Unchained - The Chopping Block: SVM vs. EVM, VC Investment in Solana and Memecoins’ Future - Ep. 706

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week, the squad is joined by special guest Mert Mumtaz, co-founder of Helius. In this episode, the crew dives into the growing rivalry between SVM and EVM, the surge of VC investments in the Solana ecosystem, and the fierce debate over rollups. They also explore the rise and fall of memecoins, Solana’s infrastructure evolution, and the future for high-performance blockchains. Tune in for a high-energy discussion on the cutting edge of crypto! Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show highlights 🔹 SVM vs. EVM Showdown: The team breaks down the growing battle between Solana's SVM and Ethereum's EVM, examining what’s at stake for both ecosystems. 🔹 VC Investments in Solana: As VC interest in Solana surges, the crew discusses how this new wave of funding could reshape the future of blockchain development. 🔹 Memecoin Chaos: The rapid rise and fall of memecoins comes under fire, with a debate on whether they are a net positive or simply speculative noise in the market. 🔹 Solana’s Infrastructure Evolution: Solana's ongoing efforts to improve scalability and performance are highlighted, especially with innovations like Fire Dancer and ZK compression. 🔹 Network Extensions Controversy: A heated discussion on Solana’s push to rebrand rollups as “network extensions,” sparking backlash from Ethereum proponents. 🔹 VC vs. Market Sentiment: The role of venture capital in the crypto space is examined, with insights into whether VCs are driving innovation or creating unsustainable hype. 🔹 Solana Breakpoint Preview: Excitement builds around Solana’s flagship event, with predictions on what key announcements could impact the blockchain’s future. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures Guest ⭐️ Mert, Co-founder & CEO at Helius Disclosures Timestamps 0:00 Intro 02:02 Impressions of Singapore 07:55 Mert's Journey & Solana Advocacy 15:41 Challenges & Growth in Solana Ecosystem 21:01 EBOLA [EVM Bags Over Logic Affliction] 31:13 Solana's Resilience  34:38 The Rise of SVM and Developer Perspectives 41:41 Network Extensions vs. Rollups 51:08 Future of High-Performance Blockchains 59:47 AI's Impact on Developer Ecosystems 01:06:19 Memecoins and Market Dynamics Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

we invented a lot of these ideas of, you know, the co-processors and roll-ups and validiums and blah, blah, blah. And like the whole, you know, we created this whole taxonomy. We analyzed the hell out of it for like five years because we staked our lives and our futures on this vision of the world coming true. And it sort of feels like, you know, look, I understand that, you know, the EVM world and the SVM world have at times been adversarial. But it's like at least show enough respect to just like call them roll-ups if they're wrongs. You know, this reminds me of like people in the late 90s, early 2000s who are like Windows versus Mac were like, you know, a memory allocator and Windows would have a certain type of name and a memory allocator and a Mac would have a different type of name. And they were realistically the same thing. But because they call them different things, the two types of developers would like fight.

Not a dividend. It's a tale of two pawn. Now your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed trading firms who are very involved. D5.8 is the ultimate problem. DFI protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello everybody.

Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intros, first you got Tom, the DFI Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. Next we've got Tarun.

He's not here yet. He will be joining us later, but we're here in Singapore and everyone's kind of running around a little bit crazy. But he will be here shortly. He is the Gubrain and Graham. and Pubod, Conlitt. So you have a special guest, the main man at Helios.

We have Mert. Murt, Murtt, I believe is your full name. Yeah, yeah, close enough. The alliteration is wonderful. Yeah. And I'm a Steve, whoops, the head-hyped man of Dragonfly. We are early-stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice.

Please see chopping block that X, XYZ, from our disclosures. So we're here, token 2049. Mert, is this your first token, 2049? Have you been before? No, actually, my first one was the biblical flood and new by the... Oh, okay, but this is your first one in Singapore? It's actually my first time in Asia and Singapore.

First time in Asia, period. Yeah, so, I mean, I was at Korea Blasheen Week, and I came a little earlier just to make sure I adjust for jet lag by the time this one came around. But yeah, first time in Asia. Wow, what do you have against Asia? Just, I don't like flying too much. But now that I've been here, I did get food poisoning, so I have that against it.

So now you're even more against Asia. No, no, actually. Were you like in a meat, like in one of those open air meat markets? No, I just, I don't even know what I did. I just, because I have like a swallowing problem. So I just really drink stuff and soup and alcohol. But apparently, because you can't drink those hot water in Malaysia. And people are basically like, Navajo.

That'll do it. Yeah. He's like, yeah, like you just basically can't do anything or eat anything or that's been in contact with water. It's like, okay. Huh. So you got food poisoning in Malaysia? I'm speculating. but probably that would line up. That sounds that checks out.

What were you doing in Malaysia? So Salana has this thing called Super Team, which is like a bunch of decentralized communities around, let's say, the globe. And we did a Super Team Salana dinner in KL because, you know, between Korea and Singapore, there was this gap. And everybody went to like Bali or Thailand. But I was like, I've never been to KL, so that seems interesting. Okay.

Yeah. And you regret it. I actually like that. Never coming back to Asia after this. Okay, got it. I actually, I actually like KAL quite a bit. It's like very interesting mix of like Islamic art

plus like Chinese art and then like some griminess, but then like some modern buildings. Yeah. It's pretty cool. I like it. It's cool. Okay, but never going back.

It's all right. We don't have a Malaysian audience. They're not going to hear about this. Okay, well that's, so first impressions of Singapore, I guess you first time here, What do you think so far? Oh, I think it's super well designed. I've been a pretty big fanboy of Lee Kuan Yew.

So I make quite a few memes about him. Oh. I think it's very well designed. I think like the one thing was the like no zins or like no nicotine pouches into the country. And I was like, oh, shit. The deal breaker. Okay. Yeah.

I was like, you cannot do this during Solana's main event. That is true. Right. And but it turns out, and I'm not going to disclose them. people brought them in anyways. I was like super scared. I was like, I'm gonna,

because I think the propaganda is a little strong. They're like, oh, you'll get chained or go to jail or like, yeah, get fined like a billion dollars and like nobody checks anything. And so. Not that you would rat them out on a show.

Yeah, I would not rat them out. But I've had a few meetings, requests and it'll be like, hi, my, one, I have Zins. Two,

can we meet to discuss something? Wow. So it's smart BD. So you really open yourself up to bribery, really, Anyway, now that you're broadcasting all this. Yes. Okay.

Got it. All right. Well, let's hope that Singapore officials are not watching the chocolate. I feel like that's how you know when you have good rule of laws. Like, people are so scared even like the concept of breaking, you know, a minor law that they're like, I'm not, I'm not even going to try it.

The gum, you know, it's not worth the time. Like, it's like, the opposite people. Like, yeah, you know, fuck it. I'm going to jaywalk. You know, no one's going to like taking me and, um, the, the, well, I found an arbitrage which is that, so nicotine pouch is illegal. gum is illegal, but nicotine gum is legal. So, just went to the form.

How does that work? Yeah, what? Shouldn't it be extra illegal? I feel like, that's what I would have figured, but like, you must have some alternative to credit cigarettes. To be clear, I don't believe gum is literally illegal. It's illegal to import gum. Yes.

But having gum, chewing gum is actually fine. Like, the thing about gum being illegal was like in the 90s or something in the early days of Singapore, but it's not literally true anymore. I've even heard a lot of the stuff, it's lax. I mean, like, you know, people, if you come in with like a vape from Malaysia, you're not going to get caned. It's like no one is, they're looking for people who are like mass importing and selling these things, which is what is illegal? Not a single individual bringing in a pack of gum. But to be clear, if you bring any kind of hard drugs into Singapore.

