The Wolf Of All Streets - Why Is Solana So Popular? | Anatoly Yakovenko

Episode Date: May 14, 2023

Get ready for an eye-opening interview with Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana. In this video, Anatoly talks about Saga, Solana's innovative new phone. He shares how big companies are hesitant about digital ownership, but Solana's web3 app store is leading the way. Discover why Solana is outshining Ethereum, and how memes play a role in mass adoption. The interview covers a range of topics, from AI to Saga adoption, stablecoins to CBDCs, and the multichain world, ending with an intriguing discussion on Bitcoin and religion. Don't miss out on this fascinating conversation! Follow Anatoly Yakovenko: Twitter: https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anatoly-yakovenko/ ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►BITGET GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT AND GET MASSIVE DISCOUNTS ON TRADING FEES! 👉 https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget    ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets   ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Solana #Crypto  Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:15 Solana is not dead 3:18 Solana phone 5:00 Big companies don’t like ideas of digital ownership 7:50 Solana web3 app store 9:45 Solana is more popular than Ethereum 15:20 Memes 17:55 Mass adoption 20:45 Do blockchains need tokens? 24:15 Helium move to Solana 28:00 Solana world camera 29:30 AI & crypto 35:00 Saga adoption and its future 40:30 Next cycle & stablecoins 45:45 CBDCs 47:50 Multichain world and interoperability 51:00 Bitcoin and religion The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

take your time machine back to 2022 and one of the main narratives with that solana is dead they were inextricably tied to spf and ftx and solana was going to zero fast forward only a few months into 2023 and solana is actually doing many more transactions by many multiples than ethereum and other layer twos and layer ones why is solana still so popular what are they building why are developers still committed to this chain? I talked to Anatoly Yakovenko today, the CEO, founder, and he told us exactly why Solana is still winning. Congratulations, first of all.

You're not dead. solana still exists uh much to the despair of bitcoin maxis worldwide and anyone who uh is looking at you guys after fdx unbelievable thought man unbelievable do you think bitcoin maxis wants solana dead more than ethereum actually that's that's a good question actually i might have like misappropriated that hatred i mean what do you make of it i actually think that there's a vast majority of crypto folks appreciate what we're doing and there's a small minority that's always like the super die hard fans but if they weren't you know about solana they'd be fishing about something else it's just that they are they're about Solana, they'd be bitching about something else. It's just that no. They are.

They're bitching about Solana and Layer 2s and you name it. They're bitching about anything that's not their thing. But I know it was a rough time that you obviously had at the tail end of last year. But I think that was shared by most of the market. But I'm assuming in your mind, nothing had changed through any of that. Yeah, it was pretty scary like I wasn't sure what was going to happen but um kind of running that hackathon grizzly thon and seeing like you know our registration numbers and the number of teams that can submitted projects to be higher than the previous hackathons it felt like okay there's like the the market sentiment is to

like totally disjoint from like what's actually going on in the ground and like devs like don't care about this little detail right like everyone I think that's an influencer in crypto is like hyper aware of like FTX and their place in the market and stuff like that but the engineers actually don't. They want to build products. They don't really care about one exchange or another. Yeah. And speaking of products, you've got the phone coming, right? Or the phone's here, right? Excuse me. You've got the phone launched, which I've been seeing everywhere. So it feels like they're popular and people are buying them and using them. Maybe we should just

start there. Why the phone and how's the reception been yeah so phone was kind of a crazy idea conceived uh about a year ago but a little more than a year ago and the thought there was that first of all like i spent most of my career welcome as soon as i got into crypto, I was immediately kind of like, why don't we use the technology that we already have for secure signing? And there's a couple interesting pieces that have been built. This was like five years ago at this point. One is the secure element on every device that stores your biometrics. That's the place where your seed phrase should be stored. The operating system can't touch it. There's a way to isolate the display and the touch screen so the operating system can't read it.

And it's called secure touch and secure display. And that means that you can't take a screenshot of your seed phrase, right? Like even if you're like messing around with it, entering it or like stuff like that, Android can't steal it, The applications can't steal it. So all this stuff already existed five years ago. So I immediately felt like, why don't we

have at least an Android device that does this? And the second piece is that, and that took a while to realize, is that if you believe that it's OK for humans to own digital content like do you think if that's like a fundamental right or should be allowed uh that's very contradictory to how all the big tech app stores work today and it's such a weird subtle thing but when you buy a movie on apple you don't actually buy it you're renting it from apple definitely and you can watch it and do whatever with it but you can't sell it you can't transfer to your definitely and you can watch it and do whatever

with it but you can't sell it you can't transfer to your kids you can't like put it up on ebay hey i got this like vhs tape you can't do a garage sale in your neighborhood hey take pick up all my vhs tapes right my collection of vhs tapes so like big companies like big tech companies don't want this idea of digital ownership. And like this started happening in the 90s, Windows stopped letting people transfer their licenses and stuff like that. You are no longer like buying software in a box that you could sell to somebody else. You are kind of licensing something to be used on a specific machine for a specific

amount of time um so with web3 though you have real ownership of digital assets like i buy an nft i own it i can sell it for whatever price the market's willing to bear and magic eden or any other like tensor or any other nft marketplace can't charge 30 more in their ios experience for the same NFT that they sell on a desktop. And they can't eat those fees because they don't own the content. They're not leasing the content to their users. So that's such a weird thing to think about.

