Everything you need to know about Solana | Santiago Santos & Konstantin Lomashuk

Transcript

hey bankless nation we are excited to bring you another bankless panel this one is all about solana solana a layer 1 blockchain some have people have called it an eth killer maybe an east competitor maybe it's an east companion dave and i realized we wanted to learn a bit more about solana and the ecosystem and to have a panel where we could have a uh a fairly neutral conversation about solana to dig in deeper uh so that's what we're doing today we've brought two fantastic guests which i think can represent a bull case for for a solana perspective in a kind of a credibly neutral way so know these two guests are very passionate about defy know they care about values that

that the bankless nation cares about that's why we wanted to bring them both on david do you want to tease who the guests are and then maybe we can give a quick tease of what this panel is going to cover and our positions going into this panel yeah sure so we brought on uh santiago santos who is a big ethereum bull uh and is also bullish on solana and so for somebody that uh i like resonate with their bullishness on ethereum i would like to know why like what are the rationales behind the bullishness on solana and so we're bringing on santiago just to for for that angle and then we also have constantine lumashok uh who has worked uh many different projects around the world uh around the the crypto ecosystem uh part of the lido team um uh

has experience uh with validating uh systems proof of stake systems blockchain systems so he will be useful to talk about the nature of the uh technical details of solana uh and is also bullish on solana and so uh i i have detail uh questions about that and then i also we i think we also have to ask you know kind of more or less the same questions that all blockchains have to ask themselves the nature of the token distribution uh the nature of who gets to validate uh and just the why it is a a what did it unlock right and so from what i've been able to gather solana is a pretty cool piece of software from the people who are tech more technically competent than me they have good things to say about the software that is solana and so i want to

dive into that as well yeah absolutely i think um we we probably both of us have a a particular thesis coming into this conversation right one that we've held for a while so you know first of all the vision when we started bank list was we want a self-sovereign bankless money system for the world the most decentralized system possible we saw that in bitcoin we saw that in ethereum we see that in defy and um we've always had an open mind to like what is coming next i will say i i probably have a um a preconception going into this conversation uh and that that is this um solana as david mentioned is a cool piece of technology they're a real project there's a real team behind

us there's some uh fantastic engineering talent they have a real community um i see backing from some interesting funds uh ftx and uh you know other crypto banks as as well so i see some some traction so it felt time to have a conversation about it um other layer ones like haven't reached even even this stage where it's worth spending a lot of time on at least for me but dave and i thought it was time to have a conversation about solana i will say um my current perspective on solana is that i believe it might be a bit too decentralized or too centralized to be a global world settlement layer for defy

things i'm going to ask and i'm concerned about the ability to run a node from home is very important the ability to kind of verify transactions and opt into the system there's some issues with state growth that seem unresolved some questions around the supply of the token this got a start in sort of vc land in a pre-sale that wasn't publicly available a relatively small group of folks who have been distributed the token at least in the early stages some of that may be decentralized i think ultimately i've concerns about the uh the number of validators that it it you know takes and the number of colluding parties that it takes to kind of co-opt the network censor it uh roll

back the chain these sorts of things i i feel like my take coming into this conversation and the way the the reason i'm i'm sort of um spending some time to illustrate this is because uh it's important you get a sense for for the questions david and i are asking is it feels to me like solana is a fine platform for a lower value settlement maybe things like nfts are you know great for it uh maybe other low value use cases but um i don't think it's decentralized enough to be the bankless you know defy settlement layer that we want from this space at least that's my thesis going in and i'm open to the conversation around this open to change my mind but all of

this might mean it doesn't actually compete against uh ethereum it's actually a companion to ethereum in the same way other side chains are other layer twos are even centralized exchanges help propagate they do settlement on ethereum too so ultimately i i do want to echo the sentiment that this is not a zero sum game like we're all in this together i do think that salon is actually good for ethereum so the eth killer versus ethereum uh thing is is somewhat of a myth but we do need to get to the bottom and have a conversation about the the trade-offs of various systems and particularly the layer one that we

select for this industry as kind of the the shelling point for all d5 we need to make sure it is as decentralized as possible so i'm probably going to be asking these panelists some questions along those lines i don't know david if you have anything to add that's a longer preamble than you know you did it yeah i felt it was important all right so let's go ahead and get into the takes from our guests and so but before we get there we must talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible when you shop for plane tickets you probably use kayak expedia or google to compare ticket prices so why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto when you make your trades you want to make sure that you're getting the best possible price on your

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arbitrary so you may want to pack your bags in preparation for the great migration to the arbitrary layer 2. to keep up to speed with arbitram follow them on twitter at arbitrom and join their discord hey guys we are back with the panel that is all about solana we have two guests for you really excited to introduce them to you the first is santiago santos he is a crypto investor he spends most of his time at the intersection of defy and the metaverse he has a crypto punk of course number nine one five nine he's a former partner verified long time investor in the space also a repeat bankless guest santiago thanks for joining us today great thanks ryan thanks dave it's great to be here again we also have constantine lamishok who is

uh an investor in the ethereum crowdsale and also a solana seed investor so both of those networks at the same time has watched them grow from little seedlings to what they are now so i think offers a fantastic perspective also a validator in this space a co-founder of the p2p.org project uh and also lido he is a unisox holder need to mention that we've got to uh pump our nfts whenever possible right guys constantine welcome to the show it's great to have you hi guys all right fantastic well we are going to get into the panel with i think the first question which sort of sets the basis for all others which is what makes you bullish about solana santiago maybe

start with you yeah look a minute i think um it was interesting i think generally when you're investing in this space you have to keep an open mind of of how things are evolving i think protocols are organisms that expand and grow and um bitcoin i saw bitcoin early on and ethereum early on as well just and like they've taken a shape of their own and they've grown in a very meaningful way i think uh what drew me to solana was um was a couple of things but i i think this idea that um the number of developers that were um entering the space not just like solidity devs going to solana but it was more like new talent entering the space and i think that was a large part the gravitas that sam ftx and that

consortium has um they're they have a lot of muscle and resources to attract new developers which i think is net positive to the space descript when i say the space i think like you know ethereum bitcoin just broadly kind of crypto and to me was really encouraging i was a judge in a few of the hackathons and the number of developers entering the space was improving and talking to these developers the thing that i focus on the most is how easy is it to build insulin and i think that the dev tooling and resources have come a long long way since they launched what is it a year and change ago a year and a half ago a year nine months ago so i think to me that has been most encouraging it's sort of like followed the devs and and why they're building and solana and

understanding that led me to to become more interested in in the space and also i think you alluded to this in the preamble which is well there are certain things that i think like certain blockchains is my view that our app application specific blockchains you know like a blockchain doesn't need to do everything i think we're we're in this mindset that we think of the internet as this one you know like just the internet right but i think blockchains might be different where they might lend themselves to this trade-off that you're making the security and centralization and and faster throughput and um and settlement and and execution and lower cost and so i think ultimately i think that to me is this a growing desire to see more different use cases

be explored whether it be social or nfts or stuff that you know if you're if you're settling you know a million plus dollars well you're gonna value security a lot um but you know there are certain applications that might not require and and especially the user might not even appreciate decentralization security so ultimately i think it's now positive as you said and to me that was most interesting and have been uh for a while now supporting and just observing what's happening and and on the device side of things and also the nft kind of metaverse side of things so but i'll pause there we definitely want to get back to the conversation around um the use cases for salon and how that might be distinct from ethereum or or similar to ethereum when we talk about the apps but let me throw the same

