157 - Will Solana Make It with Anatoly Yakovenko

✨ DEBRIEF | Unpacking the episode: https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/debrief-anatoly-solana ------ ✨ COLLECTIBLES | Collect this episode: https://collectibles.bankless.com/mint ------ In today’s episode, we have the creator of Solana and the Co-founder of Solana Labs, Anatoly Yakovenko. We brought on Anatoly to ask: is Solana going to make it? Price is down. A major public backer…SBF is down for the count…will Solana make it? Will it survive the bear market? Anatoly shares his thoughts. In addition, he also shares the full Solana story, back to its earliest inflection points all the way to the current state of Solana today. ------ 📣 MetaMask Learn https://bankless.cc/metamaskshow ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi ------ Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 7:58 2022 & 2023 10:05 Solana Origins 14:40 Passage of Time as Data 25:30 Bandwidth Trade-offs 29:29 SOL as Money? 32:04 Security 36:24 Continuing the Solana Story 44:10 Early Day Solana Vibes 48:20 Solana Growth Acceleration 51:31 2021 Solana Price 53:12 The Crypto VC Narrative 54:37 Solana Haters 59:55 FTX & SBF 1:07:16 Solana Critique 1:09:35 Cultural Debt 1:14:46 The State of the Solana Community 1:19:37 The Future of Solana 1:24:36 Solana VM 1:26:39 Will Solana Make It? 1:31:15 Final Solana Questions Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Anatoly https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko Firedancer https://jumpcrypto.com/firedancer/ ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You like looked at all the product launches from inception of crypto to now to what's going to happen in the next 12 to 18 months. The next 12 to 18 months is probably going to be way more than everything else combined up to this point. And if people are launching products, they're grinding for product market fit, they're going to get users, means crypto is going to survive. It's just that's going to happen.

• 0:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams and I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless. Talking about Solana today. The chips are down, prices are down, a major public backer of Solana, SBF, he's down for the count as well. He's definitely not helping the sentiment. So we brought on the Solana co-founder to ask the question, is Solana gonna make it? A few things to look out for in this episode. Number one, we go through the full story of Solana, back to its earliest moments. Number two, we talk about the state of Solana today, both post FTX, pre FTX as well, and at the bottom of the bear market that we find ourselves in. Well, might not be

• 1:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  the bottom yet, we'll see. And number three, Anatoly's reaction when he first heard the news of SBF. And lastly, we ask the question that I think is on a lot of people's minds in this market. Will Solana survive the bear? And if it does, how he thinks it will make it out. David, you really wanted to have this podcast. Tell us why.

• 1:28David Hoffman?

  I've wanted to bring Anatoly on for a long time, and I think right now is the best moment to do that. And that's because of really where Solana is, as it relates to its community, its builders, and its leadership. I think right now, the Solana ecosystem is going through a moment of self-reflection as it looked back upon its own absolutely insane bull market throughout 2021 and 2022. And I think I see a lot of parallels to how Ethereum progressed through 2017 to 2018. I kind of think as Solana is doing a lot of the same, taking a lot of the same paths that Ethereum took. A crazy, crazy adoption story of a bunch of just, well, ultimately-

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  Really ended up to be a lot of hot air, like Ethereum had ICOs in 2017. Solana had a lot of hot air in this last 2021 bull market. And at the end of this very bad year of just downward price action, a big pillar that really held up the Solana ecosystem, FTX and SBF turns out to be a complete fraud. And so because the Solana community is really going through this period of self-reflection, that makes me bullish about the Solana community. That makes me really interested in seeing how they choose to take on hardship, how they choose to go about the, what is going to be a very difficult long bull market to pull Solana out of the hole that it's in.

• 2:50David Hoffman?

  And that's why I wanted to bring Anatoly on, because Solana is different than almost any other chain that is in crypto. It's different from all the EVM clones, Avalanche, Phantom, like whatever, in that it's got a multi-client architecture. It's the only other ecosystem that has a multi-client architecture. And there was, there is a real builder community there. There's a real Solana community there. And so like, Ryan, I know like you and I have been branded as like, you know, we have a big ETH bias, of course, can't really deny that. But now that we are in this bear market, my walls, I think, come, it feels safe to take down my walls during the bear market because of all of the crap that we flushed out during the bull market.

• 3:34David Hoffman?

  So like my walls go up during the bull market because a bunch of newcomers come in and, you know, don't really understand the deep fundamentals about what makes crypto work. And now that that is well behind us, now that we are deep inside of this bear market, the people that are here are here, now here for the tech, no longer for the money. They must be here for the tech. And so that's what I see in the current state of the Solana community, people that are here for the tech. And I think now is the right time to bring on Anatoly to tell that story and to ask, what's Solana going to do in 2023?

• 4:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I can't wait to talk about that with you in the debrief because there's some things maybe we agree on, but I think there's some things we might disagree on about this. I think for the first time, yeah. And, you know, we'll have that discussion, that debate in the debrief. So, premium subscribers, if you want to hear all of that, the episode we record right after this episode, then click the link in the show notes, sign up for a Bankless Premium membership, and you can get access to that on the Bankless Premium feed, full of special episodes that aren't available on the public feed. Guys, before we get into the episode, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, and especially Kraken, who's our strategic sponsor for 2023 in the exchange category. It's our number one recommended crypto exchange for 2023. Go check it out. There's a link in the show notes.

• 4:52David Hoffman?

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• 5:35David Hoffman?

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• 6:19David Hoffman?

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• 7:04David Hoffman?

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• 7:46David Hoffman?

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• 7:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we have Anatoly Yakovenko. He's the creator of Solana and the co-founder of Solana Labs. Anatoly, great to have you on Bankless. How you doing?

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Good, thank you for having me.

• 8:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, how is 2023? Are you glad to have 2022 in the rearview window? Dave and I were just talking about this, like whether we would go back in time and crush 2022, make it so it never happened or not. What's your feeling on the year of 2022?

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I'm glad it's behind us, but that was the year that I was like spent obsessing over priority fees and dealing with spam on Solana. So if I could just like take that engineering effort and move it a year back, that would be awesome.

• 8:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, how are you feeling coming into this year, though? Are you feeling like burnt out? Are you feeling jaded? Are you feeling discouraged? Are you feeling optimistic? Are you feeling energetic?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  All of the above. Like, I don't feel burnt out. Like, I think it'll probably take...

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Like these cycles come and go, right? Like I think the 1819 cycle was really bad. Like people were really depressed and like nobody like people were, I don't know. Companies were just like shutting down like left and right, like people that were true believers. So far that's not happening. So there's a lot of energy that keeps you going. Like people are still coming up with like crazy ideas, like things that seem like they have a one in a thousand shot of working and they're then they believe they're the ones that are going to crack it like Uber and blockchain, right? Like that stuff like that, I think is is like energizing because

• 9:40Speaker 00

  that's kind of like evoking all of the promises and all the cool shit and like of an open financial system built on open source software. And there's somebody with a lot of energy that's just driving it right now. That to me is like really energizing. All the shit that happened in 22 definitely is a is a drag and does burn you out.

• 10:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, we we definitely feel a lot of that as well. And and totally, one of the things I think we want to do on this podcast today is tell the story of Solana pre 2021. I think a lot of people, a lot of the Solana community came into Solana in 2020 or 2021. But the story of Solana begins actually much earlier than that. And bankless listeners will certainly know of of mine and Ryan's bias towards ETH. And so for our own purposes, I also like to to hear this story as well. So let's go, let's go back to the very beginning. Where where does the story of Solana begin? What was the where was the inception moment for it?

• 10:41Speaker 00

  So 2017, like I've been following crypto loosely. Like I thought it was cool to figure out if I could build like a faster miner. And like my first experience, true experience with crypto was when, forget the company, but they promised to ship you an ASIC. And they mined all the Bitcoin with the ASIC before shipping it to you. And I got like the first taste of what crypto is all about.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  But I

• 11:05David Hoffman?

  The original front run.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I like thought it was like kind of silly, but um I got it like, you know, my family left the Soviet Union. They saw like the full devastation of what like a centralized, badly run economy and currency can do to like people and like that like belief of sound moniness and like what Bitcoin promised, I think like resonated with me. But I wasn't serious about it until 2017. Um, when I saw that one, there was a Ethereum like demonstrated that there's now like an application platform. And this is what I did all my entire career. I build application platforms like everywhere I worked.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Uh, um, Qualcomm, majority of my career, like if folks ever had a flip phone and ever played like any of those games. I wrote a bunch of code that made that possible. Like I was a kernel engineer at Brew and like learned how to be an engineer in that like in that environment. So when 2017 came around and like the fees spiked across all these networks is when I started noodling on how do you make these things? These systems fast and efficient and cheap while maintaining like that property of mid trust minimization. Um, and I literally had like two coffees and a beer. This is a true story, a cafe Soleil. At that time, I had like this cheesy side project with

• 12:33Speaker 00

  one of the co-founders, one of the folks who became a co-founder of Solana. We were mining crypto while building deep learning hardware. Like we were, we were into deep learning. We were putting up racks of GPUs. And we were mining crypto with it in the background to pay for the GPUs. And we were just like arguing about proof of work. Is it stupid? Like, why, why are people like paying for our GPUs?

