Acquired - Special: Solana (with CEO Anatoly Yakovenko)

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

We sit down with the hottest new protocol layer in crypto today: Solana, and its cofounder Anatoly Yakovenko, who is the CEO of Solana Labs. If you listened to our Ethereum episode or follow crypto even at a cursory level, you've likely heard of Solana and its ability to scale transactions thousands of times higher than Ethereum. And, unlike other so-called "ETH killers", Solana is doing so in production today with large and real applications. We dive into the project's history coming out of the 2017-18 crypto winter, how it works and what's ahead now that they've recently raised $314m (yes that is Pi $million) from a16z and Polychain Capital, with their native SOL tokens currently trading at a market cap around $10B (!). Sponsors:ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acqsnaiagentsHuntress: https://bit.ly/acqhuntressVanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvantaMore Acquired!:Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the SlackSubscribe to ACQ2Merch Store!Topics covered:Anatoly's background as a wireless engineer at Qualcomm, and how it led to a fundamental discovery of how to improve crypto system scalabilitySolana's role in the crypto protocol ecosystem and why there's a need for it (and why it can and will exist) alongside Ethereum versus "killing" itStarting Solana during the 2017-18 crypto winter, and how it forced them to focus just on building and shipping versus raising and posturingBootstrapping adoption with the mining community (Solana's "true believers") and the early and ardent support they providedWhere Solana falls on the Vitalik "Scalability - Security - Decentralization" trilemma, and why Solana's superpower of maintaining composability is so attractiveLinks:Solana: https://solana.comSolana on Twitter: https://twitter.com/solanaSolana Hackathon submissions: https://airtable.com/shriNT26cAZeDJagn/tbl5fZ4E1BBbVAttWFTX: https://ftx.usAudius: https://audius.co Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

um yeah should we do it just dive in yeah let's do it who got the truth is it you is it you is it you who got the truth now is it you is it you is it you sit me down say it straight another story on the way Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, 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. 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, 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 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 Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder and CEO of Solana Labs. Solana Labs is the company that spearheads the development of the Solana blockchain. And just to set some context, they recently raised $314 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital. Yes, that is Pi $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 Pi million dollars, you would raise like $3.14 million, or maybe $31.4 million. Wow. 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 acquired.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 for his work at Solana and introducing us to Anatoly to make this episode happen. So thanks so much to Austin. Huge shout out.

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your enterprise. They boost productivity for employees, enrich customer experiences, and make work better for everyone. Yep. So learn how you can put AI agents to work for your people by clicking the link in the show notes or going to servicenow.com slash AI dash agents. 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. 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 Yakovenko, the founder and CEO of Solana. Okay, welcome, Anatoly. We are so excited to have you here with us for so many reasons. We've been following Solana 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 Solana now. You had some huge news last week where you raised pi hundred million dollars 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 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 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 it was like active decisions versus just trying to survive. The project was started kind of end of 2017, start 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. And like, sorry, guys, we can't fund this. Wow. With these dedicated crypto funds? Yeah. Yeah. And 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 going to be magic and crypto 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 itching to go build the next big thing. The true builders there that were like super experienced and have worked with me for over a decade, like all jumped 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 building Zoom out of Webex. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That was really awesome and a 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 proof of history. Nobody else was working on it. There were a few academics defining verifiable delay functions. But it was really 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 too from investors who were much more readily eager to invest in

somebody with like huge pedigree out of MIT or whatever, like an Ivy League. And Anatoly, I want to put a pin 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 want to highlight, you just used a term proof of history. We're going to put a pin in that and come back to it later because it's one of the things that makes Solana special, but I'm going to do the work of highlighting a, hey, I'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 a little bit starving

