we are limited by bandwidth right now in two years there's gonna be twice as much maybe we'll need twice as many cores to drive it because there's twice as much data to sign and cryptographically verify but these are all Moore's Law problems that just kind of solve themselves but what we need to make sure in the design is that we can always increase the bandwidth like if if the bet if the network capacities go to 100 gigabit in like four or five years at every data center they kind of aren't in a bunch of them already then Solana could run at 100 gigabit we don't really care like we shouldn't be limited by the design we should be limited by the hardware if you kind of design around that you have a very very scalable system it's very elastic to demand up to that limited Hardware that's really the final bottleneck and I think we've done a pretty good job with the design because what I see is that the fire dancer folks without having to make any design changes are showing Much Higher throughput by just doing straightforward okay you guys had to ship this thing as fast as you can but let us rewrite it in a better more scalable kind of just raw software architecture way and then they can really demonstrate that all the components can can scale very elastically with Hardware this episode is brought to you by Gino Gino is the easiest way to start earning Mev Awards on Solana through liquid staking get your soul stake it with Judo and get instant access to liquidity through their liquid saving token Judo Soul get started today at Judo dot Network [Music] what's up everyone welcome to another episode of Lightspeed today we are joined by Anatoly from Solana Anatoly thanks for joining us thank you for having me yeah yeah we are pumped to have you on um I've been studying more and more about salon and every time I do I get more excited uh so I want to start high level to set the scene um and really frame the conversation so when looking at all the different design choices in crypto it's easy to really get caught up on what you're building or what's being built and not why it's being built so I want to start with the end with solanus like what is the Solana thesis like what is it built to enable and I think that will then lead to why you went with an integrated Global State machine and not a chain that relies on sharding state with Roll-Ups uh but instead relies on like ever increasing bandwidth and compute so the what I thought was really cool about crypto was that it enabled permissionless markets and if you've ever traded and any permission markets like I I traded like there's a total amateur I like had connections to like interactive brokers and a bunch of other places you know from my algorithms every time I thought that I had Alpha my data would arrive a little slower and my orders would be submitted a little slower and just felt like everybody was always getting ahead of me and that's because those are not fair markets and what makes them unfair is that there is centralized actors that get the information before you they get to submit the information ahead of you and that creates massive amounts of value capture for them and losses for somebody an amateur like me so what I think is really cool about permissionless systems is that they can create fairness and the whole purpose of Solana that I thought was really at least it would be valuable to the world is that we can create Fair markets at the core information level meaning that bits are transmitted everywhere around the world as equally and fairly to everybody and concurrently at the same time as as physics allow and that submission is also is as fair and competitive as as physics allow so those are kind of the two problems that we set out to solve and um I think this is very different than most of probably every other crypto project that start out at that time because they started from either the store of value narrative at Bitcoin we want to build a decentralized money and or settlement guarantees we want to build a decentralized settlement layer and none of those really care about when the information arrives who gets to submit it like no all those problems are secondary um and there are interesting problems but I think what most people don't realize is if you build the first if you build this like perfect information system settlement is free like it's just inherently part of it so like solving this like much harder problem actually solves all the other ones so um that's really like I think kind of our goal Solana's vision is to be that like perfect single state machine that everyone can rely on for fair access to the data and kind of see it as a as a source of Truth for the world so obviously the information is sinking globally at the speed of light is kind of the big um let's say kpi that you're optimizing for it's not an obviously kpi but so and and with that said the first pitch for Salon the elevator pitch Takashi slogan was NASDAQ at the speed of light um so my first question is okay I came up with it is that um is that still you think um how people should talk about Solana um I think there's like kind of a bit of a trap there to think of it only in terms of trading this is something that I realized I was building as like building this is that the building like a NASDAQ competitor is and like going out there and trying to get stocks listed I think is that could be like a thing that people do but I think that's a very small part of web3 I think the fact that you have open permissionless markets really disrupts how the web is monetized how people coordinate globally and like all the kind of really cool web3 things that you want to do that I think are much more revolutionary than you know reducing the amount of take that like Citadel and NASDAQ has um they're just much higher impact than that if everybody in the world has a cryptographic key and they know what to do with it they know how to sign according to Dow that's effectively full Global democracy full Global direct democracy like people can direct funds right with that they can all deposit into a dial that says we're going to buy every coal plant on the planet and shut them down and if people know that that will actually happen like I think they will actually take you know throw a thousand bucks in there and that's very very quickly can become very meaningful change that is uh like enacted through this so I think crypto is just much bigger than markets but what makes crypto interesting I think is the the fact that people have cryptography this is I think vitalik had a quote that I think cryptography is the first time that defense has an asymmetric advantage over offense it's not just like you cannot break it you know with an atomic bomb you cannot break uh at t519 signature this is kind of like the really cool thing about it that it will take infinite energy to to go uh or break that key and that that's really really cool and I think that's a very empowering empowering thing and I honestly think that like if we could give humans the cryptographic keys it doesn't really like the networks will just emerge from that like the blockchains all the stuff like I think those are implementation details to to a large degree um the way that I'm interested in attacking the the coordination problem is through the the thing that I'm good at which is like low latency optimizations making things fast and I think uh a chain that focuses on that unsynchronizing State the least amount of overhead as as possible has a place in that world where everyone has cryptography keys and they're doing stuff on chain with them so uh my second question and you kind of answered it as well is so you you mentioned that the other chains Maybe started from a place of like settlement which I believe you think is the most boring part of of Finance um store value like Bitcoin um The Sovereign aspect but then yours is globally shared state which is actually a pretty abstract concept I know some people who aren't too familiar with maybe what that means to sell it like how do I sell it to like somebody that's like this is this is a digital goal they're like that's cool exactly um so that leads me to my question which is how do you how do you ride people around globally shared State like how do you know there's pmf like do people care what makes you think that's the right direction to pursue well I know that it like it eliminates uh like ways for like this Arbitrage kind of I think parasitic value capture like when the system gets faster lower latency more competitive in terms of who can write like the amount of opportunities for somebody to extract unfair value goes away and that's really important