Bankless - David @ Solana Breakpoint | Anatoly & Austin

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

David sits down in person at Solana Breakpoint 2023 with Solana’s Founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, and Austin Federa, Solana Foundation’s Head of Strategy.  The three chat about Breakpoint’s Evolution, Solana vs. Ethereum, and exciting new releases/products coming out of Solana.  🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT  ----- 🔐 Get a Free Trial of Doppel https://bankless.cc/doppel  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠  🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/Toku  🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE ⁠https://bankless.cc/uniswap  🔗 CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo  ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 6:00 Breakpoint 2023 6:53 What’s Breakpoint?  7:49 Breakpoint 1  12:20 Breakpoint 2  13:54 Evolution of Breakpoint  16:13 Aesthetic of Breakpoint  17:35 Who Attends Breakpoint  18:30 Solana’s Hardest Year  20:52 Solana Community Excitement  23:50 Consumer Solana Apps  24:48 Up Next For Anatoly 26:00 Anatoly Role Change  26:44 Solana vs. Ethereum Relationship  30:44 Solana Dev Mindset  31:44 Anatoly Cult  35:17 Firedancer  42:33 Solana 2.0  43:11 Runtime v2  44:18 Confidential Transactions  46:00 Up Next For Solana  48:48 Solana L2s & Slow-Lana 52:37 Solana Governance  56:05 Next For Austin 56:45 Breakpoint 2024  59:28 Closing & Disclaimers  ----- RESOURCES Anatoly Yakovenko https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko  Austin Federa https://twitter.com/Austin_Federa  Solana Youtube  https://www.youtube.com/@SolanaFndn/videos   ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Bankless Nation, I'm coming to you from Salana Breakpoint in Amsterdam. This is the third breakpoint that has ever happened in the year 2023. And this one is a little bit different. The first breakpoint happened in 2021 in the second half of the year. Absolute peak froth of the bull market in Lisbon, followed by the second Salana Breakpoint in 2022, also in Lisbon, which happened right before the collapse of FTX. And here we are a new venue, new city, Amsterdam.

for Salana breakpoint number three. And this one has a little bit different of a vibe. This one is deep into the bear market, perhaps coming out of the bear market. And the Salana community has been cultivated as such, as you would imagine, the people that went to the 2021 Salana breakpoint when sole price was over $200,

a lot of them didn't make it. The third Solana breakpoint. Instead, what you have left is the low-level devs that comprise the majority of what I would say is the Salana community. Over the last year or so, I've dabbled with Solana, being Salana curious, I guess you would call it, mostly fighting. But I've definitely learned that if I want to learn about Solana, it's not going to happen through the filter that is crypto-Twitter, or probably not inside of any of my Ethereum native circles either. But since I'm on my way to East Lisbon, I'm taking

a flight here shortly, I decided to pop over a little bit early to Amsterdam to check out Solana Breakpoint for myself. In this episode, I talk with Anatoly. the founder of Solana and Austin, of course, from the Salana Foundation, just to kind of get a vibe check over the arc of Salana breakpoint, what this conference means to the Salana community, and overall what people are getting excited about as it stands today in Solana. Anatoly is persistently busy, of course. So we had him and Austin for the first 30 minutes, and then Antoley had to run. And so then me and Austin had a chance to chat about all of the different rabbit holes and things that are going on in Salana. I do my best to compare them to what people on this podcast might be familiar with in the Ethereum world.

So, for example, that they have Salana Fire Dancer. And in terms of significance, that's kind of like EIP-159 or the Ethereum merge, at least in that it's a big protocol upgrade that the Salonah community are interested in. And so I do my best. Actually, I have to do the only thing that I know how to do, which is compare evolutions and progress in Salana and kind of use Ethereum as a frame of reference just to gain my own understanding. And since you are likely a long-time listener of this podcast, it's probably useful for you as well.

So if you are curious about what is going on in the state of Solana or you weren't able to attend Breakpoint and you just want to kind of catch a vibe, this episode is for you with Anatoly and Austin of the Solana ecosystem. So let's go ahead and get right into that conversation with Anatoly and Austin. But first, a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Crackett are preferred exchange for crypto in 2023. If you're not having an account with Cracken, what are you waiting for? the Bullmark is about to get started and you need a centralized exchange like Cracken to buy some of your crypto assets. There is a link in the show notes to getting started with Cracken today. Cracken knows crypto. Cracken's been in the crypto game for over a decade. And as one is the largest and most trusted exchanges in the industry, Cracken is on the journey with all of us to see what

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Number three, Anatoly. Austin, how's it going, guys? That's great. Thanks for having us here. Yeah, thanks for coming. Yeah, so we're pretty far out of the city. I don't think we're actually in Amsterdam. We're in Zam Dam, some other local, Netherlands city. The campus is phenomenal.

Who has more information about how Breakpoint came together? This one probably awesome. Yeah. I'm out of a loop at this point. Yeah, so we loved Lisbon for the last. last two years. I mean, Lisbon, year one, we can get into that later, how that happened. But we really wanted to not do a distributed multi-venue conference where you had to take, you know, a shuttle bus to go between it. And then also, like, quite frankly, we didn't want

to end up instead of a soulless hotel complex. And so this campus just ended up being an awesome spot to keep things in Europe, but also give us a little bit of feel of like the first two breakpoints who you had different venues, different characteristics. So just starting at the very basics. What's breakpoint? Oh man. It is a conference the Salana Foundation puts on every year that is meant to bring the community together to sort of galvanize talks and conversations around some of the biggest issues and topics that we're facing. It's first and foremost a developer conference. But we've got a bunch of news and announcements that sneak into that as well. But you can probably talk more about the original vision of why even do a conference. Well, I mean, we had like Sulkcon, 2019. This was part of, we threw basically a meetup with some beer and pizza at DevCon in Tokyo. And that was Salkon. That was really our first attempt at a conference, like 20 people showed up. You can literally see photos of that of like just me being the only person in the picture in the crowd while somebody's presenting. And so like the Solana ecosystem, of course, has. grown immensely since then. When did breakpoint number one happen? And that was in Lisbon,

correct? Yeah. Okay. When was that? And how many people attended that? It was 2020, right? 2021. Yeah. And so we had, you know, it was just coming out of COVID. And this is sort of like the origins of the Slana Networker, main net launched in the depths of COVID, right? Just as the world went into lockdown. And so the thinking was sort of in spring of 21, could we find somewhere in the world that enough people could travel to that we could actually bring everyone together who's really only been building together online. Most of these people have never met in person before. And we had this crazy idea that we could get 2,000 people to come to Lisbon right after COVID with this basically network that no one knew about a year ago. It was like the only country open to for that.

