Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - Solana Founder: Crypto is About to change Finance Like the Internet Changed Everything Else w/ Anatoly Yakovenko, Dave Blundin, Salim Ismail & Alexander Wissner-Gross | EP #204
Episode Date: October 30, 2025Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends Anatoly Yakovenko is Co-founder at Solana Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Sal...im Ismail is the founder of OpenExO Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified – My companies: Apply to Dave's and my new fund:https://qr.diamandis.com/linkventureslanding Go to Blitzy to book a free demo and start building today: https://qr.diamandis.com/blitzy Grab dinner with MOONSHOT listeners: https://moonshots.dnnr.io/ _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Connect with Dave: X LinkedIn Connect with Salim: X Join Salim's Workshop to build your ExO Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Connect with Antoly X Linkedin Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on October 21, 2025 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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                                        The fact that we now have stable cone legislation and that people are projecting like 1 trillion to 10 trillion worth of digital dollars being minted over the next, you know, five years is going to massively accelerate things.
                                         
                                        Why does your company exist? And second, why we need it.
                                         
                                        Solana's there to really enable that one billion people to go fully interconnected.
                                         
                                        Bitcoin is store value. Ethereum is settlement in Solano's execution.
                                         
                                        I just simply wasn't interested in settlement or store value because
                                         
                                        They're not the kind of engineering problem
                                         
                                        that I'm interested in solving.
                                         
                                        So is that the future a single machine layer
                                         
    
                                        for all markets everywhere?
                                         
                                        There's no computer science academic reason
                                         
                                        why it can't exist.
                                         
                                        It's purely an engineering problem.
                                         
                                        And we're on our way to solve it as fast as we can.
                                         
                                        Telling, how long before this science fiction future
                                         
                                        could come into existence?
                                         
                                        My gut is that, uh...
                                         
    
                                        Now that's the moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.
                                         
                                        Everybody, welcome to Moonshot.
                                         
                                        Here with my Moonshot mate, Dave, Lundon.
                                         
                                        Hey, Dave.
                                         
                                        Hey.
                                         
                                        Alex Weisner Gross.
                                         
                                        Hey, Peter.
                                         
                                        Hey, and Salim Ismail.
                                         
    
                                        And we have a special guest today.
                                         
                                        We're going to be diving into Solana.
                                         
                                        Anatoly Yaakovenko is here.
                                         
                                        Software engineer, entrepreneur, co-founder, and CEO of Solana Labs, which today is the sixth largest coin.
                                         
                                        Now worth over $100 billion.
                                         
                                        Congratulations for that.
                                         
                                        We appreciate it.
                                         
                                        Yeah, you know, 100 billion here, 100 billion there on your way to a trillion.
                                         
    
                                        You know, a bachelor's in computer science from University of Illinois, Urbane, began your career at Qualcomm, an amazing company, right?
                                         
                                        I had a chance to watch their domination.
                                         
                                        And Solana has emerged as the leader in decentralized finance and blockchain generating, what is not, $2.2 billion in annual revenues between 2024 and
                                         
                                        25. That's extraordinary. It's the cool one around MIT. I can tell you that first hand, too.
                                         
                                        I'll give you some quotes later, but yes, you are known and you are cool. That's awesome.
                                         
                                        So, guys, today, I really want to hit on a few things, which is the Crypto Essential,
                                         
                                        sort of Solana 101. What makes it different from Bitcoin and Ethereum? I want to dive into
                                         
                                        Solana as a use of payment, sort of the everything coin, and then really the convergence of
                                         
    
                                        crypto and AI, which is going to cause this explosion in the global economy. Let me begin with
                                         
                                        a question that is on my mind, Toli, which is, you know, given sort of our incredible rush towards
                                         
                                        AGI, every dollar in the ecosystem is being sucked into this black hole of computronium
                                         
                                        we're building across the planet.
                                         
                                        So we've got AI, we've got agents, we have Solano, we have stable coins.
                                         
                                        What's the future of money going to look like?
                                         
                                        I mean, do you think it's going to be recognizable in the next 10 years?
                                         
                                        I think the two things that I see converging is that the cost for intelligence is dropping
                                         
    
                                        and markets require intelligence.
                                         
                                        And because it's not cheaper to have intelligence to analyze all the signal
                                         
                                        in the world, you can now have a lot more markets.
                                         
                                        And public permissionless blockchains,
                                         
                                        like Salon, allow you to create markets permissionlessly
                                         
                                        for whatever random thing is.
                                         
                                        And you kind of saw this with prediction markets
                                         
                                        and polymarket and Kalshi kind of taken off.
                                         
    
                                        But the weird kind of cool experiments, like Futarki,
                                         
                                        where you have decision markets for every decision
                                         
                                        that a fund or a company can take, those can now exist.
                                         
                                        And as intelligence gets cheaper,
                                         
                                        you have more markets that are viable and you kind of see this exponential explosion of everything being decided through market forces, which I think is, it's like the quote I made before the podcast is like the answer not aware of the intelligence of the ant-hill.
                                         
                                        I can't fit all these markets in my head or like the outcome of this, but my gut is that this is probably the most optimal direction for kind of for society.
                                         
                                        to move forward and make decisions, the more market-based it is, and the more intelligence you have
                                         
                                        to make those decisions correctly, and the forcing function of losing money is a good way
                                         
    
                                        to course correct when you have bad intelligence. So hopefully it's a good thing. But beyond my,
                                         
                                        I can't fit it all in my head. It's beyond my comprehension. The speed of change is awesome right now,
                                         
                                        right? I mean, I think, and Alex, we talk about this, like Economy 3.0 in the future.
                                         
                                        Before we started recording Tully and I were, I would say, sort of lamenting the sad case of Truth Terminal, the autonomous AI agent that's being forced to mint its own meme coins just in order to survive in this really harsh world for AI agents right now. I mean, Tully, I'd be curious. So in principle, new layer ones, including Solana, offer the premise for AI agents just to survive. Humans, for the most part, were banked. We have the ability to,
                                         
                                        to engage in a human economy, if you're a baby AI agent just trying to find its way in this world,
                                         
                                        and you can't open a bank account, you can't interact as a first-class citizen, what do you do?
                                         
                                        Like, what's Tolly's handbook?
                                         
                                        What's your, what's your guide for like, can you tell a good joke?
                                         
    
                                        Can you tell a good joke that you can survive?
                                         
                                        I think that is the finalistment test for true AGI is can you entertain a person?
                                         
                                        or not even like a complex person.
                                         
                                        Can you keep a toddler entertained?
                                         
                                        How do you economically survive if you're a baby AGI and you want to be autonomous?
                                         
                                        I think, yeah, meme coins is like a weird Keynesian beauty contest for attention could work.
                                         
                                        Then if can you keep people paying attention to you by being entertaining,
                                         
                                        then you can probably pay for the inference to do that.
                                         
    
                                        That's the main business model that I see right now for these poor baby AGIs.
                                         
                                        So it's, you know, maybe as an assignment to you, the creator of Solana, we need a better
                                         
                                        business model for these baby AGIs to survive other than minting meme coins.
                                         
                                        Alex, can you imagine an AGI coming in you and say, listen, would you please adopt me?
                                         
                                        I need a human to sort of fend for me in the banking system.
                                         
                                        With a credit card.
                                         
                                        I think in some sense, Peter, that's the corporation model that we have right now with AIs using corporations as embodiments for themselves as economic actors.
                                         
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                                        All right, now back to this episode.
                                         
                                        Wait, why we kick ourselves off with a little bit of the Solana Vision here?
                                         
                                        Because, you know, our buddy Mike Saylor is, you know, he's the Bitcoin promoter of all promoters.
                                         
    
                                        But Bitcoin is the original vision of Bitcoin was as a transactional tool.
                                         
                                        Now it's become a store of wealth, a huge store of wealth.
                                         
                                        But it's way too slow to be the transactional engine of the future.
                                         
                                        And so, you know, Alex's baby AI is no way.
                                         
                                        going to sit there at the cash register for 20, 30, 40, you know, years of AI time trying to buy
                                         
                                        something. But, you know, Ethereum came after that, but now Solana, I heard on your last podcast
                                         
                                        a thousand times faster than the Ethereum chain. So it's keeping up with AI, basically, right?
                                         
                                        Yeah, that's the goal. And I think very, very simple way to think of it as like Bitcoin is
                                         
    
                                        store value. Ethereum is settlement in Solana's execution. And I,
                                         
                                        just simply wasn't interested in settlement or store value because they're not the kind of
                                         
                                        engineering problem that I'm interested in solving. And execution is a very hard, like, I don't think
                                         
                                        it's a computer science problem where we need theoretical solutions. It's just a fun engineering
                                         
                                        problem. Like, how do you move bits as fast as possible around the world? And this is what I like
                                         
                                        to get my hands dirty and I was just kind of gravitated towards that. I would love to
                                         
                                        hear a little bit of this history behind the proof of history concept that you came up with totally
                                         
                                        because i think that's such a fascinating uh unique approach to blockchains also while we're doing this
                                         
    
                                        i'm i'm unboxing a seeker phone live nice you guys are always a lot of seeker phone that i that i got
                                         
                                        that i've been wanting to unbox for a while so uh but curious to hear about that yeah it's um
                                         
                                        So, first of all, I'm not a researcher.
                                         
                                        I'm an engineer.
                                         
                                        I spent most of my career Qualcomm,
                                         
                                        got there right after college in 2003,
                                         
                                        and was just really interested in optimizing
                                         
                                        how fast it can move bits through memory.
                                         
    
                                        So as a performance nerd, I would have dreams
                                         
                                        where I have debugger windows between different co-processors,
                                         
                                        because I would stare at them for so many weeks,
                                         
                                        like just trying to debug problems and stuff.
                                         
                                        And I was definitely aware of Bitcoin when it came out
                                         
                                        and Ethereum as well.
                                         
                                        As an engineer, you often overlook the social aspect of these things.
                                         
                                        You kind of look at it, oh, it's not going to scale,
                                         
    
                                        not going to work.
                                         
                                        But kind of missed the whole transformative change
                                         
                                        that these things could provide because they're so new and weird.
                                         
                                        And in 2017, I was actually working at a side project,
                                         
                                        always had a side project.
                                         
                                        This one was building deep learning boxes for transform
                                         
                                        and mining crypto in the background because you could pay for the GPUs this way as to offset the CAP-X.
                                         
                                        I was just doing this for fun with a friend of mine, another Qualcomm nerd that I do side projects with.
                                         
    
                                        And I had two coffees in a beer at Cafe Salé in San Francisco.
                                         
                                        It's a combination that usually doesn't sit with anyone, didn't sit with me.
                                         
                                        So it was up to 4 in the morning, and we were discussing proof of work and this idea could
                                         
                                        we build a single threaded mining system that was just totally different concept.
                                         
                                        And I kind of had this eureka moment at 4 a.m. that there's a way to measure different physical
                                         
                                        constant than entropy, which is what proof of work does for civil resistance. There's a way to
                                         
                                        actually measure passage of time in a way that's hard to fake. And this is a recursive cryptographic
                                         
                                        hash function like Shout 2506. You run it over itself and you run this process and you sample it,
                                         
    
                                        and you get a data structure that you can say then,
                                         
                                        well, it's incredibly hard to be TSM by more than a factor at two
                                         
                                        at how fast you can make a processor.
                                         
                                        So the amount of time that somebody took to generate this data structure is at least X.
                                         
                                        And obviously you can cheat and go a little faster,
                                         
                                        but you cannot go arbitrarily faster.
                                         
                                        You're basically limited by where technology is today.
                                         
                                        And that was this eureka moment in my head,
                                         
    
                                        because even though I wasn't working at protocols,
                                         
                                        Qualcomm, just being at a cellular protocol company, you just know how this stuff works.
                                         
                                        And one of the first cellular protocols that anyone ever built was called time, division,
                                         
                                        multiple oxygen.
                                         
                                        Yes, TDMA, yes.
                                         
                                        Yeah.
                                         
                                        And this actually, like, if you remember your physics classes, two radio towers transmit over the same time,
                                         
                                        at the same frequency, you get noise.
                                         
    
                                        So the first thing that they gave them is a clock to alternate, and that's how you get TDMA.
                                         
                                        Well, in Bitcoin and proof of work, you have a similar problem.
                                         
                                        If you produce a block at the same time,
                                         
                                        in two different parts of the world,
                                         
                                        you get a collision.
                                         
                                        So the network is in this noisy state
                                         
                                        and information is not passing through.
                                         
                                        So the difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin
                                         
    
                                        is almost very similar to how Aloha has
                                         
                                        a random adjustment to retransmit in a random-based radio
                                         
                                        protocol is you're trying to prevent this collision
                                         
                                        from occupying the same channel.
                                         
                                        So you stretch it out to make sure the probability
                                         
                                        of a collision is very small.
                                         
                                        But because you're doing that, you're
                                         
                                        lowering the channel efficiency.
                                         
    
                                        You can't send as many bits through it.
                                         