to like all the D finders I think the reason why Solana has like a resilient defy Community that's been able to take these major hits is because they get that Vision that they know that if I built a project here I'm not going to get screwed by all these intermediaries that can extract massive amounts of mouth and they inherently don't want that that's bad for their users like MAV seems like a good thing right like on ethereum because it like there's like this idea that uh fees fees are good but that's actually value that's extracted from the user there's zero chance that Senator Warren of the SEC would allow NASDAQ to take the kind of fees the ethereum does it would shut that down like instantly like all those right all those Regulators of have like created everything around you know Finance the United States to prevent that kind of fee extraction from occurring so I think for cryptos to be competitor has to be better than the existing regulatory systems not just better because it's open and permissionless but actually better like it's got to be cheaper faster more open and then I think it can kind of like start replacing those systems and then like the be uh add value to the world you know yeah 100 agree Let's uh let's talk about some of the ways that Salon is actually going about doing that uh you've said that the final bottleneck is Da bandwidth what what do you mean by that and how does it apply to how performance Salon is trying to be So like um this was an intuition that I had early on we didn't even call it data available it was really just this idea that the chain you have a quorum right this network of nodes that all have to synchronize the state uh that's the current active set of nodes in the Quorum the fast as fast as they can synchronize that state is going to be limited by the the slowest one-third of the network your Byzantine threshold whatever however many you need you need to get to consensus that slowest one-third is going to limit the throughput um so you have to basically optimize and increase that throughput and what's cool is that when you increase that throughput you can increase the Quorum because what's very very trivial to build a very dumb consensus thing you can build is that every node votes and propagates that vote to everyone else that's just part of the no the way the chain normally schedules all the transactions and all the events this is why Solana consensus is implemented as a native Solana program like a smart contract and that's why votes or normal transactions is because when you increase TPS and capacity and therefore the data availability bandwidth at each node you can actually just add more nodes and increase your Quorum and therefore that that like number of users that are getting the data that's around the world increases and you have a fair and more open system it becomes harder for you to uh you know delay the data from any part of the world and therefore extract value right information value from that so this is a very very kind of like Brute Force approach um because it's not algorithmic it's very much based on if we're limited by bandwidth right now in two years there's going to be twice as much maybe we'll need twice as many cores to drive it because there's twice as much data to sign and cryptographically verify but these are all Moore's Law problems that just kind of solve themselves but what we need to make sure in the design is that we can always increase the bandwidth like if if the bet if the network capacities go to 100 gigabit in like four or five years at every data center the kind of iron and a bunch of them already then Solana could run at 100 gigabit we don't really care like we shouldn't be limited by the design we should be limited by the hardware and if you if you kind of design around that you have a very very scalable system it's very elastic to uh to demand up to that up to that limited Hardware um so that that's really the final the final bottleneck and I think we've done a pretty good job with the design because what I see is that the fire dancer folks without having to make any design changes are showing Much Higher throughput by just doing straightforward okay you guys had to ship this thing as fast as you could let us rewrite it in in a better more scalable kind of just raw software architecture way and and they can really demonstrate that all the components can can scale um very elastically with with Hardware I'm sure you saw this recently on x.com that you know people think that all blockchains and and obviously all computers do benefit from Hardware advancements and and bandwidth and mansions and whatnot but uh you know what I said was that Solana benefits you know like the benefit that you get from each chain is not proportional like they're not the same thing can you describe like how you think about that like if when the hardware increases the improvements are made do all blockchains benefit the same why not you know how should we think about it it really depends on so like that kind of idea of like it's not yeah what I I kind of made a response to your to your post saying that it shouldn't be that Solana is scaling with Harbor is that Hardware is all you need and this really came from my experience at Qualcomm um I was there from like 2003 until like 2015 or something like that and this was when we went from flip phones to smartphones and literally every year we had an architecture change at the CPU and like a process change and like arm was getting better it's just it felt like not not it was Moore's Law wasn't even going at 18 months interval it was like a 12 months interval time and it was pretty crazy and if you didn't write your software in such a way that it's just going to get better by the next chip you have to rewrite it so it was like a waste of time to build it in a way that doesn't scale well with more Hardware um and that was just really burned into me as I was doing the software development trying to keep up with like the hardware improvements um that's that's kind of like the the idea there is that like because Hardware can scale at this exponential Pace if you design your software such as just natural takes advantage of it whatever inefficiencies you have in the algorithm maybe there's an algorithm that's just way more efficient in some parameter they just shrink they just become marginally irrelevant so all the time you're wasting trying to optimize for you know like all like squeeze out extra percentages right now they should just do analysis figure out where you're not scaling with a number of cores and fix that because it's literally in two years you're gonna have twice as many cores and those other optimizations are going to be half as important and this is kind of this like exponential curve that's that Humanity's on um you know my personal belief is if that ever stops uh we should all be working in Bunker coin we've hit the limit of human civilization like things are going to get really bad so I'm an optimist I don't think we'll ever get there I personally believe that the number of cores per system per dollar is going to continue to go up because we're not even like stacking them in three dimensions yet like these are still single layer you know like kind of single CPU not everything some phones do have stack Ram but like it this is still we're super early in in terms of how much like normal normal silicon can be pushed um so a lot of other chains do get improvements from from hardware and I I don't want to say that you know like I don't think that's what you meant with your quote it's just Solana and Oliver engineering is specifically tailored around this idea that we need to parallelize and Max maximize the efficiency across the number of disks across the number of cores number of network cards to make sure that in two years when this stuff gets half the price that everything just elastically gets better and if we achieve that we're kind of like done with the software architecture we're done like we can kind of rest easy or probably not we have to work on all the other stuff in the application layer which is infinite amount of work when you do that you get to rely on like Intel and AMD and ISP providers the more bandwidth right one thing that Salon has been known for is paralyzable execution and why why is it that something like ethereum didn't originally start with parallel execution and is does part of that go into the fact that Solana separates uh State and programs yeah so this is again from my experience working on embedded systems like working on on dsps and things like that if you've ever had to program a DSP or a GPU or like even like an AVX