How Solana’s Founder Sees Crypto Transforming Global Finance, AI Innovation, and American Opportunity | Anatoly Yakovenko Pt 2

Welcome to Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu! In this episode, Tom Bilyeu sits down for part two of his fascinating conversation with Anatoly Yakovenko, the creator of Solana. Together, they dive deep into the future of finance, the interplay between politics and technology, and how crypto and AI are shaping our world. Anatoly Yakovenko shares his unique perspective as an immigrant from the former USSR, reflecting on the distinctly American spirit of innovation, self-reliance, and problem-solving. He offers insights into how feedback loops in democracy, technological advancements, and economic incentives drive both progress and setbacks in the United States. The duo explores the challenges of building trust in an increasingly digital world—from cryptographic signatures to the limits of human perception—and discuss how AI is rapidly transforming everything from software engineering to healthcare. Anatoly Yakovenko reveals how crypto is cutting out middlemen, democratizing financial access, and why meme coins and speculative culture are here to stay. Get ready for an episode packed with optimism, critical thinking, and a clear-eyed assessment of the innovations and hurdles ahead in tech, governance, and society. Whether you’re a crypto enthusiast or just curious about the forces reshaping our world, this conversation will give you plenty to think about. Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpodHomeServe: Help protect your home systems – and your wallet – with HomeServe against covered repairs. Plans start at just $4.99 a month at https://homeserve.comShopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Pique: 20% off at https://piquelife.com/impactNetSuite: Right now, get our free business guide, Demystifying AI, at https://NetSuite.com/Theory https://netsuite.com/Theory Ketone IQ: Visit https://ketone.com/IMPACT for 30% OFF your subscription orderAquaTru: 20% off your purifier with code IMPACT https://aquatru.comIncogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impactSintra AI: 72% off with code IMPACT at https://sintra.ai/impactHuel: High-Protein Starter Kit 20% off for new customers at https://huel.com/impact code impactBevel Health: Visit https://bevel.health/impact and use code IMPACT to get your first month free. What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show: https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call: https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/: https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu FOLLOW ANATOLY YAKOVENKO Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko Solana Foundation: https://solana.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

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• 1:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Welcome back to part two of this incredible conversation. Without further ado, here we go. Okay, so you brought up the USSR. What do you think would happen to crypto if the, what I think is the Democratic Party fully embracing socialism? What happens to crypto in that scenario? Because that gives me a way to get outside of a system where they can snatch all my stuff.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  I'm again, an optimist. I think you start seeing the ebbs and flows. People call one side socialist, the other side fascist. But when you actually look into it, or if you're an immigrant with experience in either one of those, you're like, yeah, come on, give me a break.

• 1:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, in my defense, they call themselves a New York socialist. So you look at that and you think, nah, this is a watered down American version that we don't have to worry about.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  You do worry about it and people should push back and like be critical of bad proposals. And like really actually like test people like you really, you know, the problem you're trying to solve is solved by building more houses or building more hospitals. And you haven't built any of those things in the last 10 years. So you're full of shit. Like give them that feedback. And I think the feedback loops in the US are fast enough that. The people who want to get elected, want to get elected so badly that they will do the right thing if you push them on it. This is, I think, the best part. They want to get elected, right? That's their career. That's the career they chose. So there is incentive for them to,

• 2:44Speaker 01

  like, do the right thing if that's what will get them elected. So it's ultimately up to the the people and the voters to kind of push them on meaningful, measurable, like, results. Where a lot of problems come in is like, people like, you know, claim that they solved housing affordability with subsidies, but no new houses being built. So you got to call them in that bullshit. You haven't solved anything because you have the same number of houses, no matter how you move the numbers around. Some more people, fewer houses, somebody's screwed. You haven't solved affordability unless you build stuff. But that requires kind of, that's ultimately up to the people. And I think there's enough smart people that kind

• 3:28Speaker 01

  of push back on stuff that I think ultimately things work out. I think

• 3:36Speaker 01

  neither, like, even the worst administration, like, Gensler and Warren and all this stuff during the last four years, had no meaningful impact on crypto adoption slowing down. Like, I think stablecoin growth went like 5X or something like that during those four years. And this is because a lot of the adoption is happening outside of the US. And because they don't have these trusted financial systems that can guarantee that when I send you money, you actually receive it, especially cross-border, like Argentina to China, who are you going to trust, right? If you go through the traditional finance channels that are trusted, you're paying a lot and it takes 14 days, like 10-plus days to settle, like, that it's just.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Business people that need to get products and services shipped immediately to sell them will use the rails that work and crypto actually works and it and it removes all all those intermediaries and removes a whole bunch of failure cases. So you're not going to be able to stop that from the United States, no matter what the next administration tries to do. So from my perspective, I think kind of it doesn't really matter. Like, I think who's in charge. It matters for founders. Like founders will just move offshore where they don't have to deal with the hassle of like paying the lawyers and figuring out like all of the stuff. They'll just move to Singapore or some other place like that, like they did during those four years.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  But I think in terms of products and real adoption, not much will change. Like it'll it'll continue growing no matter what.

• 5:14Tom Bilyeu?

  So I have a giant region of my brain dedicated to America needing to avoid becoming a has been.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Which happens all throughout history. And so I am, I am also optimistic, but my optimism is really about humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. We can get very good at anything that we apply ourselves to, but history tells me that countries can and do go wrong for very long periods of time and that people will suffer. And so I have a much higher degree of paranoia than you do. So I look at this and I'm like, ooh, who's in power matters a lot because it's cold comfort to somebody who's not going to leave America that America's moving in the wrong direction.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. It does, it matters to to people's lives. I mean, like, it's crazy that the Palisades fire homes haven't been rebuilt yet.

• 6:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  But it's nothing to do with lack of bricks or mortar, like short, USSR level shortages, where they just didn't have any of that stuff. It is a self-induced shortage. Like it's, it's purely our own politics that's preventing those homes from being built, which is nuts, right? But it's a different problem than literally factory says that they built all the bricks, but the bricks don't exist.