But the way all of tech is built around digital content is that the user doesn't own it. The user purely consumes it. They, you know, ideally pay a subscription fee and they're constantly consuming it without actually like taking ownership of anything. So if you believe that that's weird and kind of messed up, then Web3 is for you.

But how does that actually transfer to the technology that's built into the phone? I mean, obviously understand the, you know, body metrics and face ID and not being able to take a picture of your seed phrase, which I think is amazing because most people are dumb and they're going to lose their seed phrases or mess it up in some way, shape or form. But, you know, how does that make a superior experience for ownership? How does it help sort of really in real time, live out the ethos of Web3 and of

crypto? So you need like the self-custody piece is obviously important because that's what lets you take ownership of digital content. And the second part is that you need an app store. You actually need a marketplace where this stuff is possible to build and distribute to users. And you can do it on the web. And this is where crypto has been basically trying to find a foothold is like through websites

of these weird like kind of desktop applications. But ideally, you have mobile apps that are native, that have rich experiences that you can deploy through an app store and people could go use them

and buy and sell them to whatever they want with their nfts or tokens so the second kind of fundamental piece of technology in the solana mobile stack is the the web3 app store so there's no fees there application developers can build their you know whatever token nft gated features or solutions that they want to add and they can trade nfts and stuff like that um so this is what a lot of developers are excited about um and the big question is is this going to translate it to like users are the users do the users care enough about self-custody and like that rich awesome ux of like using these applications that they're willing to give up an iPhone, right? Or their main Android device and go get this,

go pick up a Saga. And this is definitely the first time I've seen people tweet that they're willing to go from an iPhone to an Android device. So there's a cohort of diehard Web3 fans that care more about crypto than they care about Apple, which is pretty cool. I do think that there's a bit of diehard Web3 fans that care more about crypto than they care about Apple, which is pretty cool. I do think that there's a bit of an anti-Apple sentiment to a degree, certainly in the crypto community. Maybe not everywhere, but the issues that you pointed out before, I think, have become sort of mainstream knowledge and weren't before.

There's been a lot of pushback against the App Store and the way that they've treated things and their predatory fees. So it is good timing, I would imagine. Yeah, for sure and you know as the more and more of the economy becomes digital this is going to be like you can't have a 30 tax on every digital interaction you have like it's just absurd so i think these business models have to change i don't know what it's going to take like if we definitely had a awesome success and we show that there's a billion dollars worth of revenue to be made with web3 the big companies will switch immediately but that's that's a massive success that's like you know we're

post product market fit uh problems uh so like obviously you know that's my goal as a founder but this is a big undertaking competing with these big, massive technology firms. Yeah, absolutely the case. But I happened to just look at it this morning because I was curious. I had no idea. I mean, Solana is crushing all the other blockchains and transactions right now. I literally didn't know, but it was dramatically larger than dramatically larger than ethereum yep significantly larger than polygon why is nobody talking about that I mean if you go if you're on crypto Twitter every Solana fanboy Maxi or whatever is constantly

talking about it right um we have built a pretty cool technology that really tries to give you everything that you want, which is a large down count to give you that super high security form of decentralization and a lot of performance. And not just performance. It's not strictly about throughput. We have to iterate a bunch of the design to get to a point where we're at is is that we can handle these large bits or these events where there's a lot of demand for a specific thing without creating uh massive fee spikes on the network for all the users and this is kind of I think the the real main difference between Solana and like

every other blockchain out there is every other chain out there, it doesn't matter if it's a zero-knowledge base chain or optimistic roll-up or whatever. They're all built around single-threaded execution and performance in a mempool. There's this process where a user submits a transaction, it bubbles up to the top of the mempool, block producer picks it up, executes all the stuff in sequence, and then user gets a confirmation. That's a very sequential kind of operation that if there's a lot of demand for any given thing, because while these are systems that are shared systems, like a shared Unix process, like back in the 80s, you have like shared workstations everybody wants to do something at the same time everyone's terrified that they're not going to get a chance to do their transaction so everyone bids up the the fees up to the the economic uh uh

opportunity cost to that user so if you have like a liquidation that's worth 50,000 bucks, you might be willing to pay $49,000 for that transaction to go through, right? Like that's kind of like the massive problem with, I would say, every other blockchain that's been out there. And it took us a while. Like this wasn't something that we got right from day one. We had massive congestion problems last year and observing them and understanding what was causing them allowed us to build something really, really cool, which are the localized fee market. So when we had like the Mad Lad's Mints alongside with all the stupid meme coins, transactions just didn't budge for like helium was migrating their end of their hot spots at the same time to solana and their fees were completely flat because that was a different part of the state all the spikes

were localized and you saw like uh you know this awesome you know nearly a million iot devices become nfts in about 24 hours without any interruption to service to them or to the folks trading NFTs, which is pretty cool. Are those outages now a thing of the past? I mean, is that a false narrative that people are now perpetuating based on what happened before, or is that still possible? I know you're probably hesitant to say never again, right? Yeah, never again. Well, I want to say never again, right?