question to constantine now so constantine uh you were there from the very beginning both of ethereum and also of solana so tell us what made you bullish on solana in the early days and then what uh what makes you bullish now yeah you know it's my answer is pretty simple it has a different vision on scaling and it's not bad it's good you know like uh if you do only i mean the same things it's either but for ecosystem we should try different one and compete with each other it will bring you know like a better product for final users and before uh we start this discussion i also want to say that i'm a big believer in ethereum success you know like and

have you know like much more ethereum that i bought on for example on crowd scout sale and uh so i'm not going in this conversation try to sell solano uh my goal is you know like to show that solana and ethereum are good friends and there they can co-exist together and together we can achieve like the goal of decentralization and censorship resistance faster and like to bring more value i mean to everybody then if you compete attack and try you know like uh compete with each other and also i i mean uh in 2014 you know like i did a report about all blockchains and their this valuation is

more than one hundred thousand dollars it was about 100 of them and we split them already in 2014 and proof was taken proof of work and what did we try to understand what is the difference between all of them and what we saw we saw even in 2014 already a lot of bitcoin maximalists you know they still exist you can see them now we have a lot of also ethereum maximalists i don't try to say that it's bad it's also good that we love the products that we build but what i try to say that i mean we need to to look uh deep more we need to make more critique not only to competitor but also to products that we love and push to make them better so back to the question you

know uh in 2018 when it was the beginning of crypto at the beginning of crypto winter so nobody want to allocate capital to new pro products especially to layer one and i had a conversation with anatoly where he told me like a lot of different things you know i didn't catch everything because he's more technical than i am but one thing that i catch it was like that he want to build the blockchains that scale with the speed of technology you know like and it is a little bit different as this that we have in this ethereum for example when you want to like make more like transaction for example when you want to build more scalable solution and if it is new hardware

exists you can make more transaction per second and in this different vision you know i'll allocate my capital because i think i don't know what the division is i mean or like what what is better finally what will win what ecosystem will mean i i will happy that like all those ecosystem coins coexist and will find own uh like place on the market and there this is my goal that's what protract i what what i try to do from 2018 i run a validator i run this notes i help you know to make it censorship resistance and central decentralized yeah this is my answer david you're muted

fantastic constantine i appreciate that uh perspective and um but both of you got your both of your guys's answers uh had some sort of a allusion to um solana being a meaningfully different innovation than just um what would be just a fork of geth right like and i think the reason why like we we are doing a solana panel rather than like a binance smart chain panel or a avalanche panel is that both of those things are just forks of death right like and that's not really true innovation in my mind and ultimately it's it talking about the evm is ultimately just talking about ethereum with extra steps salon is not that solana is its own thing it's bringing its own uh innovations to the table and so my question to you guys is what is solana

optimized for as a result of its new like package of software right like and uh do the do what if a salon is optimized for something is it optimized for something that is similar to ethereum and what ethereum is is optimized for or is it something different um santiago let's start with you i was gonna say constantine if you want to go first but you sure i'll i'll jump i think you know i ultimately don't my view is that solana perhaps takes um like every network i think through utility decentralizes so bitcoin and ethereum were pretty centralized i think initially as well um

the the constant team's point i mean i spoken anatoly and he he worked at qualcomm i believe and so it has a sort of view of how uh networks scaled in the early days of the internet and and i think there's sort of these sequential waves where um you know you have this technology no one really cares about it then it gets a lot of traction and it pushes right the limit of a server of network and then you have sequential waves of innovation but there's this sort of gap where there's more demand what the network can support and i think that experience from anatoly coming from the network side of things is interesting ultimately i think both ethereum and solana are designed to be just generalized and i don't think they have

a particular um like vertical in mind now i think as i think of it i mean i'm skewed right because i i like d5 um but i've also become more interested in nfts in the metaverse uh and back to my original statement you know i think solana is more this is my view i don't know why it was if there's this is true of its design but i think that um at least for now you are more likely to see applications that require less security uh both from uh especially on the user side of things and can scale more easily um and and i think those are naturally things that have been tried to theorem but haven't gotten that much traction or have gotten reasonable traction but i

think you're seeing a lot of like i think i think you're seeing over a million active users in salon a number of transactions per user is like two three times higher than ethereum why because i think it's just cheaper right and so all that's telling me is that social nfts um gaming applications at the moment of where the network is in terms of its security um and concentration of validators sort of if you look at the like nakamoto consensus i think is more well suited for those types of applications now over time that's not to say that like d5 applications for instance cannot i mean there's something like mango and a very thriving d5 ecosystem that is being built a lot of which has been hey what's worked in ethereum let's pour it over to solana and build that

right i think d5 is like a core backbone than any any of us i think most player one chains are now realizing hey look wow d5 is really the killer use case at least in ethereum let's port that over and have all these yield incentives to attract users um my view that perhaps we should discuss at some point is this idea that d5 protocols when you're securing that type of value you know like i think tvl in salon is actually quite small at the moment it's like three billion or so and ethereum's like it's like 30 or something or much more um and the question is can you actually get there and will institutions and funds get comfortable like meaningfully staking value in the solana ecosystem and

i i don't know it's sort of like i think it's still tbd um my view is that it might take a little bit more time to like battle test this network um and but but it's not to say that it can't get there so longer than answers saying i think at the moment you're in this curve of security decentralization where applications that require less security um are probably and are more like computation intensive we're going to get more traction but um but yeah that i'll pause there but hey david you're muted again thank you uh constantine same question to you uh since solana is a new suite of you know software it's a new collection

of softwares how is that how is that software collection like optimized for differently or similar to what we see on ethereum you know i think like old blockchain tried to like like optimize to i mean from one side security from other side scalability from the other side decentralization and there i said that like it's a lot of critique to everyone still to ethereum for example i mean launch of beacon chain from one site is security but like it's give a lot of chance for exchanges to be like the leaders of proof of stake for example uh these are also like or i mean for example so and i think like ethereum

tried to be secure first you know and they're decentralized and sound like scalable you know like by different other and to move not so fast and solana doesn't have you know like this option to move so so slow i mean like uh sold in a social secure way they take a lot of more risk because you know like to i mean ethereum like is that almost number one blockchain for i don't know how much four years or i mean if you don't like uh look on bitcoin for example and solana only launched in 2018 you know and they try and to build a system to bring developers to do all the things to build the product is really

difficult and there is not easy that's why you know like when somebody like could like make a lot of critique to any products i i send them to build something you know and there i i think of course solana from one side they want to be censorship resistance and do they are they're doing a lot of work i i i i can say yes they bring so many validators they spend so many funds on top of it they spend more time on like validators than maybe any other blockchains maybe like zac did a good work in cosmos uh of course it is like some issues with that but like uh solana did a great work in uh i mean uh salona to build like this validated community and it's

not a lot of other blockchains that gives this example but i think the main goal of uh i mean uh like salaan is giving you scalability it's still think about security about decentralization but the main goal to run like an application that can be composable with other applications and has one billion users is it a complex task yes it is is it like a lot of different way how to build such blockchain yes it is and this is like just different approach so i'm curious about your your model for things guys like so when i think in my head about like um decentralization right and trustlessness first of all it's very hard to pin down and define right but it's very clear

there's also like a a spectrum of of trustlessness right and and uh decentralization and so let's say you have on the on the far left of you know most decentralized smart contract chain out there we put ethereum right um and then on the far right you might have you could call something like um coinbase for example or binance or something that settles to other public chains uh chains of themselves right they're kind of like single validator i guess um ledgers if you will that settle on top of this open ecosystem of chains and then if you move a little bit further right you might get like side chains for instance with some

