So it shows like the length of time period that it took to do something versus like making it up or lying about it?

Yeah, how do you prevent somebody from transmitting data or saying that it's my turn to make a block and then making it And there's a bunch of different protocols to do it.

And Bitcoin does this 10-minute back-off thing with the proof of work, which is really slow.

You had more traditional Byzantine fault tolerance where the entire network has to agree, okay, Turner just spoke and he's done speaking.

Has everyone agreed that he's done speaking? Okay, now it's Anatoly's turn.

Okay, now Anatoly, you start speaking.

oh, wait, he didn't actually say anything, he timed out.

yeah.

Who were you most excited to get a yes from back then?

Yeah, we got like really good early investors.

I would say we're like Foundation Capital and Slow Ventures and Multicoin were like the big three.

But I was pretty excited.

None of them were like huge funds and Multicoin was a really small fund at the time just starting.

And we were their biggest shock and surprisingly, like we didn't expect us ended up being kind of probably the most pivotal, hardworking, like actual, you know, when we see say they add value.

The vast majority value they add is the money.

What would you describe as Solana's mission? Like what do you want it to do in the world?

Yeah

...

the absolute guarantees of what they're doing is deterministic.

There's no way for a third party to interrupt or screw up, um, you know, the, the financial systems that they're building on top.

So this permissionless, trustless layer is really critical as a foundational building block, and then the ability to express whatever controls that can be- that are needed for an institution to, to operate in whatever regulatory environment they're in, those have to be expressible by that particular actor.

What they don't want is the ambiguity, that they don't understand the system that they're operating in, and the rules of them are opaque, and, um, hard to, hard to enforce.

Um, so Solana being open source and permissionless is this really great foundational bedrock, and the fact that it's cheap and fast, um, is what allows them to build businesses on top that can actually scale to consumers.

[laughs]

So how did it all begin? Yeah, this

is, as the legend goes, it actually did happen.

So I had a startup, not a startup, a side project with a buddy of mine We were building actually AI stuff, like deep learning boxes.

And we were mining crypto with these GPUs that we were buying to pay off the GPUs before we had any real users or traction.

And this idea of why are people paying us real money for what seems to be useless work? started kind of getting stuck and warmed in my head.

And I had two coffees and a beer and we were talking about mining and proof of work and the Nakamoto consensus and the algorithm, why it's important that you're using electricity in the process.

And I was up till four in the morning because beer and coffee is not a good mix, right? Not really.

Yeah, we had a...

There's no cost to send it, yes.

Yeah.

So, if there's no cost to create blocks, I could fla- flood the network with infinite blocks and the whole thing stalls and you get a failure.

Um, so they use energy to do this, and it's very simple and elegant, and I think this is part of the strength of Bitcoin, is how simple it is t- to understand a Bitcoin white paper, and because of these principles.

But it's, uh, slow, like in terms of the number of transactions that you can push through it, and it's expensive, like, you're spending a lot of money on the security of the network, which is this energy thing.

So, proof of stake is this alternative.

I think Cosmos was the first major proof of stake network that was live, and then, I think, probably us right after that, and then Ethereum transitioned to p- proof of stake.

Um, how big is the market currently? Is total value locked a relevant metric? Or, like, how do you think about the, the size of the current Solana ecosystem, and, um, what do you personally monitor so that you have an understanding of what's happening, what the supply/demand is? Just love to hear about your own creation, um, directly from you.

When you were getting Solana off the ground, how much of it was a technical and architectural vision that you had versus maybe a set of trade-offs that you were trying to solve that ETH didn't fill or Bitcoin didn't fill? And you said, I'm just going to try and do this.

I think, you know, I can't speak for all founders, but, you know, I think founders are driven by kind of crazy vision.

They have to be a little bit insane.

So my insane vision is always this idea, like imagine finance 20 to 50 years from now, the science fiction version of finance.

What I imagine is a single giant ledger, a single computer for every market in the world.

That means it's available in Nairobi, New York, in London, in Singapore.

And all of these things are synchronized at the round trip time of speed of light through fiber around the world or, you know, through Elon satellites.

Tell us about what that movement is all about and what the utility is that is there if it works.

Libertarian, let the chips fall where they may, so to speak?

I think, um, it's a huge opportunity to really accelerate American innovation and spread American finance around the world.

I think we actually have the best financial system in the world that's the most trusted, the most robust, the best regulatory environment for, for what it's worth as well, um, but it was built after World War II before the internet.

So its APIs are kind of like a fax machine based.

What crypto is allowing, I think, is this new technology stack built on top of the internet that's completely Western aligned.

It's for transparency, it's for capitalism, but now we can actually interface Western US based finance to the rest of the world.

And I, I think America is gonna benefit primarily from this, like more so than-

Do you think they're gonna be advantaged or disadvantaged given where they're coming from? Does the lock-in with regulators, the relationship with regulators, the lock-in with the market participants give them some leg up? Or do you think that the disruptors are ultimately gonna be able to operate more freely and more quickly?

sure.

So I spent most of my career at Qualcomm.

I landed there straight out of college.

And in college, I had a startup working at Voice over IP, which failed because we were in the middle of Illinois after the dot-com crash, building like a Vonage thing.

Vonage didn't exist yet.

But I was super into performance optimizations and they kind of hired me in the spot.

And I was really into optimizing low-level code for mobile and surfing and playing indoor hockey and doing Ironman triathlons.

Right now, the industry is still very young, so it feels like there's a lot of infrastructure experiments going on as people are trying to find different niches but as the conversation evolves and then we potentially get more into an application environment and this layer becomes commoditized at a certain level do you see most of those experiments either being absorbed or failing and kind of go into a singularity of the infrastructure that is blockchain or do you see a future state where there's a market for many different purpose-built chains

So how do you kind of cut through all of that and make this a thing? Because there's a lot of things out there.

Yeah, yeah.

So we're like, the core of what we're building is this idea of the super connected world and censorship resistance.

Every optimization we make allows us to grow that set.

Every time hardware improves allows us to grow that set.

And that idea is extremely powerful because when you have 8 billion people that are all super connected, there's no most, there's no middleman.

You literally have the people that want to, you know, like, do stuff and the value producers all connected directly with each other without anybody taking a few percentage points and everything in the middle right there's no there's no 12 a month bank fees there but that that's like the that's the world that we're working for so the kind of community that we built was around bad idea but achieving it with you know blood sweating tears optimizations hardware building out this network at a global way the folks that are participating in this are from, you know, at this point, I think from like every different continent outside of Antarctica and like the running validators in Russia inside the great firewall in China, right? Like, so that to me is that like that future of a super connected world, it needs this ridiculously censorship resistant network.

What else is going on?

What's sort of the vision behind creating the world's fastest, cheapest blockchain? Like what use cases are you targeting with

this? There's this like, This is a really good question because we don't know at what point is the market saturated with block space? Are there use cases that are unlocked at subset transactions that are worthwhile for anyone? There might be, there might not.

There's some indication of that.

You look at IoT stuff like Helium and HiveMapper.

It would be really, really tough to do it in any other environment unless it's completely centralized running on a database.

You kind of need something like Solana for those.

But could the world create those services in a completely centralized manner and be fine and life goes on? That's another question.

So how do you feel about last year's issue being in the review mirror? Do you feel confident? Is Fire Dancer part of that? What makes you confident that the future is going to look better than the past?