pipeline an Intel it's a quite it's quite different environment you have to lay out all the memory and all the lanes for a program ahead of time so you have to know all the dependencies of all the memory accesses ahead and then you tell like the CPU here's the code that you're going to execute across these Lanes of memory and then it just Zips through them because once it knows the locations of all the dependencies it can pre-fetch all the memory if thus eliminating any kind of uh speed hit to like I missed memory like a load or something like that and just everything just runs through through the system as fast as possible and that's really translating like making the system be as efficient as possible in terms of execution but that requires developer to do this work ahead of time they have to know all the dependencies of all the memory locations and yada yada yada and that obviously eliminates features like Global memory that you can just go and call random memory or jump to a random memory location so the way solano's runtime is designed is from that idea the developer does the painful work of figuring out what are all the memory dependencies that the program has and conveys that in the transaction that they constructed and then the runtime is a very easy job it never basically has a cache Miss so then we can schedule all these events and execute everything in parallel um it's been like I think it's been interesting to see how hard it is to do that once you kind of open the Pandora's box and let developers call random locations and do whatever they want with the state because just the way that they can post programs once they're given that option is very different and they'll take advantage of it right you give them the tools they will like treat everything as a hammer and that becomes very painful to rewrite those systems so I think it's going to be very I think parallelism is going to be really really hard for evm and it almost given that the fact that that the way evm is designed it almost makes sense that Roll-Ups are the way to go because there you're isolating state with with like tokens and nfts through a bridge and then you have a little evm environment that runs on that state that's all Global then you have another little evm environment another roll-up that does its own thing and then there that's how you do your state separation right you've kind of created parallels in that way but that's a much more uh like kind of it's far less granular right you can't like compose between these states very easily everything becomes much harder on the composition side I'm gonna ask two questions which won't be that related so uh I know you you said you have like a theory that being able to process multiple things in your head is like uh improves the brain Hardware or whatnot um uh first is having said that actually l2s are probably the better way for ethereum scale I'm curious on your thoughts about monad which seems to do parallel IBM and second so what what's you know it feels like it should be obvious to most seasoned Engineers that you want to scale with Hardware um yet you I would say you're like one of the I think Salon is probably the first serious attempt at that and some people will make the argument that well the reason is because you can't run these systems on retail internet right like at my house you need kind of very strong internet connections and whatnot so that people can maximize the number of nodes running but then you say to that well it doesn't matter how low the requirements are what matters is the incentives to run it how come that seems to be an unpopular View um well I think you have to go back to what you believe is is kind of like what is decentralization which is a very philosophical question and I I'm a philosopher and I my belief is that all all like interesting theories have to be grounded in physical reality you have to see actually something physical happen for this to be a worthwhile Theory to even discuss so if we're talking about decentralization how does it manifest itself in the physical world and from my perspective like the key components of decentralization is that the system is permissionless like anyone can participate in it that means that I can physically create my own box I don't really care about the cost there like the cost could be a barrier we could argue about whether it's 400 a month is too much or 50 a month is like the required amount for decentralization I think that's almost like but if we get to that if the discussion ends up there like I've already won right like but I think the key part is that the system's permissionless it means anyone can connect to it anyone can create a box anyone can create the state and the other part to it is that there's enough people that give a [ __ ] that it's running that even if something fails it'll continue it and that latter part is all about the incentive so in a system that is very cheap to run and cheap to participate in it I think it works for ethereum but this is not going to work for anyone else it's like if you start at a very slow expensive chain now that no one's participating in you're not going to get enough incentives for people to actually care that it's running that they would go and continue it so you'll fail in the on the latter part the fact that ethereum has succeeded I think is because it was early and it created the whole smart contract system and has a lot of very credible awesome researchers working on it and really working on that towards that goal of settlement and it's it has pmf in what it's doing but there's no way it's like if I if somebody else tried to copy ethereum and launch it they're going to fail for the same reason that if I try to launch a Bitcoin like slightly with slightly bigger blocks or slightly smaller blocks whatever right like it's just somebody already captured that part of DMF you need to find another incentive structure that will guarantee that people actually care about the state and continue running it so Solana is a very um performant technically like sound chain and I would say it had I had a lot of updates in 2022 that went under the radar and I think a lot of that was with SPF and some Network outages and some of those were quick and stick way to qos which we can go into that but it's really just like Network stability you know at fees you added priority feed markets isolated fee markets which I would like to touch on and how that kind of corresponds to l2s you also have things like so laying introduce where you can do solidity on Solana um you can even do move now um I'm curious with all that work that you put behind it is how easy is it for this might this is me being not technical how easy is it for another ecosystem to almost just copy all those updates that you've had because to me Solana is shipping faster than any other chain out there and is it really just the community that's the part that's not um able to be forked oh it's it's like you know BSD had jails like I think 10 years before Linux had namespaces it takes even if like those and all those Engineers knew each other like literally we're all friends and we'll get beers together it's actually really really hard to yank stuff from one one part of the like one operating system to another one so I think some things could be somewhat transferable I think you could take like svm and run it as a roll-up on ethereum and like I encourage people to do that like I think eclipse is one of the teams that's doing that I think we need we just need more svm like environments out there um it sounds counterintuitive people think oh it's competitive with Solana no it's great it's like more people like give a [ __ ] about svm they'll create more value for the entire Salama ecosystem with Linux you know um I think those kinds of pieces can be ported over I think the other pieces you really have to understand what impact they have and apply them directly to in your design and the real challenge to what I found in building the system is that there's a very uh there's almost like an amdahl's fight not like if you're familiar with amtel's law it means that you have a complex system and you look at all the components that for like create you know like uh friction or create a cost right a compute cost or latency cost and you try to optimize one of them even if you make that thing a hundred times faster because of all the other parts in the system the overall impact is very marginal see you have that effect across everything like you can take solanos like turbine and if you stuck it in in like ethereums like block propagation it'd have very minor impact overall on like performance