Yeah. It was wild. We were looking through the list of like where can people get to that is easy for visas, they feel safe traveling to, that like we could also throw a conference in. And Lisbon was like the perfect spot. And okay, so that was 2021. What part of the year was that in? Uh, is it November? Early November. Okay. Okay. So let's see. That that, that's like that at the highest point of the market, right? Where so like what, what was the vibe of break point one? It was like very much like consensus 2017. Hmm. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That kind of vintage. And like, but there were like some devs.

There were some developers there and some folks to connect with. We like, you know, we gave a bunch of talks on security and programming and like all the smart contract development. And there was like a crowd of people that was like kind of staring at like the nerds and trying to figure out what they're doing. And those nerds when all of them like hung out in one house. Right. But we all called a hacker house like jokingly.

And it like, the. Like, worked out so well that a bunch of people just wanted to keep running these, like little hacker houses right after a breakpoint, just keep going with it. And that's really like, I don't know, if you've been to any of the hacker houses or like you heard of Salana hacker houses. It was just really that like we wanted to capture that vibe of all the developers that are just like nerding out in a single place and just run with it. So we threw a bunch of these like little events around the world.

And like, yeah, post peak, the price is dropping, but like the developer engaging is rising. And like people are shipping code and like building products and stuff. So like it like I think during that year, we formed like a really strong core of like the community. Like all the security companies like Neodyme, all those guys that kind of became what they are today during that year. And like a bunch of the products that you know and Solano launched that. through that. Yeah, so, okay, so if this was at the top of the market, 2021, and there was, like, a lot of,

there's, like, a lot of the tourists in the industry as a whole. But you're saying there was also the kernel of what later became the Salana community. Well, like, just what were the lessons that were pulled out of the 2021 breakpoint that, that have continued forward? I think, like, the tourists and stuff, they will show up during a bull cycle. There's not like you can, like, keep them away, right? Like, we're not going to, like, even, like, even. Even if we tried, right?

Like, you can't, like, tell them not to come. And that's fine. I think for founders or people that are trying to build a community, you really got to, like, be principled and really focus on those, like, nerds and, like, the people that are actually building stuff in there for the long haul as much as you can. So that takes some focus and, like, takes, like, your internal team to not get, like, you know, get confused or, like, what the, what the mission is and stuff like. that and like we have an awesome team and those folks really pulled it together. And you could see like

the next breakpoint. We had a year of like everything going down. It was a bunch of devs. It was like mostly developers, mostly like companies trying to ship product. And kind of like the same thing happened again, right? Like I would say this last year, right, the last break point on the flight back, like the worst possible thing that I could have ever imagined happened. And if you were told me then, that like this is what it's going to be like a year from now. I would have like probably punched you at that time. But the second salana break point, what you're referring to is the second salon of break point

was like right before FTX. But like retroactively didn't, the salon of break point was just a salon of break point. FtX happened right afterwards, but like the conference itself was totally isolated. Yeah, it was awesome. We had like, I don't know, like 60 game companies showed up for game day.

They were like all like launching like games and stuff. We had, I don't know, a bunch of devs registered for that hacker house, I think, like, 1,500, which is, like, insane. Like, the energy was great, and people were building, building stuff. And then, like, right at the end of it, right? I think at, like, the closing party, effectively, I'm seeing all these tweets about, like, FDX imploding. It was something. It happened at the end, not right before. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So, like, it was. I don't know. I think the reason why we're still here is because those developers stuck around that weren't tourists, right? They actually see some value in this technology and they continued building. That's what kind of really, that's, I think the goal of all these conferences, all these events and hacker houses is to like get that, you know, the social glue that's going to like fork the network when something bad happens. You need to actually build it. It's not just going to like happen automatically. And you got to get those folks in. and like it or not, I think those people have to be pretty technical.

They have to understand how the system works. It's usually going to be your pool of developers or validators. So, like, you got to invest in that. So we're at breakpoint three now in 2020. And understanding that some people attending breakpoint three have been to all three breakpoints. And, you know, at some point, like three plus years, you're seeing the same three faces three years in a row now, you know, in other spots in the world, but also at break.

Point and for some people in the Salinas community is going to feel like that's home for them. And so, you know, three plus years. That's a lot of time as a community together. How would you describe the evolution of Breakpoint to where we are today? Like what would be the like sentiment around Breakpoint 3? Yeah. You know, one of the things that's great about this year is we had something called MevCamp last year, which should have spontaneously popped up a bunch of validators and the Mango team and a few others and Gito decided. last year, oh, we're going to do a pre-breakpoint event. And that, a lot of people who attended

that said that was one of the most high-value things they got out of the year was like that community focused on high-performing blockchain. And so they actually ran MevCamp here formally as part of Breakpoint. Block Zero was a validator conference that kicked off beforehand. IBC Amsterdam came here and did a whole conference on blockchain connectivity in day one. And so we're seeing like breakpoint go from something that like was 90s. 90% organized by the foundation to something that's maybe 65% organized by the foundation this year. And maybe next year it's 45% organized. And it's that long journey to say that like the foundation and its role here is really a part of it. It's not the whole thing. And to start handing

over bigger and bigger core components of this conference to the ecosystem. And that's where that like, to know that the ecosystem of developers and builders is strong enough to actually organize big events that draw their own crowd is really awesome to see. That's my biggest takeaway, at least. What's yours? Yeah, they want to do less work. It's really cool. Like, I mean, every breakpoint, there's somebody trying to do something on their own and, like, throw events that, like, surprise us. And, like, I think it's important that, like, the folks of the foundation recognize that and try to incorporate it and, like, kind of run with it. Because all the good ideas come from the community. you know, we don't know what we're doing.

