Bankless - Solana is Launching a Phone? | Co-Founders Anatoly & Raj

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

Solana just released a flagship Android phone for web3 called Saga. And it really begs the question: does a blockchain need to have its own phone? Well, we brought on Co-Founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal to make the case. Let us know what you think about this release in the comments below or on Twitter @BanklessHQ - bullish or bearish Saga and why? ------ 📣JUNO | Crypto Friendly Banking https://juno.finance/bankless  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🚀ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool  ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ❎ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🦁BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  🌴MAKER DAO | DECENTRALIZED LENDING https://bankless.cc/MakerDAO  🔐LEDGER | SECURE STAKING https://bankless.cc/Ledger  ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 6:15 Bear Market Vibe Check 10:03 Solana’s Bear Market Agenda 14:28 Why Web3 Needs a Phone? 17:30 Solana Mobile Phone Explained 25:52 The Solana Mobile Thesis 30:50 Mobile Hardware Features 33:45 Mobile Wallet Adapter 36:15 Solana dApp Store 41:40 Is Solana Mobile a Distraction? 47:00 Jason Keats & Osom 50:45 Describing the Solana Mobile Device 51:32 Competitors 54:40 Costs to Launch a Phone 56:32 Solana Centralization Critique 1:03:50 Solana Scalability ------ Resources: Anatoly Yakovenko https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko  Raj Gokal https://twitter.com/rajgokal  Solana https://solana.com/  Solana Mobile https://twitter.com/solanamobile  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Hey, Bankless Nation, welcome to another episode of State of the Nation, where we do a deep dive on a specific topic relevant in crypto. Hey, guys, are you ready for the Web 3 phone wars? Because I think that is just kicking off. David, that is our subject today. Last roll up, we had a take on the Solana phone. I feel like, David, we didn't exactly nail that take. All right? We didn't get a complete take there.

And we want to rectify that today. We want to do a deep dive. dive with a more nuanced take on what Solana is launching. So we have Anatoly and Raj, the co-founders of Salana to tell us more about the Salana phone. David, what are we going to cover today? Yeah, so there's a, interestingly, in the last two weeks, three phone announcements all happened. Salon is definitely the biggest, the biggest phone announcement with like the most amount of just like effort and energy put behind it. So of course, we've got to bring the Salana team on to talk about it. But overall, like, the thing that we were missing when we were talked about it

on the weekly roll-up, Ryan, is like, obviously we use crypto on our computers, your phone is also a computer, but what does a phone-first ecosystem really unlock the Web 3 crypto world? What does that really bring? And that is a question that I don't think we knew what the answer was on the weekly roll-up, and that's the question I think we are trying to answer here.

What does a mobile-first, mobile-specific web-3 ecosystem really bring to the table not just for Solana, but for the entire crypto industry, and why is everyone seemingly having their mobile play at this present moment. So there's lots of things to unpack here. And I still have some questions, David, and I still have a little bit of skepticism. But I'm hopeful by the end of this episode, we might be able to update our take on what the salonophone actually is, where it adds value to the ecosystem and what it is about.

So that is the subject today. Also, David, got to tell them about our friends and sponsors over at Juno. So, David, Juno has this fantastic crypto-need. bank is what I would call it. What's special about a Juno account? So it has all of the powers of crypto built right into it. So you get your normal features that you'd expect, like yield on your USC or your Bitcoin or your ether. But I'm pretty sure this is the only checking account in the world that goes straight from your checking account straight into crypto, but not just on on layer two. You go from your bank account to optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, and they also have ZK

sync and Starkware coming soon as well. It's the only one. bank account in the world that does that. You get your direct deposit into this account, and then you get zero fees to swap that direct deposit fiat into the crypto assets that you know and love, and you can also automate that too. So like, check in count to layer two, that's crazy, yield on your crypto assets. We like that. But then also getting your direct deposit in crypto, Juno. It's the crypto first bank account for the digital age. They got a deal going on too, right? So look at the top says, welcome bankless listeners. There's a little deal. Tell us about that, David.

Yeah, so if you deposit money from your direct deposit, you get $100 from Juno. And if you deposit crypto on the crypto side of things, you get $10. They are paying you to be a customer. Yeah, as long as you got to have a bank account, you have real-life fiat bills, you need one of these. It is a step to go bankless, and it's an upgrade from your Wells Fargo account. I can tell you that much. David, got to ask you the question we start every single state of the nation with, which is what is the state of the nation today, sir?

You know that Batman movie with Bain where there's that meme where he goes, we're going mobile. That is the same thing, Ryan. We are going mobile. Oh, my God. That's a deep cut right there. I barely remember that clip, okay? Yeah, well, anyways, everyone's going mobile.

Solana is looking like it's leading the charge into the mobile first ecosystem. So we're going to explore what does it mean to go mobile as a crypto industry? Because it's not just putting your crypto apps on your phone. It's much more than that. And I think Anatolian and Raj have some of the answers there as to what Web3 mobile really, really looks like. Look, this is a big project to sink your teeth into during the build market, which is what we're in. So we'll get the full scoop in just a minute. We'll be right back with Anatolian Raj from Salana.

But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Rocket Pool is your decentralized Ethereum staking protocol. You can stake your eth in Rocket Pool and get our ETH in return, allowing you to stake your ETH. and use it in Defi at the same time. You can get 4% on your ETH by staking it with Rocket Pool, but you can get even more by running a node. Rocket Pool is the only staking provider that allows anyone to permissionlessly join

their network of validating Ethereum nodes. Setting up your Rocket Pool node is easier than running a node solo, and you only need 16Eth to get started. You get an extra 15% staking commission on the pooled ETH that uses your node to stake. You also get RPL token rewards on top. So if you're bullish e-staking,

you can boost your yield by adding your node to the decentralized rocket network, which currently has over 1,000 independent node operators. It's yield farming, but with Ethereum notes. You can get started at rocket pool.net, and you can also join the Rocket Pool community in their Discord. You can find me hanging out there sometimes in the chat, so I'll see you there. Arbitrum is an Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use

defy and NFTs. Some of the coolest new NFT collections have chosen Arbitrum as their home, while Defi protocols continue to see increased liquidity and usage. You can now bridge straight into Arbitrum for more than 10 different exchanges, including finance, FTX, Whoobie, and Crypto.com. Once on Arbitrum, you'll enjoy fast transactions with cheap fees allowing you to explore new frontiers of the crypto universe. New to Arbitrum, for a limited time, you can get Arbitrum NFTs designed by the famous artist Ratwell and Sugoi for joining the Arbitrum Odyssey. The Odyssey is an eight-week-long event, where you can play on-chain activities

and receive a free NFT as a reward. Find out more by visiting the Discord at discord.g.ggy slash arbitram. You can also bridge your assets to Arbitrum at bridge.arbitrum.io and access all of Arbitrum. apps at portal.arbitrum.orghum. In order to experience defy and NFTs, the way it was always meant to be, fast, cheap, secure, and fiction-free. Maker Dow is the OG Defy Protocol, the first Defy Protocol to ever exist, even before we called it Defy. Maker Dow produces dye, the industry's most battle-tested and resilient stable coin.

