Podcast appearances and mentions of austin federa

This week, Ryan and David unpack Bitcoin's explosive run to $111K and the macro chaos driving it—specifically, the U.S. Treasury's failed bond auction and what it signals for the dollar. They break down the Senate's landmark stablecoin bill (and Elizabeth Warren's meltdown), Ethereum's ZK miracle that could 100x Layer 1 throughput, and Texas launching its own state Bitcoin reserve. Plus, why Stanley Druckenmiller's portfolio strategy might justify going all-in on crypto—and whether alt season is finally on the horizon. ------

Austin Federa is the Co-Founder of DoubleZero, a dedicated high-performance network for modern distributed systems, and President of the DoubleZero Foundation.Prior to co-founding DoubleZero in 2024, Austin served as Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation where he was responsible for setting the direction of the Foundation and working with projects and developers building across the Solana ecosystem. Previously, Austin worked on marketing and product at Bison Trails, and was Director of Marketing at Republic and Republic Crypto, a private investing platform.In this conversation, we discuss:- The future of Solana- Token 2049 & Dubai- Solana's emergency patch- We are living in the best time, and we're on a good track- How AI will impact our lives- The founding story of Double Zero- Increase bandwidth and reduce latency- Testnet transactions are always quicker than mainnet- Manufacturing- Scaling to 500,000 TPS- Why validators are so important- Data routing is a huge problem for high-performance networksDoubleZeroWebsite: doublezero.xyzX: @doublezeroDiscord: discord.gg/doublezeroAustin FederaX: @Austin_FederaLinkedIn: Austin Federa ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------  This episode is brought to you by PrimeXBT.  PrimeXBT offers a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders that demand highly reliable market data and performance. Traders of all experience levels can easily design and customize layouts and widgets to best fit their trading style. PrimeXBT is always offering innovative products and professional trading conditions to all customers.   PrimeXBT is running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the podcast. After making your first deposit, 50% of that first deposit will be credited to your account as a bonus that can be used as additional collateral to open positions.  Code: CRYPTONEWS50  This promotion is available for a month after activation. Click the link below:  PrimeXBT x CRYPTONEWS50

Gm! This week we're joined by Austin Federa to discuss the latest happening with Solana & DoubleZero. We deep dive into the importance of speed for capital markets, the rise of alt L1s, how to remain competitive as a blockchain & more. Enjoy! -- Follow Austin: https://x.com/Austin_Federa Follow Jack: https://x.com/whosknave Follow Lightspeed: https://twitter.com/Lightspeedpodhq Subscribe to the Lightspeed Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed -- Zenrock is a permissionless, decentralized custody network backed by 1RoundTable Partners, 10T, Maven11, and Spartan. Live on Jupiter, $ROCK is the native token for transactions within the Zenrock ecosystem and secures Zenrock's decentralized custody network. The first application launching on Zenrock is zenBTC – yield-bearing Bitcoin on Solana. zenBTC will be live in April 2025. Visit zenbtc.io to learn about earning yield with Bitcoin on Solana. -- Grab your tickets to Permissionless IV. Use code LIGHTSPEED10 for 10% off: https://blockworks.co/event/permissionless-iv -- Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ -- (00:00) Introduction (01:23) An Update On DoubleZero (09:00) Zenrock Ad (19:25) The Rise Of Alt L1s (24:51) Firedancer (27:10) Zenrock Ad (27:54) How To Remain Competitive? (31:50) Hyperliquid (33:56) Does Decentralization Actually Matter? (37:48) Tokenization -- Disclaimers: Lightspeed was kickstarted by a grant from the Solana Foundation. Nothing said on Lightspeed is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mert, Jack, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Austin Federa is a co-founder of DoubleZero. The Scoop's host, Frank Chaparro, was joined by Federa to discuss how the current public internet infrastructure bottlenecks blockchain performance, and how DoubleZero looks to address this by leveraging underutilized fiber optic cables to create a dedicated global network to support higher performance. OUTLINE 00:00 - Introduction 01:02 - Sponsor break 02:03 - DoubleZero's core thesis 05:42 - The problem with the public internet infrastructure 10:13 - Understanding the current infrastructure 16:36 - DoubleZero's impact 19:59 - Speed is the name of the game 24:18 - Timeframes for rebuilding infrastructure 31:11 - How DoubleZero finds and utilizes infrastructure 35:35 - Tokenization 36:55 - Technical difficulties 37:20 - This isn't your grandfather's internet 39:20 - Hiring talent and being a founder 40:21 - Hiring Talent for a New Layer of the Internet 44:37 - Conclusion GUEST LINKS Austin Federa on X: https://x.com/Austin_Federa DoubleZero on X: https://x.com/doublezero Are you hiring in crypto? Use Campus to quickly find your best candidates with our challenging Crypto Assessment Test. Faster hiring, stronger teams. Sign up for a trial today: theblock.co/campus This episode is brought to your by our sponsors: Fidelity Explore Fidelity crypto careers today. Go to crypto.FidelityCareers.com to learn more.

In this conversation, Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero, discusses the innovative vision behind the project aimed at revolutionizing internet infrastructure for blockchain technology. He explains the limitations of current systems and the need for a new physical fiber network that can support the demands of decentralized networks. The discussion covers the importance of multicast technology, the challenges posed by existing internet infrastructure, and the business case for upgrading to a more efficient system that can handle the future of blockchain transactions. He explains the significance of the internet's infrastructure in blockchain performance, the concept behind Double Zero, and the decentralized approach to building network contributions. The discussion also touches on the political landscape for crypto, the importance of incentivizing participation in the network, and the potential for repatriating crypto foundations to the U.S. as the industry evolves.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Double Zero and Austin Federa01:19 The Vision Behind Double Zero04:32 Innovative Technologies for Blockchain Connectivity11:48 Challenges of Current Internet Infrastructure15:40 The Business Case for Upgrading Internet Infrastructure21:13 The Future of Blockchain and Internet Integration22:23 Understanding Double Zero: The Name and Concept28:50 Integrating Double Zero Across Blockchain Networks32:49 The Centralization Threat in Technology34:30 Incentivizing Participation in the Network36:16 Mainnet Launch and Future Plans37:31 The Evolving Political Landscape for CryptoCheck out Plus500: https://plus500.comCheck out CoinFlip and use my code CRYPTO101 for a great deal: https://coinflip.techCheck out BODi and use my code CYPTO101 for a great deal: https://www.bodi.comCheck out NPR: https://npr.orgGet immediate access to my entire crypto portfolio for just $1.00 today! https://www.cryptorevolution.com/cryptnation-directGet your FREE copy of "Crypto Revolution" and start making big profits from buying, selling, and trading cryptocurrency today: https://www.cryptorevolution.com/freeMERCH STOREhttps://cryptorevolutionmerch.com/Subscribe to YouTube for Exclusive Content:https://www.youtube.com/@crypto101podcastFollow us on social media for leading-edge crypto updates and trade alerts:https://twitter.com/Crypto101Podhttps://instagram.com/crypto_101Guest Linkshttps://doublezero.xyz/https://x.com/Austin_Federa*This is NOT financial, tax, or legal advice*Boardwalk Flock LLC. All Rights Reserved 2025. ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬Fog by DIZARO https://soundcloud.com/dizarofrCreative Commons — Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported — CC BY-ND 3.0 Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/Fog-DIZAROMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/lAfbjt_rmE8▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬Our Sponsors:* Check out NPR: https://npr.org* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Gm! This week, we're joined by Austin Federa to discuss the launch of DoubleZero. We deep dive into leaving the Solana Foundation, Austin's vision for reshaping the internet, the DoubleZero business model, what to expect in 2025 & much more. Enjoy! – Follow Austin: https://x.com/Austin_Federa Follow Mert: https://x.com/0xMert_ Follow Jack: https://x.com/whosknave Follow Lightspeed: https://twitter.com/Lightspeedpodhq Subscribe to the Lightspeed Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed Utilize the Solana Dashboard by Blockworks Research: http://solana.blockworksresearch.com/ -- Lightspeed Audience Survey: https://lightspeed-4bed7b.beehiiv.com/forms/8c6edcb5-f0e8-4d08-957f-2bfc3a41686c -- Chaos Labs, the leading onchain risk management firm, recently launched its new flagship oracle product, Edge, which delivers integrated, high precision risk and price data for any onchain application with a market. Edge emerged from stealth after 2 months securing Jupiter, the top trading platform on Solana, already securing $30B in volume and more than 60% of all Solana perps volume. https://chaoslabs.xyz/ -- Ledger, the global leader in digital asset security, proudly sponsors the Lightspeed podcast. As Ledger celebrates 10 years of securing 20% of global crypto, it remains the top choice for securing your Solana assets. Buy a LEDGER™ device now and build confidently, knowing your SOL are safe. Buy now on https://shop.ledger.com/?r=1da180a5de00. -- Renaud Partners has built the most elite network of native crypto marketers globally. They create custom, expert teams to support founders with transformative strategy work. Trusted bysome of the best founders, VC firms, and ecosystem leaders in the business, helping their teams expedite their marketing success and catalyze their growth. If you're a founder or a VC looking for support for your teams, I highly recommend connecting with them at RenaudPartners.com -- Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ -- (00:00) Introduction (03:46) Title: Founding DoubleZero (08:58) Title: The DoubleZero Unlock (14:04) Chaos Labs Ad (15:04) Ledger Ad (15:58) Renaud Partners Ad (16:58) Reshaping The Internet (21:29) Demand For Fibre (32:44) The DoubleZero Origin Story (35:28) State Propagation (39:21) The DoubleZero Business Model (47:12) What's Next For DoubleZero? (48:48) Leaving The Solana Foundation (58:58) Looking Forward To 2025 -- Disclaimers: Lightspeed was kickstarted by a grant from the Solana Foundation. Nothing said on Lightspeed is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mert, Jack, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

In today's episode Austin Federa (Head of Strategy at Solana Foundation) and Ekram Ahmed (CMO of Celestia) - break down what actually works in crypto marketing. They discuss why Web2 marketing principles fail in crypto, reveal how Solana and Celestia developed their distinct narrative positions, and explain what most projects get wrong about crisis communications and community building. The conversation covers everything from the "modular vs monolithic" narrative war to why marketing agencies rarely work in crypto. Thanks for listening! - - Start your day with crypto news, analysis and data from Katherine Ross and David Canellis. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire?utm_source=podcasts Follow Ekram: https://x.com/ekrahm Follow Austin: https://x.com/austin_federa Follow Jason: https://x.com/JasonYanowitz Follow Santiago: https://twitter.com/santiagoroel Follow Empire: https://twitter.com/theempirepod Subscribe on YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/4fdhhb2j Subscribe on Apple: https://tinyurl.com/mv4frfv7ww Subscribe on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/wbaypprw Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ - - Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 04:54 Crypto vs Web2 Marketing 10:29 Creating a Brand in Crypto 36:44 Building Narratives 43:56 Genius of Modular 52:07 When to Pivot? 58:09 Hiring Marketers 01:09:58 Crisis Management 01:19:21 Value of KOLs - - Disclaimer: Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Santiago, Jason, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

A daily update on what's happening in the Rocket Pool community on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and the DAO forum. #RocketPool #rpl #Ethereum #eth #crypto #cryptocurrency #staking #news 0:00 - Welcome Rocket Pool news 0:57 - RP biweekly update https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163979141545995/1280939058079600763 2:04 - Langers asks about Houston hotfix https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/774497904559783947/1280372151811178578 4:08 - RPIP 62 to the forum https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/1267421248288198677/1280071160058482742 https://dao.rocketpool.net/t/rpip-62-tokenomics-rework-prelude/3238 13:00 - Changes to RP leaving people behind? https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1280923566509920256 16:40 - 1kx closed pools https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1280508799731634227 https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/894377118828486666/1280502732179898481 20:00 - Liquity v2 starts with rETH https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1280927646519394314 https://x.com/LiquityProtocol/status/1831316738786652481 25:10 - RP sponsor Staking Summit https://x.com/StakingRewards/status/1831308583624958075 25:50 - GMC support bounty https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/1212029664285954058/1279926116793978980 27:42 - Client releases https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2/releases/tag/v24.8.0 https://x.com/nonfungible_nel/status/1819119771407024476 Butta teasing RP mode on beaconcha.in https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1280458156165566514 Staking news 30:12 - ETH staked at ATH https://x.com/eth_everstake/status/1830639941799342190 Ethereum news 31:#ETH2 - ETF flows bad https://x.com/farsideuk/status/1829637658706071862?s=46 33:44 - Arbitrum Stylus https://x.com/arbitrum/status/1831020553211089243 https://x.com/ethereumintern_/status/1831020907034226961 36:13 - CTFC sues Uniswap Labs https://x.com/news_of_alpha/status/1831354031106666545?s=46 https://x.com/theblockupdates/status/1831355442007519273?s=46 38:30 - Sky (Maker) and Aave parter https://x.com/SkyEcosystem/status/1830788183056900133 40:20 - Euler v2 live https://x.com/eulerfinance/status/1831331399619756375 42:30 - Trump DeFi project https://x.com/tier10k/status/1831073328850665587 https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/09/03/inside-the-trump-crypto-project-linked-to-a-2m-defi-hack-and-former-pick-up-artist/ https://x.com/adamscochran/status/1831076979803877437?s=46 https://x.com/skesslr/status/1831079008945254555 45:02 - Samsung joins Sony https://x.com/StartaleHQ/status/1831023158713065599 46:30 - AI agents transacting https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/1829623778726592804 48:39 - L2 growth parabolic https://x.com/growthepie_eth/status/1830578656017576339 https://x.com/RyanWatkins_/status/1830746513053561053 52:00 - Stable coin growth https://x.com/peterschroederr/status/1831374082194935943?s=46 53:53 - Polymarket is HUGE https://x.com/NTmoney/status/1829972110917451946 54:36 - Penpie hacked https://x.com/shoucccc/status/1831044487323529639 https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1280624624270311485 https://x.com/Penpiexyz_io/status/1831157212963598555 58:18 - EigenLayer S2 airdrop https://x.com/eigenlayer/status/1831376290357690647?s=46 59:38 - Ethervista https://x.com/S4mmyEth/status/1830577612806082897 https://x.com/0xngmi/status/1831107023401857096 In other news 1:01:03 - The great Solana pivot https://x.com/Austin_Federa/status/1830570709900493293 https://x.com/ryanberckmans/status/1830721291265138830 https://x.com/KyleSamani/status/1830710714140688610 1:06:27 - Raffle for August https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18T5w_w9uf6eOy5tt3GDNLFjNp7pr__1Z9IaW4RBCAQY/ https://harpocryptes.github.io/raffle.html

Join Austin Federa, the Head Of Strategy at Solana Foundation, as we discuss what the future holds for Solana. Austin Federa: https://x.com/Austin_Federa In the second part of the show, Dan from The Chart Guys will share his market analysis and some trades.  The Chart Guys: https://www.youtube.com/@ChartGuys  ►►PLEASE LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS HERE (THERE ARE NO BOTS ON MY POSTS

Gm! This week we invite Austin Federa to the show for a discussion on the current state of Solana & the most exciting developments happening in crypto. We deep dive into the current state of Firedancer, how to build community within crypto & attracting developers to Solana. We then debate is economic security a meme & of course the latest meta... social tokens & meme coins. Enjoy! -- Follow Austin: https://x.com/Austin_Federa Follow Mert: https://twitter.com/0xMert_ Follow Dan: https://twitter.com/smyyguy -- Join us at Permissionles III. Use code LIGHTSPEED10 for a 10% discount: https://blockworks.co/event/permissionless-iii -- Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/43o3Syk Subscribe on Apple: https://apple.co/3OhiXgV Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3OkF7PD Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ -- (00:00) Introduction (02:11) The State Of Solana In 2024 (05:17) The Solana Foundation (08:45) Firedancer (11:37) Helium Mobile Ad (12:56) The Solana Roadmap (19:20) Crypto Marketing (24:54) Blockchain Speed & Latency (31:27) Permissionless III Ad (32:29) Blockchain Incentives (36:03) Is Economic Security A Meme? (38:42) Issuance vs Cost (47:41) Meme Coins & Social Tokens -- Get 15% off an indoor or outdoor Helium Mobile Hotspot using code LIGHTSPEEDHOTSPOT: hellohelium.com/hotspot Helium Mobile is a new phone service that uses the Helium Network – a decentralized wireless network built by people – AND the nation's largest 5G network. By creating coverage, you're helping to build a better network together, while earning MOBILE rewards. Disclaimers: Lightspeed was kickstarted by a grant from the Solana Foundation. Nothing said on Lightspeed is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mert, Dan and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

A daily update on what's happening in the Rocket Pool community on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and the DAO forum. Today's episode covers: ETH ETF approval moving fast, Houston delayed again, Lido gets a security breach, Dankard advises EigenLayer, and Vitalik projects what Ethereum will look like in 10 years. 0:00 - Welcome 0:37 - The ETF is real! https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1792895494605160805 https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1792889119640617197 https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1792922337806884892 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1792692379377656074 https://x.com/EricBalchunas/status/1792885274311037167 https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1792993889189593502 https://x.com/ericbalchunas/status/1792875387342532644?s=46 https://x.com/sgjohnsson/status/1792923105620336976?s=46 https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1792924835099668527?s=46 https://x.com/jseyff/status/1792936711766389022?s=46 https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1792719930644922556 https://x.com/iamdcinvestor/status/1792928763254124761? https://x.com/tier10k/status/1792956314366226817 9:57 - Eth market cap pump https://twitter.com/HsakaTrades/status/1792711461690839426? https://x.com/0xfoobar/status/1792707487872983130 https://www.binance.com/en/trade/ETH_USDT Rocket Pool news 13:40 - Houston delayed again https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163979141545995/1242331283284299797 15:29 - Knoshua explains bug bounty changes https://dao.rocketpool.net/t/immunefi-bug-bounty-changes/2987 18:45 - Jasper's bullish tweets https://x.com/drjasper_eth/status/1792980030886215848 https://x.com/drjasper_eth/status/1792718784958287929 https://x.com/drjasper_eth/status/1792975945738912124 20:09 - IMC vote about to go live https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/1241252359414485105/1242110300552036352 21:08 - Jasper's job offer from EiL https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1242521571487383572 22:08 - New ratio lowhttps://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405503016234385409/1242330916404203572 Staking news 23:05 - Lido security breach https://research.lido.fi/t/lido-on-ethereum-node-operator-numic-security-incident-disclosure-may-21-2024/7536 https://x.com/drjasper_eth/status/1792919627854422257 https://x.com/hanni_abu/status/1792977073642053944? https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/1138704692772356097/1242483937943486474 25:52 - Dankard advises EiL https://x.com/dankrad/status/1792741374447534083?s=46 https://x.com/llamaonthebrink/status/1792792479114354866 https://x.com/LefterisJP/status/1792845448941555952 https://x.com/hudsonjameson/status/1792891901860880624 https://x.com/enshriningplebs/status/1792807496307875922 Ethereum news 30:24 - Vitalik's endgame for Ethereum https://x.com/vitalikbuterin/status/1792792167670243744? https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1792792783847346662 32:12 - Uniswap have a response to their wells notice https://blog.uniswap.org/wells-notice-response.pdf 33:36 - zkSync airdrop coming https://twitter.com/TheBlock__/status/1792942319915671871 https://x.com/aevoxyz/status/1792988864929210556 34:58 - Taiko airdrop and thoughts https://x.com/taikoxyz/status/1792947662519443491? https://x.com/llamaonthebrink/status/1792955154628518029?s=46 36:20 Crypto companies moving back to the UShttps://x.com/martypartymusic/status/1792933277742875074?s=46 37:10 - A funny conspiracy https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1792907980624523549 In other news 38:18 - FIT21 and call your politicians https://x.com/Austin_Federa/status/1792916554117452183 https://x.com/LoganDobson/status/1792918925245645209 https://x.com/ddayen/status/1792949681531892195? 40:11 - A little bit of hopium https://x.com/RaoulGMI/status/1792887001147998592 https://x.com/evan_ss6/status/1792971249439609135?

Today's episode begins with the biggest talking points from Paris Blockchain Week, as venture capitalist Tim Draper explains why it's not too late to buy Bitcoin and where it could be headed after the halving. Austin Federa from the Solana Foundation unpacks the reasons for Solana's network congestion issues, and a research report suggests that Bitcoin miners could sell up to $5 billion worth of BTC after the halving. In other news, the Winklevoss twins became co-owners of Real Bedford alongside Bitcoin podcaster Peter McCormack. The pair invested $4.5 million of Bitcoin into the English football club. Lastly, Cointelegraph's investigations team published an exclusive report revealing that the cryptocurrency exchange BingX allows sanctioned Iranian users to evade restrictions.Further reading:$250K Bitcoin? Tim Draper says halving, Bitcoin ETFs will drive demandHow Solana developers are tackling network congestion challengesBitcoin miners could dump $5B in BTC after halving: 10x ResearchWinklevoss twins become co-owners of Bitcoin soccer club, inject $4.5M of BTCBingX exchange openly supports Iranian users, defying sanctionsGrab yourself a coffee, and let's get into today's episode.This episode of Rise'n'Crypto is brought to you by Cointelegraph and is hosted by Gareth Jenkinson. You can follow Gareth on Twitter.Rise'n'Crypto is brought to you by Cointelegraph and is hosted and produced by Robert Baggs. You can follow Robert on Twitter and LinkedIn. Cointelegraph's Twitter: @CointelegraphCointelegraph's website: cointelegraph.comThe views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this podcast are its participants' alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph. This podcast (and any related content) is for entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice, nor should it be taken as such. Everyone must do their own research and make their own decisions. The podcast's participants may or may not own any of the assets mentioned.

Although Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies are going through a massive crash today, I am still bullish, and my today's guest, Austin Federa, the Head Of Strategy at Solana Foundation, is bullish as well. Together we are going to discuss what's happening with crypto and how Solana became one of the main beneficiaries of this crypto rally. Austin Federa: https://twitter.com/Austin_Federa ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY!

We catch up with Austin, Head of Strategy at Solana Foundation and former Head of Communications at Solana Labs. In particular, we focus on how Solana continues to differentiate itself from a fast-growing array of challenger blockchain ecosystems with token extensions. We also chat about Solana's emphasis on grassroots growth over top-down business development approaches and how Solana positions itself across a variety of strategic sub sectors within the emergent crypto economy. A great overview from the perspective of one of Solana's most prominent voices. -        - Time Stamps 0:00 - Business Development strategy 5:18 - Token Extensions program 7:55 - Why build app chains anymore? 10:06 - Native L1 private transactions 14:03 - Unlocking on-chain payments 17:05 - Why Coinbase ignores Solana 19:05 - DePIN achieving PMF 24:53 - The rise of Solana-based games 30:50 - Unlocking the abundance of NFTs through compression 33:01 - Mobile strategy 38:06 - L1 governance 40:42 - Maintaining fast updates alongside decentralization   44:12 - Surviving state-level attacks 49:57 - Human coordination is the final boss? 55:59 - What is Austin excited about? -        - Podcast Resources Follow Sal: https://twitter.com/salxyz Follow Dave: https://twitter.com/SolBeachBum Follow Unlayered: https://twitter.com/UnlayeredPod Subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or Google: https://unlayered.io/ Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UnlayeredPod -        - Episode Resources Follow Austin : https://Twitter.com/AustinFedera Follow Validated : https://Twitter.com/ValidatedPod

Join Austin Fedra as he delves into the resilient world of Solana in this podcast journey. From its survival to exploring its ecosystem, including projects like Helium and DePIN, the discussion touches on the evolving landscape of DeFi 2.0, token extensions, and the intersection of Solana with governments and regulations. Tune in for insights on scalability, infrastructure readiness, airdrops, and the potential of Layer 2 solutions, all while contemplating the self-sovereignty and interoperability challenges Solana faces in the crypto realm. Austin Federa: https://twitter.com/Austin_Federa ►► DevvE DevvE is a next-generation cryptocurrency - DevvE addresses Bitcoin's most significant weaknesses—regulatory compliance, energy consumption, costs and speed!

Austin Federa joined me for a great conversation about what Solana learned over the past year to harden their infrastructure as they see surges in interest in their NFT & DeFi ecosystem, plus how their phone, the Saga, has been doing in the market to redefine how blockchains can not just be software, but hardware running digital asset codebase. More about Solana here: https://solana.com/

This week, the Lads are joined by Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation and host of Validated, Austin Federa. The Lads share their thoughts and experiences with Solana, ask "What is Money, Really", and dig into what separates Solana from other chains? A jammed-packed episode you're not gonna wanna miss! In this episode we cover: 00:00 Intros/Jordi & Austin's Tweets 02:08 Solana Ecosystem Experiences 10:49 Is 'Crypto As Money' A Meme? 39:26 What Separates Solana? 59:45 Pasta of the Week

Austin Federa is Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation. In this episode of The Scoop recorded live at Solana Breakpoint 2023, Federa unpacks some of Breakpoint's biggest announcements and explains how Solana builders persevered through the depths of the bear market to continue enhancing Solana's tech. According to Federa, Solana's recent performance enhancements have rectified many of the problems that plagued Solana's performance throughout the 2021 bull run.  "I think you saw a lot of 'thinkfluencers' tweeting 18 months ago that Solana's architecture was somehow fundamentally flawed and they could never get this thing stable because of 'original sins' in the code base — and like most most radical statements on Twitter, it turns out to really not be substantively true." This episode is brought to you by our sponsors PayPal. Make your crypto move with PayPal. Get started today at PayPal.com/crypto

David sits down in person at Solana Breakpoint 2023 with Solana's Founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, and Austin Federa, Solana Foundation's Head of Strategy.  The three chat about Breakpoint's Evolution, Solana vs. Ethereum, and exciting new releases/products coming out of Solana. 

