Unchained - Can Solana Edge Out Ethereum to Win the AI Agent & RWA Race?

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

Tushar Jain and Mike Ippolito make the bull case for Solana as competition heats up. Thank you to our sponsors! Fuse: The Energy Network – Shift your energy use and earn rewards. MultiChain Advisors – The Growth & Capital Markets Partner You Need Crypto Tax Girl – Save $100 on your crypto taxes. With Ethereum refocusing on L1 and Hyperliquid adoption growing, Solana is arguably facing stronger competition than ever. Can it thrive still? Multicoin co-founder Tushar Jain and Blockworks co-founder Mike Ippolito share several reasons to be excited about Solana, including Alpenglow and anticipated market microstructure design flexibility. Find out why Tushar and Mike say Firedancer has not been a flop despite seemingly low adoption, why they don't see block building issues stopping Solana from challenging Hyperliquid, and why they say the network doesn't have to do anything to specifically attract AI agents. Plus, why they both believe that the RWA race is too early to call despite Ethereum's dominance. Meanwhile, with Alpenglow still months away, Mike says the wait doesn’t matter — for the next 12 to 18 months BD and marketing matter more than tech for adoption. Guest: Tushar Jain, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Multicoin Capital Previous appearances on Unchained: Solana Rejected Inflation Reduction-Here's Why CoinFund's Jake Brukhman and Multicoin's Tushar Jain on Generalized Mining  Binance Hack: Should the Threat of Reorgs Be Used to Deter Hackers? Multicoin on the 1 Thing Crypto Teams Miss in Their Quests for Success Mike Ippolito, Co-Founder at Blockworks Links: Unchained: Ethereum Lets Go of the Rollup Story. Here Are the 6 Tokens That Benefit Jump Crypto’s Firedancer Goes Live on Solana Mainnet BlackRock Just Chose Uniswap. The Market Didn’t Care. Here’s Why. When AI Agents Take Over, What Does a Post-Human Economy Look Like? Uneasy Money: How the Increasingly Better AI Agents Are Being Used Onchain Pump.fun Cashed Out $436M Since Mid-October: Lookonchain Zora Shocks Base Community With Solana Pivot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm not actually sure the tech matters an enormous amount on a 12 to 18-month time horizon here. I think Salon is probably good enough for the time being. You know, Big Web 2 giants adopting stable coins in a big way, that's going to end up moving the needle an enormous amount. So some of it comes down to tech, but my sense is it's probably actually more of a VD in marketing game. I'm pretty bearish these corporate chains. We've seen this movie before. You all have been around.

You've seen this. You've seen this in the last cycle and the cycle before that. Remember Hyperledger? Like that was a thing, right? Like, we have seen this and people get excited. They're like, oh, look, big trusted company. We love these guys. They're going to be incredibly neutral.

And, like, we can trust them. Let's just put all of our trust in them. And then, no, that doesn't work out because, you know what? Audien is not going to build on Stripes chain. And MasterCard is not going to build on Visa's chain. And if you think Goldman is going to settle their trades on a chain controlled by J.P. Morgan, Ben, I don't think you understand how competitive these organizations are. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host,

Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream. Before we get started, a quick reminder, nothing new here on Unchained as investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guest and I may hold assets discussed in the show. For more disclosures, visit Unchained Crypto.com. The Energy Network is an intelligent, decentralized, grid that coordinates smart devices to balance supply and demand. Energy Dollar is the native token of the network from one of Europe's fastest growing energy startups. Follow at Fuse Energy on X to find out more. Multi-chain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create 50 plus billion dollars

in enterprise value for 80 plus clients over the past four years. They're the partner to help navigate markets. Build real traction today at multi-chain adv.com. Quick note before we get into today's episode. Bits and Bips now has its dedicated feed. We're spinning off from the Unchained Feed and moving to a new podcast and YouTube channel. So if you want to keep up with our weekly live streams and macro meets crypto breakdowns, make sure to subscribe to Bits and Bips directly. We won't publish there until March, but subscribe today so you can be ready for launch. Be sure to subscribe to the new feeds at Unchained Crypto.com slash Bips and Bips.

Today's topic is where Sol go from here. Here to discuss our Tushar Jane, co-founder and managing partner at Multi-Coin Capital, and Mike at Bolito, co-founder at Blockworks. Welcome to Shar and Mike. Hey, Laura, thanks for how many. So currently, Saul is trading at around $89. And the last time it was at this price was kind of, you know, late 2023. So that was kind of just as the meme coin craze was about to hit its frenzy.

It's down about 60% or so since October 9th, before 10-10. In comparison, we're seeing Ethereum down about 55%, Bitcoin down about 46%. Although actually, I wrote these percentages a few hours ago, so hopefully it hasn't changed too much. But I was wondering, you know, you're looking, obviously, I'm sure, at all these developments in the market were sort of at this in a certain time, you know, perhaps at the beginning of a bear market. What are the main metrics, factors, developments,

that you're watching to see how you think Solana will fare this year. And 2-star, why don't we start with you? Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's a handful of things to pay attention to. There are backwards-looking metrics that everyone focuses on, but we really like to think about future-looking metrics and think about what's going to change in the future. And I think the number one thing to think about

with regards to Solana this year is the technical roadmap. I think understanding what application controlled execution enables, the scalability upgrades that Alpinglow enables, and the decentralization of the network improving as you have more fire dancer adoption. You're seeing competition at the block building layer. I think the chain from a technology perspective is firing on all cylinders and is by far the most advanced and best in terms of a community and a truly decentralized effort. And at its core, that's what the chain needs to do. That's what it is. It's a platform to then allow developers to build on top of, to allow issuers to go and issue assets on top of. And we're seeing that too. We continue to see a lot of development enthusiasm around

SVM. And we continue to see asset issuance from, you know, like such as private credit folks or some of these new experiments around tokenized equity. And you saw Galaxy, you saw, you know, like that's actual equity. It's not a receipt, though you have seen some of those receipts like the Crackin'X stocks and stuff too. So you're seeing issuers excited. You're seeing the technology continue to progress. And I just think using the market price as an indicator of fundamentals is a bad heuristic. You have to really look under the hood in order to understand where things are and where they're going. And Mike, what about you? Yeah, I think I'm sure we're going to get into talking about the technical roadmap and what's happening underneath the hood with

Solana. One piece of meta commentary that I would give is, I think, a rising tide that's going to benefit, actually, both Ethereum and Solana is the raising barriers to entry for new developer platforms in crypto. So I think over the course of the last five or so years, one of the hottest trades has been new L1s and L2s. And if you look at today where there's actual organic demand, it's really happening on Ethereum main chain Solana and in some cases, hyperliquid. That's where there's kind of organic takeoff at the moment. And I think part of the reason for that is it's just very, very difficult to build one of those ecosystems.