you actually have to go and like take all of these pieces and Implement them all at the same time to actually see the overall Improvement and that's really really tough like I think that's just really really hard a lot of like especially like a lot of the like I'd say nearly all the chains that are running um are coming in from this kind of design that's very much like tendermint-esque they've like small quorums that do like agreement in a single block then they move in the sequential kind of Step function forward it's very very hard to optimize those with the kind of techniques that we did yeah I can't even like when I'm building a reactive I can't even swap my build system where I'll own a blockchain so I can't even imagine um hey everyone quick break to tell you about Cheeto 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stani Christine Moy and Kyle samani talking about ZK Tech roll ups account abstraction Mev app chains more look I'm damn excited because you're a listener in blindspeed you're going to get a special discount type in discount code live speed 30 and you'll get 30 off your ticket that's right just type in Live speed 30 when buying a permissionless ticket and get 30 off click the link at the bottom this episode and go get it now because prices are going up every two weeks all right back to the show you you just mentioned uh svm Roll-Ups in in L2 so I'll use that as my opportunistic segue here um I have been trying to get you to write a blog post on this on this comment and I'm just gonna read it out loud um so you said on Twitter there aren't any breakout products yet in crypto that depend on low-cost fast networks that's just it if you don't believe it will ever happen each L1 is all you need if you believe it will l2s aren't going to work what do you mean by this why won't they work well because they fragment the capacity that they fragment the user base So like um the ux becomes very very complicated and you kind of I don't know if you ever worked at a big web 2 company like Dropbox we had one giant mySQL database for all the folders because as soon as you start fragmenting them links become very hard to create links between uh like different users of different folders and tracking consistency between those between two different databases a major pain in the ass you would have to synchronize everything through the L1 and that just happens at a large enough scale that that fragmentation creates like massive composability like either ux problems because you're like oh you're not in this roll-up go go to another roll-up kind of thing or or like you have to go resync through the L1 and that's going to create the same kind of costs and that's very very difficult to deal with um and you can think of it as like nfts are like a perfect example of this you can't have an nft in every roll up it actually can only be bridge to one tokens you can kind of fudge with this and create different markets but if I want a specific nft the marketplace that it's sold is the marketplace that I need to buy in and it can only exist in one of those and then therefore you've kind of broken up composability of like just the marketplaces for that one single nft by by creating these different states so that's I think kind of the fundamental challenge with ltus is their trade-off in like this you get performance benefit because you create this single Global lock around the state and then you can go work on it asynchronously from everything else but you're creating uh kind of a very hard composability challenge until you add a you had a tweet also talking about like the hypothetical example of an L2 building on Solano now you said that when it actually affect the fees because um it's not that you can you're competing for bandwidth or compute it's actually the state contention so if you maybe talk about that and say how isolated feed markets play into it this obviously there's limits to this if Salon is over capacity fees will go up um but that means uh it's really bandwidth saturated and then your the dollars per byte that you're submitting to the chain are now going up there could be other ways that it's saturated through compute and other things but those are those actually do tie into State contention I think a lot closer um so assuming that Salon itself is not saturated what an L2 does is that you can think of it as like as a bridge into something that a synchronously process some State and the way that that bridge works is that it runs a bunch of orders transactions and it submits those transactions to the L1 and that submission part you can think of it as settlement that can occur in batches asynchronously kind of like at whatever the cheapest opportunity time is and the computation part is occurring locally in in that system and what's going to create fees in that state is if you have you know a thousand people that all want the same t or a thousand people that don't want to take the same liquidation or trade they will bid up to access that one Economic Opportunity up to the the cost of that opportunity right so if this if I'm going to make a hundred bucks in this liquidation I'm going to bid 99 to go be first because at least they'll make a dollar um that obviously doesn't always perfectly work out like that but you can kind of think of it at the most perfect efficient market somebody will always bid up to that to be first to like take the smallest amount of profit so those fees are spiking not because anything's saturated it's just simply because there's economic access to State and that state you cannot you cannot partition that like if you only have one liquidation that's on sale you cannot put it into two different Roll-Ups and then have half as many Feats it's simply because there's this one liquidation it's kind of like an nft right it's Unique and it's a unique opportunity and it doesn't matter if it occurs on the Solano one or in a roll up so this obviously breaks down as if Solana itself is saturated like there's so many like economic opportunities happening in Solana that all at the same time that you cannot fit them all into the block and now they're fighting fighting each other to be first and at that point what the validator should do is they should double the course in the network we should all like you know I will personally fly out to the to 400 data centers or however many will do it like everyone will do it and like go go double your course like the network is saturated like that at that point like this is kind of I think the philosophical difference between ethereum and Solana is that we're like okay we're saturated just double the cores and we're good to go and then prices then go back to what this should be based on the Economic Opportunity so one thing I want to touch on here um just to make sure we we do the L2 folks uh justice here um you said that the reason why Altos wouldn't work is because of fragmentation and probably talking about complexity as a developer as well um well so two things to that one is that so are you saying like do you are you like bearish that people can come up with abstractions to uh remedy that and two most more importantly some would argue that you actually need one L2 and then you know you don't need all these Altus what do you say to that so so then that system where you have like basically you take svm that runs as many things in parallel as it can like up to the limit of the you know it always increases Hardware capacity to meet the demand and then you take all that data and you dump it into uh dank sharding like perfect implementation of a DA layer that tries to maximize its d8 system so you have 102 one bandwidth optimized system that's basically what Solana is like there's some implementation differences there like I think which I think we're we're all kind of slowly working on they're just not like a major fire but like Solana itself can asynchronously execute all the program all the programs and then pick forks separately in a separate pipeline then execution of the programs so that kind of gives you that like data really quickly confirmed all the forks are quickly picked but then these bigger systems can go execute on the programs you can then do like batch Decay verification if that's what you need like all that stuff is all to opal and Solana this is effectively like that single L2 that can Dominate and com and take up all 100 of The Da bandwidth that design you have 102 that's able to take a hundred percent of The Da bandwidth that L2 needs to implement localized fee markets because if a single use case can saturate the fees for everyone there's a need for 202's right that breaks down something