This episode is the opening presentation from Breakpoint 2023! You'll hear from Solana's top talent, including Anatoly, Dan Albert, Amira Valliani, Noah Prince and Mert Mumtaz. This is the Solana ecosystem deep dive you won't want to miss! - - Join us at DAS (Digital Asset Summit) in London this March! DAS is the #1 institutional conference in crypto, hosted by Blockworks. Use the link below to learn more, and use LIGHTSPEED20 to get 20% off your ticket! Sign up now because the price goes up every month. See you there! Learn more + get your ticket here: https://blockworks.co/event/digital-asset-summit-2024-london/home - - Timestamps (00:00) Introduction (00:52) Anatoly: The Solana Thesis (12:58) DAS 2023 Promo (13:55) Dan Albert: Firedancer Is Live On Testnet! (20:03) Amira Valliani: Client Diversity and Decentralization (27:35) Noah Prince: Only Possible On Solana (35:29) Mert Mumtaz: Now Is The Time to Build (42:18) Austin Federa and Anatoly: What's Next? - - Follow Anatoly: https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko Follow Dan: https://twitter.com/DanPaul000 Follow Amira: https://twitter.com/amiravalliani Follow Noah: https://twitter.com/redacted_noah Follow Austin: https://twitter.com/Austin_Federa Follow Mert: https://twitter.com/0xMert_ Follow Garrett: https://twitter.com/GarrettHarper_ Follow Lightspeed: https://twitter.com/Lightspeedpodhq Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/43o3Syk Subscribe on Apple: https://apple.co/3OhiXgV Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3OkF7PD Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ - - Resources Link to all Breakpoint panels https://www.youtube.com/@SolanaFndn Breakpoint 2023 https://solana.com/breakpoint - - Disclaimers: Although our guests this week are managing partners of a registered investment adviser, nothing in this podcast should be considered an offer of Multicoin's investment advisory services or should otherwise be confused for investment, tax, legal or other financial advice. Lightspeed was kickstarted by a grant from the Solana Foundation. Nothing said on Lightspeed is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mert, Garrett and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

When I sat down with Austin Federa a few weeks ago, the crypto world's sentiment, especially around Solana, was still a bit bleak. Fast forward to today, and the landscape seems to have shifted dramatically. In our wide-ranging conversation about Solana, we delved deep into: - Solana's unique approach to scaling blockchain at its core. - The history and evolution of computing and its parallels with blockchain. - The economic dynamics of crypto and how Solana fits into the bigger picture. - The challenges and criticisms faced by Solana in the crypto community. - Austin's journey from environmental studies to the forefront of blockchain technology. It's fascinating how a few weeks can change perspectives. Dive into our chat and discover the philosophy, technology, and rise of Solana.

Austin Federa is the Head of Strategy at Solana Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Switzerland that provides grants and supports development on the Solana network. Solana is known for its fast, cheap, and scalable blockchain solution with transactions finalizing in 400 milliseconds and low fees of around $0.00025 per transaction.  Why you should listen Solana first gained adoption due to its ability to handle a high volume of transactions at low costs compared to other L1 blockchains like Ethereum. The Solana Network continues to grow with about 2,000 nodes globally, demonstrating decentralization and increasing stake distribution compared to other networks like Ethereum or Polygon.  Visa is running a pilot program using the USDC stablecoin on the Solana network after previously conducting it on Ethereum. Austin says that the collapse of FTX did not significantly impact Solana as users continued transacting and builders kept building on the network. The network is resilient and has a strong community.  Supporting links Bitget Bitget Academy Bitget Research Bitget Wallet Solana Andy on Twitter  Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin   If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.  

In this episode of Crypto 101 we have back on one of our favorite guests Austin Federa who is Head of Strategy for the Solana Foundation. This is a true must listen for anyone interested in learnings about all the updates around Solana including their partnerships with fortune 500 companies like Visa, the technology they continue to innovate, and an important conversation all the FUD about the Solana token locked up in the FTX bankruptcy.  Hedge Fund Summit FREE TICKET: https://www.cryptohedgefundsummit.com/registration1675302455773Please Support Our Sponsorswww.netsuite.com/cryptoGet your FREE copy of "Crypto Revolution" and start making big profits from buying, selling, and trading cryptocurrency today: https://www.cryptorevolution.com/freeSubscribe to YouTube for Exclusive Content:https://www.youtube.com/@crypto101podcastFollow us on social media for leading-edge crypto updates and trade alerts:https://twitter.com/Crypto101Podhttps://instagram.com/crypto_101Guest Links:https://solana.com/https://twitter.com/Austin_Federa*This is NOT financial, tax, or legal advice*Boardwalk Flock LLC. All Rights Reserved 2023. ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬Fog by DIZARO https://soundcloud.com/dizarofrCreative Commons — Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported — CC BY-ND 3.0 Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/Fog-DIZAROMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/lAfbjt_rmE8▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Bankless hasn't had the most coverage of Solana, the network, and SOL, the asset, but in this episode that changes. Our guest, Austin Federa is Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation and is the host of the Validated podcast.  David was recently a guest on Austin's podcast where they went back and forth on some of the cultural and philosophical differences between the Solana and Ethereum projects. Today is a continuation of that episode.  Despite some differences in community perspectives, Austin brings a fresh perspective on the design philosophy that relates Solana the network to SOL the asset and so much more.   -----

Today we have Austin Federa from the Solana Foundation chat all things Solana, we talk about what Austin is excited for, what it's like being the face of the foundation on Twitter, what the role of the foundation is versus Labs and a ton more. Enjoy!

Our guest this week is Austin Federa. Austin is head of strategy and communications at Solana Foundation, responsible for setting the direction of the Solana Foundation and working with projects and developers building in the Solana ecosystem. Austin discusses Solana's pragmatic engineering culture and the need for developers to focus on building things that are truly only possible on Solana. He also highlights the Foundation's role in supporting infrastructure-level initiatives and turning R&D into stable, standardized solutions. Finally, he stresses the importance for founders to focus on revenue and business models during the bear market and to build outside of the United States. Show Notes:0:55 - Starting with Solana6:42 - Pragmatism at Solana11:15 - Labs vs. Foundation17:36 - Exciting new things at Solana21:52 - Things Austin is personally excited about          26:19 - Contributing to Solana31:47 - Who is a builder you admire in the Solana ecosystem? Full Transcript:Brian Friel (00:00):Hey everyone, and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show. We highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Austin Federa, the head of strategy and communications at the Solana Foundation. Austin, welcome to the show. Austin Federa (00:25):Hey, thanks for having me. Brian Friel (00:26):I'm super excited to talk to you today. As I was saying just before recording, I think this is the first time I'm recording someone who's actually a podcast pro, so I have a lot to learn from you. Thank you for making time. Austin, before we get into everything about Solana today, I'd love to just learn a little bit about you, how you got started at Solana. And I remember when I first joined Solana, you were the head of communications, and I think at the time there wasn't a clear split between labs and foundation. Since then, a lot has changed and maybe you could go in a little bit of that of how your role has evolved as well. Austin Federa (00:56):Yeah, definitely. So I originally joined in January of '21 out of Bison Trails. So Bison Trails was getting acquired by Coinbase to become Coinbase Cloud. I'd worked there for a little over a year running a bunch of the product marketing there and those sorts of things. And just with the transition over to Coinbase, it was like, oh, you don't want to go work for Coinbase, do you? And I was like, no, probably not. And so it was one of those things where it was somewhere in between one of the people who didn't make the cut and one of the people who they were like, you're just not going to be successful here. And I was like, that's a fairly accurate read. I got tons of great friends who are still working at Coinbase, but for me it just wasn't really the right spot. So I was talking to a bunch of L1s and L2s about coming over. (01:41):And so, one of the big things we'd done at Bison Trails is we had built out almost all of the world's Eth2 staking infrastructure. And I mean almost all the world's Bison Trails infrastructure ran solidly over 50% of the Eth2 network when the Beacon Chain launched, and still at that point in January of '21. Now this didn't matter from a decentralization standpoint because the Beacon Chain wasn't actually a thing. It was just a place you could stake. There wasn't actually user transactions or anything of value on it besides some Eth. But I was pretty heavily in the EVM world at that point. And so I was going around and talking to a bunch of different protocols. I was talking to a bunch of L2s and scaling solutions and these sorts of things, and I was talking to Polkadot as well and some of those type of other L1s. (02:25):And a friend of mine who I worked with back at Republic years ago, Ben Sparango was like, "Hey, what are you up to?" And I was like, "Ah, I'm kind of between stuff right now. I'm interviewing a bunch of places. I don't really feel super passionate about it. I was like, maybe I should leave crypto. I kind of like this industry a lot, but I don't know. We'll see." And he is like, "You should talk to Raj and Toly." I was like, "Of Solana?" He goes, "Yeah, yeah, I joined Solana a few months ago. It's great. You should come talk to us." And I was like, "I don't know, man. I worked with 20 different protocols when I was at Bison Trails and none of them were Solana. Solana was the weird thing that was hard to run and no one understood how to build software for it, but we supported it at Bison Trails because there was people who were trying to run infrastructure for it. (03:04):And he is like, "No, just come and talk to them." And we just finished up this big project with Masari, which was the state of Eth2 was basically the report that we just helped them write and put out. And I had a lot of questions and I thought the questions were just things that I was getting wrong. I thought it was me who was not understanding the model under which Eth2 was going to work. This is back at the time when you're going to have Parallax, execution shards on the network and all this sorts of thing. And I was like, I don't understand how DeFi is going to work here. The minute you break what now we call the global state, but the minute you start moving data into segregated places, that means the data has to be moved before it can interact. (03:45):And if there's one thing we all know about computer science, it's that copying is expensive and takes a lot of time. And so I got on the call with Anatoly, and I was just talking about Eth2 stuff and asking him some questions about what he thought about this stuff. And he's like, "Oh yeah, there's no composability in charting." And I was like, "You're the first person who's told me this. Tell me more." 'Cause I've been talking to a bunch of people who were talking about like, oh, well, it's just harder and it's like... He runs me through the whole thing about like Solana's, a single global state machine, really fast blockchain, what all these advantages were here. And all this stuff, for me, I was like, oh, this makes perfect sense. All of the things that I have been thinking and feeling about the undefined world of what the new state... Now I would sort of call it the cosmofication of Ethereum, what that process was like. (04:32):I wasn't an idiot and I wasn't just not smart enough to understand what folks were talking about. Folks just were talking ahead of the problems they'd solved. And this is not to say that we're never going to have composability uncharted ecosystems, but it took video game designers almost a decade to figure out how to program for multi-core processors. And that took a long time to figure. Out for me, this sort of decision to come and join the Solana Labs at that point was really practical. It was like, I don't know if this weird wacky idea is going to work, but I know I'm going to learn a hell of a lot here from these folks who are doing something very different than the rest of the industry. And the very different than the rest of the industry is usually where the cool stuff's happening. Brian Friel (05:15):I think that is the most perfect intro for this because it hits on so many themes. I want to dive in with you. Austin Federa (05:21):Great. Brian Friel (05:21):One theme that you kind of hit on right there, and this is before we even get into what you currently do as your role and everything, which we should definitely hit on, but I think that resonates pretty well with what Phantom saw originally. Because Phantom also coming from EVM background and the founders were all Zero X folks, seeing that, hey, there is this thing, it's maybe the redheaded stepchild of crypto right now, but these people who are marching into their own beat. This is like 2021, very early 2020 at this point. But basically what I would say it was a very non-consensus bet to do things differently and built out its own genuine kernel of developer ecosystem, which has just evolved into all this craziness today we can talk about. (06:00):But I think one of the key principles of that that I've noticed in my time in Solana is just the level of pragmatism and the reality of, Hey, these are problems today. We have users today, and how do we ship and iterate on these things and not talk about a problem that might be 10 years from now, which may or may not be solved, but actually addresses the problem today. And I think there's a lot that is going on in Solana about this across just all sorts of stuff. We should dive into all of that. Austin Federa (06:27):Oh yeah. Brian Friel (06:28):But I love that framing, and I'm curious, is that level of pragmatism... Who do you think that's set by? I feel like that's almost something an Anatoly thing, but is that an explicit choice that Solana Foundation or Solana Labs is choosing to bring into the ecosystem? Austin Federa (06:42):So one of the things I think is really important when you're looking at any software system is to look at philosophies that the people building it have. And a lot of the places you see that philosophy is in their background. And so if you look at Anatoly and Stephen Akridge and a bunch of the other early founders of the Solana project, their expertise was all in embedded systems. A bunch of these folks came from Qualcomm or very similar companies to Qualcomm, and they were trying to figure out how you could cram the best user experience possible on a flip phone or a proto smartphone onto a chip. And they had to do all these crazy low level optimizations to get this stuff to work. And Solana's not super, super low level, but one of the major things there was saying, we're going to combine the consensus layer with the virtual machine. (07:38):And that's not for some elegant principle of software architecture. That's because it's faster and yes, it's harder. And yes, there's a lot of other problems that come with that, but at the end of the day, the pragmatism comes from the background of folks who actually had to ship chips that companies were going to build software on that would interact in the real world and be the basis of all of this mobile revolution. And so there's other approaches that are very sort of come from the academic computing world where it's as long as we can define the perfect software system, in theory, the problem is just finding the execution place to do it on. And there are some chains that have been more successful than others with that. But I think at the end of the day, the thing Solana has going for it is this sort of ruthless pragmatism. It's a desire to build software in a way that doesn't let perfect [inaudible 00:08:33] of the good, but also keeps its values front and center. (08:36):And one of those major values is if you know you have to do the hard thing, do the hard thing first. And that is the thing I will routinely tell people internally is the only way you eat an elephant is one bite at a time. And that is kind of the way we go through all of this stuff. It's so easy to talk yourself into waterfall releases. It's so easy to talk yourself into, well, when this thing comes out, then this and this and this, and this can all come out and then we'll have this end state of this. And it's like you're making assumptions about what the blockchain industry's going to look like 18 months from now. I don't think any human is ever successfully predicted what the blockchain industry would look like six months from now, let alone three times that. So there's all this stuff about not working with entrenched assumptions, picking software architecture systems that feel like they're persistent. I would say that the software philosophy that Solana core engineering builds on is closer to brand philosophy than it is like technical philosophy. It's very interesting. Brian Friel (09:36):Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, being [inaudible 00:09:39], I think we have a front seat to that too, as the ecosystem changes as the leadership basically, like you said, just takes the hard challenge first and says, this is something that we have to face. Let's tackle it now. Here's an open proposal, here's how we can do it. I'm looking back at what Solana was even just a year ago, one of the dev advocates on our team on it put out this tweet that said, "Things we didn't have a year ago on Solana Wallet's standard." Austin Federa (10:02):Oh, I love it. Brian Friel (10:03):Which is like looking at the state of other blockchains trying to be an ejected wallet there, it's a mess. Solana takes that hand on, makes a chain agnostic wallet standard for that version transactions, which like high level, massively refactoring how transactions can be done such that you can just access way more accounts on Solana DeFi doing multi hops exchange. Jupiter, the perfect example of that. Priority fees on the network, I mean elegant state level hotspot fee markets that don't impact the rest. Anyone else on Solana. Programmable NFTs, state compression, quick, stake weighted QoS. (10:37):I mean, not to mention Saga, new token programs. There's just so much going on right now. From where you sit, and maybe this can get into a little bit of the labs versus foundation discussion that we want to get into too, is how do all these ideas come to life mean? Some of these are community driven, like Metaplex having their own programmable NFTs. But a lot of these also are Solana engineers who are just on the front lines with their own proposals. Jordan Sexton has an idea he's doing it. How much of that is top down driven? How much of that is bottom up? And how much of this is a labs versus foundation? How do you see all this kind of how it plays out? Austin Federa (11:16):So before we even get to that, one of, I think the most interesting examples of pragmatism is how little work wallets have to do on Solana. This is super different. On Ethereum, the wallet has to build the transaction, that is a part of the thing. And on Solana, the DAPs have to build the transactions. Because the DAPs know more about what they're building than the wallet does. So why would the wallet build a transaction? The wallet's role is to verify that the transaction is what the DAP says it is, right? But it's those little tiny things where it's like how do we make it easier for people to build something like Phantom in six months as opposed to nine months? (11:55):And that's kind of one component that falls into that. But you were saying these sort of ideas about where do these things come from. A lot of it comes from best practices in other ecosystems about things people are talking about. I think one of the things that Ethereum is far ahead of Solana on is formal verification. And formal verification is not something that we came up with or claimed to have come up with. (12:20):It's like, oh, this is a really strong thing in another ecosystem that we should take and bring into this. Proof of history is just time division multiple access. It's TDMA, it's literally what 2G cell phone technology run on. But you've applied that to a blockchain with a leader schedule now and suddenly you have an incredibly fast blockchain. I think one of the best things to think about is Solana is full of out-of-the-box solutions to very conventional problems. And those out-of-the-box solutions will often come from engineers who are working on this stuff. They'll often come from engineers who are not working on this stuff. The number of suggestions that have come from someone's like, oh, I'm trying to build this thing, and someone like over lunch or over a Zoom on something else is like, what if you just do it this way instead? And they're like, okay. (13:08):And then they go down that... It's sort of this idea that there's not an intellectual purity test. You don't have to subscribe to a philosophy of how something should be built in order to have an idea here. P NFTs came entirely from community demand for them. That was a direct response to sort of a problem. The wallet standard is again, it's like it's really annoying that developers have to integrate calls for every wallet into their DAP. Wouldn't it be so much easier if there could just be one thing they could call and all the wallets in your Chrome Exchange could be like, hello, here I am. And that was an incredible easy turnkey thing that didn't require creating a whole separate product, a whole separate company to just connect wallets or adapt wallets if we should say it that way. And that's where these kind of things come from. (13:58):Now sometimes this leads to suboptimal user experiences too. I would say that we have three excellent explorers on Solana for what you want to do with that explorer. And you don't go to Solscan for the same things you go to Solana FM for and you don't go to the explorer.solana.com for the same things you go to those other ones for. And so there is sometimes this sort of fracturing that occurs because everyone has great ideas and they feel very comfortable building them before we've had a committee meeting or faculty meeting or something to decide what the right path forward is. As much as possible, the goal is to move fast and see what's adopted and the stuff that's adopted then gets tons of resources thrown behind it from the community. Brian Friel (14:48):Yeah, I do think that's incredibly refreshing though for crypto. I mean, especially an industry that's still... I think as a whole macro level iterating a lot. The meta is constantly changing. Some pattern that I've noticed is with P NFTs is a lot of times Solana will hit a new meta or figure out a new problem well before other ecosystems because of this rapid iteration and experimentation. And it's almost like, hey, Solana's figured it out. Let's take the learnings from there and tell everyone else and get up to speed on that. Austin Federa (15:16):Oh yeah. And tell everyone else we thought of it ourselves. That's also the other thing. And we see this all the time, not in a way that people are like, but all of the tricks that Monad is doing to try and speed up EVM, they're all the things that Solana did. Except they're trying to do it with an underlying architecture that it's a lot harder on because transactions on Solana have to specify their accounts, their instructions, their memory, their compute, before they get accepted and executed. So the work of transaction simulation on Solana is a lot more about just reading what the data says and being like, yes, these things say what they actually say they say, and then you can simulate balance changes and all that sort of stuff. But that is a very different problem than trying to stochastically model what an EVM transaction is going to do. (16:05):And if you're trying to do out of order processing of EVM transactions, I'm not going to say it can't work because a lot of people thought Token Ring was the only protocol that could possibly make the internet work. And the idea of just throwing packets randomly at a router and being good luck, well, that sounded insane, and that is exactly how the internet works. You just randomly throw packets at routers and most of them get there somehow. It's pretty astonishing. Like packet collision's super rare nowadays, even though everyone's just screaming at the top of their lungs constantly for bandwidth, and that's wild. (16:37):So who knows if the stuff will actually work on that side. But the cool thing I think that's going on in Solana is this lack of ideological purity around how something has to be done, and it's more of a purity around what the outcome has to be. There's so many analogies here, but the United States, we talk about equality of opportunity all the time, and that is actually a much harder thing to do than equality of outcome. And so I think with Solana, it's like if you focus on the outcome that you want and not the process by which you get there, you will find a better way to get there. Brian Friel (17:12):I love that. So from where you sit on the foundation side now head of strategy at Foundation, you mentioned that there's all these engineers, some at Solana, some not at Solana, who basically have these problems. They come up with pragmatic solutions. What's the role of the Solana Foundation on all of this? And is there any big bets in particular that you're excited about or you guys are making for this year on Solana? Austin Federa (17:36):Yeah, So the Foundation is a Swiss nonprofit foundation that exists to further the adoption and advancement of the Solana blockchain. And so this is the entity that gives grants. This is the entity that if you've ever sort of interacted with a granting apparatus, breakpoint, hacker houses, developer boot camps, those are all run out of the Solana Foundation. That's its role for being in the world. And so the initiatives that we are working on are really infrastructure level. They always have been, and I think they will continue to be throughout this year. So a great example of this are fee markets, like you mentioned, right? Local fee markets. That was technically shipped in September, but I would argue it practically wasn't shipped until December. And that was because there wasn't a method at that point for an RPC, for a wallet, a DAP, anything to hit up an RPC and say, how much do you think I should prioritize a fee if I really want to make sure this transaction gets through? (18:34):And without the ability to guesstimate, you don't have anything, right? That is not a functional, usable, shipped thing without developers actually being able to implement it. And that's kind of the difference I would describe between the work that gets done through let's just say Solana Labs and core engineering there and the work the Foundation's supporting. A lot of the work that core engineering does and a bunch of, obviously not all, there's core engineers all over the place, but a number of the core engineers are on Solana Labs' payroll. And those individuals, they're focused on the core engineering, right? (19:09):They're like, we shipped fee markets. We're good. At the Foundation, we're like, wait a minute, wait a minute. There's so much work to actually be done to turn this into a standard that every DAP and wallet can use without spending days writing custom code. And so I would say that's kind of the place that the Foundation comes in is it's not directing what work gets done, but it's sort of the process of taking stuff that feels like it's either R&D or it's super hot production engineering. And turning it into something that's more stable, that's more standardized, that's more universally understood, and doing that in a way that there's feedback collected from many people in the ecosystem, in addition to the whole granting apparatus. Brian Friel (19:47):So the developer relations team sits at the foundation level no longer at the labs level? Austin Federa (19:52):Yes, very much. You were saying earlier like, oh, these things maybe weren't as separate before they actually were just as separate. They were just very few people worked for Foundation. So because most of the work at that point was just sort of kick out as much as you can get out the door. There were folks at Foundation giving grants and stuff like that, but a lot of that sort of work that we do today, it wasn't necessary to do it yet because the thing didn't exist yet, at that stage. When I joined, there were 36 programs on the network that had daily transactions through them. Brian Friel (20:25):Wow. Austin Federa (20:26):Absolutely nothing. And now we're over like 1200 easily. And I just think that's such an interesting change to see over such a quick period of time. Brian Friel (20:35):Oh, for sure. It stood out to me too, that... I think I mentioned the earlier conversation too. It's like this kernel of genuine developer interest that basically no other blockchain ecosystem I think has outside of Ethereum where it's people who are very much specialized, Solana centric as Chase loves to say too in Glass, but really just thinking about what's only possible in Solana? How can I iterate on this and expand on this? That's super invigorating to be a part of, and that's my favorite part of the ecosystem, essentially. Yeah, Austin Federa (21:04):We love it. Brian Friel (21:05):On that note, there is this meme now, is recording this in April 2023 of only possible on Solana and these things that everything we talked about, this pragmatic engineering culture of basically what's the outcome, what's the end user experience that we really want, and finding ways to ship that. There's a lot going on right now. I mean, I think Saga is an awesome example of this. It's like, how could we take a phone that just is the most kick ass crypto experience you could possibly have on mobile, but there's all sorts of stuff. There's compressed NFTs and state compression, what that means, DPIN is this new thing. There's all existing, DeFi, just normal FTs payments infrastructure. What are you personally most excited about and are any key themes in the year ahead that you think people should look into now that really highlights the strengths of Solana? Austin Federa (21:52):So the decentralized physical infrastructure layer is a really interesting story for me personally. And I think there's so much that goes on with that that goes into that, whatever kind of language you want to use to describe that. I am just super excited about what that looks like. And for me personally, the stuff I'm most excited about on Solana is you really don't have a choice to build it anywhere else that you need a fast composable ecosystem that has the capacity to go up to tens of thousands of transactions per second for a base fee of $.000025 and that's rare. You really can't find that in a lot of other places or a lot of other applications. And so for me, that's like some of the coolest stuff on Solana. Now, in terms of what's coming this year, I think we're going to see Fire Dancer rolling out on testnet probably in Q4. (22:40):That's going to be really interesting to see how that performs when it's intermingled with the other clients on the network. So that's going to be very interesting. There's a ton of work being done to make custom contracts easier to deploy on Solana. This is a project called Interfaces. This is out of necessity. The Token 22, which is code name, it definitely won't be called that once it's released. Token 22 is this new token program coming to the network. And it brings all sorts of things like interest baresing tokens. You can charge fees to use contracts directly in the contract. (23:11):There's a lot of really interesting stuff that comes to it, but it adds a second token program to the network. And that second token program means you need to suddenly have a way that a wallet can instantly say, Hey, which program should I look at for this arbitrary piece of data on chain? And because of that, it means if you've built support for two, you can build support for 20,000. So there's little pieces like that that are coming, but I really think this is going to be another infrastructure year, but instead of it being base level infrastructure, it's going to be something closer to developer tooling. I'm not sure I would call Interface is developer tooling, but it's definitely usability tooling. That means it's easier to develop novel things for the Solana ecosystem. Brian Friel (23:55):Yeah, I see that as well. The conversation shift towards interfaces is really exciting too, because Solana's account model and program model has some implicit instruction in that where, okay, this is the canonical token program. Austin Federa (24:08):It's perfect. What are you talking about? Brian Friel (24:09):Yeah, it's perfect. What are you talking about? And I think that just leans even more into those pragmatic values kind of shipping. And that's like, Hey, if we do have these interfaces where all of a sudden any wallet can take any of these token programs, any NFT exchange you can list on, you can list your NFTs through them. Opening up that design space, a deeper infrastructure level, I think would be really exciting. Austin Federa (24:31):Yeah. This will support everything from if you are a... No offense, but if you're a super corporate NFT project and you want to make sure that you have certain protections or certain things or whatever, you might want to deploy your own version of an NFT contract. And right now it's really hard to do that. It's not hard to deploy the contract, it's hard to get the ecosystem on board with the contract you've deployed. Brian Friel (24:55):You have to knock on every door to get a custom integration. Austin Federa (24:59):And we're seeing this with compression, right? Compression is awesome. It's been picked up by a ton of wallets. There's not an NFT marketplace that supports it yet. Brian Friel (25:08):Not yet, but I have heard soon. So maybe, and by the time that this podcast is released. Austin Federa (25:13):Who's adding it? Brian Friel (25:14):I have heard Tensor. Austin Federa (25:15):Interesting. Brian Friel (25:16):As an alpha drop. Austin Federa (25:17):They've been making moves. Brian Friel (25:18):They're making moves, but I would not be surprised if Magic Eden and others would be following suit at some point. But if we can open up an interface, some sort of interface standard where we can get buy-in, do the hard work up front to get all these different companies to buy into some sort of interface together, it's going to unlock a lot of really cool potential on Solana. Austin Federa (25:38):Absolutely. Brian Friel (25:39):One other thing I want to ask too is, you mentioned a few things kind of implicitly there. One of my questions was going to be like there's all these exciting things happening where we should we be investing now to unlock all this. But I guess there's also... I've noticed on Solana, and particularly Solana Twitter, there's this part of what this pragmatic culture has attracted is a culture of doers and people who show up and they want to contribute and they want to lend their time. And a lot of developers who maybe not even be working in the Solana ecosystem who are just excited and passionate about it. If you could speak to those people, where do you think they should be focusing their time and energy? What is Solana most in need from external contributors at this time? Austin Federa (26:19):It's a really good question. I mean, the problem there is I don't think the advice that I would give external contributors is good advice for their project at this point. It's great advice for Solana. The advice for Solana, I'd say is keep building strong open source tooling and foundations so we can make it easier for new developers to get involved. Anything you build that fits into the Lego thesis super strong, please keep doing it. What I would actually give as advice for founders in this space right now is that we're probably in a bear for at least another 12 months, and it's going to be a climb out of this thing. And you should be spending time thinking about revenue. You should be spending time thinking about business models. Not a lot, not enough to go raise a massive series beyond, but enough that you're extending your runway by a few months that if you have to raise a bridge round, you can show, hey, actually we do have revenue. (27:23):Here's our revenue numbers. Give us a little bit of money. Because I think this is a really hard time in the capital markets. It's really easy to be like the bear is a great time for building. That's true. The bear is a great time for building. It's a terrible time for payroll though. And that's kind of something they just remember as you kind of go through the process. Now, what does Solana need? I mean, I'm going to tell you my vision of how Solana could not win. And the way Solana doesn't win is if these incremental small scaling solutions for EVM, that 400 transactions per second, you can do an EVM right now if you really try. Maybe we just don't come up with transaction heavy use cases that anyone truly wants for a while. And that's a situation where all this horsepower that's been brought to bear on something like Solana isn't actually needed for what things people want to build on blockchains. (28:20):Now, I don't think that's true, but that's the thing to think about. What Solana needs is for people to embrace only possible on Solana and to build more things that are truly only possible to be built on Solana. Because as much as I love NFT projects, very few of them are only possible on Solana. This is the great thing about XNFTs. Those are truly only possible in Solana right now. But let's see teams going out there and saying, okay, a 10,000 drop is cool. What if we do a million, 10 million, a hundred million? Yeah, they're going to be cheaper. Yeah, the dynamics are going to change. Something's going to change, right? But this is the thing that I think is so interesting about this space is everyone has internalized this financialization, Bitcoinification view of all crypto. Like, Bitcoin's value is scarcity, period, end of day. (29:20):That's great. Props to Bitcoin, nothing since Bitcoin is Bitcoin. Like Magic The Gathering is not worth less money every time they print a new trading card pack. The Pokemon company is not worth less money every time they sell a new Pikachu plush. There are models here that people just seem emotionally afraid to try. I think Clano is getting pretty close to this and they're doing some very cool stuff with how they're doing some collection expanding. On the NFT side though, I think people need to get away from the idea that their value proposition is scarcity and figure out ways to do like LVMH and Louis Vuitton have done where they have something that is still high end, that is still hard to get but is not fixed cap. And sort of see where that maybe heads from there. On the DeFi side, start building outside of the United States, translate your projects, websites into Vietnamese and Turkish. (30:18):Don't think your growth is going to come from the United States in the next year or two because the regulations here are really uncertain right now. And it's a bit of a tricky time for folks to be in the United States. But I went to Turkey and I went to Vietnam, and folks are using crypto, and they're using crypto because in Turkey it's significantly more stable than their actual native currency. And that's a crazy thing to be thinking about, but that's true. So let's embrace that. Let's actually think of this stuff and make sure that the work that's being done truly actually supports this kind of stuff. And I think that's kind of one of the most important things to think about from the perspective of a founder at this point. Brian Friel (30:57):Yeah, I think there's been a key theme here throughout this whole conversation of basically going back to first principles and thinking, what's the outcomes that we want? Originally, I think Solana's tagline, even blockchain at Nasdaq speed, we were promised flying cars. We got Twitter, we got the greatest JPEG trading engine in the world on Solana, but how can we continue to iterate on this and what are things we can only do on Solana? All those examples you brought up I think are awesome examples. I really appreciate that you guys are continuing to challenge the ecosystem and to push and to not be afraid to try new things, and that's where the unlocks happen. Austin Federa (31:30):Yeah, of course. I think that's incredibly important and powerful here. Brian Friel (31:34):Well, Austin, this has been an awesome conversation. Thank you so much. One closing question we ask all our guests. Keeping line with the last question of the things you're excited about is who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem? Austin Federa (31:48):I mean, there's so many, it's hard to pick one. There's the easy answers of Armani and those folks and Mango Max. And I think the truth is that the folks who are doing some of the most interesting work are the ones who are bug fixing, who are going in and saying, ah, I ran into this problem with this tool set that I've seen someone else build. Let me go spend a little time trying to fix this thing up. And I don't have anyone particular to name in that, but it's very easy to be like, holy shit, Armani and X NFTs. Wow. And it's like, that is incredibly important. You know what else is really important? The dude that went in and made RPCs 20% more efficient for certain types of calls. And I think those are equally important things, and I wish we did a little bit more celebrating of the maintenance work in addition to all of our celebrating of the true innovations only possible on Solana. Brian Friel (32:40):Mert is going to love that, that you said their call that out, so. Austin Federa (32:44):There we go. Brian Friel (32:44):Maybe we can put Mert, Triton, all those folks, everyone, all the infrastructure that does the unsexy blocking and tackling that maybe really is the true glass eating on Solana, all of those guys. Austin Federa (32:56):Totally. I mean, there's a bunch of devs that work in Mango that are actually part of core engineering now, and they just fix a bunch of stuff because they're just like, we were trying to build our next version of Mango and we kept running into these problems, so we just started fixing stuff. Brian Friel (33:10):No one knows it better than them. Yeah. Austin Federa (33:12):Exactly. So it's good. Brian Friel (33:13):That's amazing. Well, Austin, I'm really excited for the next year Solana, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Austin Federa (33:20):Definitely. Thank you. This is fun.   