It's also very difficult to do it from the perspective of being neutral, which is one thing that I think both Ethereum and Solana have going for it. They're very unique kind of go-to-markets as opposed to something which is hyperliquid successfully counterpositioned Ethereum, I think. year, but they did it by being very opinionated and more controlled. They look more like a company to me than a platform in their current form. I think also, just from a branding standpoint, what Solana has established that's very difficult is I think this is probably the year where we stop talking about chains as being truly general purpose. When I see what I kind of see a

divergence here in between Ethereum and Salada, which allows both of them to win and be successful, When I look at what's happening on Ethereum, it's a lot of, I kind of think of it as borrow, lend, money market on chain. For lack of a better word, there's a lot of really interesting activity going on with faults and morpho and bringing asset management on chain. But when I look at Solana, I look at it as a neutral platform to internalize trades and kind of a consumer app ecosystem. And a couple of data points that I would point you to that I think are pretty interesting in this direction of some of the applications that, Salana has recently won away from competitors like Base, who have, you know, base has done a lot to both kind of spend money, but also attract new application platforms that Salana seems to be winning here in an organic way. So yeah, I agree with Cheshire on the

price point. I don't think you can just look at price and infer the potential of an ecosystem. And I think there's a lot of strong things still going for slaughter right now. Yeah, it's funny because actually my next question was going to be about, what kind of narrative you think Solana should, you know, push. Because I agree that it's sort of like this competition we're seeing where, you know, for a long time it had been Ethereum and Solana. And then now Hyperliquid is sort of coming in and again competing. You know, it's funny. In my head, it's like with Solana, but I guess it could also be with Ethereum in a way. But it sort of feels like Salana is just in this moment where it's kind of facing competition in various ways.

And, you know, I've seen your tweets, Mike. This is why I found of you for this show. Because as everybody knows, Blockworks has a reputation for potentially being maybe a bit more pro Solana than other chains or Ethereum. However, you know, recently you have tweeted multiple times that Ethereum looks very good to you here right now. And, you know, it's things like. you know, their quantum roadmap, they just double down on defy, they're, you know, no longer following

the L2 centric roadmap. I mean, there's just multiple reasons why it sort of looks like Metallic maybe heard what the community wanted and is actually responding to it. So, you know, given those changes and kind of the increased competitiveness, perhaps from Ethereum, you know, I'd be curious to hear you guys talk a little bit about like what you think the main narrative is that Salinas should, you know, be pitching. And obviously, we've heard about internet capital markets for a while. And there's a number of different narratives that they have been pushing. But I don't know if there's something to respond to the changing competitive landscape that you think they should emphasize or focus on. Well, just to respond. So, first of all, Blockworks is very pro-Etherium. I know that that's our reputation, but very pro-Eath. I think this is just speaking for Mike, not speaking for Blockworks. The way that I've felt, over the course the last three or four years with Ethereum, maybe a point of frustration

where a lot of the messaging that was getting pushed out didn't make a lot of sense to me. I've always been one of these people that thinks I'm not a big, everything's a meme kind of guy. I think generally when you think about an asset and why you want to hold it, I think most assets in the world are fee-based and if they're commodity-based, yeah, probably like most commodities end up trading sideways. So I've always been a big proponent of Ethereum having this very early headstart, very trusted brand, a head start and critical mass around really interesting use cases like stable coins and decentralized finance. And I've always been a big proponent of being a little bit more pragmatic on scaling main chain and trying to just generate fees instead of giving up from the go, right, from the from the off. And yeah, I think one way of looking at what's happened with Ethereum over the course.

course the last couple years is I just my opinion I think we had a lot of the wrong ideas but I think that the market has corrected those I think a lot of activity I can see recentralizing recent recent recent recentralizing wrong word I just regathering on on one chain and it's a really exciting large use case we haven't really talked about genius I'm sure you guys all saw the meta news that they're going to be launching another stable coin and I kind of think that's where a lot of the interest in the activity is going to go. what's making me more positive on just Ethereum and ETH. In terms of what Ethereum doesn't have is it's certainly never going to get to a level of scale and throughput that you could have

like consistent trading activity happening there. So that's to me when I look at the unique value proposition that Solana has is it's still neutral. We haven't talked about prop AMMs, but that was probably the most exciting innovation in market microstructure and moving price discovery on chain that at least I've seen in the last year or so. And so I know Tushar and Multi-coin has been kind of all over this, but I like the internet capital markets positioning for Solana. And I think it can win a bunch of the trading and capital markets kind of issuance use cases that Ethereum can't support. Too sorry.

Yeah. So I'd love to chime in on that. I'll go on the same order that you did. I want to start with. Ethereum is what got me excited about crypto in the first place. And I've told this story before. So I have a lot of love for Ethereum. And I think the ecosystem was very misguided for years and years with the L2 strategy. And it makes me really glad to see that the ecosystem has been able to self-correct. I wish it had happened sooner because there was a lot of money spent on that strategy. A lot of developer energy and time was spent on that strategy. And it clearly has not worked. You know, L2s don't deliver value back to the L1. And like now we just have incontradable proof of that.

We're seeing that in the market. So I do find myself more enthusiastic about Ethereum now that they've moved off of the L2 strategy. However, there are still scalability challenges when it comes to Ethereum at L1, and those scalability challenges are so substantial that barring some complete re-architecture of the system, I don't see how Ethereum L1 can be competitive for any sort of trading applications. And if it's not competitive for trading applications, I don't see. how it can be competitive in the long run for borrow land applications.

Mike, you mentioned you see it as kind of a money market or a lend chain, but one of the most important, if not the most important attribute of a money market is the ability to liquidate collateral in order to prevent bad debt and insolvency. And in order to do that, you need liquidity, you need trading volume on that chain so that you can liquidate that collateral at a reasonable price without incurring that debt. So I think where you see the trading activity is where you will see the borrow land markets start to migrate. And I think this is where Solana has a huge advantage. Solana has an advantage because it can support the trading activity,

and it also is credibly neutral enough to support asset issuance. you can see some of the largest asset managers in the world issuing tokens on Swana. And so I think it's actually got kind of the best of both here. It's got the best of performance, but it also has the required credible neutrality to serve as the substrate for internet capital markets as a thesis. And I think that's playing out. we're seeing it like you know if you just ignore price salana is in a better place today than it has ever been we're seeing competition at every layer of the stack we're seeing competition we're seeing innovation in market microstructure with prop amms we're seeing innovation on block building with gito's bam product which allows applications to control the sequencing of transactions such that they can allow things like makers to cancel orders before takers can take them We are seeing innovation, you know, with like dozens of different perp-dex teams exploring

different microstructures and that that design space is so large. I think it's impossible to sit here and say, oh, we've crowned the winter already. You know, it's over. I think you need to be a place for permissionless innovation. And people will always surprise you with new innovation if you love them. Yeah. I agree with you, and that's why in a moment we're going to get into all the tech developments, but just one commentary on the base Ethereum thing, you know, when Bass announced that it was going to develop its own tech stack and get off OP,

I just found my mind kind of playing things out a few steps ahead and feeling like, you know, leaving aside the issue that, of course, Coinbase is a public company. It's very centralized, like, you know, blah, blah, blah. just like, wow, there's a potential world where base itself becomes a huge competitor to Ethereum, especially now, you know, you're seeing all this agenic activity on base, and that's clearly what the next big thing is going to be, you know? And, you know, it's, I don't know, it's just like a, I think that alone, the fact that that thought even popped in my head shows, you know, what you were saying about how the L2 roadmap was something that it just really didn't benefit Ethereum, the base layer.