Using Maker, you don't need to sell your collateral if you need liquidity. Instead, you can spin up a Maker Vault and use your collateral to mint dye directly. With Maker, the power to mince new money is in your hands. And there's something new in the MakerDAO ecosystem. Every time a new MakerDAO is opened, the owner can claim a POAP, which contributes funds to one tree planted, an organization with ongoing global reforestation efforts, creating a world where digital participation and the health of our environment can live side by side. Soon, Maker will be present on all chains and layer two's, bringing the biggest and best Defi credit facility to everywhere there is defy. So follow Maker on Twitter at MakerDAO and learn from the oldest and most resilient Dow in existence. Hey guys, welcome back. We are here with the co-founders of Salana. We've got Anatoly, who's a co-founder of Salana,

and also the co-founder of Salana Labs. So the protocol and the labs company. We also have Raj, who's the co-founder of Salana, the COO of Salana Labs, and a board member of the Salana Foundation. We're going to talk a little bit about all of those organizations so you get some context. But the main topic of discussion is the Salana mobile phone. Raj, Anatoly, how are you guys doing? Great. Yeah, great. How are you guys? We're doing okay.

You know, this is a time for reflection. It's a time where we get to concentrate and there's not as much noise in the space. But let's start there. Before we get into the phone conversation, how are you guys doing in the bear market? What has changed? What has stayed the same? Like, what are the vibes like over in the Solana ecosystem and, you know, what you guys are building right now? And, Tilly, why don't you start?

Well, I think the bull market was the exception for us. We started in the 2018 bear market. So we're kind of used to the slog of it. Like, this feels normal to me, actually. Like, we've got to work. We've got to, like, you know, hustle and, you know, make connections, stock to a lot of people build. So it kind of feels more natural.

So I feel like, you know, you guys calling it the build market. That's a good analogy. Good way to put it. Raj, you feel the same? How are you feeling? Yeah, totally. I mean, I think if I got better at monitoring the velocity of email and telegram, I might be able to find and calculate some kind of leading indicator of, you know, a market collapse. But it's just amazing. I mean, I think the noise really cuts down by a factor of 10 and it becomes so much more clear, you know, what the important and durable problems.

problems are to solve that are going to push the space forward for another 10 years. So yeah, I think during the big run-up, it felt like it grew to sort of a fever pitch. And, you know, you see these wild dreams about what might be possible and what people want to build. And I think when when clear minds prevail and the markets cool down, it just becomes a lot of clear what's actually worth building. Right. Yeah, I absolutely resonate with that. And this was, I don't know how many cycles you guys have been into, maybe answer that question next, but this was my second go around. And at the peak of this bull market, like, I knew things were crazy. I knew things were weird. But like, sometimes they were like, damn it, I fell for it again. Like, it's on it. Same. Same. I've seen it got me. It still got me. How many cycles have you guys gone through? this would have been the second bull run that I was like hyper aware of what was happening. Yeah, same.

So during this bear market, now that we have our sober caps on, just explain to me, like, what's just the vision for like what Solana wants to get done in the bear market? Obviously, this mobile thing, which is going to be the focus of this conversation, but just like generally in the whole Solana ecosystem, what do you guys focus on during the bear? It's still the same thing. So I think product, like how to get crypto adoption, how to get crypto to a billion people. Those are like the big dreams. And it's really, really hard for us to know which apps or what use cases are going to drive it.

So the only way we can do that is to like get devs to build them, like get a thousand people throwing darts against the board and one of them's going to hit a bullseye. So we're really focused on developer tooling, developer adoption, like everything. And that ultimately boils down to even like low level network performance because the faster in the network is, the cheaper it is, the more devs use cases they can launch and build and, you know, hopefully get the next bull market started. You think back to like DeFi summer, that was four companies really, right? That was it. So out of the thousand devs, though it took a thousand shots on gold for them, did it right,

and that kicked everything off. So we need the next four or five, whatever entrepreneurs to figure that out. Does anything change when token price is like down big? Right. So like, Ether price is down 80%. You know, Bitcoin's way down. Salon is down like 87% high. Are there things you can't do when token price is down?

Or does like, is price kind of just background noise? It doesn't really matter. It doesn't affect your roadmap plans. we never grew to a large company so labs is 75 people so like we were not it's not like we got to cut personnel and stuff like that that's been like I think like we only hired people when like there was a fire that or like I was so overloaded or like that we could hand off a task that I'm like okay you go do this and then I go do the next thing and that has kept us I think at a size that price isn't as important as to, I think, maybe other companies.

Yeah, I think either, you know, you over levered and you're an investor, you're a hedge fund, you know, or you were providing an unsustainable product that really needed growth, needed a market run up to keep going and you blow up, or, you know, the lighter version is you just scaled up a little bit too much. You have to do layoffs, but both of those are pretty painful. and luckily we haven't had to do either. One comment while you're talking Anatoly about kind of Defi summer, it was just four companies. One thing I've been thinking of is actually how resilient Defi has been over the past couple of months,

particularly when you contrast it to CFI. And how actually, if you think about this from a fundamentals perspective, like this is what's just happening in crypto, how all of the CFI, all the trusted proxies kind of broke down yet DFI survived is more of fundamentally bullish for Defi, then DeFi Summer 2020. In my mind, that is true. And so if you're a fundamentals investor, if you're a builder, and you just watched all of the collapse of CFi around you, and Defi is still standing, fundamentally, that is incredibly bullish, even though price doesn't reflect it, right? So just an observation I have. Yeah, I don't know if I got shared this.

I just don't agree with you. When Maker, like, survived a 2020 crash when everything dropped in one day by like 50%. And Maker survived it. I was like, okay, this is despite people like shitting on it and like complaining about like the, it was like a stressful time for them. But the fact that it basically survived, I was like, okay, this is a thing that can handle a double black swan that was built like on this like kind of toy. Like everyone, like it was like a toy computer, right? Like prior to that. But all of a sudden, it's one that can handle like this crazy financial collapse. And I thought that really to me showed the resilience of Defi. And that was before I think Defi really broke out into the mainstream. Okay, so I want to turn this conversation to the phone conversation. And so I want to read a quote that thankfully somebody put from our own weekly rollup into the YouTube chat here.