you've broken couple's ability so it's Gotta Implement exactly the same system as Solana does that's great like I mean this is where like if you look at like the conversations me and like the leading Note have we end up okay yeah everyone's working towards the same goal yeah I think yeah there's still they're still kind of like a fundamental difference between Solana and something like that I think like there's not going to be a a demand for Solana to do dang sharding because that really breaks that idea of information synchrony across the world this is like the one aspect that Salon was started with and I think is building folk towards that I think is really important for a permissionless some blockchain to implement and I think since we're on since we're the ones doing it we should keep doing it like I don't wanna split the data availability even though you might be able to get an improvement in bandwidth there it's actually does still have a trade-off you still need a system that is working for that use case that when I submit one bit like here that it's equally observed in like Singapore in Brazil everywhere in the world as fast as visits allow because that actually creates value for the world that reduces the information and symmetry between 92 players it allows for fair markets to exist I think that's the one core use case that you really really can't optimize away with like all these other systems L2 itself could actually Implement that this is kind of like the L2 that's running in this 1da layer could be Implement that like perfect synchrony but it's effectively Solana it's running the same as fast as possible consensus and there's dumping its data to ethereum because it's once that data availability Bridge so like sure so you're basically saying like if I understand correctly because I I might be a little slow today um so you're saying that well Altus and or the Ethan modularly roadmap and Solana actually have the same end game and they would basically have to do what Salon is doing today to scale anyways so long just does it in an integrated way and they don't want to compromise on the uh information sync being Ace uh synchronous around around the global near the speed of light whereas ethereum does will have to compromise on that unless they add the add the sharding layer to the L2 itself um the data availability roadmap for ethereum the way I understand it is like the end status like these ding sharding subcommittees that can all sample each other um they will be able to increase the bandwidth because part of the sub one subcommittee is getting different blocks than another one so that implies that you don't have a single state that with perfect synchrony right like you you effectively are splitting the system um so it's just that you cannot take that optimization without the sacrifice right and if that sacrifice is really really important to you then you would design something like Solano where everything is built around how do we propagate the data as fast as possible to as many nodes as possible and turbine and all these things come like are the solutions to that so I think the but the idea of having like a single roll-up that can that can take up all of the bandwidth uh of the this data availability layer whether it's Solana or Celestia or ethereum I think that idea is it's like something that I think a lot of the engineers agree is probably the more efficient design like if you have a single roll up that can take up all the data availability bandwidth you eliminate all of these like composition bottlenecks and all this other stuff but that's very hard like I think politically to swallow because what are you gonna do like say like arbitrov is a roll-up or optimism like the way that free markets work is the like the faster like we get faster development when there are free markets and there's competition we don't have the single enshrined thing so it's good just it's good for ethereum to actually not intran anything of at least for like probably this decade what what is the key trade-off that Salon is making Hardware is more expensive so if you if you need more bandwidth you gotta increase the hardware if you need more bandwidth and ethereum you have more subcommittees in the subcommittee hardware is fixed but that means that each subcommittee is not observing the state at the same time like that that's like you cannot solve both of those problems at the same time there's a fundamental trade-off there if you care about like having stayed everywhere equally then you need more Hardware yeah and it sounds like that's going to happen no matter what though like if you think about uh vitalik's post that he had it's like block production is going to use more Hardware it's going to be more expensive it's like Solana is just having a path dependent way where they're embracing it from day one instead of working back to what you see in ethereum I think like one good thing about l2s it allows for a lot of experimentation but that's something that you can see with the svm and l2s as well so like is that like if you're thinking about the svm and how that benefits um Salon is that kind of the key thing is you might see experiments there that you can adopt or is it just building out the tooling or something else um I think there's uh if you're talking about the application space itself that's kind of an just a never-ending problem because like every two years like developers are expected to learn a new stock it's just kind of been part of my career like you shouldn't uh and this is where a lot of the work that we did in svm to use llvm and these other components is like to allow that kind of experimentation that we can take move or solidity and start building tooling to integrate better with it but it's it takes work somebody has to drive it and push it and like do the iteration um it's not always clear that there's even demand for that because um like a big part of me thinks that like smart contracts are actually not a language that is like a distribution language it's not like Swift for iOS where you get access to their distribution Network right or JavaScript for the web it's a back-end system that's kind of more like building on top of pulse graphs or my SQL or whatever and do you really care like do you need that many languages for that or like that many solutions like you kind of end up with like this is like the one two Engineers that write kernel code your driver code and once your drivers are built you have all the other people on top that are building all the applications and everything else but like once those drivers are built um I don't know how much Innovation there is or like it doesn't seem as big of a surface area for Innovation as the application alert itself so I want to zoom out now um I think we've we've had our a little nerd moment uh which I enjoyed um so I mean having said that you know Solana and l2s and each probably have relatively similar end games and it's maybe the path that matters one thing that comes to mind and something we've I don't want to say we but Solana has been heavily criticized for is BD and you know whatever that means um how do you think how do you think about Solana winning this this BD battle and this getting just more users and developers on the chain um oftentimes like what what is what do you believe is the BD criticism like this what is the specific one that like we did not get some brand or logo to to say that they're building on Solana so um I'm just trying to Echo the sentiment of that I've heard I personally don't think there's such a thing um but so I mean like people will say like well how come polygons getting these deals and Salon is not um etc etc like how do you think about that how should the community think about it so like the way that I run labs and this is been like why a lot of a lot of the deals we've said no to is because I want labs to get paid for the work instead of paying a customer so like if we want to do if we want to do an integration like it's got a like sure like we'll do whatever if you pay our Engineers to do it and this is very different from a lot of how other crypto crypto like startups operators actually pay the customer like yeah we'll do this integration we'll give you x amount of millions of dollars to get an announcement and stuff like that out there's some value to that because I think that does establish like brand trust but I generally feel like that's um a lot of money out the door for very little guaranteed like usage because there's no like internal driver at these companies that's like I need this is a problem that I need to solved today and I'm willing to pay to solve