In my head, though, like, yeah, there's random things. Like, you know, I don't want to, you know, go down random rabbit holes. But another thing is that I could actually see some version of a modular setup working down the road, which hopefully, I don't know, maybe that's a controversial statement,

but it's sort of like, we're just at a moment in crypto where to be like a, little bit more centralized or nimble or like not be as complex is going to be an advantage because you know we're sort of like pre mass adoption um but yeah i just i don't know i found myself thinking um well who knows down down the road but anyway i don't want to get signed tracked let's talk about this road to internet capital markets for salana because yes as you guys mentioned there's a lot of technical things in the works i'm not a technical person so i try to do my best hopefully we will

cover at least all the main topics. But, you know, in order to get there, you know, there's a number of different advancements that the chain is working on. You know, Tushar just alluded to a few of them. You know, some are really kind of minute about, you know, how the blocks being built, you know, reducing transaction finality. As everybody knows, we did a show on double zero. That's like, you know, literally looking at physical infrastructure. But, you know, before we dive into kind of each of the main points, like, So which ones are you most excited about or which ones do you think will be like the ones that move the needle the most for Solana to, you know, get to its goals? Yeah.

I'm happy to take a stab this first. And then, like, please add anything that I miss. Before I do answer that question, I do want to comment on a side point that you have there. I think base is a competitor to Ethereum. It's already a competitor, right? Like any transaction that happens on base is by definition not happening on Ethereum. And that's market share. Like you want to own as much market share as possible.

So I think that's already the case. But I know we want to talk about, you know, Solana and the technical roadmap. I'll tell you the things that I'm most excited about on Solana, there's two key things that I'm most excited about. And then there are several other things that are also quite exciting. But the two things I'm most excited about are first Althamglow. because Alpenglowe reduces the time to finality. It dramatically increases chain performance.

It is just such a simpler system for consensus than what Swan is currently operating. And it's just a step change improvement. The analogy that I would use here is the viewers might have seen the image of like the first engine that SpaceX used and then like their V3 engine, which looks super slick and like you can't see any of the wires and it's just like way simpler, that's Alpin Glow. So like the original version is like turbine, proof of history, all of these components that had to stick together and make Solana function. And then AlpenGlo is the far simpler, far more efficient system.

The biggest benefit that regular users will see off of that is faster finality. they're going to see higher like higher probability of transactions landing when they expect them to land and I think they're going to see more throughput in the case that they need to

the chain is actually at capacity so I think Alpingwell is really exciting a lot of the work on that has already been done it's in you know testing phases I expect her to be live on Mingat this year So I'm pretty excited about that. The second thing I'm really excited about is application controlled execution or ACE. We actually published a blog post on this last week talking about the design space for ACE and what this now enables that previously wasn't possible.

And this kind of thing doesn't really exist anywhere else. I haven't seen it on Ethereum for sure. I haven't seen it in any other major system. Maybe there's some small midgy thing. But what this enables is each application can control the order of transactions being executed within a block. So let me give you some concrete examples of what that means. This can mean that a borrow lend platform can prefer the liquidator who owns a bunch of that token. So, for example, Camino, which is a leading parolent platform on Swana, can say, hey, if you buy and stake my token, and you submit a liquidation transaction, yours will get processed first.

But they can do this without damaging the protocol in any way, because if I have the most token staped and I don't submit that transaction, it's not like they're waiting for me. They can just allow the next guy to liquidate that transaction in that same exactly. block. Or another example of this is you see there's this concept of price time priority on all order books. And what that means is the order that will get traded against first is the order with the best price that was placed the longest time ago that's been on the book for the long ago. And I think that there's design to explore that too, where it can be sort of price time priority, it can be price stake priority. Of course, if you have the best price, you get executed first, but if two orders have the same exact price, then you give the fill to the trader who has

more stake. And that incentivizes stake collection. And you are able to do things like this with application controlled execution. That is live today on Solana through Gito's Block Assembly marketplace, so BAM product. So you can actually build on that today. And I expect that adoption to really continue. And I'm just super excited about the design space exploration here. I think that this is going to be the next big market microstructure evolution. So I already just did the prop AMM evolution. And I think this is the next one that just like dramatically increases liquidity and usability.

Like what about you? I was going to also, I mean, I think one of the things that Salon has always had going for it is a very clear. North Star. I also have thoughts on the, I think a modular, I basically just think Ethereum overbuilt for demand. I do think long term,

a modular roadmap actually makes some amount of sense to me. But I think one of the things that it always lacked that I did think was a very valid criticism and doesn't have a North Star. And Salon has always had the IBRL North Star,

I think is exactly right for it. So I would echo what Tushar said on on both things. I think maybe like one slightly controversial opinion that I would have here that I know doesn't always land super well. And we're at nerdy space that loves to get nerd sniped. But I'm not actually sure the tech matters an enormous amount

on a 12 to 18 month time horizon here. I think salon is probably good enough for the time being. And I think it's also doing this. I think the foundation is extremely focused. on going out and getting like RWA asset issuers to come on chain. I don't have any special insight information,

but that's what it seems like the priority is. And yeah, I think that there are going to be a couple of big fintechs or too sure I know this was a multi-coring prediction from many years ago, but yeah, like metas or big web two giants adopting stable coins in a big way, that's going to end up moving the needle an enormous amount.

So some of it comes down to tech, but my sense is it's probably, actually more of a BD and marketing game at this point. Oh, wow. I would tend to agree that BDN marketing absolutely matter. And especially in the short to medium term, a lot of wins are driven by BDN marketing. And I also agree that scalability is no longer the goal or the panacea that it used to be. And a lot of people who've been in the industry for a long time,

remember when that was the challenge. Chains would just get congested and you couldn't plan in transactions. That, like, doesn't happen anymore. So I agree that that direction of tech advancement is not going to be the game changer. However, I do think the direction of tech advancement in terms of market microstructure can be the game changer. Because getting the right market microstructure, improves your liquidity. There are returns to scale there.

Everyone wants to trade at the place where there's more liquidity, and thereby increases the liquidity of that place. And that all comes down to market microstructure and understanding those fine details. And there, Swana is undeniably doing the most experiments and is in the lead with things like application control of execution and what that design space now enables. So I think the scalability tech doesn't really matter so much,

But the market microstructure stuff, like, does matter. Yeah. Yeah. I had the same thought that, like, I could just imagine builders listening to this and, you know, thinking, oh, well, that gives me, you know, the room to, you know, execute this creative idea that I have for, you know, whatever it is. So I think, like, if you attract builders, then, yeah, then that's really where it's at. Mikey were going to say something. Well, I agree, but I think, I mean, even just to back into the timeline on some of this stuff, and also I think the Salana, Salana has been pretty good at shipping on time,

but everything in crypto always seems to take longer than we'd like. And Alpenglo is Q3 in a best case scenario, and then multiple concurrent proposers. That's another one we haven't mentioned, by the way, but MCP and Ace is like another year probably after that. So I think this is also me partially saying, hey, let's make some incremental improvements while we can. And then what I think we're sometimes guilty of in crypto is waiting around for the tech to improve and saying we're on a roadmap and it's very far out. But I think we're in a moment in time here is my particular, this is my framing of this exact moment, which is I've been in crypto for eight years. I've heard a lot of times that the institutions are coming. I was there in 2018 when Mike Novigrat said we're six months.

away and he said the herd is coming and it just didn't but they are coming this time. It's not that far out. We have genius while it got passed last year. You know, it's going to get the earliest that can actually be implemented and there can be a real genius stable coin is in November of this year. That is very real and you can already see big companies marshalling. And there's kind of a, I think there's a moment in time. This is a moment in time where you really want to be dialed in on the right levers and absolutely improve the tech do cool stuff um but i think that this is a that's where i'd be directing my time and attention uh yeah so similar oh go ahead i was just going to say some of the stuff too uh not to push back too sharp but like ace is a pretty old that's actually

originated in cosmos but there's also maybe a jaded i've been talking like i've been talking about i heard this from the cosmos people four years ago and it made its way to some of the m like the mv microstructure a couple years ago. Like, there's probably had jaded, I'll believe this when I see it, you know, tight response that you might be picking up on too.