But I'm an engineer and I can tell you that like it's a bunch of code by humans and all the testing and everything else that we do you can still make a mistake so the last bug was actually there from Genesis it was a misconfigured buffer that was uh that got saturated like the size that it was set up for was just not something that it was tested for like in real life. Something like that could sneak through, but I think those are becoming fewer and fewer and further in between.

The fundamental kind of core design of a technology where you have massive demand for access to block space, being able to isolate it and shape the traffic so that massive demand does not cause congestion for everyone else that's been live since uh basically last breakpoint since uh November last year and it's been through the ringer and we've seen it work over and over again and that I feel like design wise, we're ready for that like, let's scale crypto to all the users, all in one chain. It's all possible.

Like I have no doubts that we are actually like proven that you can run all of crypto, all of finance and on a single monolithic chain. So that to me is really exciting. In terms of making sure that there's never any bugs, I think that we are doing massive amounts of testing. I wrote a blog post, basically a third of the engineering team is now just focused on reliability. But the biggest southern project that's in the works is that there's a second team building a second implementation of the Solana

validator from the ground up. And that's really what's going to give you that redundancy because it's very unlikely that two high quality teams will write the same bug at the same time, like in the same place. So that, that level of reliability, I think it is, you know, the Byzantine fault tolerant paper actually mentions this. You need to have separate teams building separate clients. So I'm excited like seeing the progress of that team and I'm hoping by end of the year they'll be on Tesla you talked about mempools obviously on other blockchains and for people who don't know that's just effectively

the queue of transactions that haven't gone through but it seems that we could literally rename the meme pools at this point because memes are congesting every network not called Solana, right? Pepe is absolutely murdering Ethereum at the moment. And Ordinals and BRC20 tokens, to some degree, are congesting the Bitcoin network to the point where exchanges are having to halt withdrawals of Bitcoin. Yep. That was actually why I started looking into crypto. This was 2017.

Bitcoin fees were getting to 70 bucks a transaction. And I had this like, okay, why is this thing so slow moment? Like, actually, let me dig into the tech and understand what makes it expensive and slow. So that was the inspiration is that the 2017 congestion era. I mean, does that mean that Bitcoin is just not fit for purpose for this specific thing? I know we're all Bitcoiners. We all love it. But I think most of us love Bitcoin as the store of value or digital gold or hard money

narrative. There's definitely a big push to build everything that we've seen now on other blockchains with Bitcoin as the base layer. You know, I'm really curious to see how that'll pan out. I think it's going to be clunkier and like the UX is not going to be as good, but I think it's possible to get most of the things working on top of Lightning and these things. And like, then it's going to be up to user preference and in terms of what they want and that's actually pretty cool like even if even if it's slow um bitcoin has such massive lindy effect and it is the biggest thing in crypto that having it support you know like stable coin transfers on top or something like that would be meaningful I think

in terms of getting crypto wider adoption like usage in terms of usage and like wider adoption around the world it's going to be much harder for like I think regulators to argue about technology preferences when you have similar things on Bitcoin and ethereum and Solana like they're not going to be be able to like cut one off right like right right yeah it's actually good for everybody if it's uh happening in multiple places kind of the Hydra three-headed circuit that makes a lot of sense so why do you think that we haven't seen more mass adoption of lightning when we've seen these congestion issues and block wars in the past and i think there's a general awareness that you

know on the main chain it's just these things aren't going to work we don't have compelling enough use cases for crypto that normal people would want to use it every day on an everyday basis so the kind of use cases that you see cause fee spikes of both ethereum and bitcoin are you know it's very speculative nft or like meme coins for the for the most part you know like defy summer kind of came in one and like there there's not and that was also memes we talked about how d5 summer was so like groundbreaking and amazing but i mean literally people were like flipping tacos into yams and right i mean yeah that was also just another speculative bubble that was a bit of a proof of concept but i think you know winners emerge from all of those sort of bubbles that we have

in crypto i mean wouldn't have compound and ave and all these things if we had not had that d5 summer so i don't necessarily see it as a bad thing. But you could make the argument that our best killer app so far is still speculation. So, you know, if you take a step back and you kind of think about it, like, you know, it's really, really cool that Ethereum, Bitcoin, and to some extent Solana could implement self-sovereign money. That's a cool thing. And if the only thing that's making it sustainable is speculation, that's maybe good enough. I personally have higher ambitions for crypto. I don't think if Solana is this self-sovereign money store of value. I think of it as a message bus, world computer, kind of that. That's the angle.