Yeah, the hard drugs is. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Or even soft drugs. Yeah. Any kind of hardness of drug in Singapore is very, very no, no. It's one of the most restrictive laws in the world of like fairly developed rich countries. Yeah.

And I think that's fair. It's just the nicotine stuff. It's like, you already have nicotine gum. You have cigarettes. So can I just take like the paper phone? I mean, look, we're addicted. It's not fair. How can you? Okay. It's tough. So, uh, so this week, of course, is also Salon of Breakpoint, which is the big flagship conference. I think it's happening Friday, Saturday, I believe. Um, what should people be looking out for with respect to Breakpoint this year, obviously yourself? Yeah, I think the biggest differences are there's no panels. So it's just, going to be debates and five-minute rapid-fire kind of product keynotes. And then a very few keynote or not keynote fireside chats. So me and Tolley will be doing one to close out the first day. And then Balogy and Roger doing one to open it up. How is that no panels? Yeah.

I also was wondering this. But I think it's because like it's just two people having a chat as opposed to like, you know, five, six people. Sure, sure. They say two's a chat, three's a panel. Okay. That's that. Oh, yeah. And then I get, and then the other important thing.

Yeah. The really important thing will be the fire dancer team. They're doing a few talks. Nobody has more than one speaking slot this year except for FireDancer, who I believe have three. So Kevin Bowers, obviously the gig of brain behind FireDancer will be doing a talk. And I would recommend everybody to check that out because, yeah, they're going to be, they've been doing some work. Nice.

Very interesting. So before we jump into Fire Dancers, because I do want to talk about Fire Dancer, I want to start with yourself. So I think everybody knows Mert, largely as a sort of online attack dog. I think that's probably your first and foremost reputation, but you're also a founder.

You run an infrastructure company on Solana. Tell us about the company that you run and also how you came into the role as being the Salana attack dog. And also the second most famous bald man in Crypto. Are you the first? No, no, I'm third. Well, so I used to work at Coinbase.

I was a tech lead for the platform or a part of the platform team called Ledger, which... Do you work for the most famous bald man in crypto? Yes, yes. That's why I lost my hair. I actually had hair when I was in Coinbase. There's an emoji because we work with Coinbase now, and it's a murder emoji from Coinbase and it's me with hair because I actually had it. Oh, damn.

And so I was working there. around 2021 and I was we were supporting all the chains so I used to do research into like even polka dot avalanche Salana and like my background is in math but also communications engineering so like signals satellites stuff like that and while looking at all the L1s and the different kind of white papers Salon it was actually structured or engineered more like a communication system more than others and I thought that was like quite interesting and there was a lot that you could actually apply and so I just started building stuff on my own this is before like Salana had any explorers or like zero analytics tools and people would just say like bizarre shit on on Twitter

like NFT influencers would say something like oh you know the supplies running up quickly and stuff but nobody would actually be able to check their claims so I would write like some scripts and be like oh actually you just minted all of it to yourself and then now you're trying to scam your users So I was like 2020. 2020 like right around degenerate apes, like when Solana really went from like eight to like 46 and I just kept going up. It was around that time. And so I was always like, let's say, I always had an attack dog mentality. I would just do it internally or like on more niche topics.

Okay. And then while doing that, I basically was like, you know, there's a lot of problems. building on Solana because I was building it out of myself. And I wanted to build these things for myself first. And then, you know, at the time, I was also super annoyed with the lack of real applications in crypto, which I'm still quite annoyed by. And I basically said to myself, like, okay, there's two paths here. I can go ahead and build on Ethereum today.

And what I would need for success in that case would be, The merge has to happen because it hadn't happened yet. 484-4 needs to go alive successfully. L2s need to get the stage 2. And like all these kind of conditionals need to happen. And each time there's a conditional, you know, the probability of success, when you multiply them together, it decreased over time. Whereas on Solana, it was like, okay, the chain mostly works.

It's certainly not perfect. But if somebody can go and fix some of these very fixable problems, then I think we can get app developers to build here right away. And so that was the thesis. And, yes, just started building left Coinbase, started Helios, recruited my university roommates, Liam and Nick to be my co-founders. And we, at first, we released something called Human Readerable APIs on Salana because Salon is famously unreadable. And it was always like that. And as we kept doing that, we noticed a lot of other problems in the stack, like the RPCs kind of suck.

The indexing is too expensive. Transactions don't land. Like archival sucks, all these things like scaling, ZK compression. And around, we were actually like a relatively successful business at first. Like we made money. We were getting customers and growing relatively good or well over time. And then FTX happened. And around that time, I would already see people on the internet like Justin Bonds or something. back when he hated Solana. Say like random, like false things. Like Solana has a fraudulent design pattern because like you know who the block leader will be. Therefore you can spam them and then stop the network. But then it's like most chains actually have a predictable block schedule.

Right. Including Ethereum 2 actually, it was called Ethereum 2 at that point. Yeah. And like I would call these things out and then people would just like, but I would call them out because I'm just generally, angry person. I would call them out for aggressively. Where does that, where does that come from? Where does that come from, you think? You know, I think it's, I think it's genetics in a sense. Okay. Like Turkish people, because I would admit you, you do not seem like an angry person,

but I would say, like, the online persona is super agro. Where, like, how do you reconcile that in your mind? Yeah, so it's, here's how I think about it. Yeah. In person, people generally don't say ridiculous things. But on the internet, they say anything. And like, especially on crypto Twitter, like people, some guy who like trades some charts did like a poetry major will talk about like a poetry major. We'll talk about like very specific Solana infrastructure stuff. And I'm like, what are you talking about?

Like that's completely false. Yeah. Like it happens in person too. Like most people don't cash me in person because it's not a very scalable media. Sure, sure. But like some guy was at Korea Blasheen was like, what do you think about Salana? being like an only meme coin chain and I was like like I was ready to like so anyway that's that's I had already been doing that for quite a bit and then FDX happened and I was actually happy that

ftX happened in some sense because one of my main things with the chain was everybody hated because of FTX and SPF. I feel like oh that guy's like weird and stuff. Yeah. Tredatory and my actual first thought which was I I guess naive looking back was great. Now that the biggest predator is gone. So now there's no excuse me. Nothing in the way. Yeah.

Nobody will ever say that thing about salon again. Yeah. And then to my surprise, of course, everybody starts shooting out way more. And then, but the thing that really got me was they started making comments on the chain itself, like the technical architecture and the scalability. And then they somehow like threaded like SBF in there and stuff. And I was like,

that is not an argument. Like you're conflating a bunch of different things. And this would happen every day. And, you know, I had some knowledge about Solana and EVM chains and all these other things from my time at Coinbase. And I basically just said what I thought was correct. Sometimes it wasn't correct. And I would learn from that. But most of the times when people talk about Solana, one thing that I've noticed is a lot of

salon people know much more about the EVM because EVM has been around. for longer. Yeah. Has better documentation, frankly, and a bigger ecosystem. But the counter is not true. Like a lot of people coming from EVM don't quite understand Salon ecosystem that well. And so being like one of the few people, and I'm not the only one, that actually had a relatively

well understanding of both. And then combine that with being bald and angry. I think that's kind of what led to it. Got it. You know, one of the things that we were, that we've, we've been discussing quite a bit and we've also talked about in the show in the past is the differential between the the funding that has gone to the EVM ecosystem versus the SVM ecosystem.