The aesthetic of Breakpoint, I think, is pretty interesting. It's very Apple-y. The Apple-design is, like, very, very prominent in Breakpoint 3. Was that? A lot of this stuff, I think, comes from Raj, like I would say. He's, like, the spiritual designer of Solana. Like, it doesn't come from me. I can tell you that.

Was Breakpoint 2 and 1 like that, or is that a relatively new, like, design kind of vibe? we had more time this year than we've had with breakpoint one or two so i think there was a bit more focus on you know visual design and sort of the the animations you see on the main stage and that sort of thing and ross our creative director at the foundation like has a huge hand in working with raj and making sure that stuff comes together well um this is also the we have a events director ellie at the foundation and you know she came from netflix and ran a lot of really high profile events for them. And so, you know, the conference is growing up in a lot of ways. It's growing up through more participants and greater decentralization and all these really awesome things we get

to do. But it's also growing up from a production standpoint, too, and that like, you know, the first hacker house you were talking about, it was literally like a bunch of folding tables in a room and like a bunch of power cords being run over the ground and like, I'm sure it was totally not up to code. That's awesome. But at some point, you know, it's like, all right, well, we have a few months to plan this thing. Let's see if we can do it a little more right. What about the composition of who is attending breakpoint three? Like who's coming here? It's, I would say, like, just from talking to random people, it's a lot of, like,

people that have been around in the community for, like, a year or two. Like, I think it's folks that have kind of stuck around, but I also see a bunch of new faces. Mostly developers, at least the people that come up to me, it's, and, like, it's mostly devs, which is pretty cool. Like, I think that's, like, the goal, right? get a bunch of engineers together, get folks talking and meeting each other and build those relationships. Yeah.

And there's more engineers from other ecosystems here, too. I mean, you're here. Justin Bonds is here. Definitely not an engineer. But we're starting to see more folks who are more engaged in sort of the research community and other networks start to look more seriously at Solana. And that's just hugely flattering to see like Rune is here as well from Maker. So it's a good collection of folks.

Yeah. Especially this last year, I'd say, at least from my procession, like this has been the year, maybe you guys can be more informed about this, but the year like Salonichute glass through the bear market. How has that impacted just like the cultural vibe and what this event means for the community? I have a lot more gray hair. Me too. Yeah, this was, I would say, like, the hardest year for me, like kind of the most painful because it was such a slog. It wasn't like, you know, an outage or something. something happens, you'd like work through it, you know, the engineering problem and then you're,

you kind of, it's behind you. But like, it was really cool to see like how many people, like, again, surprising like people just suck around. They're like, you know, they're like, oh yeah, FtX collapse. I guess that happened. I'm just going to keep shipping my code and like shipping my product because that's what they're focused on. So that was awesome to see. Like it really means that people do see something special about the technology and really want to continue like investing in it in it um and those are the folks that really create all the value like create the community they kind of carry the carry the the whole network um so i don't know it was uh it's cool to see them cool to shake hands with everyone i'm like grateful for everyone that's showed up anything anything from you about you

the evolution of the slawan community here yeah you know uh so we're told was saying about folks just continuing to build and ship. I think what what I've seen personally is like Solana Defi this year like all the stuff that was being worked on through 2022 like it just shipped this year. And it's been really incredible to see like new versions of Jupiter coming out and what they're able to do. Like MarginFi and some of the stuff they've been building. The new Orca product that's launching this week. Like there's a lot of really good sort of, I don't if you call it Defi 2.0, but like some new generation of like Solana Defi and like the work. squads has been doing on multi-sigs and like those hardcore real code-based projects like that was the real test for me when I was like oh all these folks are still are still fully committed to slana they're still building here they're still shipping awesome stuff and they they did what everyone always tells

you to do which is build through the bear but like they actually did it you know what what would you say is the thing that or the handful of things that really excites the salana community as a today? What are people looking forward to? I mean, like, I think you can kind of tell the focus between the Salana, like, conferences and Ethereum. There's a lot less scaling talks, right? Like, a lot of companies are focused on consumer and things.

And it's like, it's, I guess, our vibe. Like, I'm probably coming from, like, myself and from everyone else. Like, at least my message is we got scaling, taking care of. you don't have to worry about it. So, like, the kind of people who attract are the ones that at least believe in it or at least, like, can verify that or it mostly works and can focus on, like, consumer and products.

And that's pretty interesting. I think, like, there's a lot less, like, it's harder. It's really, it's much harder to build, like, consumer and products. It's easier to build infra, right? And to, like, raise for it. So a lot of the folks here, like, really grinding for product market fit, like, in, in the trenches really trying to get users. And a lot of the conversations that I have with doves are like,

and things that I'm not an expert in. I can tell them everything about like systems engineering and stuff like that. But what they really care about is how do I grow? How do I get like users? Where do I like, you know, like what advice can I give them in terms of product development? So that's like a ton of learning for me as well. What's your perspective, Austin? What's getting the excellent community excited these days?

Yeah, you know, there's a lot. I will say it's definitely the consumer-focused applications are like, there's this understanding in the Salon community that like we've been waiting for consumer-facing applications to hit. Like, oh, it's been a U.S. problem. Oh, it's been a U.I problem. Oh, it's a regulation problem. Oh, it's a scaling problem. Oh, there's no good self-custody solutions. Like that's been sort of, and this is not, you know, specific to any network, but there's sort of been like an excuse mindset, I think, in crypto for a number of years.

that like, oh, we were ready to build consumer applications, but USDC isn't available in New York, so suddenly we can't do it. And there's just a lot of founders attracted to the Slana ecosystem that sort of say, eh, I'm just going to build it. And like, it's not my perfect vision. Like, Sling launched yesterday here. It's peer-to-peer Venmo built on, you know, US dollar stable coins. And it's not available in New York. And they're just like, yep, it works in 30 countries, doesn't work in New York, like, too bad. And that is like a thing that is just like a, this is this vibe of just like build and ship and like we can figure it out later and something you see in a lot of web two companies is that people seem to be really worried about building

the perfect product before they ship it and there's like a willingness to experiment in production that's always been part of the crypto ethos for non-consumer applications and we're seeing that move more into the consumer side I think well is there what kind of consumer applications are going around that are worth noting if people want to go and explore some yeah so I would say Sling, which just launched is really pretty interesting. What Drip House is doing with sort of free NFT collections that are time limited as opposed to being number limited. Those to me are particularly interesting. What Helium is doing with their $5 mobile plan.

