Special: Solana (with CEO Anatoly Yakovenko)

0:03 Um Yeah. Should we do it? Just dive in? Yeah, let's do it. Who got the truth?

0:11 Is it you, is it you, is it you Who got the truth now? Is it you, is it you, is it you? Me down Another story

0:25 Welcome to this special episode of Acquire. the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'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.

0:45 And we Are your hosts. All right, 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 with all this excitement around DeFi and NFTs and decentralized apps and

1:05 I mean th 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 gonna 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

1:30 Gas fees were Fifty, sixty bucks. It's crazy. Brutal. That's like close to an all time high.

1:37 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 Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder and CEO of Solana Labs. Solana Labs is the company that spearheads the development of the Solana blockchain.

1:55 And just to set some context. They recently raised three hundred and fourteen million dollars led by Andreas and Horowitz and Polychapital. Yes, that is pie hundred million dollars, and they have a market cap of all their coins right now, right around ten billion dollars. Both so fun. And so crazy. A couple of years ago if you're gonna say like Make a joke. Oh, we're raising pie million dollars, you would raise like three point one four million dollars or maybe thirty one point four million dollars. Wow, just the scale of all this is incredible.

2:26 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 Federer, not only for setting up that channel and curating that community and keeping it awesome.

2:48 But for his work at Solana and introducing us to Anatoli 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.

3:05 The agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yep. It's sort of obvious that AI is gonna completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chat bot out there. Ligora 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.

3:37 For 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. Legor's Bet 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. And 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.

4:25 And Ligora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Ligora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head to head pilot with their top competitor, they win seventy percent of the time. Lagora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from twelve hundred legal teams in fifty countries. And crazily, they went from one million

4:52 In about Eighteen months. Mm. Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test. Plenty 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.

5:08 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 Lagora.com/slash acquired. And just tell'em that Ben and David sent you. Well, listeners. As 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.

5:30 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 onto our conversation with Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder and CEO of Solana. Okay, welcome, Anatoly. We are so excited to have you here with us.

5:54 For So many reasons. We've been following Solana for uh a little bit now. Thanks mostly to Austin Federer in the acquired community founder of the digital assets channel in the acquired Slack.

6:08 Which is a wonderful and vibrant community in its own right that's developing and Austin, of course, works with you guys at Solana now. You had some huge news. last week where you raised pie hundred million

6:22 Dollars from uh Andrews and Horowitz and Poly Chain. Capital. Which uh we definitely want to get the story behind that. And um Excited to tell your whole story here to the acquired community.

6:34 Awesome, yeah. Great to be here. Before we get into What Solana is. Why it exists, what problems it's solving.

6:43 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.

6:58 Wonderfully well. You know, you said that your path is not quite like a lot of other crypto projects who raise tons and tons of money out of the gate. Maybe can you rewind and tell us a little bit about How you ended up sort of shipping first and what it was like when you first tried to raise capital.

7:14 And and why you decided to take this path. Well W I wish it was like Dis active decisions versus just trying to survive. The project was started

7:24 Kind of end of twenty seventeen, start of twenty eighteen. 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

7:39 At that time, like the funds that were committed to us like blew up in front of our eyes and like sorry guys, we can't we can't fund this. Wow. With these dedicated crypto funds. Yeah, yeah, and and not nothing to like You know, like not 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 like Extremely promising, like everything's gonna be

8:05 magic and crypto in in the span of a year to Oh my god. The world is falling apart. 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

8:29 Itching to go build the next big thing. The true builders there that that were like super experienced and have worked with me for over a decade. Like all jump ship. That was really surprising to me too. They're like as soon as I asked, they're like, Yeah, where do I sign up? You were like Eric Yuan uh building Zoom uh out of WebEx. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It it w that was that was really awesome and a huge kinda like

8:52 a huge confidence boost in in the design of what we're doing what was right because there was a huge amount of technical risk, right? I came up with this idea previously, nobody else was working on it. There were a few academics defining verifiable delay functions, but it was really like Out there, you know. Everybody else in the industry was going a totally different direction. So They made it hard for us to get

9:16 a lot of commitments too from investors who were more 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 Anatolia, I wanna put a pin, uh, as we dive deeper down the crypto rabbit hole here, we have a lot of sort of non-crypto native audience, of sort of startup native audience. So I wanna highlight you just uh used 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 uh

9:46 Hey. I'm gonna force you to define that here at some point because uh a lot of us are are very new to this. Yeah, totally. So we got the team together and uh we had like decent runway in like I think around two years and we thought, Oh, this is gonna be done in a year.