it if you can get somebody like a customer to say that right you know that you have pmf so I I am like always searching for pmf and I think it's very important to like make sure that all the work that we're doing is is being driven by some external demand that's legitimate um this may be surprising to a lot of listeners but literally like the way that a lot of these deals are structured is that you would pay like Brand X to go launch in your chain and that means that you've not like you're paying your customers just feels really really backwards so from my perspective is like when we have an opportunity cost like do we focus on paying some brand or do we pour it into like like I'd rather throw a party at a hacker house honestly like at least like our devs have a good time or do we put into uh like funding like we have a Solana Ventures arm that's done like 150 Investments or so far across the ecosystem there's like at least like a CEOs like hey I'm gonna build this product in Solana and grind for pmf there's at least a chance of BMF there so that's been like kind of my how I've been thinking about it I don't know if it's right like I think honestly like looking at polygon I've had to think about this like would it would it have helped if Solana like was more had more Brands just like more announcements or not maybe in the short term not sure in the long term I don't know these are like really really hard questions right like you have X amount of months to every month is a swing kind of thing you know on that same train of thought two related questions one is is that how Solana Labs tends to make money like is that kind of the main business models of of labs and two there's also some Foundation which presumably their role is a bit more um you know getting people to build on build on slana is that how people should think about it like what's the mental model there yeah that's kind of the way like Foundation is there to like make sure that there is like a it's like the Linux Foundation there's a bunch of companies working on open source software it's got to make sure that it actually all like lands and moves forward and kind of like Shepherd this whole process of validate it and and like multiple core development teams now and like things like that and it's a big pain in the ass including like just providing the hardware to like tests like large networks like stuff like that like there's just a lot of kind of like kind of nitty-gritty that goes into like that part of the development um Labs we try to like do that kind of work where we're like hey we'll build you software for money we try to uh to Investments we try to find teams that need like um like we build templates like hey these this is like a product that I think should exist here's a smart contract for it we will go out and do Audits and then help those teams like accelerate and that could be tied into a venture like kind of like a YC style thing um there's a bunch of different ways we try to launch a phone like we we launched the phone Okay the phone's awesome we got like really really good reviews from users and try to get more of those solved that's like another way to to make money in crypto uh that one is the hardest one so what would you like to see the Solana Community lean into I I feel like a lot of it's organic you saw nfts take off in 2021 and then deep in I don't know exactly how that started in Solana you had high mapper helium Kim over from polygon and then you had render uh come thrown app chain and then there's also defy so you kind of have like these different areas what would you like Solana to lean in lean into it's honestly like if I was really good at picking what's gonna have pmf I would be more confident in giving that advice I think that's a really really hard really hard um I really like compressed nfts because I think that reduction in costs created two new business two new kinds of businesses like one is drip the other one is dialect so I would really like to see more folks like lean into that like actually go try to imagine like what if you could mince basically nfts for like for your users for free because the cost of the infra is so low what are the kinds of business models that you can build out and like there needs to be more like iteration of those like we need like five dialects you know not that I want competitive like we invested a dialogue I don't want working like there's like some some uh some some hard like uh trade-offs there like do we want more competitors for existing things or do we want like the one thing to grow but I honestly think that there's different iterations you can take on that idea of a messaging app with nfts that dialogue the paths that dialect isn't taking instead of a clone so I'd rather see like people like go like go figure it out and try something new and different um similarly I think compression itself like you can apply to tokens you can apply it to generic programs I know I've been like asking for like one compression for tokens and stuff like that I don't know if that's gonna like open up the same kind of use cases as in a compressed nfts did but I think it's at least worth trying um it's those are like the opportunities that I feel like can't scale to 10 20 million users like if you have a if you build a social network with like a few million users it probably would be really really hard to get funding and traditional VCS with like two three million actives on your social network but um it would be a runaway hit in crypto that would be like like the biggest thing in crypto right now so I would I would like like to see people take swings at it so you are the CEO of Solana Labs um Solana is a network there's also a lot of Ventures and then Salon a foundation there's a lot of moving pieces here and I know like running Helios that's already pretty like full time but you have like a lot of different things well I'm only the CEO of Solana Labs I don't do anything at the foundation Ventures is part of labs but it's run by an awesome personal map back um so I like yeah most of what I do is a lot of Twitter and like product development and like kind of iteration and um you see me published MDS and stuff like that to where I think the core engineering should go but honestly I'm not um I'm not coding in the kernel anymore so to speak so that like I would actually love to do that like but I would mean dropping everything else so like this is like the big the big sacrifice of somebody in my position is I can't do the thing that I love and why I started this whole thing in the first place when you're watching from a foreign that you would like to change I think we need to basically fix ecosystem governance like I think that's some that was like looking back at the last cycle there's just been a bunch of failures that could have been prevented with just like some very common sense basic structures that have existed in like corporate finance for you know hundreds of years probably at this point uh and like they're very easy to build with like Realm style or whatever squats and just have like delegation like the reason why proof of stake networks work really well and um John carvanos like talk on proof of governance I think really touched on this uh is that you have well-branded actors that are like people delegate to so there's like an election there's an Epoch for that election they're sticky they're they have they get paid right to be a validator and they care about that income so they're all incentivized to keep the network on us and running because if they all collude To Go destroy it they're not all going to collude to go destroy their own value right like the thing that's creating value for them and that's very actually easy to replicate for governance for dials and for like these token based startups and if I could had any like if I could wave a magic wand I would have every company that Launches on Solana every like token project that creates a token literally have like a standard template do elections out of validators literally go tell the validators to be on these vows and run the dials and have very standardized templates for token economics and that would eliminate say 99 of the kind of failures that we saw on both ethereum or Solana and the last cycle you just said before this that you wish you could still work on kernels but you you have to do some other other responsibilities uh that a CEO has for Salon Labs um so that brings up kind of two questions one is kind of what do you see your role in like the next 10 years in in Solana and two when do you when would you ever deem Solana like successful and you're just it's time to pack it up