And it does feel like, you know, this year has very much been the year of SVM. You know, we've seen the rise of, you know, ellipsis, eclipse. Isn't it, I believe there's one more that's also SVM-based. Of course, there's a, what's the, what's the virtualized EVM on top of Solana? Neon. Neon, there's neon. So it just feel like the Salana ecosystem is growing and the quantum of capital available in Salon ecosystem is growing.

But it hasn't always been that way, right? I think last year was probably kind of the valley of darkness for a lot of Salana developers. And then before that, there was this almost FTX monoculture where, you know, basically FTX and multi-coin and then Horizon. Sinai-O, yeah. Formerly known as Sino, we're sort of funding all the projects in Solana. So from your perspective, and I know there's something that you've commented on in the past, how do you think about the availability of capital for Solana and SVM-based founders relative to

what it was like in the past? So relative to what it was in the past, I think it's better. Like when we first raised the seed round for Helius, it was very difficult. This was when? This was 2022 June. June. So there's like post-FTA, post-P. three arrows collapsing. I don't quite remember the framing everything but okay um it was but

terror had already collapsed market was already coming down I think so because terror collapse in March March 22 yeah I think that that had happened uh it was very hard for for me to raise for helios and everybody said no basically and a lot of the things were like well the developers are on the EVM so like why would you make and because we were also exclusively vertically area under Salana we didn't you know play this game where we just go to different chains and then keep you know making marginal improvements but then the product suffers because you focus is split so everybody was super skeptical everybody passed except for like reciprocal who co-led the round with chapter one

so it was pretty bad back then and then obviously FTC happened that made even worse a lot of my friends who were pretty smart people just could not raise um that's like because i have a pretty good network let's say within vc's and especially salana and like people just couldn't raise people were blowing up etc so it was pretty bad yeah um now it's certainly much better um especially on the earlier stage stuff um because like uh i'm an angel now as well so there's a lot of the the amount of deal flow has increased quite a bit yeah and And it's also much more fraud or consumer focused or like deep in focus or something like that. Not too many infra plays on Solana.

There's certainly some like the SVM stuff. But for Solana, the Alone itself, there's not too much infra. And like, you know, I think consumer startups in general are harder to fund because a lot less certainty around, you know, how this grows, to go to market and all this. So I think that also plays a role. Like, I don't think it's purely a Salana thing. I think it's also the class of applications being built on Salana. But yeah, it was bad.

Now it's better. I would say, though, so we just did our third round. I don't think any team on Salana is actually done a third round. I think the only exceptions are matchheed and Phantom, but they're multi-chain. But like a Salon a specific team, I'm not sure. Maybe Gito might be another one. Gito, I think they did two rounds and then they launched their token and then they might be doing another one. But I think a lot of the reason for that is that they just launched tokens.

And then of course, Jupiter never raised venture capital, I believe. Correct. So I think there, did radium raise multiple rounds? I don't even know. It's Phoenix. Yeah, so they did a series A. That's true. That's true.

But to your point, it's more, this is the way kind of capital markets are forming in crypto is like you do a seed, you do an A. if you have a token, you launch a token, and then maybe do like a treasury sale or something, versus many rounds of capital going into a team that's launching like a defact protocol or something. Yeah, I think part of maybe what explains that as well, as you mentioned, there's not that much infrastructure being funded on Solana. In large part, this is because Solana is the infrastructure, right? With Ethereum, you sort of need all these, you know, wings and kind of extra things built down the side to support what people actually want to do on chain.

With Solana, the whole idea of Solana is it, okay, it's kind of a monolithic chain. you don't really need that many augmentations to it, although we'll talk about the concept of those augmentations. And as a result, I think it more tends to be infrastructure projects that, one, are more capital intensive. They require a lot more funding. And two, they tend to take longer to launch a token. Whereas, you know, a lot of the consumer apps or things, you know, like a Dex or something,

you really, you know, you need like, you know, five to ten million to get it off the ground, launch it. And then, you know, generally it's token. And then you, you know, sell tokens out of D.C if you ever need it. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's correct. Yeah. But like the thing that's changed is during the first, let's say, or the past two years, it was,

people just thought Salana was going to die. So I think VCs thought it'd be a very risky bet. Some were comfortable taking it. Some weren't. But I think now that's changed. Like it's quite clear that Solana is going to be very hard to kill at this point. Yeah. And so it's de-risk it for a lot of people.

Now there's still risks, I would say for sure. But it's like if you're. Now there's like a hackathon, the radar hackathon. There's a few incubators on Solana. Some of the alliance teams are actually choosing Solana for some of the first times ever I've seen. So some of the alliance teams? Do you mean Alliance now guys? Oh yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the incubator. Yeah. So it's certainly changed. It's still not like perfect, but like I think, you know, you probably heard of Ebola. I have. We're very familiar with the concept. So can you define what Ebola means? I think it stands for EVM logic.

Are they EVM bags over logic affliction? Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I think that used to be pretty prevalent. I don't think it's that prevalent anymore. I can be wrong on this just based on my experience, funding teams myself. Yeah.

But also raising myself, like we had no shortage of interest. So it's funny you mention that. So somebody from the Salana Foundation, Akshay, what's the name? Yep, Achshah, Akshah. So Akshah from the, no, maybe it's not Akshay. No, sorry, somebody else from the Salon Foundation. So I tweeted this show. And basically, I think that's where they went public with the Ebola acronym,

which I think was something that people in the Salon ecosystem knew, but it wasn't something that was aired publicly. And they actually specifically call out Tom as being an example of somebody with Ebola. And so, okay, what is Ebola? I totally miss this. I feel like their efforts were wasted. Potentially a little bit. So, anyway, so Ebola basically means that you are kind of, you have two heavy EVM bags,

and you are biased against Solana. And I think it was the show where we were talking about the delta of capital available in the Solana ecosystem versus the EVM ecosystem and whether it makes sense for an entrepreneur who's building a consumer app or whatever to like build on base, build on Arbitron, build on Solana, whatever. And so I think they're, the Salana foundation, at least, feels like there's a lot of VCs who still have a very strong bias against Solana. And apparently they think we're in that club.

Curious, so you said that you think that that's less of a thing these days. Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably not consensus view. But I do think it's like kind of overblown at this point. I think like infrastructure is just easier to fund. And it makes like there's a lot of because like, you know, I would say most. VC investing not all is relatively social in some sense like oh there's somebody leading that round hey we've seen this before now what happens if it's on this chain etc so it's easier to underwrite in a sense yeah uh whereas salana apps tend to be a bit crazier like pump that fun for example

yes it's like what even is this like i didn't i even know what it was i wouldn't have funded it myself so there's also that uh but like if you if you build a product and and have customers and have some traction, like a VC at this point is not going to say no because you're building on an all one I don't like in my view. Yeah. Well, so I, so there's a little bit of history on this show in particular about Salonah, right? So we've had Anatolia on the show. We've had Lucas from Gito on the show.

And in the past, so if you go back probably like 2021, I think is when, you know, it was, we had the most critical episodes, I think of Salana back then, where that was when, you know, A lot of fee markets were falling over. There was a lot of downtime. There was a lot of criticism back then. And this was very much the FTX era of, you know, the block explorers were just, you know, really just unworkable that you couldn't see contract code. There were no deterministic builds.

