The Pomp Podcast - Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO and Co-Founder of Solana: What "Sharding" Actually Means

Episode Date: May 24, 2019

Anatoly Yakovenko is the CEO and Co-Founder of Solana. In this conversation, Anatoly and Anthony Pompliano discuss underwater hockey, Iron Man triathlons, self-custody of identity, the current use cases for high performing Blockchains, the complexities around sharding, and where we are with staking and validating. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Anatoly Yakovenko is the co-founder of Solana. In this conversation, we discuss underwater hockey, Ironman triathlons, self-custody of identity, the current use cases for high-performance blockchains, the complexities around sharding, and where we are with staking and validating. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek

Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm here with Anatoly. We got all kinds of cool stuff to talk about. Thank you so much for coming on and doing this. Yeah, thank you so much, Pop. For sure. You were coming all the way to New York from San Francisco, so pretty cool. All right, what's your background where uh where you come from so born and raised uh in ukraine but shout out ukraine yeah uh but grew up grew up in chicago went to school in urbana champagne i ended up

in san diego working in qualcomm um so my buddy and i lived in solana beach we would wake up surf back to work bike home surf again horrible like man from the streets of ukraine to the Beaches of California. Yeah, but, you know, those eight hours that we worked at Qualcomm, they were pretty awesome. So we were building, like, you know, cutting-edge mobile platforms. If you guys ever had these old CDMA phones, Motorola Razr, they're on a software system called Brew. I was a core kernel developer. So basically, we built this thing from the ground up.

Before there was an iPhone, there was a mobile platform that had, like, a billion app downloads. There's still 500 million devices of these live right now. It's crazy that we forget the Qualcomm's of the world because Apple is so pervasive at this point, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool. All right. So you get all the way from Ukraine to the beaches of California and you do some weird shit, right? Let's talk about this underwater hockey.

So, you know, I was in college, you know, trying to make fronts. Do you still do this? Yeah. Okay. So it's a co-ed sport. Okay. So I started playing just to meet people. And I played.

Is that code for you want to meet girls? Yeah. Just meet girls. But it's an awesome community of, like, people that are, like, for whatever reason, there were a lot of engineers in the sport, you know. And I played, like, a little bit. But after I moved to San Diego, you know, there's a club there. And I had no friends.

So I really got into it then. And I started playing, like, kind of a lot. I ended up on the U.S. men's team at one point. All right, hold on. What the hell is underwater hockey? Is it literally what I think it is? Like you tread water and then you like. You hold your breath.

You go down under the water and play hockey and then come back up for more air? You hold your breath. You have like a stick that's maybe like, I don't know, a foot long. And there's a puck that's got a lead core and you flick it around. Got it. So it's on the bottom of the pool though. Yeah. Right.

So it's not like. And then the puck, can it come up off the ground or is it too heavy to come up off the ground? You can fling it up, like, five, six feet. So it's, like, kind of three-dimensional. Interesting. And you hold your breath. So you're kind of, it evens out the game. So we had, you know, world-level players and, like, you know,

a six-year-old guy that was playing in the same club. And no matter how good you are, you run out of oxygen. You've got to come up, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so is it, like, in traditional hockey, right? I've never played, but just watching, it's like being a large human who can go fast and also is agile like skate forward backwards it all seems like that helps yeah so is there like running backwards in the pool on defense and you can turn pretty quickly

and like um at the higher levels it's it's obviously like um split by gender so the men's games are more like a a scrum like a almost like a rugby match in the water i was gonna ask me one of my questions can you get like physical in terms of like basketball okay have you ever played like a physical game of basketball okay it's kind of like that so you know you can't actually tackle each other but uh it's not like you're trying to help the other person yeah yeah exactly you need to help them all right got it and then uh six on six and is it just like a continuous game and they're continuing there's two halves but continuous 15 minute halves and it sounds short but holding your breath for 15 minutes and redlining it it's you're like you're really spent

yeah dude what so and then what happens in terms of like do the teams coordinate like all right you two go up and get some air we're gonna like push it down the the kind of field or the pool so at the higher level everyone is fit enough to where it's basically six all six down at the same time and people do come up but like you come up for one breath and go back down really yeah and how long do you think you can hold your breath for um so since i started this company i haven't been working out yeah but just like at the height what do you think i could swim uh so with fins i could swim three lengths of a pool underwater and that's like 75 yards wait what so you you would jump you jump in or start uh start at the wall kick off the wall swim to the end kick off swim

to the end kick off and then all of that in one breath yeah and then you feel a fish you feel some I was really, like, I was at the bottom of the team. So there were, like, top six players that are really talented and really fit. I was fairly fit, but I think got the short end of the talent stick. What, like, how much further could, like, let's say the top guy on the team, could he just swim farther? They could do it faster. Oh, faster.

