, you cetera. And that's really like incremental in a lot of ways, but really powerful because ssds are doubling it performance internally. We're seeing tasks where we can end up by Billy and I
It's buttered a
hardware lazy. So you're because I mean, this was the thesis all along, right? Is that you would sail with as the hardware scales you would scale
with it.
Yeah, and that's a doubling, right? Like it's crazy. How both slow it is and how fast it is. You know, 10 years is 32 x 20 years thousand acts.
Wow, that's that is so awesome. One question around that when I am. Maybe I'm thinking about this the wrong way, but when you think about proof of work, and you think about okay, well, people Engineers came together and said, in order to do more of this more efficiently. We need to build custom built processors A6, things like that, right? That's the path that I went down to, to.
The mining side. When you think about the performance side of Solana, you're using equipment that the engineers at all, the companies you named are going out in manufacturing and bringing to Market not specifically or purpose-built for Solana, but just because they're improving the hardware. Do you see a world where Hardware manufacturers say? Hey, we can actually do a few tweaks or, you know, we can improve performance in this way or that way that will actually benefit salon.
- oh, there's there's custom Hardware design for Solana. Was that just crazy thinking?
No, like we're a bunch of X Qualcomm guys. Are always itching. Like, what, where's our chance to go for their own system on a chip? Like what can we do it? So, the way that's done and like, even a Qualcomm is, let's say you have like a new augmented reality or something like that Loop that you really excited about because it tracks eyesight much better than anything. You try to take that software.
And optimize it for the current system of the chip which has dsps and has gpus and it's a lot of work to form to restructure code that so runs efficiently there. But doing that work forces you to really kind of chop away, all the unnecessary bits of the of that algorithm and get to a level where it's almost structured to the point. That okay. Do we need that extra 5x performance Improvement for that part?
If we do, then we ship it as an Asic and making that decision at something like welcome at that. This is going to be a use case that out of the, you know, 4 billion. People that have cell phones, that hundreds of millions of them were get I want to use, right. So, this is why it's so important. It's like, the next-gen use case is going to be like, people will buy a phone because it has that thing,
right? And understood. This is why Apple does their own custom chips. It's like, yeah, they know that they can optimize things for their specific.
Vic hardware and they're used to specific use cases,
right? Exactly. And like, a lot of the stuff like everywhere else in Sac is hyped driven, and I'm kind of like, goes by the wayside, like, do we need neural network accelerators and mobile phones, right? It sounds exciting. Like, we're going to have a I right hand, but maybe they use cases in there. Right? Like maybe there isn't actually an application that needs it.
It's great for marketing though, man. Like they tell you more artificial intelligence and you know, there's there's always got to be a slight upgrade.
To get you to buy new
hardware and and as a hardware company, you're making this bad, like almost like a 5-10, your bat. This is where the industry goes. And it's a big commitment because it is hundreds of millions of dollars worth of engineering effort and it takes space on the chip. You can always use that space for L2 cache and just make the chip better. But so those are you know, those are trade-offs that companies live a diet by for us it's easier because we can build a card that plugs into
CIA bars that maybe accelerates like, you know, pools that work packets fetches state from a bunch of ssds and then has like a bajillion optimized Digital Signal dsps or something like that, that can execute smart contracts. Maybe that's something that we'll get to, but we're not there yet. And like the advantage for us is that thing could be maybe like that card itself could be 5,000 bucks, you made, it doesn't need like a hundred million units of it. Right? Like it only needs, maybe 10,000 or 20,000, but it makes it
Harder for us to deploy these systems in like financial institutions which are the true users of this, right? If this is a network that connects the world of Finance, then Finance Circle, coinbase. They don't run dedicated Hardware. They're on their stuff in the cloud. They want to run it on generic systems. So how do we make sure that they can do that? But also have the fastest possible, not work, right? These are
like, yeah, that's tricky, right? Because the some say,
They want to build a trust, the hardware. You want it to be almost like commodity mass-produced so that anyone could just pick it up and you know, there's with anything Finance are there there now auditing these motherboards at the chip level right to make sure there's no malicious code or anything. Actually tucked into the chip fabrication process, which is just insane. So I can see that would introduce a bunch of new additional complexity that when you're not running into any limitations today, it's not like you need to optimize the
Get an extra, you know, 50% performance. Like you don't you're not having those problems, right? But in a
world where this is the fabric of Finance, you could see like us defining this. Here's the, here's the design for a risc processor that implements Alana and then Nvidia Cisco cetera, right? They see that every business that dude does Finance needs one of these six. Maybe at that hundred thousand units, you know, then they're like, okay, let's go. Let's go build it.
