Bankless - Do We Hate Solana?

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

The truth on how we feel about Solana.  Today we define the fundamentals, compare other networks, and ultimately share how we think SOL stacks up in the Layer 1 race.  ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT  ------ 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  ⁠  👾GMX | V2 IS NOW LIVE  https://bankless.cc/GMX  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo    🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE ⁠https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Intro 01:41 Addressing The Criticism 07:32 Defining The Fundamentals 14:05 Comparing Other Networks 19:11 Takes from Crypto Twitter 22:55 Our Thesis 26:19 Solana UX 30:37 Ethereum's Flaws 33:38 Discord Reactions ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

The bull market's in, and when you use salon, it's got fantastic user experience. Let me just say that. One of the best wallets come out of the community, the phantom wallet, fantastic user experience, right? It feels very good to get a transaction through and to pay like, you know, micro fractions of a cent. And to do many of the things that the original Ethereum vision promised. All right, David, so we put out a bankless stakes yesterday and got a lot of feedback from that on Twitter, YouTube comments.

And actually, the highest signal for me. me is the bankless citizen discord. Yeah. So that's where, you know, bankless citizens really are. You know people are real there. Yeah. And so some of the feedback is basically like, I guess I would summarize it. Hang on. Can we start with what's the bankless takes episode? What is the structure of this? Yes. The bankless takes episode is a episode that you and I kind of formulate based on the last week of our hot takes, things that we're thinking about or the conversations. Not even hot takes, just, just takes opinions, stuff we're thinking about. opinions and the conversations that might be going into crypto Twitter. I think when we were preparing this week's takes agenda, it was basically like what I really cared most about was talking about

the bullcase for Ethereum. Right. And how it feels like it has a lot of strengths and, you know, 2K is undervalued, like going to the bull market. So that was my main take, the main thing I wanted to talk about. Also on the menu, there was a big Twitter discussion. about Salana. There was a conversation about Salana Duning and flippinging. We had a discussion about this and I was like, David, I don't even know if we should talk about this at all.

What specifically, the Salana element. Yeah, the Salana element. Because the Eith element was Eith's fundamentals are really strong and also fundamentals are in understanding them are important. And one of the meta-conversations that was happening in the Twitter sphere

was the back and forth between Fisci and Santiago on the podcast. And Fisci was all about, like, you just said that Solana has a 20% chance of flipping Ethereum. What fundamentals are you basing that on? Basically saying, like, you can't, you are just making this up because how can you not?

Because of the fundamentals are missing. So I totally understand how they were related. And that's why we ended up including it. The reason that I was cautious about that is because, like, that can feel like punching down or that can feel like dunking. And that can feel like negative hate content. Right.

Because it's our takes, because it's our opinion. Yeah, when you're saying that like this one thing is great, but this other thing that the market thinks is great and that a whole bunch of users think is great from an asset value of cruel perspective, this other thing like is maybe isn't so great. Right. The incumbent, the big one is fantastic. And the disruptor, the smaller one, the one tenth of the size of the one is shitty and bad. So I didn't want to, like my instinct was we shouldn't include it. Like we shouldn't talk about it because just the perception is you're propping up one thing and you're punching down the other. Right.

When really I think we ended up including it. And the case for that was basically, well, it's all the same conversation about like what are crypto fundamentals. Right. And that is the topic. So like part of the Twitter conversation here, this is a tweet from Italio, just watch the latest bankless HQ episode and quote, It's Salon is more narrative than actual fundamentals. One of us may have said that, probably said that. And he goes, you have an L2 and 527, you have an L1 and 527 L2's stuck in a vicious infrastructure cycle,

but that's fundamentals for these guys. I'm going to put Ryan in the Bit Boy category from now on. So I had a nice little conversation with this guy on Twitter, and I said this. Ethereum was also more narrative than fundamentals last cycle, but by fundamentals, I mean profitable blocks-based sales. And I define it as such in the episodes. It's fine. If you disagree, I could be wrong. It's a bankless takes episode. So we give our hot takes. One thing I'll just say there is, like, that's what the episode is. It's our hot takes. I don't know that is this episode format a good idea. It's in the name. It's in the name. I don't know. Some people like it. Some people like the space. I guess some, the spice. I guess some people. people get upset when we give kind of our raw takes. But that's the episode format. And he goes, he continues. For whatever reason, your hot takes about any network that's not ETH, L2s are just bad