Not to doubt any of the, you know, builders sold, but I think that's maybe a little bit of what I'm coming from to. It's so funny. That's totally fair. And I would say,

look, I think the cosmos ecosystem had some of the best, like, ideas. There was so far ahead of their time. They were just so far ahead of their time, like the execution.

just was not there. Yeah, so I learned a lot from that ecosystem, even though it clearly hasn't worked. On ACE, though, it's live today with Gito Bam, is live in production today. If you're a developer on Swana, you can use that today. So I know, you know, like the first party ACE stuff and MCP is a little ways away,

but I think what's exciting is if you are a developer, you can start experimenting with Gito's BAM product right now. And you can get those benefits right now. Yeah, it's so funny that you guys mentioned Cosmos because after Vitalik's post about the L2-centric roadmap, I tweeted something about how my takeaway was like, now Ethereum is Cosmos's vision or something like that. And yeah, so it's just funny that, yeah,

It does appear they had a lot of good ideas. Okay, we need to get back to the tech stuff. I did want to mention, you know, one long-term goal finally was Raged Fire Dancer went live on Mayna in December. At least as far as I can tell you know, right now, it's only garnered about 1% of the network. Are you guys disappointed by that? Like, you know, did you expect that, you know, it would gain more adoption early on? And obviously, at least to my mind, I don't think if it has one percent. of the network that that really gives, you know, it adds much to Salana's resiliency. So, yeah, I'm just curious to hear you, you know, talk about, you know, the fact that it's here, but it doesn't appear to be doing that much yet. I think that these things just take time. I'm personally, you know,

in the client debate, I'm not really in the Ethereum camp of we need, you know, five different execution clients and multiple consensus. But I do think, you know, at least having like two does breed for some resilience it at least protects against the doomsday scenario of some sort of weird day zero bug so you know the tech behind fire dancers really strong I think it'll get more widely implemented you know as the year goes on but I'm not massively disappointed in that rollout so far I mean yeah one thing that I will say though is um it like it's not just a zero day bug but also um you know I wrote about the DDoS attacks on Ethereum back in the day.

Clearly somebody, you know, made a study and then one by one just, you know, attacked Ethereum relentlessly for, I think it was like a month. So, you know, that's not out of the realm of possibility as well. And some of the attacks were ones where, you know, it really targeted one client and they really truly had to switch the network all over to the, you know, to like, like if it was guess, then, you know, to parody and vice versa. So it is a thing. I'm trying not to, I'm not trying to give anybody ideas, but anyway, Tushar. I agree with the Laura. I'll actually take the view that I think Firedance has been an enormous success. And I do not think you should measure the impact that

Firedancer has had by just looking at how much stake is running Firedanceer as its primary client on chain today because the benefits of FireDancer in my opinion are all the second order things that it has just created. First, FireDancer created a sense of competition amongst core developers and has led to the Agave team just massively stepping up. The performance of the core chain really stepped up and I think you know what made that happen is competition. And the The Agave dev team saw that everyone was excited about the fire dancer and they said, we can do that. And they did. They stepped up and they built a way better client than they used to have.

So that's the first second order effect that I think is meaningful. The second one that's meaningful is exactly what you're saying, Laura, about resiliency. It doesn't matter what is the primary validated client that people are running. the fact that they can switch over in the case of an attack to the other one is an enormous point of resiliency. And the other client is independently written. It's not like, you know, fire dancer is some fork of the agave client with some tweaks. They wrote it off again from scratch, right? And so the chances of a bug or an exploit existing in both of them is extremely low.

And so just having that optionality of the fact that a large valetor who's running Agave as a primary client can switch over in the case of an attack prevents network downtime and improves network resilience substantially. And then the third piece that I'll say where Firedancer has been an enormous success is in improving the credible neutrality of Solana as a blockchain. I think you do need at least two open source clients with competitive dev teams to be credibly neutral. Because ultimately, you need to have some accountability. You can't have one group who is in charge of anything and everything that all this technical decisions that need to be made at a corporate call level. And now we have that. we have that meaningful level of decentralization. And I think that really matters.

As a side point that's related to this, I'm pretty bearish these corporate chains. We've seen this movie before. You all have been around. You've seen this. You've seen this in the last cycle and the cycle before that. Remember Hyper Ledger? Like that was a thing, right?

Like, we have seen this and people get excited. They're like, oh, look, big trusted company. We love these guys. They're going to be incredibly neutral. And like, we can trust them. Let's just put all of our trust in them. And then, no, that doesn't work out because, you know what, ADIN is not going to build on Stripes chain.

And MasterCard is not going to build on Visa's chain. And if you think Goldman is going to settle their trades on a chain controlled by J.P. Morgan, then I don't think you understand how competitive these organizations are. Like, that's not going to happen. The credible neutrality really matters. And I think that Firedancer delivered just a quantum leap. incredible neutrality for the Salana ecosystem. And that might have been the most powerful thing that it did.

Yeah, I was just going to just want to double down on that point. I think, you know, the criticism of that Ethereum has had of Solana about it not being centralized because of the price of validators, I've always thought was a really silly criticism given the trust assumptions that you're making operating on an L2 and settling down to Heath, like you're making probably worse trust assumptions there. But with the, they actually never really shouted about this, but I thought it was always a pretty valid point that the decentralization that's meaningful is who is deciding the direction of the protocol. And this was actually something that Solana probably had to get used to, I would imagine, right? It used to be kind of labs and then Onza, you know, broke out and now there's the fire dancer team.

And coming to consensus between different groups sometimes might actually take a little bit longer, but it's far more resilient. and I am ultimately a believer in the idea of credible neutrality. However, you want to define that word. I think the idea is that if you're building on a platform like Solano or Ethereum, you aren't going to get rubbed. And if you have multiple teams, it's just far more difficult to do that. So I just want to underline. I completely agree with especially all of those points, but definitely the last one.

All right. So in a moment, we'll dive into a few more of the different tech developments that are coming up. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. The world is about to see one of the largest infrastructure shifts of the century. New technologies are using more energy than ever before, but our legacy grids can't supply the demand, and we are barreling towards a global bottleneck. So Fuse is rebuilding it.