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Like, what is the point of all this? And I had two coffees and a beer and I had this like eureka moment that there's a way to encode passage of time as a data structure in a similar way that you encode entropy as a data structure in Bitcoin. You generate this. Difficulty like you solve the difficulty challenge, right? Like you generate this long string of zeros. You can infer from that that a certain amount of energy was spent to generate that. And that means you've proven entropy, right? There's some, some amount of energy was spent. And the time piece was like sequential, just run shot sequentially is a, and I couldn't Google for it because I didn't know the term verifiable delay function. I didn't know that Dan Bonet and a bunch of other very smart people are working on this

• 13:43Speaker 00

  and that there's very sophisticated versions of this. But that was enough to like, make me think that I had something interesting because that time component is very important for optimizing wireless networks. Uh, and if you think of censorship resistance as a communication channel, as a means for a user to send a message reliably to all the subscribers. That's what censorship resistance means, right? It guarantees delivery. You can think of it as a communication channel. And once you start thinking of it as a communication channel, there's a very obvious optimization called time division multiple access. This is what 2G cellular networks run on.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  The tricky part is the time part. How do you say that everybody agrees in a certain time? And that's a very pain in the ass problem to solve. Um, there's a bunch of papers. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

• 14:39David Hoffman?

  Can we, uh, cause Ryan and I aren't developers. We kind of get it, uh, but the bankless, bankless nation is also going to be largely non-technical. Could we just really drill down on this like eureka moment that you're explaining? And just make sure that we, cause this is, this is the inception idea of Solana. So I want to make sure that we get, that we get this right. Could you just like do this one more time and like explain like I'm five?

• 14:58Speaker 00

  So Solana came a little later, but like just, I was just really obsessed with this like kind of blown away by the eureka moment that there's a way to encode passage of time as data. Because there's a lot of like, kind of like, there's no mathematical explanation of time. There's no error, proof of error time moving in any direction. So it was in that sense, it like jarred me and like, made me like, holy shit. I think there's something really fundamentally cool about these systems. Um, why, why it was really important for Solana is because it's really hard to.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  Pick a leader. It's really hard to make a block, right? To decide who's going to make blocks. And there's a whole bunch of ways to do it. And the way that Bitcoin does it is we solve this challenge. There's a puzzle and there's a difficulty such that only roughly one person in the world every 10 minutes gets to solve it. And on Ethereum, they tuned proof of work to be, I think, as fast as proof of work could possibly be. It was like one in 12 seconds. And that's still much, much slower than wireless for 5G, right? Or cellular networks or anything that we use in the world. And there's other ways to do this where you run consensus and then we elect a leader. We all, two thirds of the network agrees that Ryan gets to talk.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Then after Ryan is done talking, two thirds of the network agrees that he's done talking and then David gets to talk. And that's a very stepwise process. It requires a lot of communication, a lot of rounds. And if you think of it, I have X amount of bandwidth to use for messages. And Ryan gets to talk for five seconds. And then we run a whole bunch of junk that nobody gets to talk to, to select David. That's a very inefficient use of that bandwidth. That's a very inefficiently used channel. And this is why wireless protocols, they basically create a schedule and say, from millisecond zero to millisecond 100, Ryan gets to talk, then David, then Anatoly. And if you miss your slot, too bad, right?

• 16:58Speaker 00

  The network just keeps going, but as long as everyone is up and running and talking, there's no gaps, right? There's no election process. Nobody has to wait for a random event. You just get to transmit and that's basically gives you nearly 100% utilization of the hardware resources that you have.

• 17:17David Hoffman?

  And just to really drill down on this point, this is the main architectural difference that separates Solana from I think almost every single other blockchain that really exists. And this is why if people have been following me on Twitter, why like I've given a lot more credence to Solana than I have other EVM clones like Avalanche, Phantom. EVM clones I don't really find very interesting unless they become layer twos on Ethereum. This is actually, I think, something that's actually interesting in the fact that it is actually a completely different design space that is unique and specifically created by Solana. Is that a fair take?

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Yes. No one else has gone this crazy route.

• 17:59David Hoffman?

  And the idea is that in proof of work and also proof of stake, the next person to propose a block is pretty random. In Ethereum's current form, it's actually selected, but it's selected randomly, which is different than Solana. Can you go into the difference of how proof of stake leader election is selected? And then how that's still different in Solana?

• 18:22Speaker 00

  I don't want to misspeak about Ethereum because I'm not like 100% up on the latest design. But like Tendermint is like the simplest way to think about it is that you have, let's say 100 validators in Tendermint. They all have one vote and then two thirds of them vote and vote on a block. There's a known block producer that's next. But what's not known is whether the block producer is going to succeed or not. Let's say that's David. So we wait for David to produce a block. And then everybody says, hey, I did see a block from David. Let's all agree that we all saw a block from David. Okay, we all saw the block. Let's agree that the block was good. And then Ryan gets to do it.

• 19:01David Hoffman?

  So there's a block that's proposed. And then there's a round of verification. And then there's a round of verification of that round of verification. And that's the last step. And then the next step is another block is proposed. And this design structure is able to let Solana optimize for bandwidth versus like proof of work or proof of whatever Ethereum's proof of stake flavor is.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Basically, yes. So because we know, so Tendermint, you know, all the leaders at Hata time too. But you have this like stepwise agreement. Did David succeed or not? In Solana, we don't really care. David has 100 millisecond, 400 milliseconds to transmit. If he transmitted, great. If he didn't, too bad, right? The network moves on and then somebody else goes. Now there's still forks that happen logically. So when you, David proposes a block, he's got to attach it to some previous fork that he observed. And then everybody votes and agrees. Was that the heaviest fork or not? And stuff like that. But nobody waits for anybody to start transmitting. It just kind of goes no matter what happens.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  And that's in an optimistic sense, which is actually happens 99.9% of the time. Super majority of the network is live. There's actually no, nobody votes on a different fork. There's no forking. Everybody just transmits and votes and the blocks occur very, very quickly. And you utilize 100% of the bandwidth available to the node. So if you have a thousand validators, all of them have one gigabit of bandwidth. That's a lot. That's not a lot. That's a 22 year old standard at this point. Uh, I have one gigabit at my house.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  You have a lot of capacity for transactions. Like in the most optimal case, when my stupid white paper said, I think we can stuff 700,000 transactions in there. Realistically, I think with the way internet operates and like erasure coding and all of the other stuff, you can cut that in the worst case by four. And that doesn't, it doesn't matter how many nodes you have. If you have a thousand or 40,000, because of how the blocks propagate, we can actually utilize that one gigabit bidirectionally between all the nodes. And let's say that's 200,000 transactions per second of bandwidth available, right? Then how do you use it?

• 21:22Speaker 00

  Um, that's, that's kind of like the, the, the other, the big question is like, how do you actually process it? How do you manage all the state and all of the signature verification and all this other crud? And this is where, like, the reason why I like started building Solana is like, once I realized that I think we have a design that can utilize all the bandwidth available to the hardware. The other hard problems that are left were basically the bread and butter of my career. And like all the folks that are worked at Qualcomm. How do you get silicon to process a shitload of data as fast as you can? And like execute as many programs, system calls, like move memory from one part of the state to another like as possible?

• 22:05Speaker 00

  This is like, I'm sure you guys can imagine people that work at operating systems. This is what they do day in, day out. And this is This is a known quantity. Right. And this is why I was like, okay, we can, I see the, the light at the end of the tunnel. Like we, we have a design that is a unique way of utilizing like, that gets rid of like the overhead of consensus. It can utilize bandwidth that's available to all the machines to whatever limit those machines have. And that's an exponentially growing limit. Every two years that gets cheaper or bigger. Um, and the rest of the problems are problems that I'm very familiar with. Like I know how to solve the memory problems, the runtime issues, like the parallelism, all of this stuff and.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  That that's what drove me to uh to go like basically take the leap, become a founder, try to raise money. Um, and I got pretty lucky there. I had like basically a bunch of friends at Qualcomm that I worked with for over a decade. And at that time, uh Broadcom was trying to acquire Qualcomm, Apple was suing them, and they had to call like President Trump to stop the acquisition. So it's like kind of low morale internally. And I called a bunch of people and I was like, hey, we're gonna build an operating system. We've done this before. It's a new developer platform. It's for these things called smart contracts.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Nobody knows what they're for, but like Ethereum was worth a bajillion dollars. So like, I think we can build something cool and unique. Um, so I never thought of like building uh an Ethereum killer. We never like marketed as like this is the fastest smart contract platform. Our pitch was like, we think smart contracts are good for finance. Like, I think there's like an application for finance, and I think finance depends on information propagating as fast as possible around the world. But that's, those are valid assumptions, right?