sort of you know delegated proof of stake you might have like cosmos you might have um you know polygon in its in its for in its current form uh and then maybe somewhere in between i you know i can't quite make up my mind you have like a a solana which is possibly a bit more decentralized than a delegated proof-of-stake sort of you know tendermint based chain like something in the cosmos ecosystem something like terra uh or not and what i first of all i'm curious if this is kind of your mental model um and and also like what one i guess uh thing i forgot to mention is we also have layer two which is essentially i would say further further

left closer to ethereum because while it has some you know cryptographic and economic sort of additional trust uh requirements it's still using the ethereum network ultimately for its economic security and its full security so it's kind of like a is this the model is this how you model the world in your mind and then like b how much decentralization is enough for something like defy and santiago i'm curious your take on this first yeah i i think your mapping is relatively how i think of it as well and and jumping directly to the question around defy is look i mean i think

anatoly sorry um constantine alluded to this earlier i think if you anatoly i've heard him say a number of times there is an implicit belief in assumption in sort of this moore's law concept that the cost of running validated lana will go down pretty dramatically over time which will allow for more i guess diversity of of the validator set and because right now there's what 900 coming up in a thousand um and but it's still relatively expensive i think to run a node um and constantine you you you can collaborate corroborate correct me if i'm wrong but and so okay it begs the question right um when you think about security i think the security is what is the economic

cost to a taxes chain okay and and and i think the simplistically you would say okay i think you need like a third or whatever to a third or two thirds i guess like um two two two for validates to glue and then like you know roll back the chain or like attack the network fine but i think when it comes to d5 so i think d5 protocols it's an interesting dynamic where my theory is okay so if you're a d5 protocol you have a lot of these assets you have your own token right and you have all these users right that are using your protocol your maybe an amm or a money market then i think when you have the choice of

which validators to use or like i think it sort of like increases i think the cost of the attack because like you know there are these stewards i guess of capital in the system that are that are going to choose i think the validate the validators so like it's not as like we think in theoretical terms i think uh okay what would happen if someone were to buy all this equipment and then like try to attack the network but the reality is there is some choice in that i think process uh where d5 becomes an interesting i think mitigator to simplistically just saying oh it's going to cost x to like get x percent hatch rate or x percent of the validator set and just like collude and

try to attack the network i think is is my theory but um i'll let constantine jump in yeah what do you think constantine so you know same question um is this the model that you see the spectrum of decentralization and how much decentralization is enough for d phi uh you know uh it's a complex question i mean i can't measure like this decentralization of solana on this spectrum and there we even don't have a lot of data to do it i mean if you look on our for example ethereum validator set how we can calculate how many real validators are running in the network we can't you know like i'm running the natural kind don't know how and by that

you mean like individual people like companies like individuals like some other parties you know uh how many professional validators are running in ethereum you know the and the amount is really low why because ethereum didn't have delegation and as a lighter we tried to find these professional validators and bring them to leadership is it anyone please don't reach us we will be happy to give you like some steak but i mean and in case of salana it is also like they have now like for example 900 980 like militators in the data set but is it all real people i mean it is a difficult to understand it's different

to like measure what is you know like or i mean what is there or really censorship resistance is it like one thousand validators is it ten thousand twenty days and when i speak with these guys for example with anatoly or like with bankrupt from ethereum you know they all pushing us they say we need ten thousand validators you know but is it economic enough to pay everyone like for the run you know validation is it possible to run individual i mean uh validator by uh by individual is it you know like flashing condition so it is you know like really complex thing and to you know like and it is so it is a lot of our things how we

should measure it and there are we could have more metrics and now we don't have so you know like yeah i i even can't like say like is it like ethereum proof of stake network is like for example like how much decentralized i can't measure it you know if i could ask a question to constantine because i've been involved lito and i think lido has seen impressive growth but there is this idea of how much should light will be like like what percentage of the network should lighter have right because the theorem is transitioning to pure state and it's a i'd be curious because if you you when you talk about this mapping right or you think about decentralization proof of stake concept is how much is too much

because lido's gone incredible traction but in maybe if you can talk about that constantly because like i think like it forces to think about like ethereum and so on in the context of okay light is getting all distraction you're you're approving certain validator sets right and new validators into the lido trusted ecosystem if you will so so i think that acts as a mitigator right because you know these people you know these operators in some capacity you know that they're you know there is always some sort of social trust in any of these networks now it's not realistic to assume that you're gonna in a world where there's like 10 000 values you're not going to know all them right and it's sort of this permission the system that anyone could just spin up right their own infrastructure um and so the question is to you

constantinos lido expands into solana like would you say that like okay it's a fairly like limited validator set today but if you're a d5 protocol or if you're a big sole holder you're going to choose which which um validator then then you're going to have to like do some due diligence you're going to have to vet that right if you're a d5 protocol and you're holding all these soul and tokens well like i think that's ultimately like we forget but i think blockchains are social constructs of coordination like there is always an element of hey i trust constantine because he's been running validator nodes forever and i know his like i know his slashing rate i know that he's super competent operator and and there is an element that i know him and i know he's probably has an

incentive not to attack the network or be corrupted but but that's just my sort of perspective yeah you know like we are as ptp.org we are running notes like for many years and you know like it's how people choose validators they can't understand it's more marketing you know like or sales it's like i mean users even the funds they don't think really a lot on security and this is an issue and that's why like products like lido can solve this problem because what is the goal of lidar is to make happy ethereum holders is to extract for example mav to ease holders is to keep network decentralized is to choose like best validators and then more

competition between such actors like glider then more they will bring validators for example when i'm speaking with anatoly and say oh we're going to like why they want to launch us on solana and he said oh we need ten thousand validators you know and i and i say how you know like what should i do it's impossible and he said let's do it you know let's find the way we will find some like brands some other things and it's complex it's complex things and i i what i try to say is that you know like to make this network decentralized you are like bankless what bank this is doing you should push people to like to go to leiden to go to ethereum foundation to go to other

parties and push them like to make this network decentralized it should be more politic discussion about of stakeholders to push uh i mean uh to decentralization back to the question of solana you know like i mean it's it is it has like 980 like validators but i mean like it's more maybe decentralized than like 10 validators or 128 and i mean we still don't know how the biggest like decentralized network has uh how many validators it has but i mean amount of validators it's only part of decentralization also it depends how like it's contract architecture of this blockchain and all other questions

yeah there are so many factors that make up uh decentralization including like even token distribution which we could talk about i'm yeah let me maybe throw out throughout kind of some of my experience so um constantine i um used to actually have a validating entity validating company um did some work with uh cosmos it's on the early cosmos test net and um one of the things that was interesting from a you know observer's perspective of being a validator was you know cosmos uh had an ico so it had some distribution but what would seem to happen post the launch of the cosmos hub is that a lot of the stake kind of collected in the hands of of wales and a relatively small

number of validators so nominally there'd be like 100 validators right but like a good portion of the network they were all in the same disc we're all in the same channels we knew one another you know like um a lot of the actual validators were former employees of like tendermint and uh and cosmos uh and it just it just felt very and of course it had um you know governance on chain vote governance and it felt very centralized and i don't actually fault the cosmos ecosystem for that right it's using it's kind of you know delegated proof of stake type model and uh to be fair its vision is actually not to have a a single chain that rules them all it's to have this massive ecosystem of self-sovereign chains and

