David @ Solana Breakpoint | Anatoly & Austin

David sits down in person at Solana Breakpoint 2023 with Solana’s Founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, and Austin Federa, Solana Foundation’s Head of Strategy. The three chat about Breakpoint’s Evolution, Solana vs. Ethereum, and exciting new releases/products coming out of Solana. 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT ----- 🔐 Get a Free Trial of Doppel https://bankless.cc/doppel ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2%20%E2%81%A0 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask https://feeds.flightcast.com/%E2%81%A0https:/bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum https://feeds.flightcast.com/%E2%81%A0https:/bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠ 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE ⁠https://bankless.cc/uniswap https://feeds.flightcast.com/%E2%81%A0https:/bankless.cc/uniswap 🔗 CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 6:00 Breakpoint 2023 6:53 What’s Breakpoint? 7:49 Breakpoint 1 12:20 Breakpoint 2 13:54 Evolution of Breakpoint 16:13 Aesthetic of Breakpoint 17:35 Who Attends Breakpoint 18:30 Solana’s Hardest Year 20:52 Solana Community Excitement 23:50 Consumer Solana Apps 24:48 Up Next For Anatoly 26:00 Anatoly Role Change 26:44 Solana vs. Ethereum Relationship 30:44 Solana Dev Mindset 31:44 Anatoly Cult 35:17 Firedancer 42:33 Solana 2.0 43:11 Runtime v2 44:18 Confidential Transactions 46:00 Up Next For Solana 48:48 Solana L2s & Slow-Lana 52:37 Solana Governance 56:05 Next For Austin 56:45 Breakpoint 2024 59:28 Closing & Disclaimers ----- RESOURCES Anatoly Yakovenko https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko Austin Federa https://twitter.com/Austin_Federa Solana Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@SolanaFndn/videos ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

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

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, I'm coming to you from Solana Breakpoint in Amsterdam. This is the third Breakpoint that has ever happened in the year 2023, and this one is a little bit different. The first Breakpoint happened in 2021 in the second half of the year. Absolute peak froth of the bull market in Lisbon, followed by the second Solana Breakpoint in 2022, also in Lisbon, which happened right before the collapse of FTX. And here we are, a new venue, new city, Amsterdam, for Solana Breakpoint number three. And this one has a little bit different of a vibe. This one is deep into the bear market, perhaps coming out of the bear market. And the Solana community has been cultivated as such, as you would imagine.

• 0:47David Hoffman?

  The people that went to the 2021 Solana Breakpoint, when sole price was over $200, a lot of them didn't make it to the third Solana Breakpoint. Instead, what you have left is the low-level devs that comprise the majority of what I would say is the Solana community. Over the last year or so, I've dabbled with Solana, being Solana curious, I guess you would call it, mostly fighting. But I've definitely learned that if I want to learn about Solana, it's not going to happen through the filter that is crypto Twitter, or probably not inside of any of my Ethereum native circles either. But since I'm on my way to East Lisbon, I'm taking a flight here shortly. I decided to pop over a little bit early to Amsterdam to check out Solana Breakpoint for myself.

• 1:30David Hoffman?

  In this episode, I talk with Anatoly, the founder of Solana, and Austin, of course, from the Solana Foundation, just to kind of get a vibe check over the arc of Solana Breakpoint, what this conference means to the Solana community, and overall what people are getting excited about as it stands today in Solana. Anatoly is persistently busy, of course, so we had him and Austin for the first 30 minutes, and then Anatoly had to run. And so then me and Austin had a chance to chat about all of the different rabbit holes and things that are going on in Solana. I do my best to compare them to what people on this podcast might be familiar with in the Ethereum world. So for example, that they have Solana Fire Dancer. And in terms of significant... That's kind of like EIP 1559 or the Ethereum merge,

• 2:14David Hoffman?

  at least in that it's a big protocol upgrade that the Solana community are interested in. And so I do my best, actually I do the only thing that I know how to do, which is compare evolutions and progress in Solana and kind of use Ethereum as a frame of reference just to gain my own understanding. And since you are likely a long time listener of this podcast, it's probably useful for you as well. So if you are curious about what is going on in the state of Solana, or you weren't able to attend Breakpoint, and you just want to kind of catch a vibe, this episode is for you with Anatoly and Austin of the Solana ecosystem. So let's go ahead and get right into that conversation with Anatoly and Austin. But first, a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Kraken, our preferred exchange for crypto in 2023. If you not have an account with Kraken,

• 2:57David Hoffman?

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• 3:40David Hoffman?

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• 4:25David Hoffman?

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• 5:09David Hoffman?

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• 5:54David Hoffman?

  We're coming in from Amsterdam at Breakpoint number three. Anatoly, Austin, how's it going, guys?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  It's great. Thanks for having us here. Yeah, thanks for coming.

• 6:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so we're pretty far out of the city. I don't think we're actually in Amsterdam. We're in Zamdam, some other local Netherlands city. The campus is phenomenal. Who has more information about how Breakpoint came together?

• 6:17Speaker 01

  This one, probably Austin. Yeah. I'm on a little loop at this point.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we loved Lisbon for the last two years. I mean Lisbon year one, we can get into that later, how that happened, but we really wanted to not do a distributed, multi-venue conference where you had to take, you know, a shuttle bus to go between it. And then also, like, quite frankly, we didn't want to end up in sort of a soulless hotel complex. And so this campus just ended up being an awesome spot to keep things in Europe, but also give us a little bit of feel of like the first two breakpoints where you had different venues with different characteristics.

• 6:53David Hoffman?

  So just starting at the very basics, what's Breakpoint?

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Oh, man. It is a conference the Solana Foundation puts on every year that is meant to bring the community together, to sort of galvanize talks and conversations around some of the biggest issues and topics that we're facing. It's first and foremost a developer conference, but we've got a bunch of news and announcements that sneak into that as well. But you can probably talk more about the original vision of why even do a conference.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, we had like SolCon 2019. This was part of, we threw basically a meetup with some beer and pizza at DevCon in Tokyo. And that was SolCon. That was really our first attempt at a conference, like 20 people showed up. You can literally see photos of that of like just me being the only person in the picture in the crowd while somebody's presenting.

• 7:46David Hoffman?

  And so like the Solana ecosystem, of course, has grown immensely since then. When did Breakpoint number one happen? And that was in Lisbon, correct?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:55David Hoffman?

  Okay. When was that? And how many people attended that?

• 7:58Speaker 01

  That was 2020, right?

