

Meet the Solana engineer who defected for his own L1
Welcome back to The Gwart Show! Today, Liam from Through (formerly Fire Dancer engineer) joins us to talk about building a high-performance L1 blockchain from scratch. We dive into why Solana has structural limitations, his leaderless consensus design, proof-of-burn mechanisms, and why economic security is overrated. Plus takes on trading, Fire Dancer's progress, and the future of DeFi.
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NOTES:
• Fire Dancer has ~10% of Solana network
• Through team is only 5 people currently
• Testnet launching in 1-2 months timeline
• SDK support targeting July release
• Solana chain halts if clients disagree
• Economic security was higher than ETH
Timestamps
00:00 Start
00:12 Liam's background
02:18 Early trading
03:13 Firedancer experience
03:58 What's Unto?
05:40 Solana L1 limitations
08:07 Applications
09:51 CLOB wars
11:58 Proof of stake flaws
18:23 Multiple concurrent proposers
21:38 Burn design
25:27 Improvements in trading
27:47 Commodities on chain
30:08 Onto chain performance
32:52 Performant L1 chain competition
35:38 Desired apps
38:00 Firedancer progress & marketshare
42:10 Decentralization & price discovery
45:57 The value of a market
50:10 MEV on Solana
53:56 L1 token value
1:01:28 Through updates
1:03:42 Wrap up
The Gwart Show is sponsored by Ellipsis Labs. Ellipsis Labs is building Atlas, the blockchain purpose-built for verifiable finance. You may know of Ellipsis Labs by their first product Phoenix, a fully on-chain orderbook DEX that’s done over 50 billion dollars in unincentivized volume.They are one of the strongest teams I know in crypto. If you’re interested in working for a mission-driven company, Ellipsis Labs is hiring engineers passionate about crypto and finance to work on Atlas. You can learn more and apply on Ellipsis Labs’ Twitter “at Ellipsis_Labs”. Don’t forget to check out Atlas too, @atlasxyz on Twitter.
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