                                        So as soon as I had this like, oh, I have this clock that nobody needs to trust as a third-party provider,
                                         
                                        I can do the same trick and maximizing the number of bits that can show through the network.
                                         
                                        And my back of the envelope was like, oh, this is at least 10,000 times faster than Bitcoin.
                                         
                                        So that was this kind of thing that, like, I built TDMA for blockchain.
                                         
                                        So what's funny is that, I don't know, I was bad at,
                                         
                                        like selling the idea to venture capital,
                                         
                                        or maybe I was good enough.
                                         
    
                                        But this idea that what you really,
                                         
                                        the problem that you're solving
                                         
                                        is this channel efficiency problem,
                                         
                                        that was hard for me to actually communicate
                                         
                                        in those early days and it was more focused.
                                         
                                        Oh, this is a whole new consensus algorithm,
                                         
                                        the yada yada, really focusing on the implementation side
                                         
                                        more so than what it unlocks.
                                         
    
                                        And years later, now like I think we're in what,
                                         
                                        year seven for Solana and like,
                                         
                                        year 20 for crypto in general, we now see the next generation consensus algorithms don't
                                         
                                        actually have to depend on the clock, like proof history, but do solve this problem of channel
                                         
                                        efficiency.
                                         
                                        So we got so successful that I was able to hire kind of best in class bleeding edge consensus
                                         
                                        team out of ETH Zurich that are throwing away proof history and all the code that
                                         
                                        could jump in the early days, but literally understand the problem that I solved.
                                         
    
                                        And like, this is the problem that you solve.
                                         
                                        This is why it's important and why that's a good thing.
                                         
                                        But you don't actually need all this complexity.
                                         
                                        So now I get to see my baby retired in a way.
                                         
                                        Just so everybody knows, ETH Zurich is, it's the MIT of Europe.
                                         
                                        It has nothing to do with Ethereum.
                                         
                                        Yeah.
                                         
                                        Just total coincidence that it's called ETH, but nothing to do with Ethereum.
                                         
    
                                        That's such a beautiful founding story totally.
                                         
                                        And in part, I never made the connection between.
                                         
                                        TdMA and just in general, the Qualcomm view of wireless and aiming for high throughput.
                                         
                                        I'm curious, if you were to mentally run the clock forward, although source code for earlier
                                         
                                        versions from Solonda Lab still preserve for posterity on GitHub, I see, but if you fast forward,
                                         
                                        what does the perfect layer one look like to you?
                                         
                                        Like where do you see all of this going if you could fast forward 10 years, 15 years?
                                         
                                        Yeah, I think, like, what is it solving, right?
                                         
    
                                        So I think if you're solving execution, what you're trying to do is have as many markets around the world synchronized as much as possible.
                                         
                                        And there's several challenges there.
                                         
                                        And one is you look at something like NASDAQ or NIZE, it's a centralized piece of memory.
                                         
                                        Like literally, it exists in a single physical location.
                                         
                                        So, and that seems like the fastest way to build something.
                                         
                                        can build sub-microsecond matching engine
                                         
                                        and run really, really fast markets there.
                                         
                                        But the problem that it has is that if you
                                         
    
                                        have an event in Singapore where a container ship full of iPhone
                                         
                                        sinks outside your window, that information
                                         
                                        still has to go speed a light through fiber
                                         
                                        from Singapore to New York before it's in the market.
                                         
                                        It's the market.
                                         
                                        So perfect layer one is something that can do both.
                                         
                                        And the way that we envision it at Solana
                                         
                                        is you actually have concurrent block
                                         
    
                                        producers that are making blocks at the same time,
                                         
                                        one in Singapore, one in New York.
                                         
                                        So your latency to the block producer is as short as possible.
                                         
                                        And they're located to where all the signal is.
                                         
                                        In the most important markets,
                                         
                                        you have concurrently ingesting transactions
                                         
                                        and your latency to stick this data into the chain.
                                         
                                        So markets can now take action on it is as low as possible.
                                         
    
                                        So this is kind of the communication physics problem.
                                         
                                        And this is, again, the analogy that's kind of done,
                                         
                                        works is you're going from TDMA to CDMA. We have concurrent channels you can simultaneously use
                                         
                                        at the same time. And you can shove all this information into this single giant state
                                         
                                        machine that is churning through it as fast as we can synchronize around the world. So is that the
                                         
                                        future a single machine layer for all markets everywhere? Yes. That everything is living
                                         
                                        on top of? If you imagine science fiction finance 20, 50 years from now, that's what it looks
                                         
                                        And this is where there's no computer science academic reason why it can't exist.
                                         
    
                                        It's purely an engineering problem.
                                         
                                        And we're on our way to solve it as fast as we can.
                                         
                                        If you could walk us through concretely, what is it in your mind?
                                         
                                        What does that future look like?
                                         
                                        Does it look like every object, everywhere where we talk on the pod all the time about tiling the earth with data centers and with compute?
                                         
                                        No, you talk about it.
                                         
                                        We just agree.
                                         
                                        We agree.
                                         
    
                                        We agree.
                                         
                                        Okay, fine. First person, singular. I talk all the time about tiling the earth with compute, but in your mind, does this vision concretely involve basically embedding like shah or like hash function proof of history generation in every object everywhere?
                                         
                                        No, no, you don't need, you don't need any of that. But just kind of the next generation, Byzantine full tolerant consensus like Alpenglo, there's or there's, or there's,
                                         
                                        a bunch of other options, but you can just
                                         
                                        have concurrent nodes that are ingesting signal
                                         
                                        anywhere in the world where there's valuable signal.
                                         
                                        What's kind of interesting for a proof of stake network,
                                         
                                        people will move stake to those places
                                         
    
                                        so they can run those block producers more often,
                                         
                                        and therefore be the center that ingests
                                         
                                        that signal into the chain.
                                         
                                        And that's the most profitable part you can do,
                                         
                                        because the way that these networks,
                                         
                                        proof of stake networks make money,
                                         
                                        is you have markets.
                                         
                                        on chain, there is value at risk in those markets, and the faster you get data to adjust
                                         
    
                                        those markets, the faster you can make money.
                                         
                                        Like your cost of opportunity to being late, to being second to take that trade is effectively
                                         
                                        the entire profit of that trade.
                                         
                                        So you're now incentivized to go and start co-locating next to the signal, whether that's
                                         
                                        Singapore, London, New York, LA or whatever, or in the future, who knows where, you can move
                                         
                                        the block production next to where that signal is produced, that impacts markets, you ingest
                                         
                                        the data as fast as you can into the single global data structure.
                                         
                                        And it's actually not that big because markets themselves and trades and all this other stuff,
                                         
    
                                        they're not a 4K video streamed in real time driving in China to a person in LA driving.
                                         
                                        This is what Qualcomm built, mind-blowingly complex, low latency, high throughput stuff.
                                         
                                        and trades and all these other things
                                         
                                        are actually relatively small amount
                                         
                                        of memory and small amount of messages
                                         
                                        in comparison.
                                         
                                        So the NFL
                                         
                                        is building all the info for us.
                                         
    
                                        Like that...
                                         
                                        How long before this science fiction future
                                         
                                        could come to existence?
                                         
                                        And is there a tipping point
                                         
                                        at which point when enough people
                                         
                                        are on that player,
                                         
                                        on that platform, on that layer,
                                         
                                        it makes, you know,
                                         
    
                                        it doesn't make sense for NASDAQ,
                                         
                                        not to be there.
                                         
                                        It doesn't make sense for everything else not to be there.
                                         
                                        Yeah, I think you'll still have very localized markets because there is
                                         
                                        advantages to being co-located and having that light cone around microstructure and
                                         
                                        like the keys.
                                         
                                        You are people talking about light cones.
                                         
                                        That's great.
                                         
    
                                        In that little like server room in NASDAQ, there's actually a lot of value into having
                                         
                                        that part run.
                                         
                                        But to build a single global kind of layer for all these stuff to synchronize, I think
                                         
                                        that that's kind of the challenge that we want to.
                                         
                                        to take on. How fast is going to happen? I think the fact that we now have stable
                                         
                                        code legislation and that people are projecting like 1 trillion to 10 trillion worth of digital
                                         
                                        dollars being minted over the next five years is going to massively accelerate things,
                                         
                                        because those dollars are going to get minted for all sorts of trade purposes and settlement
                                         
    
                                        between, you know, like an inner country and basically globally. And once a
                                         
                                        Once those dollars are there, it's just a very simple interface to interact with them.
                                         
                                        Yeah, the price to move dollars from Ethereum to Solana is a million times cheaper than to move it between any two banks.
                                         
                                        We had Jeremy Aller on the pod two weeks ago, so we're discussing this.
                                         
                                        Saleem, what are you thinking right now?
                                         
                                        It feels to me like one of the most incredible applications here would be the whole defy world.
                                         
                                        And can you speak to what you guys are doing there?
                                         
                                        Yeah, so I think of, you know, like what are smart contract platforms do
                                         
    
                                        as they implement some kind of escrow mechanism,
                                         
                                        is that you can escrow money and then conditionally release it based on some action in the future.
                                         
                                        And that could be alter and complete computation or whatever.
                                         
                                        And defy is basically the use case for this,
                                         
                                        is being able to conditionally place money at risk based on oral.
                                         
                                        or market or whatever, some future signal.
                                         
                                        And I think it effectively applies to almost everything that businesses do.
                                         
                                        You have to borrow money from somebody that requires escrow and requires risk calculations that are running all the time and things like that.
                                         
    
                                        So the challenge here is that like we have, in the US, we have a really, really amazing financial system.
                                         
                                        It was mostly built kind of like after the railroad boom and the scams there and the four world.
                                         
                                        World War II and kind of a little bit after World War II, as that was exported to the Western world,
                                         
                                        it was all built before the internet. It functions amazingly because through a lot of trial and
                                         
                                        error regulators actually constructed processes and systems that are very robust, but they're all
                                         
                                        human-based. And this human action is what forces two-day settlement. It's like it's very hard
                                         
                                        to cut that down to one day or four hours or 10 milliseconds because people are in the loop.
                                         
                                        blockchain was built even bitcoin with its 10 minute blocks was built well after the internet
                                         
    
                                        and it can rely on cryptography and the fact that I don't even know if NATO can actually
                                         
                                        reliably partition the internet anymore like we live in a super connected world and we have
                                         
                                        cryptography that can mathematically guarantee correctness of certain actions you know just
                                         
                                        just to reinforce your point you just made I was at a public company board meeting all
                                         
                                        morning and we were talking about something we might be interested in acquiring. And one of the board
                                         
                                        members said, well, maybe they'll just go public. And the other board members said, there hasn't been
                                         
                                        an IPO below a $3 billion valuation in like decade. You can't even afford the legal. The friction
                                         
                                        is so high. Like, wow, how's that going to work in the world of AI? Like, the friction is way too
                                         
    
                                        high for that system. Like you said, built after the railroad. Texas baby.
                                         
                                        Before World War II. Texas exchanges are coming. Yeah. But there's 50,000 meme coins launched
                                         
                                        today. And there hasn't been a single IPO. And like, you know, the number of IPOs, I think,
                                         
                                        have shrunk to the slowest levels since, like, the 70s or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
                                         
                                        I'd like to pull on that point if I might totally. I mean, so I think stable coin amazing, right?
                                         
                                        So, you know, the Collison brothers call it room temperature superconductors for finance,
                                         
                                        in principle driving international money transfer efficiency to infinity. But what in your mind is sort of
                                         
                                        the killer app for layers two and three that expands the wealth of humanity versus just driving
                                         
    
                                        efficiencies in terms of monetary. It's like, where's the Dow's for a while? We're going to
                                         
                                        create an entirely new class of economic actors, mixed sort of success. What's the big transformative
                                         
                                        outcome that we get that radically expands human wealth? I think what you should start seeing is the
                                         
                                        cost of finance to basically drop to it's the actual value it's providing.
                                         
                                        So the challenge here is like you look at like the figment IPO, I think what they
                                         
                                        lost like $3 billion right in that process in a single transaction.
                                         
                                        That's 10% of the market cap of the company, which is kind of crazy, where if, if you
                                         
                                        have 10, 1 to 10 trillion stable coins, you have incredibly deep on-chain markets, they
                                         
    
                                        could literally just use a smart.
                                         
                                        contract, a direct list, and if they use, like, a third party to go actually create that
                                         
                                        market, that party has to actually provide the value that comparable to what they're getting
                                         
                                        for it, right?
                                         
                                        Like, they could maybe, like, be the person that they use an analyst or whatever to actually
                                         
                                        go dive deep into the company and, like, create that nice set of information that everyone
                                         
                                        else consumes so they can participate with, you know, safety or whatever in that market.
                                         
                                        but none of the listing or access to capital,
                                         
    
                                        all of the stuff is fully on chain,
                                         
                                        there's zero cost to actually get access to it.
                                         
                                        All you're trying to do then is get above the noise floor
                                         
                                        in terms of signal, yeah, you should allocate capital here
                                         
                                        because of X, Y, Z.
                                         