• 8:01Speaker 02

  2021.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Oh, 2021, yeah.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  And so we had, you know, it was just coming out of COVID, and this is sort of like the origins of the Solana network, or mainnet launched in the depths of COVID, right? Just as the world went into lockdown. And so the thinking was sort of in spring of 21, could we find somewhere in the world that enough people could travel to that we could actually bring everyone together who's really only been building together online? Most of these people have never met in person before. And we had this crazy idea that we could get 2,000 people to come to Lisbon, right after COVID with this basically network that no one knew about a year ago.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  It was like the only country open, too.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  It was it was wild. We were we were looking through the list of like, where can people get to that is easy for visas? They feel safe traveling to that like we could also throw a conference in and Lisbon was like the perfect spot.

• 8:55David Hoffman?

  And okay, so that was 2021. What what part of the year was that in?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Was it November, early November?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  It was November.

• 9:01David Hoffman?

  Okay, okay. So let's see, that's like that at the highest point of the market, right? Where so like, what was the vibe of breakpoint one?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  It was like very much like consensus 2017.

• 9:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  That kind of vintage. And like, but there were like some devs, there were some developers there and some folks to connect with. We like, you know, we gave a bunch of talks on security and programming and like all those smart contract development. And there was like a crowd of people that was like kind of staring at like the nerds and trying to figure out what they're doing. And those nerds, when all of them like hung out in one house.

• 9:43David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  That we all called the hacker house, like jokingly. And it like worked out so well that a bunch of people just wanted to keep running these like little hacker houses right after breakpoint, just keep going with it. And that's really like, I don't know if you've been to any of the hacker houses or like you heard of Solana hacker houses. It was just really that like, we wanted to capture that vibe of all the developers that are just like nerding out in a in a single place and just run with it. So we threw a bunch of these like little events around the world.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  And like, yeah, post peak, the price is dropping, but like the developer engaging is rising. And like, people are shipping code and like building products and stuff. So like, it like, I think during that year, we formed like a really strong core of like the community. Like all the security companies like Neodyne, all those guys that kind of became what they are today during during that year. And like all a bunch of the products that you know, and Solana launched that through through that.

• 10:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so, okay, so if this was at the top of the market 2021 and there was like a lot of, there's like a lot of the tourists in the industry as a whole, but you're saying there was also the kernel of what later became the Solana community. Well, like, just what were the lessons that were pulled out of the 2021 breakpoint that that have continued forward?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  I think you could like, the tourists and stuff, they will show up during a bull cycle. There's just not like you can like keep them away, right? Like, we're not gonna like, even if we try it, right? Like, you can't like, tell them not to come, and that's fine. I think for founders or people that are trying to build a community, you really gotta like, be principled and really focus on those like nerds and like the people that are actually building stuff in there for the long haul as much as you can.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  So that takes some focus and like takes like your internal team to not get like, you know, get confused or like what the what the mission is and stuff like that. And like, we have an awesome team and those folks really pulled it together. And you could see like the next breakpoint, we had a year of like everything going down.

• 11:55David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  It was a bunch of devs. It was like mostly developers, mostly like companies trying to ship product. And kind of like the same thing happened again, right? Like, I would say this last year, right? The last breakpoint on the flight back, like the worst possible thing that I could have ever imagined happened. And if you were to told me then that like, this is what it's gonna be like a year from now, I would have like probably punched you at that time.

• 12:23David Hoffman?

  Okay, but the second Solana breakpoint, what you're referring to is the second Solana breakpoint was like right before FTX. But like, retroactively, it didn't, the Solana breakpoint was just a Solana breakpoint. Like, FTX happened right afterwards, but like the conference itself was totally isolated.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was awesome. We had like, I don't know, like 60 game companies showed up for Game Day. They're like all like launching like games and stuff. We had, I don't know, a bunch of devs registered for that hacker house. I think like 1,500, which is like insane.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  There's like, the energy was great and people were building, building stuff and then like... Right at the end of it, right? I think at like the closing party effectively, I'm seeing all these tweets about FTX imploding. It was. At the end, not right before. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like, uh, it was, I don't know. I, I think the reason why we're still here is because those developers stuck around. They weren't tourists, right? They actually see some value in this technology and they continued building. That's what kind of really, that's, I think the goal of all these conferences, all these events and hacker houses is to like, get that,

• 13:33Speaker 01

  you know, the social glue that's gonna like fork the network when something bad happens, you need to actually build it. It's not just gonna like happen automatically and you gotta get those folks in and uh, like it or not, I think those people have to be pretty technical. They have to understand how the system works. It's usually gonna be your pool of developers or validators. So like, you gotta invest in that.

• 13:54David Hoffman?

  So we're at breakpoint three now in, in 2023. And understanding that some people attending breakpoint three have been to all three breakpoints. And you know, at some point, like three plus years, you're seeing the same three, like the same faces, three years in a row now, you know, in, in other spots in the world, but also at breakpoint. And for some people in the Solana's community is gonna feel like that's home for them. Uh, and so, you know, three plus years, that's a, that's a lot of time as a, as a community together. How would you describe the evolution of breakpoint to where we are today? Like what, what would be the, the, the like, the sentiment around breakpoint three?

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, one of the things that's great about this year is we had something called MEV Camp last year, um, which sort of spontaneously popped up a bunch of validators and the Mango team and a few others and Gito decided last year, oh, we're gonna do a pre-breakpoint event. And that, a lot of people who attended that said that was one of the most high value things they got out of the year was like that community focused on high performance blockchain. And so they actually ran MEV Camp here formally as part of breakpoint. Um, Block Zero was a validator conference that kicked off beforehand. IBC Amsterdam came here and did a whole conference on blockchain connectivity and, and day one. And so we're seeing like breakpoint go from something that like was 90% organized by the foundation to something that's maybe

• 15:15Speaker 02

  65% organized by the foundation this year. And maybe next year it's 45% organized. And it's that long journey to say that like, the foundation and its role here is really. A part of it, it's not the whole thing. And to start handing over bigger and bigger core components of this conference to the ecosystem. And that's where that like, to know that the ecosystem of developers and builders is strong enough to actually organize big events that draw their own crowd is, uh, is really awesome to see. That's my biggest takeaway, at least. What's yours?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, they want to do less work.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  No, but that, it, it's really cool. Like, I mean, every breakpoint, there's somebody trying to do something on their own and like throw events that like surprise us and like, I think, um, it's important that like the folks at the foundation recognize that and try to incorporate it and like kind of run with it. Cause all the good ideas come from the community, you know, we're, we're, we don't know what we're doing.

• 16:13David Hoffman?

  Is the aesthetic of breakpoint, I think is, is pretty interesting. Was it, it's very Apple-y. The, the, the Apple design is like very, very prominent in breakpoint three. Was that?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  A lot of this stuff, I think, comes from Raj. Like I would say, he's like the spiritual designer of Solana. Like, it doesn't come from me. I can tell you that.

• 16:34David Hoffman?

  Was, was breakpoint two and one like that? Or is that a relatively new like design, design kind of vibe?