city-states right um but this is kind of where i'm coming from when i look at solana right so we have uh generally a closed sale vc sale you had to be an accredited investor to get the tokens dominated by a bunch of vcs but also validators who got in early on the solana launch right and many of these validators know one another i've heard that you know 18 validators or so have 33 of the network like it's a relatively small group of people but but what it doesn't have and what i think ethereum does have is the ability to actually run a node at home right like on my comcast internet connection

i want the ability not to run a validator necessarily that i want that ability but also to run a non-validating node on ethereum and just like make sure that uh i'm not getting a bunch of like garbage injected in by occluding group of validators so to me that's what's what's kind of different is it's uh you know coming from that perspective um it feels like you had a more centralized launch than something like ethereum you have a small group of validators who become kind of the you know almost like the early banks right this is uh like they control sort of the ledger it's a smaller consortium smaller group of people and then the

average user doesn't necessarily have the ability to to run their own node to to clinch it off and so what santiago you were saying earlier about hey some of the stuff decentralizes over time actually i partially agree because i think token distribution decentralizes over time but when you construct a network that um requires such massive like bandwidth and like uh you know state growth is is a problem it's a problem for ethereum for instance right i worry that ethereum is going to become more centralized over time and because state uh ish like state growth issues remain unresolved so i'm curious your perspective on some of this maybe we'll just start with like the ability to run a node at home how important is this for

the decentralization of an of the network constantine yeah so or you know like you tell so many questions and i even tried sorry you know i remember your product you know like back in cosmos ecosystem you had like a beautiful website these are good for for big fishes you know like i remember this sir this was like meet those right yeah yeah exactly it was yeah yeah i was running notes too yeah there you go yeah so i i i under i you were one of the first school you know start to work in cosmos ecosystem made the website i mean before everyone else and start to outreach people you know and i saw on your website try to copy some like pieces and try to do the same and i am

agree with you that like cosmos ecosystem for example i don't remember how talking holders they have for example 3000 yes but i mean the distribution was i mean pretty centralized but you know i i i am agree with the opinion that then more utilities and better distribution if we look back in ethereum it was only 10 000 people who participated in crowd sale for example i participated two times so maybe like it was i don't know how much you know a couple couple transactions yes but i try to say that it's difficult to uh understand uh the real i mean like or decentralization of stake but we know that ethereum has

like traction it has a lot of users and the redistribution happened during this time people saw talking so like something happened the same i think is here then more like a utility for the network then more uh network will be decentralized in the long term and also about the running like the equipment at home i asked my team you know like devops team how much this equipment i mean is the price of this equipment it can be like the prices it will be like from five to twenty thousand like for the one setup and you can run it at home for now i mean it's not so many transactions when the state will go when they're like uh i mean our amount of transactions

will grow you need more for example like uh like video cards but still the same is mining you have like i don't know small uh like container of some is like a lot of different mining equipment so can you like run it at home i think yes uh the question is like would be like the best like performed note i don't think because you need to have a team around it uh i mean but if you had devops you can like buy it and i also you know like this equipment is cheaper and cheaper like every like two years the price is going down so that's why you know like if you speak about youtube in 2000 everybody tell you that i mean it's impossible to that somebody will

for example have a youtuber and nobody will would invest in their youtube in 20 and 2000. the same with zoom or skype for example anderson and horowitz you know when they start to work on browser one the first idea was to make like calls between each other but it wasn't possible and what i tried to say that you know like i mean are the the price of hardware will drop down and for example you already like on uh i think like uh on our playstation has one petabyte of like uh yes ssd and you have some other uh like metrics so i i in my point of view if you want to run a note you need to

have some delegation in stake and you can do it in solana too and also yeah from a practical perspective it's like i'm just curious because i do think this is a fundamental trademark trade-off that solana makes right so like uh we can run an eth2 validator and we do uh on a raspberry pi at home home internet connection basically right um you know uh solutions like rocket pool do things like you know decentralized i know lido is moving to a more decentralized model too but the average user can run it at home i couldn't do that necessarily with my cosmos validator node i mean that did require a bit more devops but it was possible

maybe right solana i worry that like from a practical perspective maybe like a hypothetical yeah somebody one guy could figure out the devops and like run this thing from home he's got you know high super high speed internet um but it's not part of the culture and maybe that's a trade-off that is made it's basically like hey we're going to have lots of validating nodes and other nodes throughout the world they're all going to be on aws and they're all going to be in data centers in various locations and that's okay that's the point at which solana is on the spectrum of decentralization but it has not prioritized the ability to like for a regular person to run a node and read

write to the ethereum chain is this kind of a fundamental trade-off because this is part of the challenge i when when i have solana you know discussions with people i always feel like we can't get to like the bottom line of okay i there are some trade-offs that are being made between ethereum salon it's like what are they if this is one cool i understand now we understand the trade-off now we can have an argument of whether that's uh good or not but is that the trade-off do you think constantine the inability to run a node as an individual user yeah right how many for your friends you like know a lot of people in ethereum community and and maybe like it's a critic you know but we need to like speak more openly about it how many of them are running ethereum node really

like i mean validation now and for example i would be really because of the slashing because of the other risk i would really i mean worry to run it by myself because i'm not so technical i can't run it and i i would use the special software then can you know like uh damage my note and i would be not really sure that it will work in a way uh in a secure way so how many people do you know like who is running ethereum note at home i i think the answer to that question misses the point and it's not it's not it's not the wrong point but the the the option to run a node is extremely important yeah yeah yeah yeah and yeah but you

at home i think i i don't see like her i mean i i know people this devops people they have her like vpn inside at home you know like they have like a service at home and they're they're running vpns and some other things is it possible right now i think it is but uh what you need to be like or to do some research to spend some time and you will stop it racing at home santiago what's your take on all this so far i think yeah like look i i think the solana foundation would tell you it is hard to run a node today it is it's just more expensive it requires more technical expertise um

the hope is that an anatoly says it's a technological problem not a computer science problem it's an engineering problem i've heard him say this a number of times i think he's right i mean ultimately you are banking on this idea like our weave is for instance the cost of running a node will will collapse over time this sort of moore's law construct of hey it's going to become cheaper easier you're going to abstract away some of the complexity for anyone to run a node and maybe that's what opens up a lot of these use cases that we talk about where it really you know as i said earlier it might just open up and solana can become visa might choose to settle usdc on salon for instance but it chose ethereum

so is it too late at that point maybe maybe not i don't know but i do agree like from a design perspective at this moment in time i think we can all agree that it's harder to run a note on solana and i think the solana team will tell you yes and they're focused on that and that's that's the the challenge right um so so then i think it moves on to the second part of the question because i think constantly alluding to is then then social trust and diligence becomes very important the social layer of these networks and the culture becomes more and more important i think earlier on earlier in the stage i think there's a transition of trust and and and of course and and sort of security and decentralization right

now i would say there there is a lot of trust in solana that you need to be trusting these validators that as you say ryan i don't know for a fact but if they all potentially could collude well i think like just to pose another question is like how much do you trust in fiora and and joe lubin and the consensus team and you know there is concentration there will always be concentration the same way that like if you look at political systems like it is unrealistic to assume that everyone is going to run node in their home it's just let's just like agree on that because it's not going to happen i think we can probably make it easier for people and try to layer in some incentives but um i think people ultimately just delegate

and and want to to use trusted delegators and as constantine was saying there needs to be more talk and more discussion across networks not just solana but also in ethereum and also we talked about bitcoin like where's hash rate it's all in china right okay well let's let's talk about that and let's figure out ways to mitigate that not like brush over these things then i think it becomes important to do for instance tooling and educational resources to say hey this is the track record of this validator and this is where it's based these are the people maybe there's a blue check mark that says these are whatever someone's like validating or like attesting to the legitimacy of this validator or