How does Solana support innovation for Web3?   In this episode of The Next Billion podcast, George Harrap is joined by Austin Federa, Head of Strategy at Solana Foundation.   They begin by discussing Solana's recent focus on creating an easily customizable building process for developers, allowing them to choose the necessary pieces and leave out the rest.    Austin discusses Solana's goal to create an affordable and fast network for NFTs and other applications. They also discuss whether Solana should build tools specifically for Web2 companies transitioning to Web3 or let it happen organically.   They further explore Solana's efforts to activate builders and developers, support teams in the ecosystem, and provide education to help people understand the dynamics of Solana.   Towards the end, they discuss Solana's commitment to new markets and regions for development and their goal of kick-starting community meetups worldwide.   Listen to George and Austin's raw and insightful perspectives here, and on Spotify, at //open.spotify.com/show/2ELv0Ct    Follow Austin on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/Austin_Federa Follow Solana Foundation on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/SolanaFndn   Crypto is so much more than just numbers and nodes. It's about onboarding The Next Billion users. The Next Billion podcast is a direct, and unfiltered dive into the stories of the builders that are making this happen.   Host George Harrap has wide-ranging conversations to help people better understand the future of crypto adoption and uses around the world to help onboard The Next Billion people into crypto.   Subscribe to join us on the journey of onboarding The Next Billion.

Solana Foundation hype man Austin Federa was kind enough to join us this week to discuss one of the bedrock truths when it comes to money: People like to steal it. Seriously, listen to this one if you think cryptocurrency has its own special category of crime, because you might be missing the forest for the trees.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Austin Federa is the Head of Communications for Solana Foundation, where he works across communications, marketing, strategy, and product.Introducing Validated, the weekly podcast focused on expanding discussions with web3 industry leaders to cover a wide range of topics for those who are eager to learn more about blockchain and crypto.In each episode of Validated, host Austin Federa (the Solana Foundation's head of communications) tackles some of the big questions people have about the world of web3 — including NFTs, DeFi, decentralized governance, games, and more — alongside some of the world's leading experts. Perfect for fans of Decoder and Acquired.fm, Validated looks at the big picture ideas and research about the decentralized future, as well as the trending news of the day.Linkshttps://link.chtbl.com/yJftVHV8?sid=CryptoCurrent*Disclaimer. Richard Carthon is the Founder of Crypto Current. All opinions expressed by members of the Crypto Current Team, Richard or his guest on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Crypto Current. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Richard as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.~Put your Bitcoin and Ethereum to work. Earn up to 12% interest back with Tantra Labs~New to crypto? Check out our Crypto for Beginners Step-by-Step Guide to Crypto Investing~Follow us on Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, & Tik Tok~Want to make ~$25+ a month for FREE? Sign up to get a FREE emrit.io Coolspot today! ~Want to learn more about cryptocurrency? Check out our educational videos today!~Swan is the easiest and most affordable way to accumulate Bitcoin with automatic recurring purchases. Start your plan today and get $10 of free Bitcoin dropped into your account.~Want access to cool crypto/blockchain projects that you can use immediately? Check out our partnerships page! ~Looking to attend a cryptocurrency or blockchain event? Check out our events page!~Tune in on Crypto Current TV throughout the week for a 24/7 crypto stream on the latest action on crypto markets, news, and interviews with the industry's top experts!~Enjoying our podcast? Please leave us a 5 star review

In this episode of Crypto 101, brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs we talk to Austin Federa who is head of Strategy and Communication at the Solana Foundation who gives us a deep dive on everything Solana.  Consider this episode the Solana State of the Union Address where you get everything from a recap of the FTX fiasco to where Solana stands today and all the awesome things they are working on to grow their network, community, and technology.  Digital Currency Summit Registrationhttps://www.digitalcurrencysummit.com/registration43922607Sponsored link:www.LinkedIn.com/cryptoGuest Links:https://solana.org/https://twitter.com/Austin_FederaYouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@crypto101podcastShow Links:https://CRYPTO101podcast.com Social Media:https://twitter.com/Crypto101Podhttps://twitter.com/BrycePaul101https://instagram.com/crypto_101 Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/groups/101Cryptohttps://www.facebook.com/CRYPTO101Podcast **THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL OR LEGAL ADVICE**© Copyright 2022 Boardwalk Flock, LLC All Rights Reserved ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬Fog by DIZARO https://soundcloud.com/dizarofrCreative Commons — Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported  — CC BY-ND 3.0 Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/Fog-DIZAROMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/lAfbjt_rmE8▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Austin Federa is the Head of Strategy & Communications at Solana. In this podcast episode we discuss how Solana managed to survive the FTX crash, what are the driving forces behind the project, economic theories that are being built in the blockchain space, identity management, blockchain gaming, and why Austin is so excited about crypto that he can hardly imagine working anywhere else. Austin Federa: https://twitter.com/Austin_Federa ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER https://thewolfden.substack.com/  GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT AND TRADE ALL SPOT PAIRS ON BITGET FOR ZERO FEES! ►► https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io  Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe  Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c  #Solana The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Follow the @SolfatePod show on Twitter for updates. Thanks for listening frens :)Notes from the showJames and Nick talk about ordering their Saga phones, including the Saga cards airdrop. They explore the idea of digital collectibles over time and how business may use them to entire consumers down the line.The gents talk multi chain and the Phantom wallet, then Nick baits James into a personal hackathon by first offering him $BONK to ship an mobile app within 2 weeks of getting his Saga phone. James refuses the $BONK offer but counter requests a Solana Spaces NFT from the drip.haus airdrops.PS: After getting rugged on their first try recording the entire episode, Nick and James recorded an entire new episode for this week. You may notice some mentions of that throughout the episode :)Huge shout out to Jeffrey Ando (@ser_ando) for the amazing AI generated cover art!Full show notes available at https://solfate.com/podcast/3Links from the showSolana Mobile announced an airdrop to “select” Saga Pass holders. Ominous.Phantom started allowing people to test their multi chain walletSolana Sandstorm hackathon submissions are closedSolana Spaces weekly airdrops for the community at drip.hausJoe C from Solana Foundation DevRel published a new Solana crash course video series on YouTubeSolana news from the weekSOL price is up. Nice!Solana.fm added some extra tracking on the wormhole exploiterThe official Solana podcast has been rebranded to ValidatedItalo shutdown the apr dev domain and merged the registry into SolDevSOL price surged after Austin Federa appeared on BloombergFormfunction shipped an airdrop feature to allow creators to easily airdrop their holdersSolana Foundation advanced the minimum validator version (to 1.14.13) on Testnet for those participating in the Delegation programFollow us aroundNickfollow on twitter: @nickfrostyfollow on github: github.com/nickfrostywebsite: https://nick.afJamesfollow on twitter: @jamesrp13follow on github: github.com/jamesrp13

Introducing Validated, a new podcast where host Austin Federa talks to people who are rethinking the internet — and our world. No hype cycles. No financial advice. Just conversations on the biggest ideas shaping the future of the internet.

On the latest episode of The Bit, Michael Mouradian sits down with Austin Federa, Head of Communications at Solana Foundation, to discuss how Solana differs from other networks regarding performance, security, interoperability, and its top-rated projects. The pair explore Solana's evergrowing developer community, its major partnerships of the last 12 months, and the most recent updates on the Solana Web3 smartphone that looks to provide users quick, easy access to crypto through the device.

The Acquired community's own Austin Federa joins us for a 101 primer on how to self-custody your crypto assets, and why it's the only truly safe way to hold them. Given all the current turmoil (and fraud) in crypto-land, we were thinking “how could we do something to help the Acquired community right now”, and Austin gave us the perfect idea. In addition to running the #digital-assets channel on the Acquired Slack, Austin is the head of communications at the Solana Foundation and has plenty of hard-won experience through previous crypto cycles and implosions. This episode covers both the nuts and bolts of a “how-to” guide, as well as a more philosophical discussion of self-custody across asset classes, and the practicalities and convenience tradeoffs involved. ‍Sponsor: Thank you to the Solana Foundation for being our presenting sponsor for the LP Show this season. Solana is the world's most performant blockchain and the best place for developers to build Web3 applications. You get in touch with them here (just tell them them at Ben and David sent you), and you can find and listen to Solana's own podcast here, hosted by Austin himself! Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.  

We had the rare opportunity to interview Jay Hoag, cofounder of the first tech crossover investing firm, TCV, at TCV's Engage Summit in Half Moon Bay earlier this fall. Jay and Rick Kimball started TCV back in 1995 and have been part of the private-to-public journeys of storied companies like Netflix (which Jay shares some great war stories about on this episode), Spotify, Zillow, Expedia, Facebook, Airbnb, Peloton and many others. Jay and TCV were kind enough to let us release the conversation as an Acquired LP episode, and we're excited to share it with all of you. We cover the firm's history, how companies should calibrate the magnitude of their future-looking product investments (a topic we didn't realize would end up being so timely) and perhaps most importantly, pivotal moments where now seemingly unstoppable companies almost died amidst big macroeconomic changes. We hope you enjoy! Links: The Acquired Merch Store The Acquired Slack ‍Sponsor: Thank you to the Solana Foundation for being our presenting sponsor for the LP Show this season. Solana is the world's most performant blockchain, the BEST place for developers to build Web3 applications, and of course very near & dear to the Acquired community's heart. You get in touch with them here (just tell them them at Ben and David sent you), and you can find and listen to Solana's own podcast here, hosted by the Acquired community's very own Austin Federa! Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

We sit down with Brian O'Malley of Forerunner Ventures to talk about where in the cycle we are right now for consumer investing. We touch on the macro environment (obviously!), but also how to navigate between and around the current generation of platform incumbents, and where the next breakthrough consumer technology companies might come from. And in true Acquired Playbook fashion we talk about the benefits of focusing on niches — and how on the internet they can expand ever bigger than you might initially imagine! Links: Acquired Qualcomm Live Show at Breakpoint 2022! The 2022 Acquired Survey! The Acquired Merch Store The Acquired Slack ‍Sponsor: Thank you to the Solana Foundation for being our presenting sponsor for the LP Show this season. Solana is the world's most performant blockchain, the BEST place for developers to build Web3 applications, and of course very near & dear to the Acquired community's heart. You get in touch with them here (just tell them them at Ben and David sent you), and you can find and listen to Solana's own podcast here, hosted by the Acquired community's very own Austin Federa! Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Austin Federa is the head of communications for the Solana Foundation, which supports the Solana blockchain. We talk about him growing up in western Massachusetts, the prevalence of ultimate frisbee in hippie towns, going to a DIY college and eventually his foray into web3 and blockchain. Learn more about Solana Follow Austin on Twitter

Kindergarten Ventures LP (and fellow podcast host over at Unlimited Partners) Thomas McGannon interviews David about Kindergarten's investment thesis for their recent large investment in Vanta. Along the way they discuss KV's overall strategy, how it fits into Acquired, and why it's “accidentally” become the best answer David has ever had to “why should a great founder take my capital?” Links: The 2022 Acquired Survey Vanta! Kindergarten Ventures on AngelList ‍Sponsor: Thank you to the Solana Foundation for being our presenting sponsor for the LP Show this season. Solana is the world's most performant blockchain, the BEST place for developers to build Web3 applications, and of course very near & dear to the Acquired community's heart. You get in touch with them here (just tell them them at Ben and David sent you), and you can find and listen to Solana's own podcast here, hosted by the Acquired community's very own Austin Federa! Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

We sit down with Kettle cofounder — and David's Kindergarten Ventures partner — Nat Manning to discuss the fascinating world of reinsurance, risk and climate. We couldn't think of a better and more appropriate conversation to have on the LP Show, and this was an absolute blast. Tune in and enjoy! ‍ ‍Links: Kettle Kindergarten Ventures on AngelList ‍ ‍Sponsor: Thank you to the Solana Foundation for being our presenting sponsor for the LP Show this season. Solana is the world's most performant blockchain, the BEST place for developers to build Web3 applications, and of course very near & dear to the Acquired community's heart. You get in touch with them here (just tell them them at Ben and David sent you!), register for Breakpoint here, and you can find and listen to Solana's own podcast here, hosted by the Acquired community's very own Austin Federa!   Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

不会代码也能参与的 Web3 抢劫事件，到底是怎么发生的？今年 8 月初， Web3 领域先后发生了 Nomad 和 Solana 两起影响广泛的黑客攻击导致钱包被盗事件，有创业者重申以太坊创始人 Vitalik 年初对多链生态下跨链项目发展的担忧，也有投资机构选择事后加注 Web3 安全赛道。一个普通人是如何成为 Web3 的白帽黑客？Web3 最成熟的应用领域里都存在哪些重大安全挑战？安全行业在 Web3 是否也存在成本与刚需的悖论？困境之下，从业者如何划定 Web3 生态的安全底线？ 本期人物 刘力心，Keystone CEO 周亚金，BlockSec 联合创始人，浙江大学“百人计划”研究员 源楠，CertiK 安全工程师 刘灿，「科技早知道」监制 主要话题 [03:59] 攻击 Nomad 其实很简单？Solana 这个事儿还没结束？ [15:48] 项目方的风控能力有问题？Emergency 机制会产生中心化风险？ [24:21] 跨链项目为什么容易受到攻击？Layer 2 的安全性不仅仅依赖 Layer 1？ [45:59] 项目方能提前防范风险事件吗？线上与线下的逻辑有哪些不同？ [61:07] 安全审计公司怎么看黑客事件？开发者发现不了的安全隐患是？ 延伸阅读 - Web3 知名白帽黑客 samczsun 关于 Nomad 事件的复盘：samczsun (https://twitter.com/samczsun) - Solana 发言人 Austin Federa 对今年8 月份钱包被盗事件的回复：Austin Federa (https://twitter.com/Austin_Federa) - 闪电贷（flashloans）：一种金融行为，指代在一笔交易中同时完成贷款动作和还款动作的套利行为，可用于去中心化交易所之间的无风险套利，是 web3 黑客实施攻击的主要手段之一；2018 年由 Marble 协议提出，目前 Aave、Unisway 等平台都有闪电贷功能 ；闪电贷是很多区块链项目开发者的安全盲区，也是当下安全审计公司进行项目审计时最关注的问题之一。 - 重入攻击（Re-entrancy Callback）：利用智能合约基础漏洞所发动的典型攻击行为之一，可分为 single-function 和 cross-function， 2016 年以太坊 TheDAO 项目就遭到了重入攻击并一度暂停交易；目前主流应对重入攻击的主要方法有 Checks-Effects-Interactions 和 Reentrancy Guard。 - Layer 1：指代底层区块链，大家熟知的比特币、以太坊、Solana 均属于 Layer 1 层级；在交易需求和处理速度的压力下，Layer 1 可以通过 Layer 2 解决方案完成扩容，Nomad、Ronin 等跨链、侧链项目均属于 Layer 2 层级。 使用音乐 Shanghai Institute-Gridded 幕后制作 监制：刘灿、信宇 后期：Luke 运营：Yao 封面设计：饭团 关于节目 原「硅谷早知道」，全新改版后为「What's Next｜科技早知道」。放眼全球，聚焦科技发展，关注商业格局变化。 欢迎加入声动胡同会员计划 (https://sourl.cn/BiLZhA) 订阅方式： 国内支付渠道（年付） (https://sourl.cn/G4B2Wt) 国外支付渠道（月付） (https://sourl.cn/UXhR7j) 「声动胡同」是以声动活泼北京办公室所在的前永康胡同为灵感，为喜欢我们的听众打造的一款社区产品。我们希望在这样的社区里，能让有价值共识的年轻人们在此获得更多源源不断的思考养料，彼此支持和成长。如果你加入成为我们的街坊，将获得以下与我们保持更亲密连接的机会： - 每周三封 newsletter 形式的「胡同来信」，获得更多节目之外的信息与故事。 胡同来信试读：「教主来信｜像记账一样，记下你花出去的时间」 (https://sourl.cn/6MACkD) - 每季度举办一场线上或线下活动，例如已举办了三期的「露天演讲台」 (https://sourl.cn/BzAURb)、「胡同里的清醒梦」快闪活动。 - 你也可以在邮件中和我们讨论或询问任何事，我们都会一一邮件回复。 Special Guests: 刘力心, 周亚金, and 源楠.

We sit down with long (long!) time Acquired community member Austin Federa to discuss the current state of crypto and Web3. By day Austin is the head of marketing & communications at the Solana Foundation, where he was one of the earliest employees. But many of you also know Austin from his "night job" as the founder and lead of the #digital-assets channel in the Acquired Slack, where he does an incredible job curating some of the best and most accessible digital asset discussion on the internet. No matter whether you're already deep in Web3, curious but sitting on the sidelines, or a diehard crypto skeptic, this episode is well worth listening to and learning from.   Sponsor: Thank you to the Solana Foundation for being our presenting sponsor for the LP Show this season. Solana is the world's most performant blockchain, the BEST place for developers to build Web3 applications, and of course very near & dear to the Acquired community's heart. You get in touch with them here (just tell them them at Ben and David sent you), and you can find and listen to Solana's own podcast here, hosted by the Acquired community's very own Austin Federa! Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Welcome to episode 117 of the FTX Podcast with special guest Austin Federa and your host Tristan Yver!Austin is Head of Communications at Solana Foundation and a central figure to the Solana ecosystem in its entirety.Thank you for your time, energy & insight Austin!

What does a $200 million+ acquisition look like up close? How much time, focus, and communication happens between the first conversation and closing the deal? And when do the CEOs of each company just need to use the "red phone" and have a direct conversation without the 86(!) lawyers in the room?  We sit down with ProfitWell founder and CEO Patrick Campbell to answer it all, centering on ProfitWell's recent acquisition by Paddle. And incredibly, Patrick built and scaled the SaaS company without taking a single dollar of investment! If you're running a company that may one day need to navigate an acquisition (or just curious), tune in!  Links:  - Our Previous Episode with Patrick, a Masterclass on Pricing - The Documentary: "We Sign Tomorrow?" ‍Sponsor: Thank you to the Solana Foundation for being our presenting sponsor for the LP Show this season. Solana is the world's most performant blockchain, the BEST place for developers to build Web3 applications, and of course very near & dear to the Acquired community's heart. You get in touch with them here (just tell them them at Ben and David sent you), and you can find and listen to Solana's own podcast here, hosted by the Acquired community's very own Austin Federa! Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.