So still about three, like, down, back, down, but just do it much faster. Exactly. Yeah. That's crazy. And then when you play, it's just at the end of the game, from a time perspective, whoever's winning wins? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it.

All right, and then where do you shoot the puck? There's like a little trough at each side of the pool that's in the bottom. You just try to get in there. There's no goalie, but there's like kind of three defenders, three on the offense. Almost looks like soccer because it's a little, the speed is slower, but it kind of fits like in the court. But no goalie?

No goalie. Goalie would drown, right? Ah. So you've got to come back up and somebody rotates in, right? So you kind of like... Oh, man. All right. I might have to go try this out.

Underwater hockey, ladies and gentlemen. That's what that is. All right. And then you're super into another insane sport, which is these triathlons, these Ironman triathlons, right? Before I started this company, I had time to work out. So I was an Ironman, but really like a slow Ironman. What is that? That's you have to swim, bike, and run, right?

It's the race that ends with a marathon, as people like to say. Wait, hold on. How far do you swim? The Ironman is different than just any triathlon, right? It's longer, right? You swim 2 1⁄2 miles, then you bike 112. You just said that like that was nothing. You swim 2 1⁄2 miles to start off the race.

Yeah. And you said that down, back, down in a pool is 75 yards. But you're not holding your breath, right? Yeah, but still. Yeah. most people if they just swim down and back they're tired right like if you're not a swimmer yeah you get tired all right so two and a half miles go ahead 112 mile bike ride it's you know sunday ride stop for a cappuccino okay and then sure and then you run a marathon

and then you run a marathon and how long does this take uh i am slow so for me it took about 13 hours but if you're so top end athletes doing it eight like you know eight eight twenty eight eight hours and 20 minutes they when they run the marathon they're running like six minute miles imagine like doing all of this and then like i'm just gonna run six minute miles right like i don't know if i ever told a story on the podcast but i ran a marathon uh recently last fall and says this fall of 2018 um my beautiful and wonderful girlfriend decided that we should go and run the original marathon in Greece. Oh, that's awesome.

Sounds awesome. Wasn't. Let me tell you why. Because so they market it as the last six and a half miles are downhill. Sounds awesome. What they don't tell you is the only way that you can get downhill is you got to go uphill in the middle. Oh, wow.

So there's about 12 miles where, you know, it's not a steep hill, but you're kind of gradually running up this hill. And so I'm not necessarily a runner. I'm not necessarily a marathon runner. And so I did enough training to be arrogant enough to think, oh, I'll just kind of push through it, right? And so when we started running, I told her, I said, the pace we're running right now, I'm running all the way through.

I'm not going to change pace. I'm not going faster. I'm not going slower. But I know I'll finish, and I'll run this pace. And so I didn't run with a watch. I don't want anything, right? I'm going to run, and at some point I'll run to the finish line. and so we're running we're running and we're passing people and i'm like okay i think it's

a little tough right she starts yelling at me because i keep stopping uh to get water but i'm not getting water to drink i'm pouring it on my head as if that's gonna like revive me right and we finished the marathon and i look at i go how fast did we run it what i should have asked was how slow did we run it because i ran in about five hours and 20 minutes that's all that matters And so, well, the best part about this is these Ironman triathlons almost did a triathlon at the Ironman level faster than I ran this damn marathon. So it's pretty cool. But do you still compete at all or train? No.

Like, no? Yeah. Just no time. Just no time? All right. And then talk to me about this other idea you have. So that's the craziness you do from a physical standpoint. Psychologically, this isn't as crazy of an idea, but just like the self-custody of identity.

What do you mean when you talk about that stuff? So when this space blew up, what really struck me as the foundational kind of change is that cryptographic identity, self-custody of your own keys, allows us to interface with digital things without giving up your human identity. Like, I have a Nest at home, but it knows my Google account. It knows who I am, which is ridiculous. Why the hell does my thermometer need to know who I am? Yep. Right? Well, because Google thinks that it's important.