something like that right ryan if you're running a mythos well hey like someone can vouch for you and then there's an implicit social layer i think on top of this consensus that that creates i mean this is sort of the idea of slashing right uh but you can potentially maybe include a reputation layer built on top of that that becomes interesting because i don't think you solve it as easily for any network i think you're always there will always be a gravitational pull towards some concentration the question is how hard i think in salon it's easier to go towards that extreme that you're talking about ryan where it's just by design at the moment it's easier to go to a state where it can become uncomfortable for financial institutions and large people to settle value like

meaningful value of this network and this is kind of an improvement this is kind of what i like what i worry about and like back to back to david's point just just because people lots many people don't run um nodes at home you know um it's kind of like i mean many people don't vote in their democratic elections right particularly their local ones right um and so should we say at the protocol level well hey we only get like 25 percent shown up to these elections let's just stop elections be way more efficient if we just had some you know central leaders who could make the decision in this jurisdiction this area it's like well no because it's important to have the option to to vote in these elections and i think that's important for

the most decentralized base layer settlement layer d5 protocol uh to preserve i think ethereum preserves that and that's kind of my question about solana maybe this is why i would say like i think we're all on the same page that solana plus ethereum is like pi expanding and is great for the space and it's good it's like it's great for ethereum it's also great for uh solana so like i i don't ever want to to um couch it as a like this versus that but i i do want to fight and make sure we preserve these values of decentralization that the entire crypto movement is based on the ability to opt out of the existing system i don't want to have us at the protocol layer

the deepest layer of this whole financial stack some kind of a centralized lock-in and maybe to constantine's point hey it's like look man this is all going to centralize anyway and people aren't going to run raspberry pies through their home and like if that's the case then man you know that would be sad we will have lost something in crypto and then i kind of go existentially i'm like what the hell was the point of the whole thing you know and so yeah i mean the users care about decentralization no but okay like let me offer you other data points for other networks that i was running validated so like taser was for instance if you were one of the early bakers which is the validators you were gone like to your point if you were in top three like you would it would be like it was

more at that point a marketing effort and bd and it was practically impossible because i would be offering like ten percent five percent like take rate on the on the reward and you gotta go find whales don't you i mean i played this exactly it was it was i mean incredibly hard to convince people to un-delegate and redelegate and they were paying 40 um to a validator it is wild you know i said economically rationally speaking you would say these people would switch and they didn't right it's hard right people are lazy or whatever what happened people when it comes to money you rarely switch your bank account and i think that dynamic for me tezos was interesting to observe uh now of course you could un-delegate and you i think

that kept like the validators honest and what they were voting for and you could you know there was a process to delegate in a cycle and what have you and so okay that's fine the optionality is super important right i definitely agree but look at look at uh cosmos too i mean you have to have a certain amount of delegated atoms to even be a validate now like to your point a lot of that was an early advantage from a lot of employees from tender who who who cleaned up i mean it was just easy for them to do that right it was an unfair advantage i didn't like that i didn't agree with that so i i said you know what i don't believe in that even though tendermint as a protocol i think is pretty interesting but i didn't like that dynamic of the validator set

and i thought it's it's a it's a big kind of it's a challenge i think for a newcomer at least in some of these systems just to get reasonable validation this is difficult uh so it's also a sales effort and a bd effort um i think tara is doing something interesting actually where obviously like there's more apps being built in the tarot ecosystem which has been pretty impressive to see and what they're doing is the air drops that some of these protocols are issuing and the tara foundation i think is layering in rewards um to incentivize users to delegate to smaller validators in the set and this is what i was going at i think like this could be an incentives design

where if you're the foundation heck if you're the solana foundation let's just agree that that's sort of like the more neutral party that has a really strong incentive not to like for the network to be secure the same with the ethereum foundation and consensus did it early on um and the terra guys are doing it well let's just like create incentives to stimulate a very more vibrant um validator set and incentivize users to delegate to the small guy um or to even subsidize part of the hardware i don't know if this would be practically possible with solana but this is just an idea that i've had which is tara is doing it and i found it interesting because even as a sort of as a font or what have you i was like okay this is interesting i'm just

going to re undelegate from the large guy and try to really delegate to maybe the guy that's on top 10 or top 20 and has never has been slashed or what have you never skipped the blog yeah just want to add something you know like i don't try to say that i mean i i am happy that like ethereum can run like on raspberry pi i just try to say to look like and now i i think it's one of the most important things you know that you can launch a note in any place and to run it you know but i just tried to say i mean to look on reality you know like to discuss it to push it you know we need more discussion for example now to run an ethereum note you're not like

you need like 32 e's how much it is it do you know how much city is right now it's like 120 thousand dollars is it a lot is it like expensive is it or i mean i mean how much they're equity rather price is cheap but like the stake is expensive so i mean it is a lot of things that we need to push and i'm 100 agree that it should be available to run anyone and note at home this is definitely i mean the right of blog that blockchain should give you yeah i do want to make one quick distinction like uh 32 eth to run a validating node right but like you can run a non-validating node at home which is which is important

which is also essential so that an individual can read and write to the blockchain without going through any third parties but i've talked so much david i want to get let you get a question in here well i i do want to move on to other subjects but i first want to maybe hopefully wrap up this conversation with this with this question and i'll put on my skeptical eth maxi hat and say that uh ethereum as a consensus system is built to be neutral to allow any sort of expression of alternative systems to be built on top of ethereum that's kind of its goal maximally simple uh layer one blockchain to allow layer twos to be however they want to be uh and so my skeptic hat is is saying why didn't solana if uh get what it wanted to get out of

like a more scalable platform as a layer two to ethereum and my my uh malicious skeptical hat will say well if you deploy as a layer two to ethereum solana wouldn't be able to do like a a vc pre-sale race and enrich a lot of many early founders like you they they wouldn't be able to hype themselves up as a as a layer two in the same way that they would be able to hype themselves up as a scalable layer one and so they perhaps chose the layer one path rather than a layer two on ethereum with a money motivation right and to me that like taints the incentives of the bootstrapping the genesis of this this ecosystem so that that's my skeptical ethereum maxi hat why is that wrong constantine i saw you shake your head

why is that wrong yeah yeah you know like do you know how much are like this l2 solution now raising obviously money do you know the valuation i think i'm just did a 1.2 billion dollar one right yeah much bigger than like really one solution so any like that you want to build well so the question still stands like why why build a layer one instead of a layer two yeah so the question is the same yeah so i mean like layer two solution still has some i mean uh like uh price cost you know like to run on ethereum it has some uh restrictions it's not so i mean it's depend on what what you can do in ethereum too so you need like if it's like roll up for example uh then you

need to have an ability to like uh i mean uh to execute it on ethereum if something happened and this is like price is this is like a user experience it is like some uh issues that's going with like l2 solution and there you know like i it is a lot of people who are has own vision of uh of a solution and it's good you know like it's a big thing and they're they have it why they can build own way how they think like this layer one should work and there about like this we see money i mean what we see is doing is usually allocating capital and not all of them are bad you

know i am allocated capital and many blockchains and we know i allocated capital it was a small capital it was my pocket money allocated in ethereum and it was a big thing for me you know i'm a boy from kaliningrad you know like i don't i don't think that you know what it's calling that but i mean i just don't try to say that like give me the chance you know like to do it solana didn't give a chance they didn't like give a chance i mean to everyone to invest but not because they don't want to do it because the market changed it was impossible to make ico in 2018 not because you didn't raise capital but because it was a security risk they based in u.s guys and there it is reality you know and as they did their race i think by 40 cents or