There was a lot of stuff that we criticized Salana for very publicly. And I think a lot of that landed seemingly with some of the foundation who now are, you know, not very happy that we have said a lot of things that are negative about Solana. But almost everything that, and then, you know, traditionally Turun would be. the pro-salana guy. And I think he was, you know, they invested much earlier into, you know, they did the seed round of J-toe. They did a lot of early investments in. There was, there was some other decks on a drift. They did drift very early. And I, you know, my take is that almost all the criticisms that I levied against Solana in 2021, Solana addressed, right? Pretty much everything that I just

mentioned is fixed now. And, you know, Solana has a real fee market. It's not all the way there, but it's like definitely way better than what it was in 2021. They're deterministic builds now. You can actually see verified contracts on block explorers and actually see the corresponding code. There's a lot more of the dominant applications on Salana are open source. In the past, it was like mostly closed source. There's just a lot of things that Solana has actually really improved to get to parity with what people generally expect from public blockchains. But I think the – and as a result, we've also spent a lot more time in this salon ecosystem over the last two years.

and we've made a lot more investments in that ecosystem. Now, as an investor, you know, we invest a ton into non-EVM. The ecosystems were big investors in, you know, near Aptos. We know, we've done some. Oh, Turing. Yeah, I was like, what do you? Okay, wait, why is Shrewing at? I don't know.

He was like looking through the people. Turin, what are you doing, man? Come on. Oh, no. Come sit down. Come sit down. You came in at a perfect time. We were just talking about the history of being critical of Solana on the show.

and we were talking about the positive Ebola. You saw that tweet, yeah? The Ebola tweet from the Salana Foundation that was calling out the chopping block for being full of anti-or-old-TVM bags. Well, the first time I heard Ebola was from Lily. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I believe it was her.

Yeah, well, she was one of a point in the term and I think they, maybe it was Jack from the Salana Foundation? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But anyway. So yeah, my claim is that Salon has actually really transformed a lot of the things that we criticize it for in 2020 or I criticize it for in 2021 and 2022 to the point where now I think for you to not consider it a VC investment because they're billing on Salana is just kind of insane.

It's very clearly, you know, the the ecosystem of consumer, of DPN, obviously of meme coins is a huge part of the activity, but just the raw amount of retail activity happening on Solana. it is very, very clearly the winner of 2024. By the way, are you being nice all of a sudden because you put the two bald guys on one side and it's like, it's like solidarity? Because you were going to take so long to be. I didn't want to have him sitting alone on one side.

I thought it would be kind of sad. So no, that's not the idea. But anyway, want to get your reaction to that. Yeah. I think, yeah, it's one of my favorite parts about Solana, which is like the culture, let's say, sat at the top by Toli is this. engineering culture and engineers criticize each other and the tech relentlessly and in public

like me and totally will debate in public him and trent will debate in public um that's kind of just how we it's like what it's just how like any engineering system works generally especially open source stuff like it's all debates um and that's kind of uh the reason why like doing the ftx stuff people were saying all these things like oh you know it's an unscalable chain it's doomed whatever And then we'd be like, well, actually, we just had a fee markets and stuff. So that's actually not a thing anymore. And so that's actually tweeted, I believe, two days ago, what I believe to be the most important part of any new ecosystem is kind of this culture of open critique and like actually

trying to pursue some truth as opposed to like trying to manufacture narratives that probably will die out in like, you know, X months once the price starts doing different things. So I think like fundamentally blockchains are our distributed systems and like the metal needs to work. And the only way you're going to discover problems is first you have to be, you know, open to receiving critique, but then also being able to ship in a very timely manner to fix those things. That's my favorite part about Solana. It's just that culture. Yeah. Because there's, I mean, believe me, there's a lot of material there to hit on, which I call them out.

you know, people, you know, I'm going to talk talk to for Solana for sure, but I also, I would say I call out Salana more than basically anybody alive on how many things be wrong. Yeah, this is absolutely true. And I give you a lot of respect for this, is that, you know, at a time when I remember this was like 2022, when everybody on Twitter was getting mad about Salana labeling vote transactions as being part of TPS and it was like, oh, we have, you know, tens of thousands or whatever, 50,000 TPS. You are one of the most fervent people within the Salana ecosystem being like, yeah, yeah, we should get this right, because, you know, we still have great performance, right? It's nothing to be ashamed of what Salana's, you know,

kind of on-chain transaction load actually is. But now I think Salana has, again, move past, almost like a sort of youthful insecurity about just being saying, look, here's how the chain works. And it works, it works really well, as long as you're willing to entertain those tradeoffs. But your intellectual honesty about it is something that I've always respected. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not. even, I just get annoyed. Anger is the primary motivator across the board. Some of these new data sites will say like, oh, Solano just hit like a all time high

in blockchain history for daily active addresses. And I was like, please shut the hell up. Like that's a completely useless thing. I was almost actually going to build like a like a little cursor AI video. Like, okay, I'm just going to actually create all these items myself and inflate the metrics real time to show you how stupid this is. And so it still happens in all ecosystems. but I understand Sala the most myself.

And so I think there's some moral obligation to criticize internally so that, like you said, you do learn from it and improve and then get better over time. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that has been the most obvious looking from the outside is how quickly Salauna has improved as an ecosystem over the last couple of years.

And in a way, I think the separation from FTX was clearly very painful for people in the Sala ecosystem because it was such a massive distribution engine for Solana, for getting retail in the front door, for just supporting a lot of the ecosystem and funding a lot of the stuff that was happening in Solana. But it was also very much held back by the fact that, you know, there was this sort of overlord kind of, you know, hanging over the chain. And once you become free from that, it's like, okay, well, let's just start changing stuff and like making it, making it better and not worrying so much about appearances.

I feel like there's, there's something there. And, you know, something that you've mentioned many times on the show is that going through that really difficult period makes a culture and a community much more tightly bound together, right? Where you see that there aren't a lot of ecosystems that really have community, right? They have hype, they have excitement, they have a brand, they even have people who've made money, but Salana really does have community. And community is one of those things very difficult to break once it's there. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things I noticed actually during the NFT craze in 2021, where it was like, oh, we have the strongest community and stuff. And it's like a community isn't a set of people centered around making the price go higher to sell to another person. You can only gauge the strength when things are going the worst possible way they can go. And I mean, FTX happened. But before then, there was the outages and stuff and people still stuck around. And so it was always like these kind of mini trials and battles, which like I think all major ecosystems need to have that to actually form a community. A lot of people in that come up to me from other ecosystems like, you know, how did you guys do it at Solana? And it's like, well, like manufacture a few black swans and then see people stick around.

There's also some technical things. Is he saying there's a sciop? Like Sam was never really pulling the strings? That'd be, yeah, no further comments. Well, and then I think there's some technical aspects to it as well. Like the decision to create a new VM that was not just the EVM makes it such that there's like higher switching costs. But then you also need to be actually interested in this tech to want to build there. Yeah.