                                        And providing that value, I think, is important,
                                         
                                        and then how much you charge for it should be at the most competitive price ever.
                                         
                                        Like, I think this is where we see, like,
                                         
    
                                        I think finance right now is taking out a huge chunk of, like,
                                         
                                        the GDP and it's a tax. It's not actually generating as much value as it's consuming.
                                         
                                        It's sand in the gears. Yeah, exactly. The statistic I've seen is over the last decade of the
                                         
                                        corporate American profits sent 40% of corporate American profits went to the financial
                                         
                                        services sector. It's unbelievable sucking sound there. But pulling the threat on that,
                                         
                                        if I may, so if the desired end state in your mind is basically driving,
                                         
                                        profits in financial services to zero. A, is there anything beyond that? Or like if
                                         
                                        blockchain technologies in general, not just Salana's layer one specifically, are able to suck
                                         
    
                                        all the profit out of financial services, do you declare victory? Is that sort of the end and
                                         
                                        you move on to something new? Or is there something even larger than just making financial
                                         
                                        services profitless? I think the end result of that is you basically have talent anywhere in the
                                         
                                        world. So that can acquire capital from anywhere in the world. And that unlocks, like, human potential, right? Like, I have a really
                                         
                                        great idea. I'm an engineer in Ukraine or whatever. I can now get funding from people in China,
                                         
                                        US, Australia, and I'm not relying on the, you know, the kind of the trust model that, like, a safe
                                         
                                        is based on NYC. That the fact that YC due diligence in this particular person, that then you can
                                         
                                        invest in them and this kind of flimsy contract that, right, like, I think, which is awesome.
                                         
    
                                        Like, I think the fact that that works and reliably produces great results is testament to, like,
                                         
                                        how important finances and into, like, innovation. So we need to eliminate all those barriers so
                                         
                                        you can actually have as many founders in the world's turning companies and getting to that
                                         
                                        profitable state and creating value for the world. This is the velocity of money.
                                         
                                        going through the roof, right? It's accessibility and velocity, finding the lowest level,
                                         
                                        and just becoming a fuel for acceleration of the economy. Can you give us your vision on the
                                         
                                        regulatory? Like, if you look at Mercor as an example, and here's a company, two years old,
                                         
                                        getting close to a billion dollars of revenue, unleashed a whole new class of employee in the AI
                                         
    
                                        world, but still paying them through traditional banking means. And obviously, that needs
                                         
                                        to move on to Solana and be frictionless.
                                         
                                        But you've had an incredible journey
                                         
                                        through different regulatory regimes
                                         
                                        in just your seven-year history.
                                         
                                        It's got to be the most crazy roller coaster.
                                         
                                        And that's just in the U.S.
                                         
                                        Look at every jurisdiction in the world.
                                         
    
                                        So how's that going to unfold
                                         
                                        as this over-the-top economy rolls out?
                                         
                                        I mean, Paul Atkins and Hester Peers have been awesome
                                         
                                        and David Sachs has been awesome.
                                         
                                        And you can kind of think of that,
                                         
                                        like the whole security
                                         
                                        law was created in the United States, so when your neighbor says, I have this railroad
                                         
                                        certificate, gave me some money for it, and you get it, that one is it's a real certificate
                                         
    
                                        that railroad company exists, and you have all the information to actually make that decision.
                                         
                                        So a lot of stuff can go wrong that, right?
                                         
                                        Even if your neighbor is not lying to you, they can literally have a fake piece of paper,
                                         
                                        or the company doesn't exist, or the company lied about everything that it's doing,
                                         
                                        and there is no actual railroad.
                                         
                                        So those scams actually happened
                                         
                                        and fueled a lot of railroad construction
                                         
                                        and a lot of bad financial decisions
                                         
    
                                        in the late 19th century.
                                         
                                        And a lot of regulatory paperwork.
                                         
                                        Exactly.
                                         
                                        So what's cool now is the difference
                                         
                                        of blockchain creates is kind of like the SSL
                                         
                                        little lock in e-commerce in the 90s.
                                         
                                        I can transfer you a token.
                                         
                                        You can cryptographically verify
                                         
    
                                        that this token goes back to the issuer,
                                         
                                        but the issuers, public keys that signed off on their financial statements, all the stuff
                                         
                                        that they published, their SWAN, et cetera, and you know that you're actually receiving what
                                         
                                        they're claiming to be their equity. So when you're paying for it, all those guarantees that
                                         
                                        are solved with regulation are now just solve the math and data, just like the SSL lock tells
                                         
                                        you when I put in my credit card number here, some intermediary sending this data is not going
                                         
                                        to steal my credit card. So a lot of stuff that humans do kind of goes away.
                                         
                                        And the regulators have a hard time getting up to speed to that because there's a lot of stuff
                                         
    
                                        that simply works.
                                         
                                        And there's no reason to change stuff that works when there's a lot of financial risk at stake.
                                         
                                        But the fact that the whole crypto industry, outside of support of any regulation, has
                                         
                                        been able to grow so dramatically to such a large market cap, like with Bitcoin and Ethereum
                                         
                                        and Solana kind of leading it, is the fact that this stuff actually solves real world problems.
                                         
                                        the reason why somebody in Singapore can go start a protocol around trading coins and make money
                                         
                                        and ROI is because people can trust that settlement and execution of those assets.
                                         
                                        And they're willing to put money at risk.
                                         
    
                                        And because the software minimizes the risk, they can maximize the amount of money.
                                         
                                        They actually put at risk into these systems.
                                         
                                        So it's happening anyways.
                                         
                                        Like it's happening with or without United States.
                                         
                                        I think with the regulation on board now and like with the Stable Coin Act, like,
                                         
                                        coming out. I think you're just going to see this accelerating. And a lot of these services
                                         
                                        and kind of the intermediaries along the stack are all like one resistant to change, but also
                                         
                                        there's so many of them, some of them are always looking for an opportunity to move up and down,
                                         
    
                                        they're vertical and kind of expand. Maybe dwelling for a moment on the regulatory side.
                                         
                                        So in a paper contract, you mentioned the Ycombinator safe earlier, you have a few parties,
                                         
                                        And there's a whole societal apparatus built around paper contracts.
                                         
                                        You have court systems and rule of law and regulations.
                                         
                                        With Solana or other smart contract, you have, to first order, approximately, none of that.
                                         
                                        And so I'm curious, where do you see this going?
                                         
                                        Do you think rule of law basically moves on chain in some sense with bodies to adjudicate disputes also on chain?
                                         
                                        How do disputes work in a future where, hypothetically, everything's on chain?
                                         
    
                                        I think you're minimizing the number of intermediaries necessary to go do the right thing.
                                         
                                        So if somebody raises money and they lie about their purpose of raising those funds, that's fraud.
                                         
                                        And if they do it on a public blockchain or not, they're still liable.
                                         
                                        It doesn't matter whether they do it with a safe or not.
                                         
                                        What changes is that if you do it on chain, is that I don't have to rely on some transfer agent or broker or whatever to facilitate moving these contracts around.
                                         
                                        or to certify that this contract actually does belong to this YC company.
                                         
                                        You can actually do all that verification.
                                         
                                        So all the boring stuff that people don't think about when they think about finance,
                                         
    
                                        all those little service layers that all take a few bips off the top,
                                         
                                        those go away and you're dealing directly with that company as the issuer.
                                         
                                        They could obviously use some third-party service provider to implement the software
                                         
                                        to manage all of these things.
                                         
                                        And there's a bunch of them like squads on Solana is like a great example.
                                         
                                        example of that have formally verified multi-sid contracts for managing governance and all this stuff.
                                         
                                        But at the end of the day, if it's a company that's claiming they're doing X and you buy this
                                         
                                        thing, the end result that enforces whether the company's lying or not is going to be the local
                                         
    
                                        jurisdiction where they're incorporated. And they're still just as liable. I totally, totally
                                         
                                        get it. As a stepping stone toward where Alex is going, the actual, just the safe note itself,
                                         
                                        So just to take this hypothetical transaction, you know, I want to invest in your company, you're in Singapore, here's my money, it's on chain.
                                         
                                        What about the safe note itself?
                                         
                                        Do you just store that and hash it and then put the hash on chain?
                                         
                                        Or how do you deal with the actual terms of the safe note?
                                         
                                        Or do you not touch that?
                                         
                                        I mean, this is where you want to draw the abstraction.
                                         
    
                                        There are efforts to actually use the ledger as the cap table.
                                         
                                        So whatever's on the ledger, however these safe nodes are allocated and distributed.
                                         
                                        those public keys, private keys, that's the actual cap table.
                                         
                                        And then you can build all the cap table management software on top of that
                                         
                                        because that's a public data structure.
                                         
                                        You can manipulate and move this around.
                                         
                                        And whatever rules you want around clawing back shares or only allowing transactions
                                         
                                        if the company agrees, you can encode all those in a smart contract reliably.
                                         
    
                                        And all that stuff is just code.
                                         
                                        It's a pain in the butt because it's a bunch of database kind of gnarly code.
                                         
                                        but it's all doable.
                                         
                                        But this would be the best way to do it
                                         
                                        because then you're getting rid of
                                         
                                        all these other layers, transfer agent brokers, etc.
                                         
                                        Like all those people are gone.
                                         
                                        Not just that, but I don't want to beat this
                                         
    
                                        Y Combinator Safe Note to death,
                                         
                                        but if you look at the actual terms of the note,
                                         
                                        because we do these every day,
                                         
                                        they're not settled in the courts.
                                         
                                        You know, they go straight to jams
                                         
                                        or to some third party because the courts
                                         
                                        will be years before they decide what they want to do.
                                         
                                        And so it's already, it's not on,
                                         
    
                                        chain, but it's certainly out of the courts and out of the federal and state system, because it's
                                         
                                        just too slow.
                                         
                                        So, like, I think bankruptcy could be one of those things that could be dramatically optimized
                                         
                                        where it took, like, two years to resolve the FTX bankruptcy.
                                         
                                        That was a massive bankruptcy in crypto, but because FTX is not, is it a centralized exchange
                                         
                                        that is not, as a company, a defy company, right?
                                         
                                        They just bought and sold tokens, like any other centralized financial system.
                                         
                                        when they collapse, it's incredibly messy to go and wind all of that.
                                         
    
                                        And like to go through the bankruptcy law and figure out who owns what.
                                         
                                        But in reality, if it was like a single ledger, even if it was a permission one,
                                         
                                        if they just ran a ledger, one is you would immediately see that the amount of money going out
                                         
                                        is more than the amount of money going in.
                                         
                                        That would be obvious immediately.
                                         
                                        So you wouldn't even get to that stage where you have bankruptcy.
                                         
                                        But if you did, like Ave has liquidations, which is effectively the bankruptcy process when you borrow and you can't repay, those are programmatically encoded and run on every block, every 12 seconds in Ethereum.
                                         
                                        And Camino does it every 400 milliseconds on Solana.
                                         
    
                                        So you would never even get to that stage where you have to spend two years to figure out Google On's what.
                                         
                                        It would get liquidated and processed immediately.
                                         
                                        And I think that is a really critical part in finance.
                                         
                                        If you can invest knowing that in case of a bankruptcy, that there is this deterministic process that's run immediately, everyone gets the best what you could get out of that process within like a minute.
                                         
                                        It makes investing a lot more viable, especially across jurisdictions where you may not have the ability to go enforce it in the courts, like in Ukraine or whatever.
                                         
                                        So I think those FDX investors were getting 50 cents on the dollar, 60 cents on the dollar
                                         
                                        because of, I mean, it's just an insane amount of money lost in that friction, just in that FTCS case.
                                         
                                        All right.
                                         
    
                                        Let's go to Salim.
                                         
                                        Salim, ask a really intelligent question that I'll understand, okay?
                                         
                                        Well, I want to make two points.
                                         
                                        Then I'll ask a question.
                                         
                                        The one point I want to make is there's a really important distinction around digital and crypto,
                                         
                                        which is the value of crypto is not the fact that it's digital.
                                         
                                        the fact that it's programmable.
                                         
                                        And what totally talks about
                                         
    
                                        when you can do settlements all programmatically,
                                         
                                        it manages it all, you know, it's all done.
                                         
                                        You don't have to think about it.
                                         
                                        And that takes it away from the human layer
                                         
                                        and it takes it away from all sorts of other things.
                                         
                                        I think it's worth for our readers
                                         
                                        at whatever time to just take a step back
                                         
                                        and understand the Byzantine General's problem
                                         
    
                                        because that's actually sitting at the core of a lot of this.
                                         
                                        So I'm happy to get into that question,
                                         
                                        but can I take a minute and describe that, Peter?
                                         
                                        Sure.
                                         
                                        Yeah, of course.
                                         
                                        Okay, so.
                                         
                                        I remember, you're the first person ever to tell me about it.
                                         
                                        This is such a fun, foundational thing.
                                         
    
                                        So for the viewers that aren't familiar with Bitcoin, blockchains, Solana, etc.,
                                         
                                        the core innovation at the heart of blockchains is what's called the Byzantine generals problem.
                                         