So I said, we said on the roll-up, Bankless says that a blockchain having its own phone feels like a big distraction and, quote, feels weird, questioning why Salana entered the hardware game when blockchains are software? So I'll open up the question to you guys. Like, why does Web3 or even a specific blockchain ecosystem need a phone? Like what does that do for that ecosystem? So Labs is a company. It's not the protocol, right? The protocol is a bunch of math, a bunch of codes, run by bunch of. bunch of validators and labs the company builds products one of those products is a phone and it's a

web three phone it is primarily like we're focused on the salana part but the stack the the SMS stack it's open source so if there's devs i want to add Ethereum support bitcoin support to send PRs we'll integrate and we'll get them audited and we'll make it happen and the goal for this product right is to build an awesome experience a delightful experience for signing for self-custody for those integrations between applications like native applications and digital items NFTs and all the stuff you want to do with Web3 just make it really really like as amazing as using Apple Pay right like every time I use Apple Pay I'm like this is I don't want to enter another credit card ever again right like this doesn't suck I want the same experience for crypto we don't have that like and you kind of need I a couple pieces for that to work. The main piece is taking the seed phrase and sticking it inside the secure element on the phone.

It's not a new piece of hardware. I was at Qualcomm like seven years ago, there were secure elements on every device that ever shipped. There's a trust zone on every device that ever shipped. Just adding those APIs so you can do BIP 39 key recovery. It's pretty, pretty simple. Right? Like having the trust zone be able to sign

and give the user trusted. display so the wallet can't lie to you what you're signing. The wallet never sees your seed phrase. That means that Phantom can, is now can ship an application. The user doesn't have to trust Phantom to not script their seed phrase. And that thing can be brought up and tap to pay when you go pay for your coffee or when like Magic Eden wants you to, you know, pay for an NFT or something like that. So that, like piece of hardware allows devs to innovate. And that innovation is what I hope will bring product market fit, get to those billion users. You need devs to throw darts at the ball, you know, at the target. Right now they've all been doing this on desktop. Mobile is such a

prevalent thing, especially outside of the U.S. in Europe, like most people just have a phone as their primary computer. Actually, most of them, an Android phone. Okay, so you said that all of the devices that shipped out of Qualcomm, and I'm assuming every single mobile device out there has that, like, secure element, like 99% at least. The hardware is there. The software is not. Right. Okay.

So I think that leads us into, like, there's two parts of this conversation. There's the hardware of the Solana phone, the Saga phone, and then there's the software, the SMS stack. Would you say, like, one of these things is more important than the other? And if you're telling me that, like, every bit of hardware has more or less the same, like, parts, the same components. I'm guessing it's the SMS, the Salonin Mobile stack part of it. That's kind of the bigger story here. Over the long term. Long term. Over the long term. I hope that what we're doing just gets co-opted by Google and Apple and they're like,

yeah, this should exist and they just ship it. And then all of a sudden we cracked them open and Web 3 mobile native is there and everyone's happy. I think like what you imagine like post-Crypto adoption, you imagine your phone. doing native signing, right? Native applications, like all that stuff being integrated, being shipped by every major manufacturer. That's going to happen. But somebody has to do it first. And the device, this flagship device, it's built by an amazing team. Like Jason, if it wasn't for Jason, this would have never happened. He's the founder of Awesome. He was the lead architect of iPad Pro. He built like James Cameron's submarine door,

did like crazy projects for Johnny Eve that he can't talk about. and like was the first or second hired essential. And like this is the device and his ability to ship hardware is what like allowed this idea to actually go from, you know, me dreaming about the day that we're going to have like native crypto experiences on mobile. And they're like, okay, let's go do this. So. So one important thing there is that, you know, if you, once you guys hold the device, you'll see it's, it stands alone as a flagship quality Android. phone, and it's kind of undercutting the market on price.

So, you know, worst case, this is just a really, really awesome Android phone for Android users. But, yeah, as you can see from the site, and if you watch the announcement, I think the video is there on Salonamobile.com, too. Maybe we don't need to watch it now because it's like an hour and a half long. But, you know, the first announcement was Salana Mobile Stack. And, you know, maybe it's worth mentioning for folks who don't know. So on a mobile stack is a few different features.

It's seed fault that uses the secure element for a custody protocol. It allows instant signing of transactions, but it partitions the private keys from wallets and apps and the rest of the Android operating system. So it's something like cold storage on your phone. And then there's the mobile wallet adapter, which lets you sign transactions basically across all mobile web. So you're not dealing with these web views and applications and, you know, copying and pasting links between apps to access mints and things like that.

And then there's the DAP store, Salana Dap Store, that is basically no fees, no restrictions on NFTs or tokens. And it's just a free playground for all the apps that people have already been using on Solana to just launch in a mobile native way. And that needs to happen because the digital like items like NFT, are owned by the users, right? They're not owned by the content creator. And this is something that just doesn't work

with Web2 mobile apps. Like Google and Apple expect the application that is the mobile app to be the creator that owns that content, to be able to take 20% of the value of that content and send it to Google. But like Magic Eden can't add $2,000 and a $10,000 NFT sale on a mobile app

because that would like kill them, right? Like it just doesn't work. Like when you, you get to true digital content, like the way that the business models for like the big app stores just don't work. And they'll change eventually. But the only way they'll change is that somebody pokes that bear, you know, a little bit. So that's our hope is that like we're the ones that poke him hard enough. And they're like, okay, fine, we better, we better change your models. And that frees up mobile for everyone. Yeah. I think a couple of things that happen here too. Like,

you know, the first 250,000 users for Solana came through DGen Ape Academy, you know, just these 3D apes. And it was a total shock. Like, we didn't know that was where usage was going to come from. And that was a result of, you know, Metaplex launching and basically breaking like the nifty gateway model of these constrained launches and no on-chain, you know, royalty splits. And it iterated really rapidly through like 100,000 projects into the. this really strong product market fit for PFs.

And then step in, we didn't know step in was going to happen, right? And get to 2 million users that quickly. And I think if you speak to tap developers today, they have no idea how to get something like that through the app stores. It's just, it's so opaque of an approval process. And even if they get through it so long, and then if something gets approved, they're really afraid to iterate on it and change it, you know, because it might, it might then get And in my mind, as soon as a step in happen, there should be 10 step-ins, you know, and we should be rapidly saturating, you know, everyone who has a key pair on, you know, Solani Ethereum everywhere with these applications that get product market fit and learn to grow in that way. So we can then figure out how to make them, you know, really sustainable and deliver more value through those models. So when we talked to, you know, app developers, you know, there was just this very clear big mental block. Like we're not even really really.

thinking about a world where we can do anything in the app store and every user has, you know, the ability to sign transactions across the whole operating system. That's just not like the way we've been operating. And with users, it's just very clear, you know, pain points. You know, today, I think crypto is in a very different place than, you know, three years ago, because now we can say, look, like Salana's got at times 22 million monthly active addresses, you know, six million weeklies. And there's millions of people trying to get these NFTs. And we hear all the time, like we see people, you know,

carrying their laptops through conferences or, you know, leaving a party or skipping a party because there's some hot mint happening. Or, you know, an NFT starts mooning and they're like, I'm going to go delist it. Like I literally have to go home, you know, like people are leaving, you know, this has become important enough for at least a few hundred thousand people. you know, maybe a few million, that they're leaving their everyday life. I'm sure you guys, you know, feel this and experience this.

