What Happens When Wall Street Runs on Solana?

Transcript

Jetto is the largest liquid staking protocol in Salana. View ourselves as the economic growth engine for Salana. >> What is your long-term vision for the future of Salana? >> Basically, where all of finance happens on chain? I would say it's all done on a single state machine at the speed of light. You want to trade stocks on Robin Hood. How many hoops do you have to hop through to do that? Send them your driver's license. There's a whole KYC process and they limit you on how much you can purchase. It's like, what are we doing here? I think if it happens on Salana, you can download a wallet on your phone, press a few buttons, and then you have access to this whole financial system. Bitcoin is just kind of like a pet rock. Salana is like doubling and it continues to double capacity. It's hard to not be impressed

with what Salana has achieved and there's still so much work to do. >> Lucas, thanks for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having me. >> Yeah. Okay, so tell us what you're working on with Jetto. Yeah. So, Jetto is the largest liquid staking protocol in Salana and we're kind of view ourselves as the economic growth engine for Salana. So, we have a liquid staking protocol and then we also build a validator client which basically tries to optimize the transaction ordering on the network. >> Why would we need such a service on >> Salana? We started judo in 2021 and we just had this thesis that there would be a lot of spam on Salana just transaction spam and a lot of

>> and there has been because block space is so cheap. >> Yeah. And trans transactions are super cheap. Transactions are less than a hundth of a penny. So very cheap. Salana was pretty early back in the day. The tech has gotten much better but back then it was a little simpler which can be good and bad. Um for for a while it's pretty bad there. >> Some outages here or there. Yeah, I started doing MEV before then. So, I was doing a little trading on Ethereum and fell down that that rabbit hole for a few months. So, I was working my day job and then I'd go home and work on this trading bot. Discovered Salana, I think early 2021 and just kind of fell in love with it.

>> What was it about Salana that attracted you having come from, you know, your background with Ethereum? >> I would say it was just like the very low level stuff. I study computer engineering, so like very low level. how are how the processors work? That team knew what they were talking about like I could tell right away and it was kind of just a different approach. I think everyone was really focused on L2s and scaling through that method and some other methods and Salana was just like we think we can synchronize this entire state machine on one network versus many different networks. Started looking at the code and everything and just I was like oh this is a very cool network. I think it's going to scale probably going to deal with some spam in the meantime.

So uh yeah, we started judo in 2021 and built out this uh validator client and this whole system that basically tries to help Salana filter spam kind of like a cloudflare is I think that would be like a good analogy. >> So Cloudflare recently they well they're sort of this kind of intermediary between the end user and websites. They grew up being this sort of like DDoS shield and now they're like saying they're going to filter out AI bots and things. That's kind of like where they're they seem to be transitioning. That's what Matthew Prince has been saying.

>> Yeah, I think that's kind of like a good analogy for the past few years of goto. So, it's like take a lot of load off the network. I think we were pretty successful in that. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun building it. >> How do you measure success? >> I think there's like the numbers, but I think it's just like we're so intertwined with the Salana network. Like we ship a validator client, roughly like 80 to 90% of the network runs that client. We're the largest liquid staking protocol. Like we have our own numbers that we care about like the numbers I just mentioned, but at the end of the day, it's like how many people are using Salana and how much trading volume is there. And I think we have made pretty good contributions to Salana being what

it is today. Obviously, a job's not finished, but uh Salana is doing the most dex volume. The cool thing is that Salana is the cheapest place to buy Salana. The best place to buy Ethereum isn't on Ethereum. it's on like Binance or Coinbase or these sexes. And over the past like six to nine months on Salana, the markets and the activity have just gotten so good and the there's a lot of smart engineers working on exchanges and things like that. They're just so good that it's actually like much cheaper to buy Salana on Salana. >> Something that was really interesting to me to see, I mean, Salana has talked about real economic value, this sort of metric as a way to measure them by. So, we just put out our state of crypto report. we which we put out every year big data report just to see of all of

the projects in crypto uh which ones are people paying the most to use you know which projects are are people paying for block space for yeah Salana's way up there >> like Salana and Hyperlid are I think they're the top two >> yeah to clarify what you said like it's not even people paying the most like people pay the most on Ethereum when there's that market that crazy market activity I guess like two Fridays ago search pricing when everybody's trying to transact. >> Yeah, everything on Ethereum went up like I think the fee on Ethereum was like $1,500 for one transaction. So, if I want to sell whatever I have, I want to swap ETH to USDC, I got to pay $1,500 just in the processing fee. On Salana,

it was like a penny or something. Yeah, it's just the the number of transactions times the price per transaction is very high, but uh the number of transactions is much higher on Salana than other networks >> and it's going to keep going up and up. >> What misconceptions do people have about the problem you're solving? >> Yeah. So, we've been working on this new product BAM. The main customer for this is applications on Salana, but you need validators to kind of buy into this vision because ultimately they're the ones that produce the blocks and you want more blocks produced by the software to give the applications these kind of customizations. I would say more recently we've kind of discovered that some validators are very aware of what's going on in the Salon ecosystem and then

just other ecosystems. So they're aware of Hyperlquid. They're aware of these L2s and other ecosystems that maybe have a little more customizability over how things work. Some of the validators were surprised to learn like what Hyperlid is, how it works. Uh many of them didn't really know that. They're kind of like really in the weeds on what on running a good validator, not very in the weeds on the other ecosystems. there's some like education and awareness that needs to happen on our side to where maybe validators aren't fully bought in. They think it's like judo trying to sell something for a problem that doesn't exist.

