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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