Fuse account abstracted wallet. It's pretty cool. So you can basically no seed phrase, you set up multiple devices that are part of your own multisig. So that's pretty cool to see. Like those are like the features that I think like take a lot of design work and folks to really think through all the really, really complicated UX challenges and like put it together in a product that improve security and usability. You rarely see both of those happening at the same time. Yeah, I've been impressed with squads V4. Yeah.

Cool. And absolutely. So every time I see you, you're running around pretty busy. Once breakpoint ends, what are you going to go do? What's like the first thing that you're going to focus on? I'm gonna hang out with my family and kids. I had to miss like Halloween with the kids, which is... Oh, no.

They were so sad that I wasn't there that they saved me candy. Oh, that's nice. That's nice. Okay, but what about inside of the Salana ecosystem? Like, what's first on your agenda here? I like, it's like, I'm... As a founder, right, you're often, like, do whatever, whatever is necessary, right? you jump in and you're like, I will, you know, help people to brand.

I'll, like, do messaging and stuff like that. The ecosystem is mature enough. Foundation is mature enough. And like all these things are actually getting filled with experts that are much better than me at like all the things except systems engineering. So I get to actually do some of that again. So I'm like working on the multiple concurrent leader design, like stuff like that. like trying to make sure ABIV2 and like all the runtime changes land and like a robust.

So like I get to nerd out, which is pretty great. Yeah. As founders grow and their project grows, they tend to go into just like an operations role where they're not really actually doing the thing that made them successful in the first place. They are now managing. How much of that? How much are you like managing and operating? That was like the last two years.

Like, you kind of like the last three years, I would say like as soon as we launched, I couldn't do systems work at all. Like I was like basically running around, you know, talking to everyone, almost like a sales role, I would say. And like now, like there's just so many other people that are much, that are much better than me that like all these other functions. So it's pretty great. Okay. So pivoting a conversation to something completely different. What would you guys say is the long term relations between Solana and Ethereum? Awesome. I'll throw this one to you.

I mean, I don't know exactly what... There's a lot of different ways that could go. I would say, to start, I don't think we directly view Ethereum as a competitor. Sure. Right? I think there's very different approaches to what's being built on Ethereum and what's being built on Solana. I know Tully's got some fun ideas about using Solana as a sequencer for an L2. But there's a lot...

you know, I think at the end of the day, like, what I would love to see is that folks who are using Ethereum for what Ethereum is great at, they use Solana for what's great at, too. Like, the classic example of this is there's no reason the Apecoin AirDrop should have been on Ethereum, right? Now, yes, you could talk about offloading that until there too, but you could have dropped ApeCoyne on Salana and people would have been able to spend basically zero dollars on gas fees and then bridge it back over at their convenience if they want to instead of paying $3,500 to claim anirdrop. So I think there's a lot of technology synergies that can happen between them. I hate to use that. Right. Yes word. Synergies. Yeah. What are you been thinking about? Yeah. What's your

I think like there's like this nice narrative that I keep in my head and I don't know how true it is. Is that like Bitcoin is like stateless money, Ethereum a settlement and then Solana's execution. It like sounds good in theory, but like there's obviously feature overlap, right? Like, Ethereum is also great stateless money, right? And Solana also implements settlement. And there's going to be tension between all those things, right? And that's fine, right? Like there's going to be competition.

Some people prefer one or the other. And like, to me, that's great because like that forces innovation. People have to think through hard problems and like figure out like, you know, how do I build maybe the same thing in a different network. It actually does spark ideas and moves the industry forward. So like, it'll be. It'll be competitive. It'll be somewhat like open source, you know, like BSD devs and Linux devs compete,

but they share ideas. It's all good, right? Yeah. I would also say that, like, we have this. Human brains are really bad at not competing when you put a chart up. So the fact that we have a market cap chart. Yeah, there's a leaderboard. There's a leaderboard.

Right? And, like, Bitcoin didn't need to fail for Ethereum to succeed. And Ethereum doesn't need to fail for so long. to gain mass adoption, right? And like, slana failing would not give Ethereum any more adoption. And globally, we're just dealing with such a tiny fraction of the pie that currently uses crypto that, like, there's all of this like PVP, one group punching each other in the face, like, that is just totally unnecessary.

And it's just because we have a leaderboard. Yeah, that's a good point. I've never really considered the leaderboard as like the instigator of so many fighting. I think like as long as people don't do personal attacks, people arguing about tech and vision, all that stuff is fine. I think that is like part of our search for truth, right? We're trying to figure out what makes sense, what doesn't. I don't see a world where Solana succeeds and Ethereum fails.

I think that's just like ridiculous, right? Like Ethereum is awesome. I think the reason that their technology is moving in that direction is because of the success that they have. They're kind of like in a specific spot. thought, if I was involved in the Ethereum community, I'd probably be arguing for the exact same design decision as they're doing now because that's the natural path right to go. So like, I think it's totally fine.

The competition's great, right? Like, I think it's awesome. You know, I hope like the optimizations that like Kevin Bowers did for like 256 bit multiplication end up, you know, increasing EVM throughput. That'd be great. Like, it's all open source code. It's all good. Sure.

I think there's one thing I've just learned from just chatting with the people here at Breakpoint is that there's a certain archetype of type of person that comes to the Salana community. And it's like this like low level devs, right? Like the X Tesla's, the X, like SpaceX type of the Google type of people that I, like, so you find some of these people in Ethereum, but really there's a lot of these people that Salana attracted that I don't think would have joined any community because of just the nature of how that blockchain was built versus Solana. There's something about like the way that Solana, the emphasis on hardware, for example,

has attracted a certain dev mindset that I think is kind of like the base of the Salana community. At least that's, that's my perception. Yeah, that's weirdly true and I don't fully understand why. Like, I mean, I'm one of those people. Like, I'm an embedded systems dev. I can't, like, maybe it's because like I like set the narrative and people like, oh, this guy sounds like me, but like, yeah, I don't know.