• 16:38Speaker 02

  We had, um, more time this year than we've had with breakpoint one or two. So I think there was a bit more focus on, you know, visual design and sort of the, the animations you see on the main stage and that sort of thing. And Ross, our creative director at the foundation, like has a huge hand in, in working with Raj and making sure that stuff comes together well. This is also the, we have a events director, Ellie, at the foundation and, you know, she came from Netflix and ran a lot of really high profile events for them. And so, um, you had, the conference is growing up in a lot of ways. It's growing up through more participants and greater decentralization and all these really awesome things we get to do. But it's also growing up from a production standpoint, too. And that like, you know, the, the first hacker house you were talking about,

• 17:20Speaker 02

  it was literally like a bunch of folding tables in a room and like a bunch of power cords being run over the ground. And like, I'm sure it was totally not up to code. And like, that's awesome. But at some point, you know, it's like, all right, well, we have a few months to plan this thing. Let's see if we can do it a little more right.

• 17:35David Hoffman?

  What about the, the composition of who is attending breakpoint three? Like who's coming here?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Um, it's, I would say like, just from talking to random people, it's a lot of like, like people that have been around in the community for like a year or two. Like, I think it's folks that have kind of stuck around, but I also see a bunch of new faces. Mostly developers, at least the people that come up to me, it's, and like, it's mostly devs, which is pretty cool. Like, I think that's, that's like the goal, right? Get, get a bunch of engineers together, get folks talking and like meeting each other and build those relationships.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there's more engineers from other ecosystems here, too. I mean, you're here, Justin Bonds is here.

• 18:17David Hoffman?

  Definitely not an engineer, but.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  No, no, but, but we're, we're starting to see more, more folks who are more engaged in sort of the research community and other networks start to look more seriously at Solana. And that's just hugely flattering to see. Like Rune is here as well from Maker. So it's a good collection of folks.

• 18:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Especially this last year, I'd say from, at least from my perception, like this has been the year, maybe you guys can be more informed about this, but the year like Solana chewed glass through, through the bear market. How has that like impacted just like the, the cultural vibe and, and what this event means for the community?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  I have a lot more gray hair.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Me too.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, this was a, I would say like the hardest year for me, like kind of the most painful because it was such a slog. It's, it wasn't like, you know, an outage or something, you know, happens, you'd like work through it, you know, the engineering problem and then you're, you kind of, it's behind you, but like,

• 19:12Speaker 01

  it was really cool to see like how many people, like, again, surprising, like people just stuck around. They're like, you know, they're like, oh yeah, FTX collapsed. I guess that happened. I'm just going to keep shipping my code and like shipping my product because that's what they're focused on. So that was awesome to see. Like, it really means that people do see something special about the technology and really want to continue like investing in it. And those are the folks that really create all of value, like create the community. They kind of carry the, carry the, the whole network. So, I don't know. It was, uh, it's cool to see them, cool to shake hands with everyone. I'm like grateful for everyone that showed up.

• 19:55David Hoffman?

  Anything from you about the evolution of the Solana community here?

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, what Toly was saying about folks just continuing to build and ship, I think what I've seen personally is like Solana DeFi this year, like all the stuff that was being worked on through 2022, like it just shipped this year. And it's been really incredible to see like new versions of Jupiter coming out and what they're able to do, like MarginFi and some of the stuff they've been building, the new Orca product that's launching this week. Like, there's a lot of really good, sort of, I don't know if you call it DeFi 2.0, but like some new generation of like Solana DeFi and like the work squads has been doing on multi-sigs and like those hardcore, real code-based projects. Like, that was the real test for me when I was like, oh, all these folks are still, are still fully committed to Solana.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  They're still building here. They're still shipping awesome stuff. And they, they did what everyone always tells you to do, which is build through the bear. But like, they actually did it, you know?

• 20:52David Hoffman?

  What would you say is the thing that, or the handful of things that really excites the Solana community as it stands today? Like, what are people looking forward to?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  I mean, like, I think you can, you can kind of tell the focus between the Solana, like, conferences and Ethereum. There's a lot less scaling talks, right? Like, a lot of companies are focused on consumer end things. And it's like, it's, I guess, our vibe. Like, I'm probably coming from like myself and from, from everyone else. Like, at least my message is, we got scaling, taken care of, you don't have to worry about it. So like, the kind of people we attract are the ones that at least believe in it, or at least like can verify that it mostly works and can focus on like consumer and products. And that's pretty interesting. I think like, there's a lot less, like,

• 21:46Speaker 01

  it's harder. It's really, it's much harder to build like consumer and products. It's easier to build infra, right? And to like raise for it. So a lot of the folks here are like really grinding for product market fit, like in, in the trenches, really trying to get users. And a lot of the conversations that I have with Doves are like, and things that I'm not an expert in. I can tell them everything about like systems engineering and stuff like that. But what they really care about is, how do I grow? How do I get like users? Where do I like, you know, like? What advice can I give him in terms of product development? So that's like a ton of learning for me as well.

• 22:24David Hoffman?

  What's your perspective, Austin? What's getting the Solana community excited these days?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, there's a lot. I will say it's definitely the consumer focused applications are like, there's this understanding in the Solana community that like, we've been waiting for consumer facing applications to hit like, oh, it's been a UX problem. Oh, it's been a UI problem. Oh, it's a regulation problem. Oh, it's a scaling problem. Oh, there's no good self custody solutions. Like, that's been sort of, and this is not, you know, and specific to any network, but there's sort of been like an excuse mindset, I think in crypto for a number of years that like, oh, we were ready to build consumer applications, but USDC isn't available in New York. So suddenly we can't do it. And there's just a lot of founders attracted to the Solana ecosystem that sort of say, eh, I'm just gonna build it. And like, it's not my perfect vision.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Like Sling launched yesterday here. It's peer to peer Venmo built on, you know, US dollar stable coins. And it's not available in New York. And they're just like, yep, it works in 30 countries. Doesn't work in New York, like, too bad. And that is like a thing that is just like a, like this is this vibe of just like, build and ship and like, we can figure it out later. And something you see in a lot of web two companies is that people seem to be really worried about building the perfect product before they ship it. And there's like a willingness to experiment in production. That's always been part of the crypto ethos for non consumer applications. And we're seeing that move more into the consumer side, I think.

• 23:51David Hoffman?

  Wait, is there, what kind of consumer applications are going around that are worth noting if people want to go and explore some?

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I would say Sling, which just launched is really pretty interesting. What Drip House is doing with sort of free NFT collections that are time limited as opposed to being number limited. Those, to me, are particularly interesting. What Helium's doing with their $5 mobile plan.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Fuse, a kind of abstracted wallet. It's pretty cool. So you can like basically no seed phrase. You set up multiple devices that are part of your own multi-sig.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  So that's pretty cool to see. Like, those are like the features that I think like. Take a lot of design work and folks to really think through all the really, really complicated UX challenges and like, put it together in a product that improves security and usability. You rarely see both of those happening at the same time.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been impressed with Squad's V4. Yeah, cool.

