In short
Podcast Notes: Raoul Pal: The Journey Man - Solana: The Past, Present and Future
Episode Overview
- Podcast Title: The Journeyman
- Episode Title: Solana: The Past, Present and Future
- Description: Raoul Pal interviews Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, discussing the current state and future prospects of the Solana ecosystem, highlighting key developments and the impact of technologies like AI and NFTs.
Key Themes and Concepts
The Exponential Age
- The world is undergoing rapid changes driven by technology, which presents both significant opportunities and unprecedented challenges.
- Exponential Growth: Technology evolves at an accelerating pace, making it challenging for humans to grasp its implications.
Solana Ecosystem
- Solana has demonstrated resilience, rebounding from challenges, notably the collapse of FTX.
- Anatoly discusses the community's response to adversity, emphasizing a collective commitment to innovation and development.
Key Developments in Solana
- Fire Dancer: A new high-performance client for Solana that aims to enhance network speed and efficiency.
- Compressed NFTs: A new standard for NFTs that allows for efficient tracking and management of digital assets.
Investment Insights
- Raoul Pal has increased his investment in Solana, emphasizing its potential to become a leading platform in the crypto space.
- Discussion around the applications layer and the speed layer, noting Solana's advantages in these areas.
Detailed Discussions
The Impact of FTX Collapse
- The FTX scandal was a severe shock to the crypto ecosystem, creating a gut-wrenching experience for many involved.
- The Solana community demonstrated resilience, with teams pivoting to focus on product development rather than dwelling on setbacks.
Advantages of Solana
- Speed and Cost: The Solana network is robust, handling millions of transactions without significant fees, making it attractive for developers and users alike.
- Diverse Applications: A variety of applications are being developed, from DeFi projects to NFTs, showcasing Solana's versatility.
Compressed NFTs
- Compressed NFTs represent a shift in how digital assets can be managed and traded, with potential applications in areas like ticketing and loyalty points.
- The technology enables broader access to NFT creation, moving beyond traditional art and collectibles.
Fire Dancer
- Fire Dancer aims to eliminate single points of failure in the Solana network, enhancing decentralization and fault tolerance.
- The project seeks to optimize the network's performance by allowing it to scale effectively with additional hardware.
Future Prospects of Solana
- The growth and development of the Solana ecosystem are viewed positively, with expectations for significant innovations and applications in the coming years.
- Raoul Pal encourages listeners to stay informed and engaged with Solana, emphasizing the potential for high-impact developments.
Conclusion
- The conversation between Raoul Pal and Anatoly Yakovenko provides valuable insights into the transformative potential of the Solana ecosystem.
- As technology continues to evolve, the implications for finance, decentralization, and community engagement will be profound, making Solana a critical area of focus for investors and enthusiasts alike.
Key Takeaways
- The rapid evolution of technology presents both opportunities and challenges.
- Solana has shown resilience and growth potential, particularly in application development.
- Innovations like Fire Dancer and compressed NFTs could redefine how we interact with digital assets and decentralization.
- Investors are encouraged to stay informed and explore the developments in the crypto space, particularly within the Solana ecosystem.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00People are going to lose their minds. This is a moment in history unlike anything humanity's gone through. It's a very different world for humans to come. Take a step back and see the broad picture, which is the way all these technologies are interlinked. Because this is all about exponentiality, and humans can't think in exponential terms. How consequential do you want to say machine intelligence is? It's almost certainly as consequential as writing. How long did writing take to disseminate through the human population? you know, hundreds, thousands of years. And we're dealing with it now on a scale of months.
0:33But in this kind of world, you're compounding 100 % growth every year, and the numbers become astronomical. AI is going to spot patterns in the world that were just completely invisible to us. Even if you think that the AI and the robots are your demise, you might as well bloody invest in them and make some money out of it. If not, you're just going to be angry man shaking your fists at the clouds.
1:06Hi, I'm Raoul Pal, and welcome to my show, The Journeyman. This is where I take you and myself on this journey of understanding at the nexus of macro, crypto, and exponential age technologies. Crypto has been a big part of my thesis going back to 2013, when I wrote one of the first, if not the first ever macro strategy piece on crypto. And I saw in Bitcoin a lot of the things that would give us the future of the financial system. And I was enamored by the space. And as the space developed, I realized it had become something more than just the financial system. It was absorbing culture. It was becoming the value layer of the internet overall.
1:52all. And if you remember my last conversation with Dan Tapiero, we talked about the scale of what's happening here and the adoption of people into the space and the kinds of companies being built. But first and foremost, like Dan, I'm an investor in the space and I hold tokens because that's something I look at and I do a lot of deep analysis in my work at Global Macro Investor. And we also do it at Real Vision in Real Vision Pro Crypto and Real Vision Pro Macro. That's where we do our deep thinking about this space. And it was about March 2021 that I first met Toli from Solana. I had a small position in Solana, and I was really impressed by him.
2:36We were at a panel at some very private events. And I got to know him a bit and had been observing it. And then when When things started blowing up in 2021, 2022, I started investing more seriously, thinking, okay, well, it's either going to go to zero, or this is basically Ethereum all over again in 2018. And I continued to monitor the space when FTX blew up, and I saw some magic happening, which was that people were coming behind this ecosystem and not walking away from it. And that gave me a lot of comfort that this was something big. And so my conviction levels over time have risen in this space.