Noah Prince (Co-Founder/ CEO, Strata Protocol) and Austin Adams (Lead Protocol Dev, Metaplex Studios) sit down with Austin Federa to discuss the integration of Strata's Dynamic Pricing Mint tool into the Metaplex Program Library.00:51 - What is Strata?02:12 - Challenges when launching a token04:43 - Why is Strata more successful than competitors?06:15 - Fundraise and the changing use cases of tokens on Solana08:47 - Changing mentalites around the function of tokens10:48 - How is Metaplex's approach different11:51 - Description of the flow using Strata13:25 - Mechanisms of dynamic pricing15:12 - Tools for dynamic pricing / Collusion19:06 - Metaplex and additional tooling21:54 - Optimizing Metaplex's architecture for the community25:05 - Advantages and drawbacks with metaplex's architecture29:44 - Metaplex and backward compatibility32:39 - Pitch for using dynamic pricing DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. Austin Federa (00:10):Welcome to The Solana Podcast. I'm Austin Federa. Today we're talking about a new partnership between Metaplex, the NFT implementation on Solana, and Strata Protocol, a toolkit that helps developers launch tokens. They've built some new tools to help creators set dynamic pricing for NFT mints and these change the economic incentives around NFTs which will hopefully reduce the botting of NFT mints. We're joined by Noah Prince, the co-founder, and CEO of Strata Protocol, and Austin Adams, a software engineer and lead protocol developer at Metaplex. Gentlemen, welcome to the Solana Podcast.Noah Prince (00:42):Thanks, Austin.Austin Adams (00:42):Thanks for having us.Noah Prince (00:43):Glad to be here.Austin Federa (00:44):Great. So let's go ahead and start out today with just an overview of, Noah, what is Strata and what are you guys trying to do in the space?Noah Prince (00:52):So Strata Protocol at its core is a protocol for launching tokens and managing the liquidity around those tokens. So we have a variety of different auction mechanisms, and we can launch tokens anywhere from small tokens that you don't really know who the counterpart of the trade is, there's not going to be much volume, all the way up to large tokens where you want to do a large offering and then eventually put those on a DEX. How we ended up getting into this space is just that our auction mechanisms for tokens also offer a solution for the NFT botting situation. So we thought long and hard about how to keep bots from botting the token launches that we have. And if you launch one of those tokens and then put it as the entry price to a Candy Machine, you get a dynamic pricing Candy Machine.Austin Federa (01:39):So let's talk a little bit just to kind of roll back to what Strata really is trying to accomplish here. You mentioned it's a solution for launching tokens and providing initial liquidity for those tokens. What are the challenges that people run into when actually launching a token? I think if you look across the space, you'd see that there are hundreds of different tokens run by hundreds of different projects across the Solana ecosystem, the majority of which were not launched with something like a launchpad or basically a protocol to help them go through that process. What are the challenges that people are facing when they're actually looking at launching a token?Noah Prince (02:12):Yeah. So I think token launching kind of comes in a few steps, right? The very first step is the ideation phase, where you're trying to figure out what your token is, do you have multiple tokens? What are the tokenomics? And somewhat in that same phase is where legal comes in. And to a lot of degrees, that is the hardest spot is where you're going to figure out what your token does. But a lot of times for people launching a token, there's this kind of big okay, we know what we want to do, but how do we physically create that token? And then how do we go and do things like auction that token off? I want to sell some of that token to investors. I want to sell some of that token to all of my community, how do we actually distribute that thing?Noah Prince (02:54):And then after that, there's the step where you've distributed it, you've collected some money for the token that you can use to bootstrap the project. And then you also want it to be tradable on a DEX or on an AMM. And then you go and set that up. So Strata is really there to help with the creation part of the token and for really small tokens, we also manage the liquidity. So if you don't want to even care about what is an AMM, what is a DEX, who is the counterparty to a trade? We have a way you can launch a token and it's basically one click. The protocol just takes care of all of it for you.Austin Federa (03:30):Yeah. So if you think about maybe a year ago, when someone was trying to launch a token, there was lots of technical components in actually creating and launching that token, but you'd have to go and submit something to the Solana token registry. You'd have to then go ahead and set up a permissionless pool on something like Serum. You'd have to go ahead and try and get it verified to get it actually listed there so it would show up in the list. Someone didn't have to add it as a custom market and all these things are functionally automated through you guys at this point, correct?Noah Prince (03:56):Yep. So for the most part, those things are automated. You still need to go and set it up on a AMM after you bootstrap the liquidity, but yeah, we're basically making it permissionless to go and do this. So the idea was to make it as easy to launch a token on Solana as it is right now to launch an NFT which Metaplex has kind of done a great job of.Austin Federa (04:16):And so there's been a lot of organizations that have tried to create launchpads or create basically systems of easier onboarding on the Solana blockchain. And a number of them haven't really gone anywhere, or they've been sort of overrun with, I would say very low-quality projects that are just trying to find a quick way to launch a token. What's the reason you think that Strata has had a bit more success here and not fallen into some of those traps?Noah Prince (04:43):Well, I think the first big trap there is talking about projects that are obviously disingenuous, they're trying to cash grab. They're not actually a real project. And when you talk about creating something permissionless, you want to get away from that, right? The barrier to entry should be low so that anybody can do it because tech is tech, but we don't want to be the ones that are creating the list of all the different tokens that we think that people should buy, right?Noah Prince (05:12):Equally, Metaplex isn't doing that. Metaplex doesn't go out and tell you which projects to buy. There are plenty of Launchpads that have their own lists that'll tell you who they think you should buy, and there are plenty of Twitter influencers who will tell you that as well. So that's one way that we're doing it. And then the other way that we're doing it is trying to make it easier for these projects that are smaller and maybe don't have all the idea of how to do everything that's complicated with launching a token, they just want a simple token. Things like social tokens are like little community chat projects, making it easier for those.Austin Federa (05:47):Some of the interesting things you guys have done in addition to the ability to create a new token or sell an existing token bootstrap liquidity is this idea of a fundraise and the dynamic pricing of NFT mints. On the fundraising side, what did you see in the changing ways people wanted to use tokens or the changing use cases of tokens on Solana that really led to the idea of a fundraise being something that a launchpad protocol should build tooling for.Noah Prince (06:14):Yeah. Fundraise was inspired deeply by ConstitutionDAO, which if you didn't see it, was this thing where a bunch of people on Eth just banned together, they said they were going to buy a copy of the Constitution of the United States of America. There was an open bidding that happened. I think they raised like $30 or $40 million and ended up getting outbid, but it was still this example of a community coming together and bootstrapping a ton of liquidity to do something cool. And the idea was that there will be shared ownership of the Constitution, or at least this copy of it after the bidding was done.Noah Prince (06:49):And so how you do that mechanically is just, you're collecting money into a pool that somebody then uses for the bid. And then as you're collecting money, people are getting a token that represents their share of that pool. And so even after you've used the money, they still have the token. And so with the ConstitutionDAO you had the people token. And that's just one of many ways to launch a token and why a launchpad is formatted like a wizard because we want it to be like a no-code tool where it asks you the questions that you need to answer to get towards launching your own token.Austin Federa (07:20):It's super interesting to think about the implications for some of the stuff for the intersection of real-world assets like something like a constitution and then the intersection of the ability to have full liquidity through something like a token mechanism for this. So I think that's a very interesting use case for it. And one of the great things I think about ConstitutionDAO when we saw that all happen is it's still going, right? There's still a community there. It's still passionate about this thing that they failed to create, but now is turned into something else which is in a large part, a lot of the story of NFTs on Solana as well, is that they start with one mission and suddenly something changes and Trash Pandas are now fighting plastic in the oceans, and all these other projects are building real community service kind of components into them.Austin Federa (08:05):When you're looking at the idea of a no-code solution here, what was the reasoning for something like that for more complex protocols? I guess the thing that I'm trying to tease out here is there's an assumption from a lot of folks that if someone's not sophisticated enough to figure out how to launch a token, they're probably not sophisticated enough to launch a project on a blockchain. That's obviously not necessarily the case, but that is part of why you've seen launchpads in general, or less code solutions be something that tends to have a lower quality project coming out of it in general. How do you respond to some of that criticism or look at the different ways that we just need to change our mentality around what a token's meant to be used for?Noah Prince (08:47):Yeah, I think there is that tendency, but as a dev, it's all about tools, right? For me, it's how can I get something done with the least effort possible that meets all the requirements. And so when you give tools to devs so that they can launch a token really easily, the devs can spend time focusing on the things that matter and not the things that don't. So part of it is that but also you need this primitive and you need this primitive to be easy because we're in the infancy of tokens right now, right? There's just one token. We're starting to see more complex systems like STEPN pop up where you have systems of tokens where that's just two tokens, all the way up to things like WOMBO, and BitClout, and Rally, where you have hundreds and hundreds of social tokens. And these things all start to interconnect together, and you can start to do really cool things when you can create systems of tokens. And that's something that you couldn't do in the past without this kind of primitive.Austin Federa (09:43):Yeah, it's fascinating. So, Austin, let's talk a little bit about the interface here with Metaplex NFT initial mints. So one of the things that we've observed over the last few months is that the increasing demand for NFT is on Solana. And also I would say real success of projects in building a strong community pre-launch has created situations where there is both a high incentive to bot the launch of an NFT, but also there's just extremely high demand for these things when they're coming up for initial mint. Some of that's driven by expectations that they might be able to flip them, but a lot of this is just organic community demand for a project that they feel very excited and interested in.Austin Federa (10:22):There's been a few attempts to create systems that would either increase the fairness or would try and reduce the incentives for botting. One of these was the Fair Launch Protocol which was created as sort of an extension of the Candy Machine toolkit, but Fair Launch Protocol never really caught on from a community standpoint. So what is sort of different in the approach here that you think is going to be successful in creating better incentives and dynamics?Austin Adams (10:48):I think the reason that this will be more successful is we will market it a lot harder than we marketed Fair Launch, but also the mechanics of Fair Launch weren't really, and they could have been changed they weren't really a great experience having to wait and then not knowing if you were going to get things. The NFT minter, once that sort of casino-style experience, they pull the lever, they get the thing they know right away, they're having fun, it's addicting. With the dynamic price mint coming in we get that addicting and fun feeling while still getting some technical protection against bots and making it a little bit more advantageous for creators. If they've created demand, they're getting rewarded for that demand.Austin Federa (11:38):Yeah. That's super interesting. So let's walk through, I guess, from both of you, what is the flow that both a creator and a user goes through if the project that they're trying to mint is using this new dynamic pricing powered with Strata?Noah Prince (11:52):Yeah. So the flow right now is a little bit broken up and that's kind of the point of this partnership, but right now you launch a normal Candy Machine through Metaplex, you grab the ID of that Candy Machine, and then Strata has a UI where you can plug in that ID and it converts it to a dynamic pricing Candy Machine. Now from a user standpoint, this looks pretty much exactly like the usual mint interface that you're looking, they're used to, right?Noah Prince (12:18):You just click a mint button, but the price is changing. So the price is just slowly ticking down and occasionally it bumps up when somebody purchases something and you can also switch tabs and you can go look at a price history plot. But as a user, you're trying to figure out at what point do you want to enter, right? At what price do you want to pay? And bots are playing the same game which is an unsolvable game. When do you enter a live market is a question that nobody knows the answer to. So it feels very much like a normal mint it's just that the price is moving and it's a game of who flinches first.Austin Adams (12:53):That's the current experience but as I'm sure you'll get to, we hope to create a deeper integration together that can utilize Strata's tech and Metaplex's tech for the entire experience without needing to go from one place to the other but using our new UIs and CLI tools, they can create a dynamic price Candy Machine that also gives us even more bot protections than we had before without having to go from one website to another.Austin Federa (13:25):So what is the dynamic pricing set based on? What are the mechanics that go into actually setting what that amount should be and how much volatility do you expect to see throughout the course of a typical 10,000 mint that might sell out in the course of several minutes?Noah Prince (13:43):Yeah. So generally, you want to establish what is basically the order of magnitude of the price. So something that's going to be in the 0.01 SOL range versus something that's going to be in the 10 SOL range, they're pretty different and it would be hard for any system to account for that. So generally what you're doing is you're setting kind of a range that you expect. So in the case of Divine Dogs, they were one of the very first ones that we did this with, they were minting an NFT that they thought would probably sell for two SOL. Now they're associated with the gods. And so 3.33 is a magic number for them. And so they actually set the starting price at 3.33 SOL and the minimum price at 1.1 SOL.Noah Prince (14:24):And so the idea was the minimum that they were willing to take as a project to get the funding to do what they needed to do was 1.1 SOL and they thought that people would pay up to 3.3 but probably not much more. And so what happened with that was I think the average price ended up being 2.32. But generally, you want the prices start slightly higher than what you think people will enter at so that bots don't have an advantage to spamming, they're just waiting for it to fall down and then it'll hit some fair price and it just oscillates around the fair price.Austin Federa (14:57):You mentioned a few things there where it sounds like projects have to do a bit of estimation around what they expect to see. What are the either software or just like human tools that someone should be looking at when they're trying to figure out where do they start with dynamic pricing?Noah Prince (15:13):Yeah. I mean, I think to a lot of degrees this is similar to right now people are just deciding a fixed price for their mint which is even more dangerous. You have no idea if it's going to sell out for that fixed-price or not. If you're a really hyped project, it probably will as long as you set it less than 10 SOL. But there's also a stigma, right? SolBears came out and set it to 10 SOL and people got pretty mad about it. So I think for most projects, this range of I mean, it depends what SOL's current prices, but right? This range of 1 to 5 SOL is generally reasonable. If you get really far off on the price, it can go above the starting price but we haven't seen that happen in practice. Usually, projects have a pretty good idea of what they're going to sell for or at least like a ballpark. They don't know exactly but they know a range.Austin Federa (16:05):Yeah, just because this was one of the first prominent uses of the Fair Launch Protocol where the community of degenerate Trash Panda Minters banded together and actually crashed the price. They all basically colluded against the project owners to mint at 0.1 SOL when the pre-mint tokens had been trading at 3 or 4 SOL on the exchanges and obviously, the price has gone up from there, but it's a very interesting dynamic when you give the community the tools to set their own pricing, you do open yourself up to a certain amount of collusion which I think is fascinating. No one would've thought that in a free market open system you'd be able to get a bunch of degens who are trying to optimize for the most value they can create to all band together and try and basically drive down the mint price of an NFT.Noah Prince (16:52):They also got to change their vote in the second half which made it a little less risky to bid small.Austin Federa (16:57):Yes. That's true. So that sort of one-tiered system is part of the dynamics here that you think make it more robust to get something like that.Noah Prince (17:06):Oh yeah. I mean, so we've done a couple of mints with it now and every single time in the Discords I actually hope that someone proves me wrong because it would be kind of interesting from a psychology perspective. But usually, there's a band of people in the Discord that are like, "Nobody buy. Nobody buy. We're going to let the price fall really low, like the bid small." But because it's so real-time, what ends up happening is it hits a number that's really, really good and it's just like a prisoner's dilemma. A few people defect and then everybody sees that a few people defect and all of a sudden the faction that was trying to hold back and not buy everyone starts buying and the price starts ripping because it's the lowest price that they're going to see.Austin Federa (17:47):Yep. Totally. It's really interesting the way those dynamics play out.Noah Prince (17:51):Yeah. Honestly, if your project gets hit by this and the people actually manage to do a prisoner's dilemma experiment where nobody defects, you have an amazing community, I don't even know that you need the money. Your community is incredible.Austin Federa (18:04):Yeah. It's worth noting that for the more successful projects out there, they have made many multiples of the initial mint revenue on secondary sale royalties. So it's kind of this interesting dynamic where you really want to bring the strongest community possible into an NFT project but the same time you need to fund appropriately for whatever your medium-term goals are to make sure you can actually deliver on any roadmap you've sort of laid out as a project which is really interesting. So when we're looking at some of the underlying architecture here and how it interfaces with Metaplex, I know there's a whole bunch of work on Metaplex that's been rebuilding a lot of the way that some of these contracts work. There's a whole expansion of what's possible on Metaplex coming soon. Austin, how are you thinking about additional tooling like Strata and other types of partnerships that will make it easier for a lot of this work that's being done to actually be deployed and usable? So the difference between reference implementation engineering and actually production engineering.Austin Adams (19:06):I think on a case-by-case basis, we always look at where we can stay generic and composable meaning one contract calls into the Metaplex contracts and the Metaplex contracts stay as this secure core that we audit very frequently and we're taking care of all that nonsense for the community. But in other cases, we identify a piece of technology that's really good and the composable way of doing it doesn't give us the guarantees necessarily that we want. And so we look at a deeper level of integration. The recent gains in shipping velocity that Metaplex is getting are coming more from CICD and looking at ways to improve our software stability so we are not scared to ship.Austin Adams (20:00):And I think that's what Metaplex is moving into as we're stabilizing and as we're trying to remain the base infrastructure for NFTs as well as move into some exciting new landscapes. So with this specifically, we do have some big changes coming to canning machines soon. We have some big changes coming to optional changes for everyone coming soon, but this one here falls right in line with our anti-botting work. And so we're heavily invested in making this as deep of a integration as it needs to be and shipping it as soon as possible, as well as shipping it not just in the contract level, but shipping it in our UIs and CLIs that are coming out or are out.Austin Federa (20:44):Yeah. Interesting. So I'd actually love to dig in a little bit more on how you're thinking about multiple layers of contracts or interoperable contracts that all can, I guess, give optionality in terms of how someone wants to deploy something. What are those different components and how are you thinking about... So classically, every time you have a contract talk to another contract, you've created an attack vector. This is most of the hacks that you see across DeFi and on Solana and on other places in Solana are non-validated fields. There's some ability for someone to inject something into the contract at a point that someone thought wasn't injectable that ends up creating an outcome that's not desirable for the users of that protocol or that contract.Austin Federa (21:28):That's like a very standard attack vector. So not to go too far into the security of this because of course that's maybe a separate conversation, but when you're thinking about that sort of multiple contract architecture, talking back to one central contract, what are the types of things you are thinking about or the Metaplex protocol is really thinking about from an architecture standpoint to make that secure, stable, but also upgradeable and able to respond to the needs of the community quickly?Austin Adams (21:53):Yeah, that's a great question. So I do believe it does depend on what the contract does in a large part, but generically, when we think about Web 2.0 land, when we've all created public APIs that take in user input, we can think about those as if they're analogous to we're allowing someone to direct their digital plumbing pipe at our digital plumbing pipe to use the euphemism or the saying that we're just all digital plumbers. I think I like that. One of the ways that we approach this is just being extremely careful on validating the input and being very restrictive with what specific instructions and what specific things a transaction can do when calling into our contracts.Austin Adams (22:47):So for example, with Candy Machine, although it is not as composable as other programs may be, we restrict the specific programs that can call out to Candy Machine and we restrict what they can do. We look at the instruction data using the instructions this far. For those who are non-technical that just means we can inside of the instruction or inside of the program, we can look at the instructions that are coming in and we can validate the input that's coming in. But for other programs such as AuctionHouse, we actually have purpose-built it to be composed over. And the way that we handle that is by bringing all the things that we want to make sure always stay secure into the contract.Austin Adams (23:33):So the token account creation, the mint creation, for example, the transfers, all of those are in the core AuctionHouse transaction protocol, but we've created this other system of composability called Auctioneer where people can put their additional logic such as token gating, timed auctions, even dynamic priced auctions via Strata can be done at that layer. So like I've said in summary, it does depend on the contract for Candy Machine because it's such a target for bots. We are very restrictive but we hope to find additional ways to loosen those things to allow more contracts to compose over it while still getting more bot, anti-botting guarantees.Austin Federa (24:20):It's kind of an interesting question here. When you think about on most layer ones or layer twos, the implementation of an NFT is something that's sort of done, I guess you called it the L1 or L2 level at the protocol level, as opposed to at the application level. Metaplex is a little bit different in its architecture, right? The tokens that are built are fundamentally still SPL-compatible tokens. And they're built more like an application level. And by application, I mean, it's not hard coded into the base Solana code. It's actually running on top of it which is a little bit different of an architecture than you see on something like Ethereum. What are the both advantages and challenges that both of you have run into because of that difference in architecture?Noah Prince (25:05):Yeah. So I did a deep dive at one point on composability on Solana versus Eth. Fundamentally, the NFTs on Eth and even the tokens that are on Eth are just following an interface. So it looks a lot like interfaced extension. I'm going to get real deep in engineering if I don't be careful here.Austin Federa (25:23):No, no, no, let's do it. This is the back half of the podcast.Noah Prince (25:26):Cool. Okay. Yeah. So it looks a lot like interfaced extension and classical object-oriented programming. So you think Java is the big example of object-oriented programming. Now Solana actually ends up looking a lot more like functional programming where you've got these contract endpoints that are effectively functions that operate over some state and then output a state. And then the next function can take that state and do something with it. Now, a lot of people will tell you when they're learning functional programming coming from object-oriented programming, it's scarier at first. It's like chewing glass. It's a little bit more complicated, but there's a lot more that you can do with it. And so like my example of composability actually is the current state of the integration with Metaplex where you talk about how there are different security vulnerabilities with checks, but a token is the absolute interface between us and Metaplex and that's the only interface.Noah Prince (26:26):The single check is whether or not you have the token that allows you to mint this Candy Machine and we just output that token. So we are a function that takes in some SOL and outputs a token. They are a function that takes in a token and outputs an NFT. And actually, they don't have to know about each other at all. It's only the user interface that knows about it. So this is how we generally deal with composability on Solana and why I like this model a little bit better, but I am a little bit of a functional programming maxi, so …Austin Federa (26:57):Austin, what about you?Austin Adams (26:59):Yes. I believe that the Metaplex model for NFTs is actually quite brilliant. And I'll talk about the pros first and maybe the cons second. I believe one of the reasons for our enormous growth is because our contracts are like APIs. You don't need to deploy your own contract. You don't need to manage that. You don't need to have everything that can be known about your implementation done ahead of time and then deploy an immutable contract. You can iterate and fail and try again and do new things on top of our programs without having to, one, manage the security of the program. Two, without having to really be an expert. And I know that you don't have to be an expert to launch an Ethereum NFT series because there's some great tools. But I think that's one of the reasons people choose Solana. Devs choose Solana, creators choose Solana to run their NFT projects is because the Metaplex contracts were brilliantly designed as APIs whereas they could have been designed in an interface model.Austin Adams (28:07):Now the cons of that are the Metaplex development team now needs to look at backward compatibility every single day. Any change that we make we have to micromanage that aspect all the time because we don't want to break anybody's use of the system. And through our DAO we need to ensure that what we're doing is reflective of what the community wants. So another con would be that some people see it as less decentralized, but in reality, because it's a community project, it doesn't seem so decentralized when you can build right on top of it and do whatever you need to because we try to keep the protocol light and do less things. I see that we can move into both areas. We can produce an interface-like system while getting these contracts as API feel. And I think that's some of the backbone of some things that you'll see coming out of Metaplex soon.Austin Federa (29:07):So when you think about something like backwards compatibility, what does Metaplex see as its sort of role and responsibility there, right? So famously for a number of years, Android had like seven different versions of the Android API that Google had to support because folks just would not update their apps. And Windows still has backwards compatibility with stuff that was probably about when most of us were born. What are you guys thinking about when you look at that sort of backwards compatibility and how long or what kind of functionality needs to persist for X amount of time?Austin Adams (29:44):So what we try to do is never break you unless it's security-related. If it's security-related, we fix it as soon as we can and we announce as quickly and as widely as we can. That hasn't happened very often and currently, we think that... We kind of take the semantic versioning approach where we will give you a long amount of time. Now we don't have a rigorous set amount of time yet. We're very new as a project if you think about it, but we will always provide you a new instruction and deprecate the old instruction and it works perfectly fine for a long time. And it's very rare. In fact, it's only happened once where we will remove old instructions. Part of that is looking at our contracts as APIs. And when you look at microservice patterns because that's how we think about them kind of is our contracts are microservices.Austin Adams (30:43):Look at the traffic of your instruction. If you're seeing it the traffic go down, people have moved to the other one, you're in safe territory to start announcing that, "Hey, we're going to start moving on from this specific instruction." But if you see it holding steady, that's a good signal from your community that that thing still needs to live or you need to educate and do more work. And that's how we'd like to see it. I think in the future, we'll see probably more rigorous guidelines around how long we're going to keep things out. But right now it's we'd be nothing without the people using it. So they're our top priority when we're shipping new things, we don't want to break anyone.Noah Prince (31:22):Yeah. I think at least how we've been approaching it with Strata is that I am very, very bearish on the idea that I'm never going to have to change anything. And so actually every one of our smart contract endpoints, every one of our arguments, every one of our piece of state has a V0 next to it. Some of them actually have a V1 already. And then in SDK land, so like in JavaScript, we wrap these calls with things that don't include V0 and we wrap them in interfaces such that if we ever have to change anything, we just bump it to V1 at the protocol level, change the interfaces, leave the V0 endpoints around for a while and then like Austin said, watch the traffic and then slowly deprecate them. But yeah, I mean, I think you kind of have to accept that these things are living, breathing things and like most APIs, you just have to version them. Now, a lot of people who don't have V0 next to their things, don't worry, you can put V1 next to anything.Austin Adams (32:19):It's okay.Noah Prince (32:19):And V0 is just the lack of a tag. It's okay.Austin Federa (32:22):So all of this depends of course, on creators and people launching NFT projects actually adopting and using the dynamic pricing tools. What's your pitch for why someone who's launching an NFT project should do it this way as opposed to doing it the way that's currently done.Noah Prince (32:37):Yeah. So one of the big things, I mean, even if you watch Frank, he is talking all the time about how he wants people who are long-term his project. He doesn't want paper hands. He doesn't want flippers, right? So right off the gate, you've got to acknowledge that having people that are just buying the project to flip it immediately aren't really good for your project long term anyway. I mean, if you were going to overprice your fixed price mint, you just weren't going to sell out. And so this will help you sell out which is ideally what you want, right?Noah Prince (33:09):Because you're picking the quantity of the mint so that you have a certain size of community. Now, if you had underpriced your fixed price meant, this actually means that you're going to get more funding to do what you want to do, right? And that's what matters is that you can actually execute on your roadmap. Now it's not like that price discovery isn't happening, right? It is still happening. If you price your mint at 2 SOL and the NFT is actually worth 10 SOL, it just drives up to 10 SOL on the secondary. But you know who makes that money? People who are flipping it and don't care about the project. So I would rather have that money go to the team than people who are flipping it any day of the week.Austin Federa (33:49):I'd love to hear from the Metaplex side what the pitch is to use it that isn't just it doesn't break the network.Austin Adams (33:55):Then I get nothing.Austin Federa (33:56):Because this is the thing is like one of the things about crypto is we have to assume everyone is a evil self-interested actor at all times who cares primarily about what they're trying to accomplish from a financial standpoint and isn't a altruistic actor trying to make the world's best-decentralized computing environment possible or else all of the assumptions of how blockchain works start to break down. So I think that's one of those questions that if either of you have something addressing that sort of side of things and-Austin Adams (34:25):Yeah, totally. I'll go with Metaplex's side of why I use dynamic price mint. So from the Metaplex side, we realize that Candy Machine has been botted so badly and we want to increase fairness for the collectors, creators, and the community. Just like Noah said earlier, we want to incentivize long-term holders, people to be a part of the project because NFTs are showing us they're more about community than they are really like a financial mechanism. They are a financial mechanism, but they've exposed this incredible new, psychological phenomenon.Austin Adams (35:01):For collectors, we've seen click farms, and bots, and extensions, not even if it hurts the network, but just hurting the experience. So one way that dynamic price mint helps is by making these click farms and botters, I mean, have to think twice, have to actually do some calculation, and have to do it in a fast and real-time manner. So this helps them be able to take part in the project even if they didn't get into the discords or other things like that at the right time, it's also going to help us move past this whole allow list trend in the community where you have to do all these specific things to get a spot and then you get a spot and you get a chance to mint, but then you don't actually get to mint. And so, hopefully, this makes the work that's required just being a part of the community and having the desire and the funds to mint.Noah Prince (36:01):Well said.Austin Federa (36:01):Awesome. Well, I think that does it for today. Thank you both for joining us to talk about this new launch of a Stratus support for dynamic pricing on Metaplex and creating new tools for creators to be able to actually implement this. If folks want to read more about it or want to consider using this for their next drop, where should they go to find more information?Noah Prince (36:22):Yeah. So for now it's actually, if you go to app.strataprotocol.com and you have a Candy Machine ID, you can launch one directly right there. We also have on docs.strataprotocol.com. We have extensive documentation on how to set up one of these dynamic pricing mints and a YouTube video on how to do one and even do one with a white list. In the future, we hope that this is directly on Metaplex's documentation and kind of more built as a first-class citizen into the Candy Machine and Metaplex's new UIs such that you don't need to be bouncing around from Strata to Metaplex. It's just there for you.Austin Adams (36:59):Yeah. 100% stay tuned on the Metaplex Docs and on our blog, Twitter, radio station. Oh wait, we don't have a radio station.Noah Prince (37:08):Yet.Austin Adams (37:09):Yet.Austin Federa (37:09):Great. Well, thank you both for joining us today.Austin Adams (37:13):Thank you, Austin.Noah Prince (37:14):Thanks for having us.