Like, maybe we that happens, but maybe that's 10 years from now, you
know. Yeah, I mean it's happening at the proof-of-work level. Right? I mean, Invidia has dedicated cards now that are just done for GPU mining. That is purpose-built for that activity. So it's not, it's not crazy to imagine that. What happened.
What's, what I think is likely to happen? Because our art problems overlap. So much with traditional databases. Is that the problems of Oracle or whoever?
This building of XJ of databases that are deployed. A lot of times in the cloud. They face the same IO bottlenecks the same computational bottlenecks is us a lot of the engineering effort is already spent and making those better and we get to leverage that. So that, that is kind of like part of the benefit is that will likely see dedicated like cheap you to networking layer, bypass write something like that. That's just a ship a ship from Nvidia get deployed of like Google cloud and the sure and something about them.
Maybe like a dedicated
Solana, right? Make sense. I'm curious you made an announcement around pooling. Correct for your validators. Is that is that? Yes, done recently. That was a really cool idea. Tell me, tell me about that.
This is the hardest problem in decentralisation of proof, estate. That works is that there is no way to guarantee that the validator is a single entity. Is this is a unique entity and if
Miriam the way. It's design is designed to be resistant to Sybil attacks and the validator set that if you listen to the podcast, you know that debate between the
entire crowd, that's on your podcast. By the way, we should mention that that's on your own podcast. I listen to that one. I will link that in the show notes. For sure. It's a great great episode.
It came out of the blockchain debate. That's what some podcast. It believe we also promoted it, but I would go to their side because I'm back guys. Actually running into the small, very small shops. Oh, look Google blockchain.
Solana. I'm sure you'll find it. But the core difference is that the theorem to doesn't necessarily try to solve this problem. But the U building is minimizing the cost to honest minority. So not just a single validator but a bunch of people that are honest can coordinated detect frauds and any single one of them is not enough, but because of the cost is so low that they expect that the probability that dishonest minority exist is extremely high.
Absurdly High to the hundredth power higher, right? Like that kind of level. So Solana is designed for maximizing how quickly information spreads through the network and we can't I don't I suspect that the trade-offs that were making you just can't really build a system. Like if you're in that all like these are forever efficient, but really designed for is how quickly can we propagate this information and you only need one on the snow to detect.
Just different because the that node may be more expensive than any single one of that honest minority, but probably cheaper than the cost of the honest majority. That's all for me too. But we have no way to know just like aetherium whether the top validators that are at up to 33% if they run Taiwan Ade. That's just trying to hide that fact, or if it's actually a hundred, different validators with their own keys. That are stored in different secure, locations at the Garden.
Their life and don't collude. There's no way to tell it's a simple problem. So just
let me break that down for in. Tell me if I have this correctly, just breaks it down for the average user. So what you're saying is if you want to become a Solana, validator and I want to tack the network and I want to get 33 percent market share. I go buy really expensive Hardware because it has to be performed and I could spread those machines all throughout the world. Put them in different Colo, facilities act in good faith. Look like, I'm an amazing validator, but you wouldn't know that behind the scenes.