takes. I understand we are all biased towards something, but come on. I asked him, what am I most wrong about? Would you say he's the entire thesis around Ethereum Layer 2s versus Solana? And I said it's an investment thesis. You're welcome to have your own argue for it, right? like that's it. It's an investment thesis. I think the quest here is, and maybe this was kind of lost in translation or just like the perception of us continually dunking on Solana, is I am like, and you are

trying to understand how to value assets in this space. Yes. It's been one of the longest pursuits of what we've been trying to do in this space. I think that's important to have some sort of consensus take that we all as an industry and that everyone like looking at these assets looking to buy them has a framework for valuing them because if we don't okay any pump and dump like memetic narrative thing can go from like one to 2000 20,000 and then back to zero and it's all memetic it's all a bunch of doge coin and my hope for this industry is that we get beyond memetic pricing and we actually, just like other capital assets in the real world, we have some takes on how to value the space. And yes, we might not get it right. We have to change

this over time, but that to me is like a sign of maturity. And it's important. So I'm always looking for it. And I'm open to adjusting what the fundamentals are and how to value the space. But like, if we don't have some sort of foundation for how we talk about these assets and and value them, aren't we just falling prey to whatever like pump and dump up narrative, memetic thing exists? We're just a bunch of memes, aren't we? You give room for things that absolutely have zero fundamentals to pretend that it does have fundamentals.

And one thing I think one mistake or just problem that we produce when we do these bankless takes episode is that there's a lot of motivations about like, hey, why are we saying the things that we're saying or doing the things that we're doing that aren't totally up front because people haven't been listening to bankless forever and they don't understand like David and Ryan's emphasis on fundamentals or the motivations. And then we are also the opinionated media company who's got opinions about stuff. And so those two particles combine and it results in the effect of just like Ethereum's got the fundamentals. That's why we emphasize it. That's why we talk about it. It's good for the industry that the number two

blockchain has very strong fundamentals. That's why I believe in the flippinging. And that's that's just grounding crypto in reality, which it's been disconnected for for almost its entirety of its existence. These are the things that we want to see more of in the industry. And then when we see like so much just like narrative excitement around Salana and we don't see that same grounding in reality, it turns into us punching down. I want to I want to kind of flip that a little bit because it is true. And this criticism is important that we hear and receive that is just like we have a narrow definition of fundamental. right now. Yeah, more narrow than what people like to accept, or want to accept or agree with. So, like, the narrow definition of fundamentals that we were talking about in that episode

is basically like capital asset fundamentals. It's like P&L. It's like, I'm under the, like, belief right now. I think that we can start to value our layer one assets based on how much cash it actually throws out. Like discounted cash flow, like school of finance. Other people will say, what the F are you doing? Like one, it's way too early to do that. This asset class can't be valued like other asset classes yet. We're still trying to figure this out. And so don't even talk about, you know, block space profit or revenue or anything like that. Doesn't matter. Another school of thought will say, well, actually, we don't want any of these things to be profitable at all. It's a fantastic strategy for a blockchain to subsidize user fees in order to get more users

through issuance. Like, that's a brilliant way to do it. It's called business development. It's called growth. And why are we getting on our high horse when we have, like, you know, the population of a mid-sized U.S. city using crypto right now, right? And, like, we're actually, the prize is millions of users. And so the actual fundamentals here should be.

be user experience, like active users, like the apps, the dev teams, like is it, is it actually going to work and onboard people? And you, a bunch of ETH holders and Maximilus, are narrowly defining it as how much block space you sold. And like, who cares? It's all about network effect and users. And people are using chains like Salana. And they're like, this is better. Right. It feels good. It's way better. It's way better than Ethereum, for instance, Ethereum Layer 1 main chain from a Ux perspective, and they're seeing the fragmentation of layer 2s, they're being like, so this is your great solution to that? That's what they mean by fundamentals. And we have a more narrow definition when we were talking about it in yesterday's

episode. Okay. I think that our narrow definition of fundamentals is correct in, well, it's just correct. In the longest of terms, it becomes more relevant, and I will take the fact that in the near term, that it doesn't really matter. It's more noise. And, you know, if you invested based off of like blocks-based sales or fundamentals, you would not have made nearly as much, you would have underperform the market probably in the fullness of time because it's all narrative-based, right? And so there's this era in crypto in which narrative really, really matters because this is

very young industry. And we're all trying to price in the future when there's such little amount of reality grounding us. But I think that's what people stumble on David when you say it's all narrative-based, right? And that's what people are jumping on. And I think justifiably so in some cases. Bad U-X is not just a narrative. Like, that's a fact. Yes.