Like, you can't really live your normal life anymore because we have to access our crypto assets. Like, we found something that is a foundational use case and asset class. And, you know, we're basically tethered to these, these Dells. So the just I've gotten is that the mobile stack, the software side of this whole endeavor, is the bigger of the two stories. But the software stack can't fully express itself on the legacy hardware

that currently exists in the world today. You can't take the Salon of Mobile stack and put it on like Apple iPhone or any other proprietary phone. You need an OEM's permission to do that because you need an OEM to modify the trusted element. You can't, like us as developers can't get that code through the app store. So we need to work with OEMs

and that means working with somebody like Saga. and having a flagship device and having like a founder that gets it that has like gets web three gets gets the privacy elements of it and wants to build a thing that represents that like the physical example of that I think is what can set the example for like everyone else in the world like eventually I'd love to have HTC Samsung whoever like take these take SMS and integrate it's just a bunch of open source code right so Solana is not playing in the game of like Apple or who are the other like HTC. You guys aren't trying to be at Salon Labs

insanely profitable by selling this bits of hardware. You're using the hardware as like a Trojan horse to get the Salana mobile stack integrated into the greater mobile ecosystem that is beyond your guys' control. Is that right? I hope we sell a shitload of phones and I hope Saga and Awesome are extremely profitable. I mean, that would be great.

but that's so the thing is that like the thesis here is that 50,000 Web3 early adopters that have this device that are active users that without Web3 without any restrictions in the app store for them is a better distribution channel for devs than the big app stores are today with millions of users that that's the big thesis is that if we can get the right 50,000 people to have these devices, devs are going to build apps, and that's going to grow and start growing maybe to 100, 200,000. At some point, Google and Apple will figure it out and be like, okay, we need to have a real Web 3 model and business model that works with Web 3. We need all these features. We want signing to be secure for our users, and that will shift. But I don't have

this belief that you were going to take down Google and Apple. That's ludicrous, right? a little bit. But crypto believes that they're going to take down, you know, the $20 trillion dollar financial system. We're not going to take it down. We're just going to make a better one. We want them to change, right? You want the world to change ultimately. It's not necessarily like it's a pretty roundup rebuild, right? Like you call it Web 3 for a reason. It's supposed to be fairly foundational. And I think you guys, I'm sure, are as frustrated as we are about this, but like all these cycles we've been through and you hear, you know, these partnership announcements and, you know, XYZ big company says, all right, we're doing it.

We're doing the crypto thing. We're jumping into Web 3. And a whole cycle goes by as soon as the market cools down, they get cold feet. They lay off whoever they hired to work on it. You got new people come in for the next cycle, try and pick it up. And it just never goes anywhere. There's no durability, you know, because unless they see organic, you know, grassroots applications, that create a credible threat to their core business model,

they don't really move that fast. And, you know, I mean, we've seen this like Goldman Sachs called everything rat poison until the very last possible moment, until there's billions of dollars leaving all of their, you know, most profitable accounts to go into this new defy thing. Then they say, okay, we're hiring a 30-person team. And who knows now with the market downturn, like, are they still persisting? Are they going to be innovating and pushing things forward? in our experience, it just doesn't happen.

So, you know, you have to have products that are fully owned and controlled by the crypto industry and that, you know, durably, relentlessly push against these problems for users. Okay. So these are things I think that the Salana community, and you guys have clarified for David and myself, because I think the first blush when you see this, the question is like, oh, is Solana trying to get into the hardware game? And do they have the audacity to compete against Apple and Samsung? and what started to make more sense to me as I learned more about this is like that's not the purpose, right? David's other nutritional podcast that he's going to start someday.

He always says to me that like, you weren't supposed to tell anyone around. That's not true. Okay. That's still top secret. We always says to me carbs are just a delivery mechanism for delivering real food to the body. Okay. So this hardware phone is just a delivery mechanism for SMS, which is. the Solana mobile stack and distributing that. And hopefully you get some hardcore fans who want a

full stack type phone and buy the hardware. But the goal is to kind of saturate the software stack out there. And so that starts to make more sense to me. You guys are not trying to compete against Apple or Google. But can you build out? And so one other thing, I think people mistook David and and I's take on the roll-up. We're actually bullish on the potential of a Web3 phone. Because I think we see what you see, which is like, we can't be beholden to Apple and, you know, the Google store to whitelist metamask. What happens if they just delist our metamask and phantom wallets? Like, what do we do then? And so we need to have a way to route around them. And also, what happens if they disallow all of our, like, if they call everything that we're doing with all

of our crypto economics in-app purchases, and they want to cut out of that. And it breaks our terms of service. Sorry, guys. So we absolutely need a way to route around that. But I want to ask you, it's like, are some of the features that come in the hardware side of things? They're already available on our, like, Apple phones and our Samsung phones. Like, so the Seed Vault piece, right? Help me understand that. We all have these. Yeah, there's, um, yeah. So you have like your, your board or whatever, it depends how the integration work. There's a separate piece of hardware from your main CPU that is a secure element. And that thing has various features and does various services, but it can hold your secrets.

And you have a trust zone component on the chip. It's slightly different on an Apple device, but I'm more familiar with the Qualcomm ones. That thing runs on a chip. It runs in a special context that the high-level OS, Android, and all the applications, they can never read the memory there. So that trust zone can decode the seed phrase, generate, you know, get your key generated, and then sign transactions. And it can also take over a part of the display or any part of the display.

And they can show you like a trusted set of things that you're signing, like the numbers. Like, hey, you're signing this transaction and you're actually signing a $100 transfer. And the user can then confirm that like, okay, the wallet didn't lie to me. I'm actually signing a $100 transfer. So all that hardware pieces and all that stuff exists in every phone. It exists in every Qualcomm chip. There's Apple versions of this. And they use these systems for various applications already,

like to decode your thumbprint or whatever or your face ID. But they don't use them for crypto. They don't use them for signing. And I think part of the reason is that like there is no like crypto, adoption, actual number of users that sign transactions and a monthly basis, all in aggregate, altogether and all the chains, is still pretty small. Like, I don't know, what do you guys estimate? Like, if you combined all the chain, Solano, even Binance Smart Chain together, how many humans

actually sign stuff? 10 million, 15. I think it's probably 5 to 10 million. Right. And that's not enough for like Google and Apple to be like, like, okay, we got to like, we got to make changes to the OS and make changes to the Webster policies when their user numbers are in like billions, right? So there's so much more we could get out of these secure enclaves, the hardware piece,

that we can't because we don't, Google and Apple and other manufacturers aren't giving us the software that would allow us to tap into these things. And that's what Solana Mobile Stack is trying to do. Okay. And then the mobile wallet adapter, that's open source as well, I believe. So what is that? And also I'm curious the context is, is this only for running Solana? Or could other blockchains also run on this? So it's open source. It's open source. People can send us code. We'll integrate it. We'll get it audited. And we'll make sure it lands. So in that sense, like it's true open source. We're doing all of development. element out front and we want contributors. But obviously we know Salana best. So everything we're doing is Salana first.

