Acquired - Special- Solana (with CEO Anatoly Yakovenko)

0:03Yeah, should we do it? Just dive in. Yeah, let's do it. Welcome to this special episode of Acquire, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.

0:33I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs, and our venture fund, PSL Ventures. And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco. And we are your hosts. Alright, David. On our last episode, we covered the history of Ethereum, what it is, and of course, we speculated on its future. But a big outstanding point at the end of the episode was...

1:00with all this excitement around DeFi and NFTs and decentralized apps. And I mean, this decentralized world computer has gotten really slow and really expensive. It's really slow. Yeah. Yes, it is. Sure. The Ethereum community has plans for how they're going to fix this. But listeners, as many of you heard, there are other credible blockchains out there to build applications on top of. I was trying to do some DeFi stuff the other day. No joke. And like, gas fees were 50-60 bucks. It was crazy. Brutal. That's like close to an all-time high. It's wild. Well, one credible alternative blockchain that David and I have been particularly interested in is Solana. So on today's episode, we are joined by Anatolia Yakovenko, the founder and CEO of Solana Labs. Solana Labs is the company that spearheads the development of the Solana blockchain. And just to...

1:56set some context, they recently raised $314 million, led by Andrews and Horowitz and Polychain Capital. Yes, that is pie, $100 million, and they have a market cap of all their coins right now, right around $10 billion. Both so fun and so crazy. A couple of years ago, if you were going to say, like, make a joke, oh, we're raising pie million dollars, you would raise like $3.14 million, maybe $31.4 million.

2:24Wow, just the scale of all this is incredible. Yeah, it's wild. Well, if you are new here, you should join us in the acquired Slack. And if you like this episode, you will love the community discussing crypto in our digital assets channel. You can join at acquire.fm slash slack. And thank you to listener and community member Austin Fedra, not only for setting up that channel and curating that community and keeping it awesome, but.

2:49For his work at Solana, and introducing us to Anatoly to make this episode happen, so thanks so much to Austin. Huge shout out. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, LaGora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

3:10Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Lugora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry? So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm.

3:37for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Legora's bed here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

4:06And they recently launched LaGora agent offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early LaGora numbers essentially speak for themselves, when they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. LaGora now has over 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1200 legal teams in 50 countries, and crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months. Truly insane numbers, and that is the real test.

4:59Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm, or you're in-house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Well, listeners.

5:21As you know, this is not investment advice. We may hold, I think we even will talk about on the interview with Anatoly that we do hold Solana. And yeah, you should make your own independent research decisions before buying anything, whether it's a cryptocurrency or a stock or anything like that. And the show is for entertainment and informational purposes only. Now on to our conversation with Anatoly Yakovanko, the founder and CEO of Solana.

5:48Okay, welcome Anatoli. We are so excited to have you here with us for so many reasons. We've been following Salana for a little bit now, thanks mostly to Austin Federer in the acquired community founder of the Digital Assets channel in the acquired Slack, which is a wonderful and vibrant community in its own right that's developing and Austin of course works with you guys at Salana now.

6:17You had some huge news last week where you raised $100 million from entries in Horowitz and Polychain Capital, which we definitely want to get the story behind that. And I'm excited to tell your whole story here to the acquired community. Awesome. Yeah. Great to be here. Before we get into what Solana is, why it exists, what problems it's solving, why there's a need for other layer one sort of base layer protocols out there in crypto besides Ethereum. Maybe to start this round is obviously enormous lots of demand you guys are doing wonderfully well. You know you said that your path is not quite like a lot of other crypto projects who raised tons and tons of money out of the gate. Maybe can you rewind and tell us a little bit about how you ended up

7:11Sort of shipping first and what it was like when you first tried to raise capital and why you decided to take this path Well, I wish there was like this active decisions versus just trying to survive the project was started kind of end of 2017 sort of 2018 and that was really like that right peak of that last boom cycle but the crash that followed was really fast and brutal and this is right when we were trying to raise and At that time, the funds that were committed to us blew up in front of our eyes. I'm like, sorry guys, we can't fund this. Wow. With these dedicated crypto funds? Yeah, yeah. And nothing to like, not to blame the people involved or anything like that. It was just such a volatile time in the crypto industry. The things went from extremely promising, everything's gonna be...

8:06Magic and crypto in the span of a year to oh my god So yeah, we were born out of that fire and We had enough funds to get a ridiculously amazing team together. I was able to pull a lot of like kind of principal engineer level folks senior directors at a Qualcomm that were just itching to Go build the next big thing, the true builders there that were like super experienced and it worked with me for a decade. Like all jumpship, that was really surprising to me too. They're like as soon as I asked her, like yeah, where do I sign up? You were like Eric Yuan building zoom out of WebEx. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that was that was really awesome and a huge kind of like.

8:52A huge confidence boost in the design of what we're doing was right because there was a huge amount of technical risk, right? I came up with this idea of privacy. Nobody else was working on it. There were a few academics defining verifiable delay functions, but it was really like out there. Everybody else in the industry was going a totally different direction. So that made it hard for us to get a lot of commitments to from investors who were much more readily Eager to invest in somebody with like huge pedigree out of a you know MIT or whatever like an Ivy League And then it's holy I want to put a pin as we dive deeper down the crypto rabbit hole here We've a lot of sort of non-crypto native audience of sort of start-up native audience So I want to highlight you just use the term proof of history We're gonna put a pin in that and come back to it later because it's one of the things that makes a lot of special but I'm gonna do the work of highlighting a hey

9:47I'm going to force you to define that here at some point because a lot of us are very new to this. Yeah, totally. So we got the team together and we had like decent runway, like I think around two years. And we thought, Oh, this is going to be done in a year. This is easy. We'll just ship it. It actually took a little longer, like two and a half years to do it and cost more. We had to hire more folks than we expected. And we did a couple of raises after that. But we're always like a little bit starving.