So like if Solana was like an EVM or something and FTX happened, then all these people can just redeploy on another EVM chain. Which on Salon, it's like, okay, we already made this decision. we still think it works, the tech still works, but now there's this weird social phenomenon with FTCS and stuff, and we can overcome that. Well, how do you feel about the kind of influx of non-Salena SVM platforms in general, and whether they're roll-ups, whether they're kind of like people trying to build other, you know, in general, like the SVM moving outside of its, you know, the main home, like, what sort of in your mind kind of how do you view that so i i come at it from more of a

a developer perspective it was actually on our pitch stack for for helios uh round ago where it's like okay SVM stuff is going to happen and our infrastructure will be able to deploy on it because it's the same that's that's how you kind of configured it i think fundamentally it's just open source software and as a developer um what you want is a thriving ecosystem of people contributing to the same tech stack, but also you don't want platform risk, you know, such that if you deployed on Salana, but something happens to Salana, maybe they just start making all these weird changes, maybe fire dance are totally flop, like all these different things,

you're still not, you're, all your chips are not in, or exit, not in one basket, and you can redeploy on like something like an Atlas with ellipsis or another, maybe you can do an SEM app chain like Pithnet did, for example, they have their own SEM app chain. So I think from a if you like it's these these rollups and L2s and stuff are going to happen. App chains are going to happen regardless of what anybody wants to believe or what anybody wants to call them. And it's obviously better for Solana that they use SVM for this because they're going to use something anyways. So why not use the tech that's already needed to Salana? And then you know this won't happen all the time but there'll be learnings from those that

the S-S-Salana, the L-1 can enshrine back into the core protocol, which is actually kind of happened in the past and then vice versa. With respect to what? I mean, like, so we obviously run infrastructure and like we noticed some things with Eclipse's infrastructure, for example, about the fee markets and like how the transaction cues and stuff. And we were able to like identify those problems and then predict that they would happen during like some larger traffic events.

On main net or on eclipse? Yeah, on eclipse like test net. And then we were able to like take those and be like, okay, here's our product, here are some products that will probably be useful going forward. Like better transaction fee APIs, transaction landing systems, et cetera. And so I think it is absolutely a net good for Solana. Because like I think everybody kind of thinks about this. in a weird way.

But if a business requires an integrated L1 to build their application, like let's say it's a defy app, they need like real-time price discovery, they want composability within some other ecosystem teams, then it's like, okay, then build on the L1. But if it's like a game that doesn't need global state, maybe it's just some isolated state that just does not need to be on the L1, it's like they should just do whatever is best for their business.

and because if they arbitrarily pick the L1 just because some people yelled at them, that's not going to be sustainable for the L1 anyways because those people will just move around over time. And so I think as a chain, your goal is how do we identify the best use cases that actually need our tech who are sticky users,

which is why I came up with Only Possible on Solana. It's like you should only, you should aggressively go after people who can only build things with this architecture that can't be easily, copied anywhere else. Otherwise, it's just a very short-term game and there's no real moat or anything like that. Sure.

So actually, one related question, do you think there will be in the next two years a exchange, centralized exchange that does a base like roll-up, but it's an SVM roll-up? Because right now, all of the exchange roll-ups and app chains have been mainly EVM. I mean, BNB chain, I guess is a weird one historically. No, BNB chain is EVM. But the original. original. The B and DECS was a Cosmos.

I was counting that as like their first Yeah, yeah, but that was not programming. They had many chains, I guess. Right, right, right. But I guess my question is, like, do you think we will see that in the next two years? Just a based SVM roll-up that settles on Not based.

Or not necessarily based, like some centralized exchange. An exchange sort of endorsed roll-up, like base. That is SVM-based. Oh. I think it'll depend very much on the ecosystem tooling available. So I think one of the reasons why like the EVM ones are so prevalence because there's a lot of tooling like conduit Caldera, optimism stack and all these kind of different things. I don't quite see Salana taking the Salana ecosystem taking

the same path there. Like I think there's another one called Soon Network, which is trying to do like SVM but optimism stack or something like that. That could be interesting. But I just don't thing the tooling is there like it would require a lot of custom stuff and the exchange is obviously just want security and peace of mind and like easiness and just take my money and then do the thing and then whatnot yeah so i i actually doubt it um unless like heliolius were like you know he'll just build this because there's a lot of demand for it or something i mean i certainly asked you because i think if if there was demand for it the first person that someone would ask could be. Yeah. So Salon has this concept of SPEs special permissioned environments,

which is kind of like this, but they are permissioned. And so we ran a few of those. Like there's some demand for it, but it's clear. Is this like a subnet? What is it an SPE? You can probably think it as a subnet. Okay. It's basically in L1, but it's its custom environment. Got it. Pithnet is another example. Does it, does it connect up in some kind of programmatic way to the main chain or is it just like this sort of isolated thing? It's it's mostly isolated. Okay. But like you can configure it however you want.

So you could like import accounts from the main chain but not right to them for instance. You could yeah, you could you get creative with stuff like that. Solana's path, it seems to be like maybe like ephemeral rollups like just rollups that are just around for like some period of time, do all the execution and then atomically just put it back to the state. Like there's a team called Magic Block that's doing this light protocol and Helios were working on ZK compression. Yeah.

So I don't think it'll look too skeuomorphic to what already exists today. And also there's just not that many exchanges, I don't think. There's actually a lot, but like that. Not very many good ones. Yeah. I think like Robin Hood could be an interesting one that I've heard some like, I've read some stuff on Twitter. it's like, well, you know, Coinbase and base EVM and then Robin Hood is using like arbitram,

but it's like if they really want to, you know, a different differentiation, maybe they should use an SVM rope or something. And then it becomes a BD exercise. And Salon's approach to BD is quite different, I would say, than like an optimism or like a polygon. Sure. Okay, so speaking of L2s, I want to talk about this concept of network extensions. So this ended up becoming quite controversial. So just to give a little bit of backstory, I'd say historically, a lot of the folks in the Salina ecosystem have been critical of roll-ups. And roll-ups, you know, the primary layer two construction on Ethereum has become very popular with things like arbitram, optimism, and so on. And the claim has always been, well, roll-ups, they're kind of, you know, it's only because Ethereum sucks that it needs

roll-ups and it can't scale and blah, blah, blah. And so then, of course, there's been the rise of these roll-up like things that are either using SVM or that settle directly to Solana itself. And so Austin, who's, I think, the chief marketing officer or something, something. He's head of strategy, of course, for the Salana Foundation, came out and said, I think that maybe instead of thinking about L2s, we should call the L2-like things on Solana network extensions. They're not roll-ups. They're not L-2s.

They're network extensions. And this caused a lot of people in the Ethereum ecosystem to get really, really mad because they were like, no, no, no, no. called roll-ups. We invented them. They're called L-2s. You've been shitting on us for making these L-2s for a really long time, and now all of a sudden you're co-opting them and giving them a new name. So people got really upset about this. I think, you know, Anatoly came out and defended the concept of network extensions as being distinct from the Ethereum concept of L-2s. You came out against the meme, at least, of calling them network extensions.

I mostly just saw the drama. I don't actually understand why everyone's so mad. But I get the general vibe. What is your take on why you think this network extensions rebrand slash branding exercise is ill-advised? I think both both kind of sides have a point to this. But I think the point of terminology or like semantics is to be very precise about what you're defining such that there's no ambiguity, such that like when you say the name, you know what to think. Some of these network extension type things are L2s, but a good amount of them are not L2. So for example, ZK compression on Salana is not an L2. It's much more like a stateless client architecture that Ethereum is going for. Or some of them are sovereign roll-ups. Some of them are like ephemeral

roll-ups. Some of them aren't even remotely anything to do with a roll-up or an L2, but they just use that term for marketing. Right. And so the problem with the terminology, in my view, is it's too homogenized and it doesn't capture all the differences between these different things. So I get where they're coming from where it's like, you know, this is not an L2, but you're calling an L2 just because you're used to your own ecosystems, let's say problems in the terminology. And that's incorrect. But it's also incorrect to, you know, not call L2s that are actually L2s, not L2s, right? So it's these semantic battles always are weird to me. Like when we launched ZK compression, this was way.

before the network extension stuff. Like Adam Cochrane was like, oh, this is clearly a validity. And stuff like that. And I was like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, I built this. Like, it's not. And like all these people will say like, oh, like Solan is just trying to backpile here. It's like.