10:01 This is easy, we'll just ship it. It actually took a little longer, like two and a half years to do it. It costs more, we have to hire more folks than we expected and We did a couple races after that, but we're always less a little bit starving. Under two years, under eighteen months of runway at any given time. bear market, trying to ship this thing as fast as we could so we could get to the next stage, which is

10:26 Let's get users, let's build the use case they're always dreaming of. Let's actually get to 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.

10:45 And 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 Multicoin 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 nodes.

11:09 That are crypto Gs that have been doing mining Involved in Cosmos and every other network. And It became clear like in the span of a year that like every round

11:20 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 that was uh 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 tack 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 kinda like helping us out financially and

11:53 really being our first customers. These are the first folks that we ship software to That ran it, they saw how the sausage is made. It failed. They they dealt with every failure into the Sun. So that that was really amazing to having built that part. That's cool. Okay, maybe so now

12:11 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 Protocol is about ten billion dollars. So th you have come a long way from those days. Well let's rewind it.

12:24 How did you get into crypto and blockchains. I I get the sense that you weren't, you know, uh Two thousand nine, two thousand ten, running your own nodes. True believer from back then, or maybe I'm wrong. I mean I I heard of Bitcoin right right around that time during the you know two thousand eight crash. Definitely is what kinda

12:44 Open me up to it. And uh I mined it a little bit on the CPU, lost those keys. I thought about like Like everyone. Yeah. Uh like what if I like wrote a GPU minor?

12:56 Uh somebody shipped that like as I was thinking about it. I was like, Well maybe I can do FPGAs that came out like a month later. And then I remember this is my first true crypto experience. There's a company that was building ASICs, like CPU dedicated basics, like dedicated semiconductors that they design solely for crypto mining. And I wanted to buy some.

13:17 But They built them and delayed the actual shipping them to customers for six months so they could mine with them first. Wow. Talk about front running your customers.

13:31 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 like understand that that Who who is on the other side of this conversation than the internet, right? Like if you can't verify their keys, right, if it's not software that you can verify, then you can't assume or trust anything. So

13:56 Anatoly, you were at Qualcomm. though, right through all this, which is gonna become Very important here. In a minute. Yeah. What what were you working on there?

14:05 At that time two thousand eight, shoot, I I was still working on uh Brew, which is the the s flip phone operating system that ran like You know, that was the first mobile apps or And if you're a programmer This was

14:21 Written in C But C plus plus compatible virtual tables that we wrote out by hand. So you literally like type we I I built the sophisticated macro language to generate these. It it like really made me an engineer. Like that period of of like working on these like

14:41 Dinky sixteen bit arm chips with like barely any memory. Like you had to like really think about every optimization, everything that you're doing as as like close to the hardware as you could. That's great. You teed up exactly the question that I want to ask when you called out scalability and so in a pre Solana world What are the problems? Why is it that all the existing

15:05 energy and heat, and I'm using those metaphorically in this sense, uh and 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? Yeah, well let's let's zoom in on scalability and cost.

15:25 Yeah, so systems based on proof of work have this wonderful property that When you receive all of the data. You can verify It's Thermodynamic security.

15:36 From s its starting point to its final point. And you can do so in this black box without talking to anyone else. This objective objectively measurable kind of security is something that is really unique to proof of work and That's what gives Bitcoin its kind of

15:54 claim on store value. You know, it's still not proven yet, but that that's really the strong argument there. Can it can you have store value? You need some objective 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 out of the known universe. So These systems

16:17 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

16:35 Aggressively, maybe you can double that size every two years, but People are very cautious about that because they're now sitting in a one trillion dollar 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 gonna grow so quickly that it will become unusable.

16:55 from from that perspective and lose its kind of magic power. M 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 the the 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 But the amount of ETH or Bitcoin in existence.

17:23 So that that piece of it I think is really interesting. It's like a meme. It's a phenomenon. A religion, right? Th these are like uh 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 sake.

17:38 is something that Vitalik kinda started publishing about like pretty early on, I think almost at the s right after Ethereum. Super early on, right? So th this is not a new concept, but the idea with proof of stake is that instead of using this thermodynamic energy, You have a bunch of keys. that represents some value in the native token itself. And

18:00 Based on that weighting of that those keys you can then verify the consistency of the chain. But Because That token, right?

18:08 is monopoly money, right? It's virtually manufactured inside this computer. But it's not real. It doesn't have the thermodynamic weight to it. So it's something that you have to establish this first trust. I have to find its its first root of trust.

18:23 Kinda like my browser has VereSign as its fruit of trust and then everything's derived derived from that. And that first establishing a trust is this Heart problem of Me asking the world, Hey, am I talking to the right? Network. Am I in the right network?