10:17Under two years, under 18 months of runway, at any given time, bear market, trying to ship the thing as fast as we could, so we could get to the next stage, which is, let's get users that build the use case they're always dreaming of, let's actually get to the adoption stage. Yeah, it feels like when you were first starting, it sounds like you're in this window right where like the crypto native investors, either their funds blew up, or they just were focused on other technical paradigms.

10:45And then the non crypto native investors were probably like this stuff is radioactive. We're not touching crypto at all right now, right? For the most part except for the few amazing folks like foundation like slow ventures like multi coin that that actually backed us and stuck with us through every raise and we also in that process discovered this amazing community of validators like the people actually that running the notes that are crypto a G's that have been doing mining involved in Cosmos and every other network.

11:15And it became clear like in a span of a year that like every round these guys always came in first without asking any questions. They're like, yeah, let's do this. Like you guys need more funding. Let's do this. And that was just awesome because they were validators on the Ethereum network and seeing the problems there. It's just folks that are like super deep in the space at a technical level. And a lot of them would just run every network, every cool piece of tech that that anybody would try to ship. They're just kind of true believers. And we found that community to be immensely supportive and really kind of like helping us out financially and really being our first customers. These are the first folks that we shipped software to that ran it. They saw how the sausage is made. They failed. They dealt with every failure into the sod.

12:05So that was really amazing to having built that part. That's cool. Okay, maybe so now with this kind of level set, and also the level set, just so our listeners get a sense, as we're talking, the total market cap of the Solana Pro calls about $10 billion. So you have come a long way from those days. Let's rewind it. How did you get into crypto and blockchains? I get the sense that you weren't, you know, 2009, 2010, running your own nodes to believe her from back then or maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I heard of Bitcoin right around that time during the, you know, 2008 crash. Definitely is what kind of opened me up to it. And I minded a little bit on the CPU, lost those keys. I thought about like like everyone. Yeah. Like what if I like wrote a GPU minor? Somebody shipped that like as I was thinking about it.

12:59I was like, well, maybe I can do FPGAs, that came out like a month later. And then I remember, this was my first true crypto experience. There was a company that was building ASICs, like CPU dedicated, ASICs, like dedicated semiconductors that they designed solely for crypto mining. And I wanted to buy some, but they built them and delayed the actual shipping them to customers for six months so they could mine with them first. Wow.

13:28Talk about front-running your customers. It was beautiful example of what crypto is, which is it's totally wild west, peer-to-peer system, where anything goes like true to its internet core. And you have to understand that. Who is on the other side of this conversation than the internet? If you can't verify there are keys, if it's not software, then you can verify, then you can't assume or trust anything.

13:57And I told you we're at Qualcomm though right through all this which is going to become very important here in a minute. Yeah. What were you working on there? At that time, 2008 shoot, I was still working on a brew which is this flip phone operating system that ran like, you know, that was the first mobile app store. And if you're a programmer, this was written in C with C++ compatible virtual tables that we wrote out by hand. So you literally typed. I built the sophisticated macro language to generate these. It really made me an engineer. That period of working on these dinky 16-bit ARM chips with barely any memory. You had to really think about every optimization, everything that you're doing as close to the hardware as you could.

14:53That's great. You teed up exactly the question that I want to ask when you called out scalability, and so in a pre-Solano world, what are the problems? Why is it that all the existing energy and heat, and I'm using those metaphorically in this sense, an attention with the existing systems, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum, a lot of the altcoins that were being developed in the mid-2010s? Like what are the real problems? At the technical level?

15:22Yeah, let's zoom in on scalability and cost. Yeah, so systems based on proof of work have this wonderful property that when you receive all of the data, you can verify its thermodynamic security from its starting point to its final point. And you can do so in this black box without talking to anyone else. And the subjective, objectively measurable kind of security is something that is really unique to proof of work.

15:51That's what gives Bitcoin. It's kind of claim on store value. You know, it's still not proven yet, but that that's really the strong argument there. Can you have store value? You need some objective old way to measure this. If you think about gold, I can literally verify that this is the gold element and then measure how much how much of it exists and then compute that I have X amount of it out of the known universe.

16:16These systems depend on this property that I can get the entire data set and verify it from scratch. And if you put that limit on it, it means that the underlying chain just can't grow that quickly. It has to be somewhat limited in terms of the amount of data that gets put into the system and aggressively maybe you can double that size every two years. But people are very cautious about that because they're now sitting in a $1 trillion asset and they're afraid that If we do increase the throughput of Bitcoin or something like that or the gas capacity of Ethereum, that it's going to grow so quickly that it will become unusable from that perspective and lose its kind of magic power. Magic being the like really hardcore verifiability of all of the energy that it took to create the blockchain so far. Yeah, not just the energy, but also that.

17:09the energy went into something that is consistent from its root point. From day zero, that there was no invalid state transitions and nobody monkeyed with the amount of heat or Bitcoin in existence. So that piece of it, I think, is really interesting. It's like a meme. It's a phenomenon, a religion, right? These are like what you're talking about for folks who aren't as deep in the crypto community. These are like religious concepts. Yeah. Yeah. So proof of stake.

17:38is something that Vitalik kind of started publishing about, like, pretty early on, I think, almost at the right after Ethereum super early on, right? So this is not a new concept. But the idea with proof of stake is that instead of using a thermodynamic energy, you have a bunch of keys that represent some value in the native token itself. And based on that, waiting about those keys, you can then verify the consistency of the chain. But because That token, right, is monopoly money, right? It's virtually manufactured inside this computer, right? It's not real. It doesn't have this thermodynamic weight to it. So it's something that you have to establish this first trust. I have to find its first root of trust, kind of like my browser has vericine as it's root of trust and then everything's derived from that. And that first establishing a trust is this hard problem of me asking the world, hey, am I talking to the right?

18:36network. Am I in the right network? And that that first thing is is not strongly objective. It's weekly subjective. And once you kind of bite that like apple of weak subjectivity. You might as well go all the way. Right. So start farming the orchard. Exactly. So Solana, our design is like.