Yeah. And, like, you know. Who do you think is creepier? Do you think Facebook or Google or Amazon? Oh, man, that's a good question. I think, honestly, I think these companies will transform because all they care about more is making money. And if privacy makes some money, they'll transform as well. I think Facebook knows way too much about not me as a human,

but, like, my relationships with everyone else that I know, and that is creepier than Google kind of, like, figuring out what ads to show me, like, based on my searches, right? That's just really knowing, like, my interests. Do you think you know more about somebody through search history or through their connections? I think the connections. like your network who you interact with that really defines you as a person yeah

I think search history for yeah because I bet people use Google search you know multiple times more a day than they use Facebook yeah right so like that you could tell who the connections are but the likelihood that the communication now but I guess location data right at Facebook's getting your location in Google isn't through that or something I mean what do they know about you they run a podcast right like all this stuff is kind of publicly available right like they know that Google knows I'm an engineer yeah but Facebook knows who your friends are yeah what how often you talk to them like that's a little creepy

right that's yeah sure all right so the idea of self-custody of identity is basically just you keep your identity and then you permission people in and out yeah I mean you see fit the irony that a public open public data structure like a blockchain is what the forcing function for us to create privacy in the internet right like the fact that we have to build this thing such that the data has to be shared with everyone means that engineers are forced to design it firsthand how do we keep you private right so i i think that's kind of the revolutionary part of this tech like we will change the world for sure and so uh as you got excited about blockchain self-custody of identity uh what

was kind of your initial thoughts like why why eventually you move into the space um it's just so new like uh i like my brain was infected and i couldn't really think about the virus you got infected by the virus exactly like it just you know i'm a sci-fi nerd the idea that we could build a bunch of software that glues these computers together worldwide such that it'll never get shut down right it's almost like creating like a life right it's like a it's now a system that is running self-repetitively and that is like mind-bogglingly awesome like as an engineer what else should i be working on besides the coolest fucking thing in the world yep absolutely and so as you start looking at the space and you're like all right i want to go work

in that space like what would you want to do or or did you know immediately like hey i want to go build something so like um the founding story of solana is um i had i was talking to my buddy about proof of work and like how you know expensive it is energy wise and we're trying to figure out if there's some other physical bound that we could use instead of like dumping as much electricity as you can into the system and the other one that popped up was time and i had like too much coffee that day it was up till 4 a.m and i had this idea hit me that you can create a data structure that represents time passing so you can encode passage of time as data what do you mean by that so when you look at the bitcoin proof of work structure

you can calculate how many joules of electricity is spent to generate it right so it represents energy right like actual electrons moving through silicon there's like a mathematical function you can run given like the best cpu whatever asic pod process it takes x amount of energy to build it so there's a physical guarantee to it this particular data structure this technique is called verifiable delay functions. Verifiable delay functions? There's actually VDF day tomorrow at Boston and MIT. Wait, wait, wait. There's VDF day? VDF, verifiable delay functions day, yeah. Jesus, I'm so dumb. So intuitively, you think of this as like a mathematical puzzle, like proof of work, but you can't run it in parallel. You have to actually do it in sequence. And because

it's sequential, that's where the time component comes from. Got it. And the verifiable delay function, what is the purpose of that? So just like proof of work, you can quickly verify that it's correct with a verifiable delay function. It takes real time to generate, like let's say an hour but you can verify it in like a millisecond got it so basically you have you have to let the it's almost like when you're sitting as a kid and your mom puts you in time out and you're sitting there and she like sets a timer exactly my mom used to hit us with the microwave timer yeah right so we knew when we could get out of time out yeah you're sitting there and you're staring at you're ready to go right you just had to wait and then when it hit the thing then you could go exactly

more thing exactly all right it's a beautiful explanation yeah i'm not i'm not the smartest guy in the world but i got some good analogies all right and so uh if you look at it from we're not going to expend energy we're going to expend time right a good joke would be that time is more valuable than the energy but uh what is the advantage to using time is it just that we save the energy or are there other advantages so the other advantage is like imagine like old school radio protocols like world war one there's like two people transmit at the same time yeah over the same frequency yep because they're using the same frequency you get noise right so that so what they figured out pretty quickly is let's synchronize each other's clocks and then

you transmit on you know minute one i transmit a minute or two got it that's effectively what we're doing we're splitting up like block production like in bitcoin you have this random process i win the block i get to transmit it yep somebody else could win it at the same time and that's where you get a collision you get rollback and like things get slower we use this verifiable delay function to have somebody wait in a timeout chair until it's their turn to produce the block and that forces everything to to run as quickly as possible got it and so that's where we quote unquote high performance blockchain is essentially the difference of what you're talking about versus other proof of work exactly systems and um is in

And whether it's your structure or somebody else's that has a similar structure, are there an equivalent of the miners? And if there are, how are they incentivized? So there's validators. We're actually like, you know, effectively like every system that's not proof of work uses proof of stake one way or the other. So we have a staking component. Validators stake some capital and they verify the blockchain. And that gives the safety and security of the network. Got it.