under two years, under 18 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 let's get users, let's build a 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. 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 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 are running the nodes, that are crypto OGs that have been doing mining involved in Cosmos and every other network. And it became clear in a span of a year that every round, these guys always came in first without asking any questions. They're like, yeah, let's do this. 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 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 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. It failed. They dealt with every failure and should have saw it. So 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 protocol is about $10 billion. So you have come a long way from those days. Let's rewind. How did you get into crypto and blockchains? I get the sense that you weren't 2009, 2010, running your own nodes, true believer from back then, or maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I heard of Bitcoin right around that time during the 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. What if I wrote a GPU miner, 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 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 talk about front running your customers it was beautiful example of what crypto is which is it totally Wild West, peer-to-peer system where anything goes true to its internet core. And you have to understand that who is on the other side of this conversation than the internet, right? 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, Anatoly, you were at Qualcomm, though, right through all this, which is going to become very important here in a minute. What were you working on there? At that time, 2008, shoot, I was still working on 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 like type. 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. That'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, and attention with the existing systems, Bitcoin, Ethereum, a lot of the altcoins that were being developed in the mid-, 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, 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 this objectively measurable kind of security is something that is really unique to proof-of-work. And that's what gives Bitcoin its kind of claim on store of value. You know, it's still not proven yet, but that's really the strong argument there.

Can you have store of 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 of it exists and then compute that I have X amount of it out of the known universe. So these 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 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 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 amount of ETH 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, right? Yeah, yeah. So proof of stake is something that Vitalik kind of started publishing about like pretty early on, I think almost 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 this thermodynamic energy, you have a bunch of keys that represent some value

in the native token itself. And based on that weighting of those keys, you can then verify the consistency of the chain. But because that token is monopoly money, it's virtually manufactured inside this computer. 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 first root of trust, kind of like my browser has VeriSign as its 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 network? Am I in the right network? And that first thing is not strongly objective. It's weakly subjective. And once you kind of bite that apple of weak subjectivity...

You might as well go all the way and start farming the orchard. Exactly. So Solana, our design is like, to me, this was obvious. Okay, VeriSign, Ruta 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 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 of 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 any 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 of a marketplace. It's literally what NASDAQ provides you when you jump through all the hoops and get your machine set up in the same room, server room as NASDAQ runs their markets. They literally give you an 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 kind of bought into this idea. And this is probably because Qualcomm is a communication company. I always kind of think of these old school terms of radio, Shannon Hartley theorem. Like, how do we, like, this is just information passing between people, right?

I was going to say, it's the same thing when, you know, I dial Ben 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, our next sponsor is a new friend of the show, Huntress. Huntress is one of the fastest growing and most loved cybersecurity companies today. It's purpose built for small to mid-sized

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125,000 businesses now using Huntress, and they rave about it from the hilltops. They were voted by customers in the G2 rankings as the industry leader in endpoint detection and response for the eighth consecutive season and the industry leader in managed detection and response again this summer. Yep. So if you want cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions backed by a 24-7 team of experts who monitor, investigate, and respond to threats with unmatched precision, head on over to huntress.com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes. Our huge thanks to Huntress. Anatoly, can I ask you to define a couple terms? I've heard these terms settlement

layer and execution layer. Can you go into that concept a little bit and explain where Solana could fit in? Yeah, so settlement, I can't name you a single company in the world that does settlement. They were briefly in the spotlight during this GameStocks thing. 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. And this is what Bitcoin does, right? I send you Bitcoin, an hour 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 the things that they settle. But all the fun stuff, 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 do clearing, but just think of it as 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 for 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 that can then 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. 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 even potentially touches the store of value, thermodynamic energy security. We want it to be the simplest thing that's easy to verify, easy for an engineer in college to build a client for. That's cool, right? That's

the simplest form of money, maybe. That's really what they're going for. Ethereum is trying to be in the middle where you can do some of that, 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, and you can do like kind of sophisticated contracts, constant function market makers. Those constraints in 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, Uniswap. 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.

All of a sudden there's a market and anybody can trade with it. It's literally the New York Stock Exchange in code. Yeah, in like 100 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 sense of scale, the whole Ethereum network, the global Ethereum network is limited to what, 65 transactions a second. Is that right?