I treat it as an operating system. So when I see congestion, I'm like, okay, this is a denial of service bug. Which queue is getting saturated? Let's go fix it. That's my mentality when I look at it. I look at it as a system of software there to run applications, which is an operating system. And the kinds of things that we're trying to bootstrap are like, that I'm excited about,

you know, HiveMap or Helium, you know, like things that could have real world impact, obviously the phone and like to some extent, I feel like there's now set of applications that are trying to be like maybe the wechat of crypto so backpack or dialect and those have broad range broad appeal and could really impact a lot of users like you know not non-regular crypto users lives which is pretty cool yeah i mean if you were of the belief that the only purpose of crypto was to be sovereign money you probably wouldn't

have built a phone yes yeah yeah it seems like that'd be going pretty much out of your way if that was your belief. But interestingly though, even then we're seeing even pushback against layer ones and layer twos that have tokens. I mean, obviously Coinbase is launching base their own protocol and there's no token attached. How does that work? I guess then the question becomes, why do we need tokens that are so insanely volatile for the utility on these networks if a blockchain or protocol can be built without a token at all? A layer two can be built without a token. A layer one, I don't think, can be built. No, because you have the incentive to

secure the network but or just you know you have to pick who's who gets to stake like who gets to be part of the quorum that has to be picked somehow and if it's not permissionless then you have a permission chain you can do a permission chain without a token but if it's permissionless they have to be able to trade that weight of the stake somehow and that's the token right like that that becomes a token doesn't really matter even with something like base you could like i think you can get away without a token because it's a layer two and you have effectively eth as the as the asset that's bridged in in some trust minimized way that you can start executing on. And that state is never going to detach itself from Ethel 1 because it is a layer 2.

I don't think projects need tokens. I think, honestly, the ones that are survived, like OpenSea, Magic Eaton, Phantom, Mattermass, none of them have a token. Yeah, I've been struggling with this, to be quite honest. I've said it. I had a couple extra drinks one night at ConsenSys and I was sitting with Rand Nooner and his team. And I kind of like in real time vomited that exact thought

out of my mouth for about 20 straight minutes that we just did. I mean, we got used to tokenizing or having a token element of all these things. But the most successful ones are largely ones outside of the actual infrastructure, like the layer ones, don't really have tokens. They're just platforms. It's the sort of picks and shovels in the gold rush approach.

Yep. If you can get PMF and revenues, you don't need a token. I think tokens become interesting if you're trying to incentivize the capital costs of deploying the network. So like physical infrastructure costs. So I don't think it'd be possible to build a Helium without a token or like HiveMapper because you need to incentivize users like staking or whatever, or like go run the infra. Right. Nobody's going to spend money on a Bobcat or whatever and put it on the top of their house because they think it's cool. Yeah, exactly. I think that's pretty cool. You're organizing coordinated crowdsourced action around a token.

It's hard to value those things. I think everyone is basically struggling with that um and how that turns out I think at 10 20 years uh would be really cool to see but that part I think is it's still like we're still in the unknown stage in crypto there yeah I think we're in the unknown stage and then you add in sort of the regulatory pressure that we're seeing now and it becomes maybe even now more incentivized to launch something that doesn't have the token because they don't even have to worry about being a security. It's obvious like Coinbase is doing it. I mean, there's no way they were going to just launch a token in the face of all this regulatory pressure, but that might sort of

set a precedent that you don't need them, which is interesting. Talk more about Helium moving to Solana because I think that that's extremely interesting and really compelling. I've been a Helium fan from the beginning. I had a close friend who bought a bunch of Bobcats and started putting them on everyone he could find's roof. He's truly a believer, and that's why I started looking at it. Why did they make that move, and how is that now going? Yeah. So basically, the cost of implementing your own blockchain, like a layer one that's scalable, is pretty high. And you need a pretty sizable team of experts to do it.

And if you don't have to do it, like... Why reinvent the wheel? Yeah. Why reinvent the wheel yeah why reinvent the wheel why spend all those resources on blockchain work when they could really hire high quality engineers to work on wireless protocols because that's their bread and butter so the the challenge for them though and like a lot of iot projects is that um there's really no networks that have proven out that they can manage large load and maintain like low fees and

be permissionless at the same time except solano so this is why i think they picked us and um it's also working with them i think it kind of like culture wise brain wise i'm very aligned with what they're doing because again spent most of my career welcome by, dealing with Verizon is a huge pain in the butt. And like the idea of a 5G cellular network that's built with a, first of all, incentivize in a decentralized way that everyone can bring in their own cell tower is really, really cool.