18:58To me, this was obvious. Okay, a very signed route to certificate. This is how the Internet is built. Trust and first use is a standard security model. You verify it once, then once you establish the session, it just continues running. If you go all in, then you can just start optimizing this thing to the limit. And this is kind of our philosophy is that like break away from all of these like chains of proof of work. This idea that you need this like full objective verification and just kind of go all in, make the fastest possible communications network. And then what we're thinking about isn't so much about like store value or global money, it's more do we have the most censorship resistant messaging network? This way of passing information throughout the world that guarantees that

19:50any two parties connecting to this network will always receive their messages, they can always synchronize, they can always have fair access that nobody can get ahead of them. And that's more of a financial system, it's more a marketplace. It's literally what NASDAQ provides you when you jump through all the hoops.

20:08and get your machine set up in the same room, server room as NASDAQ runs their markets. They literally give you an Ethernet cable. It's exactly the same length as everyone else's. So your information gets to the markets at the same speed as everyone else. That censorship resistance. So we kind of like bought into this idea. And this is probably because Qualcomm is a communication company. I always kind of think of these like old-scum terms of radio.

20:32Shannon Hartley, Theorem, like, how do we? Like, this is just information passing between default, right? I was going to say it's the same thing when, you know, I dial Ben on my, on my cell phone and like, I'm pretty sure I'm going to get connected to Ben. No matter how many people are around me. Right. Exactly. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture.

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22:37And, it's really, can I ask you to define a couple of terms? I've heard these terms, settlement layer and execution layer. Can you go into that concept a little bit and explain where Solomite could fit in? Yeah, so settlement, I can't name you a single company in the world of the settlement. They were briefly in a spotlight during this game stock exchange. But basically, this is what is the final state of the trade is when they look at the list of who owns what and they change the values around.

23:04And this is what Bitcoin does, right? I send you Bitcoin. I'm not a later. Everyone in the world considers that settled. It's slow. It's official. It's like the very bottom layer. Exactly. But it needs to be extremely secure. And that security in the traditional world has been commoditized to the level that the company that does it. There's only one of them and they make some small percentage of like the things that they settle. But all the fun stuff, derivatives options.

23:32spot markets, futures, perpetuals, whatever sophisticated financial thing that you can imagine, that runs at an exchange which does execution and clearing. Some of them do clearing, but just think of it as like one layer, not to make it too complicated. And this is where we're talking about physics limits of speed of light and Shannon Hartley, Theorem of how much information can we observe in the world, compress it into a price.

24:00for a particular asset and then throw that price into a market and have that be information that's then propagated to the rest of the world like and then like work in this feedback loop and those limits are like there's the radical speed of light limits on how fast this thing could do like how big of a marketplace can be built for the entire world and that's in itself a really interesting hard problem that has nothing to do with settlement right Right. And so would it be accurate to say that like Ethereum is sort of supposed to be or could be this interesting execution layer, but actually it's really slow because it's still proof of work based. Exactly. So Ethereum is like Bitcoin is fully like we don't want anything to do with anything that that even potentially touches the store of value thermodynamic energy security. We want to be the simplest thing that's easy to verify.

24:58easy for an engineer like in college to build a client for that's cool right like that's the simplest form of money maybe that that's really what they're going for Ethereum is trying to be in the middle where you can do some about at least in the current version in the eth one you have proof of work you have an execution environment which is secure but slow and you can do like kind of sophisticated contracts constant function market makers Those constraints on Ethereum have driven a ton of innovation, like AMMs just didn't exist until Ethereum really popularized them. What's an AMM? Automatic market maker. See you in a swap. It's a beautiful piece of math that allows people to passively create markets with capital in like a passive way, with just a single cryptographic signature, although some there's a market and anybody can trade with it. It's literally the New York stack exchange in

25:54Code yeah in like a hundred lines. Yeah, it's amazing, but That has its own inefficiencies because it's not Maximizing the amount of information that the world is synchronizing on yeah first. That's a scale the whole Ethereum Network the global Ethereum Network is limited to what 65 transactions a second is that right?

26:18Uh, something like that. So it depends on the gas limits and how complex the operations are. Some measurements goes low as 11, some goes high as 65. From what? Last numbers, eight checks. The uniswap does about 100,000 to 200,000 transactions per day. So right there, that's a huge portion of the capacity of the whole Ethereum network. And serum, which is a central limit order book style exchange that runs on Salana.

26:46same kind of design as Nasdaq that does 20 million transactions per day. But for much smaller amount of capital and volume. So if you think about like users, there's way more users than Uniswap. There's more more capital than Uniswap. It's much more transaction efficient. But the synchronization of information on the central limit order book exchange on Salana is just much tighter, much more message heavy and like I would consider it's closer to real prices like it's much closer to the real market Yeah, so this is a great transition to like Tell us what is Solana and how does it actually solve these problems and and maybe just to like anchor it one more time give us the transaction limit that exists today for Ethereum for Bitcoin because these are astonishingly low numbers because this thing is in the public consciousness Everyone assumes that oh, they must there must be tons of transactions, but like it is incredibly limited

27:45in the way that these networks work today until something like Solana. So what's cool is that seven transactions per second is what the Bitcoin theoretical limit is. It's actually quite a lot. Humans don't do that much stuff per day. If everybody was using it for payments, it would kind of fall over. But if we're talking about global settlement layer for this like world's reserve, thermodynamic money, it's actually pretty good. Right? Yep.

28:15There's a heck of a lot more than seven credit card swipes globally per second, but in terms of settlement layer, yeah. What we're talking about is like almost like the wire level. When you send like an international wire, how many of those per second occur Bitcoin could probably handle that and maybe that's fine. Ethereum is trying to do something more sophisticated where you have tokens, you have governance, you have these communities and they need to trade and move money between them.