18:37 And that That first thing is It's not strongly objective. It's weakly subjective. And once you kinda bite that like Apple of weak subjectivity. You might as well go all the way and start farming the orchard. Exactly. So Solana

18:56 Our design is like To me, this was obvious. Okay, VereSign root certi root of certificate. This is how the internet is built. Trust and first use is a standard security model. You verify once, then once you establish the session, it just continues running. If you go all in, then You can just start optimizing this thing.

19:16 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 Do you need this like full objective verification? And just kinda go all in, make the fastest possible

19:32 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.

19:48 That guarantees that Any two parties connecting to this network will always receive their messages. They can always synchronise They can always have fair access that nobody can get ahead of them. And that's more of a financial system, it's more of a marketplace.

20:03 It's literally what like Nasdaq provides to you when you like jump through all the hoops. And get your machine set up in the same room, server room as Nasdaq runs in markets. They literally give you a Ethernet cable that's exactly the same length as everyone else's. So your information gets to the markets at the same speed as everyone else. That's censorship resistance. So We kinda like bought into this idea, and this is probably because Qualcomm is a communication company, I always kinda think of these like old school terms of radio.

20:32 Shannon Hartley theorem, like how do we like this is just information passing between people. Right. Ben on my cell phone and like I'm pretty sure I'm gonna 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.

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22:33 And just tell them. That Ben and David sent you. Anatoly, 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 and explain where Solana could fit in? Yeah, so settlement, I can't name you a single company in the world of the settlement. Th they were briefly in the spotlight during this like game stocks thing. Uh but basically this is what like is the final state of the trade is when they look at like the list of who owns what and they change the values around. And this is what Bitcoin does, right? It sends you Bitcoin an hour later.

23:08 Everyone in the world considers that settled. It's slow, it's official, it's like the very bottom layer. Exactly. But it 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 of like the things that they settle. But all the fun stuff

23:30 Derivatives options. spot markets, futures, perpetuals, whatever sophisticated financial thing that you can imagine that runs at an exchange which does execution and clearing. Some of them declearing, but

23:44 Just think of it as like one layer, not 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 of the world. compress it into A price. for a particular asset and then

24:02 Throw that price into a a a market. And have that the information that's then propagated to the rest of the world that can then like work in this feedback loop. And Those limits are like there's theoretical speed of light limits on how fast this thing could do, like how big of a marketplace can be built for the entire world.

24:21 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.

24:42 So it Ethereum is like Bitcoin is is fully like We don't want anything to do with anything that that even potentially touches the store of value thermodynamic energy security. Want to be the simplest thing that's easy to verify. Easy for an engineer like in college to build a client for

25:02 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 of that. pref at least in its current version, in the ETH one. You have proof of work. You have an execution environment which is secure but slow.

25:19 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 AM? Automatic market maker C Uniswap. Yeah. Mm-hmm. It's it's a

25:38 Beautiful piece of math. that allows people to passively create markets with capital. in like a passive way with just a single cryptographic signature, all of a sudden there's a market and anybody can trade with it. It's literally the New York Stock Exchange. In

25:54 Code. Yeah, and in like a hundred lines of code. 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. For a sets of scale.

26:08 The whole Ethereum Network. the global Ethereum network is limited to what sixty five transactions a second, is that right? Uh something like that. So it depends on the gas limits and how complex the operations are. Some measurements go as low as eleven, some go as high as sixty five. From what

26:29 The last numbers I checked. The Uniswap does about a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand 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 Solana.

26:46 Same kind of design as NASDAQ that does twenty 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 in Uniswap. There's more more capital than Uniswap. It's much more transaction efficient. But

27:04 the synchronization of information on the central limit order book exchange on Solana is just much tighter, much more message heavy and like I would consider it's closer to real prices. Like it it's much closer to the real market. Yeah, so th this is a a great transition to like

27:23 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

27:43 It is incredibly limited. in the way that these networks work today until something like Solana. So What's cool is that um Seven transactions per second is what the Bitcoin theoretical limit is.

27:56 It's actually quite a lot. Humans don't do that much stuff per day. If everybody was using it for payments, it would kinda fall over. But if we're talking about global settlement layer for this like World's reserve thermodynamic money.

28:12 It's actually pretty good. Right. Yeah. There's a heck of a lot more than seven credit card swipes globally per second, but in terms of settlement layer, yeah. W 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 is trying to do something more sophisticated where you have tokens, you have governance, you have these communities and

28:38 they need to trade and and move money between them. A lot of this activity occurs on centralized exchanges. People deposit their tokens there, they trade at a high frequency, and then they move them back to Ethereum. But also a bunch of it occurs in Uniswap and these automatic markets and That's really like a The cornerstone of DeFi is that trading bit on Uniswap.