um dang I would like to to see like the ecosystem bro so much that um I don't have any impact on all the other things besides I can actually like my highest impact thing that I could do is be like a really strong individual contributor to the code that's that's what I would think it would be success and uh I would just continue doing that like one of you know my favorite like mentors like through my career where like these like gray beards that were there from like the 80s that are just like you know principal Engineers that just like get to work on whatever really cool interesting part of the the code base that they want to um that would be like kind of my dream to get there so slowly but surely this is what retirement is to me is that like I get to code and the parts of the system that I care about um I think Solana like metrica success it's really hard but like I would say that there's like these vanity like metrics like tvl or place in the top 10 or like the market cap which I think are like really don't capture like success at all I think if crypto really grew like to the point that it has impact a lot of people I don't really care about any of those metrics as long as Solana is actually coordinating you know hundreds of millions of people's private Keys like that they're all actually transacting in the network and there's thousands of doves that are building applications I don't really care about the before 10th or third or 20th or 50th even as long as that's happening right like I think that that's kind of like the more important metric to focus on is are we actually like touching people's like lives in in like a daily or you know even monthly or like fashion like so that would be I think success for me like I hope crypto grows so fast that Salon is not in the top 10 but we're also like are impacting like you know half a billion people on the planet that would be like the biggest success that I could imagine you said you're a philosopher early on in the episode um I want to ask a philosophical question which is that you know you you've I think I would say Solana the network has been quite successful and and you've touched a lot of uh like lives and helped you know you know I mean I build my business on Solana et cetera Etc why are you still here you know like what's the why um that's a good question um I don't know like I'm like a person that seeks stress too like I like I have always taken on projects bigger than I can chew so I think that's part of it um and I want to see us get to that point where we do have like 100 million people like all with public private keys that are all like trading it's doing something like coordinating doubts like all on chain um I like honestly believe in that future I think it would like transform the world you know like when people talk about like lack of democracy and transparency if you had 100 you know like everyone in the world was able to transact on Shane it would be Global democracy right like it would just really be like transformative so I don't know there's something there that's like interesting enough that like one that's why I get up every day and like I want to like inch in just closer and closer to about we were talking about messaging on top of all this like Chris Solana and I I do think as new users come in it's going to be a whole different story and they're gonna like listen to you they're gonna see what's being built and I think the performance optimizations at Solana's working on is going to relate a lot more to like web 2 developers it's really going to hit that once we get past like this first wave of users I am curious because how you just describe Solana probably hits really well with someone that is a bit philosophical or technical if you just you know sat next to me in a bar why would I use Solana like how what would be your your like pitch to an average user the basic thing that you can do now that's really cool I think are like the permissionless payments just like sense start using usdc on Solana you get settled immediately you have it it's yours and it's very very strong guarantees like uh on security um that's that I think is like after 2008 and like the crypto collapses and the banking crisis in the US I think everyone has likes a bit of understanding that like whole store like owning your keys with private Keys like owning your dollars with private Keys is like much much stronger than like trusting some third Adventure Party intermediary just to store them um same thing with like I think crypto I think that part of it is like that idea of like permissionless money is probably still the most important use case um and I think Bitcoin or ethereum are like very important parts of that too uh beyond that I would say like I really like collecting nfts I would like recommend that go find a really cool artist and drip and like go subscribe and like get that experience of actually owning your art like djinpo it got banned from Twitter right for like a hot minute I don't know if he's back yet but like he's back yeah no one no one was able to take your nfts you didn't lose the relationship that connection that you have and that's a really cool thing like that is actually a totally open platform for artists and and like and fans to be able to connect to artists well totally um we are going to get less philosophical and more lizard brain um I am going to just ask some rapid fire questions um and just answer as well as you can but if you want to expand you know feel free to expand of course all right um what do you enrage disagree on we actually argue all the time about like what should Labs be focusing on what should we be building um and that's like usually things are good if we are able to disagree and like fight through it and get the result it's bad like when one of us is like disengaged and we don't get that and then like well the other person just drives it and that thing it usually ends up like [ __ ] so so it's really important that we do disagree and and like that process is really important I don't know what we I'm gonna remember the last thing we disagreed on um he thought oh yeah I was like we should run another nft like uh like kind of like hackathon style event that we did and he thought that where it's cringe for us to do it for labs to do it it's it's better that the community is doing it and like you see that kind of activity of like artists being promoted through like natural like kind of um organic like places like drip or whatever so I don't know if he's right maybe he's right we'll let the audience decide yeah um what do you fear the most when it comes to Solana uh like a zero day attack like zero day bug that's like the scariest thing I can't wait until fire dancers out and there's two implementations of the runtime but yeah it's zero day is like the scariest thing what is one thing that you were super excited about in Solana but that nobody else seemed to just quite pick up on people do do care about this but like pdas I thought was like the coolest thing that I actually designed in the runtime is this idea of like uh because it uh it's very very hard to build these like escrow systems that are able to take ownership of assets uh and like this is the whole account abstraction all this other things and you look at like all these are the runtimes and I like had this Eureka moment that there's a way that you can do it with by abstracting the public field so you didn't have to like create an object or type or or whatever you just simply said that like anywhere in the entire like Solana runtime anyone that interprets like a public key has a like 30 you know 32 bytes as a public key you can actually substitute it with a PDA and it just makes composition like so natural like Dad doesn't really have to think about any of the stuff or like it's just naturally flow so yeah it took a while for that to catch on like I would say a solid year but I think people appreciate them now and pdas are program derived accounts by the way yeah right yeah yeah um um yeah gpus are really hot right now with everything in AI I I think Solana might use gpus for signature verification do you see it do you see a future where gpus are used more because I know in the initial test when you were showing like I don't know if it's 500 000 TPS whatever it was you're often quoting gpus is being used at that time yeah like when we got to a million signatures per second that was using um pretty old gpus at this point like I don't want to say 1080 but it might have been like an Nvidia 1080. yeah it was a 1080. so like four 1080s would get you to a million signatures per second like the thing is that like AI needs the