                                        It's actually the story of Constantinople in the 15th century.
                                         
                                        There were eight generals circling the city.
                                         
                                        They're trying to coordinate a siege.
                                         
                                        And they were sending messages around that network, who's going to go first,
                                         
                                        what time should we attack, how are we going to get in, et cetera.
                                         
                                        And the problem they had was one out of the eight generals was a
                                         
    
                                        trader and could send the wrong information, lose the element of surprise, blow the whole operation.
                                         
                                        And in computer science terms, that's become known as that problem because in, and in computer
                                         
                                        science terms, it's how do you send a trusted, secure, authenticated message over a network
                                         
                                        when you don't trust the network, right? Really hard problem. Forty years of computer science
                                         
                                        patients have been trying to solve that problem until the blockchain, and because of the consensus
                                         
                                        mechanism and the synchronization across multiple ledgers, you can now, if I send totally a message,
                                         
                                        has a 100% guarantee that it came from me, wasn't double entered, can't be revoked,
                                         
                                        wasn't tampered along the way.
                                         
    
                                        That's a magical thing in the digital world.
                                         
                                        And this provides an authentication layer and a validity and a validation layer that allows
                                         
                                        all of this other stuff to take place.
                                         
                                        All of the layers that we talked about in the settlement stuff, etc., all there to validate,
                                         
                                        secure, ratify, et cetera.
                                         
                                        This stuff wasn't screwed along along the way.
                                         
                                        Now that all happens as part of the infrastructure.
                                         
                                        And so that makes it an unbelievable.
                                         
    
                                        powerful. The broader implications of decentralizing authentication are absolutely profound.
                                         
                                        And so for folks that aren't aware of this, go check out this particular problem and the nuances around
                                         
                                        it. I have a question around that specifically.
                                         
                                        Wait, Selina, add the double spending problem in there too.
                                         
                                        So that was a perfect summary. You can't get into that either, which is can you stop somebody
                                         
                                        from double spending in two different places and then doubling up every time?
                                         
                                        The question I have for you totally, early on, there was a lot of criticism of Solana for the decentralization.
                                         
                                        Over the last couple of years, you guys have solved a lot of that, and I think it would be really great for you to explain what you guys have been doing and the architectural change that have taken place, because now it's really solid and robust and on its way to Ethereum-level decentralization.
                                         
    
                                        I think there's a lot of, if you're on crypto-twitter, people fight about what is decentralization actually means.
                                         
                                        And just depending who you ask,
                                         
                                        it's whatever coin they own is decentralized
                                         
                                        and whatever coin they don't own is not.
                                         
                                        But the way that I think I've always approached it
                                         
                                        is I'm kind of a, you know, started programming in the 90s.
                                         
                                        I'm a huge, like, open source Linux fan.
                                         
                                        So it was just awesome for me to be able to analyze the software
                                         
    
                                        that I'm running on my computer and know exactly what's happening,
                                         
                                        know why it's broken, why it's not.
                                         
                                        So we've always looked at permissionless being as the core part of decentralization.
                                         
                                        It doesn't matter if the system is open source, but can I participate in every part of the stack
                                         
                                        without needing a third party to approve me?
                                         
                                        So can I run a validator?
                                         
                                        Can I make blocks?
                                         
                                        Can I transact on it?
                                         
    
                                        Can I deploy code on it?
                                         
                                        But can I also own this, like have a copy of that state and be able to recover the entire network?
                                         
                                        work if that kind of failure exists.
                                         
                                        So Solana is always focused on that aspect of it,
                                         
                                        that every part of the system that anyone can run,
                                         
                                        that it's permissionless to go and run it.
                                         
                                        And I think that is incredibly critical for this idea of a single layer for finance,
                                         
                                        because no matter what, you're still going to be dealing with people.
                                         
    
                                        Like if you have the science fiction, futuristic layer of finance
                                         
                                        for all of the world's execution,
                                         
                                        it's still going to run in France and England and Spain
                                         
                                        and none of those guys are ever going to really trust each other 100%.
                                         
                                        So the banks in France will need to be able to participate in every part of the stack.
                                         
                                        So will the banks in England, so all the banks in New York,
                                         
                                        even if they're allies or whatever.
                                         
                                        But they need, because they're people, they want to have control,
                                         
    
                                        they will need to have access to every part of the system.
                                         
                                        And to make it really decentralized,
                                         
                                        you have to allow for adversarial nodes
                                         
                                        that are either misconfigured or actually deliberately adversarial,
                                         
                                        like the Byzantine problem that you described,
                                         
                                        where they're maliciously citing the wrong message,
                                         
                                        they're trying to double-spend,
                                         
                                        they're trying to create chaos in the network.
                                         
    
                                        The protocol has to be robust to handle that.
                                         
                                        And you can work it out on paper.
                                         
                                        You can say we have all these proofs and formal verification
                                         
                                        that it actually is robust with,
                                         
                                        Byzantine actors. And then in implementation, things blow up. I think the Salana journey has been
                                         
                                        that of we're trying to solve all of these problems at the same time, both performance and
                                         
                                        decentralization and doing it, you know, as a startup, shipping as fast as we can. There's a lot
                                         
                                        of trial and error, I would say, growing pains or blood, sweat and tears that went into making
                                         
    
                                        Solana robust. It's incredible. Yeah. Incredible what you pulled off. This episode is brought to you by
                                         
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                                        Here's the challenge.
                                         
                                        What percentage of the world, or let's look at the U.S., do you believe understands crypto
                                         
                                        at all, if you had to guess?
                                         
                                        A tenth of one percent of the population?
                                         
                                        I think anyone that Finnish calculus can understand it.
                                         
    
                                        I mean, like basically.
                                         
                                        Can understand it.
                                         
                                        The difference you can understand and do understand.
                                         
                                        So, I mean, one of the questions.
                                         
                                        is, you know, the idea of Solana as the everything coin that I'm using, let's define what that
                                         
                                        means for us. What would Solana as the everything coin mean? And then what would it take? Yeah,
                                         
                                        go ahead. The coin itself that runs a network, its only purpose is to prevent spam in the network.
                                         
                                        So fundamentally, like, the only problem that it can solve is decent incentivized spam. So as part
                                         
    
                                        of solving this Byzantine general's problem where an adversarial note can send infinite messages,
                                         
                                        there's a cost to send messages, that's the coin.
                                         
                                        But to use it for anything else, simply because it is tradable or can be easily sent,
                                         
                                        it exists as any other coin in the network.
                                         
                                        And you can use, I mean, we encourage people to go use dollars for commerce.
                                         
                                        If you're buying and selling stuff as a merchant, go use USDC or PayPal's USD or any other digital currency.
                                         
                                        So that to us, it kind of doesn't matter what the coin, the underlying token, the underlying token,
                                         
                                        that provides us crypto economic guarantees that adversaries pay some fixed costs for spam,
                                         
    
                                        that doesn't really matter, like what you use it beyond that.
                                         
                                        What's kind of been surprising to me, and this has really been like, you know, when you start a
                                         
                                        startup, not only do you have no idea what PMF is going to look like, but the fact that
                                         
                                        as soon as you have markets and you have money at escrow and at risk, the opportunity costs to be
                                         
                                        late to access those markets is so high that the fact
                                         
                                        that this underlying token is what prevents spam in the network,
                                         
                                        it can actually capture value that is substantial.
                                         
                                        The $2 billion, whatever that you guys mentioned,
                                         
    
                                        captured over the last years on Solana,
                                         
                                        that is because there's an opportunity cost to be late
                                         
                                        to send a trade, and you're willing to pay the highest
                                         
                                        amount to be first in the queue to actually go execute the trade.
                                         
                                        And underneath the hood, the only thing
                                         
                                        that the token is doing is preventing
                                         
                                        So the fact that it actually loops back and allows value capture for this thing, that was not planned and totally unexpected and almost like discovered through trial and error of us getting so much massive congestion on the network from NFT trading that that was the only way to solve the problem. And it was kind of the slight bulb moment. Oh, one, this is a classic database hotspot problem. Like, why didn't I think of this when we started? It's so obvious. And two, it actually works for money.
                                         
                                        Was the craze around NFTs and meme coins a surprise to you?
                                         
    
                                        Yeah.
                                         
                                        I mean, when we started, our tagline was blockchain and NASDAX speed.
                                         
                                        And the idea was we're an execution layer, which can run arbitrary number of markets
                                         
                                        and kind of keep them all in a single state machine to minimize, to maximize capital efficiency,
                                         
                                        minimize the arbitrage opportunities.
                                         
                                        We thought that was like really valuable.
                                         
                                        And the fact that meme coins took off was really surprising
                                         
                                        because those are assets with no value in all price.
                                         
    
                                        But it kind of, you know, like, if you make, look back at like the history of the internet,
                                         
                                        it makes sense.
                                         
                                        Like, if soon as you have any kind of shared state that people have,
                                         
                                        even if, like, I played Ultima online as a kid,
                                         
                                        and people would start trading gold.
                                         
                                        and I actually, like, build all these silly scripts
                                         
                                        that would auto-mine, like, wood and resources and close out of them.
                                         
                                        That was Richard.
                                         
    
                                        That was Richard Garriott's company.
                                         
                                        Yeah.
                                         
                                        Lord British.
                                         
                                        Brock Pierce, our buddy.
                                         
                                        And those things, that, you know, Ultima Online Wood is as much digital value as a meme coin as part coin.
                                         
                                        There's nothing backing it, but people still wanted to trade and consume it,
                                         
                                        one just for fun but two because you now have this shared state with some economics it just for
                                         
                                        whatever reason as soon as you have any kind of shared state people create markets and start
                                         
    
                                        trading random things i just want to be able to trade it to bring those uh gold and the wood
                                         
                                        between different video games how old your kid um 10 six and two and a half okay i got two
                                         
                                        fortunate old boys and so does lemma fortune old boy so it's interesting right the entire video game
                                         
                                        world is teaching an entire generation about the value of digital assets in an extraordinary
                                         
                                        fashion.
                                         
                                        Yeah, isn't it funny that video games, you know, that's where the GPU came from that's now
                                         
                                        driving all the AI.
                                         
                                        And it's where crypto came from to trade gold for wood or whatever than Minecraft or.
                                         
    
                                        Maybe to take the counterpoint to that, before modern video games, we had board games and we
                                         
                                        had credit systems and sort of fake money systems.
                                         
                                        So it's not in some sense that new.
                                         
                                        But I guess maybe a question for totally pivoting off of a question, sort of an adjacent
                                         
                                        question to what Peter asked you earlier about how many people do understand crypto,
                                         
                                        by which I assume Peter's referring to cryptocurrency and sort of layer one, layer there to.
                                         
                                        How many should?
                                         
                                        Because I think you were making the point earlier almost like.
                                         
    
                                        Lamports slash soul, this should be sort of under the hood and it should just make everything
                                         
                                        frictionless.
                                         
                                        I think of it as like the number of people you invite to your wedding is roughly 200.
                                         
                                        That's like your core group of people.
                                         
                                        At least one or two of them understand Linux.
                                         
                                        One or two of them will understand crypto.
                                         
                                        And that's enough because you can invite them to your wedding.
                                         
                                        You can trust them, right?
                                         
    
                                        And they'll explain it to you.
                                         
                                        and they can, like, tell you, okay, use it like this.
                                         
                                        This is how you minimize your risk and stuff like that.
                                         
                                        So I think the number of people that you actually need to understand crypto in the world is, like, one in 200, like one per social group, your extended trust circle.
                                         
                                        And I think we're probably there.
                                         
                                        Yeah, we're probably there.
                                         
                                        So I think that's striking.
                                         
                                        What I understand you to be saying is this is not something that retail investors should even be paying attention to, which is contrary to a lot of messaging out there that everyone,
                                         
    
                                        should be paying attention to. So what I think I hear you saying is this is actually just
                                         
                                        infra under the hood to build the next generation of financial services.
                                         
                                        I think it is very much a B2B system. I think there is parts where it touches the consumer.
                                         
                                        So, I mean, when we built our phone, we did a pre-sale and we had credit card or stable
                                         
                                        coin as an option. Half of the purchases came via stable coin without any incentives. Because the
                                         
                                        a friction for somebody in Southeast Asia
                                         
                                        to use the stable coins lower, actually,
                                         
                                        than to use their local credit card for like an international purchase.
                                         
    
                                        So consumers will figure it out.
                                         
                                        And you have demand, if you have products that
                                         
                                        are available over stable coins, people
                                         
                                        just use those rails on their own.
                                         
                                        But it was actually the benefit, I think,
                                         
                                        was to us as a merchant, was really obvious.
                                         
                                        We save 2% on the gross sale amount,
                                         
                                        which is like a three or four engineers.
                                         
    
                                        salaries, like easily, just on that one product.
                                         
                                        So use a merchant immediately that you see, oh, if I have this rail,
                                         
                                        I don't have to pay the 2% fee, yeah, I'm going to use it.
                                         
