Solana founders on why the Solana ecosystem will thrive
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In this episode of UpOnly, Cobie & Ledger chat with the founders of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, discussing Solana, what makes it different from other L1s, why they think it will last, and more.
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Show Notes
Marketing Solana
– It’s hard to even define what Solana is in English so that normal people can understand what it is
– Very strong product market fit with Solana and developers
– Next step: how do you get people to understand how to custody their own assets and why that’s important?
Intros
– Anatoly: “been an engineer most of my life, started at Qualcomm, was working on optimizing AR, was aware of crypto, started mining with GPUs not being used and pulled into crypto”
– Anatoly: “had 2 coffees and 1 beer (LOL), stayed up til 4am then it hit – thermodynamics isn’t only measurable, you can measure TIME”
– Anatoly: “Figured out you could trustlessly encode the passage of time then I was manic for a week… then talked to Raj and it all started”
– Raj: “I spent 7 years in healthcare, started a company there, then was introduced to Anatoly camping and knew it was the biggest swing I could take in my lifetime”
Who’s the Core Market?
– We don’t even know
– “Solana might be the go-to network to bring finance onchain in a way that finance people get”
– If we engineer and optimize well enough, Solana will be able to move as fast as news through fiber optic cables (~speed of light)
– Was introduced to Sam – 4 weeks after he tried out Solana they had built Serum
– Everyone thought it was dumb to even try DEXs…
– “but we knew if something was gonna work with blockchain, it’s probably gonna work A LOT”
– Cobie: “I’d treat Solana as if it’s a developer platform with the core KPI as user traction”
Developer Experience
– Rust (coding language) acts as a moat
– If you have enough conviction in the vision, you eat glass to build it
– “The kid who built synthetify built it during his finals”
– THAT’s grit
– C++ people do well with Rust, and tradfi devs do well with C++, so acts as a good bridge
Engineers
– “at a certain point these guys don’t see themselves as a “rust” engineer they see themselves as a “get shit done” engineer”
– Should we support Solidity? Should we support EVM?
– NAH. If you’re that good then learn rust.
Preventing Shit Projects
– Gotta just use common sense
– Lots of community review
– These guys who came out of capture the flag winners, they just destroy everyone’s code
– Free audits on Solana! These guys check your code lol
Solana Timeline
– How to balance timeliness with quality?
– “Shit, that’s a hard question”
– Our goal is through these hackathons, find coders that will code, no sleep, ship products, XYZ and just unblock their potential
How’s a Founder Raise Structured?
– Need the lawyer to say anything
– Cobie: “per year of lockup there is some percentage discount from the market e.g. if you lock up tokens for 4 years then you get like a 20% discount or whatever”
– Your tokens are the main thing you have in your war chest
Is having a central planner, even if it’s a DAO, counterintuitive for crypto?
– When you delegate your stake to the node you don’t change custody
– but the node has full control over it
– With ETH, you kinda relinquish custody to LIDO
– On Solana you don’t have to relinquish custody
Solana Community
– SBF obviously huge
– Bahamas test – if you went to the Bahamas, how well would the project do on its own?
– Read “how to start a startup” but like how useful is that lol
– I’ve learned you gotta ship quickly, and only focus on fires when you’re steering the ship
– Optimize for shipping
– Very important that the way the chain works is as optimized as possible (speed, security, decentralization)
– It’s really hard to build tho lol
– first time we booted it up it ran for like 20 min then crashed
– Then next time ran for like an hour, then a week, then we were like holy shit it works haha
What’s Broken rn
– Rn we’re just working on optimizations mostly
– Just blood sweat and tears to make it better the core structure is good
*Solana guys sent Ledger a beanbag without any fluff inside thought it was a body bag LOL*
SOL hackathon
– $1M of prizes and seed funding
– Last one, 11 teams got funded with over $1M each tho… so the money isn’t even to attract people lol
– Idea is to attract developers and forces everyone to come together at the same time, listen to the same things, form teams, and grow the overall community
– There’s also pride, if you win you had to go through the gauntlet with everyone else
New Crypto Categories
– In 2017 everyone was publishing a white paper
– None of it worked lol
– Now people are actually able to ship this stuff and it works
– The idea of a fully decentralized Discord that feels like web 2 is where a lot of the devs are working now
Will an Algorithmic Stablecoin Ever Work?
– No…lol
– Cool think about Bitcoin was getting high grade cryptography into consumer hands
– If that’s the most powerful peace of this, people will find a censorship resistant way to coordinate these things
“What do you do?” Answer
– I just say a bunch of technical words and their eyes glaze over
– I tell people I work in blockchain and it will take over
– When first looking for seed money, banks wouldn’t give a bank account when using the word blockchain
– Cobie: “I just tell people I have a trust fund” lmao
– Ledge: “I tell people I work in web stuff”
– Ledge: “The only thing worse than saying you work in crypto is saying you’re a podcaster”
– Cobie: “Only thing worse than that is saying you’re a Twitch streamer” hahhaha
Thoughts on Bitcoin
– Bitcoin good
– Self-sovereign decentralized money that’s a store of value could be a huge force of good in the world
Other L1s
– Avalanche, Cardano, NEAR, etc
– It’s all good competition
– It’s like whatever the Lakers thing of the Warriors… in the heat they’re your enemy but hanging out later they’re nice guys lol
FUD a Project
– Safemoon
– Dfinity
– ETH
– Cardano
Dogcoins
– Dogcoins are winning because money is abundant, attention is scarce and memes have value for that reason
Free Alpha
– Raj: “new normal. You wake up, Bitcoin is legal tender, just head down and stay on course”
– Anatoly: “Don’t drink to much or eat too much, work out, don’t have too much caffeine. Just use some moderation”
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