Kanav Kariya (President, Jump Crypto) joins the Solana Podcast to discuss his optimism for the future and the many areas in which Jump Crypto is innovating in the crypto and blockchain space. Austin Federa (Head of Communications, Solana Labs) guest hosts. 00:49 - What is Jump?03:07 - The path to operationalizing crypto06:00 - Optimism for Crypto10:49 - Discovering and Building in Crypto with Jump14:24 - Personal Journey at Jump16:43 - What's being built at Jump?17:55 - Reasons to want to build19:39 - What does Pyth offer?22:22 - Criticism about conflict of interest26:30 -  How Web 3.0 facilitates resource coordination28:46 - Data contributors benefiting from onchain data31:01 - Token Plans for Pyth31:46 - Message bridging34:48 - Wormhole, stable coins and asset tokens37:36 - Time synchronization for cross-chain dApps39:14 - State storage on wormhole for dApps40:21 - Is Wormhole layer 0?41:14 - Wrapped NFTs44:13 - Jump's position towards NFTs48:36 - Exciting things in the ecosystem49:43 - Custom silicon / FPGAs53:22 - A parallel execution model? DISCLAIMERThe content herein is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. Those who appear in the content may have a financial interest in any projects referenced, and any content herein is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.  This content is intended to be general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional advisor. Austin (00:10):Welcome to another episode of The Solana Podcast. I am Austin Federa, sitting in for Anatoly again this week. Today we've got a pretty special episode I think. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I think it's been a long time coming with a few false starts. Today we have Kanav Kariya president of Jump Crypto, or do we just say Jump at this point?Kanav (00:32):Yeah, Jump Crypto is good.Austin (00:34):President of Jump Crypto, which maybe this time last year very few people knew existed, very few people knew what you guys were doing, what you were building, what your role in the ecosystem has been. So yeah, I guess let's just go ahead and Jump right into it. What is Jump Crypto and how did it come about?Kanav (00:51):Yeah, thanks for having me on Austin. So for context for the audience that aren't very familiar with us, Jump is historically a prop trading firm founded over 20 years ago in the pits at the CME. Today one of the largest quantitative trading firms in the world. And we started a crypto division over seven years ago. It started as an intern project at the University of Illinois, where we were running a miner in a closet and building some trading infrastructure.And today we've got over 150 people on the crypto team doing a lot of different things. So the way I like to describe our business is spitting it into three primary pillars. One is prop trading, which is exactly what we do on the other side of the house, we build trading intelligence and we scale it. The second piece is building and that's the piece that I hope we'll get to talk a lot more about on this call and it's closest to my heart and closest to the heart of the team.And that's in building pieces of infrastructure, really streets and sanitation for the space and a couple of the marquee projects that we've really focused a lot of our efforts on have been Wormhole and Pyth. And of course, along the journey, we've aligned ourselves with a lot of the major ecosystems in the place, including Solana, Terra and a whole number of others in building a lot of different things across those platforms.The third bucket is venture, I like to call ourselves accidental VCs in that we found opportunities to add value, or we had requests come in to work with partners over the last six years in various different capacities. And we found that we could be meaningful in those contexts and work with people that were solving problems for us. And that has now grown into the venture division that's deploying across the space.Austin (02:31):I want to get into a lot of the work that Jump is doing as core code contributors and supporters of projects in the ecosystem. But I kind of want to start a little bit with that journey. I would say that the transition from prop trading equities and commodities to prop trading crypto, that feels pretty organic. And there's a number of firms in the space that have also made that transition. Albeit you guys seem to have made it sooner than a lot of other firms in the industry. What was that process like of going from deciding that you wanted to add crypto to actually operationalizing that? And then we'll get into some of the journey to actually becoming builders.Kanav (03:07):The project started as an intern project at this thing called Jump Labs. There was a research lab at the University of Illinois and was meant to work on cool stuff with the university on working on fun problems. So alongside the crypto stuff we were doing when I was an intern, there was a VR project working with professors at the university to abstract away trading screens. And there was work on some interesting machine learning and networking problems.And the group has grown out of that. And of course matured out of these things, but we've definitely strongly retained that ethos. Now I want to caveat this by saying we definitely didn't have oppressions in being infrastructure builders. When we started the project in the lab that many years ago. It's been a very organic and natural process for us. And it's hard to make the instant leap from prop trading to what we're doing today, but it's easy to reason through the steps along the way.As one of the earliest large trading firms in the space, we had a lot of requests from institutional liquidity exchanges, OTC platforms, and importantly projects that were looking to solve trading and liquidity related problems. And those conversations gave way to us exploring a lot of DeFi projects and a lot of L1 platform projects that shared a lot of the problems they were thinking through on complex financial system design or programming in resource consumer environments, which are very natural and germane to a quantitative trading firm. And those conversations led to jamming about foreign ideas to implementing governance proposals, to maybe starting to write a little bit of code in them. And then all the way into committing over 50, 70 engineers that we have today in building through the space. And that process involves a few different steps. One, it involves the willingness for the institution at large to be mentally long the space. It requires a recognition and frankly a little bit of a taste of the upside.It requires flexibility, which of course, prop trading firms just generally naturally just have to have. And then everything else you can just learn along the way, right? We've done a lot of things wrong. We've stumbled over ourselves a hundred times, but you've got to keep digging shots on asymmetric upside and with all the resources that we've had at the firm I think we've been able to make some good ones.Austin (05:20):Going back to you last year, Jump Crypto had sort of a moment where it decided it wanted to make itself public. You wrote a blog post that was laying out. I wouldn't quite call it a thesis, but laying out an idea of how you view the space and the role that something like Jump could play within it. One of the things I was struck by going back and rereading this is your level of optimism in this post, right? Which is something that you don't see from many financial trading firms. You see them seeing opportunities to make lots of money. You see them making lots of money. They're very profitable endeavors, but you usually don't see optimism contained within it. Where'd that come from?Kanav (06:01):That's a pretty good question. So quant firms today are basically research and development firms, right? So the people that build trading systems, that build the intelligence behind trading systems are generally of quantitative background. They generally have PhDs in either statistics, machine learning, physics, those kinds of endeavors. And the people building the platforms are low latency high performance systems engineers that there are different optimizations across every level of the stack to build robust, scalable, fast infrastructure.The environment down to the lab five years ago was about exploring this space. It was like, what does this space mean? Right. And it wasn't about, okay, how are we going to make X billion dollars kind of getting into this endeavor? It was about exploring it. And I think it attracted that kind of people and it occurred that kind of environment.And the leadership that stays since then has kind of embodied that. And just personally I'm a raging optimist, I believe in technology, I believe in the future, I believe in building towards something bigger. And thankfully I think the firm has shared those ideas and I hope I've been able to shape a lot of the culture and behaving that passion.Austin (07:10):Where do you think that optimism in yourself comes from? There's a lot of things you could have gone into coming out of school. What about both, something, an organization like Jump, which is undoubtedly a great place to go work. But you stay there for a while now, you've worked your way up, you're now in charge of the crypto division. Where does that sense of optimism in you come from and what makes Jump the right place for that?Kanav (07:33):I feel something for Jump because they had a cool internship program and they had a lab on site and they were working on really fun problems in a well resourced environment, that just made it fun and attractive. And after I had the opportunity to intern there for eight to 10 months, I kind of got a sense for the possibilities that existed. And this is the flexibility that the whole space had. And it was like, you come in, you get to make a lot of bets, you get a lot of resources. And if you make good bets, you get more resources and then you get more resources. This is the only place I've ever worked. I think it would be rather unique to have that kind setup. And again, no, I wouldn't say it was a passion moment to come in to Jump and know that I would be able to build suites and sanitation for crypto. But I knew I would get to do a lot of really cool stuff, work on fun problems with smart people. And where does optimism come from?Austin (08:25):Yeah. I mean, you look at a space like this. It's been through boom and bust. There's tons of amazing projects being built in the space that end up going nowhere. And especially from the vantage point of a trading firm, right? One of the secret sauce of a trading firm is it can make money in an up marketing, it can make money in a down market, right. And that is the advantage of a professional trading operation versus a more passive trading operation. But again, like those are not usually characteristics that breed optimism. Those are usually characteristics that bleed margins, where you're optimizing 1%, 2%, 3% here. So you can compound that over a year and it will make a marginal difference. But again, that's not usually an optimistic space, that's a very functional space to work in.Kanav (09:10):Yeah, it is. And traditionally I don't think it lends itself to naturally just exactly this. Jump culture has kind of always been a little bit unique. So Jump also has a number of other kind of divisions that work on non-high frequency trading stuff. Historically, since about 2011 or 2012, had a VBC arm called Jump Capital that invests in growing technologies in this space. They've had some cool endeavors in the biospace working on automation there in healthcare.And so the founders have generally been optimist. They definitely believe in the future. They've been able to take shots at things that are going on. And even if it's not naturally germane to the trading business in and of itself, the culture itself lends itself to being able to do something like this, which is a really awesome combination of knowing how to monetize, but then also knowing how to build. Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure to be able to soak in from that environment.Austin (10:04):Let's look at the building for a bit. I think it's pretty open secret at this point that Jump are core contributors to Wormhole and Pyth, you've been very heavily involved in that process. Take me back to some of the early days there where you are internal to Jump, and you're saying like, "Hey, we need to do more than just trade and invest in this space. I think we can actually build." And especially you're talking about this from the perspective of sanitation and roads and the very base level infrastructure. Crypto's been around for a long time. I think most people coming into the space in that time horizon wouldn't have necessarily looked at and said like, "Oh, there's very base level features that are missing from this ecosystem." What was that both discovery process like, and then the process of convincing everyone internally that this was worth dedicating resources to?Kanav (10:50):Yeah, the discovery process was very organic. We had a lot of inbound from people looking to solve trading and liquidity problems because a lot of people in the space, even though we were quite kind of new of our trading presence, and as one of the early trading firms that really was trying to make bigger pushes in the space. When you get to talk to awesome founders every day about all the problems that they have and get to build relationships with them, you start to uncover a lot more of the problem space that exists, start to internalize a lot of it.And once you've got the opportunity to sit in that for a little bit, and I'm sure you see this today. We are much later on than we were when we made a lot of those big switches, but there's still a lot of opportunity, right? When we were kind of ideating on the origins of Pyth, the conversation we had was, look, our whole thesis at Jump Crypto is to be as long aligned with the space as possible, right? We're trying to get the maximum exposure we can on the space that we think is going to be explosive. And we're trying to ideate this ways which we put that quote unquote trade on, right? The best way to put a long trade on in a growing space, and the best mode to value capture is value creation. There's definitely a lot of inefficiencies created by hyper growth, right? And there's room to capture those inefficiencies. But those are small in magnitude relative to the absolute value creation at play.And then there's a value creation capture correlation that you think about there. So if you think about it in that lens and you know that you want to be big contributors to the space and just aim to create a lot of value to both, then you start thinking about what the opportunities are within your realm to be able to engage in that capacity.Austin (12:27):But at some point there's a meeting, or you have a boss who you report to, and you have to go down and sit down in front of him or her and say, "Hey, I want to spend a lot of money to hire a lot of engineers to do something that's going to be totally public and totally open source at a firm that historically likes to stay out of the news."Kanav (12:46):It was a few meetings.Austin (12:46):Yeah, I'm sure.Kanav (12:46):And it's kind of baby steps along the way, or big steps along the way that compound into a complete shift and a big switch of that nature. We had this summit, we called the August summit a few years ago. And we went down to an offsite location and we talked about what being in this space means for us and how we differentiate. And I remember we showed up with these sheets that we went around and distributed to people. We were like, this is the toolkit that we have. This is the opportunity set in the space.And everyone kind of had their own, things went on, but that was one of the approaches that I've taken. And if we believe this is where the space is going, this is the opportunity set that we can tackle. And these are the levels that we have to pull, right? And then you socialize that and you try to convince them people that there is opportunity to be had here and you get buy-in to take a first little step. And once you get the buy-in to take a first little step, and you kind of really show the big medics of differentiation in a native space, you get the buying for the next step.And then suddenly it's the entire [inaudible 00:13:47]. You get the whole kitchen sink thrown behind you, and then you are kind of propelling to this part that you want to be at. And that's the whole thesis of Jump everywhere. You take bets with asymmetric upside and we throw the kitchen sink at things that are working. And a lot of the stuff that we were doing started working.Austin (14:02):How is that journey for you personally, going from an intern involved in a few projects now to the Jump Crypto teams over a hundred at this point?Kanav (14:11):Yeah. We've got over 150 now, hard to keep track.Austin (14:14):Wow. Yeah. From a leadership role, and from your own perspective, how has that transition been? What parts of it were easier for you? What parts were harder than you were anticipating? Scaling yourself is often much harder than scaling a company.Kanav (14:28):Without a doubt, yeah. I started in the team as an intern like you pointed out, working on software problems. I came back to the team a year later in a formal full-time capacity, working on quant problems, which was to do with predicting crypto markets, building alpha and kind of scaling that piece. And the early conversations with projects where we were trying to solve liquidity problems was an area that I got really, really interested in. And I just kind of went about trying to build that a little bit further.Over time that led to a transition from engineering and quantitative work to more conversational business development work, just having spent years across all those functions and natively knowing how to live them has been the biggest tool that I've been able to build in the toolbox. Now that doesn't teach you how to manage a hundred people, that doesn't teach you how to propagate culture. It doesn't teach you how to scale hiring strategy. Doesn't teach you how to value the troops when things are low.I definitely want to make a claim that there are many who are close to a finished product, rather than trying to be good at everything, good at every one thing, we always try to be excellent at a few things. And then by force just propel everything forward. I'd say some of the biggest lessons I've learned, the biggest mistakes we've made, definitely been in the shape of trying to shove square bags in a round hole. Where in a trading environment it's like the only people you have on your team are engineers and quants. They're just smart people that can solve any shape of technical problem you throw them at. When you move that towards sales and marketing and product and everything else, that all kind of falls apart.Kanav (16:05):And you need people that are able to natively live within specific sub domains across those functions. And that's something that we've been trying to scale in. I spend basically all my time hiring and trying to focus on making sure our zero to one projects have a lot of momentum. But yeah, it's been an awesome journey. And of course I have support from a company that's grown to a 1500 people as the largest quant trading firm in the world and so lots of guidance and help along the way.Austin (16:33):Let's talk a little bit about that work you guys are doing and actually building. So if I understand correctly, the two projects that you are mostly core contributors to is Pyth and Wormhole. Is there anything else that you'd put into that category of engagement?Kanav (16:46):That's the highest level of engagement for sure. We do a lot of things across the big ecosystems of course. We can talk all of what we're doing with Solana. We're always trying to get deeper. We built an NFD project on the Metaplex landscape after their investment as an intern project. That was a real fun one. We've been core contributors to some of the projects that are coming out on the data landscape today. We've worked on a lot of the mechanism design that goes on, on the other one. And there's a few other projects, but the highest levels of engagement have definitely been with Wormhole and Pyth.Austin (17:18):Looking at over that landscape, Pyth high frequency Oracle. But again, Oracles, they've existed for a long time. There's a number of name brand ones that got their start on the ecosystem in the 2017 range. Lots of people have had ideas about Oracles over the years, some of them have worked, some of them haven't. Similar to Wormhole, bridges have existed for a long time. Bridges are actually the basis of how any L2 works, right? Both of these are hardly new ideas I would say. What about looking at the landscape gave you guys the confidence to say, not only there's a need for something different, but we can help build something different and better.Kanav (17:57):Again, just like 100% organic. In that August summit, we were looking at some of the biggest things we could do. And a big problem that everyone kind of kept voicing to us is that they don't have access to equities data. They don't have access to fast data so that they don't have to have things like clawback mechanisms and all these different things that LPs don't get direct on every turn, right?The fundamental thing with financial oracles is that they're used to settle risk transfer. They're used to set a price at which two parties exchange value. And if that price is latent or slow or not accurate, one side gets left folding the bag. Now, DeFi, the way protocols are constructed, the side that gets left holding the bag is either the LP that's contributing to the protocol or the protocol stakers or a key stakeholder in building the ecosystem.And the takers are able to take all that value. If you are going to build something that's going to house all of OTC, if we're building something like synthetics for example, and your protocol stakers are taking the other side of every trade that happens on S-Oil or SSNP, you need to make sure that's the right price. Otherwise you're just going to get up the way down to zero. When we were ideating on what the biggest ways we could contribute is let's contribute our data. And the first idea was in let's start, let's go and figure out how we bring together a network of people to build an Oracle.It was how do we contribute our data, right? And we browsed through the category of solutions. We had all the conversations. We spoke to dozens of investors and builders in the space. And there wasn't an easy way to slot in high fidelity financial data, into existing Oracle solutions. And so we spoke with some of the founding partners of the Pyth program and came to consensus that there was an opportunity here. And that led to the first step and we just kept building sets.Austin (19:39):In your mind, what is it that Pyth offers that other Oracle solutions don't offer?Kanav (19:46):Pyth is a very hyper specialized tool for high fidelity financial data, specifically financial data for settlement of risk transfer, right? If you think about the way the market data landscape looks today, it's different across asset classes, but there is a class of people that have access to high fidelity, streaming price data that they can legally distribute and make available to a protocol, create like an Oracle program.One you need access to very fast financial data, which is hard to get and even harder to have a legal right to distribute. You want to make sure that the people who are publishing the prices are the real owners of the data so that you can set incentives for the data to be accurate, right? If you are staking the value of a third party aggregator, their third party aggregator has no skin in the game. That's one of the other kind of fundamental things that you have to think about.And third, you need to acknowledge the fact that a price is not absolute. A price for Bitcoin has about 20 liquid trading venues that are distributed across the globe that can often be fractured, that can often have all kinds of different idiosyncrasies. And that being able to accurately determine the price on most relevant venues and build a dispersion is really important. If you think about kind of all those things together, you want very fast access. You want a broad range of access of independent sources, not reporting from the same source.You want very high liveness and uptime of course, and you want kind of good legal clarity that that price can continue to be distributed because you don't want the application to suddenly get turned off when the regulator says, "What's going on?" And those are the kind of key things that Pyth has really focused on very heavily to build that piece of infrastructure and Solana was the perfect opportunity. Before Solana there wasn't a way to create a high fidelity fast Oracle. There just wasn't a need for it and there wasn't a platform for it, right. And so all those things just came together.Austin (21:49):One of the criticisms that you'll hear about Pyth is that because of its structured model here, where the people providing data are permissioned at this point and are also like firms that are professionalized trading operations themselves, that there is an inherent kind of conflict of interest in that system. With any system in blockchain, you have to assume everyone is trying to cheat, everyone is trying to extract the most value possible. How have you gone about setting up incentives to make sure that the users of Pyth and the contributors to Pyth are not at odds with one another?Kanav (22:27):Yeah. I think you made a totally fine point there in that we are building for byzantine systems, right? And so that's the kind of incentive design you've got to keep in place. I'll frankly say I think that claim is a little bit ludicrous for a few different reasons. Once you peel back the onion just a little bit, and I'll talk through some of the reasons why.Austin (22:43):Let's peel back the onion.Kanav (22:44):One, you've got to first understand that the amount of value that can be created in actually pulling something like Pyth off successfully is dramatic. And the forms that are building this are now incentive aligned to make that happen. But two, this is an open sourced protocol, it is decentralized, and you can look at exactly what the inputs are, how they're being aggregated and what their resort in price output is.Three most importantly, there are about 50 financial firms that are submitting independent price data to this article to construct final outputs. And these financial trading firms aren't friendly with each other. This is the very first time that a group of highly adversarial trading firms, banks, exchanges, and ODC players across the entire space have come together and said, "Let's go build a piece of infrastructure." And one, I think that needs to be celebrated a lot, it's a huge win.But two, the trading firm, there are 50 global financial trading firms contributing their proprietary prices directly to Solana on the Pyth program today. We have realized that these 50 comprise of between 60% to 80% of global asset class volumes at this point, given the network of participants that have aggregated around this protocol. When you are that big of market share that you're covering that kind of breadth, the participants in the protocol themselves are on the other side of each other's trades almost by definition. And so who's manipulating the price against who? Let's kind of just start there.The system of incentives that set up in this taking protocol, you can read through this on the Pyth white paper has some really intelligent aggregation algorithms that put all this data together, that identify the quality of each of these independent data publishers that then sets out a mechanism to aggressively punish providers that don't have good prices. And good prices can mean I published a malicious bad price. It can mean I have slow prices. It can mean I published, I had a bug, it can mean anything.The incentive design mechanism is meant to reward data providers that are not honest, but that have great data. And that's a fundamental difference in how system designs, we're not kind of rewarding agreement, we're rewarding prediction. And so you are rewarded for correctly predicting the price that would come up rather than for rewarding agreement between parties, and which can both have different kind of models and can both work in different ways.But there is almost no possibility for one collusion across these landscapes, given the composition of the people in the network. And the incentive structure again is obviously explicitly set up to discourage that. Third, all these forms are heavily, heavily regulated. I spoke about 20 years of its reputation and a giant, giant business behind kind of making a lot of this happen. And we're definitely incentive aligned to make this thing as successful as it can possibly be.Austin (25:39):The Web 2.0 world and the rise of FinTech apps has largely taught people that organizations that claim to be on their side often aren't. There's very legitimate reasons from a market making perspective that during the game stock run up and squeeze, users of Robinhood and other FinTech applications, their trading was turned off. Now, there's a bunch of really good backroom reasons for why that might have happened. But the effect is what matters to the retail trader, which is that they were using a platform that they thought gave them equal access to a market, that platform did not provide them equal and neutral access to a market.I think when people look at something like Pyth, it wouldn't be crazy to say that, well, the same incentives that made us think that Robinhood was on our side, could also be applied to Pyth. What is different about the Web 3.0 space and the construction of something like Pyth in your view that makes that not something someone should worry about.Kanav (26:37):Web 3.0 is fundamentally any means of resource coordination, and it facilitates that by, one, facilitating the export of trust. And the export of trust is actually one of the big reasons why the whole Robinhood debacle went on, right. They basically ran out of margin requirements in order to continue to clear trades on one side, since it was so directional.And there is this massive web of intermediaries that set up all throughout traditional finance for the express purpose of establishing trust as the FCM, the DCM, the clearinghouse, all the other three letter acronyms. And all of them exist to make sure that when a match occurs on any platform that actually settles into a financial trade.In crypto the match is the execution. And that's facilitated by the fact that you can export all the trust of executing a piece of code onto Solana, onto Ethereum, onto the blockchain itself. And that's unlocked this completely new means of resource coordination, which makes