• 24:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that was, that was, that's, that's a Solana thesis, yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Right, so like

• 24:06David Hoffman?

  In its bare essence.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  The niche that we were trying to build is that because of our unique consensus design, we can guarantee that if you're participating in the network, that you're receiving state as fast as everyone else. And at its like best limit, you know, 20 years of the best engineers like Crankaway at Building Solana. When you transmit a transaction, it's gonna get sent to the nearest leader. You can have multiple leaders at the same time. You don't need to schedule only one, you can actually schedule N. Uh, so that that gap, geographical gap, that latency is minimized. And then that leader propagates that information around the world simultaneously to everybody. So that information is moving basically as fast as a news wire can travel around the world.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  So for markets, that's very important. Some event happens in Singapore, that news wire literally is flying. Through fiber to a trader in New York, by the time that trader looks at a market on running on Solana or one running at NIZI, the prices are the same. Because that state transition to change the price for the news is already propagating as well. That means that we can be competitive with these like monopolies on how execution and finance and everything else happens in like trade file with open source software and hardware like run by volunteers. So that was like, that's the pitch. That was the cool thing.

• 25:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  And it's totally, what net effect of this, so this kind of consensus change that Solana has pioneered in that universe. It sounds like it's really kind of maximizing, you said maximizing the bandwidth available, right? And that's specifically a bandwidth for validators. Does the net effect of that mean that if you're running a Solana validator, your bandwidth requirements are going to be higher than say a validator from another ecosystem, say an Ethereum validator? It's like, do you need that one gigabit per second kind of connection? And you need that to increase over time? Is that sort of a trade off here?

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Well, the way that Ethereum right now works, you kind of have the same bandwidth requirements across all nodes. But with sharding, you actually, this is where the scalability that goes beyond what Solana can do with Ethereum is when you shard the chain, you have these quorums that are separate. They have their own bandwidth requirements and those could be, let's say, much lower. And they finalize the block, but they don't need to transmit the entire block to every other shard. You only transmit a portion of it and because you transmit a portion to different parts of the network, you can infer that I have honest minority guarantees that no data was withheld by the shard.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  And if there was a fault, if this shard transmitted a faulty state transition, that somebody could detect it because we have guarantees that data was propagated everywhere. But those guarantees you can achieve with sub linear bandwidth. And that's the advantage. But all of these steps. Are not, are gonna be much, much slower than the news wire going from Singapore to a trader. Right? So, so like, those are all great. And I think that's a pretty clever design. I mean, like, I love Don Krad. I've, I talked to him all the time, like, whenever I have like questions about like, how did you guys solve this problem in Ethereum? It's like a beautiful design, but doesn't do the thing.

• 27:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's different, right? So, and so it's like, is, is it part of the Solana mandate to, to ever, or vision or dream to ever have validators being able to run from a phone? For example, you know, Ethereum would say it is. We like validators should run from, be able to run from people's bandwidth constrained phones.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  What do you define? Can you define a validator in Ethereum? Cause like, is that like the consensus client or the full node?

• 27:59David Hoffman?

  Well, that is somebody who adds a block to the chain.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  A block producer?

• 28:04David Hoffman?

  A block producer, yeah.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  You can run a block producer that doesn't have the full state on Solana. So that there's like a, you basically like a block producer only really needs to like, propose transactions that go into a block. Pick the ones that they think are gonna get them the highest ROI. So they need minute, they can guess whether those are valid or not. They don't actually need to have full access to the state.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  But like, trustlessness comes from at least one full node that has the state and can evaluate all the state transitions and say that this is the correct answer and then tell you, hey, the, the majority fucked up. And then either at least to say that or find the exact, bisect the, where the majority fucked, fucked up and give you a proof that they did.

• 28:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is, I, I would love a whole separate kind of conversation on this, almost from somebody from the kind of the engineering side on Ethereum and you and Anatoly. But we'll say that because David and I are not the engineers. I think we'll save that for, for another date. But I can, I can say that kind of the, the pitch that you, you just talked about in 2018 is, is sort of what I heard from what Athana, Solana was, was trying to become.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Athana is, Solana is a layer two on Ethereum, right? Athana?

• 29:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe. Did I did I slip that?

• 29:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I remember hearing about Solana in 2018. And here's the thing that kind of threw me. And this is another, maybe, philosophy sort of difference. And I can't say that everyone in Ethereum feels this way about ETH the asset. But certainly, many people do. And this comes from a little bit of the Bitcoin school, which is Bitcoin is money. ETH is also money. That's central for the economic security of the network. And I remember talking to Solana people in 2018 as this network was being propped up. And I was very, at the time, also interested in the Cosmos ecosystem and a few others. And I asked the question to kind of the early Solana startup team. Hey, is Sol trying to become money? And the answer was always no, not trying to become money. In fact, I heard similar from Cosmos about the Atom token.

• 30:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Atom token was never meant to be sort of a store of value type of thing. And I think that's kind of been consistent with what you've said about the Sol token, too, is you don't see it as a store of value, as a money, in the same way, maybe Bitcoiners certainly see their asset as money. And I think increasingly, much of the Ethereum community also sees ETH as money. Can you talk about that difference in philosophy in the early days?

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like, imagine a world where you had like, everyone had like a magical radio that can never be interfered with or obstructed and could transmit to everybody in the world. That's a world without censorship, right? I can like push a button and transmit to everybody in the world. You don't need proof of work anymore to build a blockchain. You can, you have a censorship resistant channel. I can guarantee that messages arrive to everybody. You don't, so like, the store of value part, you can build on top of a censorship resistant channel. I think store of value is a social construct. It's a meme. It's like something that people believe in. I think that's awesome. Like, and I honestly think it's very useful to have a

• 31:23Speaker 00

  A store of value that is not tied to any sovereign, given like the shit show that happened in the Soviet Union, right? Like, if you experience that one time in your life, that you have like a very, you know that it can happen again, right? Like, but it doesn't need to be tied to the consensus layer. And functionally, what the Layer 1 chain needs to do is to prevent spam. And that's what the token does, it prevents spam. Everything else is like, I can't like code it up into a store of value. There's no like code change it can make, so long as it's a store of value. So like, I think it's kind of dumb to, for me to like, try to meme it into that.

• 32:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Doesn't it also, though, provide like, like, security for the underlying Solana chain? It's like, security of the underlying Solana chain, and some of those censorship-resistant properties are like, based on the value.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  What is security? Can you define security?

• 32:23David Hoffman?

  Blockchain immutability.

• 32:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 32:25David Hoffman?

  And liveliness?

• 32:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  The ability to not like, not reversing blocks is definitely a key property here.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  So.

• 32:33David Hoffman?

  The econo- sorry, the economic cost of how, how much it costs to go backwards in blocks.

• 32:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Right.

• 32:37David Hoffman?

  Is economic security.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  Well, like, the proof-of-stake network, once a block is finalized, going backwards is invalid. So like, you can create two forks, and that means the majority created a fault. And then you gotta resolve it, but like, let's say 100% of the validators were compromised. Like, all of them were compromised. So, and there's nothing they can do to convince Circle to wire out your dollars from your bank account without your signature. Right? Circle runs a full node, they're running it in there, it's secure, it's unstaked. It's just seeing what these compromised validators are sending them. There's no way they can like, send it invalid state transitions. So, security of the network is based on this idea that if I run my full node,

• 33:24Speaker 00

  I can process all the valid state transitions, and I know the exact state. Now, like, the.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  Creating a fork, right, creating a duplicate fork, that's an attack that you can think of as like I'm mining Bitcoin in my hidden nuclear bunker. And then I'm gonna roll back the last 50 blocks or the last 24 hours. Right, that's the economic security of a proof of work chain. In a proof of state chain, it's kind of harder concept because once everyone has finalized, Binance, Circle, all the full nodes finalized something, all the honestful nodes finalized something, they're gonna reject any other fork that's proposed. They don't have this like consensus hook that says, oh, if somebody proposes a heavier majority signature,

• 34:15Speaker 00

  we're gonna throw away our state that we accepted and like blow away all the money that like was made. All the honest, all the honest nodes that are not partitioned are basically gonna halt. And now the network is stuck. And humans go in and they're like, well, what the fuck happened? That the majority double sign invalid, like make an invalid double signature or something else? And they resolve it and that process is not based on the amount of tokens involved, what percentage or the value of them. It's gonna be messy. It's gonna involve a bunch of humans, right, like?