• 6:36Tom Bilyeu?

  That's wild.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  So I think we have a lot of problems that are.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  You know, of our own choosing. And I think what's important is that people actually kind of look at why we have those problems and take agency and action to go address them and push back on like, you know, like, I think if you look at it, there's so many stocks that you cannot possibly track them all and invest all of them. There's so many layers of government, like we have very decentralized government. You have city, county, state, federal, and many layers of federal. There's like 12 people that you have to track of to do a good job that affect your specific, whether you can build stuff locally. And it's just too much for any single person to do that. I think that's kind of part of

• 7:27Speaker 01

  the problem. Who do you actually push back on to unblock building, buildings in California is like a difficult question.

• 7:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  And a lot of it is very much local people that don't want the value of their house to go down because, right, it's stuff like this. So a lot of it is of our own choosing. And we can fix all those problems. We just gotta kind of actually just talk them out, go throw a block party and talk to your neighbors, make some hot dogs and your hot dogs.

• 8:00Tom Bilyeu?

  That's good. I like that.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  I'm very much, I'm extremely bullish in America because I think ultimately people do are have a sense of fairness and have a sense of belief that they can solve their own problems. I think that's very much a true American entrepreneurial spirit. And people that come here from all over the world come here because of that. So they're almost self-selected through survivor bias. Like, the biggest defenders of capitalism are going to be ex USSR immigrants, if you ever meet any.

• 8:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, well, I have thankfully sat across this very table from several of them. And there's no doubt that there's some of that. And I don't know how much we want to take this conversation there, but I will say that there seems to be a very big difference between somebody who comes to the country under duress, fleeing, like you're a Cuban refugee and you end up on Florida. And you're like, I gotta get to work, rebuild my dental practice or whatever. And you like scrimp and scrape and re-go to school and all that. And you build it and like, that's gangster. And what you're going to tell your kids, work hard, all that works. When you throw the bat symbol up and you say, anybody that wants to come here, we've got federal aid for you. That's going to attract a very different kind of person.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, subsidies break incentives 100%.

• 9:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. So I'm worried that we're headed in that direction, but let me look through your eyes. You were, I think we only talked about this before the camera started rolling. You came to America at 11 from what is now the Ukraine. And how much of that colors your perception of America?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  So when I was a kid, I thought United States was like Manhattan, just coast to coast, with no nature, just like skyscrapers.

• 9:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. It's not my kind of place, but alas, no.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  It was bizarre, right? Because the West, like the Western films and stuff like that colored my idea of America and then like gangster, Chicago, New York films. And I had just had this belief that

• 10:07Speaker 01

  America was just rebuilt into just skyscrapers coast to coast. It's kind of silly, right? Like

• 10:14Speaker 01

  so landing in Chicago, I was both disappointed, kind of like it was a shock that there was like country and farms and all of this. Like literally, it was just bizarre to me that there are farms in America.

• 10:26Tom Bilyeu?

  That's funny.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  And at the same time, though, 91 Chicago was like the center of music and basketball and sports. And I was a kid that didn't have access to any media. So I was like a sponge, absorbed all of it.

• 10:42Tom Bilyeu?

  That's crazy. Now, did you feel an unlocking of opportunity in coming to America?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  My first dollars that I made was that winter, me and my friend, we walked from house to house, asking people we could shovel their snow. We didn't have any shovels, but they would use their shovels and they gave us like a couple bucks and then we spend it on candy and movies. And was that like, oh my God, I can't believe how good this is? Yeah, it was great. It was awesome. Like we, we bought like upper deck basketball cards and played Street Fighter in the arcade. We fully bought into the American dream. Now, so he was also from? Yeah, yeah. There was like a little community of expats. Uh, as soon as a, like you couldn't leave the Soviet Union. This is how you know it was bad. Because they didn't want. Logging you in?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. They didn't want all the smart engineers to leave. So you couldn't leave so that you, my parents were denied exit visas, but as soon as, uh, the USSR kind of fell apart, end of 91, my parents left and they would only let you take 50 bucks per person of value. So this is where my parents landed in $50 per person. The immigration folks were telling us that you, US is in a recession. This was like 91, 92. And it was bad and whatever. My parents were like, I have no idea. We've been in a depression for like 80 years. Thank you very much. Yeah. Wow, that's wild. Okay, so go ahead.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  They were, yeah, I mean, they were extremely like proud that they got jobs immediately, never got any assistance, worked their entire life for like, love to pay taxes. Like these, they're like, right? Like they are felt so blessed to be in America that they want to pay taxes. They don't want any handouts or anything like that.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  They moved to a place, like the reason I think I can credit a lot of my success is that they moved to a city in like Chicago area with high property taxes because they had good schools. So I had access to AP classes and ACTs and, you know, I was able to just on my own merit, like study and get decent grades and go to Urbana-Champaign, take engineering. That's it. That's it. From like 50 bucks a person. That's a trajectory that anyone can achieve here because you have access to the best schools in the world. And you don't actually need to go to Harvard to succeed. Like U U E C is a excellent engineering school, like best in the world, but it's a state school.

• 13:27Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:09Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:51Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:35Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it. Going back to what you're saying about AI, what do you think is AI's role in all of this? Does it, is it the big thing to watch and it completely terraforms planet Earth? Or does it integrate with crypto in a way that is going to be more grounded, but highly useful?

• 16:15Speaker 01

  I think oddly, these are like two parallel lines. Crypto is transforming finance and I think all, all financial systems are going to be rebuilt on top of crypto rails because they're cheaper and trustless. You don't need to trust an intermediary. And every, and it's going to happen slowly, like basically every failure will cause you to go switch your processes to crypto.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  And it kind of happens in TradFi. I don't know if you, if you Google for it, like Goldman Sachs has lost, like for Citibank has lost hundreds of millions of dollars with an accidental transfer out of the country or whatever. That then gets challenged and you can't crawl it back. And this is with traditional finance. They just flub a, flub a transfer and their processes are too slow. So as soon as something like that happens, you start, how do I fix this? That never happens and you use cryptographic signing and double signing and all this stuff that you can do in crypto. And you start removing those processes. It's just a slow thing. But AI is also basically rebuilding how technology is made.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  I think, I just can't imagine any company with engineering, any kind of engineering, chemical, whatever, biology, software that's not using AI.