29:01 My understanding of what Ethereum is today, depending on gas costs, is somewhere around eleven to maybe twenty transactions per second. And I think when we've we're seeing fees over forty bucks a transaction

29:17 Ethereum was doing one point six million transactions per day. Uh, now that fees have dropped to under a dollar for transaction. I think today it's under a dollar and it's doing about one point two. million transactions per day. So we're talking

29:32 It's like same order of magnitude as Bitcoin. Way more complex transactions'cause there are smart contracts that are executing and there's just a lot more interesting use cases of this decentralized computer, but still relatively the same speed as Bitcoin. I would say that It's twice as much.

29:50 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? That that there's real people using the network just for what it was designed for. And that that's really cool. But It really needs this like

30:08 change from either ETH one to a sharded system or ETH one to a bunch of roll ups or layer twos or however you want to design that. to really take on like a billion users. It's that that's just not gonna happen there. And What we set out to build with Solana was

30:27 I think we just never thought of Solana as replacing digital gold, sovereign money, or anything like that. It was How do we build A Byzantine fault tolerance 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

30:49 Like a morbid analogy is You have a bunch of sensors detecting a nuclear strike. How do you make sure that they act correctly is you need A high degree of independent verifiable sensors.

31:04 That is necessary to corrupt for the system to go wrong. Uh Balogy described this as the Nakamoto coefficient. So It's the minimum set of independent participants.

31:15 That if they all colluded But Break the network. So right, like I have my I have my sets 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.

31:29 And to do that, to really scale that to a very large number twenty thousand, thirty thousand. 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.

31:44 Requires more hardware. And I honestly thought that everyone else was gonna do the same thing'cause to me this was the obvious kinda like that's the hardest that's the hardest problem. We gotta solve that. If we don't solve that, everything else is BS. Yeah, so how do you solve that? And just because we're storytellers here on Acquired, like how does that stem out of the things that were Known to be true at Qualcomm.

32:07 It seems like it sort of comes out of the T DMA philosophy. There's this uh if you remember physics, I mean this literally like these problems went back to like Cold war, how do we detect a nuclear strike reliably? Yeah. And and building the first radio towers. If you have two radio towers that go up and they transmit over the at the same time or the same frequency

32:29 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 You have a bunch of towers, if all the clocks are very well synchronized, that they never uh uh overrun each other.

32:47 And they can all transmit information and you get this Like, you know, information passes through. And 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

33:04 to be allowed to produce a block, right? Once you sa 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.

33:23 Like 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 block to build on next, right? They now have two options. And in the classic

33:37 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 logger. Both are exactly the same weight. Right. Both have exactly the same weight. And that's the noisy state. So 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

33:59 That noisy state. Is a delay. in the network that requires resolution. Same problem as radio. So

34:08 I had Two coffees and a beer and I was up till four a. And I had this like kind of Eury Eureka moment that Puzzle similar to Proof of Work. Using the same shot to fifty six pre image resistant hash function.

34:21 Instead of running it in this like Massively parallel Use as 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

34:37 You can force it to prove that it's Taking certain amount of time. That there's a forced delay before you do an action. Hm. So I knew that I had this like arrow of time.

34:50 So then you can start timing and assigning time blocks to exactly transactions. And This was like a I don't know, I was manic for like a week because You were at DropX 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.

35:10 And It was so cool to me because There is no mathematical version of Era of Time. There's nothing that guarantees time's forwards or backwards in Einstein's equations, right? And Digital systems or math systems. So this is like

35:26 A way that ties Is cryptography even possible in this universe, right? Like this this is an open question, or will all cryptographic systems be broken? If they are possible. Right, if there's some proof that

35:39 If we can get to a point where we can prove that cryptography is guaranteed to be secure. Then We can construct an arrow of time, right? There's a way to move like things forward and It was so cool to me.

35:52 the It's possible today with these very simple digital systems to do that. And so can I Maybe try and parrot back my understanding in a very simplified way here, and you can tell me if I'm right.

36:05 You sort of turned this method of propagating the True, correct ledger around all the other nodes from a Like real time game.

36:17 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. I would I would take it 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

36:48 It's passed to somebody else. You're on the clock. It's like chess. You're on exactly. And That difference between going from turn base to the scheduled System is why Solana is faster than Tendermint or all the other proof of stake networks.

37:04 Is that those classical BFT systems they are Like Ben takes a turn to speak. And everybody else checks. Did them speak?