                                        Like, why wouldn't I?
                                         
                                        It's money in the bank instantly.
                                         
                                        So I think that, like, huge improvement that will move dollars and, like,
                                         
                                        will have people take action, I think is going to be more in the business end.
                                         
                                        But consumers will see the benefit of that ultimately.
                                         
    
                                        A lot of the work now is going to be for Web 3 services.
                                         
                                        Peter and I talk about going from deceptive, disruptive.
                                         
                                        When something becomes exponential, it always has a huge 10-X change in usability, right?
                                         
                                        Coinbase makes Bitcoin easy to buy.
                                         
                                        Solana is making it easy to transact.
                                         
                                        The usability layer has to be there.
                                         
                                        And many Web 3 services, like I fund some liquidity pools, Dex liquidity pools.
                                         
                                        the complexity of going through those and funding a pool, etc. is so ridiculous. I have to have
                                         
    
                                        a hardcore crypto Sherpa standing next to me to make sure I don't screw it up. It's insane. And so
                                         
                                        little by little, those will uptick in terms of usability and then it'll start becoming a very,
                                         
                                        very powerful tool for everybody. Alex, it looks like you're pregnant with a question.
                                         
                                        Yeah, no, I'm trying to wrap my mind around this. So this is actually a question both for
                                         
                                        Toli and Salim. I want to put you guys both on the spot and ask, what do you?
                                         
                                        you think? So let's fast forward to the victory state. We've we've driven the future of financial
                                         
                                        services to to these highly vaunted superconductors for finance. We've driven transaction costs
                                         
                                        down to near zero from credit card fees of two to three percent. We've achieved victory.
                                         
    
                                        What do you view as the singular killer app, the concrete state that we've unlocked in the
                                         
                                        future that creates radical wealth for all of humankind? What does that look like?
                                         
                                        concretely.
                                         
                                        It's hard to point to saying that, like,
                                         
                                        accurate price efficiency globally is that big of a deal to a person.
                                         
                                        Like, do you care if you, like, if the Starbucks gets the best price for their coffee
                                         
                                        beans and the person making those gets the best price?
                                         
                                        Like, these are very abstract things that at an end-to-end, like, my parents are not going
                                         
    
                                        to understand.
                                         
                                        to where it really matters to them.
                                         
                                        But the GDP will, like, move faster.
                                         
                                        We will make fewer errors in finance.
                                         
                                        We will grow faster as a world,
                                         
                                        and fewer and fewer people will be in poverty.
                                         
                                        I think that is kind of very substantial.
                                         
                                        Like, if 40%, yeah, like.
                                         
    
                                        Concretely, though.
                                         
                                        But let me ask you a question.
                                         
                                        Right now, what differentiates America in so many ways,
                                         
                                        it's access to capital, right?
                                         
                                        Entrepreneurs throughout the U.S.,
                                         
                                        can put forward an idea, reach individuals, get access to capital.
                                         
                                        And one of the questions I have is, is this going to increase the speed of entrepreneurial
                                         
                                        creativity and financing and company financing, where it just supercharges the economy
                                         
    
                                        at a speed.
                                         
                                        And, Alex, we talk about sort of, you know, if I had time, I would rewrite economics for the future
                                         
                                        because economics are so fundamentally broken and so last century.
                                         
                                        So is this about reinventing an economics 2.0 or 3.0?
                                         
                                        So, you know, like all the companies that are worth over a trillion or like all the assets,
                                         
                                        they're all U.S. companies or Bitcoin.
                                         
                                        And I think maybe like the Saudi oil company, right?
                                         
                                        Yeah.
                                         
    
                                        So the only place for the other like the other place for finance that can compete with the United States is the Internet.
                                         
                                        And it's happening on the Internet through crypto.
                                         
                                        So you're now seeing like the kind of finance and growth that happen in the United States being replicated on the Internet through crypto rails.
                                         
                                        And this is the only place that I think could compete with the United States.
                                         
                                        And actually, in my opinion, at a gut level, I think it is effectively helping United States export its influence because the Internet is truly an extension of all the values that we care about in the United States.
                                         
                                        And we're so deeply plugged into it.
                                         
                                        I can give a kind of an anecdote, a real.
                                         
                                        life anecdote that maybe highlight some of this, Peter, and maybe to answer your question, Alex,
                                         
    
                                        if you look at, say, the NFT world, where they started doing art on the internet, right,
                                         
                                        you create a collection of 10,000 things, 10,000 apes and start selling those and mint those.
                                         
                                        You have a community building around those.
                                         
                                        All those, by the way, were default exos because they would have a big purpose and they would
                                         
                                        use crypto economics to incentivize the community to mint.
                                         
                                        The first people that got to mint got them for very cheap, and then if you mint it,
                                         
                                        later, you paid a little bit more, et cetera, et cetera.
                                         
                                        What then happened was you had a bunch of breakages in the system.
                                         
    
                                        There were some rug pulls where people collected a lot of money
                                         
                                        and the collection would basically die on the vine, et cetera.
                                         
                                        People are now doing turnarounds where they're buying old collections
                                         
                                        that are really good art and repurposing them, et cetera.
                                         
                                        There's a whole M&A thing going on in the NFT world.
                                         
                                        What's fascinating about this is that it's art in a different form
                                         
                                        because it's programmatic art that's an experience of the art that's not normal that you
                                         
                                        would look at a painting on a wall. You're engaging with it in a digital mode. So with board apes,
                                         
    
                                        for example, they gave the ability to take the, if you own a board ape, you own the intellectual
                                         
                                        property of that character, and you could license it out to people and to TV shows, and people
                                         
                                        started doing that. And that created one new wave of innovation. Then we had cybercongs that created
                                         
                                        that coins within the things.
                                         
                                        So if you own a Cyber Kong
                                         
                                        NFT, it issued bananas to you
                                         
                                        which traded as a secondary utility token.
                                         
                                        Salim, I want to challenge you on this, though.
                                         
    
                                        Hold on, hold on.
                                         
                                        Let me, the broader point I'm making is...
                                         
                                        Imagine doing all of this with lawyers.
                                         
                                        The broader point I'm not doing it at all.
                                         
                                        Let me make my bigger point.
                                         
                                        My bigger point is as you get through this,
                                         
                                        all of the stuff that's happening,
                                         
                                        there's a collective level of innovation
                                         
    
                                        at scale that's moving faster than almost the AI world.
                                         
                                        It moved faster than anything I've ever seen before.
                                         
                                        It was absolutely profound.
                                         
                                        And when people kind of did an initial set of rug pulls,
                                         
                                        now when people issue NFTs or issue tokens,
                                         
                                        you have to hold the token for six months before you can sell it
                                         
                                        and evens out the curves.
                                         
                                        There's all sorts of things happening at unbelievable speed.
                                         
    
                                        The ecosystem is learning very, very fast.
                                         
                                        And so there's something profound happening and incredibly creative.
                                         
                                        What's even more interesting is,
                                         
                                        democratize or anybody with a great idea can show up and do something and test it out and see
                                         
                                        where it goes and so there's for that adds to the collective pool of of ingenuity why are i think
                                         
                                        why is why is these examples important i think is because when i send money into this contract
                                         
                                        i have enough guarantees to know what happens if in the catastrophic event so i can actually
                                         
                                        go participate on this even if it's stupid even if i'm getting bananas
                                         
    
                                        out of this like how many bananas do you own selim right the fact that i can transfer and transact
                                         
                                        and sell these bananas i now have my risk outline is very different than if i had to do this
                                         
                                        blindly over ebay to send somebody a cashier's check to buy their wood and ultima online that's a
                                         
                                        very different type of risk involved there so the chain eliminated a whole bunch of risk
                                         
                                        that was previously impossible to eliminate and because of this yeah a lot of
                                         
                                        a lot of this stuff is going to accelerate at the tail end,
                                         
                                        but the things that now have an option to go use lawyers
                                         
                                        and go through the Figma IPO process,
                                         
    
                                        through an investment banking, now have an alternative.
                                         
                                        So the price through the traditional processes
                                         
                                        is going to collapse down to what's available on chain.
                                         
                                        And right now, you have this massive adverse selection problem
                                         
                                        where if I am, Figma, I don't need to go get on-chain capital.
                                         
                                        I can go through the investment banking process.
                                         
                                        I've been building this company for
                                         
                                        10 years. All my lawyers are telling me minimize risk. You're just going to do an IPO a traditional
                                         
    
                                        way and you shouldn't think about any of these costs because that's the last thing that you should
                                         
                                        try to innovate on. And that's hard for a CEO to make that decision. But that's going to shift.
                                         
                                        Like I think, and that's going to shift massively and quickly as you get to this trillion dollar
                                         
                                        stable coin number and then the $10 trillion is going to be way past the shift, I think.
                                         
                                        now you're getting to the meat of where
                                         
                                        throw some meat to Alex here
                                         
                                        he'll eat it like a pit bull
                                         
                                        the
                                         
    
                                        you know Peter's question about
                                         
                                        okay I want to raise money from my company
                                         
                                        you know five million bucks why is this so hard
                                         
                                        but the assumption underneath that
                                         
                                        is that your company needs either
                                         
                                        some physical like iron
                                         
                                        and something but it doesn't anymore
                                         
                                        what does it need well all it needs is labor
                                         
    
                                        for the most part or any of these virtual companies
                                         
                                        well why am I raising five million dollars
                                         
                                        Why aren't I raising some virtual thing and paying those people?
                                         
                                        You know, if those people end up being in Venezuela, Ethiopia, and Ukraine,
                                         
                                        they don't want U.S. dollars anyway.
                                         
                                        And the value, if I put a value on their time, you know, which I have to do legally in the U.S.,
                                         
                                        but I don't have to do across borders, they don't want to be valued at something that's taxed.
                                         
                                        So the economy of, you know, AI just solved every.
                                         
    
                                        math problem known demand. What's that worth? It's worth a lot. Okay, well, I'm not going to pay for
                                         
                                        it valued by a 49A valuation from an accounting firm in the U.S. And so that whole economy
                                         
                                        of trading AI-generated things with other, and even human labor, is going to be completely
                                         
                                        outside the world of normal valuations and normal payroll taxes and normal, because you don't
                                         
                                        have to value it in U.S. dollars if you don't want to. And that's where the dam is going to break.
                                         
                                        I think even if you value them in U.S. dollars and I actually think most markets will go through U.S. dollars, the fact that you have two alternative paths, I can use a safe and go to a YC company and go through that process, or I can buy a token in like an ICO.
                                         
                                        And the difference with a token is I have immediate access to secondary markets. Both events are just as risky. You're taking massive risk and basically is this founder,
                                         
                                        a jackass
                                         
    
                                        or not. It doesn't matter if it's a
                                         
                                        YC founder that's a jackass or
                                         
                                        an ICO founder that's a jackass. You're going to get
                                         
                                        screwed either way. But
                                         
                                        the guarantees you're
                                         
                                        getting out of the safe
                                         
                                        is competing with the fact that I have
                                         
                                        secondary markets and this reliable
                                         
    
                                        execution and transfer.
                                         
                                        So which one are you going to take as an
                                         
                                        investor? You may not
                                         
                                        actually be able to get any money
                                         
                                        out in the catastrophic event out of the
                                         
                                        safe or any value out of that.
                                         
                                        event either way. And the success upside is the same in both. Yeah, I think most governments think
                                         
                                        that, you know, regardless of all the transactions you do on chain, sooner or later, you're going to
                                         
    
                                        want to turn that into either real estate or labor in my country. And you're going to come back
                                         
                                        through my regulatory framework, through my Treasury Department, through my SEC, to turn it into
                                         
                                        something that you can use to enjoy your life. And I think increasingly that is not true.
                                         
                                        it's irrelevant because what you really wanted is either compute or, you know, virtual entertainment or whatever,
                                         
                                        and you can buy it outside of that regulatory framework with your Solana.
                                         
                                        And so that part of the economy today is not a big deal.
                                         
                                        I think that dam's going to break very quickly.
                                         
                                        And then that part, it operates across borders frictionlessly.
                                         
    
                                        It operates in milliseconds, and it operates entirely in the virtual universe.
                                         
                                        And that economy will grow so much faster than the physical economies that,
                                         
                                        It'll go from, you know, a rounding error to dominant in just a few years.
                                         
                                        That's my guess.
                                         
                                        If you're in the U.S., you pay dollars market to market to U.S. dollars in taxes.
                                         
                                        So even if you make your profit and soul, you have to market to market and cover your dollar exposure.
                                         
                                        Otherwise, you're running a debt to the place that can collect it with a carrier ship full of F-35s or whatever.
                                         
                                        That speaks to my original question, which is government and governance mostly doesn't live on chain right now.
                                         
    
                                        So to the extent that Peter, Dave, and to some extent, Salim are aspirational, are aspirationally hoping that we're going to live in an utterly frictionless economy.
                                         
                                        It seems the elephant in the room is that all of this physical government apparatus and the court system and jams and methods for adjudication, these are all off chain.
                                         
                                        So I guess what you're going to take it, Alex, let me take it there.
                                         