• 17:35Tom Bilyeu?

  How much do you use it?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Every day, like basically probably more than I tweet, I send commands into Claude.

• 17:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  So I tweet like 20, 30 times a day.

• 17:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, are you doing like a co-pilot thing where you're just constantly?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  I have, I pay for all of them. So I have Grok and ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini. And I use Claude for coding. So it's what generates the code and I use the other three to basically build like a planning document that I can then give to Claude.

• 18:11Tom Bilyeu?

  So that you're essentially architecting the system and then you say, here's what this whole thing is going to be now.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  But I'm not actually like, it's weird, but I'm, I'm, it's very much like I'm a manager now.

• 18:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Of the AI.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I have, I don't, I don't need deep understanding of the details. I just kind of have a high level of the thing that I want to do, but I want the, I try to create an adversarial environment for the AIs between the agents to, to come up with a planning document that is precise and concise and unambiguous. And then I like Claude, here's the doc, go build it.

• 18:50Tom Bilyeu?

  How close will it get you? Cause I've done vibe coding and I find that it always terminates where it gets in a loop and it will fix one problem only to break another.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, this, this is where I think AI is a massive accelerator for experienced engineers because you're, you kind of like step back and you're like, okay, I'm dealing with like college grad that knows everything, but is a college grad. So you're, you have to kind of like smell their, what they're doing and course correct them. And I think if you've been like an engineer 10 plus years and you've dealt with like teams that are new grads or whatever, you kind of can like start, kind of use your experience to guide them. So for me, it's a massive accelerator. Like, I don't know if I want to, for the side projects I'm working on, I don't think I need to ever hire for them.

• 19:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it is that weird. Like I can build the product and ship it and maintain it myself. I'm kind of like, basically I would hire somebody to replace that one person. That's me because I can go be that person for another project.

• 20:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  But I don't think you need a team for, for a lot of things now, which is weird.

• 20:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Very weird.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  So, so, so that is like, I think.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  I think you'll see actually like this probably benefit big companies the most like the Googles of the world can will be able to ship a lot more products and maintain a lot more products because one they have the experience engineers and you basically assign one product per engineer and that's 60,000 products at Google 60 at Microsoft, you know, insane number of breadth that they can cover now.

• 20:34Tom Bilyeu?

  When you reach into the future three, five years, what do you see? Like, how dramatic is the transformation?

• 20:42Speaker 01

  For engineering and science, I think it's very dramatic. It'll just be an invaluable tool. Like, I don't buy into this, like, the, your national output will be based on the amount of silicon and energy, like, kind of the Elon science fiction thing is like, that's like planetary scale versus some alien civilization, like how much sun energy you're converting into intelligence thing. I think that's too far out. The bottleneck is ultimately like, there's just, it's really hard to succeed. Like, it's both easy and

• 21:24Speaker 01

  hard and to succeed as a, as a business in the United States because consumers already have everything. They already have effectively like perfect lives. This is why all our problems are self-induced. Nobody wants to build housing because they're all kind of have decent housing. And they don't understand the, like, the opportunity, the cost that it creates for everyone else that's trying to rise up, right? Like, so it's just hard to convince somebody to download a new app or to use a new product or to do, change their behavior in any way because they're so comfortable already.

• 21:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about it. Trying to get them to try a new video game, I imagine, is going to be a pretty brutal task.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's, I think, is, is like, we're, we're very blessed and the vast majority of, kind of, lifting people out of poverty is happening outside of the United States because we are already so saturated with, with stuff that people need.

• 22:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, do you think about, go ahead?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  There's real big, huge improvements that can happen, I think, in healthcare and medicine, where you can probably get a better diagnosis right now out of AI for like a good number of cases and better prescriptions and all this stuff. So a lot of healthcare, like probably ninety-nine, ninety-five percent of it is non-emergency. Like, you don't need like a human AR person to like stitch you up. Vast majority of healthcare is call your doctor, they poke at you, run a test, and give you a drug. A lot of that is seems like AI could do that. Go to, you know, like a Bender Futurama machine pokes you, that spits out a drug.

• 23:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it's interesting. So Elon was saying three years that at scale surgeons will be AI and robotics, even if he's off by three X, that's still nine years.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:22Tom Bilyeu?

  That at scale, the best surgeons in the world are AI. So when I start trying to reach into the future about how much things are going to change, it feels to me like ten years from now, the world is pretty unrecognizable.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think robotics is like, kind of like start, you gotta trust this timeline on robotics like Starship. Like, it feels like all the theoretical problems are solved and it's just engineering. It's really hard engineering. So if it's not five years, it's within ten or fifteen for sure.

• 23:57Tom Bilyeu?

  And do you see anything in your experience that says intelligence is gonna asymptote in any way? Or does this feel like more, more chips plus more efficient algorithms just equals it gets smarter and smarter?

• 24:12Speaker 01

  I think the scary part is that, that that will happen.

• 24:16Tom Bilyeu?

  And it's scary because?

• 24:18Speaker 01

  It's just hard to fathom the changes.

• 24:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Like, the problems that we have right now are self-induced because we have too much. But what if the world is like, the worst kind of my AI doomerism isn't that AI takes over us like Terminator, is that it entertains us more than anything else. That would be like the most like subversive AI you can build is one that just.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Tells the best joke. Nobody can tell a better joke.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Right?

• 24:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I think about that a lot. In fact, I think about that a lot with crypto. So for instance, AI, superintelligence comes along or quantum computing, whatever. But you get to the point where it's like, I've got a better Bitcoin, this, that or the other. Do you think about that? That's sort of the fundamental structure of even crypto is up for grabs? If you've got something that's super intelligent?