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So as we mentioned earlier at the market right now is very focused on pervs. The rise of hyperliquid has definitely caught a lot of attention. You know, we're in this moment, you know, where you alluded to earlier, Salon is kind of having these block building bores. Essentially, the way that I'm reading this and feel free to correct me is the upshot is that it kind of makes it difficult for the chain to compete with hyperliquid a little bit. But, you know, I'm sure you have more details on that. So, you know, can one of you outline, you know, what is going on here and what you think are the best ways for Solana to address this?

I mean, I can give like a little bit of a history here as well, which is it's kind of funny to see at least. So I guess the history, right, of MEV in general is Ethereum because they got their first, and they really care about this idea of credible neutrality. They kind of flag the, hey, this is this really difficult thorny problem to solve in a permissionless environment where you don't know who the actors are. And they proposed this separation of duties in between the proposers, which they wanted to make very dumb and have the requirements there be very low with much more sophisticated builders that would build the blocks. There was a lot of compute and hardware and specialization that needed to go into mostly simulating. And you very quickly saw the structure there compressed on, really about two, at sometimes two or three really integrated searcher builders on the Ethereum ecosystem.

And it's been a lot of pros and cons and different approaches to that ecosystem. Salon has always been different in the sense that there wasn't a public mempool. So the benefit of that is you didn't have a lot of these same sandwiching type attacks that you did and that you saw in Ethereum. The challenge with it, though, is that there wasn't a way for you to deterministically include an order based on how much you're willing to pay. So there's an enormous amount of spam for the chain. Gito, is one of my life, but one of my favorite teams in crypto, they were very early to this. And they essentially created bundles in the same way that you had on Ethereum. And I had kind of like a privatized mempool solution that eventually, to their credit, people started to submit sandwiches and they shut down.

they there are since two solutions so Gito has BAM which is basically this very sophisticated system processing way of dealing with MF whereas you have a more recent entry or entrant here which is harmonic which is a more kind of open competition actually kind of Ethereum PBS style way of dealing with with MEPB but ultimately I think It's interesting to see differences, but I don't know if you're sure if you've got insight on this as to why these markets tend to concentrate so strongly amongst a very small number of actors. But I think you're starting to see slightly similar approaches to MEV on Solana as you were on Ethereum. And I think that that is ultimately kind of still a thorny challenge for Solana here to solve. I have no doubt that it will get solved between Harmonic and Gita's BAM solution.

but it's definitely a little bit thorny. Although I don't think it really prevents them from competing effectively with hyperliquit. I don't know. Shishar, what do you think? I agree with a lot of what you said. The thing that I come back to is I think competition is really good.

I think competition drives people to perform better. And I am excited to see this competition at the block building layer in Solana. And what we have is, you know, what used to be a single team that dominated it, now there's multiple teams that are competing on how to best build blocks on Swana. And they're both moving extremely fast, doing experiments, and trying to figure out what the right tradeoffs are. Because when you're operating at the efficient frontier of technology,

there's never really a, oh, this solution is just simply better than the other one. There's a trade-off. There's some cost that comes for that benefit. And having multiple teens explore that space of trade-offs, I think, is extremely valuable. But I do think- Wait, too short, I just need to ask, because one of the things, you know, that I took away from, from, you know, what I read about this situation is it sort of feels like, even though there's competition, which is generally good, what is happening on the network is that, there's inconsistency in execution. So like, you know, spreads, like routing. There's a number of factors that are effective. And so it means that, you know, there's, first of all, maybe a certain level of unpredictability,

but then also it means that it's not always optimally efficient. Are those like some of the downsides of that? There are downsides. Absolutely. However, having just one type of block building has its own downsides too, right? And, you know, I think we're fortunate that the Gito team has just been such great stewards of the block building process. And they did, like Mike mentioned, you know, shut down their Mampool product when they saw that that was harming the network. And that just goes to speak to the team and who they are, that they did that.

however, I think having competition means that you're not relying on people to act in a certain way. You're letting the market speak and the market can determine what it wants. So in the case of, you know, this specific competition, you can have wallets say, I will only send transactions to validators who are using this block builder versus the other because I know that, you know, BlockBuilder 1 delivers a better experience for my customers than Block Builder 2. You can see users start to demand something like that, especially the more sophisticated ones. You know, the retail guy who submitted one transaction a week or something probably is not going to do that.

But if you're a sophisticated trader, let's say you have a Prop A&M that you've deployed. Maybe the updates of Prop AIM, you go through one of the systems and not the other. because you think that is better for you. And now you have more choice in the matter. And I think that choice is quite valuable. Okay. I'll also say it's just harder to solve this problem in an open, permissionless environment. And I know that Solana gets compared a lot to hyperliquid here.

This is an easier problem to solve if you have a team, right? And you can unanimously make a bunch of these decisions. But I would push back a little bit on comparing hyperliquid direct. to Solana because, again, if you have a closed system with a team that's making all these decisions unilaterally, I think it is easier to, you have a lot of tools in your toolkit that you don't in an open and permissionless system. But I also think you get some benefits for solving this problem, like having an open system where you solve these problems. So I think that gets lost in these discussions sometimes.

All right. So earlier we alluded to what was happening with, prop AMMs on Solana, which is really interesting. Basically, this whole deck space on Solana has been maturing, and we're seeing prop AMMs like HumidFi to Sarah focus on really highly liquid assets like Sol Stable Coin or Stable to Stable Pairs. And, you know, kind of the longer standing AMMs that are more passive are actually more now capturing just long-tail assets. So talk a little bit about, you know, how this market is developing and how this is affecting the relationship between kind of the interplay, I would say, between Dex's and centralized crypto platforms and what you think this means for how Solana Defi is evolving and maturing. I could take a first run at this, which is, I mean, to me, the reason why Prop A-MMs are really interesting is what they've enabled. And one thing that I think gets lost in the discussion around, I do, by the way, I think it was a little bit of a, we would have loved to see as a salada bull, like them owning or that chain owning the dominant venue for perps trading on chain. So I think it was a little bit of a fumble to not get that. But I think there's hope and there's a light at the end of the tunnel for winning that use case back. But I think, you know, there's been a very longstanding debate in between Central Limit Order Books and AMMs.

in crypto and AMMs have always been really good for providing liquidity on kind of the long tail of assets but they really struggle because especially the early designs just weren't very capital efficient and it's kind of why should retail just be able to passively market make which is a very high skill activity and be profitable. So to me the active you know the prop AMMs were really interesting innovation because it's kind of a it's an interesting blend of some of the tradeoffs in between more passive AMMs and Central Limit Order books, which didn't really work super well on chain. But basically the difference being that AMMs, they keep some of the pricing logic and inventory management and things like that opaque and tightly controlled by the

teams that are managing them. And then they integrate directly with aggregators and do more active things like they pull real-time oracles and they can update quotes more frequently and things like that. And no one, like to the point earlier that I made about we don't need to rely on centrally coordinated tech innovations, this happened just independently, right? These were entrepreneurial teams who just discovered this opportunity within the microstructure. And what it led to is Solana is kind of the only ecosystem that actually has deeper liquidity and tighter spreads for the sole USDC pair than you'd find on centralized exchanges. So all of the ingredients are there. for Solana if they continue to lean into this innovation.