Yeah. Paying $10 for a transaction, like when you're just trying to send money from one place to another, that's not a narrative. That's a fact. Yeah, but it's like it's derived. The whole idea of block space sales is, to me, like a first principles version of valuating fundamentals. And I accept that it's like, that's a narrow way of doing this. Like, just having good U.X is something that people experience, like, and firsthand, and that turns into their version of reality, which is totally, like, valid.

And it's, like, secondary to the fact, like, that's great that you have UX, but does it translate into block space sales. The reason why blocks-based sales are so important is that one of the core tenets of the bankless thesis is positive economics. Because positive economics means that your system is going to stand the test of time. It captures more value than it leaks. If your system leaks more value over time, then in the fullness of time, it will eventually not work. It will eventually dissipate. It might be, if you only leak a little bit of value, it might work for like, I don't know, a very long time, thousands of years, perhaps. And so granted that there is wiggle room here with how fast your system leaks value versus how fast it doesn't. Like Terraluna leaked way too much value way too quickly. But still, the point stands that there's this very concrete way of valuating systems, which is, is it positively economic? Does it capture more value? And then you can say like, okay, well, Solana, yes, it leaks value, it inflates. But look what you get from that inflation.

You get like super strong U.S. you get instant transaction finality, you get like insane throughput. And so, yes, like Solana is not positively economic now, but what it is now is fantastic UX. But I would still call that like a second order of fundamentals. Does that make sense? Is that a fair take? I think so. It was like, I think another way to like maybe frame this and clarify it is, um, I think some people still do a lot of equating with like the network and the asset in all cases, right? And this probably comes from Bitcoin where Bitcoin Network and the Bitcoin asset, they're much more like singularly unified because, I mean, previously for a very long time until we had like, you know, all of the NFTs and

BRC 20s that are being spun up on Bitcoin. There were no apps. The only app was, you know, sending Bitcoin from one person to another. That was the only app. And so Bitcoin, the network, and Bitcoin, the asset were kind of like synonymous. When we get into a smart contract world, and chains like Ethereum or chains like Avalanche or Salon or any of these or Cosmos, right? You can have a disconnect between the network and the value that is created on the network for users and the value accrual mechanisms of the token themselves. So like the token is not the network and the network is not the token, right? And like I think this is an important investor sort of take in general.

like again, maybe not in the early stages, but in like kind of the later stages of things, you can have a network that creates so much value for the world. I think of networks like, you know, like Napster, for instance, like peer-to-peer file sharing. A lot of like, quote-unquote, value was created. Did any of those on the periphery? Yeah, the value was created at the margins. Yes. Did they capture that value in the form of an equity or a token or an investable asset? No. So they had value creation without like value capture. And my biggest worry in general about some crypto assets is even if they create value, it doesn't necessarily mean that the thing that you're buying is able to capture that value. Right, which is like the big problem with uniswap right now, right? Creating

infinite amounts to value and then is like, you know, kind of a shit token price of money. I'm sensitive to it too because it was honestly, it was a huge problem for Ethereum. Right. Oh yeah. In 2019. And so what in 2019, there would be a common retort from the Bitcoin community of basically like, eth is just useful for gas. Eth is gas. It's a velocity token. It's a payment token. It's not going to be able to be able to.

People are just going to hold the minimum amount of ether that need to use the applications. Right. And so the quest, like for me, since that time is to actually understand, well, okay, well, why is Bitcoin even valuable in the first place? And, like, I feel like I have a framework for understanding that, like, you know, monetary premium primarily. Like reservation demand. Yeah.