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's stuff that

• 25:16Speaker 01

  that's hard to solve right now. And it's, so kind of my how I think of it is that we have enough compute to solve Newton's laws like really, really well to a T. And this is like Starship and robotics, all that stuff fits within that. But when you look, start going to like atomic level, subatomic interactions, it's the end body problem at like maximum scale. And we just, just not enough classical compute to solve it. And quantum is limited by that, too. Like, I think AI will, will get to a level of being able to do, write papers and solve mathematical problems and like proofs and stuff like this.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  But it's just really, really hard to go and build a quantum computer with low error correction. So my, if, if we didn't have AI, I would say that quantum computing is like 50 years away.

• 26:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Because AI can accelerate scientific research, it's hard for me to tell whether just in the breakthrough, breakthroughs will start accelerating and we can get there faster. And if we can get to like true quantum computing, then we break that through that like information barrier, being able to solve like the end body problem at scale for like large systems. And that's where like, I don't know, that's science fiction, diamond age, whatever.

• 26:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  It's exciting that I could have a chance to maybe live long enough to see some of that.

• 26:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Agreed. Do you have advice for the Bitcoin community about switching their protocol to be quantum resistant?

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So for Solana, what I'm advocating for is you start seeing Microsoft and Google and Apple kind of pick a standard that they're comfortable with for quantum resistant encryption. Once that's finalized, that's my kind of like, let's ship that within a year support for that.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  For Bitcoin, I think they maybe could go a little sooner and pick a standard that is simpler, like the most simplest possible form of quantum resistant cryptography. The problem is like, all of those blow up the signature sizes by 10x. So this is a stupid block size debate.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  20 megabyte blocks are fine, just suck it up like it's not a big deal.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Like, we have a lot more bandwidth now than 10, 15 years ago.

• 27:47Tom Bilyeu?

  That's interesting.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  So it'll grow the ledger 10 times faster and people are going to complain, but like, I think it's fine. Like, I think that that's basically just suck it up.

• 27:58Tom Bilyeu?

  So block size, World War II, basically is, is what you're.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think SegWit actually kind of makes it, I think, easier because the, the witness is segregated. So your witness size blows up and you could just download the ledger, which is transactions without the signatures and see the proof of work proofs for those and then verify the, and discard the, the witnesses kind of. But you still should keep a copy of them and this is, you don't want a third party intermediary to control that. If you really, really want that, oh shit, I got a superpower collapse. I need to be able to sell these Bitcoins somewhere else. You need that guarantee that somebody else always can get a copy of the ledger and process transactions. And this is where I think that debate isn't bullshit.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Like, if you actually like buy into this sovereign store, like self-sovereign store of wealth that can survive a superpower collapse, you do need the most trust minimized system. Solana is not that. We have a totally different problem that we're trying to solve. Like, there's no point to solve the. Bitcoin problem twice, right?

• 29:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Right. So knowing that you guys are the execution layer, and I don't know if you feel like you need to explain that, but what is your guys' future? What are you pushing into?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  So out of that stack of broker dealer, transfer agents, exchanges, it's a big, deep stack of people that are all taking a spread. The one that I've nerded out on is the exchange part, and it's got this weird problem. So like, imagine you're sitting in Singapore and there's a container ship full of iPhones and it just sinks right outside of your window. That's a market moving event for Apple. That's real value that the company Apple depends on, and now it's disappeared. The news wire for that event has to travel speed of light through fiber to New York for you to trade on it. So there's like a 60, 70 millisecond worth of latency before you can take action on it.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  So the New York Stock Exchange with its nanosecond trading or whatever is 80 milliseconds behind the real world in that scenario. Regardless of how fast that centralized exchange goes, that signal exists everywhere in the world. And a decentralized distributed system like Solana, our ultimate goal is that as soon as you see that signal, you can actually submit a transaction and its ordering becomes immutable in that moment in Singapore. So then, by the time that speed of light through fiber news wire goes to New York and you look at the market for Apple token stock, tokenized Apple stock on Solana and one in New York Stock Exchange, the one on Solana has already priced that information in and there's no arbitrage.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  So we've eliminated a whole bunch of middlemen by solving a fundamental physics problem and reducing spreads and improving prices for consumers. And to me, this is like the coolest thing I could be working on, where I have the ability to like have impact, right? I, there's, Starship is very cool, but I'm not a rocket scientist. I'm a nerd that has spent my career optimizing software and stuff like that. So this is like this really cool physics problem that if we solve it and we do it well, it solves real, it benefits consumers. Like prices will get better fundamentally because we're able to encode more information faster around the world.

• 31:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, does that only play out when, because when you were talking about 80 milliseconds or whatever, being like this interminably long time, it's funny to me, obviously thinking that's just such a, not even the blink of an eye. So is it that by solving those problems that much faster, communicating that information that much faster, you shut the ongoing ability for people to like front run transactions? Like what is?

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have to solve it in a way where we don't create an intermediary that is essential, that can create this non-contestable market. So exchanges like are one of those places where you can create, if you control the exchange and there was no regulation like before 1930, you can just extract unlimited number of dollars from trading and markets break down. And that means you can't have a system with corporate stock that the public can invest in and gain profits out of, like the whole corporate, our whole world collapses, right? So the way that regulation works in the United States is they basically kind of created these

• 32:39Speaker 01

  slices of exchange, broker, dealer, transfer agent, et cetera. And they've kind of capped how much you can extract. They said, you guys can't make any more than that. I don't care what you do, but if you make too much, we will bring down the hammer. Because if you make too much, you're like screwing people over. But these systems are so regulated that they're stuck in their technology and the amount of physical information they can encode is limited because of this, like, because New York Stock Exchange has to exist in New York and design in a very specific way with a very specific order book to follow regulation. So they are minimizing how much money they make, which is good for consumers, but they're

• 33:23Speaker 01

  also minimized with how much information they can encode.