• 24:48David Hoffman?

  And it's always, so every time I see you, you're running around pretty busy. Once Breakpoint ends, what are you gonna go do? What's like the first thing that you're gonna focus on?

• 24:56Speaker 01

  I'm gonna hang out with my family and kids. I had to miss like Halloween with the kids, which is

• 25:03David Hoffman?

  Oh, no.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  They were so sad that I wasn't there that they saved me candy.

• 25:08David Hoffman?

  Oh, that's nice. That's nice. Okay, but what about inside of the Solana ecosystem? Like, what's first on your agenda here?

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Um, I like, uh, it's like, I'm, as a founder, right, you're often like, do whatever, whatever's necessary, right? You jump in and you're like, I will, you know, help people to brand, I'll like, do messaging and stuff like that. The ecosystem is mature enough, foundation is mature enough, and like, all these things are actually getting, uh, filled with experts that are much better than me at like, all the things except systems engineering. So I get to actually do some, some of that again. So I'm like, working on the multiple concurrent leader design, like, stuff like that, like, trying to make sure ABIV2 and like, all the

• 25:56Speaker 01

  runtime changes land in like, a robust, so like, I get to nerd out, which is pretty great.

• 26:02David Hoffman?

  Yes. As founders grow and their, their project grows, they tend to go into this like, an operations role, where they're, they're not really actually doing the thing that made them successful in the first place, they are now managing. How much of that, how much are you like, managing and operating?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  That was like, the last two years, like, you kind of like, the last three years, I would say like, as soon as we launched, I couldn't do systems work at all. Like, I was like, basically running around, you know, talking to everyone, almost like a sales role, I would say. And like, now, like, there's just so many other people that are much, that are much better than me, that like, all these other functions, so it's pretty great.

• 26:43David Hoffman?

  Okay, so pivoting the conversation to something completely different, what would you guys say is the long-term relations between Solana and Ethereum? Awesome, I'll put this one to you.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know exactly what, there's a lot of different ways that could go. I would say like to start, I don't think we directly view Ethereum as a competitor.

• 27:04David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Right? I think there, there's very different approaches to what's being built on Ethereum, what's being built on Solana. I know Tully's got some fun ideas about using Solana as a sequencer for an L2. But there's a lot, you know, I think at the end of the day, like, what I would love to see is that folks who are using Ethereum for what Ethereum is great at, they use Solana for what it's great at too. Like, the classic example of this is there's no reason the Apecoin airdrop should have been on Ethereum.

• 27:31David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Right? Now, yes, you could talk about offloading that on Solr 2, but you could have dropped Apecoin on Solana and people would have been able to spend basically $0 on gas fees and then bridge it back over at their convenience if they want to, instead of paying $3,500 to claim an airdrop.

• 27:45David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  So I think there's a lot of technology synergies that can happen between them. I hate to use that, the S-word.

• 27:51David Hoffman?

  Synergies.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. What are you even thinking about?

• 27:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  I think like, there's like this nice narrative that I keep in my head and I don't know how true it is, is that like Bitcoin is like stateless money, Ethereum is settlement, and then Solana's execution. It like, sounds good in theory, but like, there's obviously feature overlap, right?

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Like Ethereum is also great stateless money.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Right? And Solana also implements settlement and there's going to be tension between all those things.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Right? And that's fine, right? Like, there's going to be competition. Some people prefer one or the other. And like, to me, that's great, because like, that forces innovation. People have to think through hard problems and like, figure out like, you know, how do I build maybe the same thing in a different network? It actually does spark ideas and moves, moves the industry forward. So like, it'll, it'll be competitive, it'll be somewhat like, open source, you know, like BSD devs and Linux devs compete, but they share ideas. It's, it's all good.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Right?

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. I would also say that like we have this, human brains are really bad at not competing when you put a chart up. So the fact that we have a market cap chart-

• 29:06Speaker 01

  There's a leaderboard.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Bitcoin didn't need to fail for Ethereum to succeed. Ethereum doesn't need to fail for Solana to gain mass adoption, right? And like Solana failing would not give Ethereum any more adoption. And globally, we're just dealing with such a tiny fraction of the pie that currently uses crypto, that like, there's all of this like PvP, one group punching each other in the face, like that is just totally unnecessary. And it's just because we have a leaderboard.

• 29:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's a good point. I've never really considered the leaderboard as like the, the instigator of somebody fighting.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  I think like, as long as people don't do personal attacks, people arguing about tech and vision, all that stuff is fine. I think that is like, part of our search for truth, right? We're trying to figure out what makes sense, what doesn't. I don't see a world where Solana succeeds and Ethereum fails. I think that's just like ridiculous, right? Like Ethereum is awesome. I think the reason that their technology is moving in that direction is because of the success that they had. They're kind of like, in a specific spot, if I was in, involved in the Ethereum community, I'd probably be arguing for the exact same design decision as they're doing now, because that's the natural path, right, to go. So like, I think it's totally fine. The competition's great, right? Like,

• 30:27Speaker 01

  I think it's awesome. You know, I hope like, the optimizations that like Kevin Bowers did for like, 256 bit multiplication end up, you know, increasing EVM throughput. That'd be great. Like, it's all open source code. It's all good.

• 30:41David Hoffman?

  Sure. I think there's one thing I've just learned from just chatting with the people here at Breakpoint, is that there's a certain archetype of, type of person that comes to the Solana community. And it's like this, like, low level, low level devs, right? Like the ex-Teslas, the ex SpaceX type of, the Google type of people that I like, so you find some of these people in Ethereum, but really, there's a lot of these people that Solana attracted, that I don't think would have joined any- Community because of just the nature of how that blockchain was built versus Solana. There's something about like the way that Solana, the emphasis on hardware, for example, has attracted a certain dev mindset that I think is kind of like the base of the Solana community. At least that's, that's my perception.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's weirdly true and I don't fully understand why. Like, I mean, I'm one of those people. Like, I'm an embedded systems dev. I can't, it like, maybe it's because like, I like set the narrative and people are like, oh, this, this guy sounds like me, but like, yeah, I don't know. We're a bunch of like, systems nerds. It's what we like to geek out at.

• 31:43David Hoffman?

  Anatoly, what's it like to be sort of like some sort of a community cultural leader? I can, I can say more, more religious type figures and words, but I won't. But like, the, the whole like cult of Anatoly, what's that like to have?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Uh, it's really weird. Uh, I'm blessed that it only occurs like during breakpoint in a Solana event. If I go anywhere else, nobody cares.

• 32:06David Hoffman?