And then, okay, why is Ether going to exhibit value accrual at all? Well, you've got monetary premium, but it's also a capital asset, right? So it's actually throwing off cash. And so, like, I just apply that same framework to other layer one assets. And anyway, just because the network, the network could be absolutely fantastic. And, like, I think it's fantastic that Tron is being. used in the way that it's being used to make people more bankless. I think that, like, Cosmos in the way that it's being used is, like, fantastic. I think that Solana is also, you know,

fantastic to the extent that people are using these apps and the user experience as well. But the question is, will the token crew value? One reason I actually, like, jettisoned from the Cosmos community was, like, I didn't see the value accrual around the atom token. And, like, to be honest, I still don't. So nothing against Cosmos, like, it's fantastic. I just don't understand how the investment is good. And sometimes I think people, like, put both hats on the same time in that, are you saying this, you know, the Slauna network is bad or doesn't have fundamentals? No, the network can have fantastic U.X and fundamental, all of these things. The question in the episode we were trying to answer yesterday was like, well, how does value accrual work? And I still have a lot

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get a referral link to lower fees for you and your referrals. Try out GMXV2 now at app.gmx.com. Now onto the show. This is a tweet that I put out after my Kyle Somani, the floor is Montchularity tweet. And so I kind of did the same thing for Solana. It's like, the floor is transaction fee revenue. and Solana is like the guy who's like not touching the floor, right? And so like the bankless take on this, you know, the me and you take is like you need transaction fee revenue to be sustainable. If we want our blockchains to stand this test of time, they need to be positively economic. And then like if you go and scroll down, you'll find like Solana community members seeing like,

wow, David's dunking on Ethereum, like kind of like flipping it on its head because transaction fee revenue to many in the Solana world is extraction. right? And so this idea of a positively economic blockchain is synonymous with extraction from its user base. At least that's part of like one of the shards of the Solana narrative that many people are coming out there. And so it's one of the same like muddling of like the investment case for Solana and the application layer for Solana. These things can be bullish separately. And you can be bullish on the Salana app layer because it's minimum viable extraction. And if you believe that, that's great because then applications get to use Solana,

they could have super fast transactions or everything is subsidized. But then using that same argument to say, and therefore sole token is bullish, is missing a link here because the sole token is specifically subsidizing the value of the application. It's a transfer of the value capture of the sole token to the value produced by the Solana application layer app. And like you get to say, like, well, the token is still going to go up in price

because like all the apps are built on Solana, Solana has more mind share. If it has more mind share, people are just going to buy it. It has inflows, more inflows, right? More buying inflows. But I would call it a narrative-based buy pressure because like, oh, the apps are on Solana, I'll buy soul.

Narrative-based, or you could call it, like if you're being generous, like a monetary premium too, right? I think kind of narrative-based is like proto-monetary premium. Like monetary premium at some level is just like everything left over. Right. after you take out the reservation demand for using the asset as a product, like, sorry, as a payment token to buy block space, and after you take out the discounted cash flow,

the cash that you actually receive as a staker of sole tokens, for instance. So it's just like this monetary premium category. And to me, that's like the narrative category, the meme category. Bitcoin has this, Ethereum has this, and it is the hardest piece to value. And so that's why I very, very much like blockchains that produce, you know, cash, because you can kind of like evaluate that. The memetic layer ought to be based on top of the fundamentals, right? That we don't want memes for memes sake.

That's like Dogecoin. We want memes based off of measurable metrics that you can go take to like crypto skeptics out there and like here are the apples. Tradfye. It's like, hey, let me explain how. All the money out there. Right. Yeah. I do think that actually, you know, the floor's transaction fee revenue where Salana has no transaction fees, I think that it's actually a pretty good strategy not to try, like to not make its money on user transaction fees and to do it on the backside, which is like, I actually think if the bull case for sole tokens is that sole holders make money on MEV, basically, sole stakers make money in MEP. So that was one of the other tweets I got in trouble with the Salana community about is like, well, you know, Salon is just as extractive as Ethereum. It's just obviously.