And then I had to ask Vitalik. And he's like, yeah, this seems like a stateless client architecture. And it's like, you know, unless the Pope says that nobody believes you basically. But it's, it's, I, I. the naming is, I think, too homogenized for my liking. Like, it's too easy to get confused with these things. I mean, it's still not even clear what a roll-up is on the Ethereum side from just if you talk to John Sharp about it and then, like, people will comment on John Singh.

Classic mistake is asked John Charle what a roll-up is. There's always these things. And I'm like, the fundamental thing that matters is you need to communicate to the audience who's relevant what the properties of the system are with the name itself. Yeah. When you see blockchain, you generally understand it's blocks chain together or something like that. You see a network extension. It's like, okay, I can kind of see where you're going, but it's a very broad term.

Yeah. And so I think both of that. So your criticism is the exactness and the clarity of the label itself. To ruin, what's your take on the network extensions? I just don't think it makes so much sense also partially due to the clarity piece, but also partially due to the fact that you're, you have restaking on Solana and the restaking services are called networks, but they're not full roll-ups at all, right? They provide a much smaller surface area, a much smaller amount of computation. And those things are also inevitably could fall under the same word network extension,

right? Because they are generating some amount of SVM transactions that main net verifies, but they're not themselves running the entire kind of arbitrary computation. And so, yeah. Is it, clips or ellipsis, are these also network extensions or no? Well, those are definitely roll-ups. Yes, those are 100% roll-offs. So they're not network extensions? I mean... Because they settle to Ethereum.

They don't settle to Solana. No, no, they're, yeah, they're absolutely not... They have nothing to do with Solana except for the VM that they use. Okay, so they're not considered network extensions. I would not consider network extensions. Okay, but would Austin consider the network extensions is the question. I have no idea. Okay.

Can't speak for Austin. Okay, all right, all right. What I would say, though, is there are some other weird constructions like magic blocks like ephemeral roll-ups which like for that slot or something very briefly they do these uh off-shame processing and then commit it right back to the state and then pay the same fees and so you're not actually taking anything away from the all one really and so that starts to get a little weird because that doesn't exist uh in other ecosystems to my knowledge and so that's i think totally's argument which is like okay that is kind of different and so it's it's you know just i mean true and is about

math background too, but you just have to be very rigorous with the definitions. Otherwise, everybody just starts getting super fucking confused. Yeah. Or mad. Yeah. Tom, what's your take on network extensions? I generally probably don't know enough. Okay.

So, yeah, I don't have a strong opinion. I mean, I can see, it feels like clearly the reaction to the word network extensions is almost, it feels, I can see that the Ethereum community feels kind of invalidated. Is that like, okay, we invent. a lot of these ideas of, you know, the co-processors and roll-ups and validityums and blah, blah, blah, and like the whole, you know, we created this whole taxonomy. We analyzed the hell out of it for like five years because we staked our lives and our futures on this vision of the world coming true.

And it sort of feels like, you know, look, I understand that, you know, the EVM world and the SVM world have at times been adversarial, but it's like at least show enough respect to just like call them roll-ups if they're wrongs. You know, this reminds me of like people in the late 90s, early 2000s who are like Windows versus Mac were like, you know, a memory allocator and Windows would have a certain type of name and a memory allocator and a Mac would have a different type of name. And they were realistically the same thing. But because they call them different things, the two types of developers would like fight. And of course they didn't have like a social network to fight. So it was more like at conferences they would yell at each other.

Totally. platforms. But I think this is like true in like a lot of soft-truck. Oh, 100%. But I think it's also like the point that you two are making is a point about, you know, the clarity of a mathematical description of what is this, what is this mechanism doing? And in mathematics, it is very, very important to attribute, you know, where did this idea originally come from and be very, very clear about describing it. To be fair, though, there's a number of theorems in math where the name, they're named after people, but neither of them proved it. Sure. Okay. Fine. Okay, yes, true.

All right, fine. It's a complicated story sometimes. But in business, like, you never name the thing after the original person came up with it, right? So, like, there have been, you know, somebody comes up with a query language and somebody, like, basically copies it and calls it. No, this is a Salesforce query dialect. And this one is, oh, no, this is the, you know, I don't know. But this happened. That happens.

Like, literally all these database companies always. Which is, I think where a lot of this discrepancy comes from is that, look, if you're building a business, of course you want to name the thing after yourself. and give it some like mild inflection to like, well, our ecosystem is a little bit different. Our needs are a little bit different. So this is not SQL. This is be equal because, you know, whatever. And I feel like it's a little bit of what's happening with the network extensions concept, which is naturally because blockchain has both of those elements.

Like as you mentioned, the high priests are, you know, essentially mathematicians. But then the rank and file are business people who are, you know, trying to, you know, run businesses, essentially. It creates this dichotomy. Yeah, I mean, I think, again, both sides have points here. Like, I think, yeah, you're right that, like, Ethereum did pioneer a good amount of the roll of stuff in scaling solutions. And they're like, okay, give us some credit. But then Salon also wants the same thing, which is like these are some things that we built here, like Ziki compression, which actually does not exist there.

And so it's unfair to us if you classify it as what you built because we actually built this. And so both sides have some good points. Yeah. But then I think fundamentally it just misses the whole point. if we're just stuck doing semantics for too long. That's right. That's right. So, okay, speaking of semantics, let's talk a little bit about stepping outside of SVM scaling. So, you know, it's been widely understood at this point that Solana is super, super high performance chain. It's where anybody who wants extremely

high throughput is naturally going to pick Solana. But there's a new generation of blockchains that now have incorporated a lot of the learnings from the last, you know, four or five years, including from Solana. And many of them in some sense are a response to Salana. So in that group, I put, you know, Monad, Mega-Eath, the SWI, Aptos, as well as some of the new generation roll-ups like, you know, Eclipse and Elypsis and so on. What is your take? I know that you're also an investor in several of these. What is your take on how these things fit into the future of where high-performance blockchains are going to go? Yeah, I mean, fundamentally, as I said earlier in the episode, I care about the problem of apps.

How do we get app developers, the platforms that they can actually bring their ideas to life and actually build stuff for crypto? Yeah. So I think anybody who helps with that mission is a net good to the industry, provided that all the security and the risks and stuff are very transparently laid out, which is what I liked about Mega-Eath, which is like they're basically say, here's what we're going to do, here's how it works, here are the risks, et cetera. And that's it. And so that's a good approach in my view. Because I don't think every, again, like it's, I don't think all use cases require this global state machine. I don't think everybody needs those properties.

And so if you're okay with being in an L2 environment or something for your use case, like a game, I think that totally makes sense. And then, you know, things like Monad and stuff, I think, yeah, I'm still curious to see how that'll play out. That seems to be more like an EVM play, where it's like a lot of people already have There's already a lot of good tooling around this. Can we tap into that network effect such that we can get those developers who didn't want to come to the SVM and actually get them to build on this new L1? I think that also makes sense.

And I mean, that team also used to do some stuff on Solana. So I think that's a net good as well. And then Sway is just doing it completely differently. Like they have a very different architecture in some regards. And you know, they have an object based model. They have good numbers. And then the question for them seems to be like, okay, can we actually get? Because like bootstrapping a new ecosystem is super difficult.