  Dude, do you get recognized in real life out and about?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  No, no, like at all, which is awesome. Even at an Ethereum conference, like, it's great. So like, yeah, that, that, that is actually like, this is like the most I can like, stomach it. Um, I think like, I don't know. It's part of the job, I think. Like, um, I hope I do my, like, drive people to go build better code, more open source code and kind of collaborate. So I hope that that message is, is landing.

• 32:37David Hoffman?

  Cool. Beautiful. Uh, Anatoly, I know you got a hard stop, so we're gonna, I'm gonna let you go and then I'm gonna ask some awesome, some technical questions.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 32:44David Hoffman?

  Dude, thank you so much for, for coming on and speaking to the Bankless Nation. Appreciate it.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Thank you for coming here.

• 32:48David Hoffman?

  Of course. Have a good one. Congratulations on the breakpoint.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 32:52David Hoffman?

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• 33:36David Hoffman?

  You know Uniswap, it's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over 1.4 trillion dollars in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on Bankless. It's Uniswap, but Uniswap is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswap Mobile Wallet for iOS, the newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With a Uniswap Wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card with extremely low fiat on-ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on Mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. On the Uniswap Mobile Wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts, or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to DeFi with the Uniswap Mobile Wallet,

• 34:20David Hoffman?

  safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in DeFi. Download the Uniswap Wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. Are you launching a token? Is it already live? How are you managing the legal and tax for providing token awards for your team? Toku simplifies everything about managing token grant compensation, and you can get started with them for free. You'll have access to top-notch legal and tax support to handle the distribution and management of tokens for your team. Toku caters to every step in the process, from user-friendly legal templates for granting tokens to tracking vesting periods and calculating withholding taxes. Toku understands every grant structure, token purchase agreements, restricted token awards, restricted token units, token options, and all the other ones. Toku is already simplifying

• 35:03David Hoffman?

  this today for leading companies like Protocol Labs, DYDX Foundation, Mina Foundation, and many more. You can learn more about how Toku can help you streamline your token management and get started for free. Visit toku at toku.com/bankless or click the link in the description below. Cool. Okay, so there's like just a handful of things that I know that people just like really give a fuck about here at Breakpoint. Firedancer, I know, is perhaps at the top of the list. And then there's a few other ones, but I kind of want to just like peel back and like show whoever whoever's interested where the rabbit holes are for Solana if they're trying to learn like more, just like rather than approaching Solana head on, like what are the rabbit holes? And so we'll start with Firedancer because I think that's the thing that everyone is like super stoked about. What is Firedancer and why is everyone so stoked about it?

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so FireDancer is a new implementation of the Solana runtime and the consensus model and networking stack, which is written in C.

• 35:56David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  And so there's a few things here. One is C is just an incredibly fast performing language for this sort of thing. It's sort of the language of choice for like high-frequency traders and high-performance systems. But the other piece of it is it's just a complete rewrite. And so there are five years of development on the codebase that Solana Labs originally created. That's just a spider web at this point, right? Like, any codebase that's been worked on for that long, it's like trying to build a house when you don't know the end architecture of the house. And so just going through and starting from the beginning and saying, "We have a spec we can build against, and we're going to build a client optimized to squeeze as much performance possible out." That's really the whole point of the FireDancer project.

• 36:38David Hoffman?

  Okay, so is it kind of like when you clean out your refrigerator? You take everything out of the refrigerator, then you clean the refrigerator, and then you put everything back in? Rather than just like rearranging the... You know that metaphor?

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd say, actually, so a good metaphor would be it's like taking a house built in the 1800s down to the studs and then rebuilding the inside, right? You can retrofit in new electricity, like without taking the walls out. You can put in a new bathroom. But like realistically, if you want to turn a really old house, and they do this all over Europe, right? Into somewhere totally beautiful, you gotta take it down to the studs. You gotta take it down to the walls. You put in new stuff, and then like that space is totally transformed.

• 37:19David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  And that's kind of the best analogy here for what FireDancer is. And there's a ton of different components of that. So the version that was announced to be on testnet now is actually, we call it FrankenDancer. It's a little bit of a Frankenstein of some of the code from the existing validator client with the parts that the team building FireDancer, which is a lot of engineers at Jump Trading Group have been building. That really speeds up certain components of it, right? And that's kind of what that testnet version is today. Over time, and it's probably another year or two to replace all the bits of code that the Solana Labs team built. But we're getting to a place where there is enough performance. Enough performance improvements in those new components that it's a real step function change.

• 38:04David Hoffman?

  Okay, so just to kind of regurgitate everything Bitcoin, one of the reasons, one of my biggest critiques about Bitcoin is that it's got one client. And so if Bitcoin has a bug, then that that bug is Bitcoin. And all of a sudden you have to like socially engineer around that.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  I think they've got like four clients, but only one 98% of Bitcoin runs one client.

• 38:23David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right. And so it's what we all in in order to have a robust decentralized blockchain system, we need multiple clients.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:30David Hoffman?

  And so we have the Solana core client, which is like Solana number one.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:35David Hoffman?

  Client number one, which like I'm guessing is like the vast majority of the clients that runs Solana at that in the past.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:42David Hoffman?

  And so now we're working on FireDancer, which is a client number two, but it's not just. And so like you use the spec of the first client to generate a shape of what the next client will be FireDancer, what it will be. So we're talking and we're pointing towards the same truth that is Solana, right?

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's actually, it's actually the third client.

• 39:02David Hoffman?

  Third client. Okay, what was the second?

• 39:03Speaker 02

  There's a client built by Gito.

• 39:06David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  And so.

• 39:06David Hoffman?

  But that's just a fork of the first one.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  It's not, it is 90% similar code. And the main thing about the Gito client is it has the same upstream dependencies as the Solana Labs client.

• 39:17David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  This is something that Ethereum has done quite well is that not only other several different clients, but those clients are written in different programming languages. So for example, if a bug is triggered in the networking stack software of a library that's shared between two clients, even if two different teams wrote those clients, if you have two different implementations of a Rust client, that upstream dependency can still cause a bug. And so the nice thing about having one in C and one in Rust is that those are totally different code bases.

• 39:45David Hoffman?

  Right, sure.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  So that's kind of like, and I think this is something where Ethereum has, I think it's two or three, they technically have like six clients. But most of them share the same dependency tree. There's there's two or three different code bases.

• 39:57David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 39:57Speaker 02

  And so that's really what the difference with FireDancer is, is it's not just a new client, it's a new dependency tree.

• 40:04David Hoffman?

  Sure. Okay. And so that's where you get that multi-client robustness, at least now with with.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Like the GTO client and the Solana Labs client provides social robustness and the FireDancer client provides technical robustness.

• 40:16David Hoffman?

  Sure, except the FireDancer client is also supposed to be like much more performant.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:22David Hoffman?

  How would you, can you measure that? Is there a way to like put numbers behind that?