skates it better. If Solana is positively economic because people are going to buy sufficient sole tokens so they can have priority MEV extraction, like that's just an abstraction in the backdoor. Extraction. Yes. It's basically like, again, it's just our thesis so far from what we've uncovered our journey, our crypto journey, for David and myself, and what we think we know is blockchains make money in two ways. They either sell blocks. This is how they produce cash. They sell blocks or they sell the ordering of transactions inside those blocks. What I'm saying is if Solana or both, yeah, or both. I mean, it is both. It's just about it is both. Where's the balance between those two? And Solana is being like, let's set transaction fees at zero. Right. And the

bull case for sole tokens themselves is you make money on the ordering of transactions inside the case. Now, if they don't make money on either, okay, then they're not producing cash. Negative economics. Yes, but it could still be worth something in that like narrative monetary premium mimetic value category or uses money category. But that's just based off of, that's based off of very little. That makes me scared. It makes me scared too. I just think that's the least. It's like I don't, not to invoke this, but just like when you're based off of something very little, very feeble, it can crumbling down, it comes crumbling down because there's not much holding it up there. Although somebody will listen to this and be like, this is coming from the ethos money guys? Like, really? Are you serious?

I mean, because we are proponents, we're proponents of monetary premium for ether of the asset. Yes. Because of the fundamentals, it's a result of not first. It's the tail wagging the dog. Wait, but I am bullish on Ethereum apart from the amount of cash that it throws off. Like, I'm, I'm bullish that it is an asset that's going to be used, let's say, throughout the Ethereum economy that includes a monetary unit, you know, we've called this economic bandwidth. A unit of account in OpenC, it is the collateral inside of MakerDAO and Ave. CDPs, like you take a loan against it, all of these things. That's like monetary premium.

People buy it and stake it for yields. Salana could have the exact same. It could have like zero cash flow ability, but just massive monetary premium. And sole tokens, it just uses collateral in the Salana ecosystem. And like, it could be worth hundreds of. billions of dollars based on that. Sure. It, it, it, on the triple one asset thesis, you're missing a leg. And in my mind, that's, that's, that's, that's just, so was Bitcoin. So is, yeah, that's, I also don't believe in

Bitcoin. Well, but that's the thing is, like, that's where I feel like then you have to compete as a monetary instrument. And then you really have to have, like, a strong, like, I'm a little Bitcoin or old school on this, where you have to have some sort of, like, monetary schedule and credibility, incredible neutrality. around that schedule so that it gains legitimacy and like it doesn't feel like some centralized actor can kind of tinker the monetary policy at any point of time yeah i mean i mean the salon like monetary policy is relatively stable it like it's inflating at seven percent or something a year and but who can change it how does that change i mean that's up to solonic governance which is also in a

relatively weak state but that's because it's like a newer system and they haven't really been focusing on governance to the degree that other systems have because they've been focusing on just like shipping, execution, execution. They've got, you know, parallel fee markets, right? Like local fee markets, parallelization. And so they've been doing the execution thing that Ethereum has been like, what are we going to do? We're going to do the research and governance thing. And I was like, well, Slaan's like, well, then I'm going to just execute. Well, that's, and that's where I think some of the pushback and criticism from bankless citizens. And also from people on Twitter is basically like, you guys are living in La La World. Right? Like, basically.

basically, yeah, like basically Ethereum, get your shit together. Like, UX sucks right now. Layer 2s are hard, this whole bridging experience, like, you know, connecting, doing all these things, changing networks and Metamask, it all kind of sucks. And what they're hearing is Ethereum, like, we'll abstract that away. It'll be better in the future, but like we're not talking about the future. We're talking about here and now. Right.

Bull market's in, yeah. The bull market's in. And when you use Salon, it's got fantastic user experience. Let me just say that. Like, Solana really excels from a user experience. It's one of the, one of the best wallets come out of the community, the Phantom Wallet, fantastic user experience, right? It feels very good to get a transaction through and to pay like, you know,

micro fractions of a cent. And to do many of the things that the Ethereum, like the original Ethereum vision promised, right? Collateralized lending, trading of perps. Like, it's all, it all feels very defy. and it feels like you're doing this without kind of a finance or centralized exchange you're holding your own private keys, right?

So people are saying that and they're like, okay, but this is here and now. And by the way, it has these aspirations and promises to massively, like, the monolithic chain strategy of the integrated chain strategy is like a strategy about fantastic UX for users.