Something like that. So it depends on the gas limits and how complex the operations are. Some measurements go as low as 11, some goes high as 65. From what last numbers I checked, 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 Solana, same 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 capital than Uniswap. It's much more

transaction efficient, but 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'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 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, there must be tons of transactions, but it is incredibly limited in 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. There'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. 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 transactions per second. And I think when we were seeing fees over 40 bucks a 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 interesting 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 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 change from either ETH1 to a sharded system or ETH1 to a bunch of roll-ups or layer 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 Solana was, I think we just never thought of Solana as replacing digital gold, sovereign money, or anything like that.

To store a value, necessarily. It was, how 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 is you need a high degree of independent verifiable sensors that is necessary to corrupt for the system to go wrong. Balaji described this as the Nakamoto coefficient. So it's the minimum set of independent participants that if they all colluded would break the network. So, right, like 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. And to do that, to really scale that to a very large number, 20,000, 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 was going to do the same thing because to me, this was the obvious kind of like, that's the hardest problem. We got to 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, 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. There's this, 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 building the first radio towers.

If you have two radio towers that go up and they transmit 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 you have a bunch of towers if all the clocks are very well synchronized that they never overrun each other 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 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, 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 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 way. Ah, I see. 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 that noisy state is a delay in the network that requires resolution. Same problem as radio. So, I had two coffees and a beer and I was up to 4am and had this like kind of eureka moment that puzzles similar to proof of work using the same SHA-256 pre-image resistant hash function, 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 in the computer, you can force it to prove that it's taking a certain amount of time, that there's a forced delay before you do an action. So I knew that I had this like arrow of time. So then you can start timing and assigning time blocks to transactions. And this was like, I don't know, I was manic for like a week because... You were at Dropbox 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 era of time. There's nothing that guarantees times are 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, then we can construct an era of time, right? There is 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 parrot 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 real-time game to a turn-based game, where nobody, by being able to, 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 accomplish your thing. Yeah, I would take it one step further. It went from 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. Yeah, exactly. I see. So Solana effectively pre-schedules all the moments where I get my turn to speak. Exactly.

And that reduces all this overhead of synchronization in every step and every block. And that is more of a real-time system where it's like voice. This is how voice works in cellular networks. This is how most radio networks, 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 is tied to that, right? Yeah. And that later more complex realization of how to tie this high-level idea of an era of time to this TDMA construct. That took months to develop. And working with the folks we hired at Qualcomm, that's really when that took root. 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 throughput of the Solana network today? So we've benchmarked this at about 50,000 TPS with peaks over 65. Wow. So that's

what Visa is, basically. Yeah, but there'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 TSMClapping, 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, if we start hitting those limits, then we go optimize. And then we see what the hardware limits are. And're like this is where benchmarking is hard because you know you're dealing with like problems

in 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, like 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 at 4K resolution to do post-processing. You start like that's the limit. And then you write the software until the client is happy. But you can tell them the best we can do is 4K video at 64 frames per second. And maybe you ship at V0 at 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 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 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 bits as we can. So if all of these events are parallelizable,

if these are different markets, there's 700,000 different markets, they all want to do one event per second, we can schedule all of them. 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 am AMD doubles the number of cores. NVIDIA doubles the number of GPU lanes per GPU.

PCI buses go from like PCI 4 is 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 transactions per second. But this is going to be kind of blood, sweat and 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 we should talk about what all this enables there's just kind of no question where you're gonna run most most of your transactions. And it seems like, so you mentioned 700,000 is sort of this like theoretical high watermark 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 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. Humans are just really bad at doing anything interesting. NASDAQ does maybe two, 300 trades per per second now there's 30 times more orders per trade

and there's 30 times more cancels per order yeah because bots are just flooding the system with like no change the state that's the thing this is really about machines this is not about humans exactly wow so where solana is already from a throughput perspective, past the point where 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, if we're building a financial system, the value creators right in this thing are the machines machines that synthesize other 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, right? They actually onboard humans. 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 kind of like eliminated all of this gunk. There's nobody taking