• 34:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  So then from, from your perspective and what you're describing, does it make any difference for the economic security of Solana? If the sole token is like, say, 10 cents versus if it's $10?

• 35:04Speaker 00

  For with regards to safety, no, it doesn't. The likelihood of, of like malicious, let's say the token was like one millionth of a penny, right? The attacker could cause a liveness failure. They could be like, okay, I'm going to buy two thirds of the tokens and then I'm gonna halt the network. Or I'm gonna create a double fork and then cause this messy process to run. And that's gonna, the network's gonna have to be down for like three days. That sucks, right? So the value of the, of the coin is maybe like prevents for these liveness failures that are like messy and annoying. But it doesn't in itself prevent, it doesn't guarantee security.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  There's no way like the value of the coin has impact on Circle's dollars that are stuck in a bank that are governed by this full node.

• 35:56David Hoffman?

  I think listeners can definitely see something like the philosophical differences that me and Ryan share about like ETH as money versus the soul token. But I don't really want that. I think that's a fun exploration, but I think there's much more of the overall Solana story that I want to get back on track to.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  I think a store of value that is awesome could be built on top of Solana and could surpass Bitcoin.

• 36:19David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  Like, I don't see a reason why that wouldn't be possible.

• 36:23David Hoffman?

  Right, right. I want to pick up and a toy the story back because, okay, so we have this inception of Solana, the architecture, and in the implied existence of the soul token. And so I want to pick up the story again at the very beginning. Where does Solana go from an idea to an actual like Solana Labs and like all of this? Can you run us through that part of the story?

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I had this like idea for a VDF, which I didn't know was called the Verifiable Delay Function. But it was like what jarred me out of like being a day-to-day worker to like, I think I should go build a company in crypto. So I quit my job, got a being in San Francisco at the time, you're kind of connected to people in Silicon Valley that are VCs just by being here as an engineer. One of my friends through underwater hockey, it's a weird sport that I play, was working at 500 startups and he was like, dude, I'll give you, I forget, it was like 25K or 50K, which is more money than anyone has ever given me to do anything.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  Just on a handshake. And I was like, holy shit, that's like enough money for me to be on ramen for six months. I can like code a lot. If I had like, I can write a lot of code in six months and like actually see if this thing could work. But I, with the help of my partner Laura, she's like, you gotta do this for real. Like, there's a moment in time that happened with social networks, with search engines, with whatever, where there's a lot of ideas and a lot of people go entering a space and you have to take it seriously and go raise and stuff. And that's when I got connected to Raj and he has raised money before. He's not an engineer, so and he was like, oh yeah, I'll help you. And like he drilled me on like,

• 38:13Speaker 00

  Making the the the deck and doing the pitches and like that's that's kind of that was like whole part of the process. It was the first time I ever talked to anyone and like it felt really awkward telling him, hey, I have this idea. Nothing's built yet. No proof, but give me like hundreds of thousands of dollars so I can go hire my friends and go build this thing.

• 38:37David Hoffman?

  What were the initial like raise details? Like, how much did Solana raise on day one?

• 38:42Speaker 00

  We were trying to raise 500K. That was like my target. The price at that time for the network was 20 million, which I thought was ludicrous.

• 38:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Oh, you thought that was ludicrous?

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:56David Hoffman?

  After going after coming through 2020, like 20 million sounds extremely reasonable.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Think about it as like a first time founder. You guys are like yeah, first time founder, like all you have is an idea.

• 39:10David Hoffman?

  Right, sure.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  Typical like raises in Silicon Valley are like for that kind of valuation is you have traction. You're like, hey, we have this amount of revenue. We have growth. When you guys invest in us, that revenue is going to go up. That's the pitch, but that valuation, that was not like my pitch, but that was, I thought it was like scary high, but if we, if it was any lower, there's no way we could have like funded a team to like go build anything.

• 39:42David Hoffman?

  And I'm assuming that's what happened next, like started to building, building out a team. How many, how many employees did you guys hire in that first wave before you had to do round number two?

• 39:51Speaker 00

  Um, about five people, which were all basically co-founders, because they were so early. So, and these were folks that I worked with at Qualcomm for a long time, like

• 40:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that's still fewer co-founders than Ethereum, though.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:09David Hoffman?

  Probably have better

• 40:11Speaker 00

  I basically like called in like all the favors that I had with my like colleagues that I've worked with over a decade, like Getting folks that are like, you know, worked 10 plus years on GPU optimization to leave their very like career effectively, like pause their career at a big company and go do the startup was like a big ask. But yeah, I got lucky with timing. We did another raise in May, so we built a bunch of stuff and we built the first Solana node, like a single node that could show, hey, look, we're processing signature verification in parallel, it's doing profile history. It was doing like a hundred, hundreds of thousands of signature verifications per second because we like

• 40:55Speaker 00

  thief this box out with GPUs and whatever. Like, and our thesis was like, look, if a single node can do this, the way that the network is designed, that the network is going to run as slow as the slowest node in the super majority. So if a single node can be this fast, it means that the slowest node in the super majority can be this fast. So by design, it should scale to that. And that was enough. I think we caught like the last vapors of the 2017 bull market. This was like May 2018, ETH was dropping, funds were closing and stuff like that. But we were able to raise like an A round, like about 14 million.

• 41:34David Hoffman?

  14 million valuation?

• 41:36Speaker 00

  No, like 14 million bucks.

• 41:37David Hoffman?

  Raise, yeah, right, okay. Yeah, and Bankless listeners will know, like Ryan and I have talked about the depths of the 2018 to 2020 bear market and how different it is from this bear market. That bear market was dry, like funding absolutely dried up. And so to say, like, I really just want to drive that point home. There were fumes when it came to the private market funding in that era. And so like, I'm sure fighting for that 14 million dollars was not easy.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  So like, what was cool was that people like slammed us for being a VC chain, but like even from those early days. There were a lot of validators that were part of it. People out of Cosmos that were like, hey, we run Cosmos validators. We know how this stuff works. And this is cool and weird. That was basically like, they'd made money on these other networks. And we're like, this is so weird. And just based on that, like invested and like, some of those folks were like, they were all the first ones to run nodes. And like the first ones to go like, help us like, find data centers to actually like deal with us and then stuff like that.

• 42:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  So there were- One of the other points I would say about the VC chain charges, like honestly, 2018 for people around, like there was no other way to do it. Like how else do you like? The climate at that time was like post Ethereum ICO, which sort of broke the glass on this, but the opportunity really closed up, like there was no compliant way to do this, at least in the US. And so it's very, very difficult to see how a chain could have raised post 2018 in the way Ethereum ICO raised.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Yep, and being in the US, I'm like with kids, I was like, I wanna just-

• 43:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not get arrested?

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Sensible.

• 43:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we got, I think lucky enough, but a lot of our competitors raised like hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Which is-

• 43:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Who are your competitors?

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Hash Draft, I mean, people that you don't remember right at this point.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  There were like very big rounds for Layer Ones being filled. And a lot of folks were like, thought that we were not, just not gonna make it. Like, because there were just too many competitors that were too, too well funded.

• 44:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  There's an article that an employee out of Solana Labs wrote not too long ago and released it, the December 28th of 2022. And there's a line in here that I want to get your, get your take on. What exists in the Solana ecosystem now was created by the need to build, to build everything fast. Launch the network before labs ran out of cash. Ride the wave of the crypto expansion and create an ecosystem at parity with other older siblings in record time. Would you fair, would you say that that was, it's a fair like characterization of like the vibe of Solana in the early days?

• 44:43Speaker 00

  The lack of like a hundred million dollar funding in the early days made us like prioritize things like wolves, I guess. We, I wanted, like, I wish we had EVM support, but it's expensive to build in a way that wouldn't cripple the network's performance. Like, would Solana be here, would you guys be talking to me now if we were like an EVM chain that was like marginally faster consensus than Ethereum? Like, nobody would care. So like, stuff like that got cut and like, how do you bootstrap an ecosystem with, without piggybacking off Ethereum devs was like

• 45:23Speaker 00

  a big unknown. So we were, that was a difficult challenge and we were just throwing everything against the wall that could stick.

• 45:32David Hoffman?