• 33:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  And that means that consumers actually get worse pricing, like on stocks. So crypto through happens chance was just created bottoms up. Nobody knew what we were, what we were doing in a way that was just not, nobody thought about this as an exchange or something like that. So we were able to build these systems from first principles and kind of think of it, what does this look like without any essential third parties? Because we have to do it in this decentralized way. So we have to build it without control and When you're thinking about solving the store value problem where you're carrying this thing across state lines in the Soviet Union, that's a different problem than how do we eliminate

• 34:10Speaker 01

  exchanges or essential third parties that are have control of this information that can like use it to to extract pricing value. So totally different problem set. So we're not thinking about store values. So we're not constrained by ledger size or something like that. What we want is we actually want a high throughput system. We want people to go build validators inside data centers with a lot of bandwidth and stuff like this, but we want to make it so anybody can do that. And that creates a contestable market. We have lots of data centers. If you were a nerd in the 90s, you could build an ISP by going to a data center, which

• 34:50Speaker 01

  is literally a closet at like a Bell Labs or at a Mama Bell, whatever place and like put a computer with some network cards and plug them in and all of a sudden you're the ISP for your neighbors. So that was a very contestable market in the 90s. We want people to be able to go, go, go find their local data center with one gigabit connection, which is available everywhere, build a validator and participate in this and create a fair, open market where there is no intermediaries and information can flow into the system without any, anyone being able to extract from it. And that will result in better pricing for consumers. So this is where we can like eliminate all these middlemen and like give you a token

• 35:34Speaker 01

  with cryptographic guarantees that SpaceX issued it and you're not paying all these bips. Like you're talking about 2% like hilarious thing is that like 2% merchant fees, Apple is like 30% on transactions. All these things are like, are huge, but finance is like 50 basis points or lower. Wow. So we're trying to. Yeah, we're trying to eliminate that razor thin edge. And is it important?

• 36:09Speaker 01

  The scale of trading and volume is so large that it does become important.

• 36:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Sure.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  You're talking about like trillions per day, right?

• 36:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Whoa.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  So.

• 36:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  If you take derivatives and Forex and all this stuff, if you can shave that, those basis points off, that is money given back to consumers and in aggregate, it makes a huge impact.

• 36:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow, I didn't realize just how much was being traded daily. Now, is that what you see is the ultimate use case for Solana is to be the transaction layer of the?

• 36:43Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, it's the message bus for finance. Like, we want it to be as close to this giant global information like sync as we can, as physics allows.

• 36:57Tom Bilyeu?

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• 38:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. One thing that made crypto so popular with traders is the volatility. Solana being one that delivered a lot of wins for a lot of people, but it came at the like, you needed big swings. Do you want to see, like, to you, is the volatility of Solana advantageous? Or something that you hope diminishes over time?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  What I hope eventually is that the fees generated by providing the service, like as a message bus, are discount cash flows that people can backtrack into the value of it and be like, okay, there's a fundamental hot dog stand here that creates hot dogs. And it's worth owning for that. And it's a very, very boring thing. Like, I don't care about this thing being money and beating Bitcoin or anything like that. This is actually, I think, why a lot of Bitcoins are like, yeah, Solana's pretty cool. But fundamentally, what I care about is that we're delivering consumer value that can be captured by the protocol. And those captures are future cash flows.

• 39:12Tom Bilyeu?

  And would you see Solana at any point paying dividends?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  So when you stake, and especially if you run your own validator, you create blocks and people pay tips to be included in those blocks as priority fees. And you capture those priority fees. And that is effectively, you run your own business, you run a validator business, or you pay somebody else to run it, you are making money off that hot dog stand. So Solana is not like a corporation or like a traditional, like what you would invest in a stock. It is kind of like thousands of hot dog stands that all share the same protocol and all work together. But because they have this guarantee that every hot dog stand cannot break any other hot dog stand,

• 39:59Speaker 01

  and they can provide a service from that redundancy, right? Because they can be everywhere and take information from everywhere. That creates value. Like, there's network effects that are captured from that.

• 40:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, that's one way to make money. Certainly logical, easy to track. The Solana hot dog stand, you're a validator, you make money off the tips. That makes sense. I've made money off Solana though, just by holding the token and it went up in value. So I could, I mean, I guess it's all theoretical right now, but I could sell it. And presumably, assuming price holds, I would make a pretty penny off that. So it's the second way of making money. Is there gonna be-

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Well, that's speculation. You're not making money. You're speculating. You can speculate on anything.

• 40:38Tom Bilyeu?

  For sure, for sure. Now, on that though, that's the part that requires the volatility to be interesting. In your answer, I heard that the volatility is not interesting to you. Far more interesting that people judge it by how much value are we adding to a user? And so treat it like you would treat a standard investment. That makes sense.

• 41:01Tom Bilyeu?

  But is there gonna be a third way, which is I speculate on the token, I'm holding it. And much like I give it to a bank and the bank pays me for me loaning them the money. Are people gonna be able to get any sort of rewards for staking?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  I mean, staking is a part of the protocol, to be able to participate, to build your own hot dog stand that can-

• 41:29Tom Bilyeu?

  But can I do it without that? So like, take-

• 41:32Speaker 01

  You can stake-

• 41:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Gemini. I can just do, I think you can just hold Bitcoin with them, right? And they pay you in Bitcoin?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  You can, if you participate in the staking protocol, you're effectively paying somebody else to run your hot dog stand.

• 41:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Got it. So you're saying, I'll contribute my coin to your hot dog stand?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Got it.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  And there's, there's a very, there's a very contestable market for those that offer different rewards and fees. And you can go pick any other thousand out there.

• 41:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Why do those guys care about, like, what are they doing with the token?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  So the only thing that the token does fundamentally, from if you look at the software, is it prevents spam. So if we have this like information bus where information is valuable. People will just submit arbitrary amount of spam, like they do to your email inbox. They just send you infinite amount of data and it becomes impossible to figure out what is valuable, what isn't.