37:14 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. Yeah. Exactly. I see so so Solana effectively pre-schedules 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 in in like cellular networks.

37:50 This is how most radio networks that can Kind of the base layer of radio networks is this T DMA. Oh, that's so cool. So is it then the the proof of history? Is tied to that, right? Yeah.

38:02 And like that like later more complex Realization of How to tie this high level idea of an era of time. to this T DMA construct like That's a

38:13 months to develop and like working with the folks we hired at Qualcomm. That that's really when that's a crude. But initially I was like Holy shit, I have a mathematical arrow of time. I know that that's good enough for something in craft. So this is amazing. Okay, so with this What's the throughput of the Solana Network today? So we've benchmarked this at about

38:37 Fifty thousand TPS with like peaks over sixty five. Wow. So that's a pr that's like what Visa is, basically. But There's a lot of caveats there because benchmarking is like I worked at a hardware company, benchmarking is a game. So

38:55 You can think of it as Well T S M C 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 kinda see, okay, under these ideal conditions that we can in theory get this much throughput through.

39:18 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.

39:37 And it's not that like There's limits there that can't exceed sixty five thousand TPS. It's just If 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

39:52 You know, you're dealing with like problems with software that If somebody actually needs them f solving, it's like Three to four weeks of work to do it. Versus like everything's optimized to the theoretical

40:04 limit of the hardware itself. And if you Backtrack from the hardware specs. Like if you actually start like 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 sixty four frames per second at four K resolution to do post processing.

40:22 You you start like that's the limit and then you write the software until the client is happy. But you can tell him the best we can do is four K video at sixty four frames per second. And Maybe you ship at V0 twenty four 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.

40:43 One gig event Networks. is really the the bottleneck is like the bandwidth. You need one gigabit of input and output per validator. On this global network.

40:54 And that can in theory support seven hundred thousand transactions per second. So does that mean that this network requires pretty great internet connections in order to be Solana based 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 kinda like

41:15 Bits as we can. So if all of these events are parallelizable, right, if it these are like different markets, right? There's seven hundred thousand different markets. They all wanna do one event Per second. We can schedule all of them. Right? That that that's kinda how you can think about it, and like that capacity is

41:35 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

41:47 You know, like AMT doubles the number of cores. Uh NVIDIA doubles the number of GPU core like lanes per GPU. PCI buses go from like PCA four, it's like one terabit to two terabit in the next version or whatever. That means that

42:03 We can then Ingress. Like Inject more data. At these data centers with like bandwidth that right now goes to Twenty gigabit.

42:12 And process it and then synchronized 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 transactions per second. But this is gonna be kind of blood, sweat, and tears to get the software to get to use all of those. But I mean that's like

42:33 That's just such an order of magnitude higher than the Current state of the 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 we should talk about what all this enables. There's just kinda no question where you're gonna run most of your transactions.

42:51 And it seems like so you mentioned seven hundred thousand is sort of this like theoretical high water mark at 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 sixty thousand. But probably they handle around like five thousand at most.

43:14 per second, like at steady state. So all of Twitter is five thousand messages per second. Wow. Humans are just really bad at doing like anything interesting. Nasdaq. Does it Maybe two, three hundred trades per second.

43:31 Now there's thirty times more orders for trade. And and there's thirty times more cancels per order. Yeah. Because bots are just flooding the system with like no change the state. That's the th this is really about machines. This is not about humans. Exactly. Well, so where uh a Solana is already uh from a throughput perspective past the point where it could ever Like you 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

44:04 the value creators right in this thing are like The machines that synthesize other world's information that 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.

44:22 And we need that thing to be at the same network as The other valley creators that are building products that humans want. Right. They actually onboard humans, and that's value creation. It's really hard to get humans to do anything. So if there's no intermediaries between those two. That's like the perfect financial system, right? That means that we've kinda like eliminated all of this gunk.

44:44 There's nobody taking thirty bips on every different like every time some paper changes hands, everybody takes a little bit off the top. Like that's that's really what the stuff is all about. Like how do we eliminate all of that? And 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.

45:08 And charge.2 cents. to somebody that's Right, trying to advertise to me. But sixty percent of what they're Okay, paying for is fraud, right? Like click fraud. Yeah. Like F that. Like F all of that.

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47:20 On Solana, obviously there's tons of DeFi stuff. But Audio, which is a decentralized Spotify. And managing streams on the slana blockchain. What either talk about that or 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.