And I think you're going to start to see teams experiment with this same style on the Purps side of things as well. And there are some great teams working on this, so I would expect to see a real movement on, yeah, on Perps on Solana here too. But I just think it's a cool innovation that some entrepreneurs just looked at it and it's like, hey, we could be doing things differently.

Yeah, I agree with it. With all of that, and I just want to explain at a very basic level, like, why our crop A&M's interesting or it's emitting. I think a lot of people have heard about it and may not fully understand, like, why is this valuable? So historically, what we've seen are two different types of trading venues. We have exchanges that have a central and minority book. That's the thing that, you know, you're most used to. that's the coin base or you see that on all these centralized exchanges. And the positives to that are obvious.

You can be very specific about the price. You can run your own algorithm if you're a market maker. And you have this very deterministic execution. And then AMMs were exciting because they allowed anyone to deploy liquidity. and they just enable that long tail of assets to be liquid. You did not need to have that same model of sophistication. I think prop AMMs find a really interesting middle point. And the thing that's exciting that's in the middle here is prop AMMs allow for much more capital efficiency than old school AMMs because of two things.

one, they can update what their logic is at any time. They can change how much liquidity they are providing to the market based on the market conditions at that exact moment. They don't have to sit there and absorb a bunch of bad flows and be adversely selected against, unlike other types of AMOs. they are also able to concentrate liquidity because they're not telling you exactly where the liquidity is. It's opaque. You don't know how much could I sell to this pop-A-M-M at this price. I don't actually know. I can just keep going until they don't want to quote anymore. But I can't tell a priority before executing that, oh, you know, if I sell a million dollars worth of X into this pool, I'm going to affect the price.

And that's useful because it makes a system less manipulable. It makes it way harder for predatory traders to go and hunt people stops. It makes it a lot safer, actually, when there is this opakness to the maker's side of the orderbook. But Prop AIMs benefit against Central Limit orderbook, in that they're far more compute efficient. You can deploy the prop AMM on chain, and then you are actually allowing the router to go and simulate against it,

and then you are causing the user who wants to trade to pay the compute cost to update the state of the prop AMM. So instead of you as a maker needing to be constantly updating your order book, you are actually offloading some of that expense of doing it. that to the customer. So you only update the order book when someone's about to trade. And that means that you can just process way more transactions or way more effective transactions because you don't end up with all these like, you know, oh, I place the order, I cancel the order. I place the order, I cancel the order. I place the order. I cancel the order. You don't need that

clogging up the box space with this. So I think there's a lot to be explored here. And, you know, What gets me really excited as an investor just like at a very high level is seeing this type of experimentation. And I think swanah is very much at the forefront of this experimentation. There's nowhere else that you see experimentation at the scale or at the speed. Yeah. One thing that was mentioned in the Blockworks Research Report that I read about this is that they talked about how on Ethereum, there tend to be more category winners that just dominate for long. long periods. And in Solana, there's just a lot more competition and, you know, there isn't just

always one dominant player in his face. And I was just curious. Like, why do you think that is? I think it's culture. Salana has this deep-seated culture of competition. Right. You can see that when you talk to a lot of the people in the Slana ecosystem. They see competition as a net good thing. And look, I'm very close with the Slana ecosystem. I'm less close with the Ethereum ecosystem. But my perception on the Ethereum side is much more coordination than competition. And I think

that's a fundamental difference. But Mike, I would love to hear what you have talked about this. I was going to say, I think there's a path dependence element to this too. I mean, Uniswap started so early. they pioneered the category. And then by the time they got critical mass, I think it became pretty clear that trading wasn't going to happen on ETH Main Chain.

So actually, you know, you can kind of understand, okay, there's this massive competitor here that I'm never going to unseat. And by the way, the prize might be shrinking anyway. So most of the competition for great decks designers just moved off of Eith Main Chain, I would guess. I also would say, like one thing too that's really interesting. about these prop AMMs, is that what Tushar was saying on the first point that you mentioned there

about more passive AMMs being leaky is that there's a concept called lever or loss versus rebalancing, which is it's what AMM designers are really obsessed in the Ethereum ecosystem on, which is there is essentially a loss that you take as an LP where true price, there's a big lag in price discovery that happens on chain. So assume that the true price, price discovery for like ETHUSDC is happening on Binance. And then there's, you have to wait 12 seconds before you can update that on chain. And it's very expensive. You're essentially paying arbitrage yours, a lot of money to do that.

So you're kind of, the other thing that's interesting about the prop AMS is that a lot of the sex to dex arbitrage flows, which were big money earners for the beavers of the world. That's actually moving on chain on Solana, which is really cool because at one point, you know, there's a point, just a couple of years ago. I did a long podcast with Dan Robinson actually on Dex Design. And the question was, how are we ever going to get price discovery on chain? No one was particularly bullish about getting price discovery on chain. But it is happening on Salana, not entirely widespread, but I think the prop AIMs are, you know,

they're a step in the right direction. And I would agree with Dushar too that is just encouraging to see that type of experimentation. Yeah, to Sharr's point about how Ethereum has. has more coordination. I'm pretty sure one time on the chopping block has said something about Ethereum being Kumbaya. So that's kind of to the coordination aspect. Okay, let's be sure to talk about the AI agent thing because obviously that is just wildly hot right now. And, you know, we saw obviously with this whole open-cloth phenomenon, just how well crypto and AI kind of fit together or just kind of how naturally these agents, you know, figured out how they can transact.

You know, but the top chain where we are seeing agentic activity is base. You know, Coinbase did develop this X402 protocol. I don't know how much that helped or the fact that Virtuals was already on base. But, you know, we're seeing Open AI now has its own agent payment protocol, which works with Stripe. Google launched a. P2, which works with 60 plus financial partners, some of which are MasterCard and PayPal. And Salano itself is also seeing a fair amount of agenetic activity. It has this MCP, which is to help enable AI agents to interact with the Soleno blockchain. But obviously, as I just talked about, this is such a competitive space.

It feels like everybody is just trying to move into it. So, you know, what do you think are the best ways that Solana can compete? DeJah, you want to take this first? Yeah, I'm happy to. So the question is, you know, how can Solana compete on exactly what? Sorry, Laura. I want to make sure answer. Just gathers, just garnering a bigger share of hegentic activity.

Oh. I don't know that you need to target that. Like, agents are going to be really smart. They're already really smart, and they're going to be even smarter over time. And they're going to look to use the chain that allows them to do what they want to do at the lowest possible cost. Like, these are literally optimization machines, right? Their job is to go and optimize. They are going to, one, deeply understand the technical tradeoffs of the,

these different systems, I think they're going to understand the costs of using these different systems at a level that only the most sophisticated trading firms in the world today can understand. And, you know, I don't think, I don't think you can, like, build for agents specifically. I think you just have to build the best protocol in the first place. and the agents will use the best, most scalable, cheapest, fastest protocol. I don't think that there's anything that's like agent-specific. If anything at all, like all of crypto was built for AI agents, right? Like this is a technology that was built effectively for AI agents,

where you can just own a private key and sign transactions and broadcast that out in the world and there's no intermediary and all these things that, you know, we appreciate about crypto as early adopters and as humans. AI needs that even more, right? AI can't open a bank account. It can't do a lot of things that humans take for granted. There's no KYC that, you know, an AI can pass.