something like that by coin list and a lot of people can participate in it so but it's not a lot of people participate so they have they give an option to everyone coming so i mean uh to like answer this question that i i am you know like for broader ecosystem than more solution we have the more competition we have do you remember like how slow ethereum development was three four years now your ethereum community is much stronger is better why because it is like some competition in the market it's good for us you know it's good for ethereum believers that it is some strong people like building something else and it's push ethereum also forward and i think it's good

yeah look back to your question david um i think that there there is there may have been some motivation to and look we've seen that in icos right people realize that you build your own and there's there's much more uh sort of the idea why employees leave google to go start their own there's more upside so so there may have been some i think it goes back to the very very first question which is i think the anatoly had a vision for a different architecture design uh to a blockchain and vitalik's been talking about scaling and ethereum since they want it's been an issue in everyone's minds and anatoly i think from his perspective had a different way of constructing a blockchain incredibly like it's not like bsc to your point david you were the one

that brought it up it's not avalanche it's it feels more unique in its architecture in its design that is refreshing because we don't really know like i don't think we have perfect answers to how these systems will work i think it's very early we can try to think about this stuff and look at how much does roadmap of ethereum change over time and i think you know to me that's instructive of we don't know this is why this space is so exciting it has a lot of technological challenges and social challenges that haven't been resolved but it's fascinating that's why the smartest people keep coming to the space because people love working on difficult problems and so the other point that i want to make is i think adding to that whether you build a l2 like arbitrarily

or optimism you're still sort of beholden to l1 and what happens at the l1 right and so so like to be fair if you really want to break from this architectural system that is ethereum and then you have to you have to break and you have to make a difference you know a different system now my thesis is it will be a multi-chain world and there will be a lot of connectivity between these blockchains now yeah we talk about composability and all this sort of stuff but by and large i think we can all agree here that it is a win-win in many ways where there might be huge gaming applications in solana and social applications in solana and then to be a much thriving evolved

developed secure system of d5 and ethereum and let's talk about that let's understand the connectivity of these chains because i think it will happen i think it's unrealistic to assume that one chain will rule them all i think you know it is net positive to see flow even though people have terrible experiences there and realize very quickly that sometimes sometimes decentralization does matter it's sort of like flooding trends when hits the fan you're like oh okay i should have bought insurance but people realize until they want to withdraw and stuff but by and large i mean it's bringing on how many users have nfts brought to web3 and look the idea is even even libra coin not to get too off topic but even libra i was slightly positive on because i said okay well you have two billion people that

are all obviously going to wake up with a wall and say what the hell is this and then it's like okay i want to earn money and what else can i do with this and i think that's what i'm more excited about it's a perhaps more practical approach but you know i think um i think is solana an l2 to ethereum maybe is so or maybe possibly right you just build a nice bridge and it's a hard problem these bridges but i think someone will crack that now yeah can i add one point here so for example i also invested like in a bit from like some other projects i should disclosure it and i'm going to deliver a full disclosure to you yeah so uh also like i'm a good friend of like alex who is building the casing and it's amazing software and i hope that it will

be successful but it's a little bit different you know like it's still i mean to launch it to i mean to be an ecosystem it's still really complex and there are i also like uh had a team that is working on evm for salana and you know like it's if i am just a program inside salon and my vision was i i like allocate capital to you know to build the roll up uh it's called neon labs you know like it's like to build a roll-up from ethereum to salon you know like to execute ethereum eb but use ethereum like uh security and scala salon scalability so my goal you know like that it should be all interoperable it should be all like

more like tied together and use the best features of everyone yeah i think we're in full agreement about kind of like a um you know a multi-chain uh world right whether that's like you know we already are at a multi-chain world which is what i say when people ask that it's like it's like look uh binance and uh coinbase these are all additional chains these are side chains right like and they they set all these public networks let me ask you uh another question this kind of weaves in maybe um seoul as a as an asset as a as a token and kind of the valuation of it so another thing that's kind of tripped me up uh in evaluating salon in the past is this this this pie chart on the far right which is um distribution of of solana and um i think constantine you

made the point earlier like okay for folks that can't see this by the way 48 of solana distribution according to a missouri analyst report um was allocated to insiders uh credited investors in the u.s this is the the initial sale of solana so this doesn't account for how it's distributed since that sale versus um ethereum you know 15 right so uh we had more concentration at the very early stages of solana which which kind of lends in the in sort of the crypto native crowd to people calling uh solana kind of a vc chain if you will right not as not birthed by the community like something like an immaculate conception of of bitcoin or

because ethereum was the first ico and it was kind of publicly available and it uh you know it got through that gateway and issued publicly like it has kind of a special story about its its issuance solano's birth just like any other kind of silicon valley vc project and by the way not their fault right we understand the uh the financial prison that we live in in the u.s for those of us who are listening from the u.s that prohibit um some of these uh you know icos and crowd offerings and this sort of thing my question is how does this affect the trajectory of the network though we've had this ongoing conversation about um monetary assets in crypto right this conversation

of is bitcoin money is it historic value this conversation eth as money as a store of values a pristine collateral but as something that is used as a unit of exchange and meaning the count now we have solana which is less distributed from genesis does that mean it takes a different path do you think does this affect the effect the decentralization of it there's no proof of work uh period of time where it's distributing it's it's kind of going back to the validators and and the owners so what are your thoughts on that and are our souls essentially competing as money uh santiago let's go to you first yeah i want to make one point which is if you look at the blue shade in in this chart uh that you pulled up i i think the it's a little tricky right because

there was no vc allocation in ethereum although there are some very very large euro holders that participate in the ico that had they knew each other that collectively owned a big big stack um i i think insiders like is a little bit misleading because there were large whales in the ethereum ecosystem just to be fair that that collectively owned a big big trunk of the network and over time i think what was perhaps one of the best things that came out of the 2017 ico boom was that people were spending their eat and that led to reorganization and further distribution of eth across many many hands

um but it's a little tricky but look i'll take the point right i mean is is solana vc coin and what is that what are the implications of that because every other network you know to your point ethereum was the immaculate conception of what an ico was and it was oh we can't do this and so we're forced to work within a construct and it's very difficult it kind of is a dialogue that we should have with regulators like what are we designing here because what are the side effects of the of this uncertainty but anyways i think a couple of things right if it's centralized i mean i think solana one of the things that i've been thinking about is how quickly can a network evolve and adapt for a long time it felt like a theorem was sort of gridlocked and it was very

difficult to get moving it was difficult also to fund development if you were a whale if you're a protocol it was somewhat difficult to say who should i give money to okay joe lubin spun up consensus which look a lot of really good projects came out of that and i think look kudos to that and i think all the ethereum community and protocols come a long way as a result of that but it was difficult right i i wonder for many many years like okay if you're a d5 protocol how do you give back to ethereum because i i was like how many actual developers are thinking about e2 scaling solutions and what if i wanted to give grants to that and and have some say in that decision making process and it was

difficult and i guess there were competing designs and and look i i agree with constantine i think the pace of development ethereum maybe it was d5 to put pressure on the network it's like all right we've got to figure our stuff out quickly or a combination of that d5 taking off a killer use case and then other protocols launching i think it's healthy competition goes a long way um i think solana again is at that stage and other networks are more centralized and that allows for certain changes in the protocol to be they're more agile now you may agree if that's good or not i think some design trade-offs and changes in solana and decisions have been made in a fairly swift manner by a few insiders um that you know you have a community call and what have you but at