28:41A lot of this activity occurs on centralized exchanges. People deposit their tokens there, and they trade at a high frequency, and then they move them back to Ethereum. But also a bunch of it occurs on Uniswap and these automatic markets. And that's really like the cornerstone of DeFi is that trading bit on Uniswap. My understanding of what Ethereum is today, depending on gas costs, is somewhere around 11 to maybe 20 transactions per second.

29:11I think when we were seeing fees over 40 bucks transaction, Ethereum was doing 1.6 million transactions per day. Now that fees have dropped to under a dollar per transaction, I think today it's under a dollar and it's doing about 1.2 million transactions per day. So we're talking, it's like same order of magnitude as Bitcoin. Way more complex transactions because there are smart contracts that are executing and there's just a lot more.

29:40interesting use cases of this decentralized computer, but still relatively the same speed as Bitcoin. I would say that it's twice as much. That's enough to do a ton of really cool stuff. That's enough for governance, for a bunch of communities to form. So like the growth that you're seeing in Ethereum is real, right? There's real people using the network just for what it was designed for. And that's really cool. But it really needs this like Change from either ETH one to a shard at system or ETH one to a bunch of roll ups or later twos or whoever you want to design that to really take on like a billion users is that that's just not going to happen there and What we set out to build with Salana was I think we just never thought of Salana as replacing digital gold sovereign money or anything like that or a value necessarily right it was

30:38How do we build a Byzantine fault tolerant system that can synchronize information globally as fast as it can? And this is really kind of thinking of these systems in a very old school way, like a morbid analogy is you have a bunch of sensors detecting a nuclear strike. How do you make sure that they act correctly as you need a high degree of independent verifiable sensors that is necessary to corrupt for the system to go wrong. Biology described this as the Nakamoto coefficient. It's the minimum set of independent participants that if they all colluded would break the network. I have my sensor array to detect a nuclear strike. How do I know that it's working? I need to maximize that minimum set that would collude against me. To do that, to really scale to a very large number,

31:3420,000, 30,000. You need to make a system that just handles a lot of messages per second, does a lot more cryptography per second, uses a lot more bandwidth, requires more hardware. And I honestly thought that everyone else is going to do the same thing, because to me, this was the obvious. That's the hardest problem. We got to solve that. If we don't solve that, everything else is BS.

31:57Yeah, so how do you solve that and just because we're storytellers here and acquired, how does that stem out of the things that were known to be true at Qualcomm? It seems like it sort of comes out of the TDMA philosophy. If you remember physics, I mean, this literally, these problems went back to Cold War. How do we detect these clear strike reliably? Yeah. And building the first radio towers.

32:24If you have two radiate towers that go up and they transmit over at the same time or the same frequency, those electromagnetic waves interfere and you get noise. So the first optimization that anyone's ever tried is, why don't we give each tower a very synchronized clock and have them alternate? So you have a bunch of towers. If all the clocks are variable synchronized that they never overrun each other and they can all transmit information and you get this information passes through.

32:53And this problem exists in Bitcoin and Proof of Work because these systems have these agents called block producers. And Proof of Work is this puzzle that you solve to be allowed to produce a block, right? Once you've proven that you found the puzzle for this particular challenge, you can construct a block that's signed along with this proof of this puzzle and you transmit that and Nakamoto consensus encourages everyone else to build on top of your chain.

33:23like on top of your block. But if there's two blocks that occur at the same time, there's now two forks because the participants don't know which blocks are built on next, right? They now have two options. And in the classic Bitcoin world, it would be like, well, which one's longer? I'll go with that one, right? But if two blocks are produced at the same time, then both are longer, both are exactly the same. Right. Right. Both of exactly the same weight. And that's the noisy state.

33:51So somebody else has to pick one right the next block producer basically picks one at random or the one with the best fees or something like that and That noisy state is a delay in the network that requires resolution same problem as radio So I had two coffees in a beer and I was up to 4 a.m. And I had this like kind of you wreak a moment that puzzle similar to proof of work using the same shots of 56 pre-image resistant hash function instead of running it in this like massively parallel uses much electricity as you can to find this answer as quickly as you can you actually make that thing slow and recursive and force it to be running in a single core on a single thread the computer you can force it to prove that it's taking certain amount of time that there's a force delay before you do an action.

34:46So I knew that I had this like, era of time. So then you can start timing and assigning time blocks to transactions. And this was like, uh, I don't know, I was manic for like a week because you were at dropbacks at the time, right? Yeah. This idea was like this high level idea of like, there is a way to construct an era of time. And it was so cool to me because There is no mathematical version of error of time. There's nothing that guarantees times of forwards or backwards in Einstein's equations, right? And digital systems are math systems. So this is like a way that ties is cryptography even possible in this universe, right? Like this is an open question, or will all cryptographic systems be broken? If they are possible, right? If there's some proof that if we can get to a point where we can prove that cryptography is guaranteed to be secure,

35:44than we can construct an era of time, right? There's a way to move things forward. And it was so cool to me that it's possible today with these very simple digital systems to do that. And so can I maybe try and pair it back my understanding in a very simplified way here, and you can tell me if I'm right, you sort of turned this method of propagating the true correct Ledger around all the other nodes from a like real-time game to a turn-based game where nobody by being able to you know in the gaming world hit keys faster or in the blockchain world throw more cores at it and more energy at it That's not going to gain you an advantage you have one set sort of turn on this single threaded single core thing that you're constrained to to accomplish your thing yeah

36:39I would take you one step further. It went from like even a turn-based game to a scheduled game that you have a certain amount of time to take your turn. And if you don't take it, it's passed to somebody else. You're on the clock. It's like chess. Exactly. And that difference between going from turn-based to the scheduled system is why Solana is faster than Tendermint or all the other proof of stake networks, is that those classical BFT systems, they are like, Ben takes a turn to speak and everybody else checks, did Ben speak? Did he not? And then David gets a turn to speak after those checks go through. In the schedule system, we literally just had like a button that passed between all the windows in our Zoom. And if I don't speak during that moment, I can't speak. We need Zoom to ship that feature. Exactly.