So basically, somebody becomes a validator through a staking mechanism. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And so let's talk a little bit about why would somebody want to use a high-performance blockchain, whether it's this structure or some other structure. Just what's the purpose of a high-performance blockchain? Well, even for, like, a simple payments, like, imagine we're trying to scale Bitcoin to, like, cover the world for payments. You need, like, you need enough capacity to handle the world, right?

Like, I don't know, I'm a believer that this technology will actually revolutionize finance, like it's borderless as fast as cheap. But for it to support 10 billion people, you just simply need to do it, do it faster, right? This is where I think we can solve that problem. So for things like payments, smart contracts, we just have a much higher capacity to scale those companies that are trying to build out like world class use cases. Got it. And so, other than payments, what would be another use case? Like, is it just anything that has a high frequency of transactions? Yeah, like, so we're building a full-featured smart contracts platform. There's a very, very highly parallelized engine that we built.

What does that mean? So, virtual machines that execute contracts. We designed ours such that you can execute as many contracts in parallel as you can. So, like, when you see a million transactions, you can find all the ones that can be executed at the same time, and you run them all on as many GPUs as you have. Got it. So, basically, rather than sequentially, okay, transaction one, transaction two, transaction three, you look at the entire set of transactions, and you, I'll call it, batch them together based on similarities, and then execute them in what I'm assuming algorithmically you've determined is the most efficient way to do that. Yeah, yeah. Got it.

and uh what what would be the uh the detractors argument right so like if i brought somebody in here who was like you're a complete idiot right like what's their argument so um like all all of these things every system is fighting like cap theorem and like in general there's no solutions to these problems so we're like in the space that is what people call pareto efficient every advantage as a disadvantage okay um but we're building requires um beefier systems that means that like somebody like ethereum 2.0 or tezos their goal is to have like thousands tens of thousands of validators like people running verification and laptops so the only way to build those systems is to shard and like basically run a little bit of the computation in each

machine explain sharding for people that they don't know um sharding comes from databases but Like if you're a gamer, like if you ever played Ultima Online, you would remember different worlds with different characters. You know, same copy of the game, but different characters, right? That's effectively what it is. You split the state up, and now you have different instances of whatever the blockchain you're dealing with. And the real complexity there comes from trying to move money or value

or state from one shard to the other. And these are open-ended computer science problems still. How, explain like a little bit deeper on moving money between shards or value. So when you have like some asset, right, some digital asset in one shard and you want to transfer it to another one, you don't have these synchronous guarantees that the other one received it or the other one acknowledged that they received it. You have to build protocols that are designed to go through some central focal point. So in Ethereum, it's the beacon chain and there's very these complex setups around how folks rotate validators around how like they're basically trying to randomize which group is validating with shard and how data moves between them. And all of these approaches have risks to them that if a shard, a shard ultimately in proof of work in Bitcoin, you have this like mining rigs, mining pools with a big pile of hash power.

If you were to shard Bitcoin, it means that you're splitting your army. So half of your hash power in one shard, half in the other. That means that each shard has a weaker security. Yeah, you're basically taking away components of it. Or I guess you're separating it, right? So you still have the same number. If it was an army, you still have the same number of troops. Now they're in two different groups and they can't help each other.

Exactly. So if one shard goes down, then it's very likely that the value of your coin will drop and now miners will switch off from your shard or the capital is worthless, right? And is that a compounding problem in the sense that if you have two shards and one goes down, then you only have one left, right? But if you have 20 shards and one goes down, is that better or worse, right? Like the more shards that you have that... The more you split your troops, right? so each one is easier to attack. Got it.

So there is a compounding problem, and then if one fails out of that 20, it's likely that 2, 3, 4, 5 may fail as well because you've already weakened yourself, and then there's some kind of vulnerability. Right. So every other system is trying to work around this problem. Nobody knows what will actually work

because all this stuff is super new. Our approach is, like, just make the layer one, like, single shard as fast as possible. Yep. And do you feel like speed kills here, right? Like, speed is the most important thing? Yeah, like, I want to build, like, human-usable applications, so we're trying to maximize, like, our block times are right now 800 milliseconds.