things like Pyth possible. It means that you can explicitly lay out a system of incentives in a closed loop fashion. And regardless of who's uploading the code, or who's proposing designs or architecting any of this, everybody is independently participating according to the incentives laid out very plainly by the program itself.And that means DRW and Jane Street don't have to trust Jump when they decide to publish prices to pay. That means they look at the program that's running on Solana that they can read. They look at Solana's trust model and decided they can or don't trust Solana as a platform. And then contribute to the platform that then self executes and lives on its own terms. And the fact that we can allow different kinds of state to compose in a trustless fashion is the entire revolution Web 3.0, that's basically what the whole space has been building for the last 10 years. And that's what makes Pyth possible, it simply was not possible before.Austin (28:32):What does something like Jump or Jane Street or anyone who's a data contributor to Pyth, what do they get out of it? What is their incentive apart from any rewards that might be generated from contributing data. How are they then going back and using this on chain data in their own operations?Kanav (28:51):There's a few elements. And so one, it is fundamentally a two sided marketplace, right? It has data publishers and it has data consumers. And the other interesting thing like Uber did for taxi cabs, where it created a marketplace where cars could now come online, created this marketplace where data that was once latent came online.Jump is publishing its own trades to the Pyth network. That is IP that it has the legal rights over, has only just been a cost center so far, and now has the opportunity to get monetized. And that's the same for all of the trading firms that sit in the network. It's a lot of people to turn cost centers into potential elements in the marketplace and that bootstraps the supply. The consumers of the data obviously are paying for this extremely created highly robust set of data inputs that then get aggregated. And that creates kind of flows in one direction. And then like your regular two sided marketplace, it accrues value, right?All the data publishers today in Pyth have some sort of stake of asset interest in the thing succeeding. And there is a set of incentives that then rewards them for the correct participation going on with fees, rewards, all those kinds of things. And all that is in gross detail laid out in the white paper and we can go over some of that. But the off chain applications and some of this stuff is also quite interesting, right?So if you look at kind of back office systems around the world at forms like Jump, you don't need microsecond level access to financial data, but you need that for your trading engines because otherwise you're playing at a disadvantage related to the field. But in order to make sure that your clearing prices have happened correctly in order to make charts in order to do something like a trading view, in order to get on the Bloomberg terminal or to be on a ticker somewhere, all these applications are now easily facilitated by subscribing to something like Pyth, that's living on an open kind of blockchain area. And so a lot of the off-chain use cases are getting more and more interesting I think over time. The fundamental value is in creating the pricing source for on chain data. And this is kind of like an awesome thing that just falls out of it.Austin (30:56):That's a really interesting way of thinking about both the incentive alignments and the rule that the data providers versus the data consumers play in the market. Are there any token plans for Pyth?Kanav (31:07):Yes, there is a token plan for Pyth. You can read all about it on the white paper, no comments on timing or anything of that at this point. And that's going to be a networking governance decision, but I'm sure in the near future.Austin (31:16):Transitioning over to Wormhole, which is the other project that Jump is heavily involved in as a core contributor of the code. When people look at wormhole, I think it's very easy to look at it and say, asset bridge, multi chain, cool, fundamentally utility. The first thing I noticed when we were talking about this and looking through it is this whole component of allowing different smart contracts on different blockchains to communicate with each other. I think most people understand how asset bridging works. Can you talk a little bit about this whole concept of message bridging?Kanav (31:51):Yeah. And this also kind of goes back to your question on, how do you decide that there's an opportunity here when bridging is something that people have talked about for a while? When we were kind of ideating with everybody else on kind the Pyth's team and the network on how Pyth goes across chain. Hendrick and team were building Wormhole as Solana Eths token bridge on the hackathon project at [inaudible 00:32:17].And I called Hendrick and I asked him, "Look, is there a way to generalize this thing so that we can get Pyth messages across?" We're building this Oracle thing on the best, fast, scalable censorship resistant message bus we can, but we want to get it to all the other ones that operate on a slightly different resolution. And through the course of that conversation, we came to a conclusion that enabling generic message bosses to allow this cross chain composability in a much more high dimensional fashion than just the token bridge word was a massive opportunity set that had to be filled.And so when we launched last August as a completely generic message bus. And what that means is that any piece of state that is created or lives on a blockchain can be included as a message that then gets communicated to any other blockchain environment. And so if you think about Oracles, you think about a governance board, right? Uniswap passes a governance board on Ethereum, produces workloads on a lot of different chains. The outcome of that governance board has to, in a secure, reliable fashion, be communicated to all the other geographies that Uniswap lives on. That needs to be encoded as a message.And so Wormhole has outpost contracts on every chain that is deployed, it is deployed over eight chains today. The outpost contract just listens for a message that is sent to that contract and the Wormhole network of guardians attests to that arbitrary binary block. That block can then be picked up, relayed to any other blockchain environment, verified that is coming attested from the homeowner network and then decode to do anything arbitrary and interesting. And so generic message process have really exploded over the last year. We've seen so many awesome applications being built on it. And I think we're just kind of scratching the surface, right? There's a lot to do here.Austin (34:04):When I think about messaging, I think about how a lot of the models right now for cross chain communication of assets are a little tedious and maybe have more risk inherent to them than are necessarily required. A very centralized example, USDC, right? You can go to FTX and you can withdraw USDC as an ERC-20, as an SPL token or across several different networks. And what's happening there largely is because the mint authority to that is centrally controlled. They're able to issue new, quote unquote new USDC natively on each layer that USDC is supported on. Do you see the capability of developers using something like Wormhole to make that possible for fully decentralized, both stable coins and just asset tokens?Not only possible, but already widely adopted in the Wormhole X asset framework, right? There's over four and a half billion of assets in the token bridge today. And the word token bridge kind of has meant a lot of different things to people at different points in time, right? The old token bridges were bidirectional, state sponsored bridges that sovereign ecosystems would run to communicate to Ethereum, to get liquidity in as soon as possible.And then if you send that across a different bridge, then you would have like a double wrapped and triple wrapped implementation and just an absolute UX nightmare. When you use something like Wormhole's X asset framework, you retain complete path independence as you move assets across the ecosystem. Once you're registered as an X asset, let's take USD as an example, there's a couple billion dollars of USD on the bridge today. It flows throughout the ecosystem using Wormhole on the back end, Terra bridge money, uses one more on the back end to expose one of many front ends to users.When USD flows from Terra over to Ethereum or to Solana to Polygon and then to Avalanche, it retains the same representation on Avalanche that USD flowing from Terra to Avalanche directly or through any other part in the ecosystem would retain. It's a truly cross chain native asset. It doesn't fracture liquidity, it fungus seamlessly, and it allows a lot of cool composition.If you look at something, now like the result in second order effects of this, it's this theme that we've been calling X Dapps, right? So cross chained apps. And we've seen kind of the first marquee deployment of one of these apps in the form of X anchor, which is deployed on the Avalanche chain now, right?And X anchor is just a light set of endpoints that's deployed on Avalanche. And all that does is it lets you kind of hit some functions that then really assets and/or messages bundled or separately or back to the Terra blockchain and then trigger state transitions on the Terra site. Anchor contracts don't need to be deployed to every chain. You don't need to replicate state everywhere, you don't need to stay synchronized continuously. But you allow for outposts and communications and different chains to then communicate back to the home chain using messages and assets. And now the USD that's in the X asset standard can be deployed to X anchors everywhere. And it's a much faster, much more robust getting strategy that has far less communication over.Austin (37:07):Let's dig into just a little bit on like a technical level too. When you're talking about X Dapps or cross chain Dapps that are communicating via Wormhole, you're inherently talking about fractured state across multiple L1s or L2, it's unavoidable when you're ... anything cross chain is inherently working under a fractured state model. How fast does that time synchronization need to be for developers to actually deploy something like an AMM or a club across chain and actually maintain price parody and appropriate liquidity between them.Kanav (37:42):Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up. There's a few different programming models for how cross chain Dapps works, right? One is you try to state synchronize as aggressively as possible. You keep sending messages back and forth. You have allowances, risk limits, tolerances that allow your apps to communicate. And the other is this X Dapps framework where state only lives on one chain and you allow people from other chains to then interact with it.Now, of course that also comes with its own downsides, right? If you look at something like a club and you're trying to trigger a cross chain swap using the club from another chain, you are inherently incurring the latency of the two blockchain transactions and the finality assumptions that you want to kind of work with that. The more stateful your application becomes, obviously the more latency and risk constraints everything through. With something like a lending protocol or like a cross chain anchor, things like that. They are less stateful than something like an order book, but order book is probably the most stateful you can get right in the spectrum of applications.And so any cross chain swap design inherently has to have some additional liquidity back then, that's like fundamental, right? You can ask people to take risk on your behalf. You can have the protocol take risk on your behalf, but that risk exists. There's a lot of ways to program around it and create better user experiences, but fundamentally that's a real problem and somebody has to be compensated with that risk.Austin (38:56):For the X Dapp framework, are you looking to actually be able to offload compute to the wormhole level there? Or is it really just ... The natural extension of this seems to be that eventually there's some sort of state storage on Wormhole that Dapps are able to actually access and leverage with some functionally side chain compute resourcing. Are you guys thinking about that as well?Kanav (39:19):Yeah. The fundamental cross chain thesis is that there are going to be independent, specialized compute environments that attack their own communities, their own audiences and their own apps. And Wormhole is away for folks to leverage state that results from these autogenous environments and compute the solutions on these environments to compose.And you can cut that in a million different ways. You can leverage Solana as a state execution machine. You can leverage Terra as your stable coin asset layer and you can represent this third thing as a NFT thing, or you can bundle them all in. But the Wormhole vision itself right now with all the genetic message capabilities that are out there, in the near term roadmap doesn't need to build an execution layer of its own. It can naturally extend to it. I think you're definitely kind of pointing to something that's relevant.But I don't know if that's the lowest hanging fruit given the capacities that exist in current blockchain compute environment. The vision of course is to make people, Web 3.0 users rather than blockchain users or L1 users. You basically want to deploy resources to the most relevant execution environment with the right community, that's creating the right apps and then expose that to at a higher order to consumers.Austin (40:24):Would you describe Wormhole as layer zero?Kanav (40:28):I'm rather old school, I think of layer zeros as networking protocols and internet backbones and things like that. I think it is maybe a useful analogy for kind of blockchain audiences given how we've very economically can't use the word L1, so I don't have an allergic reaction to it, but it's not my first word of choice.Austin (40:46):What would your first word of choice be?Kanav (40:49):Interoperability protocol. I'm not that creative.Austin (40:51):Yeah. Wormhole is also supporting wrapped NFTs, which is kind of an interesting concept. I think most people don't think of NFTs as something that's been bridged and quite frankly, the numbers on Wormhole on bridge NFTs are quite low compared to the success as an asset bridge or a messaging bridge. What was the original idea of using wrapped NFTs? And why do you think it hasn't caught on as much yet?Kanav (41:20):I think cross chain NFTs as a story are just beginning to play out. So there's about 16, 1700 on the NFT bridge itself. And again, NFTs are also cross chain fungible and composable across environments. They are also part of the X asset framework. And so X assets can mean anything. It can be in rebasing assets like STE, it can be in NFTs. It can be in fungible assets. It can mean anything else, right?The NFT story started to play out as a result of new other ones trying to access marketplaces that supported one or the other chain, right? And so you get to access as new audiences, you get to create experiences with different communities. You get to access different user bases, but we're seeing the experiences get a lot richer. So you see something like [inaudible 00:42:00] come out recently, they got featured on Bloomberg for new cross chain staking program where they have in game elements that kind of change based on cross chain NFT staking that are different experiences with different communities. And much like the asset bridge has that kind of globalization and cross pollination of commercial kind of elements. Cross chain NFTs are globalization kind of culture. And incorporating a lot of those elements across games that live on Solana, that live on Terra, that live on other environments and just creating those kind of richer experiences.And so we're seeing people make NFTs on one chain, come to Solana, fractionalize them, trade them, put them back in, move them over to OpenSea on Ethereum. There's all kind of interesting use case patterns. And so it's definitely been less aggressively adopted than the explosive token bridge or the other generic message applications. But there are still 16, 7,000 NFTs, there are a lot of teams using it for cool and innovative stuff that we just kind of keep up out of the wood works every some time.Austin (43:02):Do you think that's social? Do you think that's technological? Do you think that's just like the ecosystem hasn't matured enough? I think I'm surprised how much ... well, I guess surprises maybe the wrong term. People have a lot of emotional attachment to an NFT, in the same way they don't have an emotional attachment to a Bitcoin. They may have emotional attachment to the concept of a Bitcoin, but I would be upset if I lost my particular Degen ape, even if I got a different one for the exact same value. Do you think that factors in at all to how people view the concept of wrapping an NFT, that it somehow weakens the authenticity?Kanav (43:39):I think for a lot of purists, it does. I think it was just so worthy, right. For the most part, people aren't even going to realize, the large end of this consumers like buying these things, an NBA top shot or air, or any of these other platforms, it's something on the app for them. And eventually it's going to be extracted away as we draw to Eth, we draw to Solana, we draw to wallet, connect wallet, and it's going to be kind of as simple as that. And so we're always going to have purist stakes, but I think that's going to remain within our little chamber here.Austin (44:05):For Jump Crypto in general, how do you view NFTs? There are obviously firms now that are dabbling and market making and NFTs. Is that something that you've looked at and if not, what was the decision not to enter that space yet?Kanav (44:19):It just doesn't take a lot. We are looking at trading opportunities. You are looking about margins, you're looking about what predictive offer you can have, like what the edge you can have on a traders and then how many times you can apply that edge, right? It's just as simple as that. And even if you can get a 30% margin on something that trades a hundred million like week one, I mean, [inaudible 00:44:40] now.But if you have a low volume asset class, even if it has slightly higher edge, and it is harder to predict and more dimensional, this is on a good researching decision. So as that volume changes, we will continue to stay on top of it. And I don't know if these are trading tens of billions of dollars every day, and have really interesting datasets, I'm sure we'll be trading them.Austin (45:00):If the market hundred X in size, you wouldn't be opposed to it, it's just the sizing opportunity issue right now.Kanav (45:08):[inaudible 00:45:08] you can't be the richest man. It's about identifying if there's opportunity and executing all native there is.Austin (45:14):Looking at wormhole, one of the things I do want to touch on is the wormhole hack and exploit that happened a little while ago. It was one of the larger bridge hacks at the time. It was eclipsed a few weeks later by an even larger hack of another bridge, also targeting stolen Eth in this process. I'm sure that activities and projects that Jump has been involved in have had larger losses of money or similar volumes of money just based on the area you operate in. But this is one that inherently to the nature of Web 3.0 is very public. How is that like internally knowing that your core contributors to a project that suffered this kind of exploit, and also that failure is now a public failure, as opposed to maybe where it would've been a private failure beforeKanav (45:56):Building is hard, building in the open is even harder. And building in a decentralized open space where there's a large network of participants, consumers, affected people, the stakes we're playing in, right? That's the stakes that every DeFi application, that every L1 at every bridge and that everything in Web 3.0 that aims to do something meaningful inherently adopts and has to learn to deal with.The hack was big punch in the gut, obviously a big financial loss as well. The fundamental nature of smart contracts is that the code and code can have bugs. And this exploit was kind of deep, deep, deep down in the stack, in kind of like Solana instruction verification account check that was missing. The auditors listed our team that has independently been one of the biggest bug bounty finders in the space missed, and code based at the opportunity to be out in the wide for seven months, kind of had unchecked.The day of the hack, of course really, really rough. Jump is not used to being a public institution. So this was like you said, a very public kind of fallout in nature. I can't possibly have been prouder of the way the team reacted to this incident. We kind identified it within short course of it happening. We pulled the meeting room together, identified the bug, fixed up a batch, managed to coordinate the guardian network to bring it up, bring it down, announce our intent to refill the gaping 320 million hole within an hour of the incident being reported on, and brought the bridge back up within 18 hours to end to end.Building bridges and building cross chain is very, very hard. And that's where the reward for it, building it right, is even harder. You don't even make 320 million decisions very lightly, and this should hopefully signify you how much conviction and faith we have in the code base in bringing it back up in 18 hours. It should tell you about where we think this whole space is going and where Wormhole is going and where interoperability is going and what a core piece of infrastructure in that realm would mean.Security continues to be extremely, extremely top of mind. We have a 10 million bug bounty. We have an internal red team that's basically thinking about breaking Wormhole and our key projects every day. We have multiple audit from [inaudible 00:48:12] with lots of audits going on, pretty intense security review practices, all of which can be found publicly online. And I'm incredibly confident that Wormhole has come out more stronger from this incident. The team has come out kicking and that we're building one of the best and most trusted inter op solutions out there.Austin (48:32):Looking across the ecosystem, let's say over the next 12 to 18 months, what are you personally most excited for and what keeps you up at night? What do you still have worry around?Kanav (48:44):I'm looking forward to a whole bunch of things. So definitely very excited about all the advancements that we are seeing in the succinct proof and zero knowledge space. That stuff is just awesome, it's magic. And I'm just so excited to see all the things that's going to unlock for us. There's a lot of interesting problems in the hardware acceleration space that need to be made to make that possible. There's a lot of problems algorithmically that are kind of being uncovered there. And I think hopefully this conversation has lent on that we have a big infrastructure mindset. When I say streets and sanitation, that's kind of what we think about every day. That's what we're looking forward to. And on what we can build to and contribute to that.Austin (49:19):You said something I got to get a little more info. You said specific hardware to accelerate certain kinds of applications. The only place we've really seen this so far across the entire crypto landscape is ASICs for Bitcoin mining. You see GPU mining optimization, but again, nowadays I wouldn't necessarily even call GPU specialized hardware. It's really commodity hardware at this point that's just deployed for a specific application. When you're looking at the space, where are you seeing actually custom silicon or FPGAs becoming something that it makes sense to deploy?Kanav (49:50):Yeah, I mean, definitely for zero knowledge provers, right? So like two verification times have compressed a lot to the point where it's pretty feasible on most blockchain environments today. But proving itself is still super, super resource intensive. That's where there's a lot of simple math operations that can be encoded into Silicon and into FPGAs or ASICs to speed up the process significantly. And that's where we are seeing a lot of adopt. There's already a lot of people working on this on hardware acceleration using FPGAs, maybe even ASICs on zero knowledge provers.It's a little bit of like it's tough to say when the right time is because there's new changes like algorithmically coming out all the time with the new advances in new papers. And so when you spend a whole bunch of time just optimizing Fast Fourier transforms. And then the next paper makes Fast Fourier transforms not relevant. It's tough to make a decision on when the right time is, but I know there's a lot of work already going on into it. And it's a space that we are very familiar with and that we are also excited about. And mostly, mostly positive stuff on the regulatory side.Kanav (50:56):As of recently I think there's a lot of good faith engagement from regulators around the world on setting frameworks and policies for how kind of all this stuff gets put into place. Outside of maybe China we haven't seen anything very aggressively or handed on cutting off innovation. We even saw India now finally starting to open up. And so I feel more optimistic about the regulatory landscape than I did 12 months ago. We need a new influx of builders to keep coming and building cool experience and leveraging this technology where we're seeing that happen. We need capital being continued to commit to this space where we're seeing that happen.Austin (51:35):The inverse of that question, what are you most concerned about on a macro level for the space still?Kanav (51:39):Asset pricing is of course highly dependent on macro environment and that is unrelated to crypto, right? And there's just like, it's its own thing. And so we'll see price movements on a different time scale. And if you see a very sustained global macro depressed environment, then we're going to see less capital, less builders and less momentum in the space. And I think that's probably the biggest overhang we have today.Austin (52:03):In the long run we're all dead.Kanav (52:05):In the wrong run we're all dead. That's right, so let's keep building.Austin (52:09):Yes. One kind of last question here, I think if you rerun the clock maybe three or four years, the prevailing wisdom in this space was not that traditional financial institutions were going to expand their vision and embrace blockchain and we'd call it Web 3.0 at the end of the day. And you'd have Twitter profile pictures of NFTs, you'd have Jump Trading building software that's open source for a decentralized environment. And we really have seen that that is what was originally pitched as a forked parallel path of economic development.Austin (52:42):It's a little bit more twisty curvy than we thought it was going to be. And there's a lot more integration with traditional companies. As crypto has a thesis about it, that it's moving more consumer, right? Across the spectrum you see more normies getting into crypto in one way or another. Does the existing market of specifically the United States and Europe where you see very few competitors within an ecosystem.Austin (53:07):There's basically only two phone companies. There's basically only three cell phone companies. There's basically only four internet provider companies. Across the spectrum you see very non-competitive markets. When you look at the consumer landscape in the United States, do you imagine that we're going to see similar patterns rolling out there as we saw in the financial industry, or we really are going to go back to that idea of a parallel execution model?Kanav (53:30):Yeah. I'll strongly state that I don't hold a heretical view of this kind of being a completely forked off parallel path that has no relevance to anything that we do today. I think it's an amazing technological invasion that gives us tools to coordinate resources in an untrusted environment. And that's unlocking a lot of magic.Kanav (53:49):But that again bleeds in with the rest of the real world, which is also big and has its own dramatic pieces of innovation and with a whole bunch of other stuff going on. I think one of the most exciting things has been kind of the global equalizer that crypto can serve to be. Yesterday we saw Polygon come out with an integration with Stripe. And these are three kids from India that had no early supporting or backing that kind of boosted the network on their own and are now competing on a very, very competitive landscape with people from every single part of the world that are very well resourced, competent teams.Kanav (54:23):We see [Inaudible] coming from Korea. We see teams from Australia and New Zealand over the [inaudible 00:54:28] guys. We see people from Berlin and the US and everybody competing on the same, not only the similar consumer markets, but also on the same capital markets. And there are network effects that accrue, but not cannibalistic network effects that accrue. That makes me very excited about where the space is going overall. When we talk about integration points itself, it's going to largely depend on [inaudible 00:54:52], right? And that's like an unsatisfactory answer.Kanav (54:55):But if you're talking about financial markets, crypto is already integrated heavily into the financial markets with 15 excellent international venues that are competing, so we already have a fractured environment. That is before the [inaudible 00:55:08], the NASDAQ, the CME groups have made their moves in the space. And they're clearly not going to be monopolies in crypto, obviously, right?Kanav (55:16):If you look at something like a telco and interactions with like cell networks still remains to be seen, whether like decentralized constructions of those kinds of things can be competitive. I mean, building telcos and stuff has such strong network effects and so many economies of scale. And it's unclear whether a Web 3.0 means of accruing that value to a decentralized organization has the ability to accrue the similar kind of network effects and so remains to be seen. But I'm excited to see it play out.Austin (55:43):I always enjoy getting to pick your brain about where these technologies are going and the intersection of a very traditional financial world with this new global system that we've all been building. But thank you so much for joining us for spending some time digging into this stuff.Kanav (56:00):Thanks a lot for having me on Austin. This was super fun and as always, love chatting, so yeah, we'll see you again soon.Austin (56:04):Thanks.