37:32I see so so a lot of effectively preschedules all the moments where I get my my turn to speak exactly and that reduces all this overhead of synchronization and every step and every block and That is more of a real-time system where like it's like voice. This is how voice works and in like cellular networks This is how most radio networks are kind of the base layer of radio networks is this TDMA. Oh, that's so cool. So is it then that the proof of history?

38:00is tied to that right yeah and like that like later more complex realization of how to tie this high-level idea of an era of time to this TDMA construct like that's a month to develop and like working with the folks we hired a Qualcomm that that's really when that's a crew but initially I was like Holy shit, I have a mathematical era of time. I know that that's good enough for something. So this is amazing. Okay, so with this, what's the three-part of the salon in network today? So we benchmarked this at about 50,000 TPS with like peaks over 65. Wow. So that's like what Visa is basically. Yeah.

38:45There's a lot of caveats there because benchmarking is like I worked at a hardware company, benchmarking is a game. So you can think of it as when TSMC claims three nanometer process, that's the smallest unit that they can make. So when we benchmark, you flood the system with as many non-overlapping easy paralyzed transactions as you can. And you can kind of see, okay, under these ideal conditions, that we can, in theory, get this much throughput through. When something like serum runs, it's a central limit order book. Each one of those markets right now, I think, is implemented as like a one megabyte buffer. So each order requires this one megabyte read, one megabyte write. Those are more complicated transactions that require kind of like more work in the system, but they're still parallelizable. And it's not that like, there's limits there that can't exceed 65,000 TPS. It's just

39:44if we start hitting those limits then we go optimize and then we see what the hardware limits are and the like this is where benchmarking is hard because you know you're dealing with like problems with software that if somebody actually needs them solving it's like three to four weeks of work to do it versus like everything's optimized to the theoretical limit of the hardware itself and if you Backtrack from the hardware specs. If you actually start like we did a Qualcomm, we look at a chip, we're like, okay, this is what this DSP can do. That means we can support 64 frames per second 4K resolution to do post-processing. You start like that's the limit and then you're right to software until the client is happy. But you can tell them the best we can do is 4K video at 64 frames per second.

40:34maybe you ship at v0 24 frames and they're like that's good enough right don't work on something else for now if you start at the hardware level itself one gigabit networks is really the the bottleneck is like the bandwidth you need one gigabit of input and output per validator on this global network and that can in theory support 700,000 transactions per second so does that mean that this network requires pretty great internet connections in order to piece a lot of base versus operating a Bitcoin node? Exactly. And that's because this is maximizing the amount of information that anybody can synchronize on over as many parallel kind of like bits as we can. So if all of these events are parallelizable, right, if these are like different markets, right, there's 700,000 different markets, they all want to do one event per second, we can schedule all of them.

41:29Right, that's kind of how you can think about it. And like that capacity is all over a single giant kind of like table of state that you can execute over. And as bandwidth gets cheaper and as hardware gets better, you know, like AMD doubles a number of cores, Nvidia doubles a number of GPU like lanes per GPU.

41:56PCI buses go from PCA4, it's like one terabit to two terabit in the next version or whatever. That means that we can then ingress, like, inject more data at these data centers with like bandwidth that right now goes to 20 gigabit and process it and then synchronize it around the world. So at the kind of the base hardware layer, if you're just looking at the hardware specs, I think you can do tens of millions of actions per second.

42:24But this is going to be kind of blood sweat in tears to get the software to get to use all of those. But I mean, that's like, that's just such an order of magnitude higher than the current state of the Ethereum network. I mean, you can imagine why if you're building Uniswap now or the next Uniswap or the next whatever, we should talk about what all this enables. There's just kind of no question where you're going to run most of your transactions.

42:51And it seems like so you mentioned 700,000 is sort of this like theoretical high water market this point transactions per second. Like if you wanted to be visa, you want to be a credit card network, like a super high traffic high frequency. What's their processing limit per second? So their capacity, I think they've published that they measured it up to 60,000, but probably they handle around like 5,000 at most per second, like a steady state. So all of Twitter is 5,000 messages per second. Wow.

43:21Humans are just really bad at doing like anything interesting. NASDAQ does maybe two 300 trades per second. Now there's 30 times more orders per trade. and there's 30 times more cancels per order because bots are just flooding the system with like no change to state. This is really about machines. This is not about humans. Exactly. So where Solana is already from a throughput perspective past the point where it could ever like you would never need anything more out of a network of humans pretty much doing anything in the world. But the interesting part is here like if we're building a financial system,

44:04the value creators right in this thing are like, the machines that synthesize the world's information, they look at all this arbitrary data, and then pick a price for a particular asset and throw that information, right? That's value creation. That's a machine that's doing that as fast as it can. And we need that thing to be at the same network as the other value creators that are building products that humans want.

44:30They actually onboard humans. That's value creation. It's really hard to get humans to do anything. If there's no intermediaries between those two, that's the perfect financial system. That means that we've eliminated all of this gunk. There's nobody taking 30 bips on every different. Every time some paper changes hands, everybody takes a little bit off the top. That's really what the stuff is all about. How do we eliminate all of that? It's pervasive to the point that What I consider like a totally unfair market is Google and Facebook where I go to a website They steal my data right and feed me information I don't want and charge point two cents to somebody that's Right trying to advertise to me, but 60% of what they're getting paying for is fraud right like click fraud Yeah, yeah, like F that like F all of that Hey, man All right listeners

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47:05So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. One of the, I just think super cool use cases that I know people are building on slana. Obviously there's tons of DeFi stuff, but obvious, which is a decentralized Spotify and Managing streams on this on a blockchain. What either talk about that or maybe are there other projects that you're seeing out there that are just like this is super cool stuff that could not exist Yeah, so audience I think is also one of my favorites and a lot of that comes from Renewal himself like he's just an awesome founder. You guys should totally talk to him What I love about it is that it is trying to like get away from traditional web-to-business models of

47:54Let's steal your data, shove you like stuff you don't want, undercharge our artists. It's really like, here's a platform to connect artists to fans directly, like without any intermediaries. And the metadata that it's collecting, the plays, the fan relationships between users and their artists, it's all done kind of in the open and on a decentralized platform. So it doesn't need to have this webtoon model.