30 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? they steal my data right and feed me information i don't want and charge 0.2 cents to somebody that's right trying to advertise to me but 60 of what they're paying for is fraud right like click fraud yeah yeah like f that like f all of that oh amen one of the i just think super cool use cases that i know people are building on Solana, obviously, there's tons of DeFi stuff, but Audius, which is a decentralized Spotify, and managing streams on the Solana blockchain. 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 Audius, I think, is also one of my favorites. And a lot of that comes from Renil

himself. He's just an awesome founder. You guys should totally talk to him. What I love about it is that it is trying to get away from traditional web to business models of, let's steal your data, shove you 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 Web2 model at all. Like it can just kind of run off of its token. And this stuff is really hard to imagine like what's going to take off, right? What's actually going to replace Web2,

right? It's hard to imagine that, but music has always been like at the forefront of new tech right and i'm excited to see like them having like ridiculous traction four million users like using the stuff with like traction 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 well shoot 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 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 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. 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 better to be a decentralized version of Spotify than Spotify? So it's peer-to-peer, right? That's kind of the cool thing about it. You're not really using Audius. You are directly connecting to Boy's Noise or Deadmau5. And it's their private key cryptography that's signing those assets and audience. 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 author their own HTML. 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. 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 of the blockchain that 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 sovereign money narrative, right? If you think about what we're solving for Audius, 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 described that anybody can self-publish, do whatever the hell they want, that there's no interference there. That's it, right? The token itself is just there to prevent spam in this super connected world. So Solata doesn't have a dog in this fight of should some country adopt this as their currency or change what fiat money is being used? I think thinking it from an information system only, I think it's actually more interesting to think of it. If we had a super connected world,

that's equivalent to if we all had neutrino-based lasers that could not be interfered with, that we could all talk to each other at any moment. That's kind of a science fiction thing that we're building, right? In itself. It's like, I'm reading the city in the stars by Arthur C. Clark right now. And that's literally like the, that is the city. Like, let's do that.

That's 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? That to me is an interesting question in many more ways more interesting to me than what is store value, what is mean, there is a cryptocurrency called Sol. People can buy it all over the place. I think on FTX is where I've bought it in the past. How does that factor into this? How does that work in the network that you've created? Yeah. So going back to that morbid example of nuclear strike, what we're really trying to do is guarantee that there isn't any central authority that can issue who are these set of nodes that can guard the network.

And if we were the root certificate and we issued a thousand nodes and we could issue more at any time, then that effectively makes us the point of failure, right? That censorship resistance piece is not good enough for preventing nuclear failure, right? That censorship-resistant piece is not good enough for preventing nuclear strikes, right? So if you think of it from like... I mean, I trust you, but I don't know that I trust you very much. So to eliminate this central certificate route, you limit the

number of certificates that could be issued, issue all of them, and let them decide who owns what, which is effectively what this token 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

that can censor the network, you kind of need this thing to be freely transferable and freely reassignable. So it'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 VeriSign of this network in a distributed way. And people sort of vote radibly on whether something is valid or not. Right. And the goal is to grow that set as large as possible, right? And make that minimum set that are up to 33% as large as possible. And that's our religion. If we're talking about store of value or something like as being the Bitcoin religion, the religion in our little community is maximize censorship resistance. That's the number one focus

everybody's 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 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, basically certifying 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 nuclear strike detection. Censorship resistant. Yeah. Okay. So this is a good transition to the last big topic we wanted to cover with you guys.

All this is awesome. The innovation, the technology, 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 got to 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 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 kind of think it's cool. Go try it, right? How cool would it be if it works? So we kind of got a really good community of builders that were willing to do whatever we asked them to do, which is call up a data center, go install a machine there. This is not just 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 deploy. And the use case that we thought would be really interesting was, what if we 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 DEXs are dead, that we shouldn't even bother. Wow. DEX being are dead, that we shouldn't even bother. Wow.