It would be ridiculous for us to try to build an awesome Ethereum integration because we're going to know shit about Ethereum. So like I don't even want to try. But like it is truly open source. I'm an open source maxi. The wallet adapter, like when an application like has a connect button and you see 10 different wallets and then another application has. a different set of wallets, right?

That's an application-specific connect button. We just want that to go away. And for the application to assume the OS has figured out what wallet the user prefers and just be connected automatically. So that allows up. That's OS-native, much easier user experience. It's a small piece of code that again,

like we don't have like a 30-person team working on it. Right now it's like five engineers. Right. Like, so these are, this doesn't take like a shit ton of resources to build, but these are small pieces that I feel like should be in every phone and we'll be in five years when the world has changed and we are in crypto utopia. But right now, like, we need to build them. And just to clarify what I think this looks like for the end user is that like, say, say for example, like if I opened up my phone right now, I would have like my Metamask wallet. I would have my other wallet, wallet number three, wallet number four. And each one of these is its own seed phrase.

Each one of these is its own private key. But like we could change that game. And then so if I go and like I go up to open to my desktop and I go to like Uniswap, uniswap is like, okay, do you have a Metamask? Do you have a wallet connect? Do you have like, and there's like 30 different wallet options. And so with this like integration into the straight into the hardware, there's just like, show me your phone.

Like I know that's where your private keys are. Just show me that one and like we're good to go. Is that kind of the vision here, Anatoli? Basically. Yep. Yeah. And then, okay, so the last piece here, so we talked about the seed, seed vault, the mobile wallet adapter.

And so the Salana DAP store. So is there a business model for this? Like, is there any kind of take rate that the Salana app store? And then what's like the listing policy? So the listing policy is a really hard part. Okay. Right now it's basically like going to be like our internal team trying to review it until that can't scale.

And the hope is that the saga package. and the ability for us to use the kind of models that we see that work in DOWs and being able to create moderators and things like that and make that workable, that we can scale that to start doing moderation and creating like basically lists, right? You should be able to subscribe to your like Monkey Dows, like, favorite app store list. And they're the ones providing the moderation. But that is a gnarly problem that's going to take a lot of work. It's gnarly because it's a governance problem, of course, right?

Yeah, exactly. The model for fees and stuff on the App Store, I think, can be something simple in the future. Right now, there's no fees, but if you're trying to, like, build something and there's no credible business model at all, ever, it's probably not going to work, right? Like, in the long term, I think the way that this should work is, like, basically, some small percentage, sub 1%, like, I don't know, 20 basis point fees in every transaction, something that I feel like is totally fine because it's paying for the development of the product, but it's not crushing the whole business models for all the applications running on it.

And to be clear, so if somebody had the Saga phone or some other Android phone with the Solana mobile operating system installed on it, you'd have the Salana DAP store, and then you'd also have like the Google App Store as well. So you download all your other Google apps through that, and then the Salana app stores for kind of the Web 3 things. Yep. So it's fully Google mobile service enabled.

All the Google stuff is there. Awesome. It has some like kind of lockdown modes where you can basically kill services. So you can if you want to as a user shut down Google or other services. And that's a pretty cool feature that the awesome team built. It's worth mentioning also that it's not just DAPs that can launch in the Salina DAPS store. Any application that wants to launch in a no-fee environment can launch in that app store.

So we've already seen a lot of the games that are leaning into Web3 looking at this as a pretty attractive mobile play. independent of their desire to have digital assets within the game. I do think it's important to understand, from a development standpoint, or an innovation standpoint, that, like, 30% take rate that Apple charges on the iOS app store, that's like a good tax, and which is a stunt on innovation and progress.

And especially in the Web 3 world when so much of, like, the backends of so many apps is a blockchain. Like OpenC, OpenC, he's not going to have an iOS app because they're not going to give Apple 30% of the volume going through Open TV. It can't.

It's not going to happen. Right. And so like it's physically impossible for them to do that. Like totally they would go bankrupt. All right. Like or the users are never going to pay 30% markup on any digital purchases. Just not going to work. 100%.

And so not only is like the whole rest of the world been like deprived of a zero fee environment to like fully innovate and, express the world of just like mobile apps because Apple keeps on taking it all. The Web3 world never really had that opportunity, but also needs it even more because it's inherently about like money and transactions and trading and swapping and all these things. So like we've never actually really seen a blossoming like mobile developer ecosystem. So it's kind of like no wonder why there hasn't been a blossom developer ecosystem that's gone mobile before, but hopefully before this. It's really, really hard to build a phone. I worked on like every phone

that fail that you've ever heard of, like the webOS devices, the Blackberry Q&X ones. Oh, you're talking before iPhone stuff? Yeah, yeah. Metrophone, the Amazon Fire. Do you remember that thing? I do. So I was like one of the engineers trying to get those things to work. And it's really, really tough.

And I think the real, like, opportunity we have is that, like, maybe the crypto users are actually, like, the most lucrative users. the world right now because look at OpenC's volumes look at Magic Eden's volumes the number of users that they have is much much smaller than like you know any app in in the iOS store that's in the top ton but they're generating a ton of real profit and a ton of real revenue so that that's the opportunity one one more question for you guys then we we got a comfort sponsors we have a whole lot more to cover including like the the phone wars and some of the competitors that are that are entering and second order effects and how this thing was funded and everything else. But what about this criticism?

This is not a criticism or a critique we raised on the roll-up. But some people are saying, like, hey, Anatoly Raj, look, building a scalable blockchain is freaking hard enough, okay? And like, there's a lot of work to do. Solana's had some outages, of course. Everyone knows Ethereum has not scaled yet. Still hasn't done its merge. Like we have a lot of work to do.

Is this a distraction? Or why not have a separate team do this? Why are you guys personally involved? What would you say to that critique or question? So like for the same reason that you can't like add more engineers and accelerate the merge, right? There's just you need experts that are deep working on hard problems. And a lot of those hard problems are solved by only one engineer that just given time and space to do it. And there's a bunch of, there's a really strong core team of system engineers that are constantly iterating on the chain and making it better and cheaper and faster and more reliable.