3:24And recently, I was in New York where I heard Toli speak about, who's the co-founder of Solana, about Fire Dancer, Visa, compressed NFTs, and also some other people who I really respect, like Colleen Sullivan from Brevin Howard talking about this. And it made me really pay attention that there is a seismic shift about to happen in this particular ecosystem. And so I actually became a larger investor now in Solana than I am in anything else. Now, that's not for you to copy me or that I'm right. I could be stupidly wrong as well. But really, what's interesting to me is what they're doing and how it can really help move forward the entire crypto industry.
4:12We love to see different people, different ecosystems pioneering. I'm by far and away not a maxi of anything. What I care about is the entire space and the entire space going. I'm a macro guy as well, so I'll take bets on where I think who's outperforming whom and in what format. But Solana, I think to me, seems to be winning the race in the applications layer and also the speed layer. And those things combined means it's something that could get to a billion people. And that's what makes me pay attention. So what I really wanted to do was go straight to the horse's mouth and speak to Tully himself and to see what he thinks is happening in the Solana ecosystem.
5:00Because it's a decentralized ecosystem. They're not building everything. It's just other people do. But I really want to pick his brains and find out also what a lot of these big developments mean. What is FireDance rule about? Why does it matter? What are compressed NFTs? And I think these things that are being built here are going to be game-changing. Now, other ecosystems will bring other game-changing things too. But this to me right now is my focus. So I really wanted to chat to Toli to find out from him what he thinks is going on. I hope you enjoy it and get as much out of it as I do. Thank you.
5:40Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto, and exponential age landscapes. In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.
5:59Tony, fantastic to see you back on Real Vision. Yeah, thank you for having me. No, Tony, listen, before we start, I'm going to show you something. I'm going to share my screen. It's going to set some ground rules for us. Yeah. This is one of your tweets. I follow you and your tweets. I don't understand a single word. and it's it's it's hilarious because you know a you are you know very eloquent in how you deal with the community and how you do stuff and then also you're a incredible deep thinker on the ecosystem you're building and everything around it and i read these things and i'm like i don't really understand any single point there so you're gonna have to bear with me because i think about the world in macro terms and you know obviously as you know salam has been and what you've been building has been squarely on my radar screen as something truly incredible.
6:52So, you know, well done for what you're doing. What I'd love to get, because we spoke several months ago, I'd love to get a broader update on where you are, what you're building, what's coming, because there's some, you know, last time I saw you was at the main net event. And between you and Colleen Sullivan, who was talking about Fire Dancer, that was like a really kind of holy shit moment for me but you've got so much going on that is hard to keep up with so let's run down before we get to fire dancer let's go through what's exciting for you what's happening in the solana ecosystem because it for me it feels like everything everywhere all at once yeah honestly like this has been like kind of a hardest year emotionally but easiest year otherwise and uh what made it hard it was like just kind of having to deal with all the fun from ftx and kind of seeing the ecosystem have that shock and like it's it's hard like you feel it right like when something like that happens it's like really gut-wrenching and like felt like you know you get stabbed in the back it just sucks um but what made it easy is that like a lot of the folks both in the ecosystem and at labs and foundation that have been like here for like four years or so like that have been here for a while uh are at that point that they've kind of mastered their trade and they're really took control of everything and like i it felt like it felt very different i didn't have to like i felt like the ecosystem is like pushing more than me i mean it was it was amazing it was one of the things that got me super bullish on the ecosystem even though i've been a token holder for a long time was was seeing how the community dealt with the aftermath it was incredible right yeah yeah that was really like it was awesome to see it was awesome to talk for me to talk to dabs and for them to be like yeah it sucks but we can't there's no other place like that we can do what we want to do literally like we'd have to build our own blockchain and it's just like i don't want to do that that was like the response that i got from multiple different teams and that felt good i was like okay we have like our hardcore fans that have product vision like their only alternative is literally to build their own online and they think it's not worth it for them because they'd rather build product and i'm like that's great how did do you refocus yourself at that point because as you said it's actually emotionally very hard to go through to see all of this i suck at this raj is really good he's got that like emergency room doctor i think vibe i i'm like okay at it like it's not like a panic or whatever but he is able to just like tell the story and the narrative and like kind of like reframe things to where I'm my brain is not just like focused on the on the failure over and over I tend to like get stuck in a loop where I'm like kind of just over and over thinking about the worst possible outcome that's a really good thing for the engineer brain because like when you're doing systems design that's what you want to do if you want to think about the worst possible outcome all the time uh but not good for probably every other aspect of life is that how you and raj tend to balance each other out yeah for sure for sure yeah he's he's been there's been lots of moments like this i mean every startup i think has had like a bunch of near-death experiences so like i would say i would say raj has always been able to like work through those without uh with like while i'm like panicking like this is like everything's gonna collapse at the same time yeah you've got to be an optimistic pessimist and so yeah between the two of you kind of balance that out it can be the optimist you can be the pessimist and you find the right solution in the end yeah what has happened what the hell has happened to the salt ecosystem this year so you get through that crisis the community gets together and it it explodes yeah like first of all like what is the community it's not um there's no like list right there's no like single org or anything like that it's a bunch of people that choose to go build on solana because there's something that they like about it um and there was this public perception prior right that like the only reason people built on Solana was because of SPF.