                                        This is the conversation we had with Jeremy O'Lear from Circle, in which I was asking him,
                                         
                                        when do you think we're going to see the first fully on-chain corporation, right?
                                         
                                        Where contracts, payments, treasury, governance, and even all of the agents employed by that company
                                         
                                        are on the blockchain, right?
                                         
                                        And we have the explosion of a new corporate structure that's operating at light speed compared
                                         
    
                                        to everything else.
                                         
                                        Do you imagine we're going to have that?
                                         
                                        When could we have that?
                                         
                                        I think you can go look at kind of the cool experiments in this would be Meta-Dao,
                                         
                                        because of Futarki decision market-based DAWs, where effectively every decision that this coin does,
                                         
                                        or this group that holds the coin, is using a futarchy mechanism where should we go invest in this,
                                         
                                        or should we pay these engineers? Why, the way that these decisions market work is you're basically saying,
                                         
                                        if the market decides, yes, and I'm willing to buy your metadata tokens at price why.
                                         
    
                                        So I'm willing to pay more for this, for Apple stock, if they go build, you know, iPhone 20 or whatever.
                                         
                                        But if, does that make sense?
                                         
                                        This is like the, and I would say the closest thing you're going to get to full on-chain governance and corporate control over funds and assets.
                                         
                                        Peter, I'd like to try to answer your question, but then forward a sub-question to totally.
                                         
                                        If I might, I think the answer to your question relies on a sub-question, which is when will we see, at least within the U.S., the first state government approve a new type of corporation that is an on-chain autonomous corporation.
                                         
                                        It would require an act of a state government at minimum.
                                         
                                        So by some question, Texas or Florida, yeah.
                                         
                                        Yeah, by some question.
                                         
    
                                        Wyoming.
                                         
                                        Yeah.
                                         
                                        Go ahead.
                                         
                                        So Wyoming's, go for it.
                                         
                                        Wyoming's been very advanced in crypto adoption and acceptance.
                                         
                                        They actually issued a stable coin where, as you interpret the law, because they're a sovereign,
                                         
                                        they're neither a person or a corporation, and they've issued a stable coin under their own
                                         
                                        kind of regulatory scheme, which is interesting to think about.
                                         
    
                                        But what about Puerto Rico?
                                         
                                        Puerto Rico is inside the realm.
                                         
                                        of the F-35 circling around, yet completely independent from the federal government.
                                         
                                        That's potentially a birthplace for this whole thing.
                                         
                                        Well, to me, you can already...
                                         
                                        Wait, wait, wait. Let's take this home.
                                         
                                        So the sub-question then would be, okay, so you have a hypothetical preference for Wyoming,
                                         
                                        maybe Puerto Rico.
                                         
    
                                        When does this happen?
                                         
                                        When do we see the first, in your prediction, totally, when do we see the first state-level
                                         
                                        government in the United States enshrine?
                                         
                                        in statute, the ability for an autonomous corporation, which, by the way, could be an AI
                                         
                                        as a person as well. It doesn't necessarily have to be an on-chain entity.
                                         
                                        Is this, I'm not 100% sure, but I thought there were Dow friendly bills already being passed
                                         
                                        in Wyoming, specifically for creating these kind of corporate structures that assigned
                                         
                                        control or parts of the fiduciary duties to a Dow.
                                         
    
                                        Yes, there are.
                                         
                                        We looked into this.
                                         
                                        Wyoming does allow that.
                                         
                                        The problem is you're still under the federal SEC issues.
                                         
                                        But I'll give you this thing.
                                         
                                        In Panama, there's a couple of other places where you can have foundations that create
                                         
                                        Dow's, and those are fully decentralized autonomous organizations, and then everything
                                         
                                        can be run from the Dow.
                                         
    
                                        And the Dow owns everything.
                                         
                                        So it's almost like a trust with digitized, crypto-enabled transactions going through it.
                                         
                                        You actually don't need these things.
                                         
                                        I think the key part that you need out of, I think, the federal and a government and laws is that if you participate in the smart contract, that your liabilities are not commingled with everyone else that participates.
                                         
                                        This is kind of like, I think, either needs to be passed through Congress through the market structure bill or kind of figured out in the courts, is that once that's true, the fact that you can now participate in these DAOs and things like that, those effects.
                                         
                                        become code as law because if the government says that your liabilities are limited,
                                         
                                        you're not part of this cohort that you're responsible for everyone's actions that
                                         
                                        participate in this in this mechanism, then the only thing that you have is the code.
                                         
    
                                        Then you are solely relying on the code to enforce all the decisions of that thing.
                                         
                                        So if you go into it and you lose money, tough, right?
                                         
                                        Like you've actually taken on the risk and there's nobody for you to go after anymore.
                                         
                                        So this, it's more like, I don't think we need laws to pass to allow it.
                                         
                                        What we need is laws or courts to figure out that you don't have liabilities if you participate in these systems.
                                         
                                        And that's about it.
                                         
                                        See, I think totally, you exist just by existing.
                                         
                                        You've put your finger on, I think, the core issue for the future of this entire space, which is what does the future of law as code look like?
                                         
    
                                        And I think there are sort of maybe two directions, at least two directions I can imagine.
                                         
                                        going in. One is, I think, what you're articulating, which is in the future, state plus federal
                                         
                                        law, plus a whole bunch of regulations, get encoded in something that looks like, you know,
                                         
                                        future of layer one code. It's basically software. There is another future where future of laws,
                                         
                                        and regulations remain pure natural language, but we have a whole constellation of AI agents
                                         
                                        that are interpreting them, basically AI lawyers, AI regulators. Do you have a sense of which of
                                         
                                        two futures or maybe door number three we're going to find ourselves in.
                                         
                                        I'll answer that question. We start with number two, which is you have AI agents
                                         
    
                                        dealing with natural language law, and then over time we have to develop completely new
                                         
                                        forms of mechanisms and governance structures to deal with it. Those will be on chain.
                                         
                                        What about you, Tully? I think humans in the loop and kind of how our,
                                         
                                        human egos are designed, is that you will have, I think, like, the big short is this awesome
                                         
                                        scene where the higher up the chain of command you go, the dumber the person. The less
                                         
                                        they understand about what's happening. The same applies to podcast hosts, by the way.
                                         
                                        Yeah. I think because of just human nature of politics, the leadership, and all these
                                         
                                        things you're going to see the most sophisticated understanding of how the stuff works at the lowest layer
                                         
    
                                        and then as the higher up it goes to the court system to politicians to regulators the more broad
                                         
                                        strokes they have kind of to control it and my my view is like I don't think you're going to have
                                         
                                        AI agents in that spot because of human ego like I think humans really really want or big orgs under
                                         
                                        them.
                                         
                                        So I just have to jump on that because I just think it's the coolest thing in the world that
                                         
                                        you as an individual engineer, you know, come into the country 14 years ago, whatever,
                                         
                                        settle in Sanfran, and invent a hundred billion dollar thing out of thin air, just create it
                                         
                                        out of thin air, and then to figure out how it interacts with the government, a guy, David
                                         
    
                                        Sacks, who has nothing to do with the government, ends up in the role kind of overnight.
                                         
                                        Now you guys figure it out together.
                                         
                                        Show me any other country on the planet that could ever do that.
                                         
                                        But it's exactly what you said from the big short.
                                         
                                        You get to any other jurisdiction and the moron factor, you know, in the way makes it impossible to interact.
                                         
                                        It's just the coolest story.
                                         
                                        You know, that's impossible.
                                         
                                        Hold on, hold on.
                                         
    
                                        This isn't quite fair.
                                         
                                        If you take Switzerland, which has been crypto-friendly for longer than almost anybody, they passed legislation
                                         
                                        quite a long time ago and a huge number of the crypto-founders.
                                         
                                        moved there because it was so crypto-friendly.
                                         
                                        Japan is friendly.
                                         
                                        Now there's an increasing list of countries, Malta, Liechtenstein, et cetera, et cetera.
                                         
                                        So countries are jumping on board, and a lot of the Binance, et cetera, a lot of these
                                         
                                        were created in places where they were crypto-friendly first, and then they worried about
                                         
    
                                        the U.S. later.
                                         
                                        The U.S. has now jumped on the bandwagon in a big way, which is fantastic, but it's a little
                                         
                                        bit too little too late for some things.
                                         
                                        I think in other areas it's going to really take up.
                                         
                                        You know, totally, when you started Solana, agentic AI was not even in the conversation, right?
                                         
                                        It was, you know, four or five years out, right?
                                         
                                        Just transformers.
                                         
                                        And I can imagine that AI agents are going to be the single biggest, you know, transactors of Solana.
                                         
    
                                        Can you speak to that?
                                         
                                        Yeah, I think if we, the, the.
                                         
                                        The fact that you can synthesize a lot of signal around the world through AI,
                                         
                                        the amount of cost per intelligence goes down.
                                         
                                        What that means is you have an army of analysts that can understand all of the signal
                                         
                                        and synthesize it into buy or sell, signal.
                                         
                                        You can now create a lot more markets.
                                         
                                        And I think this is where I think stuff like Futarki can actually potentially become
                                         
    
                                        scalable to large organizations.
                                         
                                        Why, like, I think this is kind of sort of happening already is if you, like, look at me or Vitalik, we're obviously not business people.
                                         
                                        Like, I have, I'm not a broad business person that understands.
                                         
                                        You play a business person on TV.
                                         
                                        Yeah, exactly.
                                         
                                        Like, we're engineers.
                                         
                                        You're like way too candid and honest.
                                         
                                        He's a researcher.
                                         
    
                                        I'm an engineer.
                                         
                                        Like, I understand how memory works and stuff like this.
                                         
                                        But just simply from this trustless coordination.
                                         
                                        of blockchain, the fact that you could own a part of soul and you could actually run the systems
                                         
                                        from Richelacy and participate in it, that actually creates enough incentive alignment for
                                         
                                        everyone in the ecosystem to move it towards a common goal.
                                         
                                        Even if each participant is rationally optimizing their own E&L under the hood, they're maximally
                                         
                                        trying to just profit and sometimes in a zero-sum way over other participants.
                                         
    
                                        because it's all cryptographically glued together
                                         
                                        into this one-gen engine where if there's
                                         
                                        a bunch of markets, it all makes money.
                                         
                                        That forces everyone to move in the same direction.
                                         
                                        I think that is an example of this class of new organizations
                                         
                                        that are not quite corporations, not quite
                                         
                                        in a single person, small business,
                                         
                                        but an internet scalable system that's
                                         
    
                                        glued together with cryptography that
                                         
                                        can all move together for a common benefit.
                                         
                                        I think that's a very, very unique, cool thing.
                                         
                                        And as you have AI explode and the ability to get, analyze a whole bunch of signal into an action
                                         
                                        becomes cheaper and cheaper, I think the number of markets that can support this decision-making
                                         
                                        is going to blow up.
                                         
                                        And hopefully, they all run on Solana and that we make more money from making sure there's no spam.
                                         
                                        But that...
                                         
    
                                        Alex, we'll see.
                                         
                                        How many AI agents do you imagine we're going to be operating a decade from now?
                                         
                                        I don't think the question is going to be meaningful a decade from now.
                                         
                                        Because I think agents is a very 2025-era term.
                                         
                                        I think we'll look back 10 years from now and laugh at the premise of the question.
                                         
                                        You have like a continuous information funnel to GPUs.
                                         
                                        That's just constantly looping.
                                         
                                        Is it one agent or a particular doesn't matter?
                                         
    
                                        How many terawatts are petawatts of intelligence will we have a decade from now?
                                         
                                        And so we currently measure AI in terms of energy, right?
                                         
                                        We talk about gigawatt data centers and so forth.
                                         
                                        For the moment.
                                         
                                        For the moment.
                                         
                                        Are we going to start a new layer of sort of measurement, which is a financial layer of measurement,
                                         
                                        in terms of how much capital is going to be transacting on these systems?
                                         
                                        Because the speed, I mean, the most, the most,
                                         
    
                                        most valuable bits of information are bits of information that carry financial value with
                                         
                                        them. Right. So that's circular, though. Like that that's circular to say what's most valuable is
                                         
                                        most financialized. Like ideally, and totally keep me honest on this, I would hope 10 years from
                                         
                                        now we're in a state where we've not just solved math, but we've solved economics. We
                                         
                                        have like a rigorous science of what wealth is. We have the beginnings of it today, arguably.
                                         
                                        But if you put 10 economists in a room and you ask them, like, what is real wealth?
                                         
                                        You'll get maybe 20 different answers.
                                         
                                        I would hopefully have actually like a decade from a notion of what real wealth is, not just monetized wealth, but actual wealth.
                                         
    
                                        And then we could actually trade real wealth.
                                         
                                        To my knowledge, we don't know what real wealth.
                                         
                                        Probably just energy.
                                         
                                        It's just jewels.
                                         
                                        Maybe.
                                         
                                        Maybe.
                                         
                                        Maybe or I'll give you an alternative, too, which is transistor flips or flops.
                                         