• 42:25Tom Bilyeu?

  But let's say that I'm a validator.

• 42:27Tom Bilyeu?

  And why would I pay someone rewards for loaning me their tokens?

• 42:33Speaker 01

  So the more tokens, if if we could allow infinite validators, or we had no limit of how many validators block producers there are, you end up with effectively a spam problem where you have infinite number of validators. And they all submit information at the same time. So you have to limit it somehow. So what Bitcoin does is proof of work, where you use electricity and your mining equipment to create a block. And that limits the number of blocks created in the network to roughly one every every 10 minutes. We need a high frequency of blocks, but we also need to limit them. We can't have infinite blocks because again, you run up into the spam problem where infinite amount of people want to make a block, there's limited capacity, and that thing gets through, right?

• 43:19Speaker 01

  So how do you limit that is with the coin itself? So if you stake with somebody, their proportional weight of how many blocks they can make per second goes up. So if you make more blocks per second, you earn more tips. So this is the feedback loop. And then they're incentivized to give you their tips or portion of their tips as much as they can, given their economics of their own business.

• 43:42Tom Bilyeu?

  Totally understand.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  And anybody can run this hot dog stand validator and give you back rewards. And because of that, it's very contestable market. So if you're in Singapore and you're the only validator in Singapore, you can go and find people local in Singapore to stake with you and you can ingest information local to Singapore that could be valuable.

• 44:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Very interesting. So what do you guys have cooking in 2026? So for people that pay close attention to what you guys do?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I B R L increased bandwidth, reduced latency. This is our motto. So the biggest change that's cooking is Alpenglow, which is this. My B plus state school engineering degree.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Is not a PhD in computer science for consensus. So when I built Proof History and Solana,

• 44:38Speaker 01

  we built something that solved the next generation problem, which is how fast can you make blocks without interruption? But we kind of did it with just brute force engineering.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  At that time, and like basically over the next like eight years, it's just a ton more research has been done on building new consensus algorithms that solve the problem that we identified. And I think the reason for for like all of Solana's success is we were able to increase the bandwidth per block and reduce the latency of how fast we can make blocks at the same time and how quickly we can come to agreement on them. So this Alpand Glow upgrade is like bleeding edge, next generation consensus algorithm that was developed in ETH Zurich by a bunch of really, really smart folks. So they're ripping out all my code, which is great. So the only way an engineer can actually retire is once all their code has been ripped out.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  So I'm like, I'm halfway there.

• 45:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you want to retire?

• 45:38Speaker 01

  No, no. But I'm writing now with Claude, I'm writing even more code. So it's terrifying that I may never get to retire.

• 45:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, do you just have like constant ideas of things you want to create? And that's why you're always doing side projects or?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, that's been probably my, I don't know, disease or whatever, mental illness since being a kid is just always trying to build something.

• 46:02Tom Bilyeu?

  What are you building right now?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  I wanted to see like, part of this idea, how do I trust software is humans write software and it's really, really hard to trust it because humans create bugs. And there's an idea called formally verified software, which is you mathematically try to prove that properties of the software that you wrote. So there's these formal verification specs, but they're extremely complicated. It's just really, really hard to to write formal verification for software. Because again, you're trying to take the software that was written to solve a problem like to to move money around or whatever. And then you're trying to mathematically model it. It's almost like, I don't know if people remember differential equations and and calculus and proving them.

• 46:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Remember the name, but that's it.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's I it's mind bogglingly boring, like and hard. Like it's just tedious. Claude is really good at generating formal verification. So I my toy project is it's on GitHub called Percolator. I was trying to see if I can write a risk engine for a perpetual decentralized exchange that's formally verified. So other people, I don't have to launch a product that can just build a formally verified system that's proven that other people can then go for can build products with. And they can and they can understand the formal proofs and the properties that they prove. And therefore they can trust the software to be bug free for those properties.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  And this this is, I think, this step where we can take go from how fast we can replace traditional finance, like it's risky, right? Like I have the system that I'm trusting humans and every once in a while they screw up and I lose tens of millions of dollars or whatever, right? At a bank or something. Switching to software is still risky. What if there's a bug? What if there's a hacker and stuff like that? So can we create a mathematical guarantee that those bugs don't exist? Is this kind of it's it's just once one way that I see AI really rapidly accelerating crypto is through that.

• 48:08Tom Bilyeu?

  That's interesting. So you think that will become possible in the near ish future with AI?

• 48:12Speaker 01

  It was a year ago, I tried to do this and it it just generated nonsense. And basically, over the last month, like with the new release of Claude, it was just a dramatic shift. It's crazy how how good it's gotten.

• 48:28Tom Bilyeu?

  That is wild. That's one of the most exciting things about AI. We use it like crazy in the game development. It sped us up dramatically. Now, you're talking about formal verification. This is something that's haunted me. So I have to constantly train my mom and my dad, who are boomers, literal boomers. And that I'm like, even if you think I'm calling you and I'm asking for money, it is not me. It is AI. You need to be very careful.

• 48:52Tom Bilyeu?

  And I just cannot understand why we have not yet put some sort of cryptographic signature where if a video, let's say, has me in it, that I can stamp it and say, this came from me.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  How would they trust that it's your public key?

• 49:08Tom Bilyeu?

  That's for you to find out. I don't know how to solve it.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is the Sybil problem, right? You tell them, here's my-

• 49:14Tom Bilyeu?

  The Sybil problem?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Here's my public key. Only trust messages from me. And somebody will craft a public key that is just almost exactly like yours. They will like get it to be as close to yours as possible. When they call you, they fake the picture, right? Like you're-

• 49:30Tom Bilyeu?

  But why, if I can sign a transaction, why can't I sign a piece of media?

• 49:37Speaker 01

  You can, but they will sign it with a public key that looks very similar to yours.