  Was there a moment where like Solana was like racing to stay alive and then, and then that moment happened where you realized that you were gonna make it? What was that moment?

• 45:45Speaker 00

  I hate to say it, but like, so 2020, we were like nine, 10 months of cash left. So the market crashed. We like, I announced our Coinless auction, March 12th, I think, or something like that. We announced that it was gonna be a week later. March 16th is when the markets crashed. And I was like, fuck, we're so dead. But I was just too exhausted to delay. And we really didn't have an option. There was no like, at that time, there was no bridge around coming. Like, the funds that we thought were like, could back us were also like, holy fuck, we've never seen anything like this before. So like, we have no advice to give you. Like, so we decided to launch because

• 46:30Speaker 00

  I was, I think, my, my theory was that like, the worst step to launch would have been right before the crash. So if we launch right after, there's a chance that this is like a huge overcorrection and then we just see at least a medium upswing. And that turned out to be like the bottom of the bottom and then like it started the crazy bull run. So that was, that was pretty wild. And then we started seeing, I would say the second hackathon is when I thought that we had real traction. Because you saw some teams from the first hackathon that were just fucking around with a network and build like- Like very cheesy dumb apps that like that didn't do anything like you vote to have like a fight or fight

• 47:15Speaker 00

  chain or something like that. Some of those folks came back and started building like DeFi Mango and like whatever. And I was like, okay, people actually like didn't hate the runtime, didn't like they got something out of it and they like had an idea that was unique and they built it and it was that was like I thought I thought there was something there like basically after the second hackathon.

• 47:40David Hoffman?

  Hmm. And when did multi coin capital step into the picture? Were they, what round were they in?

• 47:45Speaker 00

  They were in the early days.

• 47:46David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:48David Hoffman?

  Was it, was that the, uh, the $12 million or the one before that?

• 47:51Speaker 00

  No, the 20, yeah, this was like, so we ended up, we wanted to raise 500K. We had it, we had it like verbally committed, then ETH dropped like 30% in one day. And all these funds pulled out, but we managed to actually end up raising about 3 million during that round. After like a lot of hustling and conversations and like, but there was like a moment that was like, okay, fuck, I think maybe this is not going to happen.

• 48:20David Hoffman?

  And, okay, so we're, we're coming out of the depths of COVID. Solana is starting to get traction. You mentioned two hackathons where like one, the second one started to produce real outcomes. How fast did things accelerate?

• 48:33Speaker 00

  Um. Yeah, things were started moving pretty quickly because we were focused on driving more hacker hackathons. We did, we did another one and twice as many people showed up. I don't know the exact numbers, but it was a significant bump from the previous one. From the second one to the third one, there was a significant number increase in registrations and teams that completed and the quality of the teams went up. And that got us, that was basically when we had our Blunt Announcer Conference Breakpoint.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  And like Breakpoint was, the first one was pretty cool. There were a lot of, uh, people that showed up that were just, I think, high in the euphoria of the bull market. Um, and not as many builders.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  But. The cool thing there was that you kind of had like a bunch of the devs on their own. They like got a space and they called it a hacker house. And they just like ran away from all the bull market people and just coded.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  On their own.

• 49:42David Hoffman?

  This seems a lot like the Ethereum community in like 2017 where Vitalik got exasperated with like, he might remember Vitalik saying, I will leave this space if we keep talking about like Lambos and Moon coins. It kind of sounds like a little bit like that.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, uh, and like, that was pretty cool because that was, again, we, we just then copied that model. It was like, okay, there's a bunch of devs that actually want to go build stuff. Why don't we like run these hacker houses from one, one city to the next? And then we did a bunch of hacker houses and hackathons and that year of doing hacker houses and hackathons leading up to breakpoint, even though the market turned around and every, everything started dumping was actually pretty awesome. There's a lot of stuff got built. There was a lot of devs, like the whole NFT space like happened during that cycle. Like you literally, you know, Magic Eden didn't exist, you know? Like Phantom like actually became like, I think, a pretty awesome wallet that everyone I think

• 50:41Speaker 00

  knows about at this point, if, if not used. So a, a bunch of really cool stuff happened and the second breakpoint was awesome. It's like 40 teams that were building games. We didn't have a games thing even at, at the first breakpoint. Like, um, the number of attendees went up by like nearly doubled from the first breakpoint. So despite this like market drop of Solana's peak down to whatever 30 bucks was a 95% drop, right? By the number of attendees to the conference nearly doubled, the number of devs that showed up was like 1600. It was a pretty awesome vibes up until the very last day.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  There's one on the flight back, everyone started, uh, seeing the shit show with, with FTX.

• 51:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, we'll get there, but I want to cover really like the throughout 2020 and 2021. Because Solana, the sole price between the start of 2021 to the end of 2021, did probably perhaps the craziest thing any crypto token has ever, almost ever done ever, which is like go up 20,000, 20,000% in a little bit over a year. And I mean, I would imagine that went from like Solana thinking about like, damn, we're running on fumes. Are we going to make it? We need to, we need to get through this to like, oh my God, we've like, what have like, everyone's here. Like, what the hell is going on? Can you, can you walk us through like that, that part of that transition from, from, from A to B?

• 52:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. So like, I think part of the reason of that is that because we were an underdog earlier, even compared to like the cohort of competitors like Avalanche and Near and all those guys. They raised at higher valuations from VCs, raised more capital at Oster. When they launched their entry price was higher. Solana's coinless auction to launch was 22 cents. It cleared at like, what is that? 104 million or something like that? Which is what Bitcoin was worth when it was just listed on Mt. Cox.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  It was not, uh, nobody thought, there was no hype at that point. So the delta from that to, I think we passed the cohort Avalanche and Ethereum, not Ethereum, Avalanche and like Near and a bunch of those other folks and Polkadot. That I think was surprising to everybody and that, that's I think part of the reason of these like massive multiples, but.

• 53:12David Hoffman?

  Right. Do you think it's fair in, in the contrast to other chains like Phantom, Avalanche, like Near? Do you think calling Solana a VC coin is fair if, if we're not calling those chains VC coins too?

• 53:25Speaker 00

  Uh, I don't know.

• 53:28David Hoffman?

  To what degree do you, do you say that that's like a fair branding?

• 53:32Speaker 00

  I mean, like, the very dumb thing about this whole VC narrative is that, like, the crypto VCs in 2018, nearly all of them were people that invested in the Ethereum ICO, and that's how they became VCs. They, these were literally the Ethereum backers that believed in smart contract platforms and saw the future of this tech. They made big bets in the Ethereum ICO. They wrote it to like 1327 and they created a fund. Nearly all of these folks that were like the VCs of that era came from that. Like A16Z and a bunch of these other folks were not

• 54:12Speaker 00

  super active at the time. So that's, that's kind of like, I think, the weird branding. Sure, like, I don't know. Like, I don't really care about the VC branding. I think it's just pretty dumb, like, to begin with. Like, are there institutionals that hold a shitload of ETH? Probably. Like, does that make it a trade fight chain? No. Like, it's the people building stuff that make the chain.

• 54:37David Hoffman?

  So, uh, what was it like, uh, I, I, whenever, uh, cause Ryan and I have experienced this, whenever you, uh, like, are kind of, uh, whenever you experience success, you start to get haters, right? And perhaps Ryan and I contributed to that, to whatever degree we did. I'm sorry. But when, when did, like, the ETH maxi crowd come in? And what was that like to be on, like, the receiving end of that?

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Um, it was honestly, like, not, uh, I guess, stuff that I see on Twitter, like, is, I just take it for granted, as this is just people, like, being on Twitter, growing up in the 90s on forums and bulletin boards, who just, like, shitpost about everything. People were getting in, like, flamers about Linux file systems, literally, like. So, but when I talk to people that are in the ETH community, again, a lot of those folks who were early Ethereum backers, backed Solana, a lot of the super early, those folks became validators and, like, started businesses that are multi-chain. I never felt like there was, like, a hate coming

• 55:41Speaker 00

  out from, like, especially not from, like, Vitalik or Justin or DuckRat or any of the core devs. Like, I think they've been awesome and, like, super helpful. So, the ETH, like, people shitpost on Twitter, I think it's just, like, I don't know. I don't even know if they believe what they're saying. They're... Whatever. I don't really like get it, let it get to me. Stuff that's I think valuable that comes out of that is like arguing about decentralization, like actually getting to the nuance of trustlessness, like how do you minimize trust? What are the trade offs with sharding? What are the trade offs with big hardware systems like Solana?

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Like, I think a lot of value is actually created there by getting the terms right, getting to the nuance of the trade offs. So like, in some ways, like, uh, like my conversations with Don Crap, it has have influenced like Solana's design. It's like, this is awesome.