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Putting numbers behind anything in crypto is always a mistake, but what I'll say is that there are key components of the FireDancer stack that are 100 times as performant as the existing one. That doesn't mean the network is going to be 100 times faster, right? But what it means is that, you know, it's called Andel's Law, right? You can, if you have 10 components in the system and you make nine of them 100 times faster.

• 40:47David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  The system is still the same speed.

• 40:49David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  You take that last one, you make it faster. It's the lowest common denominator. The least performant part of the system is the bottleneck. And so, you know, we expect to see FireDancer be and probably an order of magnitude change in the Solana network at start, but that could go up from there, depending on a whole bunch of different things that we have to see in prod.

• 41:09David Hoffman?

  So why would anyone run the old client when they were just, they could just run FireDancer instead?

• 41:13Speaker 02

  So what will probably happen, and you know, it's all up to the community and how they decide to run things, of course, but very similar to what the big node operators do in Ethereum, where they run one client in primary and they run one client in failover. And so this, you know, if there's a bug in Prism or Lighthouse, the other one can take over.

• 41:30David Hoffman?

  Right, okay.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  And so for Solana, what we would see is because Ethereum is targeting a certain performance threshold, right? And it makes it easy because all the clients are building to what's a fairly low performance threshold. With FireDancer, they're trying to squeeze as much performance out as possible out of the same hardware that everyone else is running. And so what we expect to see is that probably everyone will run the FireDancer client in primary configuration. And if there's a bug in the network, it would basically fail back into the Solana Labs version. And yes, that will certainly be a performance hit, right? You might see fees on the network spike because there's now a 10,000 transaction capacity as opposed to 100,000 transaction capacity. You can think of it almost as falling into like a safe mode.

• 42:11David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah, yeah. So like when with the escalator breaks, it turns into stairs.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. The analogy on Ethereum here. Is that you can you can have execution continue even though finality can't be reached.

• 42:23David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Right. And that happened a few times this year for Ethereum and it provided a worse experience, but it wasn't a whole stop of the network.

• 42:30David Hoffman?

  Sure, sure, sure, sure. Okay. All right. So that's FireDancer. Like, I kind of am categorizing it in my brain as like when the Ethereum community got all excited about like 1559 or even like the the merge. This is like, kind of just like, we're getting a protocol upgrade.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 42:45David Hoffman?

  So this is about like a comprehensive new, like Solana 2.0. Is it fair to call it like Solana 2.0?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  I think if you add FireDancer plus runtime version 2.

• 42:54David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  That's when you it's fair to call it Solana 2.0. Like, the the best analogy I would say right now is like, we're we're building the most performant gasoline car imaginable.

• 43:05David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  And eventually with runtime V2, it switches over to being like an electric powertrain.

• 43:09David Hoffman?

  Okay, what's a runtime V2?

• 43:11Speaker 02

  So runtime V2 is a whole bunch of improvements in the Solana runtime. This is probably about a year out, right? So just to set expectations on this.

• 43:18David Hoffman?

  Okay, so we have 1559 and then the merge is in like a year.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:22David Hoffman?

  Right?

• 43:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So runtime V2 is a whole bunch of optimizations in terms of reducing memory copies in the runtime. We'll make just things snappier, but it'll include type-rich bytecode format, which will allow a bunch of programs to talk to each other more easily with less plumbing. And so that'll improve like the efficiency of, you know, a core component of Solana is you, you know, you use Jupiter aggregator and it'll hit six different markets. That'll make something like that much less compute expensive to run on the network. There's also a bunch of zero-knowledge proof and different curve support that gets added into runtime V2. And so some of that stuff is in the network today. So like 116, which just shipped, includes a zk-proof component for confidential transfers,

• 44:05Speaker 02

  which was demoed as part of the token 22 spec. Lot of words we can get into there. But, you know, runtime V2 is sort of like the closest thing to a Solana 2.0 that we have on the roadmap.

• 44:17David Hoffman?

  Okay, okay, cool. The confidential transactions, can you explain a little bit more about that? Is that like privacy built into the base layer?

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So, well, base layer is a tricky question. So there is something called token 2022, which is a token program on the network.

• 44:31David Hoffman?

  Right. Nothing to do with the conference or the event?

• 44:34Speaker 02

  No, no, nothing at all. It was just a spec that was finalized in the year of 2022 and then ships in 2023. Right? It's the sort of thing there.

• 44:42David Hoffman?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  So token 2022, it's a program on the network and Solana is built on this idea of program reusability.

• 44:48David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  So token 2022, or the actual token program that everyone uses to send tokens around, that's not part of the base layer of Solana technically. It's part of the Solana program library, which exists on top of it. And it's no more-

• 45:01David Hoffman?

  It's a file that you can open?

• 45:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like, I guess in Ethereum terminology, it's enshrined, right? But it's not actually part of the code base, right? If you download the Solana validator package, it's not like it forces you to use the token program. That's like a choice a user can make when they want to transfer stuff.

• 45:16David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Token 2022 is a new version of that token program. You can think of it sort of as like, you know, upgrades that have happened to like the the NFT standard on Ethereum over the years. It's like, we had this version, now we have a new version, now we have a new version, right? And part of that includes confidential transfers. And so what that means is that you and I could transact and the world would be able to see that we transacted, but it couldn't see the details of what actually transferred between us.

• 45:44David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  And there were a bunch of basically system calls that had to be integrated into the actual runtime layer, the program layer of Solana to make that possible.

• 45:53David Hoffman?

  Okay. All right. So that's FireDancer, runtime V2, and runtime V2 is about a year out.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:59David Hoffman?

  What else is worth bringing, surfacing about, just like the significant things that are getting people excited about Solana?

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, token 2022 is one where there's a lot of features that I think are going to be really powerful for folks. There's a whole trend in sort of enterprise space nowadays of like permissioned environments, right? And the thesis right now is that- Very much like in the old days of email servers, like, well, if you're a company, you have to run your own email server. And we saw the early version of this where it was like, oh, I need an Ethereum fork for my company, right? I can't run on mainnet, right? And now the version of that is like, I need my own permissioned L2.

• 46:35David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  And in all those situations, it still requires running a bunch of infrastructure. And so Token 2022 has things like transfer approvals and transfer hooks built into it. So I, as an issuer of, let's say, a tokenized fund, can say, only wallets that I've whitelisted can actually buy and sell and interact with this.

• 46:54David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  And the cool part about that is it's actually fully composable with the existing DeFi ecosystem.

• 46:58David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  So you may be able to go on Mango Markets, or Jupiter Aggregator, or whatever DeFi marketplace you love, and say, oh, I want to actually interact with this fund in addition to buying tokenized Bitcoin, or some dog money, or something like that. And if you've gone through a KYC process with them and they've approved you, you'd be able to participate in that token. So it's kind of mixing that idea of like, fully permissionless DeFi and the regulated permissioned DeFi into the same user space.