And then coordinated on chain is another really, really cool thing because basically the idea that like you can have software defined networks that are like managed in the open uh it's just really freaking cool right like kind of like the use case that you can think of is like you're watching a movie on netflix in your phone and netflix could pay to give you higher service for that movie because that movie is you know being promoted or somebody wants like the best quality for that particular thing so they could literally go on chain and pay like you know 50 cents for the towers to give you more bandwidth and prioritize

you more that that kind of basically science fiction for like any of these big carriers and it's trivial to do in opens with open source technology and open source data structure like a blockchain where all the stuff is coordinated in the open so to me it's just like really really exciting it's kind of like what the internet should have been like right this like decentralized layer of like many different kinds of connections that are all glued together in the open. So that's just pretty awesome. And it's a lot of work to build a 5G carrier. The amount of radio towers that people estimate that AT&T or Verizon might need to deploy,

so people say it's close to 10 million, probably a million would cover 99% of the usage um and there's a really good chance that helium could actually get there faster because it's crowdsourced people i can put up whatever tower i want on my own property this is kind of like the massive advantage that helium has over at t or verizon is that they have to go ask permission to go put all these cell towers on yeah really interesting that you could sort of pay to play as opposed to the subscription model which sort of is it's just so massively disruptive if you're gonna just watch a couple movies a month and you could pay uh two or three dollars to do it rather than you know 30 40 bucks for

a subscription who wouldn't do that yep yeah totally yeah that's really really interesting i never really even heard that part of it are there other things like that that i might be completely missing that people can build on zelada so highmapper is another one uh that i don't think a lot of people know about, but they're growing pretty quickly. So basically, it's a dashboard camera that does kind of this recording of the external world, similar to what Street View does with Google. But they're able to do it about 200 times faster than Google because the people that put up these devices

just constantly record the data around them, and their updates are much, much faster than what Google Street View does. There's about 60 million kilometers of road in the world. It took them four months to get to their first 1 million kilometers and four weeks to get to their second. So now they're covering over 2 million kilometers. This isn't like the same road over and over. These are like new additional,

like, yeah, kilometers of the world. So it's really, really cool. And obviously like that kind of real-time data is kind of, it's going to plug in into this like massive machine learning boom that we're seeing now. Because you need these data sets to generate, you know, want to train models

to be able to process real-time world data to be able to generate data as well. Have you guys utilized AI at all now to take a look at your code and look for those bugs that you've talked about? Is that now pretty much widely being used or not yet? There's a couple folks that are self-posting like scanners for code in solano smart contracts and it's actually able to find some vulnerabilities i wouldn't necessarily like i think somebody that wants to build a security tool on top of ai that's definitely going to be a product but it's going to take some work to make sure that it is well trained on the kinds of problems that are that like people can find like you actually need i think some some hand holding there and like specific training towards

that but i think it's totally doable um we uh we have like we announced uh you know one million worth of grand funding the foundation has announced about that much too for like small-time grants for people working in ai so like and this ranges from like anyone that's building like a chat tool to get solana documentation to like you know i just saw a post somebody built uh literally a neural network that runs on chain that can recognize digits which which is kind of, it's a toy example, but it does demonstrate that you can do small, like neural network, like computation on chain, which is pretty interesting.

It's kind of mind blowing how fast it's happening. I thought that crypto adoption was fast. You know, when I went through the last few cycles and it's basically bigger in a month than we became in, you know, 13 or 14 years. Obviously, it's got a lot more sort of mainstream applications. But maybe you're the guy to ask. I've heard of people obviously still using it to find bugs in code.

Couldn't somebody use it to implant bugs in code? I mean, somebody has to be the developer that ships the code right signs off on it and i think it would be pretty irresponsible for devs to just take auto-generated code and like not have a third party look at it and do like security analysis on it yeah but irresponsible is like the uh key factor of being a human. I think there's going to be plenty of people who take shortcuts who aren't coders at all and want to develop something and just, you know, put it to work and see what happens. Not as layer ones, of course, but even outside of crypto. Maybe. Yeah, I think it's still a lot of work to go from just generate code that's chat GPT spitting out to like a full product that's onboarding users and stuff. And anyone

that's willing to put in that much work could probably do that last 5%. Then you obviously talked about a million dollar grant sort of for small ideas in this. Do you see any places in your mind where there's a very obvious marriage between AI and crypto? No, I don't. There's like some few things like Render also announced that they had a vote that they're going to move to Solana. That's one that's pretty obvious where you have like crowdsourced idle infrastructure that you can use for inference or generate it you know generating images and stuff like that and scenes that's pretty obvious right like idle compute like it's pain in the ass to figure out how to utilize it in like any other market besides

crypto so you can go use it to to like generate some some stable diffusion or like you know ray tracing scenes stuff like that but it's pretty hard to like actually i think marry the two like ai is a very nascent field i you use it just kind of it's not part of my core day-to-day yet. I don't know if it is of yours, but... It is for me, but solely for sort of editing content and various sort of menial tasks that maybe an assistant would have done or that just saved me time. But I haven't used it to replace anything fully in my life, certainly.