48:22at all. It can just kind of run off of its token. This stuff is really hard to imagine what's going to take off. What's actually going to replace Web2? It's hard to imagine that, but music has always been at the forefront of new tech. I'm excited to see them having ridiculous traction, 4 million users using the stuff with...

48:46Traction within a small this is audience. Yeah, they're four million people using audience It's amazing and this and this is just like a single kind of like niche of like EDM artists That that's like who they went after they had like all the best people kind of jump in this and love them from the start because Music is like such a financially predatory environment for artists right like I mean rewind like every every generation of the internet Music has kind of led the way like there's Napster right like no Napster no Skype No crypto like you know, it just like it's all a lineage back to you know, it's the ultimate peer-to-peer file sharing But I think a lot of that comes from the fact that like the music industry itself is like Predatory on like every financial part of like the ecosystem from the artist to the fans like it's just really trying to squeeze everybody I'm ringing about

49:41So what's the value proposition here? I always want to just keep playing this. I was a voice in the back of my head all the time. That's like, cool. You made the same thing, but you put it on the blockchain. And in the old world, it's like, well, it's worse because it's slower and it takes more energy. And it's a lot of world. You're like, okay, now at least it's as fast as a centralized world and doesn't use up a bunch of energy. But what's the reason that it's like better to be a decentralized version of Spotify than Spotify? So it's peer to peer, right? That's kind of a cool thing about it.

50:10you're not really using audios you are directly connecting to like boys noise or deadmouse and it's their private key cryptography that's signing those assets and audios it's your private key cryptography that's connecting to them directly it's a direct line so they know how many streams they're getting from whom and they're getting paid directly exactly Yeah, it's this fascinating concept where in the abstract if you were to tell me about the internet in 1985 I would believe that the natural Way the internet would end up would be decentralized like wow It's this thing where anyone can connect to anyone else and anybody can start a business and anybody can put up their own website and offer their own HTML and it's this sort of surprising thing that happened that it led to centralization where

51:001985 me would be shocked that there are five big companies like how what that's not what the technology does and it's quite remarkable that with this next evolution moving from web 2 to web 3 of the blockchain that like now we actually do have a chance for 1985 me to be like oh yeah okay that actually makes sense on how I would have guessed it ended up and this is why we don't even care about this like sovereign money narrative right like if you think about like what we're selling for audios It's this piece of artists with a cryptographic key, a bunch of fans with cryptographic key, and we're guaranteeing that they can talk to each other. We're guaranteeing that we just describe that anybody can self-publish to whatever the hell they want, that there's no interference there. That's it, right? The token itself is just there to prevent spam and that's super-connected world.

51:51So, Solata doesn't have a dog in this fight of, you know, should some country adopt their currency or change what fiat money is being used. I think like thinking it from like an information system only, kind of, I think it's actually more interesting to think of it. If we had a super connected world, you know, that's equivalent to like, if we all had like neutrino-based lasers, that could not be like interfered with, that we could all talk to each other at any moment.

52:21That's kind of a science fiction thing that we're building, right? In itself. It's like I'm reading the city and the stars by Arthur C. Clark right now and that's literally like the that is the city. Like let's do that. Like that's a cool enough thought like full enough thought experiment that if that exists and it's a truly super connected world, what's possible in that world? Like that to me is like an interesting question and many more ways more interesting to me than what is store value, what is gold, what is money. Right. Well, in that vein, I mean, there is a cryptocurrency called sole. You know, people can buy it all over the place. I think on FTX is where I've bought it in the past. Like, how does that factor into this? Like, how does that work in the network that you've created? Yeah. So going back to that, like, more of an example of nuclear strike, what we're really trying to do is guarantee that there isn't any central authority that can

53:18issue who are these like set of nodes that can guard the network and If we were the root certificate and we like issued a thousand nodes and We could issue more at any time than that effectively makes us the the point of failure, right? That's censorship resistantes. It's not good enough for prevent nuclear strikes, right? So if you like think of it from what I trust you, but I don't know that trust you very much So to eliminate this like central certificate route, you limit the number of certificates it could be issued, issue all of them, and let them decide who owns what, which is effectively like what the Stoken represents is a weight in the network in terms of how much vote you have, how much power to censor you have, and maximizing that minimum set of nodes, a consensus of the network, you kind of need this thing to be freely transferable and freely reassignable.

54:16It's just naturally how it evolves, right? If we were actually to try to keep some form of control over it, but we did a good job with everything else, then the network could decide to remove us from control at any point anyways. So it's sort of like the people who have the most soul or they're sort of like, so you distributed all this soul among a group of people and that group is sort of like the vericine of this network in a distributed way and people sort of vote ratably on whether something is valid or not right and the goal is to grow that set as large as possible right and and like make that minimum set that at up to 33% as large as possible and that's our religion like if we're talking about store of value or something like as being the Bitcoin religion the religion and like our little community is

55:08Maximize censorship resistance. You got to like that's the number one focus everybody's working on. And that's how this is proof of stake based when we talked about proof of work. It's like proof of work in the Bitcoin senses. How much thermodynamic energy did you use up in the past? Everyone collectively to prove that this thing is real proof of stake if I'm understanding correctly is more like well, you've got a bunch of soul. And so you and all the other people who have the most of it have the most authority in deciding this.