• 49:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Because you're saying the visual representation is the problem. But why not like an SSL type certificate that says-

• 49:47Speaker 01

  So domain, so again, domain phishing, right? You go to Google where all the Os or zeros dot com. Like people will fake the domain, like-

• 49:57Tom Bilyeu?

  This must be harder than I think, otherwise someone would do it.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  This is like the human brain problem, right? Is we're really good at similar, like recognizing similar things. So if you can trust a domain, and the problem is people generate a domain name that is one letter away, and it looks exactly just like the domain you want to. And this is where 95, 99% of the phishing attacks with NFTs and stuff like that is that there's a launch, somebody's really excited for the launch, and they have to be first to click to win it. And a scammer will post a domain that is almost exactly like the real one. And you're like, you fail the check. So yeah, these are really, really hard, tough problems. The way that people solve them is they build

• 50:42Speaker 01

  layers of trust where you have like effectively smaller and smaller allow lists. Like you and your parents have like a specific like device, like app that you use with the specific kind of thing. Maybe it's Signal, maybe it's iMessage, like these other third-party channels that an attacker can't hack all at once. So when they present, like, they sign a piece of media to you, like call them, you're like, send me a message over our Signal conversation that we established before, that kind of thing. So-

• 51:12Tom Bilyeu?

  So you don't see currently a way to solve for it looks like me, sounds like me, but it's actually not me?

• 51:18Speaker 01

  No, it's just the human brain is not cannot do this.

• 51:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow, I really thought this was just a matter of time. That's wild.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Computers can do this and robots. So maybe you like have a robot that you trust. But then somebody can replace us like it's just really, really, really hard.

• 51:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow. Well, that's interesting though, because if I can go into, let's say that I have a bot. It's just on my computer and I say, okay, uh, I care about these people. Official government posts, whatever. And I go in and I say, this is the official one. This is the official one. This is the official one. Then at least it's like, it can warn me. No, no, no, that didn't come from the official account. So at least from the group of things that I track with regularity, I could have some sort of.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  My advice is, uh, throw more, more block parties. Get to know your neighbors.

• 52:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, but I'm talking about like global stuff where, you know, you've got the, uh, Trump goes on and tells some nation. Tells Greenland, we're coming to get you. It's like, well, there's no way that's him. You know, something like that where a world leader says a thing.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  We built, uh, you know, people built massive republics and empires 2000 years ago where everything was fake.

• 52:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  And they did it through basically like you trust your neighbors because you can smell them. You can shake their hand. You throw a party with them, right? And out of those 200 neighbors, you trust their feedback first, right? And we all like the fundamental, like foundation of a republic is that like, okay, we'll all look at, we'll all watch out for each of this property. Like all our neighbors, right? That you throw a block party together. And then there's some other neighborhood of 200 people that does the same thing. And we all, each one picks a representative from each neighborhood to go to smell each other somewhere. Right, and shake hands. That that's the foundation of a republic is that you throw a block

• 53:21Speaker 01

  party and you get to know your neighbors and all of this like digital verification, you try to diffuse it through intermediaries, but those that you trust personally, that you have a really high trust with. So my advice to people is like, go throw a block party, shake hands, get to know your neighbors, smell them, give them, sell them some hot dogs.

• 53:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that's wild, man. All right. So what are some signals that you want people to look out for at 26 that say that Solana is hitting the strides or the marks that it expected to hit?

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Um, the ones that I'm excited about is like more real world assets, more stable coins, stuff like that.

• 54:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you have people lined up that are going to be putting things on the chain?

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of this stuff happens like so Labs works on random little products. I'm the CEO of Labs, but there's other organizations like Jito and Solana Foundation and Onza, they do all the work at this point. So there's a bunch of announcements on solana.com, which is run by the foundation. They work with a lot of third parties to go like it, you know, like super,

• 54:34Speaker 01

  was it Securizer, whoever else like issues SpaceX stock on Solana. That would be an announcement coming from them.

• 54:42Tom Bilyeu?

  And so that would be somebody that says, okay, we bought this on the traditional market and then tokenized it and put it on Solana.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, these are like the version, uh, zero versions of this. They act as a transfer agent. So they're able to, this is how they interface with TradFi and, and crypto. This is kind of the, the biggest pain and pains in the butt. It's like, where in the traditional finance layer can you like set up an entity, get regulated and then? Become the the bridge or the proxy or the interface between that and the and the crypto world.

• 55:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Now, is it destructive of the traditional like bond of the stock so that it only exists at that point on Solana? Or does it exist in two forms?

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Similar like stable coins, there's a one to one backing. So this is where like market structure, regulation or stablecoin regulation can provide that guarantee that, okay, we need to have a essential trusted third party to be the bridge for that interface because we don't have the.

• 55:44Tom Bilyeu?

  And they basically hold it.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:45Tom Bilyeu?

  So we have the physical thing or however that is recorded. And now we have the one to one representation. So you know, when you trade this, that you're the one that owns it. Got it? Makes sense.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  So your cryptographic, if you think of it like as a cryptographic chain, your cryptographic chain goes to securitize. So you know that you got something from securitize and they are the ones that are guaranteeing that that's backed by real stock. What I want to get to the world is where people just IPO, like a startup raises money and does an IPO directly on chain. And your guarantee is that to that startups, their domain, right? Like spacex.com or whatever. By the way, like I've said SpaceX a billion times, there's no way that Elon whatever do this. And I have no knowledge of him even considering it, but this is my dream that someday something

• 56:40Speaker 01

  really, really impactful like SpaceX would just IPO directly on chain. And you have a full certificate chain to their domain saying SpaceX issued this token. So you know exactly where you're getting it from.

• 56:54Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  That would be like, we've eliminated all the layers. That would be like the coolest thing.

• 56:59Tom Bilyeu?