I'm trying to get them down to 400 milliseconds at that point. You almost have, like, applications that are interactive for humans. You can build, you know, interactive games. You have instant responses, right? Like, that, I think, could be a watershed moment for the space when humans no longer tell that they're running something on blockchain versus like AWS. Yeah. Is there a trade-off between speed and security or no? The trade-off that we're making is that each validator has to invest more capital

into the hardware and into the infrastructure that they're running in. Okay. Explain that more. So you can't like build high performance and a bunch of internet connections at people's homes on like crappy computers. That's just not going to work. you can build really massive decentralization that way um but for something to be like fast low latency and high performance um the folks that we're talking to they're professional validators got it and so i guess really like how does that stack up to the staking and validators of other

chains or like when you say professional validators um but what's this the state of staking i guess so like um i kind of see it as like early internet 95 you know okay they were like it's not like they're professional businesses with a big pile of capital these are people with a little bit of know-how and a little bit of capital to invest in a co-location space and that may cost you like 10k a year but they have enough to do that that's like a barrier of entry that's yep that that is enough of a barrier that you're not just you're just not going to do it unless you really want to and it's kind of like early day ISPs like in the 90s people would like whatever small town they were in they were the only one we

knew how to run a you know internet service provider and it would hook up that time and so when you think of this is that better or worse or maybe it doesn't matter compared to you know so these other staking services where where somebody can, you know, $500, $1,000, they just take it right there. It's part of that. So those services are, like, kind of perfect validators because they're professional, right? They're taking in, they're kind of like mining pools, effectively.

They're taking in capital from many different people and running custody and, like, doing, like, very secure, you know, custody management and running the validators in a high-performance environment. Those are, like, the kind of folks we want to onboard. I think they're also, like, interestingly, I think they're a focal point for governance because it's, you know, these anonymous networks, it's very hard for us to go and identify everybody that wants to vote on anything.

But if you have a relationship with a validator, they become a focal point to actually give you enough information on what to vote on. Like, people that, like, participate in Tezos, like, how do they know what technical direction Tezos should take? you need effectively almost experts that you trust that you have a relationship with to give you guidance yeah

and so where do you guys go from here you guys have a product that's built and working I started sleeping about a month ago because everything is up and running it's fault tolerant we've run tests in a globally distributed network

what do you mean fault tolerant explain that Like, you can go swing a hammer in the computers and, like, shut down validators and crash them, and the network continues running indefinitely. Got it. Okay. So basically it is immune to attacks on individual components of it. So, you know, I'm sure there's bugs there. And, like, our next six months are really focused on polishing everything, you know,

getting the tools right for developers and onboarding validators and fixing any operational issues. But all the computer science problems are done. like it's real got it and then so what are the next steps um so for us i really you know we're focusing on launching this network like launching a permissionless network layer one and when that happens i really want it to be a great environment for developers to onboard like my experience we built this first mobile platform right this thing that ran on on phones the only language you could code was c like there was a lot of work to onboard developers and get them to build something and now we have much better tools and we really need to make this as smooth as possible

how do you go about incentivizing developers to come build on something new um like we are not big enough like eos or tron we can't just throw money at people i think that's basically what they do yeah like i mean um they're publishing houses from my perspective like and that's a interesting business play if you have the opportunity to do so like i we don't have that opportunity but we have something that they don't have which is performance and speed and if we solve those problems for developers um they'll choose us or anyone else because you can't do something on tron or eos that you can do on our platform so we're really looking for folks that you know have these big ideas grandiose ideas right 2016

2017 everyone was pitching we can do this across the world on blockchain but the tech wasn't there let's see let's see now the tech is here go you can go build right now um so we can actually enable those folks got it um before i wrap up i always ask rapid fire questions uh we think most important company crypto is um who's that like who do you who do you think is the most important company in crypto oh man i would say ethereum foundation is such a why they have surprised um I feel their pain they okay they were the first to market and they have this enormous developer community and enormous technical challenges that they're trying to so sure I agree and and I think they're very open and

decentralized and like they have they're very honest and transparent and those properties I want to actually borrow a copy like I want weird we've been open source from day one so go steal our code fixer bugs like if we had the same success and community growth as the ethereum foundation that would be amazing absolutely make sense what uh what what regulation would you change or improve if you could I think I wish the SEC had like clear guidelines around decentralization I honestly think that they have that in their heart and they're taking their time getting there because I think what they're worried