If they need hires, they will get hires, right? Like I said before, there's like five engineers at labs that are separate team, a new team that we spun up. You know, my Qualcomm background gives me like a really strong network of pulling from the mobile world. And that team is building this and it's a separate product. And our focus on this is people think it's a distraction. But part of the reason why this idea came to fruition, like, a large part is that I talk to devs and I constantly ask him, what are the problems they're dealing with? What are the challenges? And half of them, like half of the conversations ended up mobile.

Like we can't like do what we want. Like we have to go through these like weird interfaces. jump through web views with Phantom. And when that problem gets repeated to me over and over, I start basing around the room, trying to figure out how I fix it. So, like, this idea of launching SMS and the phone really comes from, like, just talking to devs

and us telling us, like, this is a problem and we don't know how to fix it. One last thing I'll say in support of that, and then we get a cut, though, is, like, some people think that scalability just means transactions per second. But I think when you define scalability is we want to bring a billion people into crypto, then you also have to take other things into account.

You have to think about privacy. You have to look at user experience. You have to look at the fact that it is still mission impossible to go bankless unless you have a desktop machine. You can't go solely bankless on a mobile device right now. It's just not possible. And so that is also another definition of scalability, if you kind of broad. in that. So I, yeah, I, I, I, I think that's a good thing. But you guys are going to, like, try to, like, destroy us. That's the second half. We couldn't want to do. Ammo for the second half, which David's about to seize.

It's baffining me up, I guess. In the second half of the show, Ryan already listed up a few of the topics. But also, there's this, like, Jason Keats guy, who I didn't know who he was before I started, like, researching all about this. So I want to ask you guys about that. And then all the things that Ryan mentioned about five minutes ago. So we're going to get into all. all those topics and more right after we get through some of these fantastic sponsors to make the show possible. There is a brand new staking feature in the Ledger Live app today. We all like staking the assets that we're bullish on, and now you can stake seven different coins inside the Ledger Live app. Cosmos, Pocod, Tron, Algarians, Tezos, Solana, and of course Ethereum.

With Ledger Live, you can take money from your bank account, buy your most bullish crypto asset, and stake that asset to its network all inside the Ledger Live app. Through a partnership with Figment, Ledger also lets you choose, validator you want to stake your assets with. And Ledger is running its own validating nodes, offering a convenient way to participate in network validation, and it even comes with slashing insurance. Ledger Live is truly becoming the battle station for the bankless world. So go download Ledger Live. If you have a ledger already, you probably already have it and get started securely staking your crypto assets. The Brave browser is the User First browser for the Web3 internet,

with over 60 million monthly active users. And inside the Brave browser, you'll find the Brave Wallet, the secure, multi-trained crypto wallet built right into the browser. Web3 is free. from big tech and Wall Street. More control and better privacy, but there's a weak point in Web3, your crypto wallet. And most crypto wallets are browser extensions, which can easily be spoofed. But the Brave wallet is different. No extensions are required, which gives Brave browser an extra level of security versus other wallets. Brave wallet is your secure passport for the possibilities of Web3 and supports multiple chains, including Ethereum and Salon. You can even buy crypto directly inside the wallet with RAMP. And of course, you can store, send, and swap your crypto assets,

manage your NFTs and connect to other wallets and defy apps. So whether you're new to crypto or you're a season pro, it's time to ditch those risky extensions and it's time to switch to the Brave wallet. Download Brave at brave.com slash bankless and click the wallet icon to get started. The Layer 2 era is upon us. Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem is growing every day and we need Layer 2 bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a Layer 2 life. A cross is the fastest, cheapest, and most secure cross-chain bridge.

With a cross, you don't have to worry about high fees or long wait times. Assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously. Across's bridges are powered by Uma's optimistic Oracle to securely transfer tokens between Layer 2's and Ethereum. Across's critical ecosystem infrastructure and Across V2 has just launched. Their new version focuses on higher capital efficiency, layer 2 to layer 2 transfers, and a brand new chain with Polygon, all while prioritizing high security and low fees. You can be a part of Across's story by joining their Discord and using Across for all of your Layer 2 transferring needs. So go to across.TO to quickly and securely bridge your assets between Ethereum, optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, or Boba networks.

All right, Bankless Nation, we are back with the co-founders of Solana. And as I was going through the process of putting this whole agenda together, I came across this name Jason Keats, who everyone seems to speak really, really highly of, but I had no idea who this individual was. And until you want to walk us through who Jason Keats is, how he's working with you guys on the saga phone. and what's his deal? So before we launch into that real quick,

I can plug, totally just did an interview with Jason on the Salon of podcast, so everyone should go check that one out. But I'll summarize it. So he's an astrophysicist. They got into hardware because he started building stuff for his professor for telescopes. And he was like, I like this more and started like, that's where his like kind of career started.

And he ended up starting a motorcycle company. than like working on solar panels, then joining Apple and leading the like lead architect for iPad Pro, the first one. Like when they went from like iPad to iPad Pro, he was like the guy that did it. And was the first or second employee at Essential, which is Andy Rubin's company, like the founder of the Android. And this project, awesome, was his baby is like, I can build a better phone than anyone else. else. And I have the best people to do that. And so they decided to build this thing. And

they got from like nothing to a EVT1, like a working device fully built in like six months, which is pretty insane. And that's the point where I met him and I started talking to him about trying to red pill him into like Web 3 and mobile and my vision for it. And like, you never know these conversations, right? You meet a thousand people that are not in crypto and you talk to them and all of a sudden like just everything clicked for him and he was like okay let's let's do this let's like make a device that's like web three first uh like but an awesome device like a flagship top of the line android device that can be like head-to-head be competitive with like the best set of uh Samsung or or Apple even so the camera awesome and it totally and it's

OSOM that's what okay I was not following that I thought you were saying A-W-E-S-O-M, like, awesome. But this is awesome, awesome, is it, right? Yep. And this is what the saga phone essentially is. It's a creation, hardware creation that Awesome and Jason made. Yep. And it's worth mentioning that, you know, I think if this was five years ago,

10 years ago, it probably would take, you know, five or ten times as many people as the awesome team has. It's a pretty small team. And also they're super high powered. You know, they're very nimble. They move super fast. They bring things to market really quickly. And I think when Tolly meets somebody like that, you know, often it, that speaks a lot.

And things move really quickly in a partnership. And Anatole, you've got the hardware with you right now, right? I know we're going to try and communicate what the device is like through internet, which is going to be hard. But like, what's it like? Can you describe it? Okay, so it's got a 120 FPS screen. It's like bright and beautiful.