• 56:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  I do think that's a underutilized tool of Twitter and sometimes can be drowned out by all the noise.

• 56:46David Hoffman?

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• 58:53David Hoffman?

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• 59:34David Hoffman?

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• 59:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, we've talked a lot about the birth and the growth of Solana in 2020 and 2022, but you said something really interesting about, actually, 2022 specifically, and that you were at the Breakpoint Conference, I believe, when some of the FTX stuff started to bubble up. Can you just tell me about that whole experience? Because I feel like... Up to that point, the Solana community in general fared fairly well. I mean, it was a rough year for crypto, right? We had Terra Luna. That was really bad for the Terra Luna ecosystem, of course. Then we had 3R's Capital and we had kind of

• 1:00:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Celsius C-Fi is very shaky. You know, through all of that, Solana seemed kind of fine. Of course, price is down, but price is down everywhere. But this particular event, the FTX kind of event and the unfolding of that had to hit the Solana community hard. In fact, I know it did, partially because I think whether fair or not, Sam Bankman-Fried was seen as a champion of Solana. I think he was very much in the early days. So tell us about that event. When did you first catch wind of that? What were the thoughts going through your head and how did that affect you and the Solana community?

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  There's like, it was basically in the flight back is when I started seeing the tweets coming out of like, Sam and Binance and like that interaction between Alameda and like the balance sheet being leaked was like, was like, so the first kind of like flag, but I didn't take it seriously. It was like, huh, this balance sheet, is that really what Alameda has? It seems like not, not great.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  And that like,

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  that seeing Binance's reaction and CZ like making that tweet and then how Alameda responded was when like my stomachs are turning like, holy shit, like this might like be like a pretty bad event, but no, I, again, like I was really, really shocked when like it unraveled to the point that it did. Like basically when Sam said that he's trying to sell FTX to Binance was like, holy fuck, something bad really, really happened.

• 1:02:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  And how, before that, how would you characterize like Sam's relationship with the Solana community? Was he a supporter? He was obviously an investor at some level, but like, how was he involved?

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  In the early days, like it was a big deal, I think.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  Like that, you know, again, no one really heard of Solana, who just launched, trying to get people to code in this like weird Rust environment where it felt like writing Linux kernel drivers. The Sam saying that they're gonna build Serum on Solana was a big deal. That's, that actually, I think, got a lot of developers to turn their heads and be like, okay, there's something here that's interesting. Cause I think uh FTX engineers had a pretty high reputation for like being like, you know, 10x engineers, if you wanna call them that, but like being a small team that can ship a lot of product and make good decisions, like engineering decisions.

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  That drove, I think, a lot of DeFi interests and like got a lot of folks in the early days to start building stuff.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  There was this like kind of relationship between us and them where like if we had like product ideas or something like that, like, we could talk to them and be like, hey, is this like an API? Can you guys add it? Or something like this? That was like based on this assumption that like they have a lot of soul, they're aligned with what Solana wants to do and they will like help us unblock stuff. That's really, really hard in crypto because of all the regulatory hurdles you have to jump. But they have all the licenses, they do all the KYC checks for their customers, they can build really good experiences for people to like onboard. So like, for example, like the NFT marketplace we wanted to build,

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  like was open source, give the tools to creators, let them fork GitHub and go launch their own auction houses. And that was the birth of MetaBlocks. It was like very WordPressy. They wanted like a centralized one that they control the experience that ran the markets on FTX. But they used the source code that we built and they built that experience and uh it was the same data structure. So those NFTs could move in and out of Solana. And that was awesome. Like I think they tried to go get product market fit for that thing and it failed. Metaplex, I think, succeeded. So stuff like that like was more like product engineering like flowing.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  But that like collapse was like really painful to watch because I think a lot of people saw Sam as like one of the pillars of Solana, right? Like, like, why, why would you build on Solana? Well, because Sam is building on it, right? And therefore, like, I'm in a good group of people that are building awesome stuff.

• 1:05:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  It was kind of like a Joe Lubin type figure, not kind of a co-founder, but like almost like a consensus, it felt like a little bit.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  They could like build stuff like consensus could consensus is like 2000 people, right? Like, I think that we are an org with like labs is like 75 people. We just don't have that scale to go build a bunch of stuff. Having that like disappear overnight was like pretty shocking and jarring. And like, I was like, holy fuck, is this, is everything gonna die now?

• 1:05:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so like shocking and jarring. I will tell you, 2022 shook my faith in people.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Once again, at a level I don't think I felt even in 2018, kind of like faith in humanity, faith in people that I thought were, I mean, many, many folks were on one high pedestals in the crypto community, and they just completely failed from a trust perspective.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  2022 shook me like 2008 sounded like it shook people.

• 1:06:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Did you feel that? I mean, like, are you immune to that? Are you impurist? Or like, people are people?

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  Did I get like burned out on that? And I like, I don't even know. Um, I'm a very kind of trusting person. Like, I didn't have any reservations with like working closely with Sam. And maybe in retrospect, you gotta like, you probably should like be cautious about with anyone in crypto. And that like, and I don't like being that. I don't like having to think like, are there alternative motives or they're doing something shady? Because it's just like, it's exhausting.

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  It sucks.

• 1:06:52David Hoffman?

  I think, and knowing how developers think and work, I think that you and Anatoly are a dev who wants to do dev things. And so probably to have to consider, is SBF a good actor or not? It's not, you just want to build, right? Is that a fair take?

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, we wanted to make the network faster and get more shit on, more people using it.

• 1:07:16David Hoffman?

  I think that if I want to put on my super critic hat of Solana, and I'll, like, this is echoed in a lot of the ETH maxi circles, is that Solana just ended up being a place for mercenaries in this last bull market, SBF being one of them. There was that guy that spun up a bunch of that ecosystem of DeFi apps that pumped up the TVL, now being investigated by the DOJ. Would you say the ETH criticism, the ETH maxi criticism of Solana as just a place for mercenaries to operate? How would you feel about that critique of Solana inside of its 2021 to 2022 era?

• 1:07:53Speaker 00

  I think those folks definitely suck. I'm not disagreeing with you there.

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  I don't know if Solana had more of them than Ethereum, or proportionally more even. Because there was a lot of shit that happened on Ethereum as well. And those,

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  I mean, would it be wrong for me to say that those were the two growing ecosystems in that era that actually experienced pretty rapid growth? Finance march into, right? Like, I think BSC came out and built a pretty substantial side and also experienced a big pile of shitty actors.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  I think, I don't know what we can do better as a community to have an immune response to push those people out faster. Like, there's just some stuff that's like, I kind of thought would happen on its own. People would pick open source software over closed source, but they don't. They just pick whatever is the shiny new thing. They don't really look beyond that. So that was, to me, surprising that you saw the market not resolve that on its own. And like, simple things like that, like... Is it about building immutable smart contracts that are open source that have been audited? I'm like, was a development done in the open?

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  That would probably filter out like 99% of these folks. Just because the folks that want to take those shortcuts are the ones that are trying to like, you know, take people's money, right? Like, and like, and lie or whatever.

• 1:09:36David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm. There, that same article that I was referencing earlier, titled on Medium, "The Year That Solana Blew Up", and blew up in a good way. It might, it might have a double meaning when FTX blew up. But there was a part on cultural debt that I thought was, was really, really interesting. And it's something that like, I really enjoyed reading out of, especially when it coming from somebody who worked at Solana. They, they wrote, "As a result, we have a massive cultural debt in our community, one that must be repaid." What, what, what do you think when you hear this?

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  What I, what I think about is that like, there were a lot of projects that kind of launched as fast as they could to get either funding or product market fit or users. And they didn't like audit, they didn't do open source development from the start. They didn't build immutable smart contracts. They didn't use a, like governance or like a multi-sig for, for their upgrades authority. Like that kind of stuff, I think is like, very sloppy. And it's something-

• 1:10:33David Hoffman?

  And you think that got like instilled a little bit too deep in the Solana culture for that bull market?

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  I mean, what's weird is that like Armani and like, the core Solana devs that you like, look at that are like, you know, Armani, the Cheeto guys, Mango, like, all those folks are like, doing the right thing. They like build, like labs didn't build the tooling for people to verify their programs on chain. Like, they did, right? Like, they, they did all of the stuff to like, because they wanted to see it. And those are like the people that, uh, when I look to like, who are this core Solana developers? There's those folks. And there's like a whole bunch of people in the periphery that were trying to make money as fast as they could that like took those shortcuts. I don't know how like-

• 1:11:23Speaker 00

  How we correct that? Or is that a self correcting thing? Because over time, it's just those dabs are the ones going to be here in the next cycle. And all the other assholes are not.

