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, 2025

Get 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

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 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
Starting point is 00:00:37 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...
Starting point is 00:00:56 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.
Starting point is 00:01:11 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.
Starting point is 00:01:36 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
Starting point is 00:02:33 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
Starting point is 00:03:15 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.
Starting point is 00:03:37 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
Starting point is 00:04:32 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?
Starting point is 00:05:43 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.
Starting point is 00:06:19 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. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead.
Starting point is 00:07:02 I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff. Only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these metatrends with you, I writing a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta-trends 10 years before anyone else, this reports for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and
Starting point is 00:07:32 entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to Demandis.com meta-trems to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. 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.
Starting point is 00:08:00 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
Starting point is 00:08:40 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
Starting point is 00:09:27 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.
Starting point is 00:09:55 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,
Starting point is 00:10:20 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.
Starting point is 00:10:55 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,
Starting point is 00:11:38 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,
Starting point is 00:12:04 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.
Starting point is 00:12:29 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
Starting point is 00:12:49 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.
Starting point is 00:13:06 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.
Starting point is 00:13:42 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.
Starting point is 00:14:00 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.
Starting point is 00:14:35 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.
Starting point is 00:14:58 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?
Starting point is 00:15:38 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
Starting point is 00:16:09 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
Starting point is 00:16:32 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.
Starting point is 00:16:57 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.
Starting point is 00:17:39 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.
Starting point is 00:18:00 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
Starting point is 00:18:46 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
Starting point is 00:19:08 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,
Starting point is 00:19:44 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.
Starting point is 00:20:13 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,
Starting point is 00:20:28 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.
Starting point is 00:20:46 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
Starting point is 00:21:23 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
Starting point is 00:22:06 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.
Starting point is 00:22:44 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
Starting point is 00:23:32 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
Starting point is 00:24:14 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
Starting point is 00:25:01 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
Starting point is 00:25:51 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,
Starting point is 00:26:23 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,
Starting point is 00:26:45 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
Starting point is 00:27:33 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.
Starting point is 00:28:24 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
Starting point is 00:29:13 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.
Starting point is 00:29:32 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
Starting point is 00:29:59 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
Starting point is 00:30:25 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
Starting point is 00:30:42 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
Starting point is 00:31:23 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.
Starting point is 00:31:59 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,
Starting point is 00:32:33 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?
Starting point is 00:33:15 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,
Starting point is 00:33:57 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
Starting point is 00:34:31 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.
Starting point is 00:35:03 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.
Starting point is 00:35:37 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
Starting point is 00:35:57 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,
Starting point is 00:36:14 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.
Starting point is 00:36:48 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.
Starting point is 00:37:29 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.
Starting point is 00:38:19 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
Starting point is 00:38:40 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
Starting point is 00:38:56 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.
Starting point is 00:39:11 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
Starting point is 00:39:35 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.
Starting point is 00:40:12 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.
Starting point is 00:40:35 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.
Starting point is 00:41:23 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
Starting point is 00:41:55 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?
Starting point is 00:42:21 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.
Starting point is 00:42:51 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,
Starting point is 00:43:19 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.
Starting point is 00:43:40 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
Starting point is 00:44:16 Solana robust. It's incredible. Yeah. Incredible what you pulled off. This episode is brought to you by Like Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and pre-compiles code for each task. Blitzie delivers 80% or more of the the development work autonomously, while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint. Enterprises are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase
Starting point is 00:45:04 when incorporating Blitzy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5X your engineering velocity, visit blitzie.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. 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.
Starting point is 00:45:45 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
Starting point is 00:46:17 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,
Starting point is 00:46:58 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,
Starting point is 00:47:35 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?
Starting point is 00:48:28 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.
Starting point is 00:48:59 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.
Starting point is 00:49:27 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
Starting point is 00:49:57 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.
Starting point is 00:50:38 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.
Starting point is 00:51:13 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?
Starting point is 00:51:41 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,
Starting point is 00:52:12 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.