about is fraud right and if you have true self custody and true decentralization then fraud becomes uh almost impossible interesting what uh what's the most controversial thought you have in crypto what do you believe that everyone else would disagree with you with um i don't think that uh proof of stake networks with large number of validators will survive really because you you're splitting whatever rewards you are with like 20 000 notes interesting how how unless it's like all hobbyists with free time and free compute but like unlikely yeah like that that's my controversial self-thought okay i look there's definitely people who would agree with that right it's not that everyone would disagree but there's

a lot of people who would disagree yeah yeah what else what's the most important book you've ever read um book oh man um so i uh i would love uh like i love the history of rome podcast uh the history of history of rome podcast yeah um who does that uh this awesome uh history buff he basically went almost an individual though yeah yeah yeah this was he went like year to year from the start of rome to the last days wow like it's like 80 episodes when i i had my first kid i you know walked her around a lot and they listened to this in my earphones it was awesome i was like enthralled with with like history that was crazier than real life yeah i'll have to i'll have to check it out that does sound pretty good um i end each podcast letting the guest ask me

one question but before we do that uh we talk aliens uh believer non-believer think they're real um i think listening to rome so i don't know maybe um did the aliens build room no i think there's intelligent life out there i'm a believer okay do you think we'll uncover it yeah during our lifetime honestly i wouldn't be surprised like i i'm not like a disbeliever that oh this will never happen in my lifetime i wouldn't be surprised yeah i i think that's where i am it wouldn't surprise me but there's low probability that happens exactly right yeah um the thing that I keep waiting for is like there's somewhere on Earth. I was thinking about this the other day.

There's somewhere on Earth that we haven't discovered yet. This like Navy thing that they're like, there's like the unidentified like events that they're reporting now. Wait, what is it? If you Google like the Navy is adding protocols for pilots to report events they don't understand.

Interesting. Like more in the open. Yeah. It's just like, okay, that's kind of weird. Why didn't we have that before? yeah well yeah um maybe it's like you know people testing stealth aircraft you know u.s aircraft that's being tested they're like keeping secret from each other but like or maybe not i don't know but i i don't think it's aliens but i think you know sure why not yeah it well to me it's just like aliens would be really weird i'm not even sold that necessarily there has to be aliens but

like there's probably places on the earth that we don't know about yeah right like the earth is so big the ocean especially like we definitely don't know a lot about the ocean a lot a lot of people would uh agree that we know more about mars and the moon than we know about our own ocean right so like whatever so you're a sci-fi nerd too uh i i am uh i'm intrigued okay i think it's the way i would put it right like it's interesting to me uh the more sci-fi we get the less interested i become yeah so to me it's like i like this stuff where it's uh kind of light on the craziness right it's just uh it could be realistic and or become reality in the next like 10 to 25 years right but the things that are like 500 years away yeah yeah i just kind of get lost a little bit so

you know i like seeing the future just not too far yeah exactly what uh what one question do Yeah, for me to finish this up. Man, do you have a prediction for next year for the space? Prediction? Do you think we'll see the same kind of growth the internet did, like early 95? Oh, I think we'll see way bigger over the next three years. Okay. And it's just because we have the internet.

We're growing on the backs of the internet, right? So I think it's way bigger, way faster, which also means if there are more, you know, bubbles that pop, the downsides are much bigger too, right? The other thing that I would say is I think, you know, I think it was a little more than a year ago I said I thought that Tesla or Amazon in the next two years would launch a coin. Facebook's launching one. Yeah. So, you know, in the family, but not the two that I guessed. Then today I just saw that now Amazon has issued a patent for a proof-of-work system using cryptography to generate Merkle trees. Yeah.

So, like, okay, we're getting closer, right? And so to me, like, just getting these big companies in would be really interesting. And the last thing is central banks. I think that we're going to see a central bank, a sovereign wealth fund, some sort of like government type entity really go hard into crypto, probably Bitcoin. And if they do that, I think you're going to see like an incredible FOMO effect. Yeah, that would be pretty crazy, actually. Imagine if like a top 10 country was just like, yeah, by the way, we bought, you know, 5% of the Bitcoin network. Yeah.

Game on. Yeah. would be pretty epic so uh all right man listen i really appreciate you doing this uh i gotta go try out underwater hockey uh i'm probably gonna be like dreaming about that before you do that just check out our project it's solana it's named after solana beach where i figured i picked up on exactly so it's what s-o-l-a-n-a yeah uh there's a github go steal our code fix your bugs or launch a validator that's probably the most fun and join our discord we're totally open and a growing community awesome man i appreciate you doing this and i'll do it again in the future yeah thank you

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