In this episode, we talk to Chase Barker, Austin Federa, and Matty Taylor of Solana Labs.From Gamified incentives, to the Solana cookbook -- we talk about what's scalable, what's next in Solana, and catalysts in the crypto space.Episode timeline:[01:41] - Introduction of Chase[02:51] - Introduction of Austin[04:10] - Introduction of Matty[10:55] - Gamified incentives[25:41] - Solana cookbook[30:33] - EVM[43:43] - “Solana becomes easier”[52:17] - OutroFollow Matt, Chase and Austin on Twitter:1) Austin FederaAustin_Federa2) Matty Taylor mattytay3) Chase Barker therealchaseebFor more information on Jupiter please visit:Website : jup.ag/Podcast: podcast.jup.agTwitter : twitter.com/JupiterExchangeDiscord : discord.gg/jupDocs : docs.jup.ag/

In this episode, Dan Albert (Executive Director), Lily Liu (President) and Mable Jiang (Board Member) discuss the role of the Solana Foundation in advancing the Solana protocol and ecosystem with support and initiatives around the world. Austin Federa (Head of Communications, Solana Labs) guest hosts. 0:43 - Intros / Roles3:13 - The appeal of working at the foundation level07:48 - Establishing scope for the foundation12:42 - What's working in the ecosystem?20:01 - From the ecosystem to the foundation21:21 - Growing Solana in new markets33:50 - Shared Ownership of the network36:21 - Predictions for 2022 in crypto and web 3.0DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. Austin Federa (00:10):Welcome to the Solana podcast. I'm Austin Federa filling in as guest host today. We spend a lot of time on the show talking to founders and builders in the space, people building on the Solana blockchain or otherwise involved in the Solana ecosystem. But today we're actually going to be talking about a different component, which is the Solana Foundation. Today with us, we have Dan who's the executive director of the Solana Foundation. We have Lily, who's the president of the Solana Foundation and Mabel, who's one of the board members of the Solana Foundation. Welcome to the Solana podcast, guys.Lily (00:39):Thanks for having us.Dan (00:40):Great to be here.Mabel (00:41):Thank you.Austin Federa (00:42):All right, Dan, let's start out with you. Tell me a little bit about what the Solana Foundation's role is in the ecosystem.Dan (00:49):Sure. The foundation is really here to help foster the growth of the Solana network and really the Solana ecosystem kind of in broad strokes at the highest level, what can we do to make sure that the Solana network continues to grow in the most kind of sustainable and decentralized manner as possible? And how can we provide resources and help the community grow to onboard the next or the first billion users to the Solana ecosystem and crypto in general?Austin Federa (01:24):Lily, what attracted you to the Solana Foundation? And how did you get involved in it?Lily (01:30):Well, I've been in the crypto ecosystem for a little bit and I must confess that in 2018, 2019, I actually spent a good bit of time being a Bitcoin maxi. And then I even was part of Little Bitcoin Book and which is not to say, sometimes I feel like people in crypto are a little bit maybe too tribal, which is not to say I don't love Bitcoin. I still consider Bitcoin to be king. But when I took a little bit of time out of crypto, when I came back to crypto, I started just using a lot of the apps that had sort of emerged out of DeFi Summer and I was totally floored by using Raydium in April. I really could not stop talking about it for just about a month because it was very squarely Web 3.0 but it felt like Web 2.0 and it was just so obvious to me at that moment that this was going to be how the next billion people, if we were going to get a billion people into crypto, anytime soon it was going to be on Solana.Solana to me is just such a unique combination of being technically so innovative but at the same time, really understanding that to bring people into the ecosystem, it has to be a good experience. And sometimes for your end user, it really just is as simple as saying, "It's fast and cheap." And that's why ethernet is just better than 56K modems. And sometimes it just has to be that simple to the end user if you're going to appeal to a billion people.Austin Federa (02:48):Yeah, I completely agree with you. There's been so many of those moments I've sort of heard over the last year of people just trying something on Solana and having this experience of, oh, it just works. It's fast. It feels like a Web 2.0 application but it's delivered in a fully decentralized way. Just based on that, what was the decision in your mind to, tons of people have that experience, they go build something, they go work for a company building in the space in terms of a service provider company. What was the sort of appeal of something that's more at the foundation level?Lily (03:19):To me, I think that, I come from a background where I spent a lot of time, I originally started working in more traditional industries. I worked in McKinsey, I worked at KKR and I kind of fell into Bitcoin back in 2013, 2014, which at the time was not a very obvious thing to do. And so for me, I think one of the things that I maybe add to the ecosystem is helping run effective organizations and thinking about sort of how to scale a commercial kind of go to market strategy and having been in the ecosystem for a little bit. And so for me, what's always attracted to me to crypto and Web 3.0, is these kind of new ultimately end user experiences that you enable for, not just those of us who've been kind of nerding out over technical sort of minutia left and right but really making that accessible and available.Lily (04:17):Some of the things that I'm really excited about facilitating through the foundation is kind of new markets growth outside of the US, outside of Europe, outside of the parts of East Asia that are already very familiar with cryptocurrency. And to me, it's so clear that if these types of applications, call it DeFi or sort of more metaverse or social or NFTs are going to take hold, then it's most likely going to start on Solana first. And so just being a part of that and sort of making that more accessible to a broader rate of people is really what's exciting to me.Austin Federa (04:51):And Mabel, you tell us a little bit about your path to becoming a board member at the Solana Foundation.Mabel (04:57):I think among all the people here, I probably joined the board the earliest. I joined when the board started, the foundation started. That kind of history just goes back to when I think before the token launch of Solana happened to that Anatoly and Raj, they were in China and in East Asia. And then that was even before my time joining Multicoin. I met them, obviously at that point it was 2019 and then it wasn't really easy to raise fund for sure. But then we kind of just happened to hang out a lot in Shanghai, in Seoul. I think another places like Beijing and whatever. And then we spent a bunch of time over those three weeks and then talked about, oh, how do I think about or how do we usually think about go to market strategies for public chains? And then how do people really differentiate one smart contract from the other?When they go back to San Francisco, they ask, "Can you maybe write us some sort of expansion or kind of go to market plan for Solana in East Asia?" And I did that. That was right around the time when they're forming a board for the foundation. And then, that's also around the time when I joined Multicoin. They invited, it's like since you're part of the ecosystem and then you are pretty unique kind of position compared to some of the other board members, are you interested to kind of help Solana Foundation or raising the Solana awareness in a global sense? I was like, oh, that was really interesting in a differentiated way to contribute to the ecosystem so I said, yes.Since then, that was start of 2020. Since then over now, I've been doing quite a bit of things, always related to those lines, raising the awareness for Solana in China specifically because that's where I'm sitting. And also in some other places in Asia and also try to just kind of talk to different projects in multiple different ecosystem. And obviously now it's a multi chain world and then people would have different trade offs, like when to choose different things. But when they learn about Solana and learn about why they're optimizing certain things in the design, they're always willing to try it because back in 2020, there aren't that many people know about it. I think the first step really is just to having people understand how the system works and whatnot. I've been doing quite a bit of those. I think that's kind of my experience involved with Solana Foundation.Austin Federa (07:31):And Dan, as you kind of think about your role as the sort of executive director at the Solana Foundation, how do you define scope for an organization like that? What are the sort of things you're thinking about when you're thinking about initiatives that the foundation is engaging in or things the foundation is not doing and shouldn't be doing in your view?Dan (07:52):Yeah, that's an excellent question. Really, I see it as two primary areas of focus with kind of the overarching goal being broad growth of the network and the community itself without an eye towards turning a profit for the foundation. This is a nonprofit organization. We're not taking any equity investments or really taking the position to be picking winners. There's plenty of incredible innovation that's happening on Solana, lots of competing projects, lots of new stuff. And the foundation really wants to position itself to support, really talking how to provide support equally for everyone in the ecosystem. And so one of the primary thrusts, one of our main operational kind of focus points these days is really on growing the network itself from an infrastructure standpoint. That's really been my personal area of focus for really a long time now is how can we get the most number of high quality validator operators, the most humans running the most number of nodes, be it validators or RPC nodes, which serve as the API endpoints or API gateways for applications using the Solana network?And to that end, the foundation has rolled out a number of programs, really leveraging kind of the foundation's holdings of tokens, which are really allocated to grow the community and grow the network. Kind of as I see it, I don't know, maybe a bit of a personal tangent here. I originally started engaging with Solana in early 2019. I was working on the engineering team at Solana Labs and it was early stage startup. We hadn't even launched the Testnet yet, just kind of scrappy early days, trying to get everyone to understand and hey, proof of history is a real thing. We're really going to prove out this tech. And one of the things that was really hard was trying to get people to run validators. A lot of our early stage validators that helped us launch Testnet for the very first time and get Mainnet off the ground were a lot of them came from the Cosmos ecosystem.And so, we have a lot of these kind of OG longstanding validators who really helped get the Solana network off the ground came from standing on the shoulders of giants. The Cosmos ecosystem brought so much innovation to the proof of stake universe and kind of where this ties back to, in early days, myself and a couple of the early labs employees in true startup fashion, we were actually working out of one of the co-founder's basements and we hand built some of the first bare metal validators to run on the Solana network. Ordering parts on the internet, showing up in a bunch of boxes and just going forward kind of hacking on the hardware, trying to see how much performance we can squeeze out of these individual machines.We went and installed them in a data center here in the Colorado area and those nodes are still running today. Some of them are pointed at Mainnet, some of them are Testnet. And that was sort of the, I don't know, the genesis of, at least for me personally, a lot of my personal investment in seeing the growth of the validator ecosystem on Solana, having kind of physically hooked up and bootstrapped some of the first ones. And now having transitioned earlier this year to take on this role at the foundation, we maintain a program for anyone who wants to run a validator, can engage with tier one data centers all over the world that the foundation has. We've really kind of went to bat for our validator community and helped a lot of these infrastructure providers understand that, yeah, it takes a lot of horsepower to run a node on Solana and it can be hard to get your hands on some of these machines.And so in working with some of these execs at some of these older school, I'll say more traditional telco or infrastructure oriented companies, helping them to understand the value of what a powerful and secure and distributed Solana infrastructure ecosystem looks like, that's really been an exciting kind of growth track, I think for the foundation in helping to bring more hardware online and helping more people to learn to run it and get more nodes running and keep the network flying.Austin Federa (12:16):Yeah, I love the parallels to the Cosmos ecosystem being a validator ecosystem being early, early supporters of that because of course, Tendermint is also notoriously computationally intensive and runs better on bare metal than cloud so it seems like a very natural validator group to bring over in the early days.Lily, from your view, as looking over the ecosystem, what are the parts you see that are working really well in the Solana ecosystem? What do you see are areas, be it tooling, Dan talked a little about infrastructure, areas in which the foundation can make a difference in help evolving?Lily (12:53):What I think is going quite well right now is a lot of the interest in the energy and kind of the inbound on various stakeholder groups within the community. I think there's a lot of excitement from a general audience also because it's very accessible to a general audience. Again, as we were saying earlier, if it costs dollars versus hundreds of dollars to mint an NFT, that's a very meaningful difference to many people. I think general awareness has been amazing. I think there's a lot of increased developer interest and accessibility. And if you look at sort of the hackathons that we've had, probably every two or three months, three or four months in the ecosystem, the number of sort of people who are new to Web 3.0 that are starting with Solana, I think is really impressive and has grown tremendously in a very short period of time.We want to continue to extend that in various ways. And we've got a number of ideas as to sort of increasing the accessibility to even a retail audience, putting out sort of better documentation, better tooling to continue sort of onboard both maybe existing Web 3.0 developers who might be building in solidity or on sort of an EVM type environment. As well as, increasingly there's pretty substantial influx of folks coming over from Web 2.0 and thinking about where to get started and are starting off by making choices between essentially now it's really solidity or Rust and Rust, implicitly sort of Solana. And so I think that we can continue to invest in various ways of sort of helping people start within the Solana ecosystem. And I think that because Solana has grown so quickly in a very short period of time, there are also sort of ecosystem tools that are catching up right now.One thing that we hear a lot about is kind of indexing within Solana is something that we can probably improve as a community, data analytics on Solana, given that a lot of the applications are very sort of more consumer retail audience oriented is something that I think is also, actively being worked on. And so those are of the sort of near term things that people are thinking about. Obviously with the pretty tremendous growth of the ecosystem, also making it easier for people to run nodes, have access to baseline infrastructure. That's also something we've invested tremendous resources on through data center partnerships and it's known that Solana some higher hardware requirements but we've invested a lot to try to take down those various barriers. Those are some of the things that we've been thinking about.Dan (15:38):Yeah. And I would actually just kind of add to that. Some people do like to kind of harp on the interesting hardware requirements or high end hardware requirements for Solana. In the broad scope of things, when kind of the history is written about at these sorts of things, it's like, this is going to be something that's in a number of years or maybe even just a couple years, it's going to run on whatever machine you want to plug in to your home. We do have some validators that are running infrastructure out of their home. Some people choose to run in data centers. Some people do, God bless them, choose to run it in the cloud. But I think to Lily's point regarding the incredibly rapid growth of the Solana ecosystem, I think one area where we're really starting to dedicate more resources, particularly me personally and from the foundation side is on helping more people understand what Solana infrastructure really looks like.We've seen Tremendous resources and the developer relations team has put out incredible resources for new developers for Web 3.0 but the kind of tooling and community knowledge base of what does it take to run a good validator? And what does it mean to run a validator? Why should I care? I think it has a little ways to go in sort of advancing that narrative a little bit. In particular to lower the barrier to entry from, oh, you must be a sysadmin or a DevOps expert to, what I'd really love to see is all of these Web 3.0 teams and Web 3.0 app developers who are having a great time enjoying Solana and building on Solana, also participate in running the network that they so appreciate. I'd love to see more community buy in of teams that are vested in their project being built on top of a working Solana to help Solana run.What we've seen, even in just the last couple weeks or so, a number of these sort of NFT based Dow communities that have popped up on Solana over the last six months or so have started really taking this message to heart and are launching their own validator, which is just really cool to see. I know, I think Monkeydow claims the title of first Dow to launch a validator on Solana. I know the Degen Apes and the Degen community have also launched. And so it's just really cool to see these communities that really organically popped up around people enjoying NFTs and collecting these cool RNFTs that kind of blew up on Solana this summer now really starting to take a stake in the consensus and ownership and management of the network itself. And so I'm really excited to see that to start happen and really something I want to hope that the foundation can foster. And it's just something I also am excited to see the community really kind of taking it into their own hands more.Austin Federa (18:39):Yeah. I kind of love that, that it's so easy, even a monkey can do it. Is kind of the tagline there.Dan (18:47):It's perfect.Austin Federa (18:48):And the other, the Degen Apes, which are famous for having probably the least technically successful NFT launch to ever have been done by any organization have now their own validator. It's a good testament to how far we've come.Dan (19:02):It was incredible. It was such a struggle. There were all sorts of technical issues, like with the Metaplex standard had recently rolled out. They had various challenges with the mints and it was this saga that we all kind of watched unfold on Twitter and on all these channels over a number of days. And I got to give them credit. There were frustration, there was joy, there were tears. And it came out with one of the most unique, strong, enthusiastic communities on Solana having kind of gone through the fire of this rocky birth that was the minting process. More power to them. I just thought it was just so cool.Austin Federa (19:48):Yeah. I love how that all gets constructed. Kind of, along those lines, you Dan, you came initially from Solana Labs, you were one of the early engineers in the ecosystem. You're now working at the foundation. What's that transition been like? How closely do you still work with people like Raj and Anatoly? What's that relationship like?Dan (20:08):Yeah. I think the working relationship it's really interesting. There has been obviously, Solana, the whole network was built and originally launched, all the code came out of Solana Labs, where Raj and Toly run the organization. And they're obviously major players in the Solana ecosystem. This is the vision and the hustle that they've really brought to the table has been instrumental in kind of getting the whole community and the whole Solana ecosystem and the tech stack to really where it is today I think. Where we relate from the foundation is as sort of industry peers, I would say, sure, I talk to Raj and Toly, I talk with a lot of the ecosystem teams, I talk with our board and Lily and so many people that have an interest in Solana's success on the broadest terms and that's to really what the foundation is here to foster. As we continue to grow and expand and evolve our kind of working relationships with a lot of these organizations, I think just continues to evolve and expand.Austin Federa (21:22):And Mabel, looking at, you mentioned a bunch of the work you were doing was helping grow Solana in new markets. Can you talk a little bit about that? And I think, a lot of people, especially who are not working in the region, there's a lot of information around whether cryptocurrency is going to be banned in India or China, sort of how do you view some of those approaches?Mabel (21:44):Yeah, definitely. I'll answer the first part of the questions. I think it's going to be pretty much the same line as what Lily and Dan just mentioned but I'll kind of carve out those into details. I'd say, at the beginning you are also, you definitely need to engage a lot of these staking facilities but these people here it's quite differentiated because many of them are running the mining pools, meaning the proof of work mining pools. I remember back in the days, in 2019, 2020, we were talking to a bunch of those and happened to be that a lot of those are just crashing their wifi in the office. It's pretty funny. But at the same time, Dom who's from Solana Labs, we're trying to age of all of these mining pools and then we're just giving out some of those GPUs.But I think that's in the past. Now a lot more validators are actually starting from East Asia. I think there's some problem with in the past, with your location being far from the US so that's it's harder because Amazon cloud and whatnot but I think basically there's what Dan mentioned earlier, I think this will be a problem that can be solved in the future. I thought that was a pretty interesting thing to bootstrap at the beginning. And then the other things like wallets and non-custodial wallets, custodial wallets, because I think for East Asian crypto, you can never kind of ignore the centralized parties and players, especially I think in the past 24 month all the way till the next 12 month or whatever. I think a lot of those custodial wallets, including some of those exchanges, it was a lot of very pivotal work to try to engage them to support Solana, to support STL, USDC, USCT and a lot of the other stablecoins. I think, those steps that we were able to achieve in the past year in order to get a lot of these centralized exchanges to support those, I think that's also pretty interesting.Mabel (23:50):I think the other thing is that you just generally need to go to wherever because like back in the days in 2 18, 19 and 20, not that many groups are fully aware of how Solana works or even if it's like in Rust, I think people here I'd say safely were more familiar with things like Polkadot than Solana back in the days. Talking to some of those developers and just telling them, there's a few different options and then go to some of the hackathons or just developer meetups or even just the Rust China conferences, and then to promote about it. Justin Stery, he spoke there. A lot of these engagement opportunities definitely helped over the past two years for Solana to really get the writers here.I think that work still continue. And I think I believe that there will be a lot more application focused developers coming over, given from the history of Web 2.0, you see a lot of your infrastructure was built in the West but then application wise actually quite a few of them came from the East. I think, for Solana, for anything that's building on top of the smart contract platform, we could probably spec on the same track. You'll see a lot of people are going to build on top. Now once all of these are available.I think one interesting thing is that for things like wallet, you have Phantom for browser because I think in the West, people are pretty used to using browser wallet but I think here in the East, you also need something that has really good user experience and people like to go mobile first. And that's why Slope Finance, which is one of the leading mobile wallet for Solana in China, they were doing really well because they understand the user behavior and all of those to deliver to the specific audience. I thought this is like quite interesting how you will need to focus on specific areas, the same thing for East and West but then you want to make sure that people get to have the best culturally fitting choices for them so that way you can actually get it around.And then to answer the second part of the questions, so I actually the other day had a tweet about similar lines. There's a lot of Web 2.0 venture capitals and then some of the other funded funds, they're trying to deploy money and then we're asking it's still East Asia or some of the other places around still relevant because of the policy. The way I read this is that crypto is really global. I understand that there's certain restriction for developers to issue cryptocurrencies in China or in some of the other countries. However, I think the language circle and then user behavior, what I just mentioned was always going to be something more pivotal than the actual restriction. These people will move to somewhere else in Asia but they will continue to build. And then for people who want to use the kind of user experience for those products who are sitting here.I think crypto liquidity is global but user experience is always regional. And I think, if you're growing an ecosystem, you can't ignore that. I'd say I'm still bullish. And I think people are recognizing some a lot of those things are just better built on Solana because it's higher performance. And then at the end, it's just about how you make sure that you are compliant to the place that you are at. And then not definitely go with the compliance part but then also not hindering yourself building.Austin Federa (27:23):Lily, Dan, do you have anything to add on growth in new markets and that process?Lily (27:29):Yeah. On new markets, we started to invest in building out the ecosystem in India, back in June and July. And it's no secret, there's extremely large both user bases and also developer communities. I think in the most recent hackathon, after the US, the second largest contributor of developers, developer submissions to the hackathon was from India. And I think Indonesia was in the top four as well. And so I think as we continue to look to Eastern Europe, for example, Latin America, Africa, some of the early narratives as to what applications would be unique and sort of the 10X type of functionality on crypto, have been talked about and written about for years, if not decades. And for example, payment applications Which become supercharged when you take DeFi functionality, global liquidity pools and they make that adjacent to an actual you potentially consumer transaction.And I think that that to me, it's very clear that that's going to happen on Solana first. And so, what I'm particularly excited about is some of those seemingly sort of everyday type of transactions but those actually becoming very unique when you, for example, can take a stablecoin and have a Venmo feeling type of transaction or a WeChat pay feeling type of transaction but it's actually fully decentralized, fully on chain and also comes with a potentially a suite of financial services that are kind of baked into the ecosystem adjacent to that. I think those are the types of things that are going to resonate hugely in emerging markets, in new markets. And those are some of the things that I'm excited about maybe exploring in new markets.Austin Federa (29:10):Yeah. I do love how sort of culturally infectious the crypto mindset is. That to use a network, you also have to be an owner of the network and that the success of the network and the success of you as a user are tied in a way that they're really not in the setup of a stock corporation or something along those lines. You can sort of think of these things in some ways as giant digital co-ops that are all working towards this goal. It's really interesting to kind of hear that. And I'm really curious to see in the future, how that starts influencing culture. I think we're already seeing crypto just barely start to influence culture and that might take off a bit in the future. Be interesting to see.Lily (29:54):I think it is. And I think what's under the surface with crypto but what rapidly rises to the surface is that it's been talked about, written about philosophically for a very, very long time, this whole idea of a veil of ignorance, that your opportunity set is determined in large part sort of where you're geographically born today, rather than you know who you are as a person and what's in your heart and what's in your mind. And with crypto, you sort of have this radical accessibility. It's almost sort of radical equality if you will, in a way that we haven't really observed in a long time. And so I think that's really upending in so many different ways and that for me is a big part of why I continue to be interested in cryptocurrency. And also why I think Solana is really going to be at the forefront of that because all of those sorts of ideas, the accessibility, the sort of the very concept of why Web 3.0 is important and where people are most likely to get started on that today is the sort of general awareness funnels.People will hear about Bitcoin. They'll learn about Bitcoin. They'll learn about store value and people will resonate with that. Your average person will resonate with that because it sounds so much like digital goals. But then once they start to learn about Bitcoin, they're like, okay, I've bought it, I get it. It's kind of like gold for the digital age. What's next? Well can I do DeFi on Bitcoin? Eh, no, not really. Lightning, we've been talking about it since 2015. Soon.And then very quickly from there, people move on to, okay, well here, well that's really amazing. These sort of new applications. And I have some friends who bought NFTs and then they click a button and it's a $100 later. Gosh. Oh, that was painful. And I think that's kind of what a number of people have gone through so far. And so people sort of get onboarded to why this is important, why this is really sort of very exciting and part of the future. And then eventually what I've seen is so many people sort of end up with being in the Solana ecosystem. I guess what I'm excited about is accelerating that and maybe making it a little bit less of a circuitous journey.Mabel (31:59):I have a story to share related to what we were talking about here. I think, I now all of these protocols are starting to talk about Shopify type of experience, which is you have an underlying protocol and then you just have different ends. You just host a different way. It's actually not just for the cultural purpose. One story was shared by Roneil who's the co-founder of Audius, last week with me. He was saying that he realized because Audius is actually not, I think the main front end was not allowed in China at some point but then somebody actually set up a separate front end that's actually and filter out and then based on whatever the local compliance should be let a whole thing run. That front end actually works.He was exactly kind of explaining to me how he was amazed by Audius should be the underlying protocol and then it should be determined by the front end itself on the ground, what to feature versus not. And everybody can have their own choices. That's a freedom choice. Nobody's going to question that. I thought that was like really amazing. It's definitely beat beyond just kind of I think this is really relevant to what we were talking about earlier because I think for Solana, it's the same thing, a lot of the things. It may not be compliant for a certain reason in the region but I think at the end it's about the front end. It's not about the protocol. The protocol should be permissionless. Anyone else can just do whatever they want but for the ones that you want to make it work for a certain region, you can just do that. I thought that was really, really amazing and very unique about crypto.Austin Federa (33:30):Yeah. I love that, that sort of view that because of the financial incentives with crypto, you can decouple the application layer from the protocol layer, that those two things can be separate. This is in some ways, this is the dream of Twitter. We had this glorious few years where there were all these Twitter clients and then it all got, because the app engine was introduced, it all got consolidated down to twitter.com and the Twitter mobile apps. And RIP all of our favorite Twitter clients from back in the day. I love that, that the way this technology is built, it allows you to really separate those two things at origin, as opposed to having to think about the business models that support that over the long term.Dan (34:09):I would actually add, I think there's interesting things happening, both in the decoupling of that, like you said, the application and the protocol there but also an interesting sort of coupling there kind of to Lily's point about this shared ownership of the success of the project. And that's really this kind of shared ownership of the network is really the kind of core underpinning, this core idea that underpins this idea of staking on a proof of steak network. Which is your success is tied to the success and this really the security of the network. And what we're starting to see now are applications and DeFi applications, particularly stake pools that have recently launched on Solana that really bring the ability to participate in the shared security and shared ownership of the network to the application layer.There have been a bunch of community launched stake pools. There's some private stake pools. The foundation is in the process of transitioning its entire treasury over to stake pools, which are really this, I think we did a whole podcast episode on this recently so I won't belabor the technical details here but basically it gives people an easy way to enter and exit from a liquid position, which is actively helping to secure the network via staking to various validators in the underlying smart contract. But what I think is really interesting about this is we're starting to see these public stake pools that pop up, Marinade Finance, JPool, Socient, Lido and a few others that are really bringing the application experience, that really slick, fast, fast and cheap promise of what does it feel like to just use a useful service built on top of Solana and oh, how cool that a normal user can transact in these stake pool tokens rather than unstaked SOL.And I think we recently saw the first, there was an NFT sale or an NFT mint that was accepting stake pool tokens, a staked SOL positions, rather unstaked SOL. So we're starting to see this adoption of people who are not only just developing apps and playing around on the application layer but also recognizing that there's tremendous value in sort of moving the denominator of how we transact value on Solana to be pegged to the participation of securing the network itself.Austin Federa (36:40):Yeah, that's a really great point. Looking forwards, Looking into this year of 2022, what are the things that you see in Web 3.0 and crypto that have potential that could become trends that are going to advance and increase? I'll kind of start out. One of my big ones that I think is we're going to see a lot of the sort of tech-ish companies adopting decentralized Web 3.0 technologies as a competitive advantage to compete with a lot of vertically integrated companies. I think you're going to see a lot in payroll. You're going to see a lot in merchant payments, concert tickets. These companies that don't have platform scale are going to look to Web 3.0 as a competitive advantage. And you might see that role into the rest of the ecosystem. Dan, I'm curious kind of what your thoughts are. And we'll just go around the room here.Dan (37:30):Yeah, I think your spot on there, Austin. And I think one of the things that's really going to help unlock that is these sort of higher levels of abstraction of developer tooling and more sort of almost enterprise API access, if you will, to provide a more Web 2.0 like interface experience that someone could just plug in and it's Solana as a service. There's your SaaS for 2022 and it's instant settlement in stablecoins on Solana but no one needs to worry about the fact that it's a stablecoin on Solana. It's they integrate this API and the money transfers or the token transfers from merchant to customer or vendor to seller, whoever, immediately. I think that starting to see people using crypto and using blockchain without realizing that they're using a blockchain technology.Austin Federa (38:22):Lily, what are your 2022 predictions?Lily (38:25):I think industry wide I'm with you that Web 3.0 is going to become the starting point rather than sort of the periphery. I think that we're well on our way where Web 3.0 is going to sort of foment this decentralized center. And I think that there's a few things that are sort of going to happen alongside, in my perspective. One is this kind of movement towards multichain slash interchain future is just accelerating. I think that there's a few sort of different consolations within the ecosystem. There's clearly sort of the EVM world which we're going to have a connection to through Neon EVM. There's a lot of sort of obviously energy within Solana. There's some other, IBC, we talked about Cosmos a little a bit is probably another sort of approach within that and then connectors within these.And so I think there's various foci that are going to emerge there and increasingly there is going to be sort of those sort of layer ones are actually, I think, going to be abstracted away over time as they probably should be when you talk about sort of appeal to your average person. I think that another theme that I see emerging is as more institutions want to get into this and compliance with existing regulatory frameworks, institutional KYC and tooling to allow institutions to participate in decentralized liquidity pools, which I think is going to be pretty exciting. And so that's where the existing world is actually going to start getting onboarded in earnest into Web 3.0. That's going to be quite interesting.I think with that, there's a big theme around a sort of identity and privacy and on chain identity and having a little bit more control over your data on chain is another big thing, the theme that's going to evolve. And then, certainly in a consumer area, I think that NFTs went from being a very analog sort of digital representation of physical art and have now morphed into basically being the entry point into sort of Web 3.0 communities and metaverse and these kind of almost new communities, dare I say civilizations that are starting to sprout online. And so those are some of the from the more institutional to the more consumer, I think there's just so much happening out there. That's all really just going to continue to develop at a rapid pace in 2022.Austin Federa (40:49):And Mabel, what do you see for 2022?Mabel (40:51):Yeah. I'd like to maybe talk a little bit more about the application as in the middleware layer. Especially the crypto native ones. We've seen a lot of DeFi activities, 2020, 2021 for on Solana specifically because people like how fast transactions are like. But I think what's more excited, also something that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about and then exploring is that the actual kind of Web 3.0 application experience, what does that mean? People have been talking about metaverse so to speak for a long time but the things people can do beyond finance is never really happening before but I think there are, we've seen from a lot of the recent hackathons that you'll have address to address IM protocols, you have some of the Web 3.0 social graph where you can just basically have the relationship you with another person.And then another, some of the other things open C collections or some of the other things that you did. And then you also have things like on chain credentialing protocols. All of these, we are seeing them happening on Solana. And then with all of these composable, with each other, you can actually see that you have relationship between people in a game, for example. Or when you bootstrap a new application with the social graph, you can you customize the front page that you push to the users based on the social graph because like you have all those data. Obviously what Lily said about privacy preservation was very, very important. You don't want to share everything, which kind of it's kind of against the purpose but I think the idea is that for Web 3.0, you own the data.You are the one who approves the blockchain or whoever else to access your data of all eth and you control whether you approve someone to be your public connected contact. And then things like on chain credentials, you can prove, what are some of your achievements based on the contribution off chain. At this court discussion or things like whatever you've provided liquidity in the past for certain period of time or you just basically voted every single time in the community snapshot. All of these become your kind of on chain resumes or on chain badges that can later on help whatever you prioritize into a community. It's the such thing we call gated community. I think all of these are coming together. We're going to see actual consumer experience available on Solana. I thought that was extremely exciting because I think with all of these enabled, people will have no difference of experience compared to some of the other Web 2.0 application experience. I thought that's going to be very huge.Austin Federa (43:35):Well, thank you all for joining us today. It's fun to talk about some of these things that are not quite as pressing, as user facing that developers aren't picking up and doing but are nonetheless integral to the network and it's growth and its future. And I think it's really fun to talk with the names and some of the people behind the Solana Foundation. Thanks for joining us today.Lily (44:00):Thanks for having us, Austin.Mabel (44:01):Thank you.Dan (44:02):Great to be here. Thanks a lot.