Means I own all of them and then slowly trying to build towards a point where I could attack the network. That, is that what you're saying? Okay. Yeah,
so it's an unsolvable problem, which means the only solution is like human work, right? Click it. We just got to work at it and we got a tie incentives to this and then all the incentives in the space. That I believe all the risk analysis is going to come from defy. So a state pool is a token that represent, you know, you know, stay
takes given into this polled by participants. Like, you know, anybody that that wants to stake in the network there, pull together and there's some structure around Distributing that stake to a very large set of validators, to maximize censorship resistance. And because these tokens are tokens, you can then use them in decentralized finance as collateral. And if this is real Finance, the should be analysts that analyze. What the state polls are, which validators are staking to
Because Finance is always about reducing risk through analysis, right? That's the loop that we really want to create is that as staking becomes activity that is used as collateral inside. These defy applications like radium, right? It's backing the actual financial side of it and also backing the security of the network that all the
Analysts and financial like eyes pointing up the network have to also go deep and point at the hardware and like, help us identify that like if we can, if we can create those Network without those effects. It means that you try to do this and create a bunch of alligators and you try to fake that. You're a single, you know, many entities will be discovered quickly and then all those dolls are decentralized applications and the defect protocols now. Have social pressure to
Weren't you a writer or change the state weights as their side to your, to your network? So it's not like there's no simple solution to this. Right? Like, there's no way for us to tell who's a, who am I talking to on the Internet? Is it really Kevin Rose or somebody would like a voice changer? Just like there's no way to know the ballot this Valley or the public key. Where do they where they actually house that right? Maybe the hosted through a VPN right to some weird ideal location and that requires human.
In labor, right? And that labor has to be driven by something. So that's something at that carrot. At the end of that thing is really defied
Finance. So how do you actually pull this off? Then? Like what is, what was the announcement in? What did it change? So yeah. So what we did is we built
the smart contracts. The reference implementation to make the formation of pools, really easy. And since these are standard reference implementations and audited, I think by one firm already, you know, you more of the way and
Can be effectively used by developers validators to create arbitrary pools, right? They cannot form at their own will and the ones that are going to get traction are the ones that can get, you know, religion and branding and like some Financial applications behind him and then propagate that token around all the defy applications that need collateral right to to function. So this is where like we're just kind of creating the tool open opening the Pandora's Box to liquid staking.
So to
speak. Yeah, that's really cool. So today, what you can do is so let's just remember from a consumer standpoint. Let's walk through it again, real quick. So for today, what I could do and what I do currently do is I pick a single validator that I want a steak with, right? So I say, okay. I have X number of Salon tokens. I'm going to stick with them on and trust them with these. Give them my vote and I do that with a single entity.
Is that? Is that many right? Yeah, you have to do it by hand, right? You have to take right five or six validators. So five or six is just not enough.
Yeah, exactly. So what you're saying is these pools will allow me to do hundreds of holidays at once, if I want to exactly. So something like
marinade launch. This is a liquid staking token. You can effectively by it. So you can just create soul for a Band-Aid and now you have effectively Soul, which is already or yield. That's all wrapped up in this marinade took.
Plus the ability to that deposit marinate tokens and select gradient pulls the center earn additional yield on top of that. Wow,
this right
and mizdow that is trying to make sure that the validator said that they're sticking with is, you know, performance, senses your persistent, you know, these are good behaving. Validators that weren't right us what the dowel does, and the community that that's running their name. And you get to benefit from it by this very fast and
The you acts of just trading sulfur marinade.
Oh, I love this. I what a fantastic man to
man. Yep, and he know why do is, is another one of those light. O is famously, started an E2 and they're building out their solution of Salon as well. And they're the tops liquid seeking project under theorem to.
So what's the current state of the union for validators? How many and what's that growth? Look like
growing at a pretty steady clip I think.
We're over 900 already. I made up data and stairs 2100 ish TDS attempt. So the test that is where we tell folks go run a validator and tell us that if you want to Grant from the salon and foundation. So for those that want to like this, part of the effort of building State polls is what to grow the network, the Solana Foundation tries to find validators and talk to them like, hey, this is how you run one. This is how you manage your key security. This is your how you become a good boy.
Validator. And if you demonstrate that skill set, you can earn your way to a foundation. Grab may not by running nose in the past that it demonstrating value. We want that after to really be handed off to a bunch of different state polls that have their own localization, that idea about. What's the best way to educate? People get him up to speed and key management and security healthy items around these systems and in a robust way, what the foundation does. Right now, the spawning off into this Hydra.