And it seems to be less of a technical thing, but more of a, you know, BD distribution ecosystem. That sort of challenge for them. And so I don't think there will be, like, it's basically impossible for there to be one or two chains that just do everything in my view. Sure. not even from a technical perspective. Like I think totally could reasonably make the argument that you could support a good

amount of activity once a certain threshold of scaling gets met on single L1. But I think it's the incentives of just businesses and economics and culture and all this that make it impossible for that vision to be a reality. I think everybody will want or I think some people will want like their custom app space like sovereign roll-ups or like app chains and stuff like that. some people will want the generalized L1 that don't want to deal with all these uh uh because like the L ones already have a bunch of integrations with wallets and analytics and dexes and all this stuff they just don't want to bother with all that stuff they just want to

plug into something that works well to that end do you think we're basically done on VMs so we essentially have four which is EVM SVM SWAM and MOV. Do you think there's room for a fifth or do you think it's basically 20 years from now it's going to be those four? What's that? There's a lot of dead. There are many dead ones. Yeah, correct. That never quite, you know, survived birth. Is your take that you think in 20 years there's going to be four? Are there going to be two? Is there going to be just one in 20 years? Oh, man. I'm very not comfortable with predicting future stuff. You're an angel investor now. You vote with your money. Yeah. I don't, I wouldn't invest in it myself. Like, I don't think it.

it solves a meaningful enough problem today or even in five years or 10 years that I think is actually a bottleneck. I think like for Salon of the bottleneck is bandwidth and networking and stuff like that. For other ecosystems, it seems like maybe state growth. And then for other ecosystems, it seems to be not tech at all. And like sweet seems to be distribution and business BD. So it really depends on the problems it's saying exists and that it can solve it anybody else. Yeah. And I don't see the VM as being the problem today. Right. To ruin, what's your take on the VM? By the way, I should clarify,

VM means virtual machine. It's basically the language that a, essentially the programming environment or language that, or sort of operating system that a blockchain runs on top of. Yeah, I think one place I'd probably differ is I do think the move ecosystem

languages, their tooling is like much more premature. And I don't think it's just a pure business thing. I actually think it's like hard to attract new developer. Like, everyone I feel like who's in the movie system loves the language but then like doesn't like really there's not no one building tooling they have this kind of like tragedy of the commons problem which you oftentimes see in like the beginning of a new language or new virtual machine where the ton of

people who really love the new language features and they'll write like prototypes or proof of concepts or like little kind of tiny projects but nothing that's like in production like has maintenance devops whatever like updates because the tooling to do that is like annoying right and I actually think one thing that Solana got over the the hump on was was tooling and like some of that tooling maybe you know there's still people fighting over whether to use anchor or not but you know some of that tooling maybe not exactly like the the cutting edge of what people want but they got to the point that I think onboarding a new developer is like significant significantly easier like the marginal the endth developer the cost of onboarding them is is significantly less than you know the early ones

because I'm not totally sure that's true for for move yet yeah it could it could change right like I just think um I think the the the gap in terms of how you reason about programming a very secure contract between EVM where like there's lots of ways you can shoot yourself in the foot but like there's a ton of established practices and tooling to kind of make sure you don't shoot yourself with a footgun. SVM where like because of the performance benefits and because it still mainly looks like normal rust, you're like fine, you know, you don't need to know that much more if you've written in other programming languages. Move is more like, you know, am I writing in Haskell, right?

Like I really do have to think a lot more about like every time I instantiate an object, where it's going. And I think the overhead for a developer varies quite a bit from all these. in these ecosystems and it's really just about like A is there a lot of tooling for making sure you don't shoot yourself You know by making a mistake remember like a lot of these applications will have Hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in them so like you really have to be much more careful And then B I think

I think like all three might survive, but there'll be like kind of some very fast decay where like 50% is in the top VM 30 is in the same second and then after that you have the tail really small. What's also interesting is that oftentimes there is some element of you stand on the shoulders of giants of the infrastructure that has come before you of people who built. There was way way back in the day. It was remix for the EVM and then it was Ganesh and then it was foundry. And there is this sort of progression.

But it's oftentimes like just one project that ends up making the devX on a platform, just really, really huge step function improvement. And it often feels like it's just, it's hard to like find who that person is who is going to transform this developer ecosystem into just being really, really good and really just a pleasure for people to use. So that's one thing that's surprising. It's almost like a sort of strongman theory of how a developer environment or like how a programming language ends up going from a toy to being actually a really great development. I also think that's going to change in the next like one year in the sense like the AI code tools are just so different. now that like people's learn the learning curve might be a lot smaller right so like you could actually see all three of these ecosystems do really well if like they happen to build the cursor for

their language that is really good that like your marginal cost for the next developer is decreasing because like I always think of these things as like drawing a curve of like the x-axis that's a very interesting point right so that's one of the things about move is that you know it's very easy to formally verify move code. And now it's only useful if you actually do that, right? If you write move code and you don't actually use all the advantages that move confers on you, which naturally has some just from the object model. But like you sort of have to go the extra mile to actually get all the mileage out of what you're getting with move. But if we get to a place where AI and basically these automated software engineering tools, cursor obviously is a kind of nice first cut, but

probably within the next five years, we're going to see much more capable autonomous software creation tools. And they might just make it that it's like, okay, well, to the extent that the EVM has these really nice affordances, they just matter a lot less because human beings are writing less of the code. I also think like we haven't had that many crypto people like fine-tune custom code models the way you have for all these other programming. Well, Apptons actually has, I think, done, they did something with, I think, with Microsoft, where they fine-tuned some kind of copilot type thing on Apptos moves. Maybe. I haven't. I haven't. I've, only really written, looked at and written EVM and SVM contracts. And like, you know, you can see

which things that gets right and which things that completely gets wrong. Right. And it does feel a lot worse than just like general rust or like Python where like the output you get significantly better. But I think that is a large part of function of the fact that the way in which these kind of software engineering stuff is working is very pattern matchy. And I think the when we get more and more robust software engineering. O-1 is a great example of, you know, being able to explore more of the state space of how you actually write a program

and evaluate a program. I think it's going to be much more like you shove an entire language spec into the context window and it just figures out how to write the language. Yeah, so I guess my answer to your question, if we popped the stack back to two iterations, is I think we're at this very weird juncture where the notion of programming is changing so much

that it may, there might actually be this phase transition where all of a sudden it's just as easy to write a move. Whereas like six months ago was like impossible or like to do production and stuff. And that thing is the biggest unknown uncertainty to me. Yeah. Yeah, I have a, I've been playing around with this quite a bit. I've been like live streaming some like what you can build

with cursor on Solana and built like three apps with it, like a explorer, a price tracker, et cetera. And actually one of the realizations I had was, I think the EVM has a huge advantage there because there's so much more open source material in existing material that the models can actually read off of, which is on Solana. It was still giving me relatively outdated docs for a bunch of the stuff and I would have to tell to fix it, which like you can do, right? Like you can, if you have a spec, you can just say, hear or read from this instead.

But I think that small friction is, and I think move will have even worse because there's that's open source stuff available. I think that'll play a big role in my view. And so whoever can, and like, you know, that's what, you know, teams like Helios basically. We actually just added an AI feature to the Explorer, which is not released yet. You know, it took generalized AI to make Salonar readable, such that you can, because it actually understands the Salonic Core docs pretty well

when you tell it how it works. And then you can kind of use that with like, our existing documentation, which is much more up to date than what cursor has. And then when you combine them, it actually becomes much easier to write Salonicoat. I think that's, you know, there's probably still like two to three years left to go until that stuff is more mature. But yeah, I do wonder how it'll evolve exactly. Because you also don't want to, you know, trust it too much for things that hold funds.