11:35At least that was like a lot of the, you know, I'd say Ethereum maxis. On Twitter would try to spin that narrative. When in reality, like reality is far different. You know, like people have done surveys, like what percentage of devs had even investments from Alameda. It wasn't anywhere near even the majority, let alone like the plurality. that plurality so like the that like the ecosystem is big and it's amorphous and people build for different reasons a lot of them are like almost like counter uh macro cyclical to crypto at all and these are people that have like very long deployment like life cycles and these long roadmaps that just have a ton of like execution and from their perspective like is the network still up okay like i don't really care what's going on these are folks like helium hive mapper and stuff they do depend on a macro but what they really care about is like their product working and shipping and all the stuff that's involved there is just much much deeper logistics than has to do anything with like the price of bitcoin today so there's just kind of like this big ecosystem, this one event happened and it was a shock to everyone because it was so public and such a massive like amount of fraud happened that felt like a stab in the back.
13:08I think to me personally, to, I think a lot of people like can only imagine like the, you know, the investors that put their reputation on the line, like Sequoia and stuff like that, right? This is their whole careers that like, or go up in smoke over this one really, really bad actors. It's terrible, right? For everyone involved, let alone like the customers and stuff. So like, it's a massive shock. And like, it felt like the world has fallen apart, but when we can't just like do nothing. So we thought like, what's the most important thing is probably find which teams had like their runway severely impacted because they kept it on FTX.
13:51And this was something that was like, those teams are like the most in trouble, right? Like shit has really hit the fan for them. So we talked to a bunch of teams. Luckily, vast majority of them like have not. And in some ways, this is like to thank the Fed because the Fed started raising rates. a lot of people just rotated into t-bills like because short-term t-bills give you like pretty decent rate the lending rates on every platform have like went down so it was like kind of like a no-brainer for most teams that had like an accountant or somebody managing their funds uh some teams got hit really badly like word sell guys and i would say like the biggest one would be like Armani, like Backpack.
14:37And they did have enough runway for like 18 months. And this is something that Raj and I got good at, at like telling the story. Look, Solana had nine months of runway in 2020. We had to do layoffs. Like everything was like on fire, COVID hit, and we launched. And like, you have to, 18 months is a massive amount of time. It's actually all you should plan for as a seed stage founder is an 18 month cycle. you have to get to like, you have to prove something that is worth like going to the next stage, either with revenue or growth. Like you have to prove PMF is a possibility within that 18 months.
15:13If you think that you have more than that, you failed already. Like even if you have more runway than that, like you really need to think in like 18 months terms. So we were able to like, just like get a lot of the founders refocused and probably backpack guys are like the best example of this. They just like, just the energy were like, think they were angry like they got impacted personally their company got really screwed and they just pulled all that energy into like basically working you know like and they wanted to expand the team instead they expanded the hours that everyone worked by like and they crushed it right they like really focused on growth and um building a really strong community and product and have this amazing nft launch and everything just kind of worked out for them.
16:02But now, at every stage, they went strategically to what is the next product that we can build? Now they're building a full exchange that is already live and had the PIT token launch. So it wasn't just roadmaps or anything like that. They really, really executed. So maybe it's possible that if they didn't keep their funds on FTX and they had it all in T-bills and they had you know the five years of runway they would have been on this old plan of like slow grow like there's kind of like the silver a bit of hunger a bit of anger goes a long way yeah exactly and this is what we had in 2019 2020 because we always felt that our competitors raised from like all the top branded vcs we didn't we're like our biggest branded vc was multi-coin that is not it's not a 16z as much as i love kyle like so and our competitors raise five to ten times more than us so we have that kind of hunger in us one of the things that i've always observed about the slana ecosystem is how much applications layer stuff is being built that i think is a big differentiator to me you know and people migrating onto it helium stuff like that hive mapper you know even backpack all of this this is something different why is that happening and what is going on there yeah so we actually solved scale like no bullshit that's why is that uh the chain is cheap and fast and has large capacity um recently i think you saw like somebody built this new NFT token standard, very terribly named SPL 20.
17:48So taking a number from Ethereum and an acronym from Solana that are completely unrelated to NFTs and mixing them together. And because of that, the network did like three times more transactions a day. Went from like 18 million to 50 million transactions for the day when this thing launched. and there were no problems on chain. So we actually solved scale to a very, very impactful amount of capacity. We've never hit a limit to where transaction fees globally have spiked, which in my mind, that's a failure point in a communication network is when you're saturated, typically in a radio cell tower network.
18:33Hey, you're saturated. That's a bug. Go deploy more hardware. We've never been there. so everything that we focus on is not scaling technologies it's application level technologies and there is some overlap with scaling technologies like zk there's folks like like protocol but they're not building a layer two that builds sdks for developers to go build very optimized zero knowledge based systems for privacy for different kinds of performance improvements that the chain can't do, but we're not here to build more layers or frameworks. So there's no funding for that for Solana. It would be, I imagine, very hard to raise for a Solana layer two because the economics don't make sense.
19:24On Ethereum, you have a very expensive layer one, and your layer two, you can at least say, hey, we'll extract value somewhere between the optimal cost, which is what Solana's at, and Ethereum at one cost will be the middleman that can take a rake at that rate. And that's because of how expensive Ethereum is, that's actually a valuable proposition. You cannot do that on Solana because the costs on Solana are already so cheap. And when there are fees, they're for hotspots and another layer doesn't solve hotspots. There's no solution to database hotspots. So all the devs, all the investments is into applications.