>> Mhm. >> Yeah. I think there there's a real problem, a pretty optimistic solution. >> How do you persuade people of the value here? >> One thing that we're doing is trying to connect validators and the application developers so validators can really hear the application perspective. All these networks have transactions going through them. They're not just like magical transactions that will keep coming through. Like there needs to be good apps that are built on top of it. And if there's things that we can do like at the validator level or the sequencer level to make better apps, then the validator should know about that. So there's a lot of education and just like, hey, here's what we're trying to build. This is how we think the network should work and so on.

>> What is your long-term vision for the future of Salana? It's basically where all of finance happens on chain. So trading cryptonnative assets like tokens and trading actual stocks and real world assets. I would say it's all done on a single state machine at the speed of light. So I think it's a very exciting future. >> The advantage of doing it is the speed. >> What what advantages do you get for putting all of this tradain? Yeah, I would say the permissionlessness of putting it all on chain and just the lack of friction that would be involved.

Like let's say you want to accept a trade account or you want to you want to trade stocks on Robin Hood. Like how many hoops do you have to hop through to do that? send them your driver's license and all this information and there's a whole KYC process and they limit you on how much you can purchase per day until you like pass these different verifications levels and all this other stuff. It's like what are we doing here? So like I think if it happens on Salana or just blockchains in general, you can download a wallet on your phone, press a few buttons and then you have access to this like whole financial system. I think it's a pretty promising future if we can make that happen. Before this, you were telling me that you worked in robotics,

>> like autonomous construction vehicles. How did you go from doing something like that, so physical to working on go? >> I like robotics and embedded systems, basically things that interact with the real world in uh machinery and moving pieces and all that. I would say like when I was doing robotics, it was a lot of reverse engineering and just trying to figure stuff out. And I feel like that is kind of what attracted me to Salana. There's like this massive system. It's like what is going on here? How does this work? How is this so good?

Starting to like kind of peel the layers of the onion. And then uh like I just kind of got nerd sniped into that. And I would say that the mev and kind of trading side instead of moving dirt or whatever it was when I was doing robotics, it's like this movement of money and people trading and this uh activity going on that it's pretty similar to what I was doing in a uh past life. >> Moving dirt to moving money. That's the that's the connection here. >> Yeah. >> It's funny uh because the lead partner on our salon and maybe on jet too at our firm is Ali Yaya. Previously he was working in robotics at Google Brain, you know. Yeah, maybe this is just two examples, but it's just a funny coincidence that like there's this trajectory.

>> It's hard to not be impressed with what Salana has achieved and there's still so much work to do. The rate of increase of the capacity of the network. It's basically like way higher than any other network in existence like >> and with plans to double capacity by the end of the year. Yeah, I think they've already increased capacity by like 50% this year and then they want to double it and then I think it's just going to continue doubling probably like twice a year. So, it's just going to keep getting better and better and better and cheaper and faster. And then you have a lot of other stuff going on like the fire >> law but uh Anatoli's law.

>> Yeah. Yeah. New uh new law here. And yeah, you have other stuff like double zero, fire dancer, new clients, new applications coming on board. it's hard to not be excited about it. >> So, Bitcoin has been around for the longest and then you had earlier movers like Ethereum. Salana has been more of a latecomer in the grand scheme of things. What would you say to people who are just coming to crypto now and maybe they've heard about Bitcoin? Bitcoin certainly has the most attention on it. Maybe they've heard about Ethereum, but Salana to them is like a new thing.

They're like, "Well, okay, there's even more now that I have to learn about." What would be your pitch for them to get interested >> when you try to explain crypto to people and like the different projects you the best way to do it is just through analogies. I think the one that Salana marketing has started with is pretty good. So it's basically blockchain and NASDAQ speed. You know bitcoins this digital gold. Uh there's only so many in existence created in response to the financial crisis. You have Ethereum which is like can write programs on chain. it's really expensive and slow and then salon is like very fast and cheap. Tech advances at a very rapid pace and the best companies are typically ones that iterate and advance

the fastest. So if you look at all the blockchains and like Ethereum's kind of been running at the same capacity for a while now, Bitcoin just kind of, you know, it's like a pet rock and uh Salon is like doubling and continues to double capacity. >> Digital gold, not pet rock. [laughter] might piss some Bitcoiners off with that one. >> Yeah. Yeah, you might. >> Yeah. >> Will GTO always be tied to Salana? >> We don't have any plans to leave. And >> during the bare market, we were getting pit like the 20 22 2023 bare market. We were getting pitched a lot to go to other projects and ultimately I think >> was anything tempting?