In Mainnet especially, you still need to get audits and stuff. So it's still unknown. but I think the EVM does have a good advantage from just having so much material and data that the models can leverage already. Well, I think to your point about the 01 type of like RL type models is like inference time kind of updates is that you can generate code much more efficiently

for that you're testing against live. And that means you need a smaller initial data set. provided the initial data set is a good ground truth data set, right? Maybe if it's outdated by like X number of versions, it won't work. Right. But I do think, yeah, that could really change the game for these languages that don't have much source material. And so it's very hard to predict where that will go because that field has evolved so much in the last six months that it's like. Yeah.

But almost certainly software engineering is going to be the first thing to fall as these models get better and better. And we just throw more and more compute time training material against them. Well, O-1's not just compute time. It's architecture. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't know exactly what it's doing. They haven't disclosed much, but some kind of Monte Carlo. A bunch of my old coworkers work on it, and I will say that, like, it does seem like it's much more about the architecture than it is at all about compute.

Right. Like, I would argue that Anthropic went the route of throw away more compute and synthetic data. And opening I went down the route of, like, treat it more like a, you know, a game theory thing at inference time. Right. And so like my friend who works on O1 team, his PhD was on like building the first bot that like beat humans at poker called Luberdis.

And they took way more of a like multi-agent game approach than like a like oh generate synthetic data approach. And so I think that's why you're starting to see the difference between Claude and O1. Sorry, it's a divergent for our audience. Yeah, yeah, a little bit, a little bit of the soundtrack. So, okay, I want to bring it back to ground us in crypto a little bit more to close out the show. So one of the things that people have been commenting on, you know, crypto is in a little bit of slump over the last month. And we've seen volumes on chain start to retrace a little bit.

You know, Solana has been no exception to that. And we've also seen something happening. We went from highbrow to price talk. That was a fast. We've got to bring the audience back. We've got to bring the audience back. So naturally, one of the projects that has been seeing a slump is, Pump. Dot Fun, which, of course, has driven a lot of the on-chain volumes in Salana this year.

And so I want to bring back to a question. So, you know, we talked a little bit last show that we've seen the sentiment start to turn against Pump.comun. In that, you know, once upon a time, people were like, oh, Pump. Dot Fun is great. It's democratizing meme coins. This is awesome. And now people are starting to say, well, but Pump. Dot Fund, it's kind of extractive.

Is this really good for crypto? I remember we were on a panel together. I think first time I met you in person. We were on a panel together talking about meme coins. I think it was at the last token 2049. Yep. And that was like peak meme coin frenzy. Something like that.

Yeah, sometime early summer. Yeah, it was with Anselm. It was with Anselm. Yeah, Anson was on stage and it was, we were all out of our element besides him. And so now that we are very kind of in the late part of the meme coin cycle, seemingly, what is your thoughts on are meme coins and our pump dot fun good for crypto? What would you say? You can be honest.

Good for crypto. Well, there's a debate about this at Breakpoint with Iggy. Okay. And Eric Wall. And Eric Wall. That'll be a good one. I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. But we need the Mertz pregame. It's, I think it's very hard, again, to homogenize the entire category is good or bad. I think certainly there's meme coins that could be good. Like I think Bonk, for example, is a good meme coin in that they basically fund hackathons and it's basically a self-startup that's funded by speculation and things like that. That being said, I think it's just about the only one that's good that I've seen.

I see. This is a very metallic-esque take-on-coins. Like, it's the way I think about it when people say like pump is extractive or it's killed meme coins and then, you know, like blur killed NFTs, it's like this, this demand for people doing this stuff existed. Like people wanted to launch coins and buy NFTs and sell like they wanted to do this and a business came to meet that demand and people willing to pay money such that they can conduct these activities. So I don't think it's like it's killing anything. It's just making it's meeting a demand that already exists in the market.

So you resist the idea that pomptot fund has agency in the meme coin cycle? Oh, they certainly have agency. But I don't think like it I don't think they can like sing. handle-handedly kill a category because the category is market-driven it's a market-driven sector sure right like the market needs to collectively come to some decision or you know converge on some thing whether they think it's good bad and which is reflected by the price maybe or the activity yeah but i don't think i think most of them are bad like i think most of the mean points are just useless and and obviously are clearly there to just replace

some version of a casino. Do you think casinos are bad? I don't think casinos are bad. And so my next point was going to be, like, people want to speculate and gamble on these things. And so now they have a tool to help them do that easier. There's people who don't want to do that thing, do those things. And like, they shouldn't do those things.

Like, I don't trade mean points myself. But like, I'm not going to tell you to not do it because I don't. Because merch says, don't get it. Like, if you want to do it, it's a permissionless system. Go do it. my problem with it is that when people say like salon is only good for meme coins it's like no it just turned out to be a place where you can just launch these coins and trade them the easiest right it's like we're not going to add extra friction just for ideological purposes like that's not going to that would be

an even worse look in my view sure um so i don't think they're good or bad i think there's clearly pmf for people who want to speculate and do these sorts of things and they should just be able to do whatever they want. It sounds like you're saying they're mostly bad, but then you ended it with they're neither good or bad. I think individual coins launched are obviously like if you have an uneducated user that is just like aping into it and they're like, oh, I want to get rich, whatever. It's like they'll learn their lesson. Right. Like you this is a. So you will lose money if you trade meme coins is what you're saying. You will lose money if you trade meme coins and have no idea what you're doing. Some of these guys do make money. And it's like any other speculative kind of thing.

I just feel very, I'm like no one to tell people what they should be doing. So, like, I think they can be good, like in the case of Bonk. I think most often in practice, they have been bad. Yeah. But I think the entire category itself is just that. It's a category. It's just meeting a demand that people have. And they're going to continue to do it no matter what anybody thinks.

Yeah. I wouldn't say it's like extractive, though. The only extractive part of it, I would say, is the sandwich games kind of being played and stuff like that. That's obvious. But, you know, we're working to solve the MEB problems on Slauna as well. So I don't know if that answers the question. I mean, that's a good enough answer. Tom, Merritt raised the analogy between blur and pumped out fun.

What do you think of that connection? Because we've talked about that on the show as well. Yeah. I think there are markets where when you add legibility. efficiency, it kind of kills it. It's like you turn on the lights at the club and it's like, all right, this is a little, this is a little sad now or it's like, it's not cool anymore, you know, like 20 years ago. It's like it's a little edgy, a little cool.

And now it's just like, you can like. Weed's still cool in Singapore. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's now it's like a little cringe. It's like, all right. Yeah, it's not, you know, it's too eligible. And I think, you know, meme coins are maybe in a similar bucket where you're trying to like recreate this or very organic thing that happened with like, kind of like air drops in some ways

too, where it's like, it's a very cool organic moment that happened. And then people always just like pummel it to death by, you know, trying to make these sort of games on top of it and think this is maybe kind of what's happening with meme coins right now where people want to sort of have that, you know, organic spark that has happened in the past. And then it's like you can't sort of force that. And then you just, I think kind of kind of killed the market. You hear that guys? Tom says it's over. Sorry. That's it.

All right. With that, we got a wrap. Hopefully to see you guys at token 2049 and breakpoint. I think actually I was at I was at a dinner with Raj from Solana and he was like I told him oh yeah I'm going to be in Singapore for token 2049 and he was like you mean for breakpoint yes yes for breakpoint as well so that's it we'll see all you guys next week thanks everyone yeah