And is it back to the Sioux? Like Ethereum has abandoned its users type of, it's that kind of take, I think. I don't think that's an unfair take. Yeah. And the way that I would describe this goes back to our episode with Micah Bolito when we had him on. It's like Cosmos is approaching the Trilemma, the scalability Trilma. From one angle, Ethereum is approaching it from a different angle.

And Slana is approaching it from the last angle, right? And I think it's you and me. We came into crypto in the moment where Ethereum kind of really set our vision for the world for this industry. and the Ethereum perspective of you come in to the scalability trilemma, you start with and do not compromise on decentralization, and then you figure out how to get the others. Whereas Salana is coming in, well, we're going to start with scale and we're going to figure out how to get the others.

Start with users and the apps. Start with users, right? More decentralized over time. As a BD system, as a BD strategy, great, killing it, works. It has already been working. The whole narrative around Salana is absolutely fantastic right now. it's like deafening. In the fullness of time, and this was my mic,

not my point to Mike, I'm sure you remember, it's in the fullness of time, where you elect to start on the scalability trilemma, and the thing that you enshrine is like critically important, and then you'll try and get the others, determines in the wholeness of time what your system looks like at completion. And so Solano, which compromised on decentralization

in the hopes of gaining it later, will look like a system that compromise on decentralization and tried to get it later. Ethereum is a system that did not compromise on decentralization, but tried to get scalability later, and then in the fullness of time, it will look like that. And maybe these systems really look very similar to each other, but the path dependency is critically important. Right now, Ethereum has to figure out bridging and chain abstraction. Solana doesn't have to do that because it's monolithic. Salana has to figure out decentralization. The problem that I see Salana

running into is it's got its high inflation rate of Solana at the same. time that is in a network infancy phase. I would prefer a network that would have a higher inflation rate while it didn't have a smaller set of actors than it would once have in the future. Because if you combine high proof of stake inflation with a low set of ecosystem participants, then you have the inflation going to an early set of adopters that become difficult to unenthrine. You're accidentally formally enthrine the early set of people because you compromise on decentralization. So I guess really the conversation is like, which is the easier problem to solve? Ethereum has decentralization solved.

Solana doesn't. Solana has Ux solved. Ethereum doesn't. Which is the easier problem? I think that I agree largely, but also like we run the risk of like someone hearing that and feeling like there's some hyperbole there. I wouldn't say that Ethereum, for instance, has decentralization solved, right? Comparatively solved. There's things like Lido, for instance.

There's like, and this is the case that, Yeah, but again, like we call Lido. Lido is a problem, but also just like in the grand scheme of things, we have to also parameterize how big of a deal that problem is. It is the next biggest problem for Ethereum decentralization. It is not the problem for the Ethereum decentralization. Here's the thing. What if the market doesn't really value decentralization?

Or what if it doesn't value the type of decentralization that Ethereum is putting forward? And I think this is Bankless Citizen Scott Connor, who we're talking to in Discord, made this, take on Twitter. What we are market testing now is how valuable decentralization actually is. And then he goes on and says Ethereum has one definition of decentralization. Solana has a slightly different definition of decentralization. This goes to the point that we are making the other episode where, like, to me, it's not so much about like the feature set of decentralization. We can now move towards how coercion, corruption, resistant is your protocol?

Look at, you know, do ofact sanctioned transactions actually make it through? but I think he has a valid point here. It's like, how much do users care about decentralization? And that is the, at some level, that's the meta test of crypto, right? Like, what is Bitcoin? It's a big decentralized consensus database. How much do people care about that? Well, what's the value of Bitcoin right now?

You know what I mean? Like, the entire crypto experiment is finding out some value proposition for decentralization. and like you're letting the market. So at some level, it's not about you and I saying like, we'd prefer that Solana did it this way or some other chain did it this way. And like that's the way Ethereum is doing it. It's not up to us. It's up to the market.

And I recall a conversation that you and I had recently with Chris Berniske. And he was basically like, guys, you have to be comfortable with the new cohort of people that join crypto, not sharing the values that you have. And I remember Which sums up the fight between the Solana community and the Ethereum community so well. I remember hearing that and just being like Yeah yeah but I want to convince them.