We're a bunch of like systems nerds. It's what we'd like to geek out of him. Anatolia, what's it like to be sort of like some sort of a community cultural leader? I can say more religious type figures and words, but I won't. But like the whole cult of Anatoly, what's that like to have? It's really weird. I'm blessed that it only occurs like during Breakpoint in a Salon event. If I go anywhere else, nobody cares.

Do you get recognized as to in real life out and about? No. No, no, like at all, which is awesome. Even at an Ethereum conference, like, it's great. So like, yeah, that is actually like, this is like the most I can like stomach it. I think like, I don't know, it's part of the job, I think. I hope I do my like drive people to go build better code, more open source code and kind of collaborate. So I hope that that message is landing.

Cool. beautiful. Anatoly, I know you got a hard stop, so I'm going to let you go, and then I'm going to ask some awesome, some technical questions. Awesome. Dude, thank you so much for coming on and speaking to the bankless nation. Thank you. Thank you for coming here.

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Uniswap, it's the world's largest decentralized exchange with over $1.4 trillion in trading volume. You know this because we talk about it endlessly on bank lists. It's Uniswap. But Uniswop is becoming so much more. Uniswap Labs just released the Uniswop mobile wallet for iOS. The newest, easiest way to trade tokens on the go. With a Uniswap wallet, you can easily create or import a new wallet, buy crypto on any available exchange with your debit card with extremely low fiat on ramp fees, and you can seamlessly swap on main net, polygon, arbitram, and optimism. On the Uniswap On the Uniswop mobile wallet, you can store and display your beautiful NFTs, and you can also explore Web3 with the in-app search features, market leaderboards, and price charts,

or use Wallet Connect to connect to any Web3 application. So you can now go directly to Defi with the Uniswot mobile wallet, safe, simple custody from the most trusted team in Defi. Download the Uniswap wallet today on iOS. There is a link in the show notes. Are you launching a token? Is it already live? How are you managing the legal and tax for providing token awards for your team? Toku simplifies everything about managing token grant compensation and you can get started with them for free. You'll have access to top-notch legal and tax support to handle the distribution and management of tokens for your team. Toku caters to every step in the process from user-friendly legal templates for granting tokens to tracking investing periods and calculating withholding taxes.

Toku understands every grant structure, token purchase agreements, restricted token awards, restricted token units, token options, and all the other ones. Toku is already simplifying this today for leading companies like Protocol Labs, D-Y-D-X Foundation, Mina Foundation, and many more. You can learn more about how Toku can help you streamline your token management and get started for free. Visit Toku at Toku.com slash banklist or click the link in the description below. Cool. Okay. So there's like just a handful of things that I know that people just like really give a fuck about here at breakpoint. A fire dancer I know is that perhaps at the top of the list. Yeah. And then there's a few other ones. But I kind of want to just like peel back.

and show whoever's interested where the rabbit holes are for Salana if they're trying to learn more rather than approaching Salana head on what are the rabbit holes? And so we'll start with FireDancer because I think that's the thing that everyone is super stoked about.

What is FireDancer and why is everyone so stoked about it? Yeah, so FireDancer is a new implementation of the Solana runtime and the consensus model and networking stack which is written in C. And so there's a few things here. One is C is just an incredibly fast perform in language for this sort

of thing. It's sort of the language of choice for like high frequency traders and high performance systems. But the other piece of it is it's just a complete rewrite. And so there are five years of development on the code base that Salana Labs originally created. That's just a spider web at this point, right? Like any code base has been worked on for that long. It's like trying to build a house when you don't know the end architecture of the house. And so just going through and starting from the beginning and saying we have a spec we can build against and we're going to build a client optimized to squeeze as much performance possible out. That's really the whole point of the fire dancer project.

Okay, so is it kind of like when you clean out your refrigerator, you take everything out of the refrigerator, then you clean the refrigerator and then you put everything back in rather than just like rearranging the, you know that metaphor? Yeah, I'd say actually, so a good metaphor would be it's like taking a house built in the 1800s down to the studs and then rebuilding the inside, right? You can retrofit in new electricity without taking the walls out. You can put in a new bathroom. But realistically, if you want to turn a really old house and they do this all over Europe, right, into somewhere totally beautiful, you got to take it down to the studs.

You got to take it down to the walls. You put in new stuff and then like that space is totally transformed. And that's kind of the best analogy here for what Firedancer is. And there's a ton of different components of that. So the version that was announced to be on TestNet now is actually, we call it Franken dancer. it's a little bit of a Frankenstein of some of the code from the existing validator client with the parts that the team building FireDancer, which is a lot of engineers at Jump Trading Group have been building, that really speeds up certain components.

Okay. Right. And that's kind of what that TestNet version is today. Over time, and it's probably another year or two to replace all the bits of code that the Slana Labs team built. But we're getting to a place where there is enough performance, enough performance, improvements in those new components, that it's a real step function change. Okay. So just to kind of regurgitate everything, Bitcoin, one of the reasons,

one of my biggest critiques about Bitcoin is that it's got one client. And so if Bitcoin has a bug, then that bug is Bitcoin. And all of a sudden, you have to, like, socially engineer around that. Well, I think they've got like four clients, but only one client, 98% of Bitcoin runs one client. Right, right, right. And so it's what we all in, in order to have a robust, decentralized blockchain system, we need multiple clients. Yes. And so we have the Salana core client, which is like Solana number one, client number one, which I'm guessing is like the vast majority of the clients that run Solana in the past.

Right. And so now we're working on FireDancer, which is a client number two. But it's not just, and so like you use the spec of the first client to generate a shape of what the next client will be, fire dancer, what it will be. So we're pointing towards the same truth that is Solana, right? Yeah. And it's actually the third client. Third client.