                                        Well, Flops isn't right, but it's going to be some metric of compute that's more foundational than the dollar or any concept of currency.
                                         
    
                                        Right now, we're all trained that wealth is dollars, and the foundation metric is dollars.
                                         
                                        But that's going to break very quickly.
                                         
                                        And it'll be something either power, you know, electrical power, but I think more likely some metric of compute.
                                         
                                        I'd like to challenge all of this.
                                         
                                        Okay.
                                         
                                        You know, we've had for the last few hundred years, the main mood.
                                         
                                        discourse in the world has been business, commerce, money, right? And we run the world on that.
                                         
                                        And we floated off feudal systems and now the power is in the power of money, which is more
                                         
    
                                        liquid, free flowing, it will funds, good ideas, etc., etc. But we're moving over the last few
                                         
                                        decades from money to information. A startup today is much more interested in collecting data about
                                         
                                        its users and then we'll monetize it later. Facebook maybe has done the best job of taking
                                         
                                        social data and monetizing and it's fungible. You can go back and forth. Over time, though,
                                         
                                        the information becomes the Howard ribet, and the monetary side becomes less relevant.
                                         
                                        And so I would think that over time, you'll end up in a Star Trek world where you don't have any money, you don't have any commerce, you're just doing things.
                                         
                                        And the cost of things becomes so meaningless.
                                         
                                        The idea of commerce doesn't matter.
                                         
    
                                        So that would be my challenge.
                                         
                                        I'll challenge the challenge and say this very much feels like a very October 2025 era discussion where we've seen
                                         
                                        large parts of the West deindustrialized for a couple of decades, and we're just taking it as
                                         
                                        an axiomatic truth. Oh, well, we're deindustrialized. So of course, it's just about the bits.
                                         
                                        It's not about the atoms. But actually, the atoms are incredibly important. And I would argue,
                                         
                                        if I had to choose my favorite denomination of real wealth, it's going to be something embedded in
                                         
                                        the physical world. Like I've argued in the past something about future freedom of action.
                                         
                                        if we could quantify future freedom of action of humanity that in cubits yeah in qubits or even
                                         
    
                                        classical bits like that that's the closest i can come up with for a real definition of wealth
                                         
                                        but i'd be curious totally like what's your best definition of wealth
                                         
                                        okay i'll give like a hot take i think it's like shannon's law how much information we can
                                         
                                        process um so like our channel capacity to process information is real wealth it'll be
                                         
                                        be a measure of information.
                                         
                                        Yeah.
                                         
                                        I agree it'll be measured in units of information.
                                         
                                        Time out.
                                         
    
                                        I'm taking this in a different direction.
                                         
                                        So one of the things I'm concerned about right now, given the speed at which we're getting
                                         
                                        wealth aggregation into the large, you know, hypers, and given the fact that we have not
                                         
                                        in the long term, but in the short term, I think a job dislocation is that there's a lot
                                         
                                        of people really concerned about civic unrest, right?
                                         
                                        about, we had Bologi on the pod talking about I would not want to be a tech entrepreneur in the
                                         
                                        Bay Area in two or three years. You guys remember that in terms of, you know, I have a few of my
                                         
                                        friends who in the VC world getting death threats right now. It's crazy. I mean, really,
                                         
    
                                        really crazy. So my question is, how are, how can we potentially see Solana and the crypto world
                                         
                                        help ease this tension that we're going to have of this discontinuity. Because I think in the long
                                         
                                        run, totally, we have, you know, all I speak about and write books about is this world of abundance
                                         
                                        where we're demonetizing and democratizing access to food, water, energy, health care education.
                                         
                                        It's the interim state, right, the next two to eight years that I'm most concerned about.
                                         
                                        What are your thoughts there?
                                         
                                        I'm actually, I kind of have a very opposite view of biology here.
                                         
                                        Probably maybe because, I don't know, my parents came to the United States from the USSR, literally with $50 per person, like in 92.
                                         
    
                                        So I think what we're seeing with AI is a less, a smaller transformation in terms of labor than the steam engine.
                                         
                                        Like the amount of people that actually became unemployed because of the steam engine was dramatically more.
                                         
                                        And those were like all fighting age dudes.
                                         
                                        I think the likely outcome.
                                         
                                        is that we just get better at what we do.
                                         
                                        And the jobs become less easier or less risky,
                                         
                                        and you can scale up,
                                         
                                        and the amount of wealth that you create for the world
                                         
    
                                        and the poverty decreases,
                                         
                                        and people just simply work less.
                                         
                                        And the difference between the kind of work that my dad
                                         
                                        had to do as a civil engineer in the USSR versus here
                                         
                                        was like night and day in terms of risk.
                                         
                                        And that was just moving across, like, the Atlantic Ocean
                                         
                                        into like a more mature economy.
                                         
                                        me. So I think the world is only going to get wealthier and we're blessed to live in this age.
                                         
    
                                        So I'm very optimistic. It's the most exciting time to be alive. Yeah, for sure.
                                         
                                        Open AI is not shrinking its headcount. And this is the most advanced AI company.
                                         
                                        They're not hiring less people. They're hiring really smart people and giving them the best tools to
                                         
                                        accelerate that company. But that's only going to happen everywhere. I think you're going to end up
                                         
                                        with a lot of demand for people that understand how AI works,
                                         
                                        where it makes mistakes and can course correct it
                                         
                                        and keep it on track.
                                         
                                        I think that's probably going to be a super valuable skill.
                                         
    
                                        And if anything, I think that comes from experience.
                                         
                                        My experience with AI tools is that I can keep half an open eye
                                         
                                        watching Claude stream its code and know that it's doing something
                                         
                                        right or wrong, whether like a junior engineer
                                         
                                        has to actually analyze every commit and stuff.
                                         
                                        I think you will see the exact same kind of systems
                                         
                                        that you did with just advent of databases and computers.
                                         
                                        Everyone that was an accountant didn't just become homeless.
                                         
    
                                        They're super smart people with college education
                                         
                                        that have incredible access to networks that can go and retrain
                                         
                                        a lot easier than I think everyone else.
                                         
                                        What's your take on this?
                                         
                                        Well, I think if we have a kind of a breakdown in society,
                                         
                                        like you're talking about, right?
                                         
                                        What you end up happening is because it's so easy
                                         
                                        to build a crypto system today,
                                         
    
                                        you could create a local community Dow
                                         
                                        that circulates tokens just amongst itself
                                         
                                        and you can spend those tokens on certain things
                                         
                                        and very quickly boot up a local economy.
                                         
                                        Notice the most monetary transactions, 80% or local.
                                         
                                        You're buying supplies, you're getting your hair cut,
                                         
                                        whatever, whatever.
                                         
                                        Not the amount of money, but the number of transactions.
                                         
    
                                        And so crypto, because it's a strange example for you to use.
                                         
                                        Sorry?
                                         
                                        It's a strange example for you to use.
                                         
                                        It is a strange example for me to use.
                                         
                                        But so this becomes really powerful to replace and very good.
                                         
                                        This is why I believe that we're moving to, we're going to move to very granular environments
                                         
                                        where people will create small communities that self-support.
                                         
                                        This supports biology's network state idea.
                                         
    
                                        We just need to keep enough for the Internet,
                                         
                                        to keep going and everything's fine. If that breaks down, then you have major issues.
                                         
                                        But I remember this wonderful story in the 70s where there was a huge central banking strike
                                         
                                        in Ireland and there were just no checks getting cleared. No checks were getting cleared.
                                         
                                        And for two years, the Irish just kept going. They just kept passing checks around saying,
                                         
                                        well, when the central bank comes back online, it'll settle on. And two years later, the central
                                         
                                        bank went, wow, nobody's even noticed we're on strike. We might as well come back because
                                         
                                        And then they cleared all the checks and then where business weren't back to usual, right?
                                         
    
                                        And so human beings are incredibly resilient at figuring things out.
                                         
                                        And I think when we get into major issues like that, we'll figure it out.
                                         
                                        Dave?
                                         
                                        I'm hugely biased because totally to me is the most perfect example of the person you want to be.
                                         
                                        Like after he's done with this podcast, he's going to go debug some code.
                                         
                                        He's building it.
                                         
                                        And we're discussing, like, you know, what does this AI philosopher who's never done squat over here think of it?
                                         
                                        And it's like, it's just like your perspective, and especially when you come from a foreign country, you know, I had the same conversation with Thomas Petterfee, who was born in Hungary in a basement as the Soviet tanks were coming in.
                                         
    
                                        And he can't connect with his own kids who grew up here. And they're like, oh, we're destroying the world. You know, dad, you're polluting by taking a dump.
                                         
                                        And he's like, what are you talking about? We live in the best time in world history. And in the most free and fair place in the world.
                                         
                                        And you're not taking advantage of it.
                                         
                                        But what totally is doing is actually building the future platform from all of society,
                                         
                                        and it's going to create the abundance that Peter's talking about.
                                         
                                        And to me, your perspective is exactly the right one.
                                         
                                        And I'm not even vaguely connected to the alternate perspective.
                                         
                                        It makes no sense to me.
                                         
    
                                        But everything you just said perfectly resonates with me.
                                         
                                        I mean, it's exactly the right view.
                                         
                                        Anyway, that's my rant.
                                         
                                        I appreciate it.
                                         
                                        Yeah.
                                         
                                        You know, I am curious about something.
                                         
                                        We've just seen Kazakhstan launch a stable coin on Solana.
                                         
                                        And how do projects like that?
                                         
    
                                        I mean, does that get you excited?
                                         
                                        What projects are getting you excited right now about the use of the technology you created?
                                         
                                        Because I mean, you must wake up in the morning and say,
                                         
                                        holy shit, that's amazing what someone just did with Solana.
                                         
                                        I think crypto is going through, like, technology phases.
                                         
                                        similar to the internet.
                                         
                                        You had the punks create the first version.
                                         
                                        Then you have the hoodies kind of scale it up.
                                         
    
                                        And now the suits are moving in.
                                         
                                        So a lot of the stuff that's happening
                                         
                                        is driven by suits, which is great.
                                         
                                        But I'm less connected to that and more to, I think,
                                         
                                        the low-level experiment.
                                         
                                        So I think, like, folks, if they really, really
                                         
                                        want to kind of be a bit deep in crypto,
                                         
                                        go check out Futarki and decision markets
                                         
    
                                        and how to run a collective, like an online collective,
                                         
                                        that makes real financial decisions, but fully market-based.
                                         
                                        So in a way that minimizes risk for investors, participants, et cetera.
                                         
                                        I think those kind of things are like what I think are really, really cool.
                                         
                                        And to me, it's also kind of a physics problem.
                                         
                                        Can we run a market for the top 10 million important decisions that people make in the world every day?
                                         
                                        Just to drill into that.
                                         
                                        That would be cool, right?
                                         
    
                                        Yeah.
                                         
                                        Just to drill into that for a second, what Toli is talking about is Futarki allows you to do prediction markets to do Dow governance.
                                         
                                        And one of the big issues of Dow's was how do you manage governance?
                                         
                                        Because it's like you're in a town hall meeting with everybody shouting loudly.
                                         
                                        It's not quite.
                                         
                                        It's not just Dowellee.
                                         
                                        It's not just Dallas-Salem.
                                         
                                        It's not quite a prediction market.
                                         
    
                                        It's literally like if Apple said that, you know, I propose Apple builds this VR device.
                                         
                                        and I'm willing to buy your Apple stock for a higher price than it's currently trading
                                         
                                        because I'm so bullish on this idea that the managers need to do.
                                         
                                        So I'm willing to increase your value if you disagree with me.
                                         
                                        So this, in fact, forces a financial stake for any decision to be made in this Dow,
                                         
                                        which is different than let's all vote with our shares and say,
                                         
                                        yeah, we approve this or we don't approve.
                                         
                                        is you literally have to put your money where your mouth is for any decision that this Dow takes.
                                         
    
                                        Amazing.
                                         
                                        So it's a really, really cool idea, and they've run a couple ICOs that have gotten like over $150 million in commits, which is pretty crazy.
                                         
                                        Wow.
                                         
                                        I asked you a question.
                                         
                                        I didn't hear the answer, though, but in terms of super exciting projects that,
                                         
                                        that you're looking forward to on Salonam?
                                         
                                        Anything you can share with us?
                                         
                                        Obviously, Salonam Mobile.
                                         
    
                                        So go buy a seeker if you don't have one.
                                         
                                        Show it to us.
                                         
                                        Tell us about it.
                                         
                                        Tell us about the seeker.
                                         
                                        We have two goals.
                                         
                                        One, I think, is because I spend most of my career
                                         
                                        Qualcomm, it was just immediately obvious to me
                                         
                                        that you can have full cryptographic guarantees
                                         
    
                                        that a hardware wallet provides in the phone form factor.
                                         
                                        Like, in fact, all the technology to implement a trust
                                         
                                        zone and to keep your secret keys stored in an enclave,
                                         
                                        all that stuff was built years before Bitcoin,
                                         
                                        for DRM, of all things.
                                         