Where now you have like a dozen different pools that are all doing the same thing and hopefully the foundation can move Soul into those pools and let her manage it. That would be my ideal. Kind of world view is that the foundation's becoming less and less of active actor, and more coordinating with these a community-driven
projects. Yes, very cool. And weird is yield stand. Cause I know staking is around 6%. But does that vary based on the provide, you're going with some of them take these. Some of that is take a little bit of be
right? Yeah.
So some of them take a fee and the fee is is less than it's like. 10% usually is the average fee. Don't be afraid to bed. Like I think people get into this like I need to back squeeze out and maximize every possible Edge that I do want to well behaving validator that has good up time that can respond to on their noticed out and bring it back up and if they don't get it, they're not getting paid. They're just not going to do it, right? You're gonna lose more by having like a validator that's doubt for, you know,
No, eight hours or 10 hours then be of the sea.
Yeah that I forget that that's different than most staking that's out there where you just kind of like it's a simple box that has to just stay on, right? And your case Solana, that they need to have really high performance Hardware right to pull that off,
right? Yep, and some science data, you know, sometimes data centers, you know, they power down certain parts and those least those things need to be rotated and you know,
People need to pay attention and like, actually go do that work. And why do like professional staking like kind of communities like why to do that work for you? This is part of the reason why these think success.
Yeah, there's some there's some pretty big apps out there like Exodus. Now it does Solana staking. I guess they have for a while Phantom. The really popular Chrome wall. Did they just add staking as well? I believe they did, right?
Yeah. Yeah, they just started staking. So this is that sort of
third party or is that there are doing themselves.
Yes, sure. You can pick whichever validator you want. So, the staking is just a client implementation of the staking messages gasps. You can school so you can pick your validator and steak with them. And I'm hoping, as you know, Staples just launched, you know, marinade just launched to get the marinade token, but I'd love to see like Staples. This kind of having bath first class experience in the wallet as well. Where you know, you have that swap interface that you see a fan of and you quickly swap soul.
Or 30 SEC, right? You can effectively have a market of arbitrary tokens in the into a stake in one within like, you know, a second.
Yeah, so cool. Great. Well, this has been a fantastic kind of update at one thing I did want to touch on. Lastly is just the explosion of NF T's on Solana. It's been fun to watch. I Han there's been some like like retro 80s like stuff or I'm like, okay, that's some funky art right there. And then more recently. What's the a
One. That just came up. That is amazing.
Yeah. Did generate a Piccata
me? Yes, those are fantastically done, you know, the team behind that
I've talked to them over and Twitter. Only it's like a, you know, some artists in New Zealand that are not technically Savvy at all. So there they did not anticipate. The demand for this, the Discord kind of blew up to like, 40 thousand or something like that. People, and, like, 10,000 people. Just typing in. What do I get my eighth, like, over and over and the there?
Some really fun 48 Hours of us trying to help of the scalar infrastructure, which is a works out. You know, it was pretty cool to see like this, overwhelming demand for that
project. It seems a lot of means killing their infrastructure. You meet their own centralized infrastructure. Not? Yeah, wasn't a salon issue.
Yeah. It was just their website, like couldn't handle
it. Old school problems. Yeah, old web to problems.
Right? And then we are exactly. Do they like, you know, they're smart enough to click some stuff on Heroku.
Deploy it. But like when 40,000 people are all hitting, refresh, right? Like and slamming your site to get to this thing as much as fast as they can. It's they needed like some, some help there were glad that we were able to help but that demand like that, put our we had stressed our way of which is no. We work really closely with the salmon from. Are we if it's, yeah, I don't like their Gateway saw like a 50s number of requests during that day. Just wow.
So that so they had to like they're like, holy shit what's
happening? But that was a long time because you were there was no caching of the images were they just pulling them from our weave through a proxy or something? Through my ivfs proxy
or we've just not used ipfs. So they have their own Gateway protocol. But yeah, basically so you just hit their Gateway, the Gateway was a bit overloaded and there's the CDM project to CD and projects you can use for a but it takes time to update the clients that go through the CDM. So that was like that 48 hours kind of spread.
