Solana founders on why the Solana ecosystem will thrive

In this episode of UpOnly, Cobie & Ledger chat with the founders of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, discussing Solana, what makes it different from other L1s, why they think it will last, and more.LinksRAJ G◎KALANAT◎LYSolanaShow Partner This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolioShow Notes Marketing Solana – It’s hard to even define what Solana is in English so that normal people can understand what it is – Very strong product market fit with Solana and developers – Next step: how do you get people to understand how to custody their own assets and why that’s important? Intros – Anatoly: “been an engineer most of my life, started at Qualcomm, was working on optimizing AR, was aware of crypto, started mining with GPUs not being used and pulled into crypto” – Anatoly: “had 2 coffees and 1 beer (LOL), stayed up til 4am then it hit – thermodynamics isn’t only measurable, you can measure TIME” – Anatoly: “Figured out you could trustlessly encode the passage of time then I was manic for a week… then talked to Raj and it all started” – Raj: “I spent 7 years in healthcare, started a company there, then was introduced to Anatoly camping and knew it was the biggest swing I could take in my lifetime” Who’s the Core Market? – We don’t even know – “Solana might be the go-to network to bring finance onchain in a way that finance people get” – If we engineer and optimize well enough, Solana will be able to move as fast as news through fiber optic cables (~speed of light) – Was introduced to Sam – 4 weeks after he tried out Solana they had built Serum – Everyone thought it was dumb to even try DEXs… – “but we knew if something was gonna work with blockchain, it’s probably gonna work A LOT” – Cobie: “I’d treat Solana as if it’s a developer platform with the core KPI as user traction” Developer Experience – Rust (coding language) acts as a moat – If you have enough conviction in the vision, you eat glass to build it – “The kid who built synthetify built it during his finals”     – THAT’s grit – C++ people do well with Rust, and tradfi devs do well with C++, so acts as a good bridge Engineers – “at a certain point these guys don’t see themselves as a “rust” engineer they see themselves as a “get shit done” engineer” – Should we support Solidity? Should we support EVM? – NAH. If you’re that good then learn rust. Preventing Shit Projects – Gotta just use common sense – Lots of community review – These guys who came out of capture the flag winners, they just destroy everyone’s code – Free audits on Solana! These guys check your code lol Solana Timeline – How to balance timeliness with quality? – “Shit, that’s a hard question” – Our goal is through these hackathons, find coders that will code, no sleep, ship products, XYZ and just unblock their potential How’s a Founder Raise Structured? – Need the lawyer to say anything – Cobie: “per year of lockup there is some percentage discount from the market e.g. if you lock up tokens for 4 years then you get like a 20% discount or whatever” – Your tokens are the main thing you have in your war chest Is having a central planner, even if it’s a DAO, counterintuitive for crypto? – When you delegate your stake to the node you don’t change custody – but the node has full control over it – With ETH, you kinda relinquish custody to LIDO – On Solana you don’t have to relinquish custody Solana Community – SBF obviously huge – Bahamas test – if you went to the Bahamas, how well would the project do on its own? – Read “how to start a startup” but like how useful is that lol – I’ve learned you gotta ship quickly, and only focus on fires when you’re steering the ship – Optimize for shipping – Very important that the way the chain works is as optimized as possible (speed, security, decentralization) – It’s really hard to build tho lol – first time we booted it up it ran for like 20 min then crashed – Then next time ran for like an hour, then a week, then we were like holy shit it works haha What’s Broken rn – Rn we’re just working on optimizations mostly – Just blood sweat and tears to make it better the core structure is good *Solana guys sent Ledger a beanbag without any fluff inside thought it was a body bag LOL* SOL hackathon – $1M of prizes and seed funding – Last one, 11 teams got funded with over $1M each tho… so the money isn’t even to attract people lol – Idea is to attract developers and forces everyone to come together at the same time, listen to the same things, form teams, and grow the overall community – There’s also pride, if you win you had to go through the gauntlet with everyone else New Crypto Categories – In 2017 everyone was publishing a white paper – None of it worked lol – Now people are actually able to ship this stuff and it works – The idea of a fully decentralized Discord that feels like web 2 is where a lot of the devs are working now Will an Algorithmic Stablecoin Ever Work? – No…lol – Cool think about Bitcoin was getting high grade cryptography into consumer hands – If that’s the most powerful peace of this, people will find a censorship resistant way to coordinate these things “What do you do?” Answer – I just say a bunch of technical words and their eyes glaze over – I tell people I work in blockchain and it will take over – When first looking for seed money, banks wouldn’t give a bank account when using the word blockchain – Cobie: “I just tell people I have a trust fund” lmao – Ledge: “I tell people I work in web stuff” – Ledge: “The only thing worse than saying you work in crypto is saying you’re a podcaster” – Cobie: “Only thing worse than that is saying you’re a Twitch streamer” hahhaha Thoughts on Bitcoin – Bitcoin good – Self-sovereign decentralized money that’s a store of value could be a huge force of good in the world Other L1s – Avalanche, Cardano, NEAR, etc – It’s all good competition – It’s like whatever the Lakers thing of the Warriors… in the heat they’re your enemy but hanging out later they’re nice guys lol FUD a Project – Safemoon – Dfinity – ETH – Cardano Dogcoins – Dogcoins are winning because money is abundant, attention is scarce and memes have value for that reason Free Alpha – Raj: “new normal. You wake up, Bitcoin is legal tender, just head down and stay on course” – Anatoly: “Don’t drink to much or eat too much, work out, don’t have too much caffeine. Just use some moderation” Music by GiovanniPickle