• 47:29David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  And that, I think, is a much better experience than saying like, oh, if I want to trade X or Y or Z, I have to go to this permissioned environment.

• 47:37David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. So it's allowing for a permissioned environment to exist inside of the larger environment.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 47:43David Hoffman?

  Rather than having it to be like an island over there.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:46David Hoffman?

  Right? There's just simple, like, not compliance, but just like, if this, then that statement that keep rules enforced.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's sort of just like how Circle technically has Freeze Authority on all USDC. They could, using Token 2022, someone could create a stablecoin that's a whitelisted stablecoin, right? That's like, oh, you know, a classic example of this is actually like Andrew Yang's, like, Burrow Bucks idea back from the campaign, which was like, oh, let's switch over like our food stamp program to saying like, you know, we both live in Brooklyn, like, if you're on an assistance program in Brooklyn, you can only spend your dollars in merchants in Brooklyn, right? Someone could do something like that fully on-chain, and it would be able to sit in their wallet, just like any other token would, but they could only spend it at select merchants, right? Because the criticism of these programs is everyone just buys stuff on Amazon, and then like, it doesn't help the local economy.

• 48:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, sure.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  You can think of all of those types of things you could now build using the Token 2022 standard.

• 48:46David Hoffman?

  Cool. Okay. All right. What else? What else? What other rabbit holes are worth illuminating?

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Uh, oh, man. Let's see. So I think that we are seeing a lot more of interest in sort of Solana L2s for different types of use cases.

• 49:01David Hoffman?

  All right. I thought that I thought that's like, uh, just like a juxtaposition that that shouldn't exist. What Solana L2s?

• 49:06Speaker 02

  So L2s on Ethereum are used for scale.

• 49:08David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  L2s on Solana will likely be used for specific types of applications and execution that requires differences at the hardware level.

• 49:18David Hoffman?

  Cool.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  So a great example of this is something like the Render Network, right? So Render is a GPU rendering network. It's used for everything from like people style, like very complex 3D renders to like AI models and training.

• 49:31David Hoffman?

  Just like GPU farm in the cloud kind of thing?

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. But there's a lot of ways to do this. One is like you just say, oh, people have their systems and, you know, there's an off-chain database of how performing your computer is versus mine and the Render Network assigns stuff. Another way to do that is to literally run an L2 on Solana that says, you can only be a part of this L2. You can only be a validator on this L2 if you pass a certain benchmark. And that means basically like if I go buy, you know, a super high-end GPU, I'm now permissionlessly and decentralized added to this L2 because the L2 is not for scale. It's to prove that I have a powerful enough GPU to run these rendering jobs.

• 50:10David Hoffman?

  This sounds like a hardware, instead of like an app-specific chain, it's like a hardware-specific chain.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Exactly. Exactly. Right. You could also see someone building, I've joked for a long time that someone should build Solana, which is just a slower version of Solana that requires less bandwidth.

• 50:28David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  That, you know, if what you want to do is you want to be able to basically verify just small pieces of state, like data sampling kind of sucks.

• 50:37David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Right? Like it's better than nothing, but like, like clients are not full nodes, right? That's, that's like a full statement in itself. But you could build an L2 that actually was just a slower version of Solana that could be used for different types of transfers, right? If you're trying to run, you know, like we have a lot of nonprofits like that want to actually be able to do. payouts via Solana in developing countries, right? For their nonprofit work where there's really great connectivity, but there's not necessarily great bandwidth. You could see them running an L2 environment to basically slow down the network. So if more people want to be able to run validators or just state proof generators for that network, they could do something like that without necessarily the system requirements of Solana.

• 51:18David Hoffman?

  Now, is this more of like a thought experiment or actually a practical idea?

• 51:23Speaker 02

  So the first one with hardware specific requirements is becoming real.

• 51:26David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  On the second one.

• 51:27David Hoffman?

  Mainly slow Lana. That sounds like closer just like we could do this.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  So, so actually, Code Wallet has kind of built that. They've built themselves a whole sort of L2 architecture on Solana that they use to actually make sure that they can still do transfers if the Solana mainnet is ever offline.

• 51:45David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  Right. So there's those use cases too, where they're maintaining their own Merkel trees. And therefore they can update a bunch of stuff sort of offline. And then they can always push those changes once the network, you know, block production resumes.

• 51:57David Hoffman?

  Okay, cool. So it's a little bit sovereignty play.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, there's lots of those types of applications. And I think most sovereignty solutions can be solved on the L1 with token 2022.

• 52:08David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  But, you know, there's some other applications where, you know, like Rune was talking about for Maker, they expressly want the ability to hard fork.

• 52:16David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  And they want that ability to hard fork because they're trying to build a hundred year DAO. And they have to assume that somewhere in the next hundred years, the software is going to get hacked because the only sure bet you can make in software is that something someday will get hacked.

• 52:30David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Right? Enough monkeys on enough typewriters will hack Bitcoin.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  And.

• 52:35David Hoffman?

  That's a good bit.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:38David Hoffman?

  Okay, so there's so many different things about Breakpoint that like I've been learning that like Solana is like pushing the frontier of and of its own, you know, in of its own right. But one thing that I noticed that Solana is really behind on is governance. Governance conversations are so early. What's your perspective? Like, can just give us a sit rep on just like what your perspective is on Solana governance and why this conversation is coming about now?

• 53:01Speaker 02

  So Solana Governance runs in a very different way than I think other networks run. A lot of networks either have no governance or they have direct token weighted governance.

• 53:10David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  And Solana, the validators are the group that vote.

• 53:13David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  And they vote proportional to their stake weight. So the idea is that if a validator votes in a way you don't like, you can stake to another validator instead.

• 53:21David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  And considering the Solana unbonding period is about two and a half to three days, it's a pretty quick operation to change that around. This is partially coming into effect because, you know, we launched SIMD programs this year, which is basically like EIPs and ERCs. There's now like an analogy to those programs on Solana, which is awesome to see. The governance conversation is coming up because we have multiple validator clients. And suddenly there is no single source of truth.

• 53:49David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  Like, you know.

• 53:51David Hoffman?

  There is no answer to the question, what is Solana?

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So Solana, for the longest time, was a GitHub repo, right? And Ethereum now is not a GitHub repo. It's several different GitHub repos that you can all run. And there has to be a process where if a change, like the Prism team can't just Yolo a change.

• 54:08David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  Right? The Lighthouse team can't just Yolo a change.

• 54:10David Hoffman?