Exactly. I think where things get a little bit interesting is it's probably easier to integrate payment systems into AI that are blockchain based than to deal with any one of these payment companies APIs. It's just way easier. Like you have your autonomous agent with a public key, you give it some tokens and then it can be part of a multi-sig, right? All the security, everything else that you'd be dealing with, like setting up autonomous agents that control finance, it's just way easier to do with blockchain

and fraud. So that could be, I think, the angle that both blockchain gets adoption and that AI starts doing something more interesting in the world. Yeah, there are a lot of companies in blockchain, obviously, that were focused on AI before this craze. But it's almost like they had this kind of pump in price, but we didn't really hear about much adoption of it. Fetch, you know, I've had Humayun on the show before from Fetch, and he sort of explained a year ago or even longer all of these things that were coming in AI but we don't really hear about it in the news cycle that any of it's actually happening on blockchain yeah it's still I think too early to tell if these

products are like something that people are going to use on a day-to-day basis so can we get like a solana tv solana computer uh are we just sticking with the phone for now uh solana vr glasses i don't know yeah yeah the loculus yeah we'll see um i think the really important part for us with the phone is can we get this thing in the hands of like 20, 30,000 like active Web3 users? If we can, that's actually a better distribution channel for devs than the big app stores with like their 100 million users. But because of all the restrictions, like Web3 devs can't do anything with those users. But if we get this thing in the hands of like 20, 30,000 like active Web3 users that are generating these massive volumes in crypto, that's probably the most lucrative distribution channel

on any mobile dev could ever ask for. So that's kind of the big bet here and the big unknown, but if it works, then that's a viable developer platform and then it's up to the devs can they build applications they're so compelling that um somebody's like okay i'm gonna give up my you know web 2 phone my iphone my you know samsung device and go buy this thing 1 in 30 000 doesn't seem so crazy that seems very very doable. Yeah, we'll see. But these would have to be active users, right? Yeah, they have to really be deep down the rabbit hole

and using all of the features. I guess that begs the next question, which is how many people... How many of those users of Web3, forget phone purchasers, even exist? Do we think it's a million, 10 million, 50 million? I mean, how many people are using this stuff, I guess, is the real question. I would guess it's probably right now under 2 million globally, somewhere around that much.

So that makes 20,000 to 30,000 people buying the phone, especially when you consider it globally. I can see why that would be challenging to acquire that many. What would you consider a success? I mean, is it at 20,000 that you're like, this was worth it? Yeah, that's kind of how I look at it. I think it'd be disappointing if it was like 5,000, 8,000 people, but probably still worth it to continue. At 20,000, I think it's definitely like a cohort of like

users with varying tastes and stuff and like if something hits like if an app goes viral there that's like enough I think to draw more people into the ecosystem like that's a big enough base that they you know those 20 000 people are all tweeting about you know, those 20,000 people are all tweeting about, you know, that next application. They're like, holy shit, this is like the most fun I've ever had. That's a big enough, like, flywheel. So we need to, it's hard for me to know what that number is until we go try and fail. Right. And be like, well, no, that wasn't enough. Yeah.

I think we've been in search of that killer app this whole time to some degree, right? I mean, listen, the blockchains themselves, layer ones, I believe are a killer app. And certainly stable coins have been a killer app to a degree. But we're still waiting for that moment. I feel like that one thing that goes so wildly viral, it's not a meme. but uh step and had like uh if i'm not mistaken close to two million daily active unique signers so what happened is it was it their tokenomics that made that fail or the and that were the shoes too expensive right because that really did seem like it was a uh lightning in a bottle sort of moment yeah so i mean like i think everything else in crypto if you're basing your growth on

these like token-based rewards as soon as they run out, you're going to see a drop in user numbers. So whatever that like some people get a positive value out of simply working out. Right. And they see the tokens as like a hook to go get them to go wake up in the morning and go on that run. But is that number of people large enough to sustain an ecosystem or not you know whenever you do these like kind of token-based experiments I think um it's really really hard to figure out until you run it and then see okay now this this was not enough uh yeah that's the challenge I've had with a lot of these. And I don't fault them. I think that they're really interesting experiments.

And I hope as much as anyone else that one of them really becomes sticky, right? That we're not having a conversation about someone who had 2 million users. We talk about how they have 2 billion consistent. That's always been my issue to a degree with NFT communities as well. Because I think that people in their mind pretend that they're super passionate about this community until their NFT is worth nothing. This is the big blind spot of crypto product development and why I think some of the companies, going back to your earlier conversation, don't have a token. The ones that have stickiness

and sticky users and PMF, they were able, don't have a token. The ones that have stickiness and sticky users and PMF, they were able to achieve that without a token. And a token might actually cause that loop and that destruction. Right. They probably would have done exceptionally well for about six months if they did have a token. And then when it crashed, they would have completely lost market share because the incentives would be misaligned again. So it is interesting, though. It is good to see use cases proven that are real and infrastructural and that are lasting. But it's interesting that those have been without tokens. I wonder if we'll see a cycle. I don't think it'll be this cycle based on what we're already seeing with thousands of meme coins appearing a day. But I wonder if there will be a cycle that is far less reliant on tokens in the future.

I think so. Um, my big hope dream is that this year, Congress passed a stable coin legislation and we see a thousand stable coins bloom that are competing globally and getting every human in the world access to a digital dollar and that means that like you know we effectively start onboarding most of the world to to the digital dollar you know on Solana because it's the best place to do it but effectively like on a fast low-cost blockchain and once you have enough users with wallets and self-custody that are all doing this, I think then you really have a big enough market. You can start testing all the other business models like, but we'll see what happens.