And crypto is the rails for that. So I think we're already there. And I don't think that there's anything else specific that an ecosystem needs to do to compete for agentic payment flow. Interesting. I don't actually have that much more to add than what too sure said, I agree. But do you agree that it's not necessarily an area that the community has to prioritize to try to get that activity? I guess this is the question that every entrepreneur has to get comfortable with, which is how smart are these agents going to get?

I don't think that they can do it today. I think there are, especially in Ethereum, there are real challenges around. The agent's going to do exactly what you have to do, right? So think about the last time you had to bridge and manage gas costs and things like that. That is something that I don't think agents can quite do yet today. And there's some tricks around like permissioning and security and things like that. But I think these things are going to get really, really smart, really, really fast. So, yeah, I tend to agree with Cheshire.

I think the best thing that you can do if you want agents to use your chain is to put useful things. on your chain for the agents to want to do. But why don't we talk a little bit about what Solana has been known for for, you know, quite a while, which has been points. We're seeing, you know, Pump Fun has training volume that is still like somewhat healthy. Obviously, it's not anywhere near where it was in late 2024 or early 2025. But I would say it's still going strong. Pump recently crossed into $1 billion in revenue, but as I'm sure you're very well aware,

this type of platform has engendered a lot of criticism, and yet at the same time, you know, clearly, clearly they are succeeding in some regards. So what do you think is the future of, you know, it can, and it, like, it can be mean coins as we've known them or just anything that you think is a similar type of activity on Solana? I can take a first stab of this. I think meme coins are in instantiation of a broader trend and a broader thesis that we have, which we call entertainment finance. And what we are seeing is there's this cultural phenomena.

This is very much in the zeitge's broad base. We're seeing this across many different demographics where people are trading for fun, not just for profit. An example of this is sports betting. A lot of those sports betters know that they're not making money, but they still enjoy it. And they still want to do it because, you know what, it's fun. And people are willing to pay money to do something that's fun, right?

Like think about all of the other things that people do for amusement that cost money. And I think trading has become one of those things. And this is just like a mega trend. where you're going to see more and more entertainment finance out there, whether that's prediction markets or sports betting or mean coins or NFTs. Like you're going to see a lot more of that type of activity. So I think that's here to stay. I think that's a part of the cultural zeit guys.

I think that it's just it's especially something that the younger generations are attracted to. and I don't see that going away. The criticisms that I see are, you know, from people who don't participate in it. But like, you know, the comment that I would have for the people who criticize this stuff is you have to try to deeply empathize with the users who are, like, enjoying this and ask, like, why? Right. Like, those are real people who are also, like, making that active decision to trade meme coins or to sports bet or to trade on predictions. market, they're actively trying to do that. So, like, you know, meet the user where they are rather than telling them what they should like or should like. And actually, one quick question,

because obviously Zora, which has been widely known to be a base app for, or that's how, yeah, it was known for a while. It, you know, recently decided to launch its new attention markets on Solana. And I wonder, you know, why do you think, like, like, you know, from their perspective, What is it that you think kind of led them to this decision? I think to the point I think I was trying to make at the top of this episode is brand is powerful. To make a like semi-serious observation, but I think it's somewhat true and at least a little bit ironic to me is that, you know, the Ethereum Foundation of Vatollic specifically has been criticized for not being very supportive of defy where Ethereum kind of had its core. use case and early lead. And despite wanting all of these, you know,

Farcaster type apps and consumer apps and social apps, none of that really worked. And it all kind of collapsed back on Defi and now they're, you know, thinking about things differently. And I think Solana actually won some of that use case. Like they are kind of the place and the brand where if you so, I mean, I also will say for Pump, I'm still doing 50 million in revenue a month.

I mean, it's still a juggernaut. in terms of what it's generating on fees. I'm not super bullish on the market for memes here necessarily specifically, but what I do think is when the next crazy entrepreneur has some exchange or trading-related idea, they're going to do it on Solana. And that's why I think it's a powerful proof point that you've seen Zora make that move to Solana. Now, conversely, it's been a little bit harder to gain some traction on the real world asset side of things, although Camino is doing quite well there at the moment.

Yeah. But I think it's branding. You know, it's just like, if put yourself in the shoes of the entrepreneur, I think that we tend to way overcomplicate this stuff. And, you know, if you are, if you've got some new trading app, new idea, form factor you want to try, you're like, well, everyone's doing that on this chain. I'm going to go on this chain. I think it's usually simpler than we give it, give it credit for it. Yeah. I mean, that is one thing that I was looking at before this show, which is just, it sort of feels like. the way that this is working out is, you know, Salana is kind of picking up more retail and Ethereum is becoming home to institutions. So, you know, I'm curious because obviously, because Salana has long aimed to be the NASDAQ of crypto, like, you know, what do you

think will, we'll finally bring them? And, you know, when we look at kind of what's happening, It's sort of like ETHERium is, you know, able to tout that it's had this 10 and a half year, 10.5 year uptime. And Solana appears to have addressed the outage issue, but, you know, I guess it's sort of like the Lindy effect thing where you need to see it play out a little bit longer for confidence to keep building. But, you know, when it comes to RWA's, we have about $15 billion worth of RWA's on Ethereum, you know, and, you know, all of this is largely stable coins on pretty much any chain. BNB is at 2.3 billion. Solana's at $1.7 billion. So I'm just curious, like, you know, what do you think will increase confidence amongst institutions

and really move the needle for Solana to grow its share? of the RWA pi. So I can start out on this. I don't think the current numbers matter at all. They're just so small. You know, it's like saying, you know, there's one cent here and three cents there and, you know, who's going to win?

It's just like, these things round to zero. And they're very, very concentrated in things like tokenized gold or, you know, other very specific assets. So it's just we are absolutely so early to RWA issues on chain that looking at it now, I think doesn't make sense. I think what matters is what the new class of issuers are going to be. I think there's going to be a whole new class of issuers who comes into the industry post-clarity act. We just haven't seen them yet. they need the regulatory approval to even consider deploying somewhere and building somewhere

and issuing assets somewhere. And they're not going to do preemptive work on that until they have that clarity. Now, fortunately, I think we're going to see that under this administration, and I'm optimistic about the regulatory side of things. I think that'll invite these institutions to come build. I think that the features that they're going to want, a lot of them exist on Solana. The things that exist on Solana are things like token extensions that allow you to control. You can interact with your asset for your call if you need to.

The things that exist on Solana are things like Prop. M.L., which allow you to efficiently provide liquidity on those RWAs. The things that exist there are, you know, a deep set of builders who are going to compose with for assets and create, you know, net new interesting things. There's, there's many advantages there that I think are there for Solana on RWA issuance. And I don't look at the past or the present for this because I think, all of the growth is in the future. Mike? Yep.