• 1:11:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'll tell you my take on that. I do think it's kind of self correcting if you can survive. And one of the signs as somebody who's been interested in the Solana community, but kind of wait and see what happens is I almost feel like bear markets are so good for purifying. I think the charge that David just said, yeah, it's a purge of Solana being full of mercenaries. This is exactly what Bitcoiners said about Ethereum in 2018, basically. There's all these ICO scams. Who in Ethereum who is here for the right reasons could deny there weren't a lot of people that took advantage of the base layer of Ethereum to race scam the ICO pump and dumps and exit.

• 1:12:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  A ton of that happened, but they weren't the people that stuck around. And so from my vantage point in Italy, I've very much been paying attention to how the Solana community fares during this bear market season. It's being tested in kind of the fiery crucible of a bear market. And if it survives, if it shows sign of life, if the builders continue to build, that to me is a bullish sign that Solana is going to persist and continue doing meaningful things for the community. So it's almost in some way, when we were talking about at the beginning, like, how about 2022 was a good year? Would you erase it if you could? I wouldn't.

• 1:12:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  In fact, I think that, and this might sound, okay, it's like, if I were to say something to the Solana community, I think that this is a blessing, actually, for Solana to actually have to go through this. It was too easy, wasn't it? It can't be this easy. You can't just go from like 11 freaking cents or whatever to like $250. 20,000%. You can't just do that.

• 1:13:23David Hoffman?

  All right, there has to be some trough of disillusionment. There has to be some washout. There has to be some purification, some testing along the way for Solana to really figure out what its culture is, what its values are, and whether the builders are going to continue to build. So that's what I'm kind of looking for. And I don't know if we're in the section of we get to talk about like future for Solana yet. There might still be some other things to cover. But I don't know if you share that sense with me, Anatoly, like this is the testing phase for the community.

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  Oh, man. It's, uh, the testing phase sucks.

• 1:14:02David Hoffman?

  It does suck.

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  It sucks. I want to like, the, it sucks because it's like deflating for a lot of the people that are doing the right thing, that are taking slower. I think that happened on Ethereum as well. But like, I think the like Compound and all those folks are awesome, right? They, they've built really good products and like, they're an example that I think everyone should look up to. I hope we have like, the same kind of cohort of people survive that can become leaders like in the next cycle. But getting through this phase sucks for sure.

• 1:14:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. So Anatoly, here we are in 2023. And I kind of want to just do like a snapshot, an audit of the current state of Solana, because there are some parallels that I see to the state of the Ethereum community, not necessarily the Ethereum project, because there's philosophical differences that will always make it different, but the state of the Ethereum community and the state of the Solana community, right? Solana is just coming out of the overhang of SBF, right? And FTX, massive forced seller of soul into the market. I kind of see a similar parallel of honestly, like Joe Lubin and Consensus in Ethereum 2018. Big forced seller of ETH because of the operating costs of Consensus.

• 1:15:26David Hoffman?

  And to say absolutely nothing about any sort of similarity between Joe Lubin and SBF couldn't be more different. Just the nature The fourth selling of a large holder of the bag. And then also, like in Ethereum 2018, you had the ICO treasuries. Big just sellers into the market. And between like, like Joe Lubin selling for consensus ICOs selling in, because of their treasuries, like just drove the ETH price down. And I kind of see that with FTX being a forced seller. And also funds, I, you know, unsure, uncertain rumors about like multi-coin being, needing to sell their soul. Like and selling their soul into the market as well and other funds as well. You know, all of the VCs that did own soul.

• 1:16:09David Hoffman?

  And in Ethereum, when all the ICOs sold their ETH, it was a massive distribution. Same thing with consensus, same thing with like Joe Lubin, one of the biggest, most concentrators holders of ETH. All the ICO treasuries, big concentrated holdings of ETH, had to sell it into the bottom of the market to the few remaining community members, who were the, the still bullish on the future of Ethereum. And that has to be what's going on with Solana right now, where you had the concentrated VCs. You had the forced seller of FTX selling soul into the market and distributing the, the soul token to the last remaining people who are, who are bullish Solana. That, that's my like snapshot of like where Solana is. And so can, is that a fair take? And can you kind of provide your own like audit of the Solana ecosystem?

• 1:16:54David Hoffman?

  Like, how are people feeling and where are they, where are they at right now?

• 1:16:57Speaker 00

  I mean, the,

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  a lot of like the stuff that's happening, I think in, in like, that's pretty exciting is like development of new DeFi protocols, Zeta Drift, like folks building like new perpetual markets. And like figuring out how to use the chain for, to like, get to that vision of like, let's replace TradeFi and run it on Solana and like have an, have like a competitive system to, to NISI. That's happening. I think that's pretty exciting. And those are really dedicated teams that are, that are working really, really hard.

• 1:17:34Speaker 00

  And that sucks because DeFi has been like hurt the most on the network. But I'm like pretty stoked about that.

• 1:17:44Speaker 00

  The NFT community is like very thriving. It's like, I think arguably the second, it's the second largest, right? And then crypto, would you guys agree with me? It seems like by activity and by like numbers, it's half about half the size of Ethereum. That's very like, I'm like proud of that. Like I didn't do it. Do anything but like, it's awesome. It's awesome to see that. And like those folks are having fun and like building cool shit and like creating memes and like trying to build brands or whatever. And there's always constant controversy because it's big enough to where that's just a continuous thing. But that, that is awesome.

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  A lot of the mobile kits for the Solana mobile, all the dev kits sold out. So we have like a very strong, I don't know how, how that's going to translate to consumers, but there's every strong like developer, like sigh of relief that there is like a chance for an app store that isn't controlled by Apple or Google.

• 1:18:50Speaker 00

  That's coming from, from the folks in the community. I think that's, that to me is pretty awesome.

• 1:18:57Speaker 00

  I don't know if people are still like kind of down in the gutter thinking about like FTX and all this stuff. That maybe, I don't know. Like, I think the, the bear market was so bad up until that point that maybe this was like,

• 1:19:11Speaker 00

  like bad news in the best possible time. Like it just happened, the bandaid is ripped off. Now everyone's thinking about the future. Like my personal like vibes are like, I'm a bit exhausted from like the negative news and I want to see like some wins. I want to see people launch products and build cool shit.

• 1:19:32Speaker 00

  That, that you can't really do on your own. So that to me is like what I, what I'm excited about.

• 1:19:37David Hoffman?

  Well, Anatoly, one of the things that make me really optimistic about the current state of Solana is Solana is the only blockchain in crypto after Ethereum that has a second client. And this is like one of these like things about crypto that makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. That no one cares about having a multi-client architecture about their blockchain. It's insane that Bitcoin is like only one client, and if there's a bug in it, that is, that bug is Bitcoin. That's Bitcoin. We're gonna run with that bug. Like, that's insane. That's crazy. And so like, I see a lot of, like, the fact that Solana is developing FireDancer, I think in partnership with Jump, I think, maybe you can go into the details.

• 1:20:20David Hoffman?

  But that's, to me, a huge vote of confidence that we finally have a second blockchain ecosystem that has a multi-client architecture. So I kind of want to lead and open up this next conversation, the last bit of this conversation is like the future of Solana. I was like, what, make us bullish about the future of Solana. Like, what's, make it like, entice us to like, stick around in the community during the bear market? And maybe you can also dive into the, to the second client.

• 1:20:43Speaker 00

  So I mean, people are always worried about like scalability. How's it gonna scale? Where are you gonna get more throughput if it's some monolithic chain with no sharding? And like, FireDancer is like, uh, the example of how you can use software to utilize commodity hardware, stuff you can buy off the shelf, to move a lot of memory and a lot of signatures through these systems and like, scale the network. They've done demos that are like, on the, this is like the block producer stage, that can handle like 600,000 to a million transactions per second on a, and this is on commodity hardware, like dual, dual, dual CPU, like Intel systems.

• 1:21:25Speaker 00

  They're expensive, but you can buy them. And by the time you need that much capacity, it's gonna run on like, whatever, whatever desktop you can buy on Fry's. The cool thing about it is that it's just performance optimization. There's not like protocol changes. There's no like...

• 1:21:43Speaker 00

  Magic unknown, science fiction that we need to build. It's purely straightforward stuff that like every database engineer like has gone through like when they need to go from like when they need to step level the the performance of the system. So it's gonna get done. It's just gonna work. I'm like very confident that there's no like there's no magic that needs to happen. And it's a second client. And why a second client is important in a high performance system like I think you can argue that Bitcoin is so slow that with 10 minute blocks, if something goes wrong, that the community has enough time to like maybe revert eight hours worth of blocks or something like that. And that's reasonable. What that means about Bitcoin finality is like a whole other topic.