Starting point is 00:52:47 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.
Starting point is 00:53:09 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.
Starting point is 00:53:38 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
Starting point is 00:54:13 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.
Starting point is 00:54:54 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
Starting point is 00:55:35 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.
Starting point is 00:55:54 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
Starting point is 00:56:21 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.
Starting point is 00:56:54 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,
Starting point is 00:57:41 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.
Starting point is 00:58:12 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,
Starting point is 00:58:45 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.
Starting point is 00:59:15 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
Starting point is 00:59:32 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.
Starting point is 00:59:54 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
Starting point is 01:00:32 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,
Starting point is 01:01:12 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
Starting point is 01:01:37 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
Starting point is 01:02:08 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
Starting point is 01:02:25 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.
Starting point is 01:02:59 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
Starting point is 01:03:59 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
Starting point is 01:04:15 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
Starting point is 01:04:42 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.
Starting point is 01:05:18 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.
Starting point is 01:06:04 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
Starting point is 01:06:50 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.
Starting point is 01:07:29 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.
Starting point is 01:08:21 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.
Starting point is 01:08:49 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.
Starting point is 01:09:14 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.
Starting point is 01:09:51 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.
Starting point is 01:10:12 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.
Starting point is 01:11:08 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?
Starting point is 01:11:46 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
Starting point is 01:12:31 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
Starting point is 01:13:21 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
Starting point is 01:14:07 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.
Starting point is 01:14:31 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
Starting point is 01:15:00 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.
Starting point is 01:15:35 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
Starting point is 01:16:06 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.
Starting point is 01:16:30 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.
Starting point is 01:17:07 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
Starting point is 01:17:32 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...
Starting point is 01:18:03 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?
Starting point is 01:18:35 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,
Starting point is 01:19:05 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.
Starting point is 01:19:47 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.
Starting point is 01:20:08 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
Starting point is 01:20:40 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.
Starting point is 01:21:20 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
Starting point is 01:22:02 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.
Starting point is 01:22:32 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,
Starting point is 01:23:11 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.
Starting point is 01:23:59 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
Starting point is 01:24:30 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.
Starting point is 01:24:55 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.
Starting point is 01:25:27 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.
Starting point is 01:25:57 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,
Starting point is 01:26:22 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.
Starting point is 01:26:44 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.
Starting point is 01:27:12 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?
Starting point is 01:27:46 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.
Starting point is 01:28:22 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.
Starting point is 01:28:58 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?
Starting point is 01:29:20 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.
Starting point is 01:29:42 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
Starting point is 01:30:03 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?
Starting point is 01:30:34 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.
Starting point is 01:30:57 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.
Starting point is 01:31:39 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.
Starting point is 01:32:09 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
Starting point is 01:32:26 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
Starting point is 01:32:51 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,
Starting point is 01:33:19 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.
Starting point is 01:33:41 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.
Starting point is 01:34:13 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
Starting point is 01:34:38 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
Starting point is 01:34:54 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.
Starting point is 01:35:26 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?
Starting point is 01:35:41 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?
Starting point is 01:36:03 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
Starting point is 01:36:37 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.
Starting point is 01:37:04 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
Starting point is 01:37:22 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
Starting point is 01:37:47 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,
Starting point is 01:38:06 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
Starting point is 01:38:34 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
Starting point is 01:39:08 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?
Starting point is 01:39:33 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.
Starting point is 01:40:04 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
Starting point is 01:40:45 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,
Starting point is 01:41:15 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.
Starting point is 01:41:43 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.
Starting point is 01:42:35 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.
Starting point is 01:42:50 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.
Starting point is 01:43:28 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.
Starting point is 01:43:55 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.
Starting point is 01:44:19 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.
Starting point is 01:44:33 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. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport,
Starting point is 01:44:53 energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff. Only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these metatrends with you, I writing a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta-trends, 10 years. years before anyone else, this reports for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's
Starting point is 01:45:16 most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to Demandis.com slash Metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. Thank you.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.