20:02how do we actually build stuff that people use yeah and that's you know everyone says well where's the use cases i see them popping up you know all over the place i don't think yet people understand how big the compressed nfts are you know we've seen drip house they're kind of thinking you know most people just think of nfts as you know the usual kind of art or pfps i'm like no no this is solved kind of unique smart contracts at scale that could work for ticketing could work for anything how are you thinking through that yeah this was again um this was some somebody like an idea that we've had floating around for a long time and in fact the post that you the tweet that you share that you couldn't understand it's talking about compressions we've been talking about this for like generalized version of compression forever compression all i know is from silicon valley that the show yeah in a lot of ways like i think real life is is stranger than fiction it's a technology to uh to track assets on chain without using a lot of state and state is expensive um and it can be generalized to many things but nfts were like kind of the first use case that people really desperately wanted this because there are applications like ticketing like loyalty points all sorts of different things that could really really use a very very cheap blockchain they can track assets very cheaply so we built it and drip house was one of the first folks this is the webo the guy that actually started solano spaces a lot of people think that solano spaces was like built by solano no this is like a solo entrepreneur that was like hey i'm gonna try something in crypto and he had experience with retail and he got i think a grant from the foundation to go try it out, but it was his baby.
21:51So he pivoted to digital assets and he built this platform that's based on the idea that you can have artists that mint NFTs to large audiences. Like you have like Instagram style followers, you have 30, 50 ,000 followers. They pay a subscription fee if that's how the artist wants to monetize. And the artist just makes art every week or whatever and like goes mints it and amass it. And you can, you know, make some more rare, some art you can have rarity all the stuff that you can do with nfts you can do with compressed nfts but it's a different model because now you have kind of like an abundance of art you have as many artists as you can onboard with as many followers as you can onboard there's you're not really trying to play games around like 10 000 nft mint that's very hyped you're really trying to build a relationship between artists and the followers i just think there's going to be a lot of really incredible applications coming out of this because i don't think anybody's got their heads around what this enables yeah we can track salmon on chain if that's what people want to do yeah because it's a unique identifier yeah i think a lot of those applications are in people imagine them they're post product market fit crypto it's like when everyone already has like a crypto wallet when apple is shipping a crypto wallet right like we're gonna have lots of different applications that all make sense now.
23:14Kind of like in the 90s, people all dreamt of everything that we have now, but it was just too early because you don't have that deep understanding of what cryptography is, what signing is, and custody that people do with the web. And that's a learned thing. People had to learn what a link is, even if now links are much, much easier and safer to click than in the 90s. They still had to learn it and their brain had to understand that mental model myself right like people that have been in crypto i think we all kind of now naturally get what a wallet is like everyone has like even though you don't understand cryptography you get what a wallet does you get what a seed fray does um people don't get that yet so we need that like broad human base to understand this and then like google apple shame is that um that instagram didn't continue on the project i'm sure they'll come back i'm sure they will but that was a big shame right because that was so close yeah so like compressed nfts would have been perfect for them and i think drip house basically like is demonstrating that the instagram model would work which is awesome um so like yeah i hope they're watching like what the ecosystem is doing and uh when they do come back you know well i mean you know the team there and i know the team there and they're all web3 proponents but they just got for sure you know you've got to have some balls to say in this space yep um yeah when meta stock dropped like by bajillion percent and like zuckerberg was like we need to cut costs all the innovation teams got shut down yeah we're like welcome to crypto this is the way the world works right i've been here since 2012 it's never changed and what about um the defy side because that seems to be growing fast as well what's happening there yeah this was the kind of the biggest surprise one is that like Like we thought Solano was perfect for DeFi when we were designing it, really building in this idea that cheaper, faster for finance is always better.
25:17And it's been a struggle to get adoption there, especially after the FTX collapse. But there were really, really strong teams like Margin, like Solon, like Jito, Jupiter, all these guys that just kept building through the bear market, through all the black spot of events and are now like I think at that next stage of maturity to where they're really hitting the growth you know hitting growth mode and it's really really awesome to see like Gito's like numbers are like literally look like a hockey stick so and what kind of applications they building DeFi world is it all about yield or is it you know swap it what are they doing yeah DeFi is basically like decentralized markets right these are different kinds of markets and these are markets for lending or markets for trading or staking and probably kind of like some of the more interesting ones are like where like the defi application like gito and it intersects like l1 staking security because you could have a stake pool that now runs this mev optimized code that can then give back the profits that it's getting from mev to the entire stake pool so And then you're earning like normal L1 staking yield, but on top, you're also earning GITO yields on top of that.
26:40So you have like these really cool applications that are now like really tying layer one decentralization to DeFi. That means that DeFi that really depends on censorship persistence and decentralization now has like direct financial impact on the network itself in a positive way. And that's really, really good to see. So if these trends continue and DeFi really takes off and you have trading and finance and all this stuff running in the network, you have these really, really positive loops where the people that really care about the network being decentralized from a censorship-resistant and fault-tolerant point of view are the ones that are also depleting DeFi.