latest and greatest for this kind of operations that the network needs you can actually do with like pretty old old gpus to get a boost um it's actually like really really hard to use them for that because we without something like asynchronous processing of like The Ledger like because the the latency to load the data to the GPU is like in the orders of hundreds of milliseconds so it actually eats into the block time but the fire dancer guys have done is that they took a very very old fpga like the fpgas that run on AWS cloud and they're showing that they can do a million signatures per second and the latency is like been microseconds it's like someone millisecond latency so that's really really cool so maybe not gpus maybe fpgas but these are like old old fpgas we're talking like a few hundred bucks like for for one of these how do you think about competition um there's some stuff that I think is good coming out of competition I think move is like a really well designed virtual machine so I think that's cool um I try to like basically like the way that you uh should behave is you should be trying to competing against the best version of yourself and like looking at the whole industry you're like okay what would the best version of me do and how do I beat them and they would like gobble up all the best pieces that I've ever wanted like integrate them to to accelerate I think stuff that uh has been done that's that's good that's worth copying is like I think move is a really good VM I think polygons show that you can get like somewhere with um actually getting brand deals and like kind of accelerating some of it I think that's maybe important for like the foundation to pay attention to um not so much Labs but like um op stack defined like is a cool thing like the fact that there's like a now like a kind of almost like a product category op stack the fact that they were able to take this very complicated thing and create into like a word I think that is pretty cool like I think it's worth maybe for Solana to do this uh and like we're trying to do this out of labs a bit with like um like game shifts developer SDK where we basically aggregate all of these like service providers and apis across all these different companies and so like here's like a single stack for game developers so you don't have to go like try to figure out how to integrate with 10 different companies so like something like that I think like when I see like competitors do something interesting I try to adopt it in some way um at least not labs what does everyone get wrong about Solana it's not decentralized it's just um this is such a dumb dumb thing especially now like hell we like survived the FTX collabs the fact that the network went through that [ __ ] show and like has continued running and people continued building it it's like the most decentralized thing possible I honestly don't think that like ethereum could have survived consensus collapsing at a particular moment in time but ethereum would have died um what does everyone get wrong about crypto um what does everyone get wrong about crypto that's a good question that I think I think people have to understand that the Protocols are not companies and this is like a lot of that I see at a trade file like this misconception that's very very like they're just applying these old like old models and cons and like Concepts to crypto like uh Solana's a bunch of Open Source Code anyone can Fork it anyone can Fork ethereum you can go run your own instances of all these networks and the token is just really representing the spam like defense mechanism for these like Communications networks that's it it doesn't give you like voting rights it doesn't give you participation right it's like there's it doesn't do anything else like the only reason like why all these other things work is because we're able to coordinate like our decision making power with like public keys and like quickly come to decisions and like kind of build up on that but it's a very Network effect kind of thing it's not a corporation or a company it's a bunch of Open Source devs that are volunteering to work at a particular thing but anyone can leave it anytime so what do you think about Ethan what do you think about Ethan's uh ultrasound money do you think it's useful that people in that Community want to be a deflationary or is that just marketing I think it's um I think it's a it's like a dangerous meme I think like the problem with it is that like the like if you think of it in terms of that as like an investable thing the revenues on ethereum are pinned to the value of ethereum itself and like if ethereum drops so do the revenues and you kind of like have this like Revenue death spiral and it's uh like if that's what people are valuing then it's might end badly like this is why I think like I think it's kind of like worse me than store value unlike Bitcoin because that idea is just like digital gold it doesn't promise anything it's just like just there it's just there it's a dumb pet rock there's no promises of it being anything more or anything else than that and I honestly think that's like a less dangerous meme like people I think should be very careful too of how they uh approach this idea of like ultrasound on it favorite three programming languages oh like I was a big Haskell nerd actually like this is like I would say Haskell C and rust those are my top three okay two more um your most unpopular opinion doesn't have to be crypto just most of your opinion oh man uh [ __ ] what is my most unpopular opinion I don't know I think like within crypto probably that the hardware costs don't matter like it's probably like that that one's the most unpopular one I don't know besides that one what else that I have that's pretty unpopular I don't know I'm surrounded by by yes men oh no uh well uh totally you're obviously a Founder yourself um of of Solana and your CEO of Salon labs there's obviously a lot of people that want to build the future of crypto uh and especially on Solana what advice would you give to aspiring founders um I think it's like really really hard to build a company like you so I don't know if you saw like uh Mark and Jason's post they are 4 000 Investments 15 make it to 2200 are like profitable or break even or better 15 become companies that have 100 million more in revenues so like and those represent 97 of all the returns so you can kind of think of it in terms of that like you're you're probability of success as a Founder in anything even outside of crypto is fifteen and four thousand which is and like you're that kind of dream success right like 200 or 4 000 break even and that that you can consider like a really solid like founder story um given that I think it's awesome like I think this is the most transformative amazing experience like if this if you're like if you like stress like I seek stress right like if you seek stress if you're one of those people that has like low heart rate or whatever it's an awesome very rewarding very insane experience you will feel like you're on top of the world or like the depth of Despair like every other week um and you meet like a lot of people that become really close friends from that shared experience that you otherwise wouldn't have I think that kind of trauma really like brings people close together you're really encouraging new people to come to the ecosystem and I think the Solana Community is awesome like kind of awesome founder network uh really good I think if you see these really good Founders that help each other really good businesses to work with and uh it's I think one of the best places to go actually start a business um I don't think your probability of success is going to really change with what whether you're in crypto or not or which layer one you pick or not I think that's honestly like those are minor points um at the end of the day yeah talking about Community it's just Salon is as you said they uh you chew glass at Solana right and it's like over the last year or so it's like you've been punching the face a number of times but you keep coming back and to me the community is really stronger than it's ever been um and that's that's why I think this is so impressive and um we close we'll close this up now but uh Anatoly thanks so much for joining uh today I hope this conversation helped anyone that's either ignored what's going on Solana or misjudged it um I think it's gonna be a really exciting year and it's a great Community to be part of so Anatolia thanks so much for joining us for sure great all right we'll see you next time [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] Back To Top