Okay. So there's a client built by Gito. Right. And so... But that's just a fork of the first one. It's not... It is 90% similar code. And the main thing about the Gito client is it has the same upstream dependencies as the

Slana Labs client. Right. This is something that Ethereum has done quite well is that not only other several different clients, but those clients are written in different programming languages. So, for example, if a bug is triggered in the networking stack software of a library that's shared between two clients, even if two different teams wrote those clients, like you have two different implementations of a Rust client, that upstream dependency can still cause a bug. And so the nice thing about having one in C and one in Rust is that those are totally different code bases. Right. So that's kind of like, and I think this is something where Ethereum has, I think it's two or three.

They technically have like six clients, but most of them share the same. dependency tree. There's two or three different code bases. And so that's really what the difference with FireDancer is, is it's not just a new client. It's a new dependency tree. Sure. Okay. And so that's where you get that multi-client robustness, at least now with two different clients. Like the Gito client and the Slana Labs client provides social robustness. And the FireDancer client provides technical robustness. Sure. Except the FireDancer client is also supposed to be like much more performant. Yes. How would you, can you measure that? Is there a way to like put numbers behind that?

Putting numbers behind anything in crypto is always a mistake. What I'll say is that there are key components of the fire dancer stack that are 100 times as performant as the existing one. That doesn't mean the network is going to be 100 times faster, right? But what it means is that, you know, it's called Andal's Law, right? If you have 10 components in the system and you make nine of them 100 times faster, the system is still the same speed. You take that last one you make it faster.

It's a lowest common denominator, the least performant part of the system. the system is the bottleneck. And so, you know, we expect to see FireDancer be probably an order of magnitude change in the Slana Network at start. But that could go up from there depending on a whole bunch of different things that we have to see in prod. So why would anyone run the old client when they were just, they could just run FireDanser instead?

So what will probably happen. And, you know, it's all up to the community and how they decide to run things, of course, but very similar to what the big Node operators do in Ethereum, where they run one client in primary and they run one client. client in failover. And so this was, you know, if there's a bug in Prism or Lighthouse, the other one can take over. And so for Solano, what we would see is because Ethereum is targeting a certain performance threshold, right? And it's easy because all the clients are building to what's a fairly low performance threshold. With Fire Dancer, they're trying to squeeze as much performance out

of possible out of the same hardware that everyone else is running. And so what we expect to see is that probably everyone will run the Fire Dancer client in primary configuration. And if there's a a bug in the network, it would basically fail back into the Slana Labs version. And yes, that will certainly be a performance hit. Right. You might see fees on the network spike because there's now a 10,000 transaction capacity as opposed to 100,000 transaction capacity. You can think of it almost as falling into like a safe mode. Right. Yeah, yeah. So like when with the escalator breaks, it turns into stairs. Yeah. Yeah. The analogy on Ethereum here is that, you know, you can you can have execution continue even though finality can't be reached. Right. Right. And that

happened a few times this year for Ethereum, and it provided a worse experience, but it wasn't a whole stop of the network. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Okay. All right, so that's FireDancer. Like, I kind of am categorizing it my brain as like when the Ethereum community got all excited about like 1-559 or even like the merge. This is like kind of just like we're getting a protocol upgrade.

Yes. So this is about like a comprehensive new like Solana 2.0. Is it fair to call it like Solana 2.0? I think if you add FireDancer plus runtime version two. Okay. That's when you, it's fair to call it Salon 2.0. Like the, the best analogy I would say right now is like we're building the most performant gasoline car imaginable. Sure.

And eventually with Runtime V2, it switches over to being like an electric power train. Okay. What's a runtime V2? So Runtime V2 is a whole bunch of improvements in the Sala runtime. This is probably about a year out, right? So just to set expectations on this. Okay. So we have 1559 and then the merge is in like a year.

Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So Runtime V2 is a whole bunch of optimizations in terms of reducing memory copies in the runtime. We'll make just things snappier. But they'll include type rich bytecode format, which will allow a bunch of programs to talk to each other more easily with less plumbing. And so that'll improve the efficiency of, you know, a core component of salinas you use Jupiter aggregator and it'll hit six different markets. That'll make something like that much less compute expensive to run on the network. There's also a bunch of zero. knowledge proof and different curve support that gets added into runtime v2. And so some of that stuff is in the network today. So like 116, which just shipped includes a ZK proof component for confidential transfers, which was demoed as part of the token 22 spec.

A lot of words we can get into there. But, you know, runtime V2 is sort of like the closest thing to a Solana 2.0 that we have on the roadmap. Okay. Okay, cool. The confidential transactions, can you explain a little bit more about that? Is that like privacy built into the base layer? Yeah, exactly. So, well, BaseLayer is a tricky question. So there is something called Token 2020,

which is a token program on the network. Right. Nothing to do with the conference or the events. No, no, nothing at all. It was just a spec that was finalized in the year of 2022 and then chips in 2023, right? It's the sort of thing there. Sure, sure, sure. So Token 2020, it's a program on the network. And Sala is built on this idea of program reusability. Right. So Token 2022 or the actual token program that everyone uses to send tokens around, that's not part of the base layer of Sala technically. It's part of the Salaana program library, which exists on top of it.

And it's no more... It's a file that you can open? Yeah, I mean, like, I guess in Ethereum terminology, it's enshrined, right? But it's not actually part of the code base, right? If you download the Salaala validator package, it's not like it forces you to use the token program. That's like a choice a user can make when they want to transfer stuff.

Token 2020 is a new version of that token program. You can think of it, of as like, you know, upgrades that have happened to like the, the NFT standard on Ethereum over the years is like we have this version, now we have a new version, now we have a new version, right? And part of that includes confidential transfers. And so what that means is that you and I could transact and the world would be able to see that we transacted, but it couldn't see the details of what actually transferred between us.

And there were a bunch of basically system calls that had to be integrated into the actual runtime layer, the program layer of Solana. to make that possible. Okay. All right. So that's Firedancer. Runtime V2. And Runtime V2 is about a year out.

Yeah. What else is worth bringing surfacing about just like the significant things that are getting people excited about, Solana? Yeah. I mean, Token 2020 is one where there's a lot of features that I think are going to be really powerful for folks.

There's a whole trend in sort of enterprise space nowadays of like permissioned environments, right? And the thesis right now is that very much like in the old days of email server, is like, well, if you're a company, you have to run your own email server. And we saw the early version of this where it was like, oh, like, I need an Ethereum fork from my company, right? I can't run on main net, right?