27:23so they're constantly monitoring it. It's not just like these two separate like groups of people, the validators and the application users. That crossover makes everything better and faster and like just more connected. So to me, like that, just really, really good to see in the long term. But obviously like DeFi is the most important app, I think, for crypto. It's the biggest innovation, I think, that crypto brought to the world. It's the one that's the hardest for adoption because this is software eating part of finance that humans really, really do not want to give up control of. They like being the middleman and earning like a free percentage point off somebody else's money, right?
28:06Like if software can do it for 10 times less, that like they don't like to give that up. But I think it's inevitable. There's just no way that within, you know, 20 years, whatever, 50 years, that all this stuff isn't running in software. And I think it'll be faster because I think the financial community knows this as well. Yeah. I mean, they're not stupid, right? JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Blackstone, Apollo. I mean, they all know it. They all know it. And they've all got teams building. If this is a true disruption, it means it should compress their profits, right? Like this is what disruption brings.
28:40Yeah. But I think they will end up pivoting their business models because of it. Yeah. You know, I'm sure that these big pools of capital will become liquidity providers in DeFi world to get returns, stuff like that. And that's a game changer. Hey, everyone. We're going to take a quick pause and hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back.
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29:59Back to Backpack. What are they doing there? Because I've been following this story. It looks interesting. What's going on? Yeah, after the collapse of FTX, There were a lot of people that really like, you know, fight or flight, I think is like what people experience. Some people really want to fight. And Armani and Tristan and those folks, I think one of the people that really like want to fight. So their initial gut reaction was like, we're going to build a better exchange than FTX or it could be that's hyper transparent with MPC for like, you know, proof of customer funds and things like that.
30:37So this is what they're building in and shipping. So over the last year, they basically like on their Skunk Works team and running on fumes, they built both the wallet, the NFT ecosystem for Madlabs and now launch an exchange. And that means like it's a centralized exchange, but it's fully licensed, you know, like wherever, you know, they're doing the whole centralized exchange play, which is fine. I think those systems should exist because they're the ones that can really connect much easier to fiat rails right now than DeFi rails. And eventually, I hope that that changes right away. I would like Bank of America as a direct rail onto Solana.
31:22That would be my dream. But that's not where we're at right now. So it's awesome to see them just execute. um and like there's another team that was launched by um product of engineering director at solana bartosh so he quit labs and built his own exchange called cube also like hyper focused on security there's mpc of your customer funds when they're at rest so you actually like they're they built the system such that they don't even hold the funds directly it's holds it's held by like you know third parties and a multi multi-party wallet which is really really cool and segregated by each user right so like you have both fund segregation and npc for for all the funds and they're just building a technology to do all the the trading and everything else so like really really both of them took this idea that like not only do we not want to this to ever happen again we want to make it impossible for it to happen again and that's what i love about this space like it learns this failure out of failure is this unbelievably fast product cycle of which they then look at what where it failed rebuild and it keeps learning you know you see it all the time it's incredible the speed at which people do it in crypto is beyond comprehension for sure this is probably the fastest industry, I think.
32:53I mean, it's definitely the fastest one I've ever been a part of. AI is pretty scary fast. I honestly think product cycles in crypto are faster. Because also, because of how you can raise capital and go to market, it's such a fast cycle. It just breeds innovation. People understand failure risk and that net-net, the space just keeps growing over time. Yeah, for sure. NFTs are also picking up, right? I know the compressed NFTs, but we're starting to see more people building in the space, more people downloading Phantom Wallet. We're seeing a lot more of that. That's been a big spike. Why are people moving across to Solana for NFTs?
33:34Is it because of disposable income? Because people are making money in Solana, they want to own Solana assets? Outside of the compression algorithm, because obviously it's very cheap and fast to do stuff um that like i think it's hard for me to tell like i i think you kind of see maybe the nft markets are like the tip of the spear of the bull cycle i hope i don't know i just think of them as trophy assets you know for the typical nfts we're talking about these days so you make some money in solana you buy some nfts and you you kind of you still get your solana exposure i think like stuff like mad lads and like planos you steer you're seeing like very strong credible teams like continue to to like ship on their vision um and that's attracting people like i think there's other things like spl 20s and things like that which are kind of like this weird uh inscription ordinals kind of thing but people are are like learning what what the different like they're still messing around and it's still not clear what what the uh value prop is there but um like it's kind of like the nft space has always been like much much faster even the general crypto like in terms of cycles of what's cool for what's up and coming so i don't know uh it is like surprising to me like whenever like things pop off there but oftentimes it's really like tip of the spear what like becomes the narrative later on.
35:09Yeah, it's always worth watching because all of the memetics, all of the narrative all comes out of that space. And you don't see it until later when you look back and go, oh, I get it now. This was, you know, culture was moving in this direction. So let's talk about Fire Dancer because I think this is another, like the compressed NFTs, this is such a big change. Talk us through the story of it and what it does. I think of decentralization in a very kind of measurable way. I think it's very important to try to ground it in some reality. So in my mind, it has to be observably measurable. And the point of it is fault tolerance.
35:52It's obvious to me, but it's just how likely is it that the network has this irrecoverable, horrible failure? right and and making something more decentralized means removing single points of failure and one of the last and hardest single points of failure to remove is um different teams implementing the exact same protocol for the layer one for the under for the whole thing ethereum has done like kind of a remarkable job there i think that four different implementations of the ethereum layer one it's one of the reasons why things would move much much slower in ethereum is because there's four for different implementations.