Like, just looks great. And it's got a metal case. So it like feels really good and high end. I like it more than the glass devices that you see like out of Apple and stuff. Like so beyond that, it's like just a really good Android phone. Like I don't know. Like how else to describe it. Like when people get this device, they're going to be like this is a, has the,

the feel of what a premium Android device should feel like. Cool. Very cool. And it's only, we want to also talk about some other competitors who have kind of thrown their hat in the ring here. And, you know, part of the theme is it felt like Solana launched something. And then all of a sudden, this ethOS device, maybe it's not a device, a software, mobile software for Ethereum is on the scene.

and Polygon as well announced a partnership with HDC. Is this all like just coincidence that everyone had the same good idea and they're all trying to implement it at once? Or like, what's going on with the timing of all of this? I'm going to say we kicked it off, but I don't know. I think generally there's enough really smart people in Crypto know that they're all working on all the good ideas and maybe the first one to go lurches them everyone else forward.

And we made a big splash and announcement that I think kind of maybe drove some of those decisions to like, okay, we actually have to move a little faster and like get shit out. But I doubt we were the only ones thinking about how we crack mobile open for crypto. But I'll take the credit for it, sure. What do you think about these other approaches?

Are they similar? Like Ethos, we haven't gotten into detail on it, but I don't know if you've looked at it. I would have to dig into it. I think from what I'm seeing in the website, I think it's probably similar ideas to SMS, but I don't know how deep they go in terms of the integration. And also, like, what is the integration on this device?

Are they doing, like, the secure trusted element work and, like, all these other U.S. like improvements? Like, it's like, you know, the difference between Apple computers and the non-Apple computers in the 80s, there was like a vision behind them to integrate them in a very specific way. And I hope that we have that vision, right? Between myself and Jason, that like we optimize this device from the fact how fast like the thumbprint

decides that you sign the transaction and like all these things. We really want to iterate and make it like an experience that people like enjoy. And then when they use something else, you're like, ah, this sucks, right? Like you want that like, you want to get used to the good thing and make it really, really good. So I hope that that's what we can achieve at like me and Jason working together. I just want to make the point to bankless listeners

that more competitors entering this space, good. It's good for you as a user, okay? Because all of these software companies are now fighting to make the best possible crypto, Web3, mobile user experience, and they're fighting for you, for your usage, so that you use their software and their phone. and that means we all get better together.

Yeah, absolutely. I've always been a fan of competition. This is how it's actually really sad to be building something alone because you don't get to bounce off and see ideas that other people form and adopt them. And things move much, much faster when you have competitors. So I'm curious, how much did this all cost? And how is that paid for? I don't know if we can talk about numbers,

but this wasn't like a huge financial risk in terms of like Salana. It's five engineers. We have a partnership in some financial terms with awesome, but nothing that's like, like the cost of launching a phone today is much, much lower than five years ago because you are sitting on a ridiculously like

optimized supply chain. for building these devices for a dozen different companies and using Android, which is a very mature OS, very mature UX, and that's like the huge difference these days. When, when like Facebook tried to build their phone,

they wanted to build everything from scratch, their own OS from the ground up, their own applications store, similar with Windows and that, like, that's a 300 engineer kind of thing. That's, there's no way we could have pulled that off. Jason also has a ton of, you know, pretty long-standing supplier relationships that, you know, he's been able to pull strings

for. And that's why the phone has the latest Qualcomm chip. It may be maybe the first phone that hits the market with the latest Qualcomm chip. So, you know, Jason's really super efficient. He's got, he's got great relationships to leverage. And I think the suppliers also kind of see the path here. I mean, there hasn't been a more credible force in tech to launch a new mobile platform and suite of hardware products than crypto and web three. And they know that. So I think everyone's watching. If this is successful, they're prepared to, you know, to back more products, lower end products, more hardware peripherals, you know, whatever the market will support. Okay. So I, this is all great, guys, and thank you for walking us through this. I think, hopefully bankless listeners learned a lot.

Certainly we did as well. I probably have one last question or like critique. I told you the second half was going to get a bit more tough here. But like, okay, so here's, I think, what you've clarified for me is Salonah's not trying to get in the hardware game. Totally get it. That makes a lot more sense to me. The value proposition here is the SMS product itself. I was always bullish on the idea of a Web3 software product for mobile, because, again, you

can't go bankless unless you have a desktop machine, and that is clearly not the future. All right. So all of that is making sense with what you guys are doing this strategy. What my question is, and this is still a clarification point to you, that I'm learning a bit more about the Salana ecosystem, is the Ethereum Foundation's their approach to this in the spirit of decentralization is addition through subtraction. So their idea, the Ethereum Foundation, is that they slowly want to ossify the protocol and then go away. All right. I think I was initially under the impression that the Salonafone was like being developed and funded by the Salana Foundation. Okay. I learned that is not the case. There is this entity called Salana Labs, which is kind of a commercial entity building commercial products for the Salana ecosystem. And that helps. That is, that is interesting to me. So if you put your Ethereum hat on, right, you'd say like almost Solana Labs is kind of a little bit. bit like consensus, which they built in Fuera, they built metamass, they built all of these products to support the Ethereum. They probably try to phone at some point in time. They probably have 20 times smaller though. Okay. And if Huvins listening, he's probably like,

oh, phone, good idea. I'm on that. I'm working on that. Okay, so I get that difference now. One of my hangups is, right, like we are looking for a more decentralized future here, which means ultimately, we don't want any centralized. development team to control the fate of a blockchain or the ecosystem or to have undue um undue presence right and so you have the salana foundation which is separate you have salana labs which is the commercial entity but there seems to be like i don't i don't know how the funding works maybe you could clarify that if salana labs is funded by sole tokens but you guys are involved in both salana labs and the salana foundation and the Salana Protocol itself,

it just seems to be there's kind of a centralization aspect that's different than the Ethereum ecosystem. So help me understand this element of it. And do you actually think that this is a concern or am I kind of overplaying it? Am I like, oh, well, it looks like this in Ethereum and why isn't it exactly like that in Solana? And, you know, maybe there's a case of that too.

Help me understand. It's like, I would say you're, I think, I think it's good to be concerned about it because I think ultimately I don't want centralization and the foundation has a totally different goal, different board, different people on it, and they're driving towards decentralization and like billion users with self-custody. That's kind of their stick. And Anatole is not even involved with the foundation anymore, so he doesn't have a goal there. I got to step, I got to like step down from it because like Leo from Surdice is an amazing

engineer that's able to take my role as like the person that knows the network inside out at the foundation and I can hand it off to like an amazing community member. I don't know if you guys know Sirrus Juan or Leo at all, but an awesome person. So like Labs is able to build products and like labs has a bunch of money to do that and like a bunch of engineers to do that. And it tries to build products that generally like are not competing with ecosystem projects. So we don't want to build like a Magic Eden or a Phantom because we see that there's amazing really rockstar teams that are having and are executing with a vision and just kicking ass. But stuff like the phone, there's no team in the ecosystem that's like able to do it. And this is where we see like an opportunity to like, okay, maybe we do something here and it pushes the domino in the ecosystem and unlocks it.