I would just, I agree with all of that. I, just for the sake of not getting complacent, I think that all of the growth still has to happen in the future. But when new issuers look to decide where they're going to deploy, they'll probably look at two things. They'll look at the tech. And then they'll also look at where there's traction. And they go to market for, like, maybe there's an analog here of the go to market for defy has been,

well, I try to go and scrape up enough crypto-native activity. that I can then go to institutions and say, hey, look, I've got users, liquidity, people using my product, and it's kind of the selling point. So I agree with two stars that all the growth is in the future. I do think it's not a totally irrelevant data point where there's activity today. So I just, but I, it's growing on Solana very actively. And I think that it's too early, right? Like, no one has won anything fully yet, with probably the exception of Bitcoin being digital gold. I think that's just firmly won. But I think most of the rest of this stuff, I tend to think, is up for grabs.

And one huge deal, one huge integration on the Salonah side of things, maybe by a Camino, right, that makes it massive. Yeah, you can completely leapfrog the competition here. So I agree. I totally agree with Dushar. That's, it's very early. And that's why I started this by saying, I think, it's really a BDN marketing game right now and we're at a moment in time and that's where I'd be directing, you know, the vast majority of my efforts. Okay. Last question. You know, I started by

talking about price and I know that it's like, if you're here for the long term, it's maybe not always the most fun thing that people want to focus on, but it's something people care about. And, you know, Tushar, I know that you have been looking at the tokenomics for Sult. And I think the last time you were in the show was after the failure of SIMD-228, which, you know, was an attempt to make the token less inflationary. And I just wondered if, you know, you would talk a little bit about, you know, what changes in the tokenomics you'd like to see or just generally, you know, what prospects you saw for the price. Like I did see that a lot of the unlocks are done with. So I think, like, obviously that that is positive. But yeah, tell me where you think the price will go.

or, you know, what will be the catalyst for it. Predicting price on a short time horizon is almost possible. Yeah, I didn't mean to phrase it like that. So, you know, I don't know. I can tell you that the fear and greed index is very deeply in fear territory. And I can tell you that all of the same things that sounded so smart and so interesting and powerful at the top of the bull market in 25 or 21 around DFI, around composability, around

permissionless innovation. All those things are just as exciting now. The ideas don't become less exciting because of the price. I think what you need to look at is, you know, at this point in the cycle, I try to think about what has changed and what hasn't changed. So let's start with what. What hasn't changed? Human nature has not changed. This is a volatile asset class with a lot of reflexivity in the price. The price leads sentiment in a lot of ways. So you'll see people, you know,

buy because it's going up or sell because it's going down, not because they're actually thinking about, you know, what does this thing do and how useful is it? And human nature has not changed. What has changed, though, when compared to past bear markets, is in past bear markets, I don't know about you, but I had some deep fear of, hey, is the industry going to make it? Right. Like, is there going to be an industry? And now, today, I don't have that fear at all. There's zero percent chance in my mind that the industry's gone.

And that, I think, is just such a huge change, right? Like, the legitimacy that the industry has gotten, the regulatory adoption and clarity that we're getting. you have the biggest asset managers in the world and the biggest exchanges in the world, all saying that they're exploring blockchains and tokenization. And that has completely changed. So overall, like, I think we're in a bear market. I don't think the industry is going to die. And so I'm very optimistic about the future here.

And I'm optimistic specifically on, you know, like where these prices are going to go over the long run. which is, you know, why I'm betting my career on it. Like, that's why I'm here is, you know, I think that this industry is going to do extremely well, change finance forever, and it's going to be the substrate for finance globally. And but just quickly, are you going to try to revive some kind of proposal to change the tokenomics for Seoul? I haven't made a decision on that yet. I right now, what I'm working on on Solana governance is a group. propose this thing called the Solana Constitution at Breakpoint in December in Abu Dhabi. And the Solana Constitution outlines how these straw poles should go. So that way, next time we have a governance debate out there in the community, we're not debating about the meta parameters of, did we discuss this for long enough?

Who should vote? How should voting happen? Let's codify that so then we can focus on the actual issues. I do want to be clear, though, the Solana Constitution I proposed is just at the soft governance layer. This is a framework for conversations and discussion and people to align. Hard governance is a separate thing and is what code do you choose to run and which validators do you choose to stake to? And so that is going to stay exactly the way that it is. I don't think anything can really change hard governance.

But I do think having a more efficient soft governance layer for conversations related to governance. is going to be really helpful. And once that exists, I do have several ideas that I'm excited about Friswana staking. I think, you know, obviously I think inflation rate is too high. I continue to believe that. I think that there is something really exciting about long-term staking. I think that we should reward people who lock up their tokens for a longer period, more than reward people who lock up their tokens for a shorter period. Very simple concept. I don't think it sense to explore that in the swan of, you know, two years ago because there were too many other things to solve. You need to solve, you know, scalability and you solve reliability. There were a lot

of like core technical problems. But now that that appears to, you know, be at a very stable place. We don't have scalability constraints, really, on the chain today. I think that the room to experiment with things like long-term staking and our dynamic inflation rate has now opened up. So I am excited to continue exploring that. Okay, Mike, and what about you? What are you looking at in terms of catalyst for the sell price? I don't know about Seoul specifically, but I can give you my mental model for crypto at the minute, which is I think that we're in an air gap, actually, which is simultaneously the result of good news.

Actually, ironically, something I think is weighing on the price a little bit is that we, it's a long-term bullish catalyst, but we're going to have. regulation via genius and clarity. And I think what that means is the previous game of moving tons of speculative capital into the space and no one really caring about fundamentals or doing much sophisticated work in terms of valuation because you couldn't really, you literally legally couldn't have redirect any value back to token holders. I think that now that there's an option to do that, that is going to be the dominant way that people value different types of tokens. And that means the valuations have to reset. At the same time,

I don't think that crypto delivered on some of its lofty promises over the last three years. And at the same time, we haven't delivered. AI is sucking all of the air out of the room. So I think that that is what's caused, you know, there hasn't been, I think people have been a little bit confused, one, because myself included, like this, hey, this four-year cycle doesn't really make sense anymore. We haven't had one catalyst that we can point to and blame FTCS blowing up. But I think there is a confluence of factors.

and I think that's why we're entering this next bear market. I think what is going to happen coming out of this is that the same thing that happens at every bear market. There's going to be consolidation. There are going to be stronger competitors that emerge. But I do think that the industry is going to fundamentally change after this. I think there will be more rational ways of valuing these things. I think the industry is going to grow up.

And I think Solana is poised to do. really well in that world. And like just one thing that I would end on maybe what I started on here is I am looking at assets or categories where there are a couple of winners with high barriers to entry. Like to me, that's what borrow lend protocols look like. That's what exchanges look like. And that's what L1s look like. Like I think the barrier to entry to being a new successful, credibly neutral L1, it's kind of like real estate. They're not making them anymore. So I think they're really valuable. I think they can generate a lot of fees. I have no crystal ball on an eight-month or 18-month time horizon, but I do think over a long period of time, you know, Sol is a special asset.

All right. Well, thank you both so much for doing this show and also for seeing a little bit over time. It was, yeah, so great hearing all your thoughts. And I'm excited to see, you know, all these different tech developments and also kind of how the competition plays out. So, yeah, thanks for joining. Thanks, thank you, Laura. Thanks, Mike. Good, see you. And thanks to everyone for joining this live stream.

We'll catch you tomorrow.