36:31But it's also why they are like the, you know, the leader in decentralization is you can actually point to that and say, look, there's four different client teams that understand the protocol and have re-implemented it. Different code bases. So the probability of a bug existing in two implementations built by two different teams in different languages, the exact same bug is virtually zero unless it's a design. um so fire dancers separate team writing in a separate language writing it in c c++ uh and most of the team is out of uh the high frequency trading team at a jump so they're super hardware guys super fast performing co guys it's not that labs folks are not it's just they also uh have a they see the start and end of the of the maze and they can actually draw just a straight lives while we had to meander through the maze and do like research and R &D and build it while trying to survive.
37:34So they get to build this from the ground up as optimized as possible. And what's cool is so far there haven't needed to be any changes to the underlying protocol to demonstrate that it can scale elastically with more hardware. What they're really trying to show that if you add cores to any part of the system, that it just becomes faster. and once you show that that's kind of our philosophy is that you're basically done in terms of engineering because if you don't have enough cores today you have twice as many cores in two years you're probably good enough yeah because it all scales with Moore's law as well I guess exactly it's been awesome to see them really show that the exact same Solana protocol they're able to achieve like and saturate 20 gigabit networks with like four cores and different components um and right now they have gotten uh what they call franken dancer it's fire dancer code for the network stack but solana labs code for the validation like playing and franken because it's a frankenstein yeah exactly running on tesla which is a huge milestone because having the network code connected and work with the rest of the network is uh probably the biggest pain in the butt because it's hardest to verify kind of largest surface to code against.
38:56So my hope is that by next breakpoint, they have a full client running on mainnet. And once we have that, now we have no single points of failure, right? Like in my mind, that's kind of that milestone where I can say, hey, let's stop calling Solana mainnet beta. We can call it mainnet. There's no single points of failure. there's there's all all the protocol like possible things that we could fix are fixed more or less but there's still like you know it's not done like like linux hardware always changes um and like you'll always have improvements that you can make to make the to make the software like utilize the hardware better and cheaper and firedance's speed is a different order of magnitude isn't it Yeah.
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39:44So like, it's the same exact design. This is kind of what people don't understand. It's not like Solana 2.0. It literally is the same implementation of Solana. It's just they're able to spend the time to take the different components and test them to a much larger network bandwidth throughput. and because they're able to do this one component at a time they can see the bottlenecks and the algorithms and identify them and kind of restructure them if they need to or if there is actually like some algorithm that needs to be changed there's a process now to propose those changes and then get them accepted and get like labs in and fired answer to agree in those algorithms so far they haven't needed to do that but if that if they ever hit that bottleneck we can do that too does that change the whole speed of the entire salon network or is there is there a routing choice you have to take so to maintain like what we want is two clients ideally split 50 50 by stake but at least 33 of them running both clients something like that would work too where users can then switch primary to secondary right and fail over if one is having trouble so once you have that you kind of have safety and liveness guarantees that you can you can manage so what we want is then for the labs client to then like be the limiting factor in terms of how fast the network goes and have the labs engineers then figure out what are the limits how do we like what algorithms do we need to optimize and then as that happens and as validators add faster hardware, you can then increase the limits that are configured on the network.
41:30Like the block limits like exist in Ethereum, there's block limits in Solana. So you can then bump them up. The number of compute units will go from like, you know, 48 million to 96 million. So you'll be able to do twice as many NFT mints or something like that. But so far we haven't hit our current limits to a point where they're economically saturated. Yeah. And so theoretically, this fired answer raises the TPS to kind of 10x where it is now. Is that the right understanding of it or is it not? Yeah, that's what they can show. They can prove that the TPS can be raised to that capacity if the mainnet validators have the right hardware.
42:12So if they can prove the software works at that limit, then all it takes is for the mainnet validators to go get that hardware. And that will eventually happen even if we do nothing. Because your hardware gets old, you're forced to upgrade, but your data's on here. so like so even if we do nothing it'll eventually happen uh if there's no like encouragement or whatever but like my guess is that if there's demand to the point that like there's so much users coming on to crypto coming on to solana that now hardware is a limiting factor it's going to be the easiest thing to for people because you can literally just order it from amazon and go put it in your box and so when i look at when i saw fire dancer and seeing jump trading it makes it it moved one step towards being able to build the financial system on this right because it's the kind of speed you know you guys have done the deal with visa and stuff like that but visa's tps is not like high frequency trading tps or traditional exchanges and all this all the big securities market when i saw that that's what went through my head immediately is oh fuck this is massive because this is what the securities industry needs that's the goal like i think there is this dream i don't you know it's kind of a science fiction not like how realistic is it as realistic as google's dream to index all of the world right and they did it like but it is a dream that you could have a single giant, like hyper-optimized atomic state machine that's synchronized at the speed of light around the world.
43:56Meaning that like, soon as some financial event happens, like in Singapore, it starts propagating around the world to every other node. And it's like, that information is just like, imagine going through speed of light through fiber to everywhere else. That that system exists and it's Solana and it's scales to both support Visa and Nasdaq at the same time and NFTs and Jupiter and all this stuff in a single atomic composable computer because the benefit of that, I think, is just kind of like astounding for finance. Like you see this in like Jupiter, like the silliest example is that you can do a 20 cent trade in Jupiter, like you swap 20 cents and it'll hit five different marketplaces because it's more efficient that way.