• 1:22:28Speaker 00

  But for a high performance system, we need guarantees that the state is final. And with two clients, if they ever diverge, network calls. So at a gut level, you're you're actually trading liveliness for safety. Like if if humans wrote this code and humans are failable and they wrote bugs and those bugs are catastrophic to where there's a state invalid state transition exploit, then two systems written by two different groups of people in different languages, different tools, it's very unlikely that they'll have the same bug. And if they ever diverge and the network has at least 33% on on both clients, then the network will halt and humans will be like are needed to go figure out why.

• 1:23:12Speaker 00

  Now, if you had four clients, it's even better. And I think the goal for Ethereum is to have four clients, right? So if you have, then it's very unlikely that two of them will have the same bug. So one of them goes down, 75% of the network is still live and you maintain liveliness. Now, to get to four clients, they'll take a lot of work, but eventually the cool thing about what FireDancer is doing is They are also building a spec of what Solana is. So it's much, much easier to where like there's an agreed upon spec of all the definitions of all the protocols and formats. That's all in one place for somebody to again then go look at like, okay, this is how Labs did it. This is how FireDancer did it. We can rewrite this and go or whatever and make it plenty fast.

• 1:23:57Speaker 00

  And then you can have three or four clients. That's five years from now, maybe like will be a priority. But like V0, I think we need to get a second client simply because safety is paramount. Like, and then like what keeps me up at night is like the scariest thing in the world is a code execution bug in the runtime that causes like tokens to be minted or state to be corrupted. And like, that's catastrophic. That's like the scariest thing. And like, it's code written by humans, you know, like the best engineers working on the Linux kernel sometimes introduce zero days and that was just really, really frightening.

• 1:24:36David Hoffman?

  I think the other unique thing that differentiates Solana from any old EVM clone is it's VM. Can you talk about the Solana VM and how it's unique and differentiated from other VMs in the space?

• 1:24:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, everyone that like used the Ethereum VM just got a free ride, which is smart.

• 1:24:57Speaker 00

  Cause you're, you're using a VM that's securing a very large amount of dollars, right? And you, and that's a very large bounty to find every possible bug. But you are giving up a lot of performance, like the, like as I earlier described, like the whole point of Solana is like we, we like remove the, the cap on bandwidth. If the network has X amount of bandwidth, it can stuff all of it with transactions. It means you can have very large amount of throughput, like hundreds of thousands of TPS on. Old school 1 gigabit standards. Now, the hard part is then like, how do you actually process all of them? And how do users actually take advantage of this throughput in a single state

• 1:25:41Speaker 00

  machine? That's a, it's very, very tricky to actually write systems that allow for parallelism for, on the, at the user level. So the runtime, as it's designed, is built kind of from the ground up with that idea. Like, we built the system, so when transactions flow through the thing, they can be processed in parallel as fast as possible. And that's very different from how EVM is constructed. And that means that like, we had to build not only just the consensus layer, and like, the whole, and like, the tooling and all this other shit, we also had to build an EVM equivalent, like a Turing machine equivalent virtual machine.

• 1:26:23Speaker 00

  If we didn't do that, like, you would basically see like, kind of a slightly faster Ethereum.

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  That could do maybe like 30 to 50 TPS. Like, it would be very limited by how EVM works, and how memphis work, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

• 1:26:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, and it's totally, very much like Ethereum, I think, in the depths of 2018. Some people out there, maybe even a lot of people out there, are saying Solana's not going to make it, right? They're not saying that about Bitcoin. I still don't think they're saying that about Ethereum. I mean, some people are saying all of crypto's not going to make it, but let's put those haters aside, all right? It's a different podcast. You're not a typical Bankless listener. But some people have doubts about Solana. Is Solana going to make it through the bear? What is your case for why Solana will make it through this bear market out on the other side stronger?

• 1:27:11Speaker 00

  Solana, the token, or the network?

• 1:27:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  The network. And also, my answer would be yes to that. Let's talk about both.

• 1:27:20Speaker 00

  The network will, the network will make it. I mean, like, the tech is there, like, if it's, it's just like, go fork it and run Solana, new Solana, or whatever, right? The code is there, it's awesome. People like using it. So like, I think in that sense, we have enough traction and enough, like, devs that want to keep this thing going to where it'll keep going.

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  The rest is like, I think, very much macro-dependent. I think that's like a big question for like, probably all of the smart contract platforms except for Ethereum. Is like, are we gonna be in like a high interest rate environment for the next five years where everything gets all the like, all the riskier bets get squeezed down and there's no traction. That means that there's nothing for Solana to do that's useful to the world that Ethereum doesn't cover. Even if Solana is 100 times faster, right? Even if we do more transactions and all the Ethereum L2s combined, they're not providing enough value to the world in that environment. If they're not, that means it's not gonna survive.

• 1:28:31Speaker 00

  Now, that's like the big, the big if. And that, I don't know, like, that's a big if for crypto. What is crypto doing right now that is so crucial to the world that it can't live without it?

• 1:28:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  How do you feel about Solana's chances then? How do you feel about that bet?

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  I think, honestly, I feel pretty good. Like, I think the fact that we have like this thriving NFT community, which was built totally accidentally, like neither myself or Raj are like NFT gurus. It's just happened because the UX was better and it was cheap and fast. And no one has been able to replicate that and like get the get that going. I think to me speaks that there's something there in the tech that'll continue like derive value to the real world from, from the chain. And if there is like companies like Magic Eden or whatever, and the long tail of like

• 1:29:27Speaker 00

  NFT startups that have real world revenues, they're actually like making money on the web that excludes the like ad tech, like it's not Google revenues anymore. It's like Web3 crypto weird revenues that are people like have like hundreds of thousands of users. It means the underlying base layer will survive in some, some shape or another. And that, that's awesome. Like, this is like my bear, I put on my like worst hat, bear hat. Everything's going to shit. Interest rates are 10%.

• 1:29:58Speaker 00

  Or is like the web three NFT business model survive? I think so. And if that's true, I think Solana survives.

• 1:30:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  You gotta feel better about your chances than versus 2018 when you started this whole thing, right?

• 1:30:09Speaker 00

  Um, I'm, I felt, uh, chances are, I feel like way more bullish now than 2018, 2019. Like, uh, like people don't even, I mean, there's so much funding that's still happening in crypto. There's so many like smart, young people that are like not joining the, the big companies and they're like building awesome products. My guess is if you like, looked at all the product launches from inception of crypto to now, to what's going to happen in the next like 12 to 18 months. The next 12 to 18 months is probably going to be way more than everything else combined up to this point. And if people are launching products, they're grinding for product market fit.

• 1:30:54Speaker 00

  They're going to get users means crypto is going to survive. It's just like, that's going to happen.

• 1:31:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  And totally, uh, thanks for this conversation. It's, it's way more fun to have this conversation in the bear market, actually. It gives us a chance to kind of take a breath and, and, um, here's really going on. And, uh, we're excited about what the Solana community is doing. So thanks for joining us.

• 1:31:14Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 1:31:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, last question for you. Okay. You said monolithic chain with no sharding. Is that still the strategy? I, I'm just checking. You sure about that?

• 1:31:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, there, there's no way that sharding is going to get information faster around the world.

• 1:31:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. Still the strategy. Still the difference.

• 1:31:31David Hoffman?

  Anatoly, you said, uh, that, uh, if Solana can do more transactions than all the Ethereum L2s combined, is that? Do you think that that's going to happen? That Solana can do more TPS than all Ethereum L2s combined?

• 1:31:42Speaker 00

  I'm pretty sure of that.

• 1:31:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  You gotta, gotta admire the confidence here and, uh, yeah.

• 1:31:48David Hoffman?

  Game on, brother.

• 1:31:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think this is what levels up the entire crypto community is a bunch of builders, uh, in competitive games, friendly competitive games with one another. Anatoly, thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate you.

• 1:32:01Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:32:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation will include some links in the show notes with some action items for you, some further research you could do on Solana, also on the multi-client architecture that Anatoly was talking about. That was called Fire Dancer? Am I correct?

• 1:32:15Speaker 00

  Yep, Fire Dancer.

• 1:32:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll have links to that, too. As always, gotta end with our risks and disclaimers. You must realize by now that crypto is pretty damn risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:32:32David Hoffman?

  Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a Bankless Premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless Premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings, and weekly rollups where

• 1:33:15David Hoffman?

  we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks, everyone, for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.