And now the version of that is like, I need my own permissioned L2. Right. And in all those situations, it still requires running a bunch of infrastructure. And so token 2022 has things like transfer approvals and transfer hooks built into it. So I, as an issuer of, let's say, a tokenized fund can say, only wallets that I've whitelisted can actually buy and sell and interact with this. And the cool part about that is it's actually fully composable with the existing defy ecosystem. Right.

So you may be able to go on, you know, mango markets or Jupiter aggregator or whatever, you know, defy marketplace you love and say, oh, I want to actually interact with this fund in addition to buying tokenized Bitcoin or some dog money or something like that. And if you're, if you've gone through a KYC process with them and they've approved you, you'd be able to participate in that token. So it's kind of mixing that idea of like fully permissionless defy and the regulated permission defy into the same user space. Right.

And that I think is a much better experience than saying like, oh, if I want to trade X or Y or Z, I have to go to this permissioned environment. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah. So it's allowing for a permissioned environment to exist inside of the larger environment rather than having that to be like an island over there. Right. Right.

There's just simple like not compliance, but just like. If this, then that statement that keep rules enforced. Yeah, it's sort of just like how Circle technically has freeze authority on all USDC. They could, using token 2022, someone could create a stable coin that's a whitelisted stable coin, right? That's like, oh, you know, a classic example of this is actually like Andrew Yang's like Burrow Buck's idea back from the campaign, which was like, oh, let's switch over like our food stamp program to saying like, you know, we both live in Brooklyn.

Like if you're on an assistance program in Brooklyn, you can only spend your dollars in merchants in Brooklyn, right? Someone could do something like that fully on chain and it would be able to sit in their wallet just like any other token would, but they could only spend it at select merchants. Right. Because the criticism of these programs is everyone just buy stuff on Amazon. Right. And it doesn't help the local economy. You can think of all of those types of things you could now build using the token 2022 standard. Cool.

Okay. All right. What else? What other rabbit holes are worth illuminating? Oh, man. Let's see. So I think we are seeing a lot more of interest in sort of Salana L2s for different types of use cases. I thought that's just like a juxtaposition that shouldn't exist. Salana L2s. So L2s on Ethereum are used for scale. Right.

L2s on Solana will likely be used for specific types of applications and execution that requires differences at the hardware level. So a great example of this is something like the render. network, right? So render is a GPU rendering network. It's used for everything from like people style, like very complex 3D renders to like AI models and training. Just like a GPU form in the cloud kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. But there's a lot of ways to do this. One is like you just say, oh, people have their systems and, you know, there's an off-chain database of how performing your computer is versus mine and the render network assigned stuff. Another way to do that is to literally run an L2 on Solana that says

you can only be a part of this L2 you can only be a validator on this L2 if you pass a certain benchmark. And that means basically like if I go by a super high end GPU, I'm now permissionlessly and decentralized added to this L2 because the L2 is not for

scale. It's to prove that I have a powerful enough GPU to run these rendering jobs. This sounds like a hardware, instead of like an app specific chain, it's a hardware specific chain. Exactly. Exactly. Right.

You could also see someone building, I've joked for a long time that someone should build Slowana, which is just a slower version of Solana that requires less bandwidth. Right. That, you know, if what you want to do is you want to be able to basically verify just small pieces of state, like DA sampling kind of sucks. Sure. Right. Like, it's better than nothing, but like like clients are not full nodes. Right.

That's like a full statement in itself. But you could build an L2 that actually was just a slower. version of Solana that could be used for different types of transfers, right? If you're trying to run, you know, like we have a lot of nonprofits like that want to actually be able to do payouts via Salana in, you know, developing countries, right, for their nonprofit work where there's really great connectivity, but there's not necessarily great bandwidth. You could see them running an L2 environment to basically slow down the network. So if more people want to be able to run validators or just state proof generators for that network, they could do something like that without necessarily

the system requirements of Solana. Now, is this more of like a thought experiment or actually a practical idea? So the first one with hardware-specific requirements is becoming real. Sure. On the second one... Mainly slow-lana. That sounds like closer just like, we could do this. So actually, Code Wallet has kind of built that.

They've built themselves a whole sort of L2 architecture on Solana that they use to actually make sure that they can still do transfers if the Solana main net is ever offline. Okay. Right? So there's those use cases. too where they're maintaining their own Merkel trees and therefore they can update a bunch of stuff sort of offline and then they can always push those changes once the network you know block production resumes okay cool so it's a little bit a sovereignty play yeah yeah there's lots of those types of

applications and i think most sovereignty solutions can be solved on the l1 with token 22 right but you know there's some other applications where you know like like roon was talking about for maker they expressly want the ability to hard fork. Right. And they want that ability to hard fork because they're trying to build a hundred year Dow and they have to assume that somewhere

in the next 100 years the software is going to get hacked because the only sure bet you can make in software is that something someday will get hacked. Sure. Right. Enough monkeys and enough typewriters will hack Bitcoin.

Right. That's a good bit. Yeah. Okay, so there's so many different things about BreakPoint that like I've been learning that like Solana is like pushing the frontier of in of its own, in of its own right. But one thing that I noticed that Salon is really behind on is governance. Governance conversations are so early. What's your perspective?

Like, just give us a sit-rep on just like what your perspective is on Salana governance and why this conversation is coming about now. So Salana governance runs in a very different way than I think other networks run. A lot of networks either have no governance, they have direct token-weighted governance. Right. And Salana, the validators or the group, that vote. And they vote proportional to their stake weight. So the idea is that if a validator votes in a way you don't like, you can stake to another validator instead.

And considering the Solana unbonding period is about two and a half to three days, it's a pretty quick operation to change that around. This is partially coming into effect because, you know, we launched Simdi programs this year, which is basically like EIPs

and ERCs. There's now like an analogy to those programs on Solana, which is awesome to see. The Governance conversation is coming up because we have multiple validator clients. And suddenly there is no single source of truth. Right. Like, you know. There's no answer to the question, what is Solana?