47:37 Yeah, so Audio, I think, is is also one of my favorites, and a lot of that comes from Reneal 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

47:54 Let's steal your data, shove you like stuff you don't want. under charge 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 players, the

48:10 fan relationships between users and and their artists. It's all done kinda in the open And On a decentralized platform. So It doesn't need to have the Swap two model.

48:22 At all. Like it it can just kinda run off of its token. And This stuff is is really hard to imagine, like what's gonna take off, right? What's actually gonna replace Web Two. Right. It's hard to imagine that, but uh music has always been like at the forefront of new tech. Right, and I'm I'm excited to see like them.

48:40 having like ridiculous traction, four million users like using the stuff. But like traction within a small This is audio. And this is 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 kinda 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

49:09 Every generation of the internet music has kinda 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 I think a lot of that comes from the fact that like the music industry itself

49:29 Is like predatory unlike every financial part of like the ecosystem from the artists to the fans, like it's just really trying to squeeze everybody and bring them out. So what's the value proposition here? I always want to just keep playing this, uh I've I have this 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. In a Solana 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

50:02 better to be a decentralized version of Spotify than Spotify. So it's Peer to peer, right? Like that that's kinda the cool thing about it. You're not really using audio, you are directly connecting to like Boys Noise or Dead Mouse. And

50:17 It's their private key cryptography that's signing those assets and audio. 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.

50:33 Yeah, it's this fascinating concept where in the abstract, if you were to tell me about the internet in nineteen eighty five 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 author their own HTML.

50:54 And it's this sort of surprising thing that happened. that it led to centralization. Where 1985 me would be shocked that there are five big companies. Like how how what? That's not what the technology does. And it's quite remarkable that with this next evolution moving from web two to web three.

51:11 of the the blockchain that like now we actually do have a chance for nineteen eighty five 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 solving for Audio. It's this piece of

51:30 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, do whatever the hell they want. That there's no interference there.

51:44 That's it, right? Like The token itself is just there to prevent spam and the Super connected world. So Solada doesn't have a dog in this fight of uh of you know, should some country adopt uh this as their currency or change what fiat money is being used. I think like

52:03 Thinking it from like a information system only. Kinda 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.

52:21 That's kind of a science fiction thing that we're building, right? In itself. It's like uh I'm reading The City in the Stars by Arthur C Clark right now, and that's literally like the that is the city. Let's do that. Let that's a a cool enough thought like cool 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 a s an interesting question. in many more ways more interesting to me than What is store value, what is gold, what is money.

52:51 Right. Well, Anatoli, I uh so in in that vein, I mean There is a cryptocurrency called Sol. you know, people can buy it all over the place. I think on FTX is is where I've bought it in the past. Like how does that factor into this? Like w how does that work in the network that you've created? Yeah. So going back to that like morbid example of nuclear strike. What we're really trying to do is guarantee that there isn't any central authority that can

53:18 Issue Who are these like set of nodes that can Guard the network. And If we were the s root certificate and we like issued a thousand nodes.

53:29 And we could issue more at any time. then that effectively makes us the the point of failure, right? That censorship resistant piece. not good enough for prevent nuclear strikes, right? So you if you like think of it from I trust you, but I don't know that I trust you very much. So to eliminate this like central certificate route, you limit the number of certificates that could be issued, issue all of them.

53:54 And let them Decide who owns what. Which is effectively like what this token represents is the weight in the network and in terms of how much vote you have, how much power to censor you have. And maximizing that minimum set of nodes I can send to the network.

54:10 You kinda need this thing to be freely transferable and freely freely reassignable. So It's just naturally how it evolves, right? If we were actually to try to Keep uh some form of control over it. But we did a good job with everything else.

54:25 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

54:38 Group. Is sort of like the varacine of this network in a distributed way and people sort of vote ratibly on whether something is 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 are up to thirty three percent as large as possible. And that's our religion. Like if we're talking about store of value or something like us being the Bitcoin religion.

55:04 The religion in like our little community is Maximize censorship resistance. You gotta like that's the number one focus everybody's uh working on and that's how this is proof of stake based. When we talk about proof of work, it's like Proof of work in the Bitcoin sense is 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 in deciding this. basically certifying the or verifying that this is the

55:39 person you think it is. Correct. Cool. And we want to grow that set to be as large as possible. Again, thinking from this like nuclear strike detection. 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.

55:56 The innovation The technology, just the like Uh just makes me smile thinking of like technology and liberal arts. You know, 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, right? Like you can have the most beautiful thing, but uh

56:14 You gotta have people using this. How did you especially because you started in the like the crypto winter. How did you get I don't know anything. How did you start? Like Getting

56:24 People involved in this. So like the validators were really like the first group of customers or users and they're like just super positive people that just want to play around with cool tech. And This idea of maximizing censorship resistance. It's just cool. People like kinda

56:42 Cool. It's Go try it, right? How how cool it'd be if it works. Right. So we kinda got like a a really good community of builders. that were willing to Do whatever we asked him 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.