Right. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. The kids, like they need to appreciate centralization. He's like, no, just, I mean, you'll run your, you'll exhaust yourself doing that. You'll start to sound like shrill. You'll start to sound like okay boomer

if you try, if you overextend that. Which is definitely the reaction. that I tend to get when I give out my Salana hot takes on Bankless Banks, bank takes episodes on Twitter. There you go. That's it. And that's what I think the bankless community is saying to us and what some of our listeners are saying to it. And what I would say is message received. So here's Alchemy Greg here from the Bankless Discord saying, I'm honestly getting pretty tired of all the dunking and stoking and stoking the fire about Salana from the host. That's you and I, David, on crypto-twitter and in the show. I know they get triggered and are eth-maxis for life, but it's coming off pretty

unprofessional and childish. No reason both can't exist and succeed in their own right. We all survive the last bull. Let's try to bring more positivity into crypto. I appreciate more coverage of Salana on the pod, but it seems impossible for either of them to just say any positive, anything positive. Y'all talk smack, basically, is it? Let me just say something positive about Solana. Yeah. More private keys and more hands. Fantastic. Fantastic. Better user experience, onboarding more people to crypto. Fantastic. Many of the builders I've met in the space are absolutely fantastic. And, you know, I would say to Alchemy, Greg, you know, message received.

Yeah. Okay. So I think we could do. It goes back to one of the original things I was saying. It's like, well, we come in with a bankless takes episode. We've got our foundation. We've got our theses. And then we export them in a podcaster, YouTuber fashion out of our mouths into the

microphone. Yes. And we're sometimes like YouTube dance monkeys in order to like, you know, Yeah. Well, I mean, those are, those are, like, real, like, those are my takes. But there's are our takes. The delivery of them is sometimes, like, we just get riled up. You and I believe in stuff.

We really believe in stuff. Yeah. And that comes out by default. Like, it's kind of just like who we are. Yes. But I think as investors, we definitely have to be strong conviction, but, like, weekly held as well, right? You have to be ready to kind of, uh, you have to be ready to kind of, uh, In order to survive in crypto, you need to be able to call bullshit.

And perhaps our bullshit senses are not appropriate at this phase of the market. Because everyone that, like, we are right now in the inflection point between bear and bull. And according to, like, the words that we've used previously on the podcast before, all the tourists are gone. All the settlers are here. The people that are clearly in it for the tech are here, right? Right now in the market, it's going to be when that's the most true. and sometimes we still have our walls up

as if this was, we were still getting attacked by like the Terra Luna Frog Army. I just, which by the way, sometimes I do get like harassed by the Salana community. Like, oh,

you guys remind me of like getting the lunatics army on me. And so like, like we also, we need to do better in our reflections and statements about Solana. And it's impossible to ask like the Solana community homogenously to do the same.

But like, yo, sometimes just like being on Twitter and then having takes about like an antagonistic tribe, you attract some people who are just insane people. And then the same kind of thing with a bank with Dow incident. There's like real signal and then it just gets lost to like the lunatic margins of every single tribe. Yeah.

Well, what I would love to hear from Salana as it matures, and by the way, Ethereum, if you go back to like the beginning of the last cycle, Ethereum was pretty shit at like talking through how you value ETH. but there wasn't a good framework there wasn't a good kind of understanding of it there wasn't a good narrative of it and like I think we helped with that and trying to like understand it I would love something similar

through this it would be a bear it would be a bull market success story for me if we came out of this and we had something a bit more substantive for value accrual for the sole token all right so your network can have millions of users and that can all be

fantastic and I would just love to see the early signs of how that accrues back to the sole tokens. Maybe it's M.EV. Maybe it's monetary premium. I don't know. Like some bridge to help speak the language of things that I feel are more grounded in crypto. And what I call fundamentals. That's been asking for like this entire time. Give me the triple point asset thesis for Solana. To which some people say like the Solana asset thesis, the Salana investment thesis is the triple point asset. It's just at different levels of parameters. I totally. Then that's fantastic. Then somebody write that. Well, anyway, we'll be on a quest to continue to understand it. And yeah,

I guess those are the takes on the takes episode. I don't know where we just gave a takes on a episode. Well, so here's our takes about the takes episode. Yeah. Oh my God. Anyway, if anyone appreciates this, you know, here you go.