Yeah, exactly. Solana, for the longest time, was a GitHub repo, right? And Ethereum now is not a GitHub repo. It's several different GitHub repos that you can all run. And there has to be a process where if a chain, like the Prism team can't just Yolo a change. Right. Right. The lighthouse team can't just yolo a change.

Right. That's called the fork. Yes, exactly. Right. And so the governance is sort of a side effect, I think, of a lot of just that process of saying we need a more formal process to accept a proposal because now the Fire Dancer team, the Gito team, the Sala Labs team, the Salaala Labs team, the SIG team that's building another validator client and then whoever comes later, the tiny dancer team building like clients and state proofs, they all have to, if not agree, at least know this thing is going to happen and have some sort of majority agreement on it. But the true adoption, I mean, this is something that. that like, I think, you know, I was talking with Justin Bonds about this, and he was really surprised about this initially. Salon's governance is actually fairly robust in the feature activation and adoption. So a new feature or new version of the network cannot be activated unless 80% of the stake

upgrades. So we have really good implicit governance now. We don't have good explicit governance. And that's kind of where all those conversations are focused on now. Right. And so I think that in the Ethereum world, the correlate would be like the all-core devs call or like the Tim Bako or like, hey, there's this EIP, let's talk about it for like six months or something like this. Right.

This is the part of Solana that is like being developed now in its early stage. Yeah, I would say that was it was weaker in the last two years, but like Simdi64, which was transaction receipts to start being able to do state proofs and to be doing light client work. That was a three month, I think there's 500 comments in the GitHub repo about engineers going back and forth around like architecture and design for this stuff. but that really has just been built out in the last nine months. I think a lot of that work beforehand was happening in Discord, and Discord is very hard to follow, like moving to GitHub and moving to a full- governance and Discord's bad.

It's bad. Discord is an amazing place to solve immediate problems. It's a very bad place to solve long-term problems. Right. It's too fast. Yeah, yeah. You need a slower forum for that. You slow Lana for that.

Exactly. Okay, awesome. This has been great. It's kind of same question that I asked Anatoli. once a breakpoint is all set and wrapped, like what's on your focus? What's on your agenda? Yeah. So for me, one of the big things I'll be working on next is the token 2022 rollout, you know, ecosystem coordination. We did a bunch of this work on state compression last year when that rolled out, making sure there's good wallet support, making sure there's good ecosystem support.

There's a bunch of teams working on a cool proposal for an RWA standard now. And so I'll be working and managing a bunch of that process as well. And, you know, the events team is going to start working on Breakpoint in 2024. Yeah, when is that? So we're actually doing Singapore next year. Singapore. Why Singapore? So we've wanted to take Breakpoint to Asia for a while. You have to plan really far out for Asia, right?

The venues book up really quickly. And so we were looking around and we were saying, like, you know, we were basically too late to do it in 2023. And like the visa challenges of shifting a whole new location, we're pretty high. So Singapore just seems like a really great. place to do it. We're doing it right after token 2049. So a lot of the folks who are coming out for token 2049, they might stay for F1 anyway. And so it's sort of, you know, you can, you can crypto math it and say, well, I've already bought one plane ticket, so it's free to go to breakpoint. That is some real crypto math for sure. Awesome. And when is that? September 19th to 21st.

Okay. All right. Sometime around token 2049. I've actually never been to Asia. And so. Really? Yeah. Uh-huh. Singapore's great. Yeah. It's, um, Singapore's a, like, a really interesting place where things like food and ubers are super cheap and then the flights there or not. Once you get there, yeah. So I think it works well for budgeting, right? It's like, oh, okay, I know what I have to do to get there. It's a super friendly place for visas for folks around the world. That's a big thing. We have a ton of developers in India and Southeast Asia that have trouble getting visas in other countries. Yeah, of course, of course. I know it's so far, super far out in advance, not totally a year out until like 11 months, but why might

want to be excited about Breakpoint 4 in Singapore. Yeah, so I think what you'll probably see is the conference is a little shorter. It's two full days of programming. We've done three most years. We did four this year. It's three this year, correct? We got four this year. Four this year.

Oh, gosh. Wow. It's wild. It started Monday. It ends on Thursday? Yeah. Well, we go the 31st through the third, our full programming days. Okay.

So it started yesterday, which is Tuesday, and we'll end on Friday. Yes. Okay. But, you know, we had three days of. programming leading up to it from other groups, which is awesome to see. So for Breakpoint in 2024, I think you're going to see a lot more of sort of, what are businesses building on Salana, right? A little bit less of a developer-focused conference and a little bit more of a business-focused

conference that sort of fits the vibe of Singapore. And we're supplementing that with sort of a rebuild of what hacker houses have been to do a lot more developer-focused hacker houses where they feel more like mini-conferences. And so instead of trying to bring, quite frankly, the network's big enough now that we don't have to bring everyone together for one thing. We can actually have multiple things. This is something the Ethereum community has done very well, whether there's certain ETH fill in the blank events that are more business oriented and certain ones that are more technical. Right. Awesome.

I've learned quite a lot. So I've enjoyed my time here at Breakpoint. And thank you for guiding me down the corners of Salana. If people want to learn more or be pointed towards Salana at Breakpoint 4 in Singapore, where should they go? Yeah, so all of the sessions are recorded and uploaded to YouTube. So the Slana YouTube channel will have every recording from Breakpoint within about two hours of the session finishing. Wow, wow, that is some Solana type culture right there. Yeah, we worked really hard on that.

I was joking with our video director that two days ago I got a Google alert that my video from my talk at Consensus. is finally online. Wow. Five months later. So none of that, right? As a content guy at conferences, I'm always extremely frustrated. I'm like, I see you recording. It can be on the internet.

We have the technology. We can do this. Yeah. So I think that's like a real big thing for us. We know it's expensive to get to Breakpoint. We know a lot of people don't have the budget this year. We really want to make sure that the experience of not being at Breakpoint is at least as educationally valuable as we can make it.

So that's the hope. Breakpoint 2024, I want us to try and start selling tickets before the end of the year. So hold me to that internet. The internet. Awesome. Well, Bangladesh Nation, this has been a little trip down a breakpoint three here in Amsterdam. Awesome. Thank you so much.

Thanks, David. Appreciate it. Appreciate you coming. Of course.