  Right. That's called a fork.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Right? And so the governance is sort of a side effect, I think, of a lot of just that process of saying, we need a more formal process to accept a proposal. Because now the FireDancer team, the GTO team, the Solana Labs team, the SIG team that's building another validator client, and then whoever comes later, the TinyDancer team, building light clients and state proofs, they all have to, if not agree, at least know this thing is going to happen and have some sort of majority agreement on it. But the true adoption, I mean, this is something that like, I think, you know, I was talking with Justin Bonds about this and he was really surprised about this initially. Solana's governance is actually fairly robust in the feature activation and adoption.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  So a new feature or new version of the network cannot be activated unless 80% of the stake upgrades. So we have really good implicit governance now. We don't have good explicit governance. And that's kind of where all those conversations are focused on now.

• 55:06David Hoffman?

  Right. And so I think that in the Ethereum world, the correlate would be like the all-core Devs Call, or like the Tim Bako, or like, hey, there's this EIP, let's talk about it for like six months or something like this. This is the part of Solana that is like being developed now in its early stages, correct?

• 55:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say that was weaker in the last two years, but like 7D64, which was transaction receipts to start being able to do state proofs and to be doing light client work. That was a three-month, I think there's 500 comments in the GitHub repo about engineers going back and forth around like architecture and design for this stuff. But that really has just been built out in the last nine months. I think a lot of that work beforehand was happening in Discord, and Discord's very hard to follow, like moving to GitHub and moving to a

• 55:50David Hoffman?

  Governance in Discord's bad. It's bad.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Discord is an amazing place to solve immediate problems. It's a very bad place to solve long-term problems.

• 56:00David Hoffman?

  Right. It's too fast. Yeah, you need a slower forum for that. You need Solana for that.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 56:06David Hoffman?

  Okay, Austin, this has been great. It's kind of same question that I asked Anatoly. Once Breakpoint is all said and wrapped, like what's on your focus? What's on your agenda?

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So for me, one of the big things I'll be working on next is the Token 2022 rollout, you know, ecosystem coordination. We did a bunch of this work on state compression last year when that rolled out, making sure there's good wallet support, making sure there's good ecosystem support. There's a bunch of teams working on a cool proposal for an RWA standard now. And so I'll be working and managing a bunch of that process as well. And, you know, the events team is gonna start working on Breakpoint 2024.

• 56:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, when is that?

• 56:46Speaker 02

  So we're actually doing Singapore next year.

• 56:48David Hoffman?

  Singapore. Why Singapore?

• 56:50Speaker 02

  So we've wanted to take Breakpoint to Asia for a while. You have to plan really far out for Asia, right? The venues book up really quickly. And so we were looking around and we were saying like, you know, we were too, basically too late to do it in 2023, and like the Visa challenges of shifting a whole new location were pretty high. So Singapore just seems like a really great place to do it. We're doing it right after Token 2049. So a lot of the folks who are coming out for Token 2049, they might stay for F1 anyway. And so it's sort of, you know, you can crypto math it and say, well, I've already bought one plane ticket, so it's free to go to Breakpoint.

• 57:26David Hoffman?

  That is some real crypto math, for sure.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:29David Hoffman?

  And when is that?

• 57:30Speaker 02

  September 19th to 21st.

• 57:32David Hoffman?

  Okay, all right, sometime around token 2049. You know, I've actually never been to Asia and so.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  Really?

• 57:37David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Singapore is great.

• 57:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  It's, um, Singapore is like a really interesting place where things like food and Ubers are super cheap and then the flights there are not.

• 57:46David Hoffman?

  Once you get there, yeah.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think it works well for budgeting, right? It's like, oh, okay, I know what I have to do to get there. It's a super friendly place for visas for folks around the world. That's a big thing. We have a ton of developers in India and Southeast Asia that have trouble getting visas in other countries.

• 58:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, of course, of course. I know it's so far, super far out in advance, um, not totally a year out until like 11 months. But, uh, why might one be excited about, um, Breakpoint 4 in Singapore?

• 58:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think what you'll probably see is the conference is a little shorter. It's two full days of programming. We've done three most years. We did four this year.

• 58:23David Hoffman?

  It's three this year, correct?

• 58:24Speaker 02

  We got four this year.

• 58:25David Hoffman?

  Four this year. Oh, gosh, wow.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  It's wild.

• 58:27David Hoffman?

  It started, yeah, it started Monday and ends on Thursday?

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we, well, we go the 31st through the 3rd are full programming days.

• 58:36David Hoffman?

  Okay, so it started yesterday, which is Tuesday and will end on Friday.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:39David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  But, you know, we had three days of programming leading up to it from other groups, which is awesome to see. So for Breakpoint 2024, I think you're going to see a lot more of sort of, um, what are businesses building on Solana, right? A little bit less of a developer focused conference and a little bit more of a business focused conference. That sort of fits the vibe of Singapore and we're supplementing that with sort of a rebuild of what hacker houses have been.

• 59:05David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  To do a lot more developer focused hacker houses where they feel more like mini conferences. And so we're sort of, instead of trying to bring, quite frankly, the network's big enough now that we don't have to bring everyone together for one thing.

• 59:17David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  We can actually have multiple things. This is something that Ethereum community has done very well, where there's certain ETH, fill in the blank, events that are more business oriented and certain ones that are more technical.

• 59:27David Hoffman?

  Right. Awesome, I've learned quite a lot, so I've enjoyed my time here at Breakpoint and thank you for guiding me down the corners of Solana. If people want to learn more or be pointed towards Solana Breakpoint 4 in, um, Singapore, where should they go?

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so all of the sessions are recorded and uploaded to YouTube. So the Solana YouTube channel will have every recording from Breakpoint within about two hours of the session finishing.

• 59:49David Hoffman?

  Wow, wow, that is, that is some Solana type culture right there.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, we worked really hard on that. I, I was, I was joking with our video director that two days ago, I got a Google alert that my video from my talk at Consensus.

• 1:00:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  Is finally online.

• 1:00:10David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  Five months later. So none of that, right?

• 1:00:14David Hoffman?

  As a content guy at conferences, I'm always extremely frustrated. We're like, I see you recording. It can be on the internet, like.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  We have the technology.

• 1:00:22David Hoffman?

  We can do this.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think that's like a real big thing for us is like, we, we know it's expensive to get to Breakpoint. We know a lot of people don't have the budget this year. We really want to make sure that the, the experience of not being at Breakpoint is at least as educationally valuable as we can make it. So that's the hope. Breakpoint 2024, I want us to try and start selling tickets before the end of the year. So.

• 1:00:45David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  Hold me to that internet.

• 1:00:47David Hoffman?

  The internet. Awesome. Well, Bangless Nation, this has been a little trip, a little trip down Breakpoint 3 here in Amsterdam. Awesome. Thank you so much.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Thanks, David.

• 1:00:55David Hoffman?

  Appreciate it.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  Appreciate you coming.

• 1:00:57David Hoffman?

  Of course.