  What are the regulatory hurdles to that? Cause I could see a small company saying, yo, this is a way for me to essentially raise money.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think either market structure is like this bill that's being mulled over right now in Congress. I think they just released a draft of this like last night or something. So there's a bunch of kind of regulation and probably the right way to do it is if you have like a.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Future Forward SEC, give them the tools to go and build like little experiment green lines on how to do it. And they'll probably need to like cap it by dollar amounts raised and stuff like that. So space, it would be impossible for Space by Sex to do it in the near future. But my hope is that sometime in the not so near future, like the companies that I feel like people should be investing in, like are Anthropic, OpenAI, all of these that are building the future of of science are private. And that's a shame, right? Like, I think there's a lot of kind of overhead and regulatory hurdles for it to be accessible to the general public, which sucks.

• 58:08Tom Bilyeu?

  How much?

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry.

• 58:09Tom Bilyeu?

  No, please.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Not that you should put all your money into like, uh, high risk tech stocks, but having the ability and the option to put a small amount of them, I think, is part of the American dream, right? Like, I think that's critical. And to participate in that, like, kind of growth engine creation, I think is really important.

• 58:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm, agreed. How much do meme coins negatively impact, like, the perception of IPO-ing right on chain?

• 58:36Speaker 01

  I think the biggest challenges are actually more that, like, when a company CEO gets to the point that they can IPO, it is such a high risk event that they, like, all the lawyers and everybody else will tell them, just minimize risk. Just go with, like, whoever, uh, even if it's the vampire squid and they'll take, like, 10% of what you're raising, or whatever, like, some absurd amount, some absurd cut, just minimize risk. I think, um, it's more of a, you need like a CEO with a lot of agency and like, that's like, uh, kind of F the system to kind of break the mold first. And they're not going to care about, like, meme coins or anything like that. It's more, it's more

• 59:19Speaker 01

  of like, you need like, somebody that's willing to be really, um, you know, personally want to do it. And, you know, historically, like, Google actually did a direct listing as a big FU to the banks. And the financial world was like shitting on them. It was terrible, whatever, because they didn't get a cut.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  And that was the wrong thing, right? Like, it obviously became like one of the biggest, most successful like companies that create a ton of value for for people.

• 59:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think at all about the meme coin phenomenon and what it means? Like, what is it about the human mind?

• 59:56Speaker 01

  It's just like Ultima Online. In my mind, like, I think there's something weird about, like, and I wish more of this was happening in the real world, like where you do throw a block party and you meet people, like, there's persistence in the world. Like, your neighbors can see, like, your Halloween decorations, right? And that is persistent. And this is, I think, very important to culture. So as soon as you have any sort of persistence, like Ultima Online was a persistent, massive multiplayer game where if you made changes in that game, they would persist overnight, and other people could see them. And that creates culture and trade and all this other stuff. And people start valuing that with

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  real dollars. So I think NFTs and meme coins are just kind of part of that weird phenomenon that because these systems are persistent, people start valuing them and start speculating on the value of those things. And you kind of get into these like hot ball of money over, ultimately, things that are digital that have no fundamental value.

• 1:01:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it's interesting. That one, to me, the meme coin thing is absolutely fascinating in terms of what it is that people are actually doing, like, just gambling on culture. But they seem super surprised when people rug pull.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  It's a Kenesian beauty contest.

• 1:01:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Kenesian?

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Kenzian. I'm a, this is where my wife catches me. Ah, you're a spy.

• 1:01:23Tom Bilyeu?

  You're a spy. That's hilarious. Say more about that. What do you mean?

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  So that he, they ran this experiment. I don't know if it was him as a professor or some university where, basically, you were given a bunch of options in a newspaper and you would, over mail, you would send in the option that you think everybody else would pick.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Not the option that you would pick, but you're you're trying to guess what will everybody else will guess, right?

• 1:01:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Literally.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  So this is basically, I think, this kind of game that people like to play because it's a it's a winnable game, right? Like you can, you can kind of think, oh, I'm smarter.

• 1:02:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Than everyone else, and I can guess exactly which meme coin everybody else will pick and I'll be able to sell it first. And that's how it runs, even though there's no fundamental, like, discounted future cash flows that you would use to value your hot dog stand. There's no hot dog stand there.

• 1:02:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. What do you take away from the financialization of everything? Like you can bet on everything now. Polly market will let you bet on the most random shit. There are like apps now to let you like gamble on, I've got a gas bill due and you can gamble the value of the gas bill.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  Chicago School of Economics, boy, like I think this is, financialization is the absence of politics.

• 1:02:43Tom Bilyeu?

  The absence of politics, what do you mean?

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Well, like to decide polls and which polls to trust and all this other stuff without a financial open contestable market to pick is a political game, right? Somebody will say you trust this poll versus another one. They build a reputation. And that's one way to do it, but it's ultimately a very political thing. You're trying to build a a trust reputation with people in a relationship. You're pitching to them, trust me, don't trust this, this other thing, right? And that's all politics. And when you force people to say, doesn't matter, like none of this reputation and stuff matters. Put your money where your mouth is. You're removing the politics out of it. So the

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  reputation, political aspect of it is not valued anymore. You don't care about the, the, the reputation of the poll. What you care about is the liquidity and the amount of money at risk.

• 1:03:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Right.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  So you can measure that directly and objectively versus like, I have to trust Nate Silver. But then he sold 538 to some other company and I trust him as much, right? Like that's a Very political thing.

• 1:03:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Like Polymarket or Kalschi or whatever, those brands could die. It doesn't matter. But the next market, you know, Kalschi is great. It's very easy to, I think, use it with Jupiter on Solana through the, through that interface. What matters is the amount of liquidity and the amount of value at risk. And that gives you all the confidence you need to decide whether you trust, how much you want to put faith in that poll or not.

• 1:04:21Tom Bilyeu?

  That makes sense. Man, this has been fascinating. Where can people engage with you?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Uh, I am Toly, T O L Y on Twitter. It's probably, or X, it's known to the, to the new generation.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Follow me there. Most of my posts are technical gibberish, or technically gibberish.

• 1:04:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Either way.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Awesome. Well, thank you, man, for coming on. I really appreciate it. Boys and girls, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

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