44:42So imagine if you were like at a exchanging foreign currency at the airport and you had 20 cents to change into 20 euros and you went to five different markets because it's cheaper that way. You can't do that because they all have a flat fee that they charge. It's, you know, like at least a dollar. Right. So those are the inefficiencies of the real world financial system is that every one of these marketplaces to talk to them, you pay a little bit of fee and a little bit of sand in the gears. But in one giant computer where things are as cheap and as fast as moving electrons around, you don't have any of those inefficiencies.
45:20And this is what I imagine science fiction society runs on, their finance on. like in the right like they don't run it in a bunch of different kiosks so that each one just becomes the architecture for everything to be right right right like what do you imagine like you know a thousand years from now and like utopia right like how does finance run it's in one giant computer that's extremely fault tolerant with a bajillion different implementations and like no that it's all synchronized at the speed of light and there's zero cost to talk to as many financial systems as you want in a in a single transaction that's i don't know if it was you said this or somebody talks about this is a lot of people in crypto don't understand how fast and how many transactions happen in tradfi and it's like jump trading if you read michael lewis's book um um what was it called the one about high frequency trading basically their whole game is and you're not joking when you say the speed of light it's how short and how fat can you make the fiber optic cable?
46:27How close to the exchange? And there is massive competition amongst those people because the end output being the fastest is money. And if you can do that for a globalized financial system, that becomes super interesting. Yeah. And those markets will still exist, but my belief is theoretically a market running in this hyper-optimized version of Solana can be as good as those in terms of price discovery. Because when you have some crazy market moving event happens in Singapore, that information of that event still has to go to New York. So there's still latency from Singapore to New York for that news to travel.
47:07What's cool is that because Solana is global, the state transition can start propagating from Singapore around the world too. So by the time it hits that NASDAQ microwave trading system in New York, when they look at a price at NASDAQ and a market in Solana, they're actually the same. So there is no arbitrage for that news anymore. By the time it hits that geographical spot. And this is why I think something like Solana could be competitive with these super hyper-optimized decentralized systems. And that's really, really cool. That means that this decentralized technology can be better, not because it's decentralized, but because it is actually cheaper, faster, and open, and better price discovery.
47:54That means it's going to win eventually. Even if we fail because we suck, somebody else will pick up this idea and we'll make it happen. So I think it's an inevitability and like i'm excited to be like pushing it the fastest like as fast as i can it's going to be interesting to see you know the big you know trend right now is rwa real world assets but you know in my mind when i first saw bitcoin back in 2012 the idea that i saw is immediately that all financial assets can just go on chain as a way of transacting just as a simple thing like that just for proven ownership transferability speed and instant settlement and it's interesting to see crack and buy i think they're buying a traditional equity market exchange i just feel like somebody's going to crack that in this cycle for sure yeah it's coming um i think there's a lot of like nuance and local regulation that you have to go through and this has been like the the biggest problem i wish man i i wish the u.s was just like a little faster because what should be happening is that u.s should be passing like the market structure bill the stable coin bill and then telling europe and everyone else follow these guidelines and standardize on them so we can just like move everything faster at a much faster pace but like so far we've got half half like half measures like it's moving but like nowhere near as fast as it should be it doesn't help that they keep mentioning solana and a bunch of other things as things that are, you know, securities or not securities, but, you know, everyone's getting prosecuted for stuff that's not gone through courts or not been ruled on.
49:41It's kind of impossible. How do you deal with it? I think U.S. is the best place to be like an entrepreneur. Like being outside of the U.S. is not going to protect you. Like I don't think it matters. So from my point of view and kind of analysis is that we were going to have to comply with U.S. laws regardless. For sure. Like no matter what we do. Um, so might as well be here because your lease can show them like things like helium and like hive mapper and look, be like, there's a direct benefit to your constituents. People offering a$5 data plan because it's built on crypto and it can move much faster than Verizon and AT &T to deploy 5G in like rural areas and stuff like that.
50:23And like, I think things like that, when you show that to us Congress people, they actually notice and it makes sense to them and they're much more eager to move stuff forward. So like from my perspective, like it doesn't matter where you start a crypto company because it is global. But if you're in the US, you have as good of a shot at like succeeding as anywhere else. And you'd have to think about United States, even if you're outside of the US. Where are the big tech companies in this whole space? I mean, I speak to a whole bunch of them and they're, you know, they're there in the background, but nobody's made the big move.
50:58what are you what sense are you getting um i think there's hard for them to figure out how to make revenues here like i think there's been some movement on like nfts like being more open to nfts and like google play store and things like that i think apple's going to be far behind on this because all those companies make money from controlling content and charging for it it's hard for them to kind of still figure out how do we how do we make money from like peer-to-peer content but um i think they'll figure it out like i think they just need to kind of like set up a model where they get a percentage of the revenues that the marketplace gets versus the percentage of the total sale like this is like hard for them to give that up because i think that would shrink their profits because why would why would any game like give them a percentage of the total sale versus just their marketplace, you know?
