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”

Music by GiovanniPickle

403: Halloween in The Districts