55:35basically certifying the or verifying that this is the person you think it is. Correct. Cool. We want to grow that set to be as large as possible. Again, thinking from this like nuclear strike detection sensor system. Yeah. Okay. So this is a good transition to the last big topic we wanted to cover with you guys. Like, all this is awesome. The innovation, the technology, just the like It just makes me smile thinking of technology and liberal arts. You're marrying different concepts from different fields, bringing them together here. None of that matters if you don't get adoption of the network. You can have the most beautiful thing, but you gotta have people using this. How did you, especially because you started in the crypto winter? How did you get, I don't know, anything. How did you start getting people involved in this?

56:26So like the validators were really like the first group of customers or users and They're like just super positive people. They just want to play around with cool tech and This idea of maximizing censorship resistance. It's just cool people like kind of think it's cool. Let's go try it right how cool it would be if it works So we kind of got like a really good community of builders that were willing to do whatever we asked them to do which is like call up a data center, go install a machine there, like this is not just like running systems at home, you actually need to like understand what you're doing. And that process really taught us that it's not about like reducing friction for users or devs. It's about giving them something that they don't have like anywhere else, like giving them like something so interesting and so cool that they're willing to do the hard work to build and like deploy and the

57:21use case that we thought would be really interesting was what if we like ran NASDAQ on this thing like this thing that serum runs like price time queue central limit order book and through the winter a lot of people were telling us that Dex's are dead that we shouldn't bother. Wow. Dex being a decentralized exchange. Yeah. But I fundamentally believe that if the system is possible, if we can be a world's price discovery engine, than that's like the Google will be the world's information library like kind of style of like dream. Like that's like the world changing thing that we need to build for. And you guys never had any ambition to build a Dex yourself, right? Or did you? We would have done it on our own. We had plans to do so. But then right after we launched, so we briefly talked to FTX like nine months before we launched. And we were like, Hey, what if you guys you guys are cool, you're building cool products.

58:20up and come in exchange. What if we like did options or something like something interesting on chin? And they're like, is it live or like if we think in about six months, we're like, okay, we don't have time for this, right? We got to ship stuff like tomorrow.

58:39Six months later, we actually go live and we built this little demo called Break, like break.celana.com where you smash your keys and you see transactions fire off and then you see them all clear, like on the screen. Like you see them all confirmed and these are smart contract transactions. You can go look at the code and I demoed this to Sam and he was like, Okay, everyone else needs to see this in engineers. They like showed this to their like engineering folks, and they've been thinking about this from like a trader's point of view. If you can actually have a system that was fast enough to do full-style central and mid-order books, the stuff that they know, there's a chance that decentralized finance could potentially get

59:2750% of the world's finance. Maybe 25 doesn't matter. It's big enough for them to like, holy shit, this is like a big opportunity. Just to make a meta point here and I think I'm understanding this right, you could basically say, hey, you want to run a quant fund on the regular stock market? Well, use our blockchain based software that can execute super fast and go trade regular securities. You don't have to trade blockchain assets.

59:52Yeah, you could trade anything, right? Because this is an open network. The tokens can represent whatever the settlement layer tells the chain that it's representing could be stocks could be something like dollars like out of USDC. But it's more the idea that if you have this open permissionless platform, that is fast enough for this use case will like things just kind of naturally roll downhill and like end up there anyways. It's yeah, right. It's it's kind of like separating the pragmatism from the idealism where like Most of the people who actually bought Tesla's early bought it because it was a status symbol and like a really sexy car and they said I'm saving the world. And so like this actually could be the best fast software to use for a high frequency system that we're describing that may or may not trade blockchain based assets. So you pick it because it's the best system. Oh, but also I have this idealistic view of this decentralized world and that's the way it should be. And like is the decentralized world the natural endpoint?

1:00:50Because it's easier, right? It's cheaper. It's faster. It's fall tolerant. You have stronger guarantees. Like if all those things are true, right? Then will things just naturally gravitate there? And as soon as the thing exists, I mean, if you don't have to pay visa 5% of every transaction, like You know what? If you don't have to pay, you know, Nasdaq, I think earns like 10 billion a year. Where does that money come from? Yeah. This comes from the people. I want to rewind back. You talked about the validators. I think this is an important point for building a crypto, at least a protocol that I hadn't quite thought about. It's kind of like supply and demand. You needed the supply before the demand. Before you could go get an audience or you could go build a Nasdaq, you actually needed the network of validators that were going to run this, right? Yeah.

1:01:38And we started with like just 40 of these dedicated people that were just there through our first launch at crash in 20 minutes. The second launch to crash in two hours. Like, like, over and over. They like just came back. And I get what you're saying about their just being like, they're there because like, this is cool. Yeah, but they were true believers, right? And like, some of those folks were so early and like.

1:02:03We had bug bounty is that they were finding these really hard to find critical bugs that they're now founding their own security firms because of this like early investment in like digging through our code, understanding like where we made a mistake and demonstrating it and like that commitment really created a ton of value for everyone, for everyone involved it was just awesome to have these folks early on working with us. That's amazing. Alright so I had a totally after all this it sounds to me like Solon is just gonna work it's gonna take up the world like it's gonna be this super high frequency perfectly optimized blockchain for exactly what is doing when I sort of Turn my head and see their sort of elephant in the room of ethereum sort of coming up with eth 2 which is not necessarily the

1:02:52Titus defined at this point, but there's going to be a system based on sharding and moving from purely proof of work to proof of stake. Like, how do you think about Ethereum and Solana? Does it coexist in the same world? Is it one or the other? Are they doing things right? Are they doing things wrong? So what I remember from open source world like 90s, I was like a Linux geek. I built Linux from scratch and Microsoft was trying to kill Linux.

1:03:21You can't kill an open source community. We can kill Ethereum just as easily as Ethereum can kill us, meaning it's impossible. If you have people that are willing to work on something over the weekend at their own time just because they think it's fun, there's no killing that. It's just code that people want to write because they love to do that. But we're competing because there's overlapping features.