the end of the day you know you can credibly vote certain stuff amongst a few people that's i think i think that's still the state of the world for some of these networks including solana and in dfinity and maybe file point where like you know a few funds and large holders including the team unless the team is abstaining can can pass this stuff but ultimately like i'll give you my more practical answer to all this is the beauty of blockchains is it's this hyper-competitive world of open source so if you want to do dumb stuff and you want to do stuff that destroys value and it's short-sighted or nearsighted people are just going to go to another blockchain and that's the beauty of competition

right it just keeps people more accountable if you're we tend to think about like a concentration is bad right if you're apple if you're some random webtoon company yeah like people can just vote this stuff or proxy vote and whatever and and no one there's no accountability there's no transparency but you juxtapose out of web3 world which is open source ruthlessly competitive and the cost to copy is barely nothing so like i think protocols whether they're apps like d5 protocols or layer ones are always beholden to hey we start doing stuff that pisses off the community as small as it may be then we're not going to go far and so even if you had even more so right if you have a big big

stake in a network and you're a vc and you're a a team why would you destroy value and you're being held accountable in real time because it's open and transparent and that i think is the biggest it's sort of like the heisenberg principle people are observing you in real time being super critical of what you're doing because everything is publicly visible and immutable and if there's a digital footprint of everything that is being done in these networks and i think that while concentration is i'm not agreeing or not saying that is good or bad i didn't i'm just saying concentration you should decentralize over time yes sometimes being more centralized can help in agile development and making decisions

but at the end of the day blockchains are coordination tools and the community is the layer zero of all of these networks and if you don't listen to the community even though they might have a smaller stake you're done you're not going to it's sort of the fastest way to be irrelevant and and die in this ecosystem what about that second question that was um woven in there which is about seoul's having a monetary premium do you think uh does that factor into your analysis of of the valuation of souls right like right now it's interesting because like you know the framework where we see things like bitcoin is primarily stored value ethereum is like we got capital

asset we got cash flows um we also have a commodity being used as gas and we also have it being a store of value so this monetary premium do you think solana is valued in the same way that ethereum and ether is valued or do you think there's a different valuation lens through which or do you think like sometimes uh peop people like me tend to overanalyze all of this and it's like who the market doesn't care it's ju it's just kind of a narrative and so however this plays out in the long run in the short run it's just going to be valued based on um the way of uh ethereum is valued uh it's a great question ryan because i've come from a fundamental background much like you and i i like ethereum

especially now with the ip1559 i don't think by the way i don't think most people appreciate the full extent of vip 1559 i think most people are just like like constantly are focused on nfts and minting those but like i don't think it full okay i don't think the entire market has woken up to the idea of how transformational eip 1559 is to it like let's just start with there i think the market because it's so early we can't even agree on valuation methodologies for crypto i mean it took 40 50 years of traditional in traditional markets for benjamin graham and like in valuation methodologies of p ratio and valuing it off of ebitda and recurring revenue these things take time i think it

requires like banks to like put out like equity research reports or like you know folks like us that like are tweeting oh look you know some of these like protocols are trading at distressed multiples and they have all this cash flow and people are like oh no i'd rather ape into like some random vocal that has no traction like this is how rational this market is like that's why i don't short this market um so i don't really know how people are valuing these networks at times i can i think it with ethereum it's easier for me to understand the value proposition of what eth is as a substrate in the system and seeing all the activity and i think in a similar manner my framework for salon is not too dissimilar from there which is you have soul you're going to consume soul maybe less

but it's a sort of like um how the things that i rest on like where i get conviction on is what i said earlier which is number of developers which is now up to a thousand in solana how easy is it to build what are the applications being built as a proxy for how big can this network get the number of transactions and settlement um and and putting aside hey let's just assume that like this network's not going to be attacked and all this stuff like that this stuff can be figured out but you discount by the way you discount the valuation of solana at this stage based on these risks that we've discussed in this call um whereas the theorem is far a little longer than that you know when when london was announced

and eip 59 was also agreed upon by by the by the miners i'm like all right well to me that was a very clear motivator of and it changed the dynamic of how i looked at the theory in a very in a very meaningful way and i can tell you other large players in the market that were hadn't any exposure to eve also were very very observant of this dynamic because for a long time it's only been bitcoin this monetary premium you talk about ryan has only been bitcoin and so oh you know it's like how many how many bitcoin maxes are like oh let's see what's what's the uh supply of ethereum it's just like they would always go to that it'd be like the most dumb like argument you could ever make

but lo and behold you know people listen to that and then you have a network that is burning and then you're saying oh wow it's a settlement layer of the internet oh wow all these transactions oh there's a very clear way to value this network uh so anyways uh a very long response my framework for solana is somewhat similar very similar to ethereum does it have a monetary premium today tbd constantine do you want to you want to touch on these subjects uh yeah you know like i mean you also we also should understand that it is a discussion you know like if we like say that ethereum and salon are children so ethereum is seven years children you know like and salan is three year

children are they different yes of course like they have different problems on different level in case of i mean uh back in 2014 when we most thoughts about like how uh what is their like uh value of these blockchains what is their i mean token value what how we can compare it you know like and we like try to we compared like ethereum for example with the country you know like and where where you have micro economy and macro economy and there are then more transactions inside the more companies inside you know like the centralized applications then more activities there are the more values and more you can extract you know

in case of burning the same i think is with solana you know like if you have a developers inside if you have applications time they make transactions then they can do transaction businesses like for example cross and marker economy i happen to know like then more value for and the more narrative to use i don't know like bitcoin ethereum or like uh uh salana as the currency but you still will look on numbers you know like you still will look how activity inside how many like assets locked for example so and this system is much more transparent than current system and that's why we are doing we are here you know that's why i love like all these projects you know that's why i love to

spend time on it and there yeah so uh i think like any product that will have real activity not just transaction you know for i don't know like validation or for something that has real people inside real products they will find their own value and they will have a find all value proposition and they will have extra you know like value and maybe like can be used by as money and you know like i i believe like this is money and big funds already invest in investing is as money and like for example all why they like accept only eases money because you know like it's a really good case and good example i appreciate that perspective and i want to as we come to a close on this panel and i appreciate all of you guys times

and and going a little bit over so i'll ask this one uh uh quickly uh ryan and i are often criticized as being eth maxis um ryan will definitely say that he's not an ethmaxy um definitely not david definitely not and i i would also like to reframe like what i am maximalist in is developer activity and if we are talking about smart contract platforms which i do believe is where this industry goes uh i will be a maximalist about whatever the developers are a maximalist about and so if one specific system has like 99 percent mind share in developer activity then i am 99 a maximalist in that thing and so what what it would take for me to become really really bullish about solana is seeing uh a developer ecosystem grow

around solana but also things that the developers are building on solana being built there first rather than being built on ethereum right because like we are seeing a bunch of like copycat nft projects like now we have solana punks and we now we got to lana squiggles like what are you really doing here and so like uh mike my question to you guys is what are you excited about that's coming to solana that you might think will come to solana first before it comes to ethereum um santiago you want to start it's a great question david um i think you'll see perhaps more complex computationally intensive d5 primitives like option protocols and perps um that have been

struggling in in ethereum uh you know things like mango or synthetic uh you'll get just a number of users of some of these protocols more complicated especially option protocols haven't truly taken off in define ethereum and i think it's largely because it's expensive to update to refresh and so i think that's one that comes to mind the other one is is gaming um something like star atlas or uh uh like i think some of those applications maybe social as well those would be my top three kind of use cases that i think may may garner like more attention i'm seeing