Right. I think that's one of the one of the pieces that could cause like a massive boom with crypto adoption. So you agree with me that stable coins are the killer app because i say that all the time and it uh seems to be unpopular with bitcoiners but the reality is if you're sitting in venezuela right now and your currency is hyper inflating as much as we want people to rush to bitcoin they're still rushing to dollars because that's what they need look so i've seen in my life i've experienced one superpower collapse right right so like you kind of you have to gauge it by that so like i think of bitcoin as not a not a shit coin it's an oh shit coin like oh shit the world around me the world around me is on fire good thing i have some of this to get out of this like really bad jam and

if you think of it as like insurance against that kind of level of collapse i would not put more than like one percent of my net worth into it um and that's if if everyone in the world does that bitcoin is worth bajillions right like it's a massive success everyone's happy so like but this is how kind of how I think of it. It's like that self-sacred money is useful when everything around you is on fire, right? Your entire like economy and everything else is collapsing. You have something to get out, right? Like move somewhere, like restart, like enough to pay for your family to like, to leave, which is I think really, really really important and if everyone actually had that

insurance we would probably see those amounts uh fewer and farther in between because we all have that hedge right like the funny thing about hedges if everyone's hedging the thing doesn't happen so like i think that's awesome right right? Like, holy shit, Bitcoin could prevent massive economic collapses. It could allow people freedom to kind of unbank themselves in the worst possible situations. It's an awesome use case. Like, no one could have thought that that's possible from like 10,000 lines of Python. That's really, really fucking cool, right? But I think, like, all the other use cases that people want on a crypto

that are trying to attack finance at the next stage, like the 2%, 3% rate that all these financial companies take out of every transfer, you know, every fee that the bank does for overdrafts, all that shit adds up into massive amounts of dollars, right dollars that are spent on moving numbers around in computers. Literally, trillions of dollars per year in the financial sector are spent on nothing more than moving money around in computers.

Or paying seven people to check off on things on various sides. Smart contracts could do this. Solana could do this for the cost of the hardware like at whatever replication you want and it's still going to be way cheaper and i think that stage of adoption probably stable coins are the killer use case because this is what most people want i don't think they want to deal with like pigs for stuff in seoul diehards you know, NFT traders will probably want the native token because it's kind of just part of the fun of the ecosystem. But I kind of see like,

the crypto version of WeChat will probably end up using dollar-based digital dollars. Yeah, I guess the only pushback I would give is that if we get stablecoin legislation, I have a feeling they won't allow in that legislation for thousands of stablecoins to blossom all over the world. I have a funny feeling that it's going to be very specific and they might pick winners. I'm bullish on the United States. More or less, they argue that Congress is a shit show, but every functioning democracy should be a shit show.

It's just part of everyone arguing about what's important to them. Well, at least they can argue. Yeah, I'm bullish for them, actually. If they do pass something, then it'll be very economically liberal and pro-competition. So we'll see what happens though. I would absolutely love to see that happen. Interestingly, another thing that could push stablecoin adoption actually would be the proliferation of central bank digital currencies. I heard you just make that argument for stablecoins. I hate the idea of CBDCs, but I do think they would at least force everybody to learn to

transact digitally, use a wallet, et cetera. And then people would have that oh shit moment that you talked about and go into something private. Maybe I'm too optimistic on humanity there though. It gives me hives to think about CBDCs and some kind of centrally controlled ledger that is mandated to be used by normal people. I think that's a really bad idea. I think these things should be based on competition, based on user preferences, and let the markets figure out what technologies and privacy and triangle that people actually want and prefer that's feasible at scale and I think having any kind of like government mandated uh protocols would probably

set the space back by like solid 10 20 years that's a long time man 10 20 years because that's how long it takes to update anything like in like's mandated, everyone's going to be on it for the next 20-effing years. It's going to suck. Yeah, that'd suck miserably. I would just hope that it would force a certain percentage of the people to opt out, assuming they're allowed to, though. I guess that's the bigger fear, is along with the central bank digital currency, maybe you don't have permission to do these other things exactly and it's just way too early like every six months there's zero knowledge improvements privacy improvements that are coming out of research that people need to implement experiments see if any of this stuff works and like that's only possible in a free market of ideas right like you can't there's no way you could you could pick right now what technology is going to work for the next 20 years it's just like uh impossible so listen when we talked last time I sort of asked about the idea of interoperability and

could one chain rule them all you've already said it in this conversation but I'm assuming your belief still is that all of this could be done on a single chain. Yeah, I think there will be multiple blockchains, but they're all designed to be a single unifying chain. That's the only reason that they'll survive is that they're trying to win it all, right? Like the ecosystem or like the use case is trying to win it all and that's what they'll survive um but obviously there's very kind of like different there's very niche you know kind of proto-efficient trade-offs that everyone's picking and uh my views will probably interoperability is kind of actually pretty easy from a technology perspective um the fact that these are all cryptographically driven means that you can build software that manages those keys and then does actions across different chains and you can build

