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157 - Will Solana Make It with Anatoly Yakovenko
Bankless
Solana
The lack of $100 million funding in the early days made us like prioritize things like wolves, I guess. We were just throwing everything against the wall like it stick. 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 very cheesy dumb apps That didn't do anything. Right. Some of those folks came back and started building like DeFi, Mango and like whatever. And they got something out of it and they like had an idea that was unique and they built it. And that was like basically after the second hackathon.
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Speaker 2
There's an article that an employee out of Solana Labs wrote, not too long ago and released it December 28th of 2022. And there's a line in here that I want to get your take on. It's written, what exists in the Solana ecosystem now was created by the need 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 say that that's a fair characterization of like the vibe of Solana in the early days? The
Speaker 1
lack of like $100 million funding in the early days made us like prioritize things like wolves, I guess. I wish we had EVM support, but it's expensive to build in a way that wouldn't cripple the network's performance. Like what Solana B 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 without piggybacking on Ethereum? That was like a big unknown. That was a difficult challenge and we were just throwing everything against the wall like it
Speaker 2
stick. Was there a moment where like Solana was like racing to stay alive and then that moment happened where you realized that you were going to make it? What was that moment?
Speaker 3
I hate to say
Speaker 1
it, but like so 2020 we were like nine, ten months of cash left. So the market crashed. We like announced your coinless auction March 12th I think or something like that. We announced that it was going to be a week later. March 16th is when the markets crashed and I was like, fuck. We were 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 cut back as were also like holy fuck we've never seen anything like this before. So like we have no advice to give you. Right. So we decided to launch because I was I think 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 the 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 very cheesy dumb apps that didn't do anything. Right. Like you vote to have like a fighter fight 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 like they got something out of it and they like had an idea that was unique and they built it. And that was like I thought there was something there like basically after the second hackathon.
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