57:02 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 um The use case that we thought would be really interesting was

57:24 What if we like ran Nasdaq on this thing, like this thing that serum runs like Price time cue, central limit order book. And through the winter a lot of people were telling us that Dexes are dead, that we shouldn't even bother. Wow. Dex being a decentralized exchange.

57:40 Yeah. But I I fundamentally believe that If the system is possible. If we can The

57:48 World's price discovery engine. Then that's like the Google Will be the world's information library, like kinda style of like dream. Like that's like the world changing thing that we need to build for it. And you guys never had any ambition to build A dex yourself, right?

58:04 Or did you? Uh, we would have done it on our own. We had plans to do so. But then um 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?

58:19 Up and coming exchange. What if we like did options or something like Something interesting on Chain. And they're like, Is it live? Or like if we think in about six months, like okay. Two weeks. Yeah. They're like just just gotta get we we don't have time for this, right? We gotta ship stuff like tomorrow. So Six months later we actually go live and we built this little demo called Break.

58:44 Like break. Solana dot 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

58:59 Sam and he was like Okay, everyone else needs to see this engineer. Sam's the founder of FTS. Yeah. 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

59:18 full style central and mid order books of the stuff that they know There's a chance that decentralized finance could potentially Get fifty percent of the world's finance, maybe twenty five. 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

59:39 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 even have to trade blockchain assets. Yeah, 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.

1:00:04 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 kinda naturally roll downhill. And like end up there anyways.

1:00:16 It's yeah, right. It's it's kinda like um separating the pragmatism from the idealism, where like Most of the people who actually bought Teslas 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'cause it's the best system.

1:00:41 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? Because it's easier, right? It's cheaper, it's faster, there's it's fault tolerant, you have stronger guarantees. Like if all those things are true. Right. Like

1:00:59 then will things just naturally gravitate there. Like and as soon as this thing exists I mean if you don't have to pay Visa Five percent of every transaction, like You would. If if you don't have to pay, you know, Nasdaq, I think earns like ten billion a yeah, where does that money come from? Yeah. I wanna rewind back. You talked about the validators. I think this is an important point for Building it.

1:01:23 crypto at least a protocol that I hadn't quite thought about. It's kinda like supply and demand. You needed the supply before the demand, before you could go get an audio or you could go build a Nasdaq. You actually needed The network of validators that we're gonna Run this, right?

1:01:37 Yeah. And we started with like just forty of these dedicated people that were just there through Our first launch had crashed in twenty minutes, the second launch had crashed in two hours. Like like over and over they like just Came back. And I get what you're saying about them just being like they're there'cause like this is cool.

1:01:56 Yeah, that they were true believers, right? And and like Some of those folks were so early and like Yeah, bug bounty is that they're finding these really hard to find critical bugs. that they're now founding their own security firms because of this like early investment and like digging through our code, understanding like where we made a mistake and demonstrating it and like

1:02:18 That commitment really created a ton of value for everyone. For ever for everyone involved. It was just awesome to have these folks. So early on working with us. That's amazing. Alright, so Anatoly, after all this, it sounds to me like

1:02:32 Solana's just gonna work. It's gonna take over the world, like it's gonna be this super high frequency Perfectly optimized. blockchain for exactly what it's doing. When I sort of turn my head and see the sort of elephant in the room of Ethereum

1:02:47 sort of coming up with ETH two, which is not necessarily the Tightest defined at this point. But there is 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

1:03:03 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 nineties, I was like a Linux geek. I built Linux from scratch.

1:03:19 And Microsoft was trying to kill Linux. And you just can't kill it you can't kill an open source community. We can kill Ethereum just as easily as Ethereum can kill us, meaning it's impossible. Like if you have people that are willing willing to work on something over the weekend, right, at their own time, just to because they think it's fun. There's no killing that, right? Like it's just code that people want to write because they love to do that. But we're competing because there's overlapping features, right? There at any given moment there's certain number of users.

1:03:49 And that competition I think is awesome because We do something well People look at it and like, can my application running Ethereum adopt it, improve on it, and vice versa. And we're gonna see this kind of bouncing back and forth between any of these healthy communities that are growing that are like

1:04:06 Doing the iteration cycle product market fit. And it's not just like I think the colonel engineers, like honestly, we're all friends. We 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'cause it's just interesting problems, right? Yep. But the ecosystems I think have this like I think healthy flow of

1:04:33 Competition that I think is Necessary for The entire space, the crypto space to onboard the next billion users. Like 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? Should I know I should.