protocols that really eliminate most of the security attack vectors so from my perspective I think interoperability is the easy part it's that you need like use cases for users that actually care about any of this stuff, like interoperability or anything like that. So far, we just haven't seen a user that wants an NFT in Solana. They don't need a cross-chain protocol to go get that NFT. They can go bounce through Binance or Coinbase and move tokens from one chain to the other and then go buy the NFT that they could go bounce through like a Binance or Coinbase and move tokens from one chain

to the other and then go buy the NFT that they want. It's kind of a pain in the butt, but it's like they could do it already, right? So like how... Yeah, we would need millions of people caring about that to even want to build these things. It seems like this is yet another, maybe this is the case for a lot of things that have been built, just sort of a solution in search of a problem. Yeah, it is a problem, and I'm sure some people will use it, but the addressable market size, the TAM, right,

like for that user base is pretty small. So one chain to rule them all. To every, no, well, I think the chains that will survive there will be multiple are the ones that are gunning for that like one chain to rule them all uh crown you have to have that mentality yeah exactly yeah well it's it i'm just i don't know how your feeling is about you know tribalism and crypto and but it's been entertaining, at least for me, to watch the Bitcoin community squirm as they've tried all of this.

It's the web. I mean, it's just people should post things on Twitter. I think this has been the foundation of the web since the 90s that are bulleted boards full of just as tribal people

talking about Linux file systems. But now you've got money attached to it. This is Linux file systems with extremely volatile tokens and generally self-interest. I think people get as religious about random things with or without money. Honestly, I don't think it makes that big of a difference. Well, then I guess for you,

you'll hope that you become the high priest of the winning religion. It's funny. There was an article maybe last year by this guy, the stalwart, Joe Wiesenthal at Blueberry. And it was that Bitcoin was a religion. He went through this whole thing. And I freaked out. My gut reaction was like, this is wrong. It's offensive, whatever. And I wrote this whole thing and he hated me as a result. And then like a year later, I was like, maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was right. And maybe there is an element of that. A lot of things are like, I think religion is the wrong word. It is um but it is similar to like an experience of faith because uh this happened with like i think apple with open source with like you get a hold of a technology that is nascent it's in these early stages and it transforms how you think about tech right or

these things but you don't see the benefits of it. And you know that they're coming, but it's just going to take 10 to 20 years to roll out. And you yourself get bought in into that idea that this is inevitable, right? In 20 years, everyone's going to be writing open source software and only open source software. And in the 90s, that was very hard to believe. You were Microsoft, Oracle, all of these big... big boxes you were nuts if you believed in it yeah and it happened right and like that that's kind of like the the weird thing i think about these things uh is that it is almost like a you're building on faith that like it's inevitable but you're also those folks are required to actually make that happen you need to have those builders that are building through the the ups and the downs and like have a very strong conviction that technology that they're developing is going to change the world and they see that change it's just not here

yet so yeah I will say that you know I always kind of joke because it's fun to watch uh the infighting but I think that Bitcoin Maxis are historically the most valuable members of this community because they pushed it and believed in it for as long as they did in the face of endless sort of fun and pushback. Yeah. I mean, like, I think that's important. You also have like these, you know, everyone fractures and fractionalizes and then everyone starts fighting each other. I think I'm a bit more open i think the the parts that i don't yeah the parts

that i don't like is the of maximalism is that you're picking like it's like if you're if you go against the the maximalist doctrine you are being excluded from the community you're like being ostracized for it uh and that is like effectively how like you're heretics but this is how like yeah this is how like extreme just like extreme systems form right you like the bolshevik party doctrine like if you're going against it, you would be expelled from the party and then you lose access to like everything. Right. Like, and that's how you kind of create these structures of like authoritarian control. And like, I personally like, uh,

like it just makes me. CBDC will do that much easier than any ideology did. That's really the, really the fear of the CBDC right there, because don't like what you said, there goes your money. That I think is pretty unlikely, at least in the US, I think. Yeah, in China, it's pretty likely. I think, yeah, maybe in these authoritarian countries, but in the US, I imagine the CBDC would be like the interbank ledger. Yeah, I imagine the CBDC would be like the interbank ledger. Yeah, I agree.

But even that, I feel like is pretty lame because... It's all lame. Yeah. Unless they're really forward thinking about the protocols and allow real free market competition there. but it's just really hard for them because the relationship between the banks and the federal government is very much so not like a free market it's kind of very regulated space well i hope we win uh that hour went by exceptionally fast man so where can everybody follow you and check you out after this conversation uh you know go to solanomobile.com and buy a saga that's that's what i'm gonna go

buy one yeah awesome i mean i feel like we all have to right like i'm obligated to to try it i can't talk about all this stuff without actually putting my hands on it so i'm gonna go do that everybody go buy a phone yeah it's going to take a lot of people. All we need is like 20,000 really cool Web3 users. And that could be the wedge to take down Google and Apple. Think of yourself as like those super early adopters. Fight the powers that be. Yeah.

In the words of Public Enemy, I love it, man. Thank you so much for taking the time. As always, can't wait to do it again. Thanks, man. All right. See ya.