51:57Yeah, but we're seeing, I mean, they're under threat. Google themselves are under threat because of AI anyway, getting rid of advertising, SEO, and all of this stuff. So they're going to have to change at some point and figure out new business models. Yeah, my guess is that the threat of AI actually makes them even more conservative in crypto because it's another disruptor to their business model and dealing with two is going to be even harder. so we'll see what happens um i think what's cool is that ai is a new user experience if you're a developer listening to this i would actually think of ai as your opportunity to like um bypass the current existing applications and build a gpt style like ux app as a new meta like whatever app you're building make it a text interface you're talking to a robot that does your things like you've seen some of the success in this and like some things like uh the unibot or whatever telegram yeah i think those are very very limited applications but like if you're really building like you want to build a financial super app like think of gpt as your new user experience meta and that's your opportunity to like kind of outflank all the other existing applications that have these visual user experiences that then have to shoot horn gpt into them so you actually have an opportunity to go like the other way um and it doesn't mean that you'll succeed but like it's very very hard to compete head-to-head with an existing dominant player because like humans are very very sticky in their behaviors yeah i think that makes total sense it's it's a whole different UX layer that people don't yet understand.
53:47The magnitude of what's just happened in AI is staggeringly big, and people are just trying to get their heads around it. Right now, they think of it as like a hyper-powered search. It's like, no, it's none of these things. It's a much, much bigger thing. So what gets you most excited about the space overall and Solana over the next two years? Because it feels like the two-year cycle, this is going to be the madness, the opportunity my general idea is this is the everything everywhere all at once where we're going to see a lot of applications yeah every hackathon that we've had the quality of people and the products has gone up now it's been even like after the ftx collapse the net our next hackathon had more submissions than the previous one and the quality was higher and it was like Like such a relief to see that.
54:41Like I like was able to take a breath when I kind of saw those folks. So like, and especially this last hackathon is just really exciting. That's really, I think what I'm looking forward to is like new companies forming and new products being brought online. And then like, it's a very long cycle from those. Like I would say one in 20 go from that hackathon winner, where they have a product that might or might not have a chance of PMF to actually getting a semblance of PMF and having some stickiness and being able to form a company that can raise and stuff. It's still very, very hard, but you basically need to maximize the number of smart people coming into the space, trying things and seeing what happens.
55:29For me, there's going to be a lot of applications layer stuff this time around. And that's all of that VC money, the$67 billion that went in in 2020, 2021 into all of crypto. I think just a large proportion of that will end up being applications, which will be a game changer. I think VCs have been really reluctant to invest in apps because there's not a lot of like outside success stories that you can point to. I think it's all been in for investment. and this is why you see more investment in ethereum is because you can still kind of like you know you can say well this is like a new spin at a layer two technology and it's fully deleted valuation is probably going to be like one to three billion dollars so why wouldn't i invest at a hundred so this is like i think kind of like the trap i don't know kind of yeah this is like the the middle income trap of ethereum because they're stuck on infra development they can't get How many bloody layer twos do you need?
56:31That's the question. I mean, look, we're all Ethereum fans, but there is a limit to the number of layer twos you need. Yep. I mean, like the fact that we're able to build up, like focus so much more on applications, I think is the, maybe Solana actually has more investment in applications than Ethereum. I wouldn't be surprised because it's really, really most of it is focused on app development. Yeah. I think that makes total sense. And Tony, listen, fantastic to catch up with you. And good luck for the next couple of years. Let's see where we get to. I just think it's going to be very interesting and be not what we expect.
57:08I imagine that's the usual thing. For sure. Thank you so much. All right. Good to see you, my friend. So I managed to hold Tony off from having a too technical conversation because he is a very smart guy and he understands the space incredibly deeply and the technology. But what I tried to do was get him to tell us how this technology can be applied and what it can do. And I just think it's fascinating what's being built. Things like Helium, where you've got a telecom network being built on top of Solana with a reward system, or HiveMapper, which is a hive mind Google Maps. Or you've got exchanges being built.
57:52You've got Drip House sending out millions of NFTs. And this is just the start of what the technology is going to enable. So this is a story of technology, but it's also the story of how technology can enable mass adoption. And to me, the Solana space is definitely one to keep your eye on. Now, whether my bet's right that of the major layer ones, this is its cycle, that remains to be seen. Don't listen to me. Do your own homework. and hopefully this was part of it. Thanks so much. People are going to lose their minds. This is a moment in history unlike anything humanity's gone through. It's a very different world for humans to come.
58:31Take a step back and see the broad picture, which is the way all these technologies are interlinked. Because this is all about exponentiality and humans can't think in exponential terms. How consequential do you want to say machine intelligence is? It's almost certainly as consequential as writing. How long did writing take to disseminate through the human population? You know, hundreds, thousands of years. And we're dealing with it now on a scale of months. But in this kind of world, you're compounding 100 % growth every year. And the numbers become astronomical. AI is going to spot patterns in the world that were just completely invisible to us.
59:10Even if you think that the AI and the robots are your demise, you might as well bloody invest in them and make some money out of it. If not, you're just going to be angry man shaking your fists at the clouds.
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SOL is pumping, so we got Anatoly Yakovenko to stop by…
Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, joins Raoul for a deep dive into the present and future state of the Solana ecosystem. From surviving the FTX collapse, to compressed NFTs and Firedancer, Raoul and Toly cover it all. Recorded on November 27, 2023.
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