1:04:52 You guys are in In the crypto industry at large, but you don't sell custody keys. Yep. So not your keys, not your coins. You can't directly connect to an artist and audience without your own self custody, right? You're not in this interconnected world. You're still in the Swept Two world where you're going through intermediary. Yeah. What percentage of people who think they own

1:05:13 Cryptocurrency self custody. I don't know. I think My upper estimate for self custody is maybe thirty million, but that's like a very generous estimate. Thirty million people. Yeah. So T Fi summer with thirty, forty thousand people participating in these like

1:05:30 Flash. communities that would form like overnight. Imagine that was thirty, forty million people. Yeah. Rapid coming together around an idea

1:05:41 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.

1:05:56 It's 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 AMT or like X eighty six versus MIPS. These are details that are important to us as engineers, but like that End to end user

1:06:12 Like superconnected world. It's just so wild. 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 technics. Without you guys, I wonder. Do you think ma maybe you can't answer this, but like Ethereum didn't really have any I mean, there were other there were other competitors for sure.

1:06:33 Let's not say you guys. All of the various Ethereum killers out there. If they didn't exist, Ethereum would just be like dumb, fat and happy, right? Like you need this motivation to like push things forward, right? Maybe. I can't imagine a world where people wouldn't look at it and and decide I wanna build something different because The design space for these systems is just so interesting and so big.

1:06:58 That Like as an engineer, it's like operating systems, right? You look at one, you're like, Well, I wanna 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

1:07:16 Geez. If I write code that's compatible with Solana, it's not compatible with ETH two and vice versa. Why should I write it on Solana instead of ETH two? Because we guarantee this super connected world for one billion users, without shards, without intermediaries, this is where it's gonna happen first. Like we're the f 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 twos, all this other stuff if you want.

1:07:46 Or if your vision is bigger than X eighty six 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

1:08:05 Eath two isn't live yet. It's a theoretical concept. We we also like I think if you talk to any of the folks that worked with us, um Raj and I are Like it's at the end of the day it's like about the people, like I don't know what it is about Reneal that just we instantly connected. I don't know what it is about Sam, that there was this like instant trust, like we're in it together, we'll just go do whatever it takes to to make this work.

1:08:31 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. Without like actually thinking about like Any of the the the details are not as important to us, like right now. Like the the commercial parts of it, like none of that is as important as like actually building something cool. Yeah.

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1:09:48 to how users actually behaved. So 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.

1:10:07 Even just Audio itself is one example of like This is live. It's happening today. What do you think? The Solana ecosystem looks like in

1:10:16 Two, three, five years. I think well the ecosystem I think like You know, we have this dream of This being competitive with like something as big as like Google, like Android. There's five thousand engineers working in Android. Five thousand engineers costs a billion dollars per year. We can't possibly raise that much to compete with them. I don't know, in this environment, maybe.

1:10:42 There's no way, right? Like so We actually have to have folks come into the space, build out some products. Love the tack. go like start being those one of those five thousand engineers on their own.

1:10:56 community that's more grassroots than this top down like Google style centralized system. There's just no other option. So like if we succeed it it's like This Amazing set of engineers that are just working and building really cool shit.

1:11:12 And amazing set of validators that are building really cool hardware to make this stuff run as fast as possible. Like in That's kinda the dream of it, you know, that There isn't this one single central authority that's telling anybody what to do. Love it. Great spot to end on.

1:11:28 Thank you for joining us. Where can people find you? On the internet. Uh Solana.com is where you can find all the information. Uh in like Solana's Twitter handle. Like uh follow it on Twitter and follow me. If you wanna hear me talk about consensus and censorship resistance. or Raj, if you wanna you know, he's far more active on Twitter about like ecosystem and like

1:11:51 Cool shit that's being built. Are you guys on uh BitCloud yet? No, no we're not. There's a cool project called Wumbo. That is like creator tokens that are part of the that can like attach to any like social network.

1:12:06 Um the hackathon. If you want to do some work. And you're not an engineer, go look for the hackathon submissions. And then tweeted us to like what is good.

1:12:17 One of the hardest parts in in like the space is actually synthesizing information, right? Go use your massive brain, the most advanced piece of technology in the universe. Go look at all this information of all these other teams that are building stuff and tell us what's good. What do you like? What's actually high quality. Uh that takes a ton of work. Amazing.

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

1:12:46 Listeners, we'll see you next time. Who got the truth? Is it you, is it you, is it you Who got the truth now?

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