DEX being a decentralized exchange? Yeah. But I fundamentally believe that if this system is possible, if we can be a world's price discovery engine, then 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, up and 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 yeah good you know 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, like break.solano.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. And this engineer saw it. Sam's the founder of FTX. Yeah.

They showed this to their engineering folks. And they've been thinking about this from a trader's point of view. If you can actually have a system that was fast enough to do full style central limit order books, the stuff that they know, there's a chance that decentralized finance could potentially get 50% of the world's finance, maybe 25. It doesn't matter. It's big enough for them to like, holy shit, this is 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. 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. But it's more the idea that if you have this open permissionless platform, that is fast enough for this use case. Will things just kind of naturally roll downhill and end up there anyways? Yeah, right. It's kind of like separating the pragmatism from the idealism, where most of the people who actually bought Teslas early bought it because it was a status symbol and a really sexy car, and they said,

I'm saving the world. And so 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? Because it's easier, right? It's cheaper, it's faster, it's fault tolerant, you have stronger guarantees. Like if all those things are true right like 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 wouldn't 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. And we started with just 40 of these dedicated people that were just there through

our first launch that crashed in 20 minutes, the second launch that crashed in two hours. Like over and over, they just came back. And I get what you're saying about them just being like, they're there because this is cool. Yeah, they were true believers, right? And some of those folks were so early and we had bug bounties that they were finding these really hard to find critical bugs that they're now founding their own security firms because of this early investment and digging through our code, understanding where we made a mistake and demonstrating it. And 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. All right. So Anatoly, after all this, it sounds to me like Solana is just going to work. It's

going to take over the world. It's going to 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 sort of coming up with ETH2, which is not necessarily the tightest 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. 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. 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.

If you have people that are willing to work on something over the weekend, right, at their own time, just 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? At any given moment, there's a certain number of users. And that competition, I think, is awesome because we do something well, people look at it and like, can my application running ethereum adopted 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 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 the 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, right? You're not in this interconnected world. You're still in this web two 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 DeFi Summer with 30,000, 40,000 people participating in these flash communities that would form overnight, imagine that was 30, 40 million people 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. 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 decide, I want to build something different because the design space for these systems is just so interesting and so big that like as an engineer, it's like operating systems, right? You look at one, you're like, well, I want to make a bunch of different choices and do something different. Let's see what happens. There's 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 ETH2 and vice versa. Why should I write it on Solana instead of ETH2? Because we guarantee this super connected world for 1 billion users without shards, without intermediaries. This is where it's going to happen first. 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 2s, 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 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 eth2 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 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 connect it 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 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 this massive vision, I don't know how I'm going to 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 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. I love it. Love it. None of that is as important as actually building something cool. Yeah. I love it. Love it.

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Vanta.com slash acquired. All right. Well, to cap it all off, this is so exciting. Everything that's already happening, even just Audius itself is one example of like, this is so exciting. Everything that's already happening, even just Audius 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? 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 5,000 engineers working on Android. 5,000 engineers cost a billion dollars per year. We can't possibly raise that much to compete with them. I don't know, in this environment, maybe. there's no way right like so we actually have to have folks come into the space build awesome products love the tech go like start being those one of those 5 000 engineers on their own and like build a 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's like this amazing set of engineers that are just working and building really cool shit. And amazing set of validators that are building really cool hardware to make this stuff run as fast as possible. Like, and that's kind of 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. Thank you for joining us. Where can people find you on the internet? Solana.com is where you can find all the information and Solana's Twitter handle. Follow it on Twitter and follow me if 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 being built. Are you guys on a bit cloud yet? No, no, we're not.

There's a cool project called Wombo that is like creator tokens that are part of the, that can like attach 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 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. That takes a ton of work. Amazing.

All 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.