>> Yeah, there's a few tempting things. Definitely glad we didn't do it, but uh ultimately it was like we can double down and contribute to the success of Salana and make it way better. Doing that is much better than kind of like trying to spread ourselves to too many networks. I'm glad we doubled down and like I think we had a big impact on Salana success. And yeah, I would say like another thing too is like what are projects that have gone to multiple ecosystems like multiple blockchains that have done well like there's not really that many.

>> Yeah. UniS swap, Uni Chain. >> Yeah. Yeah. I would say there's probably less than like three or four. >> So for us it's like focus, make concentrated bets and like try to help out where we can. >> Let me ask you this. But what was most compelling? Or if you weren't working on Salana, >> um, >> where would you be? >> I guess without naming names, we were pitched on like helping to develop a new L1 client or potentially be one of their early operators on that network. >> I think that network is launching soon or soonish. So, three like three years later. I think if we would have pivoted to doing that then we kind of just would have been like twiddling our thumbs for

a few years but instead we just like chewed a lot of glass and worked on Salana. >> What gave you the conviction to stay? >> A lot of it is the core Salana team. So not only like Anatoli and Raj but a lot of the engineers and just like they didn't really give a [ __ ] about the macro environment. It's like let's just make the fastest blockchain in existence. Ignore all the noise. the bare market in like 2022 and 2023 was pretty brutal, especially for Salana. And so there was a lot of like stuff swirling around that, but those guys and girls were just like so heads down on continuing to ship and make improvements, they didn't care. And I was like, "Okay, that that's a good sign. They're in it for the right

reasons." >> And so, uh, we kind of just took a a similar approach and just like chewed a lot of glass and helped out where we could. No atheists in the foxhole, as it were. >> You ready for a lightning round? >> Yeah. >> All right. What's the worst advice you've ever gotten as a founder? >> Sometimes there's pressure from people outside the company to grow the team in a certain way or focus on different areas. I think that is a mistake because you uh end up hiring too many people, diluting the culture. People just kind of end up like sitting around wondering what to work on.

>> So stay lean. >> Yeah, we're pretty lean team. We're 21 people. Everyone has way too much work to do and but uh it keeps us super focused on the most important thing. >> 21. Is that a nod to Bitcoin? >> The pet rock. >> No [laughter] more. >> Okay. Hard cap at 21. >> Yeah. >> What's your biggest productivity hack? >> Probably nicotine. >> Yeah. Are you are you uh a fan? >> Yeah. >> Okay. We just had Palmer Lucky on stage. He's been talking about how the reason progress has halted uh technologically is people aren't having nicotine anymore. >> Yeah, I can believe that. It's pretty interesting how helpful it can be, but uh you can definitely overdo it.

>> What's your preferred intake mechanism? >> Uh like Zins or something. I've been on notes recently or nudes or notes. Yeah, I would say that. And then >> the sweets have cornered the market on this. >> Yeah, there's so many flavors now, too. >> What's your What's your flavor [laughter] of choice? >> Um pretty simple. I just like the uh like the spearmints. >> Okay. >> Yeah, I would say that's pretty good. And then I mean good sleep it's like so obvious but like I would say if you have a eight sleeper or a ring or something and you have one or two drinks at night and uh maybe before you didn't really notice it but when you have like an eight sleeper or a ring or whatever it is it's like oh [ __ ] like that's a big difference. So uh definitely like not

drinking [laughter] pretty simple >> nicotine over alcohol. >> Yes. Yeah. >> Give us a book recommendation show film. >> I think Momento is a good movie. Oceans 11. I love that movie. >> Fantastic. >> I'm into like the sci-fi, Momento, like Westworld Foundation Silo. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Silo was great. >> Yeah. >> First season really loved. >> Yeah. >> Okay. And finally, what is the smallest hill that you will die on? >> I would say that if you litter, you should get That's like pretty pretty reasonable one. You should get like fined or something.

>> That's a good one. I mean, coming from Texas, don't mess with Texas is like the famous anti-littering campaign. Uh, you're in Austin, so Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is like a classic marketing line because when you say don't litter, people are like, "Well, screw that. I just thought about littering, so now I'm going to litter more." But when you say don't mess with Texas. >> Yeah. Oh, I got a good one. >> If you don't put your shopping cart back in the cor corral, you should get fined. >> That is a fantastic one. There's a fine line between anarchy and order and the shopping cart is an indicator of it. >> Yeah, it's not that hard. I think it's just Americans. Like you go to Japan or like Tokyo, it's like so clean and everyone's so respectful of the shared space. And then America, it's like

>> Yeah, it's different. I love it, but >> yeah, >> it's different. >> Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on Lucas. >> Thanks.