In this special Payments episode of the Solana Podcast, Austin Federa guest hosts a conversation between Jeremy Allaire (CEO, Circle) and Sheraz Shere (Head of Payments, Solana Labs). They discuss merchant payments, stablecoins and Solana Pay: the newly released, open, and free-to-use payments framework built on Solana.00:45 - What is Circle?03:35 -  The use case for stablecoins and the mechanisms to build them09:34 - Solana Pay13:42 - Integration of USDC and Stable Coins18:45 - How could Solana Pay become mainstream? 25:27 - The Solana Pay toolkit27:39 - Can businesses operate without a bank account?30:05 - Looking at Data Privacy in Solana Pay and Circle 34:35 - Hopes for Solana hackathon outcomes  Austin: (00:09)Hello and welcome to the Solana podcast. I'm Austin Federa guest hosting this week. Today we're going to be talking about stablecoins, USDC and Solana pay. So we're joined today by Sheraz Shere, the head of payments at Solana labs and Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of Circle. Welcome to the show.Jeremy: (00:27)Thank you.Sheraz: (00:27)Thanks Austin.Austin: (00:28)Great. Well, let's start off with Jeremy, talk a little bit about Circle. Can you tell us a little bit about what is Circle and what's its role in the US DC stablecoin?Jeremy: (00:37)Sure, absolutely. So Circle is a global financial technology firm. We operate a suite of services to help businesses take advantage of digital currency in payments and treasury applications on the internet, which is all really a mouthful. But specifically we have a couple of really critical things. The first is we operate a stablecoin market infrastructure as we call it called USDC, and we'll talk, I know more about that, but USDC is a dollar digital currency that is an asset backed or fully reserved digital currency that can be used for payments and settlement on the internet. And it's already used really, really widely in the crypto economy.And so we run that infrastructure and provide that to businesses institutions, and through many, many of our partners out to tens or perhaps even hundreds of millions of end users that interact with USDC. And then we also operate a suite of services for companies to have payments and treasury management and other things that are needed to integrate this into the way that they operate. So almost like a crypto native bank account for businesses to store and transact, and then alongside that a broad set of API products.So basically Circle APIs that connect the existing fiat system, credit cards, bank accounts, bank transfers with stablecoins, with the custody, security, blockchain management, and other things that are needed to use that and integrate that into your own application. So lots and lots of fintechs, startups, companies like building on those APIs to kind of integrate stablecoins and fiat in their applications. So hundreds of companies use those and those are the key things that we do. And we've been growing with other products in what we call to treasury services. So Circle yield, which is a stablecoin yield product, which has been growing really fast too.Austin: (02:50)Yeah. I want to get into that kind of in a minute. So stablecoins, they're foundational to a lot of how DeFi has been enabled over the years. So there's lots of different applications for that. Sometimes it's just as a common transacting layer between multiple currencies. There's lots of different applications for it, but as you mentioned, there's more and more sort of enterprises and traditional companies, as well as fintechs that are in that space that are looking to use stablecoins in their business operations. At the same time, you have a bunch of DeFi Degens who are sort of the original core audience for a stablecoin. What does that decision making process look like at Circle when you're trying to balance such a diverse user base?Jeremy: (03:33)Yeah, it's a great question. And sometimes I'm asked "What's the use case for USDC," and my answer is sort of "What's the use case for a dollar?" Well, the use cases are incredibly broad, and we see that actually today, we see people who are making personal point to point payments internationally. We see people making micropayments for digital IP through NFTs, and at the other end you see institutions that are using USDC to settle half a billion dollar bilateral trades. And that's a pretty broad range of use cases that are out there. I think more importantly, conceptually when we built USDC and you can go back and read the original white paper behind it. And the idea of fiat backed digital currencies, our ultimate belief is that what's needed is a sort of protocol layer for traditional money on the internet.So you can have dollars and euros and pounds and yen and other currencies that just function on top of the internet, the same way that other protocols support the exchange of information and communications. And if we had that, and we could use those protocols at the speed of the internet with the cost efficiency of moving data, which is what I think blockchains hold that promise, Solana's executing really well on that, but hold that promise, that it could really unlock the storage of transmission of value to be a kind of commodity free service on the internet. And so ultimately our belief is that anything that any person or household or firm might need to do in the digital economy on the internet could be done with stablecoins.And so we definitely expect that to grow. Now, when we got started, it was anchored in what I call crypto capital markets. So it's anchored in market participants that, for all the work that they do and all the assets that they might be interacting with, they're all digital assets, and they all move at the speed of blockchains, whatever that is and the efficiency of that. And so they need their dollars to work the same way, and so that kind of gave demand for payment and settlement mediums that could kind of work at the speed of those markets and those blockchains. So, that was a good bootstrap use case, and that's really what brought a lot of this into existence. But now the way I like to describe it is stablecoins are both protocols and money formats. It's a protocol that works on top of a blockchain with assurance and security and finality settle a transaction, but it's also a particular representation of value of a dollar or a Euro or whatever it is, and protocols and kind of formats our network affects businesses.And so the more people who have that, the more valuable or more useful it becomes, and the more products and services that are plugged into a protocol, the more useful and in utility that exists. And so we're now seeing the spillover of the use cases go into everyday businesses more and more everyday businesses saying, "Wow, this is a very, very efficient medium. It's very inexpensive, it's very fast, it's secure. I know it's final and it works globally." So we're certainly seeing that pick up. And at Circle, as we think about use cases, we really believe that the acceptance of payments in a business context using digital currency like this is going to proliferate pretty significantly in the coming years, because it's got so many attributes that are superior to existing electronic payments methods.Austin: (07:12)Yeah. And so you touched on something that's really interesting, which I think everyone thinks of USDC as a protocol, but unlike most organizations that have launched a protocol, the underlying token of USDC is USDC. Its whole point is it does not fluctuate in value, it does not go up, not go down. It stays solid at an equivalent of one US dollar. But Circle, it obviously for-profit organization, what are the mechanisms there that actually allow you to run a business as an organization that has created USDC?Jeremy: (07:48)There are a lot of pieces. So the first is today USDC is approaching 50 billion in circulation, and Circle administers and reserves those assets. And so we generate income from that, from that $50 billion we generate income. And as that grows to be a hundred billion or 200 billion, we'll continue to generate income from that, and certainly in a rising rate environment, that's significant. The second is we run a whole set of, what we call transaction services and treasury services, and those are services that we charge fees for. So transaction services are taking traditional fiat payment methods, using our infrastructure to do blockchain, native, custody, and payments. And so those are kind of usage based and scale up kind of like a Stripe or equivalent type of transactional service.And then we also provide treasury services. So people who want to lend their USDC can lend their USDC in a self-service way through our platform, and get fixed term fixed rate returns on capital on USDC, and we generate a spread income from that as well. So we're building out this sort of suite of commercial services that are globally available increasingly, and that provide a lot of incremental value. So those are several buckets as well, that are really helping us scale our business.Austin: (09:14)So we were talking about transactional services. Again Sheraz, You have been intricately involved in building and launching the Solana pay protocol. Can you give us an overview of what that is, and how stablecoins are an important part of that system?Sheraz: (09:29)Sure. Yeah. So Solana pay is basically a new blockchain based merchant payment system. It's open, permissionless, and decentralized, and it's premised on enabling merchants to connect directly with consumers in a peer-to-peer fashion with no intermediaries. And it's really premised on the notion that merchants would accept stablecoin like USDC. Most merchants, unfortunately for crypto natives, don't really care that much crypto per se, they care about running their business. And that's why having stablecoins, US dollar denominated stablecoins are critical, because what this affords us is the ability to move digital assets at speed and cost of the internet, as Jeremy mentioned.So for Solana pay, what we're really trying to do is enable for merchants, things like instant settlement, near zero cost transaction processing, and something that's really important is the removal of intermediaries. If you think about it from a merchant perspective the most important thing a merchant does is collecting payments and engaging with their consumers with commerce, but there's a lot of friction tied to enabling payments of and commerce. And with friction comes intermediaries and with intermediaries come cost and the loss of control. So if there's one headline for Solana pay, it's really about giving power back to the merchant for the most important function, which they do.Austin: (10:48)So can you talk a little bit about that? Payments is obviously a many billion dollar industry globally. There's some big name that have reached some pretty astronomical valuations nowadays based off of providing credit card payment processing solutions and that sort of thing to e-commerce and non e-commerce business. What's the sort of difference of approach here? How would you compare something like Solana pay to a company maybe like Stripe?Sheraz: (11:15)Sure. Yeah. And Stripe, I would say that the removal of intermediaries doesn't mean that a lot of the traditional payments companies don't have a role to play. The actual act of moving a digital asset from a consumer to the end merchant, that's the piece where there isn't need to be a friction, right? So with the Solana blockchain and a stablecoin like USDC, the movement of digital currencies from a consumer's wallet to the merchant wallet should happen like an email going on the internet, it should happen instantly with no cost. However, once a merchant has accepted a USDC stablecoin or settled in a stablecoin, there's a lot of interesting services that are needed to be done that merchants typically don't want to necessarily do themselves. So setting up token accounts, doing treasury management, reconciliation, integrating into legacy bank accounts.So there's a lot of work in the core stack of post settlement of payments that traditional payment companies can be involved in. The protocol itself is just trying to simplify one component of payment processing, which is the most critical one, which is that the transfer of value between the consumer and the merchant. One of the interesting things that we're building on the spec is the ability to also have a bidirectional communication. The benefit of having a true peer-to-peer connection between a merchant and a consumer and not having an intermediary is that this allows the merchant to, for example, send digital assets back to the consumer. So what this could look like is something like, let's say you buy a new shoe, using this protocol the merchant can send you back an NFT of that shoe into your wallet, which you can now take into the metaverse. Just an example, but illustrating why the notion of a peer-to-peer, a true peer-to-peer interaction between a merchant and a consumer can open up a whole new set of new things.Austin: (13:09)So Jeremy, Sheraz was talking there about one of the pieces of the stack that Solana pay is trying to solve, that payment from a consumer directly to a merchant. You in Circle work with companies that have extremely complicated payment flows that are trying to bring USDC into. What are some of the areas that integration has been easy and straightforward for these companies, and what are some of the areas that are still challenges for enterprise adoption of USDC and stablecoins?Jeremy: (13:37)First of all, just to say, as you know, we're really excited to be supporting Solana pay. And we believe that the problem space here is a really critical one, and solving this problem of how to build a better connection between an end user and a business and building beyond just the underlying digital asset transfer and solving some of these problems is really, really critical. The way I would kind of answer the question is there's sort of the base layer of you've got a blockchain and you've got addresses and wallets and you've got this settlement finality mechanism of moving an asset like USDC as well. And that part is kind of fairly low level.Jeremy: (14:27)And so businesses that want to use this as a substitute for say, a card payment, they can implement that out with Circle APIs, they can take Circle APIs and they can automatically generate new addresses automatically for each payment. They can then track that payment to a given payee. And then they can collect that and store it in USDC, or they can sweep it out to their bank account through an automated API that pushes a wire or other things. So there's like critical kind of behind the scenes treasury kind of infrastructure that's there. The problem is most end users, they don't really necessarily know what all these things are. And so I think being able to introduce things like having metadata associated with a payment, such as what the price is, what the product ID is, any other kind of merchant information that would be needed to kind of tie that payment to a commerce transaction, to be able to have of follow on interactions that are associated with that payment.All these problems are I think really important and become things that people expect, whether it's through a traditional legacy payment mechanism, like handling something like "You sent me the wrong product I need a refund," is like the most common, or some loyalty mechanism that maybe is inducing me to want to use the payment instrument. And so how can I use a blockchain to provide that loyalty mechanism as an inducement as well, building a stronger connection between say the business and the user?And so I think the pain points are more that there's incremental value that's needed for both the end user and the merchant to kind of bring this to a point where it's a superior payment, medium to legacy payment rails. And so those are the kinds of things that we see, but certainly the getting started piece is there. There's so much low hanging fruit. And I think so Solana pay is a really good start at hitting some of the low hanging fruit and creating a way for wallet creators. And then folks like Circle on the other end to make this a little bit more seamless for all the parties.Sheraz: (16:41)I would say that if you're a developer, a founder, or even a legacy payments company, there is a tremendous amount of interesting stuff to build. We just kicked off a hackathon and we have a payments track in that. And as Jeremy mentioned, the protocol itself is pretty low level, it's pretty basic if you look at it, right, it's just a very simple... The most native transaction on a blockchain is moving value from one token account to another token account.And we've put some specifications around that to put in like transaction identifiers and things like that. The real innovation is really going to come thinking about what are the new features that can be built on top of this. Now some of this will look like traditional commerce things like offers and loyalty, but there's a whole new set of commerce related features and consumer value props that have yet to be discovered. And I think that's what's really interesting is that there are going to be new businesses built on top of these protocols that will leverage the power of the blockchain. Because this technology opens up, again a peer-to-peer connection between a merchant and a consumer, eliminates the need for intermediaries, and now it gives power back to the merchants. So both the customer relationship, the data, and power in terms of controlling costs.Austin: (18:00)Sort of to push on that little, payments has been the killer feature of blockchain since blockchain became a thing, but there's been no real successful blockchain payment systems that have really emerged. I think the closest is there are some exchanges where you can get a debit card that allows you to spend out of your exchange account, but that's still a custodial relationship with the exchanges holding your tokens. The places where USDC and other stablecoins have been really successful is not on the payments level as much as so far has been on that sort of collateralization level or within the DeFi space. So Sheraz what about both Solana pay or Solana is actually making this a useful place for payments to actually go mainstream?Sheraz: (18:48)So yeah, absolutely crypto payments have been tried before. I mean, it's been talked about ever since maybe the pizza example. The problem is the traditional approach to crypto payments have been settled with several problems. So the first of all is that merchants don't want to settle in volatile currencies, right? With some edge cases aside, most merchants say, "I want to settle in US dollars or something that is the equivalent of a US dollar." Second is that the blockchains in the past have taken minutes or longer to settle, and that just doesn't work when you're trying to complete a transaction right? On an e-commerce site every second, that delay is more card abandonment, so waiting minutes for a transaction to settle just doesn't work. And then blockchains, transaction fees that exceed the actual cost of the item that you're buying just doesn't work.So to alleviate all this intermediaries came in and said, "Okay, great, look, I'll remove some of this friction for you. I'll exchange the Bitcoin and settle with you in US dollars. Oh, and by the way, I'll take on some of the risk of settlement taking 10 minutes. I'll give you an instant authorization and I'll just settle with you 24 hours later, and I'll eliminate some of the fluctuations in network fees. And for all that trouble, I'll charge you 100 basis points." And then it starts to feel and look a lot like traditional payment systems where you've got an intermediary, there's a lot of friction and a lot of cost and an intermediary is saying like, "I'll simplify all that for you, and I'll charge you a hundred basis points. And by the way, I'm the intermediary between you and your end customer."And that's really, well from what I've seen, what the attempt at crypto payments have done. What's different now is a couple of things. So one is rise of stablecoins and specifically USDC as a US dollar backed stablecoin. And then the Solana blockchain technology that has the speed throughput and low cost that eliminates a lot of that friction. Right now you have instant settlement, you have costs measured infractions of a penny, and you have throughput. You're not dealing with congested blockchain networks.And then the other thing is we now have a growing interest in crypto, there's tens of millions of wallets out there. People are more and more kind of normies as we call them, I guess, are dabbling into crypto. And I think you're going to see two kind of mental models, right? One is I buy crypto for speculation and investments, but I think more and more people are going to realize like, "Oh, I can use this for transactions. There are transactional currencies that I can use that provide me utility." So I think there's the combination of all of these factors coming into place with these new technologies are kind of going to give crypto payments a new shot in the arm.Jeremy: (21:36)Yeah. And I would just add to that just at a high level, I think one thing to note is stablecoins and public blockchains have achieved an astounding amount as payment system. I mean, these are decentralized infrastructure, running globally, supporting literally trillions of dollars of transaction throughput, and supporting pretty material volumes that have grown, and including in a wide variety of payment use cases. And we see that all the time, the number of businesses that are just signing up for Circle accounts, because they want to use USDC as just a payment medium outside of the markets themselves. And so it's a pretty amazing achievement, and that's happened in a very short period of time. I think there's many, many thousands of products and services that have integrated USDC.It took like 50 years to get to like 10,000 issuers, which are people who have integrated the visa credentialing. And so the adoption of these standards is happening at a really fast rate, which ties into the other piece, which is there have been a number of things that have been really necessary. I think one has been regulatory clarity, people being comfortable that this form of dollar is as good as an ACH dollar or a credit card dollar in terms of its usefulness and its legal clarity. Businesses knowing that these are legitimate financial infrastructure that they can rely upon and build upon. The other's been, as we've talked about here already is just the reality of the economics, the unit cost of transaction, the speed of a transaction, and through platforms like Solana, we're seeing that be solved for.And so I think what we're seeing is many more businesses, large merchants, traditional digital wallet companies who have large installed bases of consumers who want to wire up these protocols. And I think it's not just that they want to wire them up because this is a way to pay businesses. They want to wire them up, because these are interoperability standards that make it possible for digital wallets everywhere to kind of share value with each other, which is kind of moving outside of walled gardens and into the open internet of value. And so we're seeing all those kind of combined with each other and those are all mutually reinforcing factors that will then I think have more and more businesses saying, "Why don't I just add this as a payment method?"Sheraz: (24:00)As Jeremy said, I think in payments more broadly, tremendous traction and use cases and international remittances B2B. My view is a little thinking more about specifically about like retail, consumer emergent payments. And I think there's this open question that I keep hearing is like, "Well, we can't use USDC to buy milk." Well, we ran a physical point of sale transaction using so Solana pay and purchased a gallon of milk. So we're happy to share the video of that, but wanted to demonstrate how simple it is to use this currency and set up a small mom and pop with our in-store web app.Jeremy: (24:40)I mean, it reminds me of when the web was taking off and it was like, "Well, you can't use the internet to do this, this and this." And people are just wiring this stuff up and it's going to become something that's just so extraordinarily common and every business will be... they'd be idiots not to take digital currency payments as an alternative to the things that they do now, just like they would've been crazy not to set up email accounts or let customers contact them through the web, or through an online forum or through a Facebook page or whatever. It's just, these are just going to be, you have to do this if you just want to be a native internet business.Austin: (25:15)Look, the Internet's great, but all I can buy on amazon.com is books, and I can do that at my local bookstore.Jeremy: (25:20)Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.Sheraz: (25:22)That's right.Austin: (25:23)So Sheraz, when you're talking about this tool kit for Solana pay, what is actually live now, if someone is interested in actually setting this up for their business and enabling people to buy a gallon of milk with USDC, what's that toolkit look like, and how could they get started?Sheraz: (25:39)Sure. Yeah. We have a physical point of sale client, which is a simple web app. It's a very dead simple onboarding experience as well. We have an e-commerce SDK as well, so if you have your own website, the tooling is there to support both QR code payments and browser plugin. And we have a great set of partners that are working with us to both distribute these tools and help us build the future of this protocol and specification.We have integrations with a set of wallets, FTX, Phantom, and Slope and others on the way. You know, part of the goal of this is that this is the first at bat at the first inning. We've built some of these tools to provide some reference implementations and tooling for people to start building, but there's a whole roadmap of additional things that we want the community to build with us.Jeremy: (26:53)Yeah. And we're super excited at Circle to support this. And we see getting these kinds of standards adopted in more and more wallets, it's great to see. And I think we're hoping that standards and efforts like this can get adopted in many, many other kind of crypto native wallets and other digital wallets that are kind of coming online to support USDC payments.Austin: (27:15)So, Jeremy, with this sort of front end component where you can now receive payments and USDC via Solana pay there's a whole series of other tools you're talking about, whether it's deposit into accounts for merchants. How soon of a future do you think it's going to be possible for someone to run a business, and make payroll and accept payments without actually having a bank account?Jeremy: (27:39)I think we're getting really, really close to that. I think with a Circle account, we provide businesses with the ability to open an account, it's got multi-user support, and administration so you can have multiple employees or people in your finance department using it. It provides on chain payments across multiple blockchains, it provides legacy bank payments, so if you need to get money out into legacy bank accounts, you can do that. We have a pretty exciting roadmap for new things that we're going to build there, so that kind of interoperability with legacy payouts is important as well. And then you have the ability to take your working capital and put it into yield. And so as you collect payments and you have working capital, you can deploy that and generate high interest rates on your USDC.And so those are things that are there today, and there's obviously a lot more that can be built out there. We have a pretty exciting roadmap for things that we're building. We want really any crypto native business clearly to sort of make this their global financial account for their startup or their growth company, but more and more traditional companies as well, who are getting into this who want to use this as payments infrastructure, but then will tie it into some of their working capital management and treasury management.And then underneath that is like any developer that really has something they want to do custom, everything is just a platform. Everything's a set of APIs that you can build on. Developers can automate all the different rails. They can automate how they store and move funds. They can kind of control all of that in a very, very fine grain way. And so while there is like that self-service experience, but a lot of startups want to kind of do this unique to their business so they can automate more and more of it. So we think this year is going to be a year where these types of hybrid digital currency bank like products are really starting to take more and more hold.Austin: (29:33)Yeah. So, sort of along those similar lines, the existing payments rails and industry is one where a lot of it still runs on data collection and data marketing as a way to help subsidize the cost of running a lot of those rails, right? Whether it's American Express offers or whether it's something like a company that actually is tracking purchases that are made in-store and using that to do marketing through direct mail or other means. How does data privacy play in both with Solana pay and Circle, and how are those things part of your decision making framework?Sheraz: (30:08)I think one of the most important aspects of the whole notion of the peer-to-peer transaction and removal of intermediaries is that now when you're accepting as a merchant, accepting a payment through this per protocol you're not necessarily going through Google or Apple or MasterCard or Bank of America or some other intermediary, right? You have a direct connection with that consumer, and because of that you're not potentially losing data. You don't have third parties accumulating all of this data. And the beauty of this protocol is that it's open, so any merchant could take this. We're not pushing an end solution down anybody's throat, this is an open decentralized protocol. Any merchant could take this and build the equivalent of the Target Red Card system, which is a very popular solution that Target built or the Starbucks closed loop payment system.So I think the most important thing is that if merchants have control over commerce and the protocol is open and they can kind of craft on top of it, it gives them much more control over their data. We also have under development APIs as part of our core token program that can provide additional layers of data privacy. So we have a confidential token API that's under development. And there's a lot of technological solutions that can be built in to give either the consumer or the merchant more privacy, or whatever level of privacy they're interested in, but the key is they have control, they're building it in the way that suits their business needs.Jeremy: (31:41)One of the principal benefits of digital currency and stablecoins and public blockchains is the higher degrees of privacy and security that they afford. And I think that's something that people value and it's inherent in the architecture of these cryptographic forms of money and that's really key. And so we merely provide ways to interact with that infrastructure, and so we don't really stand in any specific data around users in that way. And even new technologies that we're working on in digital identity are designed to use cryptographic proof of identity, not pass around a whole bunch of PII. And that's going to be really critical as you start to marry digital identity with payments, with merchant behaviors. How can I, as a consumer present myself and prove to a business that I'm a legitimate individual that's been compliance checked, and make a payment to you without bleeding all my PII to you, and for me as a business to say, "No, I know this is not a drug trafficker or a terrorist or what have you that I'm transacting with," and have those settlements be fast and secure and final and private?So I think those are really, really important things. At the same time I think that the building blocks of crypto give us new tooling for incentivizing customer relationships in new ways. NFTs and commerce are really powerful, powerful phenomenon, which we're seeing early experiments in. But I think for businesses that want to entice customers to give them more information or have a more direct relationship and where that information exchange can be valued in some way, I think NFTs create a really interesting and powerful way to do that. And that's something that can be direct between the consumer and the business and not something that's, again, bleeding all that information and out to other networks that are repurposing that. And so I think there's a chance to rebuild customer loyalty, incentives, loyalty marketing, and secure privacy preserving payments in a way that's superior to what we have with existing electronic payment systems today.Sheraz: (33:58)Yeah. It's like being a founder or an entrepreneur in 2000, right? Think about all of the things that needed to be built then and were built. And we are just on the starting point of this. So I think it's an exciting time to be an innovator and a developer and a founder and an entrepreneur.Austin: (34:20)I love that vision for the future. So, one last question before I let both of you two go. Riptide, the Solana global hackathons going on right now, if there's one thing that you would love to see a team build coming out of this, what would it be? And Sheraz, we'll start with you.Sheraz: (34:38)Sure. I mean, there's a bunch. I think one thing that could be really interesting is what does buy now pay later on chain look like, right? So we have so many crypto users that are sitting on SOL, and other assets that they want to hold that right, they're hold all that. They don't want to use that for transactions. So how could we enable so someone to purchase from a merchant using Solana pay, over collateralize their SOL holding and just buy now pay never? Use your staking rewards to pay for the purchase, call it buy now pay never. That's one example, that one could be really interesting.Jeremy: (35:18)I think we're excited to be part of the hackathon and putting forward some of our APIs that can be worked in conjunction with Solana pay as well. And so, I mean, just generally, we'd be very interested in seeing people who are building wallet experiences that are geared towards payments, whether it's a P2P payment or a person-to-merchant payment in particular, but really building experiences that are optimized for that flow, as opposed to being a DeFi Degen, or trading. And so I think those kinds of products that combine person-to-business and person-to-person payment experiences that abstract away some of the complexity, and then do that around these standards, I think we're super, super excited about that. And we're obviously excited to see what comes out of the hackathon. We're investing in a lot of companies now, and so we'll be watching really closely, because this is a space that we'd love to be investing in as well.Austin: (36:20)Well, Jeremy Allaire CEO of Circle Sheraz Shere end of payments at Solana Labs, thanks for joining us today.Sheraz: (36:26)Thank you, Austin.Jeremy: (36:27)Thanks. 

Solana is affected by many cliches! Is it a VC coin? Is it too centralized? Is it an ETH-Killer? In today's episode, Juri Maibaum talks to Austin Federa. He is the Head Of Communication at Solana. In today's episode we discuss Solana cliches that are not true!  FOLLOW SOLANA WEBSITE: https://solana.com/de  TWITTER: https://twitter.com/solana  DEFITIMES