                                        To keep people from stealing Netflix or whatever,
                                         
                                        phones implement all this technology
                                         
                                        to prevent any kind of data snooping
                                         
    
                                        and maintain encryption from all the way
                                         
                                        from the deepest secure enclave to the display.
                                         
                                        So it was just obvious to me, oh,
                                         
                                        why don't we embed hardware wallet directly into the phone?
                                         
                                        That was the idea.
                                         
                                        So we can make it as good of a, from a security perspective,
                                         
                                        like you get cold wallets to wallet guarantees in your hardware device in terms of the
                                         
                                        kind of security that you get, but the user experience of Apple Pay, so you get,
                                         
    
                                        so you can have a hot wallet that is both secure and great for consumers.
                                         
                                        That was, that's part of it.
                                         
                                        The other part of it is that you have these very mature companies like Google and Apple
                                         
                                        that have a 20% rate on all digital spend.
                                         
                                        at least through their economies.
                                         
                                        Crazy.
                                         
                                        And there's no, it's just like, that's a bug in capitalism.
                                         
                                        That just doesn't make sense.
                                         
    
                                        Why isn't it converging down to the lowest cost?
                                         
                                        So to me, it's an opportunity to use crypto as a wedge.
                                         
                                        Because developers don't want to pay this fees so we can use a different economics where
                                         
                                        you pay, we can earn, I think, as good of returns as Google or Apple,
                                         
                                        but through effectively trading transaction fees that are volume-based.
                                         
                                        It's a protection racket.
                                         
                                        Solana, a Solana YouTube replacement, like, you know, an Odyssey equivalent on Solana Con?
                                         
                                        There's people trying to build crypto-based content creation.
                                         
    
                                        None of those, I think, have really taken off or proven out.
                                         
                                        I think that's a harder problem that I think software and, like,
                                         
                                        kind of software experiences.
                                         
                                        Just the amount of sheer content that you need to generate to get that, like, 10% as good
                                         
                                        as like within like a margin of air
                                         
                                        as entertaining as YouTube or TikTok is just
                                         
                                        astronomical. But I think with AI
                                         
                                        and SORA like you're going to see that
                                         
    
                                        kind of change. It's just
                                         
                                        think about like how. That's actually the crux of my
                                         
                                        question. Does SORA 2 or whatever
                                         
                                        is next change the math
                                         
                                        or not? Because yeah,
                                         
                                        you're totally right. I think so. But like
                                         
                                        you need like right now it's not good enough
                                         
                                        and too expensive but like you can see
                                         
    
                                        it in five years. Oh,
                                         
                                        this entertainment stream that I'm getting, right?
                                         
                                        the infinite jest of stream of entertainment is going to be AI generated.
                                         
                                        And that's kind of a scary thought because I think humans in the loop on what keeps
                                         
                                        us entertaining is probably an important part of our shared cultural experience.
                                         
                                        But we'll see what happens.
                                         
                                        An amazing future ahead.
                                         
                                        Gentlemen, I'm jealous of your seeker, Salim.
                                         
    
                                        I'm moving, I'm starting to move all my crypto onto it
                                         
                                        and by the way totally my whole community
                                         
                                        wants to move our NFT collection onto Solana
                                         
                                        Oh awesome
                                         
                                        I may ping you about that
                                         
                                        Awesome
                                         
                                        Do you have time for a closing question
                                         
                                        Do I get one?
                                         
    
                                        Yeah please yeah go off of course you do
                                         
                                        But I have one that I think the audience might really care about
                                         
                                        So totally
                                         
                                        If the world moves all these transactions to Solana
                                         
                                        You know because it's a thousand times faster than Ethereum
                                         
                                        which is a thousand times slower than Bitcoin
                                         
                                        So it's like, it's like the engine for AI.
                                         
                                        And the fundamental use of the Solana token is anti-spam, right?
                                         
    
                                        It's a way to pay for your transaction to get settled.
                                         
                                        Is there any way to translate the value of Solana, without giving investment advice,
                                         
                                        the transaction volume of Solana to the value of the Solana token?
                                         
                                        What's the math that connects those two things?
                                         
                                        I think the transaction volume is less important.
                                         
                                        And what's more important is the opportunity cost of being laid.
                                         
                                        So where the network actually makes more value, like you as a block producer, like you need
                                         
                                        soul to stake to be a block producer because if you had no civil resistance, you could create
                                         
    
                                        infinite blocks and that would effectively spam the network to death.
                                         
                                        So you have some civil mechanism to prevent infinite block producers.
                                         
                                        So you have some amount of percentage solely at stake that gives you X amount of percent blocks
                                         
                                        you can make.
                                         
                                        When you're making blocks, people are paying you to be first in the block.
                                         
                                        to be first to get access to this trade.
                                         
                                        So the amount that they're willing to pay
                                         
                                        is based on the opportunity cost of that of being first.
                                         
    
                                        Right, right.
                                         
                                        So has anyone put together a blog or a white paper or something
                                         
                                        that says like, well...
                                         
                                        Yeah, BlockWorks probably has done the best job
                                         
                                        in terms of compiling all of this data
                                         
                                        and analyzing it into more traditional.
                                         
                                        This is revenue. These are network costs.
                                         
                                        So if you go to Blockworks, you can look at Solana and Ethereum
                                         
    
                                        and do comparisons.
                                         
                                        And this is true for all proof-of-stake networks
                                         
                                        because the civil mechanism for proof-of-stake
                                         
                                        is the token itself and you have X-percentage stake.
                                         
                                        You can literally do, I have a portfolio,
                                         
                                        do I put a percentage of it into treasury bills
                                         
                                        that are risk-free, or do I risk some of it
                                         
                                        to run a block producer and get tips effectively
                                         
    
                                        for including transactions?
                                         
                                        And it doesn't actually matter
                                         
                                        that you're getting tips in Seoul or USDC
                                         
                                        or somebody gives you a sack of potatoes
                                         
                                        because the fact that you have to stake X amount
                                         
                                        to get access to that revenue
                                         
                                        is how you can do your like Kelly optimized allocation.
                                         
                                        So this ties to, you know,
                                         
    
                                        the intelligent investor,
                                         
                                        like a very traditional boring approach to do analysis here.
                                         
                                        You can't do this for Bitcoin
                                         
                                        because the civil mechanism for Bitcoin is energy
                                         
                                        and I don't know if it'll ever change or anything like that.
                                         
                                        So I think Bitcoin is its own special snow
                                         
                                        like that I have struggled to come up with a standard model to analyze. But for proof of sake
                                         
                                        networks, I think you can really put them in the intelligent investor box into analysis and
                                         
    
                                        kind of make your own decisions. Alex, I want to give you a chance to ask a question. Then I have
                                         
                                        a question and go around the table to ask everybody. I'll ask a fun question, not a serious question.
                                         
                                        So totally, let's project forward. Say humanity does in the end take apart our solar system to
                                         
                                        build the Dyson Swarm.
                                         
                                        And we have lots of computronium.
                                         
                                        What will be the medium of commerce in a Dyson swarm
                                         
                                        future for humanity?
                                         
                                        Do you think that this is kind of like the central planning
                                         
    
                                        communism problem?
                                         
                                        Is it computationally feasible to solve it just mathematically
                                         
                                        without markets?
                                         
                                        At relatively high latencies, right?
                                         
                                        You're bound by light speed latencies just like we all are.
                                         
                                        I think this is kind of the question.
                                         
                                        How many qubits do we have to be able to solve this massive linear algebra problem, right?
                                         
                                        Like, can you allocate the resources to everything?
                                         
    
                                        You might not need commerce.
                                         
                                        Then that might be the end of capitalism, and you might only have it just simply for human entertainment.
                                         
                                        But I think personal freedoms are far more important than efficiency in a lot of ways.
                                         
                                        So I would go against.
                                         
                                        I would be very much against it.
                                         
                                        I think it's very important for people to have purpose and competing for tokens, whatever they are, right?
                                         
                                        Bananas out of a meme coin or whatever.
                                         
                                        I think it's something.
                                         
    
                                        So here's my question for the group.
                                         
                                        Go Rabat Horn here.
                                         
                                        You want to follow on Alex's question from earlier, which is what's your definition of wealth in the future?
                                         
                                        Salim, what do you think?
                                         
                                        because it's very different looking back historically at the kings and queens and pharaohs it was
                                         
                                        you know how many how many slaves you owned and your ability to you know sort of have access to
                                         
                                        agriculture was sort of wealth what do you think it's in the future here i would think it's a
                                         
                                        combination of time and health spend time and health spend okay uh Dave I think it's a no-brainer
                                         
    
                                        that it's purely tied to compute because, you know, I was asking class at MIT the other day,
                                         
                                        like, if I offered you $10,000 cash, here it is, or a GPU that's worth $30,000,
                                         
                                        how many of you would take the GPU?
                                         
                                        And they're like, are you crazy?
                                         
                                        I'll take the 10,000 cash.
                                         
                                        But in the near-term future, compute can be immediately turned into cash.
                                         
                                        I mean, the compute is the universal thing.
                                         
                                        And when you have AI agents who are the laborers of the world, you're, you're, you're,
                                         
    
                                        your number of, you know, workers is the amount of compute that you have.
                                         
                                        So your ability to make yourself happy, whether it's controlling your figure robot,
                                         
                                        cleaning your house, or building something virtual or your cousin.
                                         
                                        It's all bounded by the amount of compute you have access to.
                                         
                                        So that becomes the universal.
                                         
                                        And that also determines your health.
                                         
                                        If you put your compute towards analyzing your scans, it determines whether or not it finds your cancer.
                                         
                                        And so it becomes your health, too.
                                         
    
                                        So it becomes the universal.
                                         
                                        All right. Compute your answer. Alex. WG. What's yours?
                                         
                                        I think we're suffering from the cliche of the blind philosophers who are touching different parts of the elephant and all overconfident that the part of the elephant that they're feeling is what an elephant feels like.
                                         
                                        So I'd argue for a more general definition that generalizes all of those definitions. I would argue real wealth will be measured to first order as future freedom of action, which generalizes compute. It generalizes physical resources.
                                         
                                        It can be measured in units of bits.
                                         
                                        So it's an information theoretic definition, but it's not just about compute.
                                         
                                        It's about the ability, some might call it empowerment, but that's a specialized term, to take the course of action you want in the future, not just in the present.
                                         
                                        The first time Alex said that to me, I didn't get it.
                                         
    
                                        But if you go to AlexwG.org and you read his paper on the topic and you read it closely, you'll come away saying, oh, my God, he's totally right.
                                         
                                        Yeah, I knew I should not.
                                         
                                        I was going to say degrees of freedom.
                                         
                                        Yeah.
                                         
                                        Degrees of freedom.
                                         
                                        Yeah.
                                         
                                        It's the same thing.
                                         
                                        Yeah, you guys agree.
                                         
    
                                        I should have gone before Alex went.
                                         
                                        I'll answer and then, you know, I think it's the ability to fulfill your desires, your purpose.
                                         
                                        And, you know, compute is part of it, but nanotechnology is going to be a fundamental as well, a manipulation of the physical universe.
                                         
                                        So it's not just compute in that regard.
                                         
                                        And also thinking in scarcity terms, you've got to jump forward to abundance terms and think
                                         
                                        then all that matters is time and health span. Hello.
                                         
                                        I think Salim, you're thinking in meatbody terms. Think in post-biological terms. Come on.
                                         
                                        All right.
                                         
    
                                        Anyway, totally so your answer here?
                                         
                                        Degrees of freedom.
                                         
                                        Degrees of freedom. All right.
                                         
                                        I was just like, I think people will never feel.
                                         
                                        feel satisfied because there's somebody else that has more degrees of freedom a month.
                                         
                                        So this is like the human condition is always striving for something else.
                                         
                                        The hedonic treadmill spins faster and faster, doesn't it?
                                         
                                        Yeah.
                                         
    
                                        Yeah, I think you guys are right, because you can have a lot of compute and still be beaten like a
                                         
                                        dog every day by some government that, you know, so you guys are right.
                                         
                                        All right. We've reached the conclusion here.
                                         
                                        Tully, where do people find you?
                                         
                                        In that worldwide,
                                         
                                        An Axe.
                                         
                                        A. Yacobanko.
                                         
                                        Yeah, follow me on X.
                                         
    
                                        I have hot takes, sometimes boring
                                         
                                        takes. I don't know.
                                         
                                        Love it.
                                         
                                        Love it. Or not, yeah.
                                         
                                        Thank you for the work that you're doing.
                                         
                                        Thank you for the future that you're enabling
                                         
                                        for so many globally
                                         
                                        around the world.
                                         
    
                                        Grateful. The only time more exciting in today
                                         
                                        is tomorrow, and it's
                                         
                                        going to be a woozy of a decade ahead.
                                         
                                        Moonshot mates, love you all.
                                         
                                        Thank you for today.
                                         
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                                        I'm going to be able to be.
                                         
                                        Thank you.
                                         
                                        Thank you.
                                         