1:03:47at any given moment there's certain number of users and that competition I think is awesome because we do something while people look at it like can my application running a theorem adopted improve on it and vice versa and we're going to see this kind of bouncing back and forth between any of these healthy communities that are growing that are like doing the iteration cycle product market fit and it's not just like I think the kernel engineers like honestly we're all friends. We all like hang out when we go to conferences we end up like all at the same bar drinking beers talking about like you know consensus or whatever. Just like Windows and Linux kernel engineers hang out because it's just interesting problems right yeah but the ecosystems I think have this like I think healthy flow of competition that I think is necessary for.

1:04:37the entire space, the crypto space, to onboard the next billion users. This world right now that we live in is just so small. How many people do you think self-custody keys? Do you guys self-custody keys? I know I should. You guys are in the crypto industry at large, but you don't self-custody keys. So, not your keys, not your coins. You can't directly connect to an artist and audience without your own self-custody. You're not in the center connected world.

1:05:07You're still in this web-to-world where you're going through intermediary. What percentage of people who think they own cryptocurrency self-custody? I don't know. I think my upper estimate for self-custody is maybe 30 million, but that's like a very generous estimate. 30 million people? Yeah. So, if I summer with 30, 40,000 people participating in these like flash communities that would form overnight, imagine that was 30, 40 million people.

1:05:37yeah that was rapidly coming together around an idea and like pulling resources together around an idea just like in an hour and a day like around the world with no friction that's the power of cryptography like that peer-to-peer part of like us with keys all connecting is just kind of mind blowing how how important that is the layer one tech is like I think we're just kind of arguing about you know, Intel versus AMD or like X86 versus MIPS. These are details that are important to us as engineers, but like that end-to-end user, like super-connected world is just so wild. It's so cool. Yeah. Well, it's interesting to think about what you were saying a minute ago about you guys and Ethereum, you know, going out to a bar and having drinks and talking about technical problems. Without you guys, I wonder, do you think maybe you can't answer this, but like Ethereum didn't really have any, I mean, there are other competitors, for sure.

1:06:33Let's not say you guys all of the various Ethereum killers out there. If they didn't exist, Ethereum would just be dumb fat and happy, right? You need this motivation to push things forward, right? Maybe. I can't imagine a world where people wouldn't look at it and decide. I want to build something different because the design space for these systems is just so interesting and so big that as an engineer, it's like operating systems. You look at one, you're like, well, I want to make a bunch of different choices and do something different. Like, let's see what happens. Like, there's like an urge to try it. Well, give me your pitch. So I'm an application developer. I'm coming with some heavy weight. Maybe I've got money behind me or a great team behind me. And I'm saying, geez, if I write code that's compatible with Solana, it's not compatible with ETH 2 and vice versa. Why should I write it on Solana instead of ETH 2?

1:07:26Because we guarantee this super connected world for one billion users without shards without intermediate areas. This is where it's going to happen first like we're the This is what we're building for we don't care about anything else except connecting this billion people together So you can go deal with shards layer two is all this other stuff if you want or if your vision is bigger than X86 intel right if you're building software and you don't care about The hardware like you actually care about the user experience like we're we're the place to do that There's also an element right now too like if you want to do this You're the only place you can do it right like none of these other ether 2 isn't live yet. It's a theoretical concept We also like I think if you talk to any of the folks that worked with us Raj and I are Like it's at the end of the day. It's like about the people like

1:08:20I don't know what it is about Renille that just be instantly connected I don't know what it is about Sam that there was this like instant trust like we're in the together We'll just go do whatever it takes to to make this work There's like people like that in the world that like if you're like one of those and you talk to us and you're like I have this massive vision I don't know how I'm gonna do it like we will just boil the ocean we'll eat glass to make it happen for you But that like actually thinking about like Any of the details are not as important to us, like right now, like the commercial parts of it, like none of that is as important as actually building something cool. Yeah. I love it. I love it. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale.

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1:09:50So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com slash acquired to get started. All right. Well, to cap it all off, this is so exciting. Everything that's already happening, even just the audience itself is one example of like, this is live. It's happening today. What do you think the Solana ecosystem looks like in two, three, five years?

1:10:18I think, well, the ecosystem, I think like, you know, we have this dream of this being competitive, but like something as big as like Google, like Android. There's 5,000 engineers working in Android. 5,000 engineers cost a billion dollars per year. No, we can't possibly raise that much to compete with them. It's just, it's just right. Like, I don't know in this environment, baby. There's no way, right? Like so.

1:10:44We actually have to have folks come into the space, build awesome products, love the tech, go start being one of those 5,000 engineers on their own, and build a community that's more grassroots than the top-down Google-style centralized system. There's just no other option. If we succeed, it's this amazing set of engineers that are just working and building really cool shit.

1:11:12and amazing set of validators that are building really cool hardware to make the stuff run as fast as possible. And that's kind of the dream of it, you know, that there isn't just one single central authority that's telling anybody what to do. Love it. Great. It's about to end on. Thank you for joining us. Where can people find you on the internet? Salano.com is where you can find all the information. And like Salano's Twitter handle, like follow it on Twitter and follow me.

1:11:42If you want to hear me talk about consensus and censorship resistance or Raj, if you want to, you know, he's far more active on Twitter about like ecosystem and like cool shit. That's big belt. Are you guys on a big cloud yet? No, no, we're not. There's a cool project called Wombo that is like creator tokens that are part of the, like in like attached to any like social network that folks are building on the hackathon. If you want to do some work, and you're not an engineer. Go look through the hackathon submissions and then tweet at us and like, what is good? Because the hardest, one of the hardest parts in like the spaces actually synthesizing information, right? Go use your massive brain, the most advanced piece of technology in the universe. Go look at all this information and all these other teams that are building stuff and tell us what's good, what do you like, what's actually high quality. That takes a ton of work. Amazing.

1:12:40All right, we'll put links in the show notes. Awesome. Anatoly, thank you so much. Thank you. All right. Listeners, we'll see you next time.