like from a use case perspective in the developer composition um to me it was interesting to learn that a lot of these developers are like new folks um that don't know solidity and just enter entering the space there's few have been like uh rage quit ethereum because it's like i'm done uh there's a couple of examples but it's mostly been like folks in um so like uh i think solana has a big office in chicago chicago is a very uh very like um trader uh focused like market and there's a lot of folks like sam was a jump and you know it's pretty tech sorry it was like jane street and so or jump and some of these shops that you know they're like

financial guys but they're also quants they're developers so like i think you'll see more and more developers in that arena and so naturally because they're coming from that field they're going to probably want to build more complex d5 primitives um on solana um so so that's what i'm keeping an eye out for constantine same question to you what what do you think what's the developer environment on solana going to be like and and what do you think are what are you excited about coming first to the salon ecosystem yeah so first of all i want to say that it's a lot of problems inside salaam you know we just tell a lot of good things but i mean it's still uh i mean early days it wasn't a lot of hacks

so we don't have any like uh attacks and don't know what we can what can happen it is there not a lot of auditing companies i mean it's a big market so like maybe somebody like will build a or audit company to for solana and there it is they're really difficult to like develop application right now because it's not so many examples good examples uh and you know like it's the beginning i i i mean to launch like not even product is really complex and uh water i mean i i think i think like with like or more experiments is more uh tooling it will be easy easy and more easy you know and

there are i'm agree user i mean uh santiago about the use cases about financial use cases about d5 about games so where you want to for example to uh i mean to use to make like a turn like application with cheap transactions and uh i mean try to you know like to do it right now so some of them will try to build on salaam but for now we should understand that it's more complex than build it on celebrities but uh so i mean ibm also have a lot of own issues you know like solana is multi-threaded so it's parallelized it's also it is you know

like it has a lot of unique features guys this has been a fantastic uh discussion i know um you know david said he's kind of a developer maximalist i would say like for myself i'm uh i'm a bankless maximalist so i carry i care very much that we don't create a new financial system that is owned by a new class of bankers that just take it over like our existing financial system and um i actually think some diversity in experimentation is good and i do think solana provides us that for sure and uh look guys it was just great having a a rational conversation like a neutral conversation about this topic because crypto is so tribal sometimes and it's it's

hard to separate uh the signal from that that noise of you know tribalness that that goes on so we definitely appreciate you guys joining and and thanks i guess maybe my last question for each of you as as we close uh is this um how do you think that solana and ethereum can live together in in harmony in the future like how do you think this is going to to really work out uh for both of them moving forward santiago let's go with you dave's laughing at my question but let's do that yeah um uh i i think it it there will be coexistence so let me just agree with that now i think the way it may look thinking probabilistically is um

kind of like wechat has developed in china because they totally leave for our financial infrastructure so it started with a social app messaging and then they built a suite of products around that and and then you combine that with like the sort of aggregation theory that i think this space will really kind of go towards because right now we're all beta testers it's like it's like a speck of dust like the number of users really get paid to like experiment with this stuff that has spill a lot of risk and ethereum and bitcoin everywhere um but like you know just give an example um maybe a lot so long as it's an onboarding funnel a big one with that you have like things like star atlas and games and social applications

and then you might just click a button and say oh i want to earn yield on this or swap my my in-game items and then that might get settled in ethereum depending on whoever you're using uh the end user may not even know or care which blockchain to get set along it just by default will get settled on ethereum let me tell you why because when let's just assume that 95 of users don't interact directly with layer one they don't even know maybe they're interacting with the blockchain but large financial institutions maybe paypal or visa or jp morgan or whatever and i think at the moment security is

the thing that most people say hey do users care about decentralization i think they may not even care about decentralization i think finance marching kind of told us that in a very clear way at least so if we assume that most users may not value central asian as much they might value utility so again they might be starting solana they might swap or use some sort of financial function which you're going to be using ethereum maybe potentially why because your aggregator maybe the jpmorgan or the game that you're using will route to ethereum because it's safer or because they perceived it to be safer and then security begets more liquidity which which improves the set like the the the slippage on the trade and so i think

that's like the state of the world that i'm excited about and which i think ethereum has a mode in d5 which is it's more secure chain today so if you're an institution like visa or paypal you're going to use ethereum and so more liquidity because security becomes more liquidity and so it's that virtuous flywheel that it's just going to be more efficient to trade on ethereum in size uh and your your aggregator your financial institution your app whatever you're using may just decide to route it to ethereum because it's it's just uh it's just easier to do so that that's probably now technically i i'm not in a position to like comment on on the feasibility of that

but i am actively kind of thinking about bridges and how that might work um so so yeah i think that's how it probably you know works you have millions of users in solana which are going to require doing other things other than playing and some of those some of the in that journey they're going to use ethereum constantine what's your take on this how do these chains coexist live in harmony how does this uh play out over the next few years first of all thank you for the discussion i mean uh yeah it's great that we discuss all these things and they're openly and i think we should speak more about the problems and there are you know like who are like this salon in ethereum it's like we are like

we are the community we are people who is doing it discussing it right now who is pushing it like in some direction and what we need like we should keep this blockchain decentralized together solana like ethereum like to lets all validators of ethereum lands around salana and so on validators around ethereum nodes you know like and it will be already big things and we have what we are building you know we are building like internet of value and it will be better if it will be built on only one blockchain you know because it is also a risk it will be good if it will be a lot of different layers and it will be more secure i think without collaborating together

to you know like uh i mean to give everyone on the planet like to make a transaction without like permissionless and uh not censored and our goal as a community like of this like blockchains is you know like to like speak more about it to push these blocks chain keep them to be decentralized you know and this is important you know like uh so what we can do what like salana and ethereum we should like work together on and bring our values i mean to our community and they're trying to keep the blockchain decentralized and work together to attract more like billion people here and give them this values

absolutely those values are the layer zero of this entire crypto space uh santiago constantine it's been fantastic to have you thanks for walking us through solana today uh learned a lot great discussion was had thanks so much yeah thanks guys really appreciate the time bankless listeners risks and disclaimers of course crypto is risky so is defy you could definitely lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys not your keys not your crypto that's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallets which makes proper private key management a

breeze but the ledger ecosystem is more than just a secure hardware wallet ledger is the combination of the ledger hardware wallet and the ledger live app and if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite d apps all in one place ledger is where you want to be not only does ledger let you buy crypto assets straight from the app but it also hooks into decentralized exchange aggregators like paraswap which makes sure that you are getting the best prices on your trades without your assets ever leaving your control defy never stops growing and the ledger live app grows alongside with it so click the link in the show notes to see all the defy apps that ledger live has and stay tuned as more and more apps come online and if you don't have a ledger hardware wallet what are you even waiting for go

to ledger.com grab your ledger download ledger live and get all of your d apps all in one place bankless is proud to be supported by uniswap uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum which is what ryan and i call a money robot no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy something brand new in the uni-swap ecosystem is the uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants we have been saying this for a while and

we'll say it again dows have money and they are in need of labor if you think that you have something to contribute to the uniswap dow apply for a grant to uniswap just look at the size of the uniswap treasury it's almost three billion dollars this mountain of capital is looking for labor do you have something of value to contribute to the uniswap dow no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply for a uni grant at unigrants.org and help steer unit swap in the direction that you think it should go that's exactly what we did to get uniswop to be a sponsor for bankless and you can do the same