Until I got you, we're stuff broken, where we can fix it? The more it can be duct tape it where we can like do the right
thing. Yeah, that that's so cool. Yeah, Sam was telling me that they are working on or they had some someone was working on a way to kind of proxy are we've data through ipfs is like which I thought was was curious. So that must have I'm trying to figure out likewise Lana has blown up in the last few weeks. I mean, obviously things are working on multiple fronts, but do you think the the nft explosion is like, oh crap, like slime is going to be a big innit.
Platform. You think that's been a lot of the attention that you've seen lately. I think so. I don't know what else. Like,
I mean. Mango was definitely like an eye-opener mangoes. Yeah. That's
a great one. That's a good point. Yeah,
that was a big one. And then the, to the ape thing was also pretty big deal and you saw some stuff happening like, hints of this, right? Like Soul pumps, which is like, I wish it was more like more unique, but very ghastly, like, kind of really closely. You know, I'm very close to Maj to
Krypto Pike's that was gaining some traction and steam, and then like quietly, and maybe because the tools were there, and there was enough interest and this kind of like defy mangoat ship fell that there are big races of Solana and like d Phi is actually getting big and substantial. That's really what drove the nft. So we the network as a whole reach. They think to point like it's an all time high TDL. I think 2.2 billion. I think we're I think it's etherium polygon Finance or by dense than poly cotton soul.
In terms of. Wow, that's amazing. Well, this has been great. I don't want to take up too much of your time. I know you've got important things to go off and and build as you sculpt this network and any other exciting things in the next few months, you want to mention that are that are coming either on a project side that you're excited for their launch or something that you're building internally.
I am like really just jamming on the execution, but it's like so much stuff happening that I'm really excited not before any one thing, but all these things moving forward and us like doing
Those optimizations right there. Getting those drill runs of like 50,000 people all wanting one thing. Let's make it like a million people money. One thing.
How do we have? They're like, yeah, Scott
and then, you know, have a 48-hour Paddock to solve those scaling problems.
Those are always fun, their stressful moments, but in retrospect, you always look back on those scaling issues and like it's like, what makes startups like awesome. I mean, I think it's breaking. He's actually like, you know, it pretty
Fighting. It's like all hands on deck moments that bring that camaraderie, and the fun, you know,
it's exciting when it's like stuff that you know, is fixable women like 48 Hours, like it's just, you know, like finding the servers and like dealing with like caching and stuff like that. It's all doable people have done it, you know all over the world. So but that that is those are really fun proof
points. Awesome mine until I thank you so much for being on the show and I want to also mention your own
podcast so you can find the
The Solana podcast podcast. That's a lot of.com. We're just Google salon and podcast and suppress hit. The last episode with was with the co-founder of axi, really cool Vision. You know, there's a lot a lot of depth. Roxy. So folks are curious about what is this thing that you've never heard of that everyone's talking about? No, please give it a listen. So,
yeah, I want to encourage people to go, listen to podcast because it is not like, you know, a lot of companies, you know, they will put out their quote unquote corporate podcast and you're like, oh,
You just showing me your all your stuff all the time. Like it's not really a podcast. It's just like an ad non-stop. Adam episode yours is not that at all. You're actually interviewing like really amazing entrepreneurs building other projects, even if they're not building them on your chain, you're interviewing them, which I think is just awesome. So definitely worth a download
for sure. Like right now like the space is so small. You really just want to connect to those. Brilliant Founders that have built something doesn't matter where right? Because
They went through like the trenches to get there like and its really yassir their stories.
Well, I until I thank you so much for being on the show. Hope to have you hope we don't wait another couple of years. But yeah, we'll have you back on again soon. By the way, the prices of Solana back then. I don't even want to say it versus where it is. Today. It's going to be, but I am happy that a lot of people invested when we did that first show, but it was, it was in the admit these sub a dollar. Does that sound about right way back up the years ago?
Yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right.
As crazy crazy. Well, congrats on all your success and we'll talk again soon, right? Thank you so much. All right, that is it. I hope you enjoyed this episode and a quick reminder. If you're into n FTS and you want some really hardcore and if you coverage, you got to check out our new podcast called proof. Proof dot x y z is the URL head on over there and subscribe. That's it for now. Talk to you soon.