And Metaplex, the thing that started like the NFT craze on Solana, that was incubated by, you know, a couple engineers at a Solana and a product manager, and that got spun out as a separate, separate thing. Like, that's been kind of how labs operates in terms of like... It's worth mentioning, by the way, you know, you mentioned consensus, and they built in Fuera, they built Metamast, they built Truffle. And on Solana, we have Quick Node and Genesis Go and all these RPC node providers. We have Phantom, you know, Anatoly mentioned Magic Eden. There's Anchor. All these already got built independently by ecosystem projects that, you know, often if we tried to even invest in them, there wasn't room. By the time they got off the ground, they got product market fit really, really quickly.

So a lot of that, you know, based stuff, you could argue, happen in a much more decentralized way. didn't happen from a founder or an organization related to, you know, the creation of Salana the network. I think there's a difference here, though, with like Ethereum where I don't know if Salonah will ossify. I think it'll become more like Linux, where there is a wider group of adult, like people that are developing the protocol of different companies that are contributing to it. and the features track the demands that people have on the hardware as the hardware changes. Because the way that Solano works is so tied to how hardware develops, like, network cards and CPUs and, like, all the stuff that we optimize for to take advantage of that, that changes every two years, right?

That slightly changes and the runtime has to change, the implementations have to change. They do so in a way that doesn't break applications, but that means, that the code has to be updated and people have to do that. And as the network has matured, we now have like Gito, which is building MEP clients, they're contributing to the core code because they have a dependency on the core code to do a certain thing. Like Mango Guys started contributing to the core code because they were seeing performance bottlenecks in their application that they were able to fix.

And this is more like Linux where, you know, Intel, Red Hat, all sorts of different companies. You can say that like Red Hat was like labs, right? They had the most developers at one point working on Linux, you know, the most core devs. But at some point it really became a really, really, really small part of Linux as a whole. Like I'd say at this point, probably Google Android guys contribute more lines of code to Linux than anyone else. Thank you, guys. That's helpful. I guess last question for you, not on the phone topic, but just since we're on the topic of differences between kind of the Ethereum ecosystem and Solana, can you guys just provide an update on like scaling and kind of uptime and what the plan is there?

Because I feel like David and myself and bankless listeners have our heads wrapped around the modular blockchain scalability approach with roll-ups and L2s and high settlement assurances. And ideally like maximum dissonable. centralization, but Solana, I think, has historically taken a different approach. I want to hear what the approach to Solana scaling is right now, how you guys are thinking about this. Sure. So this goes back to the heart of, I think, what decentralization means to us, right? Like to the Salana community, how we define it. And this comes down to like, what are these networks supposed to provide? Right. And And from my understanding is that data availability and an extreme security of that data is what these

networks are supposed to provide. And like Yellowstone blows up. The network is supposed to maintain that state an approval way. And that doesn't actually mean uptime. You lean at least one copy of the state to survive. So you can say like, hey, look, I got the copy of the ledger. Yellowstone blew up. Russia launched nukes, but I still got my one copy in like an island somewhere.

And I can prove it to you because I have all the cryptographic signatures from all the validators. This is the copy. And it repopulates the network. And that obviously means in that scenario, uptime is down. And you're running, you're somehow getting all the validators together and re-hypothicating the network and rebooting it. But that process, right, like is part of running these systems because you're depending on somebody somewhere, keep the copy of the state and being able to recover it no matter. what. Now, what that means is that we need to maximize the number of independent, truly independent, like people that run these nodes for some reason and maintain those in a secure environment.

And that includes people that run validators because they want tokens. It includes Circle, finance, tether, with all the exchanges, also like Dow communities because they want to run a node for fun, right? But also apps with RPCs. like half of the full nodes on the network right now are because there's so much demand for RPC providers because they're serving users for like all the apps that are on Solana. And all those copies of the state are valid copies of the state. Any one of those can recover. So like so scalability ties into this because we can't have a network that limits the number of full nodes, right?

We have to design it in such a way that maximizes the. number of people that can join the network, they can connect to it, and therefore maintain that copy in a real-time secure way. Like when the block is finalized, it's finalized everywhere globally in the entire world. So that means it's got to process a shit ton of signatures per second because every vote from a validator is a signature. It's got to handle a lot of network bandwidth because every vote takes network bandwidth. And this is kind of how we're thinking about it.

Like, we need to optimize it and allow validators to deploy hardware that allows them to scale it in an unbounded way. So scalability to us means that if there's a bottleneck, validators can just add cores and that bottleneck goes away. It doesn't require us to make protocol changes or launch L2s or anything like that. Not that that's a different solution, different approach, right? Like not knocking it in any way. but having the power of scalability given to the validators and the only thing that they need to do is, you know,

go order some shit on Amazon and deploy better hardware means that we're kind of done, right? Like the network is scalable to whatever limits, you know, organized sand allows. David, I think I did the thing again where I just opened up the door to an entirely different podcast at the end of this podcast. I mean, that's what I'm like currently wrapping my head around.

Yeah, I know, because I continue this conversation. And like, do we go to like 10 a.m? Or do you know what I think we should do. Yeah. The rub here is that like the cost of the hardware seems to be a violation of an Ethereum ethos, which is expensive. There's like, you said similar words that we say in the Ethereum camp. We're like, yeah, we want everyone to participate in network validation.

Like everyone should like permissionlessly join the network. they so choose. But we're both using these things, but there's still like a difference in like what those things actually translates into. One is like in the Ethereum camp like a 500 to $750 laptop. And in Salana, in the Solana world, it's like, well, do you have the means and are you connected to Amazon Prime? And are you willing to spend an extra like two to shout out. I don't know what the... And I think Anatoly would probably say that doesn't even matter. That's an inconsequential cost in the scheme of when you're talking about 32Eath. we go on and we'd have a...

So I feel like we've just opened the door to a to be continued. We all love each other at the end of the day. We want to bring you guys back and talk about that. I think there are some crypto developers out there, some Ethereum researchers who would like see the, okay, somebody's got to save the state, and if somebody has one safe state, then we're good to go. I think I'm not smart enough to like make the argument myself,

but I think that would offend of a lot of it, like core Ethereum developers. Yeah, we should have you guys back and have... We shouldn't do this now, David. We should have these guys back and have that conversation, maybe in debate type of way and Dunkrad on here. I love him. Perfect. All right.

This is an invitation for a future. But to be clear, we've covered the Web 3 mobile phone that has been the scope of today's conversation. Anatoly Raj, thank you so much for coming to bankless and telling us more about that. We appreciate it. Keep building during the build market. That's what we're here to do. Thank you. Thanks, guys.

Thank you guys. Take care. And disclaimers, of course, all of crypto is risky. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier.