Podcasts about solana pay

Solfate Podcast - Interviews with blockchain founders/builders on Solana

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 17, 2025 22:52

Apple's advanced Siri update has been delayed and is now expected next year. Early Solana Seeker users are likely to receive airdrops from Solana-based projects, similar to how Saga users were rewarded, potentially including tokens from new projects, DeFi protocols, and GameFi/NFT initiatives.PRE-ORDER Solana Seeker NOW! ➜ https://solanamobile.com/refer/paulbarronGuest: Dioni Vasquez, Business & Innovation Core Team, Head of Business & InnovationSagaDAO Website ➜ https://sagamobiledao.com/00:00 Intro00:14 Sponsor: Tangem00:51 The Seeker01:42 What is the Saga DAO?03:19 Could airdrops surpass the Saga1?05:51 Merchant discounts for Seeker phones?06:20 Helium Mobile now has a store07:45 Lulo protected deposits08:40 Is real-time yields a killer feature?10:34 Apple delays AI upgrade11:06 Tars: Solana Saga AI better than Apple?14:30 Contactless payments: perfect timing for Seeker to dominate?15:00 Apple Pay vs Solana Pay?15:58 Could Seeker kill Coinbase?18:11 Shaga cloud gaming with Solana Seeker19:20 Seeker vs SuiPlay gaming handheld?22:10 Outro#Crypto #Solana #iphone ~Solana's Secret Weapon

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Solana Actions and blinks - Share blockchain anywhere with a link

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 31, 2024 55:53

Full notes for this episode at: https://solfate.com/podcast/61Follow @SolfatePod on Twitter for updates: https://twitter.com/SolfatePodPS: We are happy to announce the launch of our Solfate Drip channel where you can collect Solfate Podcast episodes as digital collectibles! Subscribe to our Drip channel today: drip.haus/solfate (we have some fun experiments planned)Notes from the showThe conversation revolves around the introduction of Actions and Blinks, a technology platform and protocol developed by Dialect and Solana Foundation. Actions and Blinks allow users to share Solana anywhere on the internet by unfurling URLs and providing interactive experiences. The idea originated from the concept of smart messages and transaction requests in Solana Pay. The launch of Actions and Blinks was a collaborative effort between Dialect, Solana Foundation, and various wallets.The discoverability and accessibility of Blinks are limited to specific browsers with wallet extensions installed. However, there are plans to make Blinks more widely available and user-friendly. The conversation explores the challenges and potential of Blinks and Solana Actions in revolutionizing the internet. The guests discuss the uphill battle of creating an open ecosystem in the current environment of mega companies and intentional blockades.Chris and Nick highlight the power of Blinks in bringing value transfer and interaction to users without leaving the app. The technical nature of Blinks and Solana Actions is explained, emphasizing the backend REST API of Actions and the frontend UI of Blinks. The guests also mention the future possibilities of mobile integration and the importance of developer feedback and collaboration.TakeawaysActions and Blinks allow users to share Solana anywhere on the internet by unfurling URLs and providing interactive experiences.The idea of Actions and Blinks originated from the concept of smart messages and transaction requests in Solana Pay.The launch of Actions and Blinks was a collaborative effort between Dialect, Solana Foundation, and various wallets.Currently, the discoverability and accessibility of Blinks are limited to specific browsers with wallet extensions installed, but there are plans to make Blinks more widely available and user-friendly. Creating an open ecosystem in the current internet environment is an uphill battle against mega companies and intentional blockades.Blinks bring value transfer and interaction to users without leaving the app, enhancing the user experience and stickiness.Blinks and Solana Actions have a backend REST API for transaction construction and delivery, and a frontend UI for rendering and user interaction.The technical nature of Blinks and Solana Actions allows for easy development and customization, making it accessible for developers.Mobile integration and native mobile implementations of Blinks are the next steps in the evolution of the technology.Find Chris and Dialect onlineFollow Chris on twitter - @aliquotchrisFollow Dialect on twitter - @SayDialectDialect's website - dialect.toFollow us aroundNicktwitter: @nickfrostygithub: github.com/nickfrostywebsite: https://nick.afJamestwitter: @jamesrp13github: github.com/jamesrp13Solfate Podcasttwitter: @SolfatePodmore podcast episodes: solfate.com/podcastcollect episodes on Drip: drip.haus/solfate

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50,000 U.S. Restaurants Launch With Crypto via Coinbase!! Devour $DPAY CEO Interview

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 14, 2024 23:44

Devour, the leading web3-powered food ordering platform, announced today that it's simplifying crypto payments for millions of users with the integration of Coinbase Commerce into its DevourGO checkout. This innovative move allows crypto enthusiasts to seamlessly pay for their favorite meals using their existing Coinbase.com or Wallet accounts, all within the DevourGO app.Guest: Shelly Rupel - CEO/Co-Founder DevourDownload Devour app ➜ https://bit.ly/JOINDEVOURGet $DPAY on Jupiter ➜ https://jup.ag/swap/SOL-DPAY_Gnca3UkjR4a1FFNZuGfEELmbaHkL6GteSC2swpdWRmf700:00 intro00:38 How Many Restaurants?01:04 Coinbase Commerce Payments02:25 Major Brands Are Next03:20 UberEats vs Devour04:39 NFT & $DPAY Extra Benefits06:07 Delivery Tracking Map07:11 OnChainSummer Airdrops09:28 Solana Saga Airdrops10:09 $DPAY on Base10:49 Saga dApp Coming?12:14 Solana Pay x Shopify13:15 Payment Processing Fees14:11 Dubai Foodverse Loyalty15:41 Competition Coming?16:27 Wow Bao x Roblox19:10 AR & AI Cooking Assistants 20:02 VR Cooking Games Exploding21:22 Devour Exploring AR/VR?22:36 outro#Crypto #bitcoin #ethereum~50,000 U.S. Restaurants Launch With Crypto via Coinbase!!

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Stripe Crypto Payments Update! | Solana & Ethereum vs Bitcoin Adoption

Web3 Academy: Exploring Utility In NFTs, DAOs, Crypto & The Metaverse

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 13, 2023 15:46

Customers of MetaMask, the most popular decentralized cryptocurrency wallet for Ethereum-like blockchains, can now top up their accounts with Stripe. This is yet another integration that simplifies purchasing cryptocurrencies with fiat funds. However, Solana Pay native wallets like Phantom are already lightyears ahead. Can Bitcoin's payments ecosystem catch up?~This episode is sponsored by Tangem~Tangem ➜ https://bit.ly/TangemPBN Use Code: "PBN" for Additional Discounts!

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Ben Mills

DeCent People

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 5, 2023 62:54

Ben is the co-founder and CEO of Meso, a platform that makes bank-wallet transfers easy across crypto apps. He's spent over ten years building payments products as part of the early team at Braintree, leading product at Venmo, and working on Solana Pay for Solana Labs.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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94 - Solana's Shopify Play, Bitcoin's Next Evolution & Worldcoin's Wobble: The Crypto Rundown

Crypto Curious

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 30, 2023 23:43

Dive into this week's episode of Crypto Curious, where we unpack the significant Shopify and Solana Pay integration, potentially reshaping e-commerce with USDC payments. We then delve into the evolving world of Bitcoin, exploring the differences between Ordinals and Recursive Inscriptions and their potential game-changing implications for Bitcoin's utility. But it's not all highs - we also spotlight the dramatic downturn of Worldcoin, a project shrouded in controversy and faced with substantial regulatory challenges. Join Tracey, Blake, and Craig for a crypto discussion you won't want to miss.To support Crypto Curious please subscribe to our podcast on your preferred platform, leave a review or share this episode with a friend or family member.If you're looking to get started investing in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Gold & Silver, you can download the Bamboo app. Use the code CURIOUS for $10 in ETH when you sign up.Follow the Crypto Curious Instagram hereJoin the Facebook Group hereCheckout the job opening mentioned here.*****In the spirit of reconciliation, Equity Mates Media and the hosts of Crypto Curious acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respects to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today. *****Crypto Curious is a product of Equity Mates Media. This podcast is intended for education and entertainment purposes. Any advice is general advice only, and has not taken into account your personal financial circumstances, needs or objectives. Before acting on general advice, you should consider if it is relevant to your needs and read the relevant Product Disclosure Statement. And if you are unsure, please speak to a financial professional. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Shopify Integrates Solana Pay; Ethereum's Declining ETH Supply; Mastercard Cuts Ties With Binance

Collective Shift

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 29, 2023 28:22

The team breaks down the biggest news items of the week, including Solana Pay and Shopify teaming up. They also cover Centralised Exchanges Binance and FTX, with some troubling news.Key Takeaways Solana Pay integrated its plug-in with Shopify, allowing millions of businesses on its platform to use it for payments. BullishThe supply of ETH fell for the first time over a 12-month period, a deflationary year. BullishBinance woes continue with MasterCard ending their partner card program with Binance. Refer to our BNB asset rating, BearishTornado cash founders have been charged with sanctions violations. Tornado cash is a privacy-preserving protocol. FTX news: FTX may work with Galaxy Digital ( Mike Novogratz) to sell, hedge or stake its 3B in crypto assets. This may spell trouble for the cryptocurrency they own and deduce to sell.

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Navegando: Más arrestos de Tornado Cash | ¿No más regalías para creadores de NFTs? | Nuevos desarrollos en Solana

Espacio Cripto

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2023 74:06

Ayúdanos a seguir construyendo mejores productos para ti, déjanos tu feedback aquí: https://forms.gle/882igNTb6ugq13UNA Escucha el episodio 125 donde platicamos con CryptoReuMd: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7DYdTom1ciurMeCx0RyESQ?si=46ef6ae426f54c2c https://podcasts.apple.com/mx/podcast/espacio-cripto/id1546684617?i=1000622483434 Bienvenidxs a Navegando el Espacio Cripto; en esta edición exploramos el dictamen de una corte holandesa respecto a las sanciones de Tornado Cash, y las consecuencias que esto provocó para sus fundadores, así como los marketplaces que han decidido ya no honrar las regalías para los creadores de NFTs, los nuevos desarrollos en el ecosistema de Solana y muchas otras noticias más. ¡Acompáñanos! 00:00 Intro. 00:30 Ganadores de la Beca de Permissionless 05:18 Precios. 12:31 A un año de las sanciones de Tornado Cash: más arrestos y juicios determinantes. https://blockworks.co/news/roman-semenov-tornado-cash-ofac-list 28:30 Regalías para los creadores: el debate continúa. https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/18/23837677/bayc-opensea-drops-support-creator-royalty-fees 37:39 Rarible dejará de agregar marketplaces que no cumplan con las regalías de los creadores. https://www.theblock.co/post/246917/rarible-opensea-looksrare-x2y2 38:30 La compañía de videojuegos móviles Zynga se adentra en la web3 https://www.theblock.co/post/244783/grand-theft-auto-dev-take-twos-first-crypto-game-launching-on-ethereum 46:30 Nuevos desarrollos en Solana: Pagos con Solana Pay en Shopify https://blockworks.co/news/shopify-usdc-payments-solana-pay 49:49 Inicia Sesión con Solana https://blockworks.co/news/phantom-sign-in-solana-wallet 51:12 Euro stablecoins en Solana https://www.euroe.com/blog/solana 55:12 Coinbase obtiene un stake en Circle https://blockworks.co/news/coinbase-equity-stake-circle 01:01:38 Offchain labs permite lanzar redes sobre Abritrum con muy bajo costo https://blockworks.co/news/offchain-arbitrum-developers 01:09:15 Acreedores de Celsius votarán para su plan de escape https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/08/18/celsius-creditors-to-vote-on-bankruptcy-escape-plan-after-judicial-approval/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Navegando: Más arrestos de Tornado Cash | ¿No más regalías para creadores de NFTs? | Nuevos desarrollos en Solana

Espacio Cripto

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2023 76:06

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ROLLUP: Farcaster on OP | Base & Friend.Tech | Coinbase x USDC | Solana Pay on Shopify | OpenSea & NFT Fails | #233

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2023 66:11

Farcaster on Optimism & Future of Web3 Social, Base x Friend.tech updates, Coinbase x Circle, Solana Pay integrates with Shopify, Helium mobile $5 plan, Opensea 0 royalties + 0.5% platform fee cause uproar, NFT Sales are SuperRare, DeGods performance after s3, Mahomes x Azuki & more!

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Weekly Crypto Review 08.25.23

WEB3 UNPACKED

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2023 3:03

Welcome back everyone, it's Friday August twenty fifth, twenty three, and this is your weekly Crypto review. Here are some highlights to bring you up to speed…The Biden administration unveils new crypto tax reporting rules, stating Cryptocurrency brokers, including exchanges and payment processors, would have to report new information on users' sales and exchanges of digital assets to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) under a proposed U.S. Treasury Department rule published on Friday. The rule is part of a broader push by Congress and regulatory authorities to crack down on crypto users who may be failing to pay their taxes. For more on Crypto taxation and accounting, be sure to check out part one of our Web3 Unpacked accounting episodes.Coinbase Global, the company behind the largest crypto exchange in the U.S., announced Monday that it acquired an equity stake in Circle Internet Financial, the issuer of USDC, the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization.Bitcoin's mining difficulty level reached an all-time high of 55.62 trillion hashes this week. According to Bitfinix analysts, the increase in mining difficulty suggests "miners believe the current BTC level is fairly valued, or maybe a little under priced of its true value."The controversial crypto project co-created by Sam Altman saw its WLD token drop 9.1% over the past 24 hours and 43.6% over the past 30 days. Despite launching only recently, Worldcoin finds itself facing regulatory headwinds due to concerns over data privacy. The backlash has led to the exclusion of U.S. residents from purchasing or trading the token, exacerbating selling pressure.XRP whale moves 29 million tokens to Bitstamp amid price slide.and finally… Shopify, the cornerstone of global e-commerce facilitating transactions worth a staggering $444 billion worldwide, has opened its doors to Solana Pay. This collaboration enables millions of businesses operating on the Shopify platform to offer their customers Solana Pay as a secure payment option. This is a very good thing, GO Shopify and Solana!Thank you for tuning in, for more insights into the world of Web3, and how to navigate the rapidly changing crypto and blockchain landscape, visit MVMT dot Media and look for Web3 Unpacked podcasts on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.The information provided in this broadcast represents the sole opinions of MVMT and should not be construed as financial advice. Any actions taken based on this information are at the sole discretion and risk of the individual, and MVMT disclaims any responsibility for the consequences thereof. It is strongly advised that individuals seek qualified professional financial advice before making any financial decisions.#cryptonews #weeklycryptoreview #solana #coinbase #xrp #worldcoin #cryptotax #shopify

Tornado Cash Mitgründer verhaftet! Nvidia AI Resultate beflügeln Kryptos! Shopify lanciert USDC Zahlungen via Solana Pay, China lanciert eigene Blockchain und NFT Marktplatz Rarible schliesst OpenSea und Blur aus wegen Royalties

Blue Alpine Cast - Kryptowährung, News und Analysen (Bitcoin, Ethereum und co)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 24, 2023 8:52

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Solana Weekly #39 - Recoverin

Solana Weekly

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 23, 2023 24:08

What's up everybody! This is Thomas Bahamas and you are here for another episode of Solana Weekly. Here to drop some alpha on what's going on and where we're going in this crazy space. It's been a trying week where it seems like there is just no bullish news. These are the best of times to buy, but the hardest of times to actually pull the trigger. Excited to dig into it and let's focking go. To the market:Sol Price: $21.43 with an overall decrease of 8% on the week. We don't like to see that, but we're in a recovery from dipping under $20 yesterday so I'm ecstatic about this move up haha. Whole market looked like it was tanking including Bitcoin and the doomers and bears were out in full force giving us their graphs of how low we go. Well I spent my time loading up on longs, so suck it bears. SolEth- .01278 with a small decrease of 1% and nothing meaningful to gain from this really. Everything tanked, Eth looked real bad. SolBtc - Also staying pretty flat. To the news: HNT on Drift. I got a Fock It Shirt, it's Mad, I'm wearing it now, LFG. Solana Pay on Shopify, I think this is huge and we should get a bounce for it.Sign in with Solana.Blaze airdrop has begun, and with it the bSOL token is getting something like 15% apr. Friend.Tech is taking over all of crypto and is bringing social fi back. With this we are seeing Solarplex launching on Solana and I gotta give a shout out to Solcial, kind of like a bitclout like product where people buy your token for a follow and tier 2access. These have huge potential and are fun. Solarplex is like all of Solana Twitter. NFT's still down while ducks stay up, 20 ducks for private Telegram and whales don't sell. SMB's sitting around 8 sol, think it's good value. My man Bully Esquire had a great tweet where he said with the adoption of Layer 2's on Eth why are other L1's even necessary. We need to be able to answer this question clearly and concisely, without the technical jargon and hopes and dreams of a bagholder attached to it .The answer, most aren't. What other L1's are necessary for is what can't be done on Eth L1 or L2's. The two most popular answers are DePin and Compression. DePin - Decentralized physical infrastructure is Helium, it's a mobile network incentivized through a blockchain that HAS to be as fast and cheap as Solana or it won't work. Compression - NFT's can be compressed so well on Solana that you can give an NFT to a brand new user for free. Drip.Haus does this. You don't have to pay to get the NFT. Also the core of the question is a bit flawed right. The goal for Ethereum with L2's is to scale a decentralized network which means increase both speed and decrease transaction costs for the masses. This goal is not there. This goal is what Solana is right now at this moment. So other L1's are necessary because they are brining about the new paradigm where cryptocurrencies can scale and be used for non crypto native users. Eth will never have that. Other than that I saw some bearish posts on DeFi and how it hasn't actually been that successful. We saw Balancer get compromised and the only profitable Defi players are the hackers at this point. So I'm cautiously optimistic about Sol Defi. We saw Cypher get hacked and I just don't want to deal with all the extra risk at this point. So I pulled my Margin lends. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thomasbahamas.substack.com

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1213. FedNow + Hedera vs Solana Payments

Solfate Podcast - Interviews with blockchain founders/builders on Solana

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2023 25:40

Hedera's crypto token rallied several times over the past month largely fueled by the Federal Reserve's decision to add Dropp, a Hedera-based micropayments platform, to its instant payments service FedNow. Dropp is a pay-by-bank alternative to credit card payments allowing merchants to handle small-value purchases with no big transaction fees. On this episode we're comparing FedNow's crypto payments vs fully web3 enabled payments using Solana Pay.

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Bitssa: Crypto Payments in Emerging Markets

The Next Billion

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 18, 2023 40:35

How can Crypto and Stablecoins coins bring a transformative change in the payments system? In this episode of The Next Billion podcast, George Harrap is joined by Kunbi Ogunleye, CEO of Swap Bitssa, a swapping platform that exchanges stablecoins for fiat money. George and Kunbi begin their conversation by acknowledging that cash remains a dominant form of payment despite significant progress in digital payment methods. They discuss how crypto was initially perceived as a neutral payment solution but has faced challenges in becoming a global payment platform. They then delve into the challenges and opportunities of using crypto for payments in emerging markets, where demand for foreign goods and receptivity to crypto payments are higher. Kunbi also gives us insights into how stablecoins are utilized for international trade, providing fast and efficient transactions without traditional trade finance requirements. They end their conversation with Kunbi predicting stablecoin adoption in Egypt and South Africa to boost African e-commerce and hospitality, citing the potential for ancillary services and credibility from strong acceptance in these countries. Listen to George and Kunbi's raw and insightful perspectives here, and on Spotify, at https:////open.spotify.com/show/2ELv0Ct Swap Bitssa Website : https://swap.bitssa.com/ Follow Swap Bitssa on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/SwapBitssa 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 Monkey Business, Solana Pay, and marginfi lending

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2023 32:30

Follow the @SolfatePod show on Twitter for updates. Thanks for listening frens :)Notes from the showHadeSwap acquired Solana Monkey Business. marginfi started collecting funds for their new on chain lending protocol, and a SolDev redesign? Crazy week.James and Nick discuss the upcoming SolDev redesign that Nick will be coding the frontend for. James gives his thoughts on the Solana Course he wrote, including Solana Pay and how powerful it is! James updates Nick on how Solana Pay works and it blows his mind!!!!Nick also just had his last day at his previous job, and is gearing up for his next role….what could it be?If anyone is interested in getting early access to the new marginfi lending protocol, you can message Mac Brennan on twitter for details.Links from the showHadeSwap acquired Solana Monkey BusinessTwo SMB sold for high prices on FFF swap: #3875 SOLD FOR 3450 $SOL#1088 SOLD FOR 7500 $SOLThe best Solana Development course around (hosted on SolDev)New Solana API docs page! Made by Nick!SolDev's Solana pay lessonCollector.sh (from Nate) - an NFT gallery appMargin fi starting bootstrapping their new lending poolSolend hack Nick was trying to articulateSolana news from the weekMetaPlex hosted a twitter spaces talking programmable nfts and royalty enforcement, with support from top projects throughout the ecosystemLedger now supports versioned transactionsHelium announced the date they plan to migrate to Solana (March 27 2023)Follow us aroundNickfollow on twitter: @nickfrostyfollow on github: github.com/nickfrostywebsite: https://nick.afJamesfollow on twitter: @jamesrp13follow on github: github.com/jamesrp13

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Chase Barker - Head of Developer Ecosystem at Solana Foundation, EP 20

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2023 35:12

With over 80% developer growth the past year, the Solana ecosystem has never been stronger. Chase Barker, Head of Developer Ecosystem at The Solana Foundation joins Brian Friel to talk about the current initiatives happening on Solana that excite him the most, along with the biggest opportunities he sees for Developers on Solana in episode 20 of The Zeitgeist. Show Notes:00:05 - Intro 01:56 - Background / Start with Solana 11:49 - Highlights from last year with the developer ecosystem16:13 - Latest exciting initiatives in Solana 20:56 - Opportunities for devs in Solana 25:03 - Opportunities to build a project on Solana27:36 - Solana plays Pokemon" game 30:43 - Where will Solana be in 5 years 32:55 - A builder he admires Full Transcript:Brian Friel (00:00):Hey, everyone and welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom and I'm super excited to introduce none other than the man, the myth, the legend, Chase Barker of Solana Foundation. Chase, welcome to the show.Chase barker (00:24):Hey man, thanks for having me.Brian Friel (00:26):This has been a long time coming. For those who don't know, Chase is the head of developer ecosystem at Solana Foundation. He's one of the earliest guys you could have seen if you were a developer coming into Solana. And it's special for me personally because Chase was the first person I reached out to on Solana. We actually did an episode on your old podcast, Chewing Glass at one point. It's great to be on the other side of the mic though, but officially welcome to the show, Chase.Chase barker (00:49):Thanks man. Yeah, it was super cool and it's also wild for me to be on this other side because we met in some interesting circumstances, you trying to dive into the whole ecosystem and I had no idea what I was doing and I needed help. And you wrote some really cool shit for me for the Solana Cookbook and here you are, leading Phantom. So anyways, I won't dive into that too much. Maybe we'll talk about it later, but it's super cool to be here, so thanks for having me.Brian Friel (01:15):Yeah, thanks for coming on. No, I couldn't agree more. Probably a good place to start, is maybe rewinding time a little bit, going back to some of those early days. Solana's pretty unique from a developer perspective. There was always, having worked in the industry pre-2018, it was always... If you're doing something development wise, solidity is the only game in town you got to be working in EVM. And Solana basically struck it out on its own and completely changed that narrative and you were around to see pretty much that whole evolution. Can you talk a little bit about your journey to finding Solana? Who are you, what were you doing, and what have you seen evolve in Solana since you've been there?Chase barker (01:56):Yeah, for sure. So I've told this story a lot and I'm going to keep this one shorter than I normally do, but I was an engineer for 12 years and then started trading crypto in 2017, made a bunch of money, lost it all in 2018, like most people. And then along that journey I found this project, Kin, who now exists on Solana, but they had their own fork of Stellar and I was into crypto and the bear market in 2018 and they had this hackathon thing and I built a tip bot with a group of other people to be able to tip on Reddit, discord, Twitter and Telegram. And I was like, okay, this is really cool. I really sort of hate my web2 job right now. I'm doing this government contracting work working on legacy Spring VC systems. It was miserable and I've talked about this a lot before and I just got everybody's email addresses and started saying, give me a job.(02:47):And they told me that all the jobs were based in Tel Aviv, but they have this developer relations role for Kin. And I was like, okay, that sounds great. What the hell is that? I had no idea what developer relations was at the time. So did a little bit of research, ended up taking the role and really just started working. They had an SDK, but documentation tried to grow a community. It's a little bit different. I'll get into this from Solana because Kin was like, this is the ICO days. Nobody really gave a shit about use cases. It was just like how am I going to be the most degenerate thing here. It was way ahead of its time, but eventually flash forward after a couple years of really loving what I was doing, traveling around the world, speaking at conferences, and helping people learn how to build in crypto.(03:31):And I heard, and it's March or April 2020 way early, and I'm talking, nobody that I knew, knew about Solana. So they were like, we're going to migrate to Solana this new blockchain. Nobody knows about it, but it's going to be super fast. Our tech team says it's great. So I followed along. Around December, I was involved in the migration process and I had spoken with Dan Albert, who's now the head of the Solana Foundation, and Raj and I engaged with a bunch of these guys but didn't really know them, but I was part of that migration. And then a little bit later into 2021, early 2021, people don't know this, but actually I was leaving Kin and I was looking for another role and I got hired by Circle for one week as a developer advocate. And then I saw Solana had a developer relations role, applied.(04:21):So I actually had an awkward situation where I had to tell Circle that “I know I just started, but I'm going to go work at Solana.” But the reason I worked at Solana is because I just DMed the shit out of Raj and Dan until they finally submitted into saying, okay, finally we're we're going to let you take this role. And at that time all that existed was the core documentation and the PaulX Escrow tutorial, aka the Solana Bible. And that was the start. May 5th, the day after my birthday of 2021, I joined Solana as the first sort of developer advocate and that's sort of the entry point.Brian Friel (05:01):Wow. So yeah, it's not really that long in calendar days. Chase barker (05:07):It's been 20 years. It's been 20 years.Brian Friel (05:09):Yeah, exactly. 20 years in crypto years for sure. A lot has changed since then. Maybe the only thing that hasn't changed is the strategy of just spam DMing somebody to try to get a job. I definitely tried to employ that with you back in the day. I know a few other people who have successfully deployed that strategy as well. But yeah, it's been crazy. There's a lot to talk about here. Maybe we just focus on the last year in particular because you mentioned 2021, it's a pretty crazy year. There was just the public tutorial on the docs and then all these people come in, you get anchor that gets built around that time. Solana takes off, a bunch of independent teams.Chase barker (05:49):Actually, let's go a little bit before that because I think this is just a really interesting thing and I like telling this part because when I started at Kin I was begging people to build on it because nobody was really building on blockchain except Ethereum at the time. And then I started with Solana and I had the exact opposite problem. You had a ton of people that were like, hell yeah, this sounds really awesome, but how the hell do you build on this thing? What the hell is rust? There's no documentation. You go into the Discord and the cord devs are just “go read the tests, that teaches you how to build on Solana.” And that's literally the world that we lived in at the time. And then started putting together this sort of part-time dev advocate team, if you want to call it that. I just skimmed Discord and looked for people who were helping others and be like, hey, come over here into this private discord with me.(06:39):And I'm like, help me scale myself. Because I was starting to write some example code and there was none of that. And then luckily I met Donnie and then Jacob and a couple other guys that are now full-time at Solana Foundation and they were helping in dev support. Jacob was working on the Java STK with Skynet Cap, if any of you guys know him. He was really one of the early OGs there. And then this whole group formed and they were writing content and then you reached out and contributed to the Solana cookbook and this whole thing just came out of nowhere. And I was literally sinking. The demand for Solana was so high because the tech was so new and the sort of hardcore engineers just really wanted to build, and the Dafi's and the Max's and the Armani's just figured the shit out.(07:28):But everybody else was like, let me, let me. And I could not do that on my own. I didn't even have the brain big enough to supply the knowledge to all these people. And then long story short, or maybe long story long is that you and I started talking and you wanted to be part of it and you wrote some really important stuff for the Solana Cookbook, I think retries, possibly PDAs and some of these other things. And it's like, thank you. And I do remember you being like, hey, can I work at Solana? And I didn't have any approval of power at the time and you left me and probably a month later I got approval to hire somebody else, but by that time you were at Phantom, but it seems like it worked out. So it is what it is.Brian Friel (08:12):I think you're right about the demands being so strong for people to figure it out that you just saw people coming together. A lot of times, you look at people who are evangelizing new tech and they're like, hey, here's this awesome thing. Try to explain it. And the first reaction of everyone is like, okay, cool, but then they just move on. And I feel like Solana was one of the few cases where that was the opposite, where everybody was like, this is incredible. How do I use this thing? How do I build this thing? And it was just this hive mind of people coming out of the woodwork to try to make it happen.Chase barker (08:43):Even me leading into Solana, and I say this a lot too because it's true in my mind, and I was like, listen to Anatoli and all this stuff, and I'm one of two things. This is the giant scam, or this is actually really fucking awesome. And luckily my instincts were right on that one and everything sort of worked out. And when I met you and then we started doing this part-time DevRel team that you were a part of for a while, first Solana Foundation.(09:09):And the next thing, my Twitter account became this thing where people would create content and I would share it and then somebody else would be like, oh, I want my shit shared. And then they would make content and I would share it. And this was this huge flywheel and that's really what turned into my account was this person who, you do cool shit, I'm going to share it. And then I became this other guy where I'm also, I do stupid shit and then I also share good shit. So it's this perfect mix of this idiot and then this guy who knows where the good stuff is.Brian Friel (09:46):You either die a developer or you live long enough to be a Twitter celebrity, I guess in your case?Chase barker (09:52):Yeah, I mean I don't necessarily love the celebrity side, but I do love getting DMs from people to say, Hey, all the things that you shared, and you probably hear some of the same like, hey, I got a job here because of this tweet that you made or this thread because I started making threads, who's looking for a job or who's whatever. And in the early days that's all we had, was Twitter. There was no other way to connect. I made a Twitter developer list and I added 300 people to it so that not everybody had to come into Solana Twitter and be like, follow each individual person and these were such manual, weird, really hard... I had no idea what I was doing. Luckily people showed up and were there and then just ran with it. I mean, looking back, dude, it's just awesome to look and see what's happened since then.Brian Friel (10:40):Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. Lots of connections made in those early days, like you said too, where people get jobs, all this kind of stuff happens and it's crazy how little interactions like that go really far.Chase barker (10:49):Yeah, exactly.Brian Friel (10:50):So I guess taking it now to this past year, so we're recording this January 2023. The past year in particular, if you were just an outside observer looking at crypto, you're like, wow, prices are way down, everything's dead. And there's a report that comes out just the other day, Electric Capitalist Developer Report, which says Solana developers grew over 80% in the year. You and I... I had an intuition for this, I'm sure you did too. It was just developer activity.Chase barker (11:20):I didn't have intuition. I actually knew.Brian Friel (11:23):Yeah, you knew. But other people I'm sure had intuition if you're around the developer ecosystem, it's not stopping. Developer activities keeps picking up, summarize a little bit in your words over the last year, what has stood up to you? What are some of the highlights? You mentioned you started this thing and it's just you and DMing people on Twitter and getting this thing going. Now it's a serious operation of a developer ecosystem here going. What are some of the things you're most proud of that stood out to you?Chase barker (11:50):Yeah, so I think the start of the year in January of 2022, we're all sitting there, and the crypto markets nuke, and the blockchain literally is devastated. And that was any sort of pre any sort of ideas about what is wrong, what is it? Basically it was all these sort of liquidators, spamming to try to liquidate people and that just turned into this thing. And I think by that point in time though, we had some really high conviction developers that were already super invested themselves in Solana. So they stuck around and I think that's very unique for that to happen. Everybody's like, when are you going to fix this? But it literally took two to three months before they even identified what those solutions might be and those solutions to many of you, the devs out there were quick and fee-markets and some of these other things that improved.(12:45):But even though these solutions were being built, that shit takes time. So during that same time, Solana NFTs were going through the roof and these bots were spamming the network. Luckily we're flash forward briefly to right now all of those things have been implemented, but the work is never complete. But we've been pretty battle tested and recently, but I think to your original question, what I'm most proud of is being able to keep that morale up, being able to really build out this sticky community and I'm focused on devs, but it's not just the devs. Without that normal diehard community, without the Dev community, without the NFT community, we would've failed miserably like every other blockchain that tried to do what we did failed.(13:33):But I think a lot of this really comes down to personal relationships and when you come into Solana and you get involved, people really cheer you on and there's that sort of camaraderie there that kept people here, even in the darkest of times. I'm just really happy. Like I said, I knew that those numbers were high and to be honest, a lot of the reason while I've been memeing about the 75 developer ridiculous reports that have been coming out, I was memeing it so hard in the last couple weeks because we crawled GitHub internally and we know where our dev numbers are and we always make sure that we know where those things are. So it was sort of funny to me to just keep memeing that and then knowing Electric Capital was going to put out a report that sort of reflected... at least they have some pretty strict rules around what they constitute a dev. Our numbers are slightly higher, but their rules are strict. As a full-time dev, you have to commit code X amount of days per month or whatever that is.(14:32):I'm sure they have that somewhere and the way that they do it, but yeah man, it takes a village to do this and there's not one person you can point to, but there's obviously some champions out there that really made people inspired to continue building. The proudest thing I can think of is all the shit we took this year and we're still here and now we just have been pretty much named and given the silver medal of the second strongest developer community in crypto and you got to give a shout-out to Eat the Kings, fully open source and putting up numbers for devs, so you got to give them credit.Brian Friel (15:06):Yeah, we mentioned a little bit early on about how it was a narrative violation for Solana to have a completely different programming paradigm to not be using Solidity to get into an account model lower level dealing with Rust.Chase barker (15:20):There was FUD that was like “Solana's using Rust? Good luck. You guys are basically screwed.” Nobody's ever going to build on Rust. So that was false.Brian Friel (15:29):Yeah, most loved GitHub developer language though I'm pretty sure that's another narrative violation for you there. So talking a little bit more about what you guys have been up to you, you mentioned you guys have been crawling the GitHubs and you've seen this dev activity, you now have a full-time team like you said that, that you're working with, but it's not just you guys at Solana Foundation, there's all these other ecosystem teams now. There's people like Super Team Dao who are doing their own thing, coordinating devs and building devs. I'd say there's stuff on the community side getting devs and raising awareness there. There's Lamport DAO, I might be giving you too many answers here, but the community side and the tech side, what are some of the initiatives that are happening right now in Solana that have you most excited?Chase barker (16:14):I think one of the most important things to note about Solana Foundation and Labs in general is the headcount stays low. This sounds weird to a lot of people, but our job is to make ourselves irrelevant in the next five to 10 years as an organization, the super team and the Lamort DAOs and Meta Camp and Singapore in these different groups, a lot of them will get grants from the foundation to get themselves up and running. But after that they basically become these sort of miniature Solana foundations where they start growing their community from the inside out and giving out grants and doing all these really cool things. But you think of Solana as this giant bubble and every time one of these new miniature groups spins out, the Solana Foundation bubble gets smaller, and then these other bubbles start getting more and plentiful to eventually you reach a point where Solana Foundation bubble was the size of the rest of these small groups.(17:08):This is the antithesis of Web 2.0, hiring as many people in as much headcount as you can and trying to own everything. I don't want to own everything. I want to find Mertz, I want to find Super Teams. I want to find Meta Camps and I don't want to just go find them and ask them. I want to find these guys that just put everything they have into Solana the blockchain and they're just so passionate about it, that it's like this is the team that we want to put our energy behind. In the beginning it really was a lot of us at Foundation and Labs doing a lot of the talking, but now you have these stronger voices and I'm not going to lie, it makes my life a lot easier to not have to be doing all that talking online anymore, but I still do it.(17:53):And I think the important point here is that if we're going to become a decentralized blockchain, we also want to become a decentralized organization itself and that means nobody has to get our permission. I think one of the greatest examples of no permission is Hacker House was kicked off, everybody's like, when my city and MTN DAO was like, fuck this, I'm just going to make my own thing. And they actually built the best thing that's really happened out of our community to date and they produced multiple, clockwork previously, Kronos, mtnPay, all these guys won hackathons.(18:33):Because T.J. Littlejohn literally came up with mtnPay at MTN DAO and a food line being like, Solana Pay just came out. Oh shit, maybe I should just build a payment thing with this new thing. And then he set up the system and people were paying with USD right there. So if that trajectory keeps happening through Solana, and I know other blockchains are trying to emulate what we do, but there's no way to emulate this unless you actually do this organically and it's happening. And anytime I just find somebody like a TJ or a MERT or whoever or a Brian or whatever, I'm going to put all my time and energy behind them and that's literally my philosophy and the foundation's philosophy in general, I think.Brian Friel (19:15):Yeah, for sure. No, I've seen that too. It feels like there's more... Solana is the only ecosystem I know outside of Ethereum really is there are these factions not the best word, but it's these unofficial groups of people that... Maybe it started as simple as we like to ski in February and we want to get together and hack. MTN DAO, but it's becoming an official collective now. People are identifying with it. And it has influence in the community. I mean I totally see what you're saying too about the Hacker House is I know we had our own last summer, we kind of piloted the Summer Camp Hackathon fan of Sponsor [inaudible 00:19:51]. But I just see that model continuing to go and more and more teams coalescing around certain regions and sponsoring their own thing.Chase barker (19:57):And for everybody listening here, don't ask for permission, don't ask when, just literally do it. And if you do it and you do it well, the attention will get drawn onto you and then I'll come find you and I'll knock on your door and ask you how I can help. So that's really the sort of mentality that I personally have.Brian Friel (20:15):Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. That was my approach trying to work in this space, just do it and then ask for help or permission. Someone will find you. That's so much better than trying to ask somebody for permission to do something. So I guess that's a good transition to, let's put ourselves in the shoes of a developer who's looking at Solana right now. There's a lot of devs out there that might see Solana and they still think, oh, Rust and scary. That's probably not true. We can talk about that. But there's also probably a lot of devs who maybe know a little bit about Solana, they're kind of like right on the cusp, because they want to jump in. What do you want to say to these devs? What are some of the biggest opportunities that these devs should be looking at right now in Solana?Chase barker (20:56):Yeah, I think there's a couple things here. I think it depends on your demographic and age range. I mostly meant age range. So if you're in college right now, look up solanau.org and it's @SolanaUni on Twitter because Dana is our university relations person who is absolutely crushing it, sponsoring and participating in hackathons, doing workshops, just really bringing in my opinion, the next generation, the most risk averse group of people are students who are still funded by their parents that can make some sort of mistakes early on. So they're the next generation that's going to take this forward and luckily they have some really tech heavy guys out there that are just so dedicated to this, the Solana core engineers and the Jito team and all these different groups that are there to mentor them when they're ready to get in this. But I think SolanaU is probably a really high leverage thing.(21:54):We spend a lot of time working with Build Space who's built Solana Build Space Core, which is an amazing program. Things are getting easier. We're still in that place where new things are coming around the corner and I get a lot of shit for this, especially from Rust maxi's, but there's Seahorse Lang where you can build smart contracts on Python right now, not fully ready for production. There's a version of this in typescript coming. We're doing whatever we can to make it easier because the Chewing Glass thing is true and it's mainly true not because of Rust, not because of Solana, it's because learning Rust and Solana and all those concepts at the same time, is literally painful as hell. But content and all these other things combined put together right now and all of the sort of tooling that different groups are building like indexers and all these things are making the lives easier because as adapt dev you want to deal with “get program accounts and all that stuff”, it's not...(22:56):We're getting to a better place and it's coming right now there's a couple places, I mean solana.com/developers we're curating our own list, but I cannot negate what ELO from SOL Dev has done at soldev.app and the whole entire thing that he's built out. So I'm super bullish on a lot of the stuff they're doing. I think there's just too many things to name of how many independent contributors are out there just building shit. I said this the other day on Twitter, I know when things are getting really good when I can't even keep up with the retweets of the things that are being built that I have no idea about. And then you have this other guy that most people don't really know yet. His name's Jonas and I think it's Soul Play Jonas on Twitter,Brian Friel (23:40):He's our hackathon winner.Chase barker (23:41):Is he?Brian Friel (23:42):Yeah. So when we hosted the Summer Camp Hackathon last summer, we had a Deep Links prize and he won as the best use of Deep Links because he was the first to build a Unity game on Solana using it.Chase barker (23:53):I'm not going to dox his location, but I'm going to tell you this mfr is legend and really going to try to push the gaming world forward on Solana, which I think is the blockchain that has the best ability to actually scale. And I want to give credit where it's due, zk-Tech is going to be fucking amazing, but Solana as is right now, has the best chance to scale if a big top tier sort of gaming company hits and decides to leverage that tag.Brian Friel (24:24):Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because I had Anatoly on as the first guest and he always talked about how his dream was blockchain at Nasdaq speed and it was like “it's DeFi all the way". Then you and I are both around for the 2021 craze where it was just all of a sudden it's the world's greatest JPEG trading machine, it's all NFTs. Now we're seeing stuff about gaming. Is there a certain type of developers interested in something they should come to Solana? It's just like everybody... It's not necessarily specialization here, but what are some of the biggest opportunities maybe if you're looking to start a company on Solana, build a project on Solana?Chase barker (25:03):Yeah, I think we're being honest here. If your use case does not necessarily require high throughput, then the options are pretty unlimited in blockchain. But if you want to be able to have fully on chain games.. And not to say that we both know this, when you're building a game on any blockchain, not everything has to be on chain and it's almost like not necessary to the extent, but DeFi, we need to reignite that on Solana. There's been a series of unfortunate events that–whatever, but I think there's a really strong group of people that are working on this open book DEX and this massive amazing thing that came true. But for me personally, I think that the big unlock comes in gaming and the real original use case of crypto that has never actually been solved, which is payments. I mean it's been solved but not in a usable way. If you're going to bring payments to new and emerging markets, the fees and stuff are important because the fees on some of these different chains is more money than is-Brian Friel (26:12):Not feasible. It's a non-starter.Chase barker (26:13):It's not feasible. And Solana Pay and a lot of these other payment options are starting to enable that. And I think it honestly just has the potential to change a lot of lives, JPEGs and all these other things. That's cool. And I love that people are having fun on blockchain also. Solana is definitely the funnest chain by the way, but payments, man payments, we have to do it. We have to get payments, remittances done on chain and Solana's the most equipped to do it, especially related to fees.Brian Friel (26:45):Yeah, I love you said it too about it being the most fun chain, priding yourselves with that because for a while, and I think you noticed this, with every new blockchain, something that starts, the first thing everyone does is copy what worked before. We're going to have an AMM, we're going to do some DeFi thing, we're going to have an NFT marketplace. But I'm starting to see now on Solana things that are uniquely Solana and just couldn't be done elsewhere. And it definitely feels like there's a unique culture. And I'll shout out too, one, we talked about T.J. Littlejohn and you mentioned payments, the Solana pay spec. Yeah, you can send payments to anyone, but you could send any transaction. So he built that NFT photo booth. You take a photo, scan it, and it mints as an NFT using the payment protocol. It's pretty cool. There's another one though, we just had him on as a guest, which will launch fairly soon on this podcast. Have you seen the “Solana Plays Pokémon” game?Chase barker (27:37):Yeah, I have briefly, but I don't know a ton about it.Brian Friel (27:40):I don't know. It's a game like that... It's like you said, it doesn't have to be crazy. It's not everything on chain, but it's almost like a new genre of game because here you have this emulator that's sitting off chain, it's playing Pokémon and it's like anyone can permissionlessly show up and just start voting to say, press this button, press up, press down. And Solana's so fast that it's basically processing these very quickly and all of a sudden you have people warring over, should we train a Squirtle? Should we release the Squirtle? Should we fight this gym leader? It's a toy today, but you can kind of see how wow, this could become kind of a new game genre where it's multiplayer and, you don't know who you're even playing with or against and it's all real time. It's all being coordinated. It's pretty wild.Chase barker (28:22):I think a lot, and I'm a big advocate of looking at the Web2 world and seeing what is possible on Solana, and also what makes sense because not every use case makes sense, but for example, like I said, I mentioned Shek earlier and Wordcel Club, which is the blogging platform and they're doing some other cool social primitives and it's like they're starting to open source those primitives, but why would you do something on web 3.0 that you could do on Web 2.0? And the answer is sort of incentives. And you look at some of these bigger social platforms that absorb 99.9% of the value and there's a way to distribute that value on web 3.0 that there never was in web 2.0. So I think that's an important one. There might be some disagreement here, but I think the group that really got closest to some sort of web 2.0 success was Stepn, because they went product first instead of... You see a lot of stuff in web 3.0 of it's like, developers first developing for developers, they're developing for things like that.(29:27):But Stepn was like, what does everybody do that we could reward them for and get this on chain? And that was working out, this is an incentive mechanism. Obviously it didn't fully work out and I think there's probably... They're working on that, but at the same time, we need to start thinking what in the web 2.0 world is working, how can we do that on web 3.0, and why would that app make sense in web 3.0? And then usually it's incentive mechanisms that give the user a reason to use it, but they're not going to do that with massive delays or lag times or all this stuff. It better work just like web 2.0 if not better if you're going to do that. So really focusing on things that Solana can do that other blockchains can't at this current moment is probably going to be some of the highest rate of success or at least some more of the higher impact things I think.Brian Friel (30:21):Yeah, I agree. It's got to be seamless in the background. There's people in crypto who care, but the vast majority of people don't want to sit around and wait for something to load. So we talked a lot about the state of Solana today, what you're excited about all these different people building. You alluded to this a little bit, but paint a picture for us. What do you see the Solana ecosystem five years from now?Chase barker (30:43):Five years from now, I see myself not having a job anymore, and I'm okay with that because I've said this since day one. If I do my job the way that I'm supposed to do my job by empowering, enabling others, then there's no need for a me anymore. And any true ecosystem that has a foundation or a labs, whatever, there should be a point that they're looking towards. The North Star is literally being able to walk away and that community in those small groups that you've sort of empowered and sort of distributed out, you can walk away and that shit just runs itself forever.(31:19):That's not just the blockchain that's actually distributed community, not just the distributed blockchain. So that's the North Star. Five years, probably not likely, but I do think in the next five years that it's going to be about as easy to build on Solana as it is to build on React. That's what I have in my mind. And we have the firepower in the ecosystem and the dedicated people that I already see completely just trying to push with Seahorse and all these other things. People are just thinking, how can I make this easier for people if we're already there two to three years in from [inaudible 00:31:59] Beta Solana, we're progressing rapidly right now and if we keep that rate in the next five years, it's going to be insane.Brian Friel (32:09):Love that. And yeah, the beta tag, I'm sure given all the trials and tribulations, we will be shedding that beta tag soon.Chase barker (32:17):I haven't seen the Bernie meme in a while and if anybody listening to this doesn't know, Anatoly said that we're going to drop the beta tag after one year from the Bernie meme that he posts about validators.Brian Friel (32:27):Zero days since last Bernie meme. Really? Okay.Chase barker (32:31):I mean who knows if that happens, but I haven't seen him post that Bernie meme in a while, so we'll see. We'll see.Brian Friel (32:36):Yeah, I'll miss that Bernie meme. We'll put some pit vipers on Bernie again, just for all time sake. Well Chase, this has been an awesome discussion, really great having you on, and it's been a long time coming. One closing question we ask all of our guests, I want to hear it from you, is who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?Chase barker (32:55):So my initial sort of instinct is to probably mention somebody that's never been really mentioned before, but I can't not just talk about Armani because he was part of the first wallet. He was part of the framework that made Solana better in terms of developer experience with Anchor. And I mean I know he's now building another wallet and it's just the truth. Armani, his whole sort of ethos and what he is trying to do is just trying to make crypto usable and better for a lot of people.(33:34):And I think that's just an important thing for me and I really respect that about him. So I truly think that Armani is one of the people that I really respect the most in the space for what he's done and transparently and just like everybody who has a very large voice gets a lot of shit. And for people like that to stick around, it's incredible. We all deal with it. You work at Phantom, I work at Solana Foundation. Armani has worked at various groups or whatever and we have to just continue what we're doing and just deal with all the that shit we get and you just got to respect that, man. So that's pretty much my answer.Brian Friel (34:17):That's Awesome. I couldn't agree more. Well, Chase, it has been awesome having you on. Thank you so much for your time. Where can developers go to get started with Solana?Chase barker (34:27):Solana.com/developers or I'll also not show our own stuff and you can go to soldev.app as well. We have different offerings like soldev.app has a lot more, solana.com/developers has a little more curated smaller list, but both are very good options. So yeah man, that's the place. So check it out and let's get going.Brian Friel (34:53):Love it. Chase Barker, head of developer ecosystem at Solana Foundation. Thank you so much.

Decaf: Remittance and loyalty points

The Cove

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 9, 2023 55:37

Today we've got Scott co-founder of Decaf on the show. We are talking crypto payments. Decaf has big ideas around the possibilities of crypto payments on top of Solana. We chat the benefits of Solana Pay, how crypto payments unleash a new level of loyalty points and how Decaf is bringing zero fee physical cash off ramps to 175 countries around the world. Note: We mistakenly refer to 197 countries, it's actually 175. This conversation is made possible thanks to Streamflow. ------ THE COVE SPONSOR TOOLS:

speak points loyalty solana remittances decaf solana pay

Is CrossFit dying?

Gym World Worldwide

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2022 41:08

Episode 1: John Franklin, Mateo Lopez, and Mark Fisher talk about Asics new partnership with Solana Pay and STEP'N, the declining number of North American CrossFit affiliates, Xponential Fitness's quarterly earnings, and Absolute Recomp's TikTok strategy. ______________ Show Notes: 1/ ASICS's new partnership with Solana Pay and STEP'N (1:10) 2/ The declining number of North American CrossFit affiliates (11:50) 3/ Xponential Fitness's latest quarterly earnings (25:47) 4/ Absolute Recomp's TikTok strategy (34:10) ______________ Enjoyed the show? Support us by: •Using Kilo for your gym's website, marketing automation, and gym management software •Subscribing to Mark's Youtube channel •Reading John's newsletter on the business of fitness

tiktok dying crossfit subscribing asics mark fisher john franklin reading john solana pay

Jonas Hahn - Solana Summer Camp Hackathon Winner, Ep 12

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 8, 2022 16:04

Jonas Hahn, an established game developer who won the Phantom Track in the Solana Summer Camp Hackathon joins Brian Friel to talk about web3 gaming and his work Combining Unity and Solana with his project SolPlay.Show Notes:00:48 What is Solplay? 02:16 What are Deep Links? 03:41 What was what attracted you first to Solana?05:13 What is the state of gaming in Solana? 06:17 Exciting things in crypto 07:56 Tooling or developing infrastructure to make a breakthrough game10:04 WebGL for building 11:08 Future projects in the space 12:12 Is Mobile the future of Crypto Gamin?13:08 Advice to devs new to Web 3 14:25 A builder he admires Links:Unity-Solana SDK that provides a single interface for interacting with Phantom deeplinks and extension from a Unity environment.Example game built with Phantom, Unity, and WebGLVideo tutorials for building Unity games with Phantom: Full Transcript:Brian (00:05):Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where 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 guests today. Jonas Hahn. Jonas is an established game developer who has won the most recent Phantom Track in the Solana Summer Camp Hackathon for his work with Combining Unity and Solana with his project SolPlay. Jonas, welcome to the show.Jonas (00:33):Hello. Super nice. Thank you for having me.Brian (00:35):We're super excited to chat with you today. We love the work that you've been doing, pioneering game development between Unity and Solana. I'd love to start off, what is SolPlay? What have you been working on these past few months?Jonas (00:48):Yeah, SolPlay is just a name I came up with when I started working on Solana games. Because everything needs a name and I heard everything in the ecosystem should be called something with Sol, so I called it SolPlay. And yeah, what's behind it is I started working on games with Solana. I started when I joined the Hacker House in Prague. And I already had a little app on my phone and I had a wallet, and first I wanted to make a Solana Pay where you can send Solana to other people. So I used the Solan Art Wallet and implemented that but then Solana Pay came out and I kind of stopped this and went back to games.(01:26):And then in Prague, I met a few other people and we started building a game, it's called World of Qro, and for that we built connection where we communicate with JavaScript directly from Unity. So we sent messages to the React app and then at some point I wanted to have it on mobile as well and that didn't work, that workflow. And then I was investigating how it could be done and then I wanted to build a deep link connection to a wallet and was trying to build my own wallet. And then Phantom came finally out, was there Deeplinks and I was super excited about it and immediately went on it and then I even noticed that there was a prize for it, so it was even more exciting.Brian (02:03):Yeah, yeah it's good timing, right? Then for those who don't know, can you walk people through maybe high level, what are Deeplinks and how has this enabled you to build a connection. Really one of the first Unity games that's on Solana.Jonas (02:16):The good thing about Deeplinks is like usually you have a browser extension or something, but of course on mobile you don't have that. But a mobile, different apps can communicate between each other using application links. And what the Deeplink does, it creates a secure connection using the 25-1-9 thing.Brian (02:36):Yeah, yeah. X25519 key pair. Yeah, that's not as important. But yeah.Jonas (02:41):So it has a secure connection and then if you want to do a transaction in the game, for example, send Solana somewhere or MinTON NFT, you just create the transaction in the app and then you send it over to Phantom. Phantom signs it for you, and then you get the signature back and it says, of course a big benefit that people who play the game don't need to write down the key phrase or something, but they can immediately use the wallet that they already have. So I think no one can be bothered writing down these words, and I think it's very accessible, a good feature.Brian (03:11):I couldn't agree more. We're super excited about its potential to break crypto out of this pure browser environment. We know with extensions now you can be doing this in mobile applications, you can be doing these gaming applications. You mentioned that you got started with this originally at Hacker houses, you visit Prague, you kind of got into the Solana ecosystem. What was it that first attracted you to Solana? You're a game developer yourself, you spent a lot of time in Unity. What is it that first caught your eye about Solana in particular?Jonas (03:42):So the thing is, I tried making crypto games for 10 years ago already. But it just wasn't possible, I had a game where people could play against each other in a tower defense game. And then I tried something with PayPal and something with a Bitcoin, but nothing worked. And then two years ago I had started trying a game called Township from Gala Games, and they were using Ethereum and I got a little fountain, like an NFT. That was my first interaction with these NFTs. And then I tried to sell it later. It was because it was worth 0.5 Eth. But then I noticed I had to mint it from this side chain, and then it was only Ethereum and I paid $60 to get it off there. And then I had to pay another $60 to list it on OpenSea, and all that stuff was very tedious.(04:24):And then I was looking off their other blockchains and at some point I noticed that there's Solana where transactions don't cost anything and the transaction doesn't take minutes or seconds, but it's almost immediately, at least if you just wait for it to be confirmed. And then for a game, it just is necessary that transactions go fast, otherwise it just doesn't make sense. You can't wait a minute for a transaction and that's why Solana is the obvious choice. It doesn't cost anything and is super fast. Short answer.Brian (04:54):Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think there's a really natural pairing there. If you could summarize for developers who maybe are familiar with building Unity games but maybe aren't as familiar with Solana, what is kind of the state of gaming in your opinion on Solana? Both maybe from the games that are out there, but also as a developer, you know what tools you have at your disposal right now to start building?Jonas (05:14):It's super interesting because everything is still super early. There are a few games which raised a lot of money like last year or two years ago. And they are building their own things, but there's a lot of games coming up from indie developers and small teams and everyone is trying to build their own things. And that's why I also want to try to make it easier for people. I started making some YouTube videos where I explain Solana stuff and I started now working on the Unity SDK and also the Phantom Deeplinks. They are also now in the Unity SDK from the people from Garbles who build it and lots of stuff is coming, many little games and I am in contact with some and trying to support them.Brian (05:57):That's awesome. What would you say is the big selling point for game developers who are interested in Web3 in general. SolPlay maybe we can take that as an example. You're able to use your NFTs in the game, you're able to save your high scores to a blockchain, but what is it that excites you the most about combining both the gaming world and the crypto world?Jonas (06:17):Yeah, I've been in the gaming world for a long time already. It's a very competitive market and I'm super excited about the whole blockchain thing because now finally you can build a game again, which isn't reliable on some service that is online. You have your own backend, you don't need the backend anymore. I mean, you still use Solana as a backend. You don't need a payment provider anymore because all you need to do is you just make a transaction which sent you some SOL or the token or whatever you want.(06:45):And what's also super exciting is, also for games companies I think, is that they can save the 30% fees in the stores. On web, it's one hand, but of course everyone wants to be on mobile because everyone uses mobile phones and these 30% fees are very important in the very competitive mobile games market, which we currently have. And what I'm also excited about is that it will probably spawn whole new kinds of games. I think the big game hasn't been spawned yet, the big crypto game, but it will probably be there somewhere and will probably be something new that we haven't seen before.Brian (07:17):Yeah, I agree. It's such an interesting paradigm, having this open backend that other people can plug into and you have tokens that potentially could be mutable and your interactions on the chain also maybe impact what your experience in the game is. I couldn't agree more that I think we don't quite know what the end state of the is, but I'd like those two examples you gave, especially the one around the 30% payment tax that most developers in crypto know all too well, especially if you're building mobile games. You mentioned that the space is early. We're still waiting for that kind of real breakthrough game. In your opinion, is there any tooling or developer infrastructure that needs to happen before we can have that breakthrough game?Jonas (07:57):It would be good if most stuff is open source. Solana is very good at that already. Many things are open source, but what's missing is targeting the traditional game developers. For example, go to the A MAZE conference in Berlin, which has crazy indie games, or go to the Unite Conference from Unity and try to get the people there. Because many developers I talk to, they still think it's a scam. It doesn't really make sense. It's super expensive, it's low and there are no standards yet where I'm not sure if it's good or bad. It kind of is this open stage still where you can do whatever you want. And also it's nice that there's not this big monopoly of a company who organizes everything. Maybe you have to use Google and now for Solana you can use Phantom software, all wallets you can use Fractal, has a nice API and very many opportunities and a Saga phone of course, if this happens, that will be also amazing if you have a crypto phone that you can use.Brian (08:57):Yeah, I don't think it's a matter of if, I think it's a matter of when. And we'll be releasing this episode shortly before Break Point. I know that Phantom and then also Solana have some great news to share around the progress around Saga phone. I couldn't agree more that that will just continue to break down the barriers and make this a lot easier.Jonas (09:14):One more thing about that topic is that there needs to be some clarity about regulation about somehow. For example, if I mint an NFT, I still have no idea how I pay taxes on that.Brian (09:24):Right?Jonas (09:25):Or if someone sends me a USDC token, what is it? It's an income. What is staking? What do I do with the tokens I get? And if that is all cleared out at some point, which will eventually happen in the next one or two years, then more big companies will also start.Brian (09:40):Yeah, the fact that this is a global phenomenon doesn't make this any easier too. You and I'm in the United States as a recording, you're in Germany. Interactions between the two of us definitely don't make it any easier and I would not want to be a crypto accountant having to think through all of these things right now. So all this is really awesome. If you haven't checked out SolPlay, I would definitely recommend checking it out. It's a great game. If I'm not mistaken, you've also used WebGL in some aspects of this as well, is that right?Jonas (10:05):Yeah, it's cross platform. So I'm building an example game. Open source example game, which also has these Deeplinks in it and now it also has a token swap using the Orca tools and Metaplex for minting NFTs. And yeah, it's mostly an example game, but it also has this slipping mechanic where you can jump around and collect points and at some point I want to put in that you can give out token and rewards, so make it play to earn and then have some staking in it as well. So I basically want to make a suite where everything is in that you need to build a game.Brian (10:37):And then as part of this too, you know, mentioned your work. You've done great open source work around the Unity SDK, integrating Phantom Deeplinks that in particular you also have a great YouTube channel where you go in depth since really long tutorials on actually bringing up your IDE and showing this is how I built the game. Walking through all the steps of that. Taking all that into consideration, you've built these games, you have these SDK tooling, and then you've also gone on the developer education front. What are you most excited looking forward in spending your next couple months in the Solana gaming space?Jonas (11:09):I want to build the perfect example game, basically. Where everything is in and which is actually also fun to play. Put it on all platforms. It's so difficult to get into the iOS store. You wouldn't believe I get like six, seven points every time I submit. And they definitely leave minting NFTs within their purchases I think. So that's one of the things I want to build next. And then just to get this game on all platforms, it's biggest challenge and goal for the next months. It's already in the Play Store, but on iOS it's definitely harder.Brian (11:43):Even us at Phantom building a crypto wallet, we've run into kind of unexplainable headaches with the App Store review process sometime. It's definitely a very opaque process. Definitely resonate with that. You've spoken a lot about cross platform and your game being a platform as well. Is there any one platform in particular you're most excited about for Web3 gaming looking ahead? You mentioned everyone has a mobile phone that in particular seems pretty compelling, but do you think mobile will be the first explosive growth phase of crypto gaming or what are your opinions on that?Jonas (12:13):Yeah, I think it will probably be mobile and I think you can't ignore iOS, just too many people have iOS. That's why I'm so amazed that everything works for Phantom on all platforms the same. But there could be... Unity can theoretically export to all platforms. So theoretically we could make a switch game, which facilitates Solana somehow. I don't think there's a phantom bullet for Switch yet, but theoretically it could be on all platforms. That would be really nice.Brian (12:38):I would love that. Yeah, Phantom on One Switch I think is going to be the next catchphrase that catches fire on Twitter here. I love that.Jonas (12:45):Exactly.Brian (12:46):This is awesome. Jonas, if you were having to talk to a Web3 developer today who's listen to this, they're interested in this, they have some game experience, but they're maybe not sure how to best to get involved with the Solana gaming space. What would you recommend is the first step for a new dev coming into this? To learn the ropes of Solana game development and to get involved with potentially a project or some direction and connecting with other devs in the space?Jonas (13:11):There are quite a few good YouTube channels to learn the basics of Solana, which you probably should learn first. The channel of Solandy and Josh's DevBox and my YouTube channel of course as well. Although I recently heard that tutorials are still a bit too detailed and complicated, but I'm trying to get better on that definitely. And then yeah, I would check out some of the games that are already there. There are a bunch of games on Fractal, for example, that you can try out and then you can already experience a little bit with wallets. And then I would check out the Solana Unity SDK or my example game and then just try it out, see how it feels, deploy it on Android, try to mint an NFT, do some transactions from it in Unity. And I think then people will already get hooked and want to do more of it, I hopeBrian (13:57):Yeah, I love it. We'll drop some links to all those that you just referenced in the show notes for folks as well. Jonas, this has been awesome. We loved hearing your story of how, you know, got involved with Solana and then we couldn't agree more that the future of gaming's really exciting on Solana. Phantom wants to be a big part of that, enabling developers to build cross-platform and make it just easy for folks. One closing question we always ask all of our guests, and I'd love to hear your take on this as well, is who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?Jonas (14:27):Oh, there are actually quite a few. I ran into a few of them at the Stockholm Hacker House and especially Jonathan Singh, Steven Laver, Steven Luscher, and they're just all amazing. Everyone actually who really built on Solana, the team, they're super amazing. I mean, not everyone in the NFT communities is always super amazing, but the people who really work on it are super nice. And then of course Anatoly, which I met in Miami and he's just such a nice, humble, genius person. It's really nice meeting him.Brian (14:59):Yeah, I agree. I think he really set the tone for kind of the culture of the developer community here on Solana. You mentioned some other Solana Labs employees as well, Steven Luscher, Steven Laver, and those guys, if you're not familiar with them, they're basically savants across all the open source initiatives. They're leading it all. They're doing the commits, they're doing the code reviews, the PR's, they're saying the strategic direction, they're speaking on stage. I don't know where Solana finds all these guys, but it's a really cool community to be part of.Jonas (15:26):It's crazy. It's so good what they're building with a mobile wallet now, it's so nice.Brian (15:32):I agree. Awesome. Well, Jonas, thank you so much. Congratulations again on winning the Phantom Deeplinks Track for the Solana Summer Camp Hackathon. We're really excited to see where you go from here and for the future of free gaming on Solana.Jonas (15:44):Thank you so much.

TJ Littlejohn - mtnPay Founder, Ep. 6

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 28, 2022 27:50

TJ Littlejohn (mtnPay CEO) joins The Zeitgeist to discuss how mtnPay is enabling real-world crypto adoption by innovating on the payment user experience.Show Notes00:42 - Background 01:53 - Story behind MtnPay 03:42 - Other participants at MtnDAO 05:53 - From white paper to actually building08:56 - Congressman interaction 10:22 - What is MtnPay? 12:22 - Future Features for MtnPay14:40 - Winning Riptide's payments track 15:33 - Developer resources 16:40 - The Photobooth 20:34 - Solana's architecture 22:10 - The Future of Payments on Solana 24:33 - The future of MtnPay 25:40 - Builders TJ admires 27:18 - Where to learn more about MtnPay Full TranscriptBrian (00:06):Hey, everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer of relations at Phantom and joining me today is TJ Littlejohn. TJ is the founder and CEO of mtnPay. A Solana API for payments. TJ, how's it going today?TJ (00:24):What's up, dude. Thanks for having me on.Brian (00:27):Thanks for coming on. We're real excited to give you guys a little bit of spotlight here. You guys have built some great products that have integrated with Phantom and some really cool ways. Before we dive into all that, do you mind giving us a little background on who you are and how you became to be building on Solana?TJ (00:42):Yeah. So like you said, my name's TJ. Background's just as a developer historically, I'm an iOS developer. I did that in college, was really into hackathons, after school went out to SF and worked at Apple doing iOS development there. Kind of wanted to do something a little more impactful, joined some startups, found Solana maybe at the end of last year, I noticed there was an opportunity to build and I couldn't ignore it. There was a lot of foundational things popping up. I think Phantom had just got going within the last couple months. And NFTs were usable, but there was still a massive vacuum for other things and so it kind of jumped in and exploring what to build really.Brian (01:23):That's awesome. And so a lot of people when they hear the name mtnPay, the first thing that comes to their mind is mtnDAO. And for those that don't know, mtnDAO started originally as this small little co-working space in Salt Lake City for some Solana builders to come together. Now it's evolved, let's say it's basically a movement. It's kind of the epitome of Solana developer culture in a lot of respects. What is the kind of founding story there? How did you get involved in mtnDAO? And what was the original idea for what is now mtnPay?TJ (01:54):Yeah, mtnDAO like you said, it's a co-working space. Month long co-working space in Salt Lake City. I got involved to go there because of my friends that brought me into Solana. I had a couple good friends, Edgar and Barrett who were into this space a lot earlier than most people were. And they were just some really cool builders and had a lot of great friends that were developers and entrepreneurs. And so I think they had done this the year prior where it was called the mountain compound. And they just had a bunch of people come out, they rented a ski house and just kind of built for a week or so. And then naturally it was like, cool, they were going to do it the next year, and so that was what became mtnDAO.TJ (02:32):And everyone was invited, I was friends with them, I was definitely going to go. Kind of popped off and a lot of people showing up. And so we were there in this co-working space and there was just ... I was looking for stuff to do. And it was a random, fun idea to build a point of sale. Solana Pay had just came out, the spec and with being bored I was reading it. And it was a night before a party and I was grabbing a Red Bull because I was really tired and there was a point of sale there that was a self-service checkout thing. We were like, what if we just rebuilt this and added Solana Pay? And that was it. There wasn't much more past that, and it was oh, we can make this for our friends for the full month. And we jumped all over that.Brian (03:13):That's awesome. Starting small, now it's basically this whole movement. You guys have a couple really great integrations, but with the NFTs I saw, being able to just push transactions on the end users and Phantom. I guess before we dive into all that a little more, just to talk a little bit more about mtnDAO, you mentioned Edgar and Barrett. I believe that's Edgar and Barrett from Cipher Protocol and Margin Five. Is that right?TJ (03:33):Correct.Brian (03:34):What were some of the other builders there? Do you still keep in touch with folks who were in that early house and how has that kind of scene evolved on Solana?TJ (03:42):It's crazy. There's been so many wins that came out of that month. Nick from Cronos was there. They're an incredible project and he ended up winning the Riptide Hackathon. My friend Jeff spent the month there and he's been experimenting with a bunch of different Defi opportunities since. Cavy, now works at Genesis Go. I know that John now is at Coral. I don't know if there was any correlation of him up there, but just shows how sick we build, he was just hanging out there all month. All the people from Cashmere was there. They were awesome to have around. Jeremy Cardinal, literally everyone. I know [inaudible 00:04:29] came through the whole time, VCs like Alex from Delfi or Cal Samani was there. Just the raw crew, you know?TJ (04:36):So that was I think really cool and inspirational and you're around those people and it just makes you want to be better and elevate yourself and be around some sick builders. Mika, I think a lot of the Phantom people came in through too. I think that was the first time I met CK. And I think honest, meeting CK there enabled a lot of the mtnPay stuff because I had this open line of coms just to pester him when Solana Pay was coming out. The new versions of Solana Pay were coming out like dude, I need this. When's it coming? When's it coming was able to work in parallel. Ended up if I think getting connected to you through that probably, was pestering you a bunch. A lot of crazy opportunities came through man mtnDAO.Brian (05:16):Yeah. I wouldn't call it pestering, but no, it's a super organic developer movement here. It's something that definitely originally drew me to Solana in the first place. Just the positivity and the sheer number of people just show up to a house in Utah and start hacking on things. So you mentioned the founding stories. You're sitting in this house in Utah, there's this square terminal where you could check out maybe buy some snacks, buy some Red Bulls late at night. Was it just you who was working on this idea? How did this come together? You mentioned that the Solana Pay spec was released that day. How did you go from, Hey, I see this essentially a white paper, maybe a GitHub to actually deciding this was something you're going to actually spend some time on?TJ (05:53):Yeah, totally. So had the idea randomly. I was reading the spec early in the week, knew about it. Literally what you said was at the point of sale, like had the idea like, oh, it'd be sick to rebuild this, but add Solana Pay. But obviously there's more that kind of follows up there. That was on Friday night. And so my boy Scott was in town. We kind of knew we wanted to go out Friday, go skiing Saturday and then started hacking on some stuff because he was there through I think Wednesday maybe? And so we had floated a couple of ideas around on what we could possibly be working on. And that was just one of them. And then we ended up on Sunday, at the shop, which is the co-working space that mtnDAO was at.TJ (06:30):We probably were whiteboarding five to six ideas dealing with stuff with Game-Fi or tokens for Twitch creators or ... It's funny, like one of the early ideas was like tokens for merchants. And then another one was just this one of doing the point of sale for this. And we're like I feel this is the most digestible and that we could hack together and it fit our skill sets. I'm an iOS developer. Scott's done some stuff on the back end before. And so he could handle a lot of the integration, the square stuff and I can do the Solana front end stuff and it just made sense. And so we grinded it, we stayed up super, super late, most nights, but it was a 48 hour turnaround because we also didn't even start it on Sunday, like that actual idea until five, six o'clock. I actually looked the other day because I was going back to some of the mtnDAO tweets. We did it on February 8th. Which was sick. So a lot of it came out on the first. So it was really fast.Brian (07:27):And no inside knowledge to the time right? You basically found out the same time everyone else did.TJ (07:32):Yeah. No inside knowledge, but I think Jordan from Solana Pay will boast that there was no insider knowledge. The repo was public since November. So anyone could have known.Brian (07:43):Alpha hiding in plain sight there.TJ (07:45):Exactly. Obscurity by just putting it on GitHub. I did feel I had insider knowledge afterwards though. I remember Nick from Cronos, it was super on payments now, was super on my radar, we had that video go kind of viral. Then Nick from Cronos came back from the Seattle Hacker House and I think he met someone there and learned about the transaction request back. And I remember in between that is when I met CK and I was like, dude, if we can figure out how to make this work for any transaction on Solana, it's over. This changes everything. And I was so sure of that, but I had no idea how you could do that. And then I remember Nick coming back and showing me the spec and I never felt like I had such insider info in my life. But again, it was just probably on the GitHub. But man, I remember reading it and just being like, this is different. This changes things.Brian (08:41):Yeah. No that's super cool. I remember that video you mentioned, I think it was at three in the morning, you guys filmed it with Scott and he's there checking out his Red Bull on mtnPay. I think you guys even had somebody who was a governor or a Senator that came by and checked out with it. Who was that?TJ (08:56):John Curtis. I believe Congressman John Curtis. That was fun too. He came another time. We had a couple of minutes in between when he was meeting with people privately or something or had a small round table with some folks. And when he was going to do a larger chat and so just got to get down with the stuff to him, which was really cool because that's a lot of what mtnPay going to do in the near term is just demo what's possible. It's kind of like a chicken and the egg thing. And so I don't think there's a massive surplus of people waiting ready to pay, but I think we have an opportunity to demo and move conversations along. And so that was just a really good example of that is how we can show the decision makers, what is actually doable and what things look like and feel like.Brian (09:42):Yeah, it's kind of like you said, the whole protocol could be sitting there on GitHub for anyone to go see, but there's very few people in the world who are going to dig into that and actually build something. And you guys are actually building products that makes this tangible, make this real, you get someone like a Congressman to come in and actually use it and buy something for real and have it show up in Square. And as a line item ran right alongside using a credit card or something like that. You hit on a couple things earlier. You mentioned that originally at this point of sale integration, but then the second evolution of this spec came along that enabled transaction requests. And so you guys have built some really great products around that, how would you describe what mtnPay is today holistically?TJ (10:23):At our interface layer, we're an API, right? So we want to be able to be pinged by anyone that has an internet connection and can make rest API calls. On the back end what we're doing is we are doing the grunt work of integrating with a bunch of different protocols and tying their functionality together for use cases that make sense to consumers. I want to pay for this, please build the transaction that does that. Or I would like to use a coupon that I have in my account and get a discount on this item I am purchasing or it doesn't necessarily have to be payment stuff. Like you said, we have some cool stuff we do with NFTs. For another example, we integrate with Magic Eden this week and have a feature where you can have a QR code that sweeps the floor of a given NFT collection. And that was done by using like of their APIs that maybe weren't intended to be used exactly together. But then we did that and then we can open that up for other people to use in whatever way they want to compose with this product.Brian (11:31):Yeah. And so this is all leveraging at the end of the day that Solana Pay spec and that transaction requests are part of that. I feel like the Solana Pay is a bit of a misnomer at this point because, originally, it's a similar evolution you guys have took, starting out payments point of sale. Now you're able to scan a QR code, sweep the floor. I even saw that Greg, one of the mtnPay team members, actually printed this QR code and put it on a shirt and has been walking around. So you can scan a shirt live in person and sweep the floor. It's pretty cool. What are some of the things that you think people aren't maybe thinking about when it comes to transaction requests? Most people know transaction requests from either just a tutorial or sending someone an invoice or something that they can pay. You guys I think are pushing the envelope a little bit here. What are some of the things that you mentioned that the sweeping the floor, what are some others that you have in mind here?TJ (12:22):I think the mental model shift that you need to hit is that a transactional request can literally just do anything you can do on Solana. So anything dApps are doing today where they're building transactions, you can do that with transaction requests. But the cool thing is you can do that on a servered environment. And so you start to separate the entities that are involved, the group that's building the transaction doesn't have to be the group that's generating the QR code, which doesn't have to be on the same device that the user is trying to grab the transaction and sign it. When you start to break up this stuff, really cool interactions can happen. And so when I had that unlocked from seeing the spec, my mind was just running and I was like, what cool things can we do with this?TJ (13:10):One of the really early ideas that we had, and a lot of it centered around what can we do that's like fun here? What do we think is unique and whatever, and so one of the really early ideas we had was Degen coin flip. Could we wrap up Degen coin flip and put it on a projector at a party and just have people doing Degen coin flip and do a cool UI. And everyone can just like get hyped when someone wins a bunch of money, that's fun. Or the next idea there was the photo booth we built. Those ideas both came from the Austin community hacker house that happened in March. I wanted to build those out for that hacker house.TJ (13:50):But the timing didn't line up with when transaction requests was going to be live in the app store. And so we had to wait on that, but that was really fun. We did the Magic Eden sweeping thing. We've done candy machine minting, just wrapping up protocols. Notice how in here we didn't build any core protocol piece ourselves or even the way to interface with them. We just go on their open source repos and just look at their front end and try to grab the pieces that call into their smart contracts. Then wrap that up in some cool ways. And to me that was a big aha moment, it was like, oh shit, you can do some stuff here.Brian (14:28):Yeah. It's pretty unbelievable that you guys have built all this without even writing a single line of rust or deploying your own program on Solana. I think you guys even won the payments track of the last hackathon, is that right?TJ (14:40):Yeah. We won Riptide, of the payments part of Riptide, shout out Cronos, Cronos won the whole thing. But yeah, we won the payments track. We were super stoked about that. It's given us a couple of opportunities and some eyeballs, which has been really nice, but you know, it's starting to become old news. Solana summer camps here, I think a new wave of peeps with eyeballs and whatever's going to come up. And so we've just got to keep going, keep innovating, keep building. And we're stoked to do that. Just got to be like, what can we integrate with next?Brian (15:10):I think it's a great story though, for all those new builders who are coming up on the new hackathon that you can build this incredible company that does all these different things without even having to get into the whole program side of Solana. There's so much that's already out there. It's so composable with one another, you can do a lot of work just on the client. You can do a lot of work, building APIs, building wrappers around all this stuff that just makes this easier for everyday people.TJ (15:33):Yeah. And there's so many developer resources out there now, too. It's getting to a point where it's easier to just look stuff up and some actual solid answers are out there. Some of the resources being yours. I believe I've had that happen recently where I'll be looking for ... We've been trying to do some things onchain. There's some really cool stuff we can do when we start moving the infrastructure onchain, it gets safer and more powerful. And in trying to do that, I came up across a lot of your articles. And so I kind of wanted to shout those out, those are really cool to see.Brian (16:03):Appreciate that. It's great to hear they're still relevant after all this time. Some of those might be outdated, so listener beware. You mentioned the photo booth as one of the applications you guys have built. For those that haven't seen it, photo booth is this actual in person kiosk, you have an iPad, you could use any sort of device here, but what it basically lets you do is take a photo just like you would in a photo booth and in a few easy steps, you can mint this as NFT on Phantom Mobile, and your favorite wallet, all seamless, all running on mtnPay APIs. What was the inspiration for the photo booth? How did you guys originally even come up with this idea?TJ (16:39):I think it was a lot of things. I think people talk about, I don't know, there's that thing of founder fit or whatever, or hindsight's always 20/20 or whatever. But there were so many little things that had happened to me from January to March to get to the photo booth happening that it's crazy that it actually did happen. So the photo booth idea came about when I was thinking about what stuff can we do with Solana Pay? I think pretty early on, I was like, oh, you could mint NFTs. I had done stuff with ... Back in January, my passion project was a custom candy machine contract where instead of minting NFTs that were directly linked to a JSON file, that was on some CDN.TJ (17:31):I was going to point it at a serverless function. And then that serverless function was going to query onchain data and then return JSON back to the user there. And so would, it'd be this cool, dynamic NFT based on onchain data. And so that was the first time I learned serverless functions, which I needed for mtnPay the photo booth. That was the first time I was digging into the candy machine code. And then thinking about fun stuff I can do, it went from the Degen coin flip on the wall to an iPad up on the wall that took the picture, uploaded it, and then you could use Solana Pay to mint the NFT and all of that was only possible because I had those different pieces of context. And then the last thing being that my friend Nick just dropped the transaction request back in my DMs.TJ (18:22):And I don't know if I would've run into it other than that single moment. And so that was kind of how the idea started to come about. And then we built it out. It's actually funny, I was actually focusing super, super hard on the point of sale app, but I thought that was the thing we were going to do. And so I was trying to put all of my time there, we were trying to do a merchant pilot and get IRL merchants onboarded to this thing. So I felt I had so much to build, but I knew that the photo booth could be this fun thing. So at first I thought about just having someone else build it, I was reaching out to some people asking for grants or like, Hey, do you want to sponsor this thing?TJ (19:01):And I could get like 3000 dollars from someone then give it to a developer friend to help build it. And I could guide them how to build it, but I couldn't source any money. And so I just had to use one or two nights of my own time away from mtnPay and just build this thing. And then after I built the first version of it, I was like, oh shit, this is kind of crazy. The idea is one thing, but when you actually get to use it, I don't know again, I feel it's kind of like a mental unlock for some people myself included. It was like a big shift.Brian (19:37):Yeah. I would definitely say it's a bit of a light bulb moment. I think the first time I saw it was Solana Miami, I think you guys brought it out and I think it was the first time you guys had also bought this inflatable cover around the photo booth.TJ (19:50):The marshmallow.Brian (19:51):The marshmallow. Yeah. Since then, I think it's gone through a few different evolutions. I've seen some cool plans in the works too for how you guys thinking of upgrading this thing. But you know, personally, I love it. We've brought it around at Phantom to a couple different places. I know we sponsored at the hacker house in Austin and then on the Degen party and there's a couple other places as well. It's been a huge hit, we see even folks who maybe aren't necessarily crypto native. It's a great excuse for them to download Phantom, download a wallet and scan this thing, submit their first NFT, especially because a lot of folks don't even know but with Solana Pay transaction requests, this can be free mint to users, right? You guys can essentially make this so someone can just download a wallet, scan a QR code, and then next thing they know, they have an NFT in their wallet without paying any Sol.TJ (20:34):It's crazy. The architecture of Solana is very composable or gas has to be paid, but it doesn't have to be paid by the user that's minting. I think that's one of the problems honestly, or not the problems, but one of the challenges is a wallet, right? Phantom, it's such a productized thing. I think Phantom's done an incredible job productizing this wallet to be easy to use. And it makes sense for consumers and holds this stuff. But reality, a wallet just is your private key. It's the software that holds your private key and then it's the actions that a user can do when the private key exists. And so you think like, oh no, I'm sending this Sol, or I'm minting this NFT where really, it's an action is just requires my signature and the signatures here so I can do that. And so as part of our infrastructure, we can sometimes pay for NFTs, we can pay for rent, we have wallets on our backend that we can sign for transactions. There's really, really cool stuff there. So anyone out there listening, that's doing stuff for the Solana summer camp, you have questions on how that works. Please reach out. Happy to walk you through that. You can do cool stuff though, I guarantee I haven't thought of.Brian (21:45):I love it. That's awesome. You hit a lot here with transaction requests, what's capable across the Solana protocol, also the founding story of mtnPay really was in this point of sale app. What do you think is the future of payments on Solana? You mentioned that we're kind of in this still experimental phase. What do you think are some of the next big hurdles that we as an ecosystem need to conquer together to make payments more real?TJ (22:10):I think it's a couple things. I think a lot of things have to happen for payments to go to scale. I think the first thing that has to happen is something like mtnPay has to exist and we have to have infrastructure in the hands of the merchants that enable them to accept non-custodial funds that is not locked into any single platform. To me that's a given, which is why I'm so stoked to be building this. But I think there's a lot of other pieces. I think protocols just in general have to exist. I think novel ideas have to be created and people have to build them out stuff like dialect, right? Where it's just a raw messaging protocol. Stuff like Cardinal, where they're adding functionality on top of NFTs for anyone to use. Really cool lending protocols need to exist.TJ (22:59):And then our job is to kind of grab those and wrap those together for product use cases. And then I think just other things totally separate from payments have to exist. I think Game-Fi, to be honest with you is going to be a massive catalyst of payments on Solana going well. I think you need users here that have a balance in crypto for reasons other than payments. And then they can start using those balances for payments as well, which is why I'm so stoked about something like the Saga, because I think it's going to start to get a lot of those early users in the ecosystem doing things that just aren't related to payments.TJ (23:37):A lot of times I like to think about it in terms of how Apple, right, the Apple ecosystem's so great because your iMessage with your FaceTime works with your photos. It's how I think like Solana kind of goes, but people get to build the different pieces. And so that's what I think the world looks like if this goes well and it sounds like a fun world. And so I hope that it happens and we're going to do our best to see that.Brian (24:02):Yeah. Well, I would say that it's already a fun world here in the Solana developer ecosystem. You know, you've seen both the worlds. You mentioned Apple, but having worked on the inside Apple, they build incredible products, but I haven't seen an ecosystem quite like Solana has where it's just so open. I mean, you mentioned Nick from Cronos, you got the Cardinal guys, all in the same chats, all showing up the same house in Utah. It's a really awesome environment where we can kind of build this composable layer together. If you had to summarize, where do you see mtnPay going from here?TJ (24:33):Yeah. We're going to keep leaning on our infrastructure piece. We want to compose with more protocols, get some integrations. We have stuff in the pipeline with Dialect. We've spoken with the Cardinal folks a handful of times. I think we can compose with them without being super hands on with them and so we're going to do that in the near term. We're in a big integration phase, try to bring these things together. And then the other side of that is the distribution. So we have some cool distribution paths that we're not ready to talk about just yet. That's kind of both sides here that we need to be super careful about. It's making sure we have a really cool set of infrastructure, but how can we go and get that infrastructure out there to as many people as possible? And so that's the real two focuses that we have.Brian (25:15):Well, I look forward to inviting you back on the pod or you can unveil a little more news there about the distribution and all you guys are up to. TJ, we ask this of every guest at the end, we want to know who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem and I got to say that our last guest, Steven Laborer, gave you a shout out. Everyone knows your energy and the space is infectious. But everyone listening wants to know who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?TJ (25:39):Can I just say Steven back? No, I'm just kidding. Love Steven. That's not who I'm going to shout out today. I'm going to shout out, I don't even know his last name, but his Twitter name's Jacob dot soul. Jacob's a sick developer. Have you met him before.Brian (25:52):Yeah, I've interacted with him on Twitter a little bit, but I don't think I've met him in person.TJ (25:55):He is really cool. He is an incredible developer. He is a lot of fun. He's part of the photo booth story where initially we were using candy machine for the photos, for the photo booth and Solana wasn't doing great that day. And so my program wasn't deploying to main net and so an hour or two before we went live, he sat down and helped me rewrite a bunch of the minting stuff for the back end. And I had interacted with him at mtnDao, but didn't know him super, super well. And so he's just a super giving dude, super talented. He's out there building. Have you seen Feeble Labs yet?Brian (26:33):Yep.TJ (26:33):The lambs or whatever. You have to interact with their Twitter or your NFT dies. It's incredible. That's where you get my respect is if you're out there doing something creative with no ask, right? They're giving these things away for free. They're doing Twitter spaces all the time. He's just one of the real, actual, creative builders out there. So I have a lot of respect for Jacob. I look up to him a lot.Brian (27:01):That's awesome. I think that encapsulates the spirit of Solana, pushing things forward, trying out new tech, experimenting, and then also being really open and helping others at the same time.TJ (27:11):Totally, totally, totally.Brian (27:13):TJ, this is really great. Thank you for your time. Where can people go to learn more about mtnPay?TJ (27:17):Yeah. So go to at @mtnPay on Twitter. M-T-N-P-A-Y. And you'll see that there. Or you can follow me TJ underscored Littlejohn, because I talk about it a lot as well. Those two spots you'll find all of our other stuff from there.Brian (27:31):Love it, TJ Littlejohn. Thanks for coming on the show.TJ (27:33):Dude, thanks for having me. Appreciate you. It was a lot of fun.

Steven Laver - Solana Mobile Engineering Lead, Ep. 5

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2022 41:09

Steven Laver (Solana Mobile Engineering Lead) joins The Zeitgeist to discuss how Solana Mobile Stack and the Saga phone will enable the user experiences and rich ecosystem that we need for the future of Web3.Show Notes00:05 - Intro00:45 - Background01:27 - Before Solana02:24 - Why mobile and SMS?04:12 - What is SMS ?06:15 - Seed Vault08:39 - ARM TrustZone10:06 - Security with Seed Vault11:44 - Restrictions with Seed Vault12:46 - Importing and exporting keys15:02 - Mobile wallet adapter21:39 - Plans for deep linking23:27 - The dApp store27:31 - Plans for Solana pay31:18 - Saga33:16 - Expanding SMS to other devices and blockchains38:54 - Working with TJ from Mountain Pay40:18 - Where to connect with Steven and SMS41:14 - OutroTranscriptBrian (00:06):Hey, everyone. And welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce my guest Steven Labor. Stephen is the lead software engineer for a suite of new Solana developer tools known as SMS. The Solana mobile stack. SMS was unveiled recently at NFT NYC alongside a flagship smartphone that will be powered by this new suite of technologies. Stephen, welcome to the show.Steven (00:37):Thanks Brian. Excited to be here.Brian (00:39):Thanks for coming on. We have a lot of ground to cover today. Couple really great announcements that you guys just released, but before we dive into all that, could you give us a brief background of who you are and how you became involved with building mobile software for so Solana?Steven (00:52):Sure. So I have been doing professional engineering now for round about 20 years, but about 15 of those have been spent working on phones in one fashion or another. Right after college, I kind of fell backwards into a job. I just crossed the road rom my university and started working for research in motion and back then worked on Blackberries back when they were cool. And since then I've had a long career building, all kinds of phones and software for phones. Few forays out into some other areas of consumer electronics, but I keep seeming to be dragged back into phones. So I must love it.Brian (01:28):Right before Solana. What were some of the companies you were just working at?Steven (01:31):When, when I took the call from Anatoly for this cool new, exciting opportunity for Solana mobile, I was sitting in a beige conference room at a very large company that likes to make very monochromatic products. And when he started selling me on what Solana labs was building here and the what the vision for the SAGA device was at the time under a very cool code name, but I was pretty quickly sold on that. And previous to that, I spent a few years working at Google, working on the Android products there. So like I said, long background, lots of different smartphones and phone software in there, but this is the most excited I've been about a phone project in a long, long time.Brian (02:09):Oh, that's awesome to hear. Most people who interact with crypto today do so on a desktop from a browser extension. Maybe they're signing with a ledger, maybe they're signing with a web wallet like Phantom. And on Solana specifically, mobile wallets only launched a little over six months ago. Why is the time right now for push into mobile and why SMS specifically?Steven (02:29):So this is actually exactly what the problem statement that convinced me that I should join Solana labs and help build this awesome product. Our phones are everything to us. They're our web browsers. They are cameras. We watch TV on them. We play games on them. They're the first place we go to for everything, they're even our alarm clocks now. And the fact that the Web 3.0 ecosystem just isn't present on our phones the same way it is on our desktops. That to me, is what really gets me excited and got me interested in building this. We're really at the square one here, as far as building for a rich ecosystem for Web 3.0 and for Solana on mobile devices. And we get to use this at use SAGA and use SMS. This is our stake in the ground.Steven (03:13):This is us saying, this is how we should be building for mobile devices. These are the user experiences we need to offer. These are the technologies we need to offer. And being on the ground floor of that, getting to build these fundamental building blocks and then giving them to the community. So the community can then go build all the great, amazing ideas that are honestly, things I would never have thought of. But when I look back at them, I'm like, wow. We have such a rich and exciting community of builders for Solana. That's what I'm most excited about for building SAGA and building the Solana mobile stack.Brian (03:45):That's awesome. Yeah. From Phantoms side, we've seen just in the last six months that even though that foundation for building mobile apps, isn't really there today, SMS hopefully will be able to lay this great foundation. Like you said, we've seen that mobile has been our fastest growing segment by far. So we're super excited for this as well. SMS covers a lot of new developer features here. It's kind of this umbrella term for this whole suite of products that you guys are building in your own words, what is SMS and how should developers be thinking about this new suite of tools?Steven (04:17):I think of it from two angles. So first of all, let me talk about it just briefly from a consumer angle. Or Web 3.0 ecosystem for consumers. Many of us are very in the know about what that means, but for some others, they may be a little less so. They're new to the space, they're still learning it. There's a lot of words and phrases and sayings and memes that are very unique to this ecosystem that people take a little while to get onboarded with. From a consumer perspective, SMS really allows them to understand what a phone offers in terms of its capabilities with Solana. And so it's really by participating in an ecosystem or on a device that has the SMS technologies on it, to a certain extent, they know what they're going to get there. They know they're going to get a device that is going to work well and is they're going to be able to fully participate in the Solana ecosystem.Steven (05:06):For developers, SMS is a collection of technologies, the big ones being, we have Seed Vault for secure key custody. We have mobile wallet adapter for connecting adapts to wallets. We have deeper richer integrations with the OS for Solana Pay, and then the Solana DAP store, which people are really, really excited about.Steven (05:25):And so from the developer perspective, we have this collection of tools which will continue to grow over time. We're going to put more libraries in there. We're going to have more samples for developers, and we're going to keep expanding on this initial set of technologies. And I'm happy to talk about each of those in detail, but as far as SMS for developers, we've got an SDK out now and we're going to be continuing to enhance that. And each of those technology offerings within SMS has value to offer to a different slice or a different segment of our developer ecosystem.Brian (05:55):That's awesome. They're very complimentary as well. Let's dive into each of them. So you mentioned four of those there. We have the Seed Vault. We have the mobile wallet adapter, the DAP store that you guys are launching and then better integrations around Solana Pay, which you guys recently unveiled earlier this year. Let's start with the Seed Vault. I feel like this is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Can you describe a little bit of more, like, what is the Seed Vault? Is it related to what a secure enclave is on iOS or a key store? How should people be thinking about this new term?Steven (06:25):So there's a pretty big gap between the level of security that a hardware wallet offers. Something like a device like a ledger or a treasure. Those are great devices, they're purpose built hardware, and they offer the maximum level of security for users. I think they do a fantastic job with that, but ultimately they are a little bit limited by the fact that they're a separate device. It needs to be connected to your wallet. It's got a very limited user interface in terms of LCD displays or buttons, et cetera. Whereas on the other end of the spectrum, we have the software wallets running on Android or iOS devices, like Phantom for example. User experience is top notch, but the environment that they're running in the Android or iOS high level operating systems, they are general purpose operating systems. They're connected to the network. They run other user code on them.Steven (07:15):And so while they can offer that great user experience because of the environment they operate in, they don't have that quite that same level of security as a hardware wallet would. Seed Vault allows us to bring a lot of those benefits that a hardware wallet is able to, in terms of custody of keys, in terms of taking advantage of extremely secure hardware on mobile phones. And bring those to the software wallets. And so I think that's actually an important point for Seed Vault. We aren't actually building any new or novel hardware into phones to bring this technology up to wallets. Instead, we're taking advantage of the very high secure elements that already exist on phones. And we're integrating those into the system layer and we're integrating Solana blockchain operations into the system to support these functionalities. So as a concrete example, when your seeds are sort of the root of all your secrets on the Solana blockchain, all your wallet accounts, all your private keys, everything is derived from those seeds.Steven (08:13):We use a secure element on SAGA to secure your seeds in a way that's very protected, even down to the level of forensic attacks. Those are the kind of attacks that would go on in like a lab. And they take your device apart and use all kinds of equipment to try to extract your secrets from that device. So we use the secure element, specialized hardware, very similar to the secure enclave that you would hear about on an iOS device, for example. And then we combine that with a very secure operating environment that is available on most Android devices. So it's called Arm Trust Zone, and it's an environment that is running below the level of Android. So everything the user sees and is used to seeing in terms of the Android operating system, there's actually another operating system running below that on the device, it's a very specialized environment.Steven (09:02):It's very secure and it's called Arm trust zone. We run a trusted application within that environment that cooperates with the secure element to do all of your signing operations. So all of your key derivations from that initial seed and all of the secure signing operations, based on that. Design transactions on behalf of the wallets that are running in the Android OS. We make use of a bunch of specialized secure technologies, such as secure input and secure display. So if you have a password associated with your seed, when you type in that password, you're actually not even typing that into Android. You're typing that into a specialized OS, highly secure. It actually takes over the display temporarily. And so that when you enter your password, it's only going into environment that is secure and ready to accept it. And then once we sign a transaction on behalf of the user, we hand that back to the wallet, for example, Phantom running in the Android operating system, and then Phantom takes that and is able to submit it to the Solana blockchain for processing.Brian (10:04):That's a great overview. Thanks for that. So is it safe to say from like an end user's perspective, is this a Seed Vault, essentially bringing the same security guarantees or even more than a traditional hardware wallet would, but with kind of an added ease of use component being that it's directly embedded into your phone.Steven (10:21):So the hardware wallets are designed from the ground up to be the most secure wallets possible. And so certain design choices that they've made such as not having network connectivity on them, their air gap devices and being designed with very, very optimized hardware specifically for security means that those are pretty much the perfect devices for the security of seed storage. But as we all know, the trade off comes in terms of the user experience.Steven (10:48):Seed Vault gets us most of the way there. We get to take advantage of secure elements for seed encryption and specialized processing environments. It's still running inside a general purpose device, which does have network connectivity, although the secure environments themselves on the device, don't. So cold storage wallets are definitely going to still have a place in the ecosystem for very, very secure storage of high value assets, high value wallets, for example, but Seed Vault gets us a substantial distance closer to that on phones. And it also does it in a way that remains readily available and easy for users to use. So this is Seed Vault is very much a day to day technology that will allow the users to bring a huge amount of security to their seeds and their keys while still maintaining all the usability of an Android device.Brian (11:37):That's fantastic. I think anyone who's been around in crypto long enough deeply understands that problem between security and ease of use trade off. Can this Seed Vault handle all types of signing or is it restricted in any way as to what types of transactions or messages this can sign?Steven (11:53):For the initial launch we're focused on the Solana chain. All the operations that are built into Seed Vault are all designed, are all the cryptographic operations that are necessary for key generation, key storage, and transaction signing on. That said, like I said before, we're not building any new hardware into phones to support this. We're making use of hardware, very, very secure hardware that was already present. This is a systems integration problem. And so we're building this really, really secure and specialized system deep into the OS below the level of Android so that users can have a secure Solana experience. But there's nothing that would stop us in the future from expanding this as well. So what I would say to users is, go to Solanamobile.com. We have a wait list there, but you can also leave comments as well. So please, if other chains are an area you have an interest in, that would be a great place to let us know about it.Brian (12:45):That's fantastic. And one final point on the Seed Vault, is it possible to import or export your keys to another phone or is this sea fault tied to essentially one device?Steven (12:56):So the Seed Vault will support the standard BIT 39 seed phrases. So those 12 or 24 word seed phrases that we're all intimately familiar with. A big part of key custody is understanding the importance of protecting your own keys. And so for users who... We strongly believe in self custody of keys and secrets with the SAGA device. And so when you first set up the device, the user will be guided through a process to either create a new seed or to import an existing seed. As part of that process, we'll be guiding the user to back up, write down in some, for example, a reference card, all of the words in their seed phrase. And store that somewhere safe and secure. That seed phrase can be used to recover your seed later. If you were to get another SAGA device, it could be used to import your seed into that other device.Steven (13:47):Or if you do already have wallets elsewhere, you can use that seed to import those other wallets into the SAGA. There is a security caveat that comes with that, which is that your seed is only as secure as the least secure place you've ever stored it. So our recommendation will be for users to go and create a brand new seed when they get the SAGA device. We've built this great Seed Vault, super high secure storage capabilities. And we would really like for users to add, to create new seeds. But we also understand that users may already have many accounts set up and they may want to add existing seeds into their Seed Vault to facilitate the transfer of their assets, to a brand new seed for the device. And so we will support both importing and exporting seeds on the SAGA device.Brian (14:30):So I think that does a really great job of laying the foundation for the Seed Vault. You mentioned SAGA, the flagship phone upon all this is built. There's three other technologies though that you guys have also bringing the market here as part of SMS.Brian (14:43):One of the next ones which I want to cover is the mobile wallet adapter. I think anyone who's used Solana both from a development perspective, or if they're just an end user is very familiar with the wallet adapter that we have on web. Does a great job of normalizing all the different wallets on Solana, making it really easy to just click and you see a drop down menu and it's easy to connect to your favorite wallet. What is the mobile wallet adapter? How do you say it differs from the web wallet adapter and what can users expect to be seeing when they interact with one of these?Steven (15:12):First of all, mobile wallet adapter is actually the one technology in all of SMS that I'm personally most excited about. It's the least flashy. It's something that users will hopefully never even know exists because it's such a fundamental and basic thing that users will assume that this is just how things are supposed to work. Mobile wallet adapter is an analog of the wallet adapter on the web that we all have come to know and love. It's the communication fabric by which we're going to bind dApps and wallets on mobile devices together. So on the web, you're used to visiting some DAP, clicking that connect wallet button, seeing a popup of the available wallets that you have installed in your browser. And just picking one and just getting this seamless transaction signing experience. Unfortunately, the same thing doesn't exist today on mobile devices, either on Android or on iOS devices for the Solana chain.Steven (16:04):And that I think is the number one thing that is holding back broad mobile adoption for Solana and for Web 3.0 on mobile devices. So just like we built a protocol and a plug-in interface for wallet adapter on the web. We're building something very similar on mobile devices. We're going to have a web socket based communication protocol that allows for dApps to connect to wallets wherever they are for signing transaction purposes. And that wherever they are, I think is the big key difference between transaction signing on mobile devices versus transaction signing on laptops or desktops. With the traditional wallet adapter, there's one environment that everything operates in, the web browser. And it's a great sandbox. It's a super rich set of tools. But on mobile devices, the ecosystem is a little bit broader there. We have dApps that will run in your web browser.Steven (16:57):Any mobile friendly dApps should be able to work on your mobile Chrome, just like they would work in desktop Chrome. You've got native applications that have run on the device as well, whether those are written in Kotlin or Java on an Android device, or a cross platform framework like Darden fluter or like react native. And then you also, a natural extension from there is saying, well, we've built this great wallet on these SMS devices with Seed Vault. Why can't this be my only wallet? Why do I even need to have a different wallet on every platform that I want to use dApps on? And so part of what we're building with mobile wallet adapter is the concept of remote signing as well. We got this phone, you've got a wallet on there. It has network connectivity. It is a great user interface.Steven (17:42):This should be able to act as a remote wallet for dApps that are running on other nearby mobile devices, or even on your nearby laptops and desktops. So mobile wallet adapter is a protocol and it's a fabric that's going to bind all of these things together with the initial release of SMS. We have a reference implementation that we've built for Android, but this is an area we see expanding beyond Android as well. So the mobile wallet adapter protocol was designed to be agnostic to the platform on which it's running. Any platform that has some of these standard web technologies like web sockets, for example, would be able to participate in the mobile wallet, adapter protocol.Brian (18:19):Yeah, that's fantastic. That's super exciting for us. You hit on a couple of things there. One of which I think I could sense your excitement over, was the ability to do this remote signing on your phone. You're interacting with a web app, either on another mobile device or potentially on your laptop. Is this similar to what wallet connect is on Ethereum? I know we haven't really had wallet connect yet on Solana on a major DAP. How is this essentially handling this connection? Is there some middle man server involved? How are you guys thinking about that?Steven (18:49):In principle, it is similar to the functionality provided by wallet connect. Though, I think, we've definitely made some design decisions in the mobile wallet adapter space to make it very suitable for operation on mobile devices. We've really optimized it for local use cases. And as part of that, one of the design decisions we've made is that we shouldn't have to reach out to an intermediate server during the signing process, if the operations that you're performing are those that can be done entirely locally on the device. And so let's just to give a concrete example, you have the Phantom wallet installed on the device. Let's say you wanted to use magic Eden through your Chrome web browser on that same device, because they're both running locally, there's no reason we should have to reach out to an intermediate server to make that connection between those two parties.Steven (19:38):And so we've split up the process into two phases. The first of which we call association, which answers the question of, well, how does the magic Eden running in the browser, how does it even know what wallets are available on the device? How does it start up the wallet so that it's in front of the user and the user has context of what's happening. And then how does it create an encrypted channel through which communications can happen? And so on Android, we've done that through an intent based scheme and then a Diffy helmet key exchange, but we've built the protocol in a flexible way so that we can add additional types of association in the future.Steven (20:13):For example, we have the ability to use QR codes for association. You can imagine scanning a QR code from your mobile phone, and that would encode all the information necessary to inform the two parties of each other. Or alternatively there're other standards we want to explore like web Bluetooth, which gives you a great way to only connect to devices that are in proximity with you.Steven (20:35):So in terms of security, it means that you can have a connection that also has a locality element to it, which would be really interesting when it comes to making use of very highly secure operations, like signing with your private keys for your wallet accounts.Steven (20:50):The second half of the protocol is connections, and we use web sockets. We create an encrypted channel, and then all of the operations that a user would make use of through wallet adapter today, authorizing adapt, signing transactions, sending transactions across the network. All of that has been created in the mobile wallet adapter protocol as well. And so that said, all together, whole bunch of technology running, hopefully invisibly to the user. And we're even building a plugin for regular wallet adapter, so that dApps are able to get support from mobile wallet adapter with just extremely, extremely small amount of work. Rebuild, select the right plugins for wallet adapter, make sure your DAP is mobile web friendly, and you'll be ready to go on day one.Brian (21:34):That's great. That's very elegant too, getting rid of the middleman server in that using just the local network. Personally having been at Phantom for a while. We've sensed the frustration in the mobile scene. A little bit, a lot of wallets today are kind of forced to have these in-app browsers, just given the state of mobile phones and given the state of the mobile phone industry. One thing that Phantom has done to get around this in particular, in interacting with native dApps is deep linking. Does mobile wallet DAP have any plans for deep linking? How are you guys thinking about handling those deep linking protocols?Steven (22:07):Yep. So I think number one, I think the deep linking protocols are a very elegant solution to getting over this problem of how do we break out of the world of browsers inside of wallets? I think that the browsers inside of wallets, I believe is a very expedient solution, but I believe it's a stepping stone on the way to having dApps in wallets, as full participants on a mobile device, using the user experience, paradigms and patterns that users are used to. So standalone native applications that are able to directly communicate with each other.Steven (22:41):The deep linking protocols, I think do a great job. They're very straightforward and do a great job for the use cases local to the device. And so I view those as a complimentary to mobile wallet adapter. Mobile wallet adapter is designed to handle both those use cases as well, but also the broader use cases of on and off device. And so I think that is where mobile wallet adapter can take the ecosystem even one more step forward is through separation of the transport layer from the association layer. We're able to design for use cases that extend beyond the device and extend beyond what the deep linking protocols are currently able to accomplish today.Brian (23:21):That's great. So we hit a lot here with the mobile wallet adapter that will be impacting how dApps and wallets interact with one another. You guys are also releasing another initiative that'll be impacting dApps. You guys are dubbing at the DAP store. The big takeaway here is that there won't be these rent extracting fees of 30% of all commerce in apps from some of the big players that we all know and love. Can you touch a little more on what this DAP store is? What some of the plans are for this and how current DAP developers should be thinking about this DAP store?Steven (23:53):Sure. So I have received more questions on the DAP store. It just goes to show how excited developers are for this. We're all very, very intimately familiar with some of the difficulties that are posed by the current app store ecosystems for mobile devices, Google Play store for Android and the App Store for apple. And they primarily fall into two categories. There is the policies aspect, what am I allowed to do? What am I not allowed to do? Is my app going to be approved for the store? Or am I going to be rejected for what often feels like an arbitrary reason? And then the second part of it is the economic angle. A 30% cut of fees is a pretty hard pill to swallow. And especially when we come to some of the use cases like purchases of digital goods, 30% fee pretty much is a nail in the coffin of trying to do, for example, an NFT like an auction house or a marketplace on a device like an iPhone, for example.Steven (24:51):And the Solana DAP store... This is our opportunity to change that. Our north star on this is that once DAP is installed the any further interactions between that DAP and the user are a matter between that DAP and the user, we're not going to be getting involved with like ongoing fees or anything of that nature. And in fact, we're making our DAP store no fee. So there won't be transaction fees in the store if users want to purchase apps or applications from the store. And like I said, once it's installed any further relationships are between the DAP and the user. We're very much building this in the model of a permissionless Web 3.0 experience.Steven (25:32):Now that said, I do want to touch on one really important area, which is the curation of the catalog. In my background, I did work for a couple years on an app store for mobile devices when I was at Microsoft. And I was a young, slightly naive engineer at that point. And I didn't really think that the curation problem would be that substantial. And I think that in fact, the trust and safety aspect of app stores is probably the single most important topic to look into. So at the beginning, we are going to be curating the contents of the app store, and we're going to be doing that to make sure that the contents are both useful to users, but also there's a huge amount of trust that goes into users when they use an app store into, who is the publisher and what are they doing to protect me.Steven (26:21):And so Solana labs will be curating the contents at the initial release, but we do have aspirations to involve the community in the curation of this app catalog. The community's involvement is always a huge area for Web 3.0 in areas like DAOs, for example, and we have the same aspirations for the Solana mobile and the Solana mobile DAP store.Brian (26:45):That's great. I think that's really important that you emphasize that from the start, setting expectations like that. In our experience, crypto can be really exciting. It's this new world, but also it's very permissionless and that is a sword that cuts both ways. We've seen that firsthand being a wallet. We actually now run, I believe the biggest block list of all spam NFTs and essentially scam domains on Solana. It's a huge, huge issue. It really is important to kind of nip that in the bud, especially for new users when they're just getting acquainted with this ecosystem. And we found in our experience we turned that block list, open source. We get community contributions from that, especially every day now. And I think whenever you're able to kind of leverage the power of the end users here, the community that's using this every day, that's a really great way to handle it.Brian (27:33):So we hit on a lot here. We just covered the DAP store. We also went over the Seed Vault, which leads the foundation for SMS, and then the mobile wallet adapter, which you're super excited about. We're super excited about that as well. There's one final component to this, which is Solana Pay. I think most people are familiar with Solana Pay at this point. It was unveiled earlier in Q2, I believe of 2022. There's a couple great use cases, around this around making point of sale, a lot easier, using SPL tokens on Solana, getting rid of middleman fees once again.Brian (28:04):But I also think Solana Pay might at this point, be a bit of a misnomer. I've seen some really great use cases leveraging Solana Pay with NFT ticketing. I know the mountain pay guys have built this great photo booth where you can snap a photo and then scan with your Phantom wallet and it mints into an NFT right on your phone. And that's all running on Solana Pay behind the scenes. What do you guys have planned for Solana Pay as it relates to mobile and SMS? What can you tell us about that today?Steven (28:32):Mobile devices, we carry them everywhere with us and they've in the last few years, people have really, really started to use mobile payment technologies. You've got, on Android devices you have Google Pay for example. And so we have these perfect devices that you carry with you and people are already used to interacting with in the real world to effectuate payments. And that's really what we're looking at for SMS and Solana Pay. We're actually not making any protocol changes at all to Solana Pay with the SMS stack. Instead, what we're doing is providing guidance on how wallet should integrate Solana Pay into the Android system. For many wallets, there's actually almost nothing to do here. Wallets like Phantom, do a great job of already integrating some of these best practices into Android devices. But by providing a set of best practices, we can really make sure that there's a standardized way by which users can expect their phone to work with Solana Pay. In terms of snapping QR codes, in terms of tapping your phone on NFC readers or in terms of interacting with Solana Pay links that are generated from within the mobile web browser.Steven (29:40):And so, by providing that set of best practices and providing samples on how to integrate Solana Pay, those best practices will give us a foundation by which we can expect that all of these real world Solana Pay interactions that users are going to be using with their phones will be consistent across devices. And by making it consistent, we give to the other side of the equation, those who are working on merchant terminals, for example, we give them an understanding or a base, if you will, on which they know that if they develop some of these Solana Pay technologies, for example, QR codes or NFCS in merchant terminals. They know that there's a base of devices that can take advantage of those.Steven (30:21):And so, so much of the Solana Pay is going to be building out this whole network of providers, software providers, both on the merchant side, as well as on mobile devices to make sure that users can pay with Solana Pay in the real world. Just like they're used to paying with say their credit cards using Google Pay. And quick note, Google pay will also be supported on the SAGA device. And so users should expect that their SAGA device will be their mechanism by which they can effectuate real world payments, whether it's through Solana Pay or through traditional payment networks.Brian (30:56):That's super exciting. So I think this is a great kind of overview we just did of SMS, the whole suite of developer tools that you guys are unveiling. You've hit on this a couple times though, though, there is a flagship phone that you guys are releasing, SAGA. This is separate from SMS, but it will be powered entirely by SMS, as well as traditional things you would expect from Android devices like Google Pay, which you mentioned.Brian (31:20):Let's talk a little bit more about SAGA. What is it like? I saw Anatoli up there on stage flashing it to the crowd. It looked pretty sleek. Would you say this is something that's purely for crypto natives, can ordinary people continue to use this for their favorite apps, say like TikTok or Instagram without noticing much of a difference. How would you characterize this phone broadly?Steven (31:40):We've designed the phone for crypto natives in mind, but it is a standard Android device in every other way. And so it's going to be a full GMS device, meaning it has Chrome. It has Gmail, it has the Google Play store. It has everything that users expect an Android device to do with the SMS stack added on top. And so there's a huge amount of value here that we're going to be able to give to the Sal Solana ecosystem to degens who live and breathe their Web 3.0 in crypto. But it's also going to be a flagship Android device. It's got 12 gigs of RAM five, 12 gigs of flash. It's got the latest and greatest Qualcomm snap drag and chip set, beautiful 6.67 inch O led display everything about this looks and feels like a flagship phone.Steven (32:31):We got that device in just before the event. And so he was able to hand it around a little bit, show some people, let them touch and feel it in person. And it's an impressive device. We have a great partner in Awesome in helping us build this device. And I am thrilled. I think that I don't know that there's any other hardware partner other than Awesome, who could have helped us realize this vision the way we've been able to realize it for the SAGA device. I've had the good fortune to have a prototype. I've been working on that for the last few months and I am thrilled for when people are able to get this device and hold it in their hands. It really does feel like a super, super premium, top end deviceBrian (33:13):Jealous. You're one of the lucky few that has the actual incarnation of this right now in their hand. What is the plan to expand SMS to additional devices though? We have SAGA, I saw, there's actually a huge backlog of pre-orders on this thing. But I'm sure a lot of people are kind of thinking themselves, well, I already have this Android phone, maybe a Google Pixel or Samsung device. Or maybe there're others who there's a lot of folks probably listening to this who are on iOS devices. What is that timeline like? Is this something you think could be running on iOS one day? How are you guys thinking about rolling this out kind of across broadly across the smartphone market?Steven (33:50):So we started our conversation on SMS talking about the collection of technologies. And that's, I think is really the point to hit on here, is that SMS isn't just one technology. It's a whole series of them. And each of them have slightly different applications and slightly different system needs in terms of integrating them. So all the way at one end of the spectrum, we have Seed Vault. For example, Seed Vault really needs the phone manufacturer to be directly involved in the systems integration process. It needs access to the secure element. It needs a trusted application that can run within the secure execution environment, arm trust zone, for example. And then it needs UI baked right into the system image, privileged UI that's able to make use of those lower layers that in the secure execution environments of the device.Steven (34:40):On the other end of the spectrum, we have technologies like mobile wallet, adapter and mobile wallet adapter actually doesn't have any hardware requirements at all. It's purely a protocol system between wallets and dApps for binding them together. And so mobile wallet adapter, the specification is currently in draft for that one. We're working with our wallet and DAP partners to finalize that, make sure we can take all of the ecosystem feedback so that when we do release it, it serves as broad a set of use cases as possible.Steven (35:10):But mobile wallet adapter will actually be available and ready to use before the SAGA launches. And so over time, what it means to be an SMS device really comes down to how many of these SMS technologies are integrated into that particular device. As I was saying, some of them do need deep integration. We would have to work directly with hardware manufacturers, the Seed Vault being the primary one of those. So it's a little bit hard to from a user standpoint, SMS has a certain branding associated with it, but from a technology standpoint, there's a whole spectrum of what an SMS device could look like.Steven (35:45):In terms of specific devices, I can't comment on that other than the fact that Awesome is an amazing partner. And we just view SAGA as the first step in many steps towards bringing all of SMS to mobile users. So that Web 3.0, really has a home with the Solana ecosystem on mobile devices. And then I just did also want to hit quickly on iOS. iOS is not as open a platform as Android is. And so some of these technologies, we just don't have the capability to independently build those into an iOS device.Steven (36:18):But we do also know how much consumers love iOS devices. And there's many people who we'd have to pry their fingers apart to get their iPhones out of their hands. And so technologies like mobile wallet adapter, we're designing them to make sure that they're not Android specific. There's things in there that we can do to make sure that becomes the fabric by which dApps and wallets communicate wherever they are, including on iOS devices. And so we're not forgetting about iOS and we want to make sure that as much of SMS as possible works on as many devices as possible, whether those are Android devices or iOS devices.Brian (36:53):Well, as speaking as somebody who's had a death grip on their iOS device for probably the last decade, I have to say, I am pre-ordering one. You guys have done a great job of convincing me. So I'm going team Android just for this. I'm super excited about it.Steven (37:07):That is great news. I want to hear your entire audience find me on Twitter and tell me the exact same thing. You'll make my week.Brian (37:13):That's great. So you hit a lot here about the plan for rolling SMS. Each of the four components broadly out across the smartphone market. You did a couple times though in our conversation hint at the idea that even though this is called SMS Solana mobile stack, really this could be applicable to a broad number of blockchains across the Web 3.0 ecosystem. How are you guys thinking about that problem? Are you guys going to be focused on Solana, is your core team focused on Solana for the time being, and you're inviting others in because it's open source? Is that the general framing of that? How are you guys thinking about unveiling this to Ethereum and potentially Bitcoin one day and more broadly across the Web 3.0 space?Steven (37:52):So we have a literal mountain of work to do to deliver the best Solana experience that we can on mobile devices. And so the Solana ecosystem remains firmly our goal right now. That said, I think I'll answer your question in two ways. This is an open phone and we would never try to prevent another chain for example, from being installed on this device. So while we are focusing on Solana, this is an Android device, everything that works on Android would work here. And we would never try to stop any of the other chains from participating on this device in all the normal ways.Steven (38:26):And then the other thing I would say there is, we're always interested to hear from the community. And so I think I mentioned it earlier in the podcast, but if you do have an interest, you can always go to Solanamobile.com, please while you're there place a pre-order, that would be awesome. But you can also register your interest in other things you would like to see on this device, whether those be features for the Solana chain or if you have interest in other chains, we'd love to hear about it.Brian (38:50):That's great. And one closing question, I think this is a good segue that we always ask to our guests, given your guys' focus on the Solana ecosystem, who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?Steven (39:02):Oh, that's a good one. So there's someone that I've had an opportunity to work with TJ from Mountain Pay and he has been contributing to the Solana Pay side of the ecosystem. And as crazy as it seems some days when I wake up and say, oh, all we're doing is taking on the mobile phone industry by building SAGA. I think of what TJ is doing. He's just looked around and he looks at all the incumbents in the payment space and says, yeah, I think I want to go head on in this space.Steven (39:30):So he's a great guy. Every time I've had the opportunity to chat with him, I've always left thinking like, wow, I didn't even think about that. And he's like... So I really admire him that both for the work he's doing and as well as for the guts to take on the space that he's taking on.Brian (39:48):Yeah. I couldn't agree more. His energy is pretty electric. I don't know how he does it. He's around at all the hacker houses at Mountain Dow, he's in the crowd and then he's got his headphones on banging away on his laptop and still shipping code. But yeah, he's got a great infectious energy and I think there's no one better to be taking on the Stripes and the PayPals and the big payments giants of the world. He's someone I would want to have in my corner for sure.Brian (40:13):Well, Steven, this has been a really great conversation. Thank you for going deep on SMS. I'm super excited about it. I'm ready to pre-order my SAGA right now. Where can people go to learn more, both about SMS and yourself? You mentioned your Twitter. I want to make sure that people can find you and ping you with their stories of how you're prying their iOSs out of their hands right here.Steven (40:35):To find out more about the SAGA and about SMS hit up Solanamobile.com. We've got links in there to the Solana mobile Twitter, our discord community, discord.gg/solanamobile, as well as you can find a link to the mobile stack SDK, which is all in the open on GitHub. So I would say those are the best places to go to learn more about SMS and SAGA. Please join us in discord. We're a friendly community. I'm there. I hang out there. I answer questions there. Lots of people from my team as well. So looking forward to seeing all kinds of people from your audience, join our discord and help us build a really cool community around SMS and SAGA.Brian (41:16):I can't wait. Steven Laver. Thank you for your time. This has been great.Steven (41:20):Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Chewing Glass - Cronos

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 21, 2022 32:32

Chewing glass is what Solana developers do. Introducing the fifth episode in a new series on the Solana Podcast, Chewing Glass. Chase Barker (Developer Relations Lead at Solana Labs) talks shop with the most interesting builders in the Solana ecosystem. It's for devs, by devs.Today's guest is Cronos, an on-chain task scheduler that allows users to schedule instructions and winner of the recent Riptide Hackathon. 00:38 - Introductions01:25 - How they started 02:48 - How they met 04:26 - Who else is in Austin 05:09 - Cronos backstory 07:34 - How they started building tasks 09:11 - TLDR: what is Cronos? 13:33 - Winning the Riptide Hackathon 15:40 - How cronos came to life 18:12 - Building on solana and familiarity with other languages20:16 - Learning curve with rust 22:50 - Nick's learning curve 25:04 - Advice on learning curve 27:08 - What's missing in Solana 29:20 - Advice to new developers on Solana 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. Chase (00:38):Hey everybody. And welcome to Chewing Glass, the show where we talk to developers building in the Solana ecosystem. Today, we have Nick and Elias from Cronos, the recent winners of the Riptide Hackathon. Welcome guys. How's it going?Elias (00:50):It's going well.Nick (00:51):Yeah, great to be here.Chase (00:52):So let's start with you, Nick. What's your history? How'd you get into this whole thing?Nick (00:56):My background is basically, I worked on the payments team at Uber for about four years or so, helping build out the payroll system there. And so, was working on a lot of international banking integrations and just became very aware how broken the current legacy payment system is. Can't really even tell you the number of times I got woken up at 4:00 AM because some system failed somewhere and had to email a CSV file to some banker to push money through the system, it happens all the time.Nick (01:28):And so I heard about Solana and I had a light bulb moment really, where I realized that this thing is cheaper and faster and easier to use than any existing payment rails that I know about and so, I got quite excited about the potential for disruption there and this was all pre Solana Pay stuff. So, yeah, we dove in during the Ignition Hackathon.Chase (01:52):Oh, you did? Cool.Nick (01:53):Yeah.Chase (01:53):Yeah, I didn't realize that. I was actually, when you were talking, I was thinking in my head, I was like payments? I was like, wow, didn't even build anything on Solana Pay. So you guys were already rolling a little bit before that, so that's cool. Yeah. So Elias, how about you?Elias (02:06):I'm pretty fresh as far as experience in industry. I did have an internship in college as a data scientist in Argentina for a bit. I then transitioned into front-end development that following year and had been a front-end developer up until when I got into Solana development. But that's pretty much it.Chase (02:23):Cool. So, with all that said, you guys' backgrounds, how did you guys end up meeting each other? What's the story? Are you in the same place? You guys are in the same city? How did that work?Nick (02:34):We're both in Austin. Elias is a few minutes north of Austin. I'm kind of downtown and we meet up down here a few days a week. We basically met on Twitter last summer.Elias (02:45):Yeah. I was at Samsung before I met Nick. I was basically a site reliability engineer for this semiconductor facility here in Austin. I didn't love it. I absolutely hated it. So I was creating toy projects on GitHub just for front-end development purposes, just to better my skills, because I wasn't really progressing that well at Samsung. I was then tweeting about it and my philosophy was, well, what's the worst that could happen? Someone's going to see this and maybe look at my repo, who knows?Elias (03:13):Randomly I get a DM from this guy named Nick. He was like, "Hey, I like what you're doing. I looked at your GitHub. We're looking for front-end developers at this product studio that we have in Austin. I would love to grab a beer." And that's really where it started.Chase (03:25):Oh wow. That's awesome. I thought that stuff only happened in Web 3, but I guess it's happening outside of that too. So how did you find that tweet, Nick, in the first place?Nick (03:36):I don't remember, honestly. It's like scrolling the timeline, don't really remember what you saw 10 minutes ago. But, I think I saw Elias tweeting, maybe a GitHub link or something, saw he was a dev and I was just looking through his projects on GitHub. And, I found his resume actually and everything there was kind of focused around like Next.js and React, which we were doing a lot with at the time. And so, I figured sending a DM couldn't hurt and just kind of realized that he was based in Austin. I had just moved here, I think a week or so prior and we met up and grabbed a beer and just hit it off from there and have been working together since.Chase (04:18):Very cool. I think there's a couple other people in Austin. I believe Castle Finance is there. There's actually a pretty decent Solana builder presence at University of Texas at Austin.Nick (04:30):The [inaudible 00:04:30] team is here as well.Chase (04:31):Oh nice.Elias (04:32):I think BuffaLou is also here.Chase (04:34):BuffaLou? The famous BuffaLou is in Austin. Are we doxxing him over here?Elias (04:37):No, he's tweeted about it.Chase (04:39):I'm just kidding. So, that's pretty cool to hear the story about how you guys met. Now, let's dive into a little bit, go a little bit further. Where did this idea get birthed or what were you building? And start at Ignition and lead up to how the idea of Cronos came about.Nick (04:55):As we were saying before, we were looking at Solana initially from that perspective of payments and coming from the payments industry. And so we started in the Ignition Hackathon building an on-chain Venmo where users could send and receive invoices and pay those back on-chain. And then that kind of rolled into a token streaming service. And-Chase (05:16):Was that called Cronos or did it have a name at the point in time?Nick (05:20):Yeah, that was called Factor at the time. What we were specializing on was the use cases of subscription payments and payroll. And specifically we were trying to figure out how to schedule token transfers because it's kind of these inefficiencies in the vesting contract model where the sender has to lock up future payments up front into investing contract. So there's some inefficiency there. And the receiver has to go out of the way to claim from the vesting contract. So we thought if we could schedule token transfers, maybe that would be a better user experience.Nick (05:52):And we were working on that for a few months, got the whole system up and running. And then around February 1st, 2022, when mtnDAO was taking off, we realized that we could generalize that protocol from only supporting token transfers to being able to automate any arbitrary instruction. And from there it just took on a life of its own.Chase (06:14):So you guys were at mtnDAO?Nick (06:16):Yeah, I was at mtnDAO before it was mtnDAO. There was a version of it in 2021 called Mountain Compound. It was way smaller, but it was 14 of us, or so, just locked down in a house, trying to escape COVID, in Salt Lake City. And that was where I first met Edgar and Barrett. Barrett, at the time, was already working on Solana and Edgar and I were working on separate startups, but I think we both got the Solana pill during that time.Chase (06:47):Man. Wasn't expecting that one. That's a really cool story, actually. Those guys are involved in red-pilling a lot of people on to Solana, so I'm always happy to hear these stories. They just keep coming up randomly wherever I go.Nick (06:58):Yeah.Chase (07:00):Yeah, so that's awesome. So when you were building this payment stuff, the idea came around at mtnDAO, and that was, or right at the beginning-ish, I think, of Riptide. TJ was just on the show. That's when he started to talk about building out mtnPay. So you guys were like, "okay, we were doing payments, we just came up with this thing. We think we have solved a really big problem and we're going to build this out." Tell me a little bit more about that.Nick (07:25):Yeah, it started with just a proof of concept. So we just had this basic question of, can you even schedule arbitrary instructions on-chain? And how do you do that? So we started by building a basic Anchor program where users could create tasks and each task is a different account. And inside those accounts we would store serialized instruction data with a schedule.Nick (07:50):We basically had set up a separate off-chain bot process, also written in Rust, but using the RPC client. Which basically watched for task accounts and then would trigger transactions whenever the tasks came due. And we found that we could invoke those inner instructions as CPIs and that then unlocked this whole like, okay, we can schedule any arbitrary instruction.Elias (08:15):Yeah. I remember whenever he called me on our sync, I think it was on Monday because he built the proof of concept during the weekend. He told me, "you know, we have Factor and it's really cool, but imagine if we just generalized it to allow for any arbitrary instruction." And I was like, "Oh. Yeah, let's do that. That's a good idea."Chase (08:33):Yeah, I was really stoked. I remember seeing it the first time and I saw what it was and I was like, "Wow, people are really going to like this." By the way you guys are both technical founders. You both built out Cronos, correct?Nick (08:45):Yeah, correct.Nick (08:46):Mostly Nick, let me just... Mostly Nick.Chase (08:49):Actually, this is probably a good point to talk about what Cronos actually is officially. Like a TLDR for everybody watching. What you guys built and how it actually works at a high level?Nick (09:01):The basic concept is, it's just a keeper network for Solana. Every blockchain, at least that we're aware of right now, has this fundamental limitation and that's, you can't schedule transactions with a validator network and there's a few different reasons why that's the case. But it creates challenges for teams that have background jobs or tasks that they need to run just to make their programs work. And so, what Cronos is, is a keeper network to be able to facilitate that and service that. But the main difference is that we're kind of turning the Solana validators into the keepers for the system rather than relying on some external, off-chain, opaque bot network. And so that's required a lot of deep integration with the validator codebase in order to enable that.Chase (09:48):That is actually very, very cool. I wasn't officially, 100% certain how it worked. So you're using the validators as the keeper network to run these jobs on the network?Nick (09:58):Yeah, exactly. Our v1, proof of concept version was not integrated into the validator network. Hadn't even had that idea at the time, really.Elias (10:08):I didn't even know we could do that, knowing that we can just build a plugin for validators. Pretty cool.Nick (10:13):Yeah, it was around the same time we were building that initial bot that we started seeing some tweets about the account's DB plugin framework. And that has since been renamed to Geyser plugin framework and we just realized that there was all these scaling problems when you rely on these off-chain bots and that they have to submit transactions through the RPC network. And that can take up a whole bunch of bandwidth and you have to compete with other traffic to get those transactions through. And we realized there was this interface that Solana was providing, and the Geyser plugin framework, that we could actually spawn transactions from there. And it was much more efficient and made the system a lot more reliable. And so we basically copy pasted our bot code into the Geyser plugin framework and it mostly just worked out of the box.Chase (11:01):Oh wow. And that's quite unusual. For things that just work. So did you guys actually have to work with the validator community or did you guys have ever set up or run a validator? What's your knowledge there?Nick (11:12):Yeah, we have a few nodes that we got through the Solana server program, which that is a very useful program, if there's anyone that's looking to set up a node on Solana. And we have some servers running on DevNet and Testnet right now, that we're using to stress test the system. But yeah, we've been reaching out to all the node operators we can to talk with them and we're looking to get this thing rolled out on DevNet and Testnet quite soon. And actually, by the time this is published, it should be out on DevNet and Testnet, and we'll have quite a few integrations going on those networks.Chase (11:49):Yeah. I'm not going to lie. So like just leading in the sense, congratulations, you guys won the Riptide Hackathon. This was super incredible. And for me personally, I was so insanely excited to see some tooling win because this is just... developers need this tooling and to see that people watching a hackathon and a lot of these other, in the past, DeFi protocols, which are amazing out there, winning, but to see developer tooling take the grand prize, says a lot about what you guys had built and what the judges thought of it. So, that's quite amazing. So congratulations. But tell me, what was that like? Were you guys, have any idea, any expectations? Like what was your thoughts going through all that?Nick (12:33):Man. Yeah, there was a lot going on at the time, even, even outside the Riptide Hackathon. It was quite a journey, I think, to get here. Cronos was what we wish we had when we were building Factor. We came upon the idea for Cronos because we were trying to build Factor, this scheduled token transfer service. And we're like, "how do you schedule a timer on-chain?" And then we found out you couldn't schedule a timer on-chain, there just isn't a way. So we were talking to some other teams and I think it was, he goes by DoctorBlocks, at Switchboard. He described for us what a Crank function was and how they were running their automations. And from there we just started pulling on that thread and realized that here was all this dev tooling that was missing that we could build out and just started running with it.Chase (13:22):Were you expecting to win the grand prize of the hackathon? How did you react whenever you actually found out that you guys had won that thing? Was there-Nick (13:30):I didn't know we were going to win. We had been getting tips from a few people that we were on these ever shorter shortlists, but we didn't know until the moment of, that the blog post went out, someone sent it to me and then a moment later, Twitter started blowing up. And from there it was just a flood of inbound messages coming in from all directions. And last few weeks have been a lot of dealing with that.Elias (13:57):Yeah. A lot of dealing about knowing what is spam and what isn't from people it's pretty difficult to do.Chase (14:03):So did you guys celebrate, did you guys go out for beers? Like you did the first time you met? Did you do anything?Elias (14:08):Sure did.Nick (14:09):Yeah.Chase (14:11):That's awesome, man. Like I said, it's really great to see some developer tooling win and that value in that. Whenever I started at Solana Labs, like a year ago, there was no developer tooling out there. This was like... Then comes Armani and then here's Anchor. And then now we have all these indexers and then now we have Cronos and they just keep piling on. And eventually we're going to reach a place where every little narrow gap is covered and developers are going to be able to just jump in and do all the things that they could do in Web 2, in Web 3 and it's going to be a huge game changer for everybody. Not quite there, or we're pretty far off from there, I would say. Every tool like this really, really matters.Elias (14:51):To piggyback off that, the most exciting part about this job is not only building it and dealing with really interesting engineering problems, but knowing the impact that it will have to developers and how empowering it is to allow them to automate things on-chain. That's a pretty wild idea. So I'm really excited for that.Chase (15:09):Yeah and I think that's why a lot of engineers get into building out developer tooling instead of products because they're engineers themselves. And they're like, "man, if I was like on the other end of this and somebody built this tool, I'd be so stoked." And how many people that outwardly impacts is probably just a really incredible feeling. And it's just really awesome. So sorry, Factor, but I'm glad that Cronos ended up winning. By the way, is Factor just kind of sitting on a shelf somewhere right now, never to be reopened again?Nick (15:38):Yeah. We, we kind of just rolled Factor into Cronos. Actually the Twitter account is the same Twitter. We just changed the name now.Chase (15:46):Nice. Okay. So it's dead.Nick (15:48):Yeah.Elias (15:49):Dead, but very much alive.Nick (15:51):Yeah.Chase (15:52):Yeah. If Cronos would've never came alive, you would've been sitting at the mtnDAO with TJ, directly competing against each other. So, that's awesome. So basically two of these projects were the winning of the payments track and then the grand champion of Riptide. They both came out of mtnDAO. Every time I hear about mtnDAO and we talk about this, it's one more reason why understanding how incredible it was out there and how many builders were out there building really cool stuff.Elias (16:20):Yeah, the community in Salt Lake was amazing just knowing that you were in the same boat with all these developers. Either just getting into Solana or being in it just recently. Learning Rust and learning the runtime environment and what is possible on Solana is really crazy. And everyone was trying to help each other and answered questions. And if you didn't know the answer, they would direct you to somebody else. And everyone's just like, "yeah, let me help you with this," which is my favorite part about that.Nick (16:48):Yeah, it's been really cool to see communities pop up. Also happening right now is like AthensDAO in Greece. And unfortunately we weren't able to make it there, but I think we'll see, over the coming months, a few more of these communities start to pop up that are a bit more like longer running than just the kind of week long hacker house format.Chase (17:06):Yeah. I'm a big fan of the community run hacker houses and all these sorts of things like mtnDAO, just because whenever it's built out with the community like that, it just forms this other type of bond with everybody and it's just really exciting to see all that happen.Chase (17:23):This is the point in the show where we shift gears a little bit. We talked about that excitement, how Cronos came alive, you guys winning Riptide and now I want to talk about what that experience was like for you guys. Because this is the very important part of this show where we talk about what sucked and what was good and what could be better. So, I want to start with Elias this time. You came from a front-end engineering background? What's actually the languages that you had touched before you came to start building on Solana?Elias (17:58):Even before I was a front-end developer, I was dabbling in data science for a bit. It was a lot of fun, but a bit too meticulous for my taste. So I was dealing with a lot of Python. Fast forward to when I graduate, I was really interested in front-end development, got pretty good at helping with some friends and building toy applications and TypeScript React, some toy web apps with Next.js. And then that's whenever, like I said, met Nick, joined the team and I was building front-end applications for a while at, like, six months. And then I found, like a lot of people who started their Web 3 journey, Nader Dabit's Ethereum article on how to... It was like a super simple... I forget exactly the context of what the project was, but it was on dev.to. And read through it and tried to understand what is this environment? What is this dev environment? What's going on? Not too long after I found Solana and Nick also brought it up, was like, "Hey, we should maybe look into this." And then-Chase (18:53):Did you do Dabit's tutorial on Solana too?Elias (18:55):I did. Yeah, I did. Yeah.Chase (18:56):Yeah.Elias (18:57):It was a lot simpler. I don't know. But also more difficult in some ways. When we were working on Factor, Nick gave me the talk like, "Hey, we may not need front-end developers. So there's a chance that I need you to flex over to becoming a Rust engineer, which is, you know-Chase (19:13):So he didn't fire you?Elias (19:15):No, no he did not. Luckily. Yeah. So fast forward to like mtnDAO when we know finally realize Cronos has a lot of potential. I buy the book that a lot of people seem to have and I have it on my desk right here, the programming Rust book. And it's been my north star, I would say, as far as growing my skills as a Rust engineer, as well as living in the Solana repo and Anchor repos.Chase (19:39):So you guys are building this in straight Rust? Are you guys also using Anchor?Elias (19:44):Yeah. So in the core of Cronos, it's a lot of Anchor. A lot of what I deal with, I'm building and optimizing the Geyser plugin that we have to listen to Cronos accounts and execute tasks when needed. That's just built in Rust and other like asynchronous libraries and things like that, but not Anchor specifically.Chase (20:03):This is the part, the glass chewing, what was your learning curve during that process of learning Rust coming from front-end? Was it as painful as everybody says? Everybody's different on this front, so what was that like to learn Rust?Elias (20:16):A big mistake that I would advise people attempting to get into the space would be first of all, just learn Rust by itself first. At least start there and understand that it is different from Anchor. And it's just a framework that lives with Rust. And then try to understand the Solana runtime just a little bit. And those are three separate entities, but they all coexist and you need the three in order to make a simple to do app in Rust on-chain. So differentiating between those three different entities is really important. And if you just jump straight into a Solana Anchor project, not knowing Rush, you're going to get really confused and pretty frustrated.Chase (20:52):So for you, was it hard or was it just time consuming? You just had to grind it out and you learned along the way?Elias (20:58):Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those things that you just have to do every day. You have to, you know, for me every morning before we would go to the mtnDAO-Chase (21:06):Glass for breakfast.Elias (21:07):Yeah, I would literally just sit on the couch and wait for Nick to finish showering before we drove to the office. And I would just read a chapter of the programming Rush book and it would just go over super simple things like structs and basic functions. And if you're a software engineer, it's not too difficult to transition into Rust, it's just another programming language just in the different context. And it looks a little weird with two semicolons next to each other or whatever, syntax. But it's not too bad. One of those things you just got to do every day. And then before you know it, you'll just hit the road running. It's pretty nice.Chase (21:39):I think a lot of people talk about chewing glass, like it's actually Solana, that's the real glass chewing, about learning the native concepts, like using PDAs and these things. And there are people out there who just don't ever end up learning Rust and they never actually tried it. They never just sat down and did it. You could get a little bit resistant to it just because it looks so foreign.Chase (22:00):And then the other part is, I've done a couple of Twitter Spaces around this exact same thing about you saying start with Rust. That's my recommendation always start with the base layer before you're using any sort of framework or anything that's intertwined in it, but there are people out there on the other side of the camp that say, just start with Anchor. I obviously disagree, because I think learning that first base language is always going to be the best. And it's going to save you down the road when you're running into issues.Chase (22:27):I'm going to go ahead and ask you Nick, kind of the same question, what your experience was like? What did you do to learn it? Was it similar to Elias? Was it hard? Was it easy? Was it just time consuming? What would that look like?Nick (22:39):I had some background working in back-end systems. Yeah, for my time out in California, I had worked mostly with Go prior and actually first tried picking up Rust in 2020, because I'd seen it was the most popular language on GitHub and it was just like, what is this? And I actually hated it the first time I looked at it because I was coming from that Go world. And Go is designed to be super ergonomic and easy to read and talk about and communicate and Rust is more optimized for performance,Chase (23:13):Performance and pain.Nick (23:16):Yeah. And so I hated Rust when I first looked at it, and I pushed it off to the side and didn't actually look at it again until we dove into Solana. I've since come to love it. It is a little bit steeper of a learning curve and there are some extra pieces to the mental model that you need, in terms of understanding memory and ownership of variables and how all that stuff works, lifetimes, for example, that other languages don't have. So that makes it a little more complicated or harder to learn. But it's not anything that can't be overcome, I think. It's just another programming language.Nick (23:50):But yeah, definitely breaking apart, as Elias said, the difference between Rust problems, Anchor problems and Solana problems and understanding that these are all like three different systems is probably the hardest thing when you're first diving into Solana because it all looks the same and all the error messages are cryptic and if you don't have a whole lot of debugging experience, it can be hard to pull that thread because all this stuff is quite new and a lot of devs, I think have the pattern of, you get an error message you don't understand, copy it in a Google and see what Stack Overflow results come up. Usually we're running into problems that no other devs have run into yet. And it's just like-Chase (24:28):It's actually pretty cool though. Like to be one of the first group of people on the planet. You guys are going to be the ones who answer these Stack Overflow questions in the future because that always starts somewhere. The first guy had to just figure it out.Elias (24:40):It's cool, but you're like, "I don't know what to do now." I guess we're just going to have to figure it out. So that's where I would just go to the Solana codebase and Nick has recommended multiple times. Just go live in there, you'll understand the runtime environment better, your errors will be easier to debug. It's a lot. The Solana codebase is a lot, but there are parts of it that really help you understand what is going on underneath.Chase (25:03):A lot of people come from Web 2, and again, I'm one of those people. We're used to having our hands held. We're used to being able to find the answers we want. We're used to all these pretty, amazing tutorials and all these different things. And when that's not the case, it makes it a lot harder. Sadly enough, not everybody's this reverse engineering code diver that's going to go do that sort of thing. And it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and sometimes, at the end of the day, there might not be considered the greatest payoff for all that work. But the true engineers, the ones who just like to figure shit out, are going to go do that and then they're going to figure it out and then they're going to build Cronos. So it's awesome.Nick (25:43):It's definitely how you know you're on the bleeding edge, is when Google doesn't come up with any results for your error message.Chase (25:49):Zero results.Nick (25:51):Yeah.Elias (25:52):The beautiful, no search results for that Google search and like, well, okay cool. Like whatever.Nick (25:57):Yeah. I Would say to any devs that find themselves in this situation, the Anchor discord in particular is my new Google for trying to find solutions to these problems. And usually, 70% of the time, someone has asked about some of the error problems like we're running into in the Anchor discord somewhere. And there's been someone that is able to chime in and help and Armani and the team that's there is extremely helpful in terms of answering questions and generous with their time.Chase (26:27):And Alan and everybody that's out there and Jacob who's on our DevRel team and Donny. There's so many people and these are guys that are actually working on like Serum and Anchor and Solana Labs and all that stuff. But outside of that, the community of people just helping each other solve these problems, it's amazing to watch it happen in real life.Chase (26:48):We've been going on for a while now and I want both of you, if you can, to tell me what is missing from Solana right now, like in tooling? You guys just created one that was missing, where you were seeing a lot of tooling come out.Elias (26:59):I have one.Chase (27:00):Okay. All right, we'll start with you Elias. What are we missing right now?Elias (27:04):I'm probably stealing this from Matt because he's probably thinking about it, but one thing we've ran into recently is DevOps pipelining. It's pretty difficult to handle versioning from so many different projects. And when we're developing, we're having to stay ahead of Mainnet and work on Testnet and it's a very complicated, and different projects do it differently, but right now in our repo, we have a forked version of Anchor just so that we have up-to-date versions of Anchor, but using some different-Nick (27:32):The latest Solana dependency versions.Elias (27:34):Yes. So that right now is something that we have to build, but if there's a way to do that at scale for a lot of other teams, that'd be great.Chase (27:41):Yeah, that's not the first time I've heard that one, but that's a good one. I hear it just because I'm always paying attention to a lot of different places, but I don't know if everybody, except the ones who are coming into this problem actually know that this is something that's kind of necessary. It's not one of the ones that people are most vocal about. It's usually error codes and indexers and all these things. So Nick, did Elias steal yours or do you got something else for us?Nick (28:05):No, I think that's a great one. There's, at least for what we're doing, where we have both on-chain programs and a plugin, that we're trying to ship DevOps challenges around keeping the versions in sync between those two pieces can be challenging. And then, I guess something that's been on my mind a little bit is how there was a DeGit project in the Riptide Hackathon, decentralized Git, which I think, stuff in that space like decentralized DevOps processes and how does a decentralized global team of engineers contribute to a protocol and how do you keep the community open, but also secure, is, I think, an unsolved problem at this point.Chase (28:50):Well, I look forward to the Cronos team actually building out this suite of tools, all of it.Nick (28:56):A few pieces, but yeah.Chase (28:58):Yeah. So I usually wrap these shows up just asking what advice would you give to somebody who's thinking, on the other side, "Hmm, maybe I'm about to jump into Solana. I'm not sure if I want to put in the effort to build something." What general advice would you give somebody who was going to build or is building on Solana right now?Elias (29:17):If you're frustrated with learning Rust, but you're really wanting to build on Solana, then you're doing it right. You're not doing it right if you're not frustrated, that's the chewing glass part.Chase (29:27):Yeah.Elias (29:27):Just keep going. Because at some point you'll be able to look at other projects and their smart contracts and go, "oh, I see what they're doing." Like right now I'm looking at the Holaplex, that's called RabbitMQ plugin or Geyser plugin, shout out to the Holaplex team, and trying to understand why they made certain engineering designs with their plugin and see what we can take from. And that's just the beauty of open source of course. But yeah, if I wasn't chewing glass consistently and I wasn't looking at code and other repos, then I wouldn't be able to do that.Chase (29:58):Yeah. That's awesome. And like it is, I wish everybody would start open sourcing their code out there, but we'll get there eventually. How about you Nick, what kind of advice do you have? And again, we've kind of talked about a few good ideas for the community, so what do you think?Nick (30:13):Yeah, I think probably two things, as Elias mentioned, spending time in the Solana repo, it's helped a lot. There's a lot of patterns in there that, if you're trying to get familiar with Rust, it's a great resource to learn from. And the second thing is to actually read the error messages that you get back, because when you actually pull on that thread, they are very cryptic error messages a lot of times, but they do have information that leads you to the bug and the problem or points you in the right direction, maybe is the best way to put it. I find that skill, that debugging skill is like a muscle that needs to be trained and learned and doesn't always come supernaturally, because it's just hard. But yeah, reading error messages and trying to decipher what they're telling you is a fundamental exercise to dealing with large complex systems.Chase (31:10):Yeah, and it's also just a really cool skillset to have, to be able to just do these manual debugging stuff. Yeah. Like you said it becomes like a natural kind of mental muscle that all of a sudden, now it just happens quite naturally, once you get to a certain point.Elias (31:23):Yeah. One thing for those interested in just in general, distributed systems, trying to understand Solana a little bit better from a higher level, there's a great YouTube course from MIT. If you just search "distributed systems MIT", it's an OpenCourseWare, like 12 lecture series, just to understand like RPCs, multi-threading, concurrency, consensus and things like that. It's really beneficial to understanding distributed systems, blockchains, well, not necessarily blockchains, but at least for Solana distributed systems.Chase (31:55):Awesome. Yeah. There's a lot of people that come into blockchain and they don't even really know what a distributed system is. And then a lot of the times it's like, hey, go actually read about like what this thing is before diving into this.Chase (32:07):All right guys. Well really, really, thanks for coming on the show. I'm glad that we got to catch up. Congratulations winning Riptide. I'll talk to you later.Nick (32:16):Yeah. Well see you in Austin.Elias (32:17):Sounds good. Yeah, see you in Austin.Chase (32:19):All right. Cheers.

Chewing Glass - T.J. Littlejohn

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2022 30:39

Chewing glass is what Solana developers do. Introducing the fifth episode in a new series on the Solana Podcast, Chewing Glass. Chase Barker (Developer Relations Lead at Solana Labs) talks shop with the most interesting builders in the Solana ecosystem. It's for devs, by devs.Today's guest is T.J. Littlejohn, the founder of MtnPay, which won 1st Prize in the Payments Track of the recent Riptide Hackathon. 01:30 - Origin Story and Background05:12 - MntDAO08:42 - Building with Solana12:04 - MntPay13:25 - The APIs15:43 - Winning at Riptide17:37 - From starting in Solana to winning 20:41 - Starting to build in Solana23:38 - Improving onboarding on Solana25:26 - The Developer ecosystem27:07 - Missing Tooling29:30 - Advice for newcomers 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. Chase (00:29):Hey everybody and welcome to Chewing Glass, the show where we talk to developers building in the Solana Ecosystem. Today we have with us, TJ LittleJohn. He is the founder of mtnPay, winner of the most recent Solana Hackathon Payments Track for Riptide. TJ, how's it going, man?TJ (00:55):Dude, it's going good. We're stoked to be here. Thanks for having me on.Chase (01:00):Yeah, man. You and I basically met, I feel like a few months ago when you were building some stuff for iOS. Basically some IDL stuff with Anchor and we were talking about potentially getting you some work going on and then next thing you know, a couple of things happen and here we are. But before we dive too much into that, let's hear a little introduction. I know a lot of people probably don't know a ton about you. Where'd you start your journey and how'd you end up here, building in the Solana Ecosystem?TJ (01:31):Yeah. Wow. For sure. Abridged version. So, I'm from Florida originally born and raised. Grew up in South Florida, went to school in Tallahassee, Florida State Granoles. Originally I was a big Math guy. Always wanted to do pure Math and trying to see how I could make a career out of that. Finance was an option. And so I was exploring that and someone told me I should learn to code. So, I started learning to code, from that found Hackathons, from that found iOS development. And just down the rabbit hole there. At a hackathon, I ended up securing an internship at Apple, which turned into a job. And then I spent four years there doing research and development and experience prototyping. And then about a year ago I decided I was done with that and I wanted to be in startups. And so I left, joined a startup. Five months after that I found Solana through some friends and I just noticed the point in time we were at. And I was just stoked. And so I quit and I just immediately started building.Chase (02:36):Wow. So you don't have a CS degree, you're self-taught programmer and landed an internship at Apple dealing on the development side of things?TJ (02:44):No, I do have a CS degree.Chase (02:46):Oh, you do?TJ (02:46):So, I did both. I did Math and CS, but the CS portion to me was the less interesting one. I loved pure Math. I thought it was so cool. CS was more of the necessity one. And then I thought it was cool when I started doing it. But I think I learned a lot more through just the apps I built outside of class. So, partially self-taught. Because that was the more important part, but my education was super important too.Chase (03:13):You have a CS degree, you ended up interning for Apple. You did that for how long was it again?TJ (03:20):It was four years.Chase (03:22):Four years. And you said research, were you actually doing development while you were there?TJ (03:26):Yeah, so we did data collection for new products. So think how face ID was trained on millions of images. We built the software to facilitate those user studies that captured the data to train the models, to enable face ID. So we were brought in super early product.Chase (03:44):Oh, so I mean, I guess that's a little more interesting, like somebody who's into Math, you're dealing with lots of data and information, or opposed to just writing a high level code or something like that.TJ (03:55):Not exactly. The Math thing, it's like pure Math. I don't do with data and numbers and processing. I just think pure Math is fucking cool. And when I have an itch about something, I just want to dive. And so, that was the Math thing for me. That was just pure. I love it and I think it taught me how to understand stuff, which I think I still, every now and then, I'll see, I have the power to do that, which is really cool. The thing with Apple was that it let me just hack on shit. I had month long projects and software efforts that, because I get bored really quick, which is a blessing and a curse. Historically. Apple just let me work on a project and then a month later I was working on something else.Chase (04:41):Yeah, we've had some conversations, like you said, you get bored really quick, it comes through a little bit in your personality. You get super excited about things and bounce around and that's why I like your energy, it's super crazy and incredible. So it's nice to have people so excited about these things and especially considering the fact of some of the more recent, great things that have happened. I want to really start this whole conversation outside of your past on where it all truly, truly began, which from what I understand was really mtnDAO. That's like, lit this whole fire off. I don't know if everybody knows about it and if they do, maybe not how great of a thing that it turned out to be. Maybe about Barrett and Edgar and what they set up and how it was and then how that whole month went for you, that led to this moment.TJ (05:31):So yeah, mtnDAO, for people that don't know was a month long hacker house in Salt Lake City, Utah, where people from all over just congregated and we spent a month working on whatever it is you want to work on, in this co-working space called The Shop. And like you said, Edgar and Barrett, they're actually the ones that got me into Solana. They were the first people to introduce me and they just threw this hack house to grow the ecosystem out of the kindness of their own hearts and love for co-working and developing and hacking. And so yeah, a bunch of us came through and we just were chilling in Utah. We'd go snowboarding on the weekends. We'd throw parties on Fridays and bring in people from around the City and just strips, just get after it.And that was the best part. We'd be working from like 10:00, 11:00 AM was when I would roll in till like 1:00, 2:00 in the morning, most days. And a good crew of people were always there doing that too. Maybe if you wanted to go grab dinner, you could and people would come back. But yeah, it was just a lot of incredibly focused work and a nice little crew formed out of that. And so I've seen a lot of the same mtnDAO folks at the next hacker houses and stuff, and that's always fun. And you just become friends with these people.Chase (06:51):Yeah, it seems like there was a lot of building going on. I'm not going to lie, I saw that notion that Edgar and Barrett, or I think it might have been Edgar, correct me if I'm wrong, put together this notion. And I was like, a Dev did this? Just because it was so organized and well put together. And then, those guys pretty much put this thing, from start to finish, got this thing going.TJ (07:09):Yeah. There was a lot of people that participated in the setup of it. I know Sam had a big part, Edgar and Barrett had a big part. A lot of those core Salt Lake City people were doing this stuff. But yeah. I mean, they took out the trash. There was, under the tables the first day, taping extension cords. So they, I mean, yeah, they did the stuff.Chase (07:28):Yeah. I talked to him in Miami and he was like, yeah, I have a room and an office that's filled with about a hundred monitors. I can't remember what it is at some point, but it looked like there was tons of building going on there. Whenever I see the community, they didn't really ask for permission. And a lot of people would say, why don't you bring a hacker house to our city or this or that? And the reality is, you don't need that. You have an idea, you execute, you make it known. And people are going to come there and you're probably going to likely get some sponsors to help you put it on because this is like an incubator. And obviously mtnPay came out of this, which is incredible. Let's talk a little bit about that. I'm pretty sure, maybe I'm wrong, is that Solana Pay, was it announced before you got to mtnDAO? Or was it announced while you were there?TJ (08:13):It was actually the same day. February 1st is when I rolled through.Chase (08:19):I was on a phone call with you actually, whenever you showed up, you remember that?TJ (08:22):Really?Chase (08:23):Yeah, you were like, I just got to mtnDAO. Yeah. We were...TJ (08:27):I probably called you from the airport. Yeah. I've been like--Chase (08:29):You did.TJ (08:30):Probably over-committing myself. And I remember we were talking about doing a possible grant or something for that IDL stuff. And I was like, just trying to not lose that. Not doing my end of it. You were like, TJ, if you just write a notion page on your idea, I can move it through. And I was like, ah, I don't know. I'm building. And yeah. So we never got through there, but yeah.Chase (08:55):Well, I think it worked out pretty well. So, you got there, Solana Pay's announced, and you were just like, okay, well I'm just going to build something with this.TJ (09:04):No, not at all.Chase (09:06):Okay.TJ (09:07):There was two funny touch points with Solana Pay that got me rolling. The first one was, I hopped out of mtnDAO to go to the LA hacker house for a two day stint, because I was working with these people. And then as I was about to leave, I remember my friend Greg from Solana News was like, I missed the news cycle on Solana Pay. They must have had insider information, that was a couple of days after it was announced. And I was like, what do you mean, dude? It's been going on. He's like, what? I'm like, yeah. Are you not on Twitter? Do you not see this stuff? So, that was funny.And so, that had top of mind a little bit, but the idea for mtnPay, it was Friday night, it was the night of the first party we were having, we had parties every Friday or Saturday. And I was grabbing a Red Bull from, they had this self-service checkout kiosk, as I do. I just consume just stupid amounts of Red Bull. And I was buying another one and you pay through square, tap your phone. I don't know. I just had a random idea that it was like, yo, wouldn't it be hilarious if we rebuilt this self checkout experience and then just added the Solana Pay stuff, because we're all Solana people here for a month, this the first week and that would just be funny.And I told him, I was like, I'm just going to do it. And they're like, that's hilarious. Do it. And then so on Sunday, my boy Scott was in town and we were at the hacker house just trying to think of things to work on for Riptide. And we were skating through all these different ideas on creator tokens or I don't remember all the different things. And it was like, what if we do that Point of Sale thing? That'd be cool. And whatever, we could probably build this in a two day stint. Not a big deal and yeah, that's why we built it.Chase (11:00):Yeah, I remember starting to see a couple of days after Solana Pay launched, I started to see all these videos of people filming themselves and you guys paying with Solana Pay. I was like, this is crazy. This just came out. I can't believe, well, I could believe that you had put that together already. And then from there, Solana Pay's really gained a ton of traction, but you were really the first person to come out and be like, look, hey guys, I did it. And it's actually live in this place right now. And it's still there to this day? They keep that?TJ (11:32):Yeah. As far as I know. Our customer success could use some work. And so I haven't followed up with them in a couple weeks. But we got them set up on our new version, which was a more self-service thing. So as far as I know, it's still running there. There's even a week where it wasn't working and Barrett was texting me nonstop. Like, bro, you need to get this working again because I need this. And so, that's that classic, build something, people would be upset if it goes away. And so we did that.Chase (12:01):Yeah. So you did this in a short amount of time and since then, there was a lot left in the hackathon to go. So, since that first day or that you got that live, I guess you've been doing a ton of work up until the point where you made your final submission, tell us a little bit about mtnPay and what work was involved and what are the features and maybe what's the future of mtnPay.TJ (12:30):Yeah, for sure. So the first half the gate was just, it's an iOS Point of Sale app that enables users to use Solana Pay to pay. And then the second thing is a square integration. So, we use the square APIs to tie it into your current Point of Sale System. So the transactions show up in line. Chase bought a Red Bull here for $3 with his MasterCard and then he bought a cookie for a dollar using Solana Pay. And so that was the core thing. And we had built it specifically for The Shop. We got a bunch of inbound of like, how can I set this up? How can I do it? So we had to take a step back and use a couple weeks to make it more robust and actually usable in self-service. Which was our base for what we wanted to submit to the hackathon, was just like a usable Point of Sale by everyone, it's still in test flight.And then Solana Pay evolved to a new spec while we were there. And then immediately became gas on that. And ever since the wheels have been turning there and then that initial spec change is what led us to where we are today, which is honestly, and not a lot of people know this, but we're more of an API company now. We're more like SaaS APIs and stuff like that.Chase (13:43):I guess, doing the API side makes it a little more versatile so that anybody can use it and they don't have to use a specific device or framework or anything like that.TJ (13:55):Yeah. I think the APIs, to be honest, they came more out of this idea of defensibility, because with a lot of the attention we got, it was like, what's the opportunity here? Is there something worth building out? And in that, there's a lot of things that could make you super existential, like just square adding Solana pay themselves. And so how do we actually build a moat in this industry or something. And so we were like, this transaction request thing came up, which enables you to use APIs in Solana Pay, what if we open that up to people and then let that be our defensibility and our moat. And so we spent a lot of time thinking about what that API suite would look like and then realize that, that's the bigger opportunity from our point of view, but probably more importantly, it's what we want to build in this space.I think there's a lot of opportunities for a lot of people to participate and building out the client that people would use. There's also a lot of stuff that we weren't interested in building. Like inventory management and tax reporting and accounting. Like, nah. I want to do the Solana stuff. And the APIs is the Solana stuff. And so that's where we're at now.Chase (15:08):Now. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Here's the thing, you build a project and you don't want to start taking on things that you don't enjoy because then you probably stop enjoying your job. So you do what excites you and then you offload or allow connection points for other people to build that stuff who see that opportunity. But it makes a lot of sense. I've talked to people who have created businesses and then they pull in, maybe not this specifically, but like the tax stuff and all these different sort of inventory management. And then it becomes like, I don't really like this anymore. This is not what I signed up for.TJ (15:42):That's what was happening. And so it was like, really I had to focus on something specifically in there and that's, we picked the APIs and it's been cool. We've been working with different protocols to add their functionality to our APIs. And yeah, it's been fun since we started focusing there.Chase (16:04):So obviously it was the right move because you, just to circle back to this is, you won the Payments Track of the Riptide Hackathon. There was a lot of competition. There was a lot of good stuff in there. So I'm just curious, how did that feel when you saw that?TJ (16:18):I'm dumb competitive. And so it was so funny because it was like, it started off as people are, oh, you going to submit this to Riptide? And it was like, yeah, probably, but we're not really focused on that. And the closer we got to Riptide, we're like, we want to win. And then so we had been paying a lot of attention to other people that were building in this space, seeing where people's attention was. The whole time we were like, I don't know, fairly confident we would do well to some extent, but then I think it was up to, what did the judges value? You don't know. But we were super proud of what we built and we're hoping other people saw what we saw and seeing that we won the Payments Track, it was just like a pat on the back. It was like, we agree.Chase (17:07):We agree.TJ (17:09):Yeah. That's what it was. And there was some chest pounding, there was something like, yes. But I also think the part I was more stoked on was just the attention that would follow and knowing that we could leverage that to build something. Because I think the attention is just like, it's fuel. And you can't do it with only attention you have to follow it up. But we knew it would empower a lot of the things that we wanted to do.Chase (17:37):Yeah, for sure. And I think these aren't necessarily your classic typical hackathon, where you hack on some little thing for a week or a month. These sorts of events are actually catalysts to build real businesses. And this is meant to be inspirational to developers that are watching this, that may or may not have dipped their toes into Solana. Maybe they have, but they haven't gotten anywhere. These stories are super inspirational. So I want to put it in context. What is the timeframe from the day that TJ wrote his first piece or read his first Solana doc to winning Riptide Payments Track? What's that timeframe?TJ (18:13):September, August. I was reading, I was staying up late. I was still working at the startup and I was staying up till like 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, reading that classic, Paul article on doing an escrow. It was partly that it was partly that Packy podcast.Chase (18:30):Oh yeah.TJ (18:30):On Solana Summer. That was super dope. I remember I was at the gym and I was listening to him talk about the DJ Apes Mint and two weeks prior I was at Miami hack week, it was like, I remember I was chilling with Barrett, I met him for the first time, we had met through our friend Eve, shoutout Eve. And it was just me, Barrett, Edgar and Eve in this apartment and they were just talking about crypto and I knew nothing. So I wanted to fit in and I was like, oh, I bought some Ethereum lately.I thought I would impress him. And he is like, nah, and he's looking at me, he's like, fuck Ethereum. And I was like, what? And just turns around and he goes, Solana. And I was like, what is Solana? I thought it was like some shit coin. And that was just when it got on my map. And then I saw the Packy thing. I did that. And then all these NFT things were popping up and I'm like, all right, what's going on? And then Candy Machine pops up. So I'm like reading that contract and I'm reading the Levi's thing and trying to set one up for myself and it feels like explosions all around me. And I'm like, what is this world? And people are just shipping and I can't keep up. And it was like overwhelming. And then I quit.Chase (19:41):So it's been about, from zero to hero in seven months, basically. Is what I'm hearing right here. Seven or eight months.TJ (19:49):Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. I feel like I got onboarded fairly quick. I feel like I was doing stuff to me that felt like mattered, immediately. All that iOS stuff that I was doing, to me felt groundbreaking.Chase (20:04):Yeah.TJ (20:05):And I felt like a hero then, honestly. That stuff made me feel more of a hero than what I felt like with Riptide.Chase (20:11):Really?TJ (20:12):To be totally honest.Chase (20:12):So it was more so just that you win Riptide, like, wow, I got this thing, but the more part for you was the personal win of actually just starting on this new journey and figuring out how to build on Solana.TJ (20:26):Like I said, I'm dummy competitive. So winning Riptide was great. It was a good job power, but with mtnPay, I don't feel like I've done anything yet. I think there's opportunities too. And we're on a path to actually really contribute to the Solana Ecosystem. But I don't feel like I've had a major accomplishment there yet. But with the iOS stuff, I totally did. I, from native iOS code, minted an NFT through Candy Machine. I figured out how to talk to Anchor programs from native iOS code. And that to me was like, that gave me so much energy.Chase (21:05):So tell me about that. You started building on Solana, did you start messing around with Rust? Did you start messing around with Anchor? Or did you go straight to those SWIFT SDKs that existed? What was your process for getting rolling on Solana?TJ (21:18):Totally. Yeah. That's a great thing to preface here is, I've done barely any Rust. I haven't shipped a smart contract to Mainnet. Mostly client work. So there's massive opportunities in this space to really participate and have impact just doing client work. That being said, the way I really learned it was just wanting to write an iOS app that would work with Solana. And so I found a couple of open source SWIFT packages that was doing iOS transaction stuff. And so, that's how I learned what a transaction object looked like and where you serialize it and how you add accounts to that. And what's an account. And what's [inaudible 00:22:02] coding. All of that stuff I just learned because I had to, to make an iOS app that talked to Anchor. And so me and my friend, Michael, we went to college together, and so we were up till like 4:00 in the morning for weeks just printing out transaction objects in JavaScript, on the Anchor thing and figuring out how do we bridge that to iOS? And that was the coolest.Chase (22:30):And then this is exactly the point we've talked about a couple times on this show. And I say it on my Twitter all the time. You just won Riptide Payments Track and you'd never shipped a smart contract. How? Well it's because not everybody needs to be this guy who writes the smart contracts. You just need to know how to talk to them, using these different APIs, SWIFT, JavaScript. There's a C# SDK, there's a Unity One built on top of that. There's a [inaudible 00:22:57] one, they're all out there and you can learn Solana, and in a way you're comfortable, which is in your native language. And you're talking about just doing print lines and printing out and just reading, what is this object? And now I get it.TJ (23:10):Yeah. That was the process. And it was great. And I think we have a long way to go before developers can step in and build incredibly easily and efficiently, but the process is still fun. And there's a lot of toys you get to use when building this up, a lot of exposure, you feel super low level. And yet, they encourage everyone to just dig in and start building shit.Chase (23:38):In your opinion, what are some of those things that need to improve to make this easier for the new guys or the old guys? It doesn't really matter. What needs to happen? And what do we need?TJ (23:47):Error messages.Chase (23:49):Error messages.TJ (23:52):It is like, you will get like, Error A4, and there's nowhere to go. And you're digging around. I'm like, dude, you literally got to clone the repo and go line by line and figure out what's that error? What are we doing? It's fun. And from when I got into it to like what Armani's done with Anchor now and the Anchor books, that's there, the Solana Cookbook, that's all there now. So it's easier to do it now. And even when I try to do more on-chain stuff or build out stuff that I'm not comfortable with, I'm able to go reference those materials, but they weren't there in September.Chase (24:30):Yeah.TJ (24:31):And that was kind of fun though. It was like a point in time. And I was always envious of people that got to code in machine code, because they had to and what a point in time that must have been to get to be a part of that. And that's why I started building in Solana, I saw that point in time again, I thought Solana was going to pop and I was like, I'm not missing it.Chase (24:53):You were basically like, I see Solana, I see that not everything's been created and there's massive opportunities and I'm going to carve myself out a slice of that and just do it. So it's pretty crazy to be talking about this now.TJ (25:05):Yeah, it's been a journey.Chase (25:07):Yeah. And a lot of this was all Discord Support. It was a huge pain in the ass. You answer the same questions 5,000 times a day. Shoutout to the [inaudible 00:25:16] team at Solana labs that really just spent way too much time in Discord and the core engineers that shouldn't be there all.TJ (25:22):Shoutout Alan.Chase (25:23):Yeah. Alan has actually been obviously incredible.TJ (25:26):Fun story, in that with Alan, we were working on that iOS stuff till dumb hours at night, I think it might have been 2:00 in the morning. And we were having these errors we could not figure out. And so we posted in Discord and Alan answered and we're going back and forth with this guy. Didn't know him at all. This is our first thing. He's like, I'm happy to hop on a call with you to help you sort it out. And we were on that call for three hours. But that to me is such a story of people in Solana. There is so many people that just are cool with just helping you. And they're in the weeds with you and it's that developer ecosystem that attracted me and I think is going to attract so many people after me.):Which to your credit, I think you've set up a lot of it. Being the dev relations at Solana, just creating the environment for those developers to thrive and giving them the resources. I think that's where this has come from, but yeah, that was just a monster classic Solana moment for me that I wanted to highlight.Chase (26:31):Yeah, for sure. And there's a lot of people. It started with Toly and Raj and then that attitude and welcomeness humor came down to me and Armani and so many different people that feels like you can approach anybody in the ecosystem. And I agree, I think this side of tone and vibe is what will attract a lot of younger developers.TJ (26:56):Yeah.Chase (26:57):There's lots of different complaints out there. One of the biggest ones we've been hearing a lot is about tooling. If you agree with that, what web tooling or blockchain tooling are we missing right now at Solana? Do you have anything personally that you would like to see?TJ (27:12):No, I don't have the most robust engineering background. When I was at Apple, we used Apple internal tools. So that was all I really knew. And so, even now, I'll be coding on something with someone at a hackathon and they're like, wait, you're not using this plugin. You're not using the Anchor plugin for VS code. I'm like, no, what is that?Chase (27:34):Here's the old-school.TJ (27:36):Yeah. They're like, baby come here. They would set me up with some stuff. So, that's so cool. I think examples are going to be great. I think just like getting examples out there for people so that they could learn that they can do it too is going to be really cool.Chase (27:48):And self-onboard.TJ (27:48):Yeah. Self-onboarding's massive. And that's one of the ways we want to go with mtnPay, because we're just like a set of APIs. I think we can open up these APIs to iOS native developers to be able to build apps, they don't need to do the exact transaction building. We can have just a normal API that lets them build the transaction themselves. So that's one of the directions we definitely want to go into and we feel like can bring native developers to Solana, hopefully.Chase (28:16):Yeah. It's about giving the tools, the education to onboard people like mtnPay and the rest of the ecosystem who then drives in the users and then that it just spreads outwardly from there. So it's pretty incredible to watch right now, I'm not going to say, like I started last May about, next month will be my one year. And the difference in one year has made, like you said, even in September, you didn't have half the things that are available now. It's happening at the speed of light and it's, who knows? In one year from now it's going to be, again, unrecognizable. So I mean, it'll be unrecognizable in like six months, most likely or less. We'll see.TJ (28:57):Yeah. Just being along for the journey, I feel grateful.Chase (29:00):Yeah.TJ (29:01):Just what a point in time that we're in. I was talking with Edgar the other day, I was like, we got to remember, we're in the good old days right now.Chase (29:08):I guess, to round this off and you kind of already touched on this and I always do this at the end of every single episode of the show is, to just give some advice to whoever you want to give to advice to, maybe it's the new devs looking to come into blockchain that might be scared or intimidated by just the name, blockchain, scares some people.TJ (29:30):I mean, just start. Just start and just build. There's so many opportunities within yourself to push things off and it's so easy to complain or give yourself reasons to not build stuff. Even within myself every day I'd catch myself either complaining or giving excuses or whatever. But reality is, just build because when you just start building, you'll figure it out. You can ask the questions, you'll get there. And then that building really gives you momentum to keep going.Chase (30:09):Yeah man.TJ (30:10):Yeah. And it attracts people to you and then those people are going to give you energy and it just, it all cycles. But you have to be the one to start.Chase (30:21):Yeah. I mean, I don't think anybody's really given that advice and it is, like, we're all engineers, we've all just put things off. We all have 200 projects that we started one night and then never got back to. So it's really just getting started and just following through.TJ (30:35):Yeah. And don't be afraid to chase the energy. There's so many things I've tried doing in Solana that I would work on for a week and then stop. But even now I go back to them and they're just tools in the belt. And you'll be able to leverage learnings later on.Chase (30:51):Yeah. For sure. Well, TJ, congratulations for winning the Riptide Payments Track with mtnPay. Glad to get you on the show. Glad to have a conversation. Love the energy. Just keep it up, man. And thanks again for doing what you do. And thanks for being here.TJ (31:09):Yeah, no, I appreciate the opportunity. I feel there's definitely the longest we've been able to chat for how long we've known each other. It's funny. I feel like we kept missing each other in Miami. So, I'm glad we got this opportunity and hopefully I'll see you in The Bahamas.Chase (31:23):Thanks for coming on.

Chris Osborn - Founder & CEO, Dialect Ep #64

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 27, 2022 38:33

Chris Osborn is the Founder and CEO of Dialect, a smart messaging protocol that powers seamless, on-chain messaging experiences, starting with wallet-to-wallet chat and dapp notifications. Joe McCann guest hosts. 00:49 - Origin Story02:06 - What is Dialect?05:59 - What are the blockers in Web 3.0?07:46 - Why Solana?11:11 - Looked into other ecosystems?13:52 - What is the process to use Dialect?22:31 - Using Solana Pay with Dialect27:22 - In-game messaging28:36 - Dialect's operations and current projects31:03 - Exciting projects in web 3.034:53 - NFTs and Messaging 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. Joe (00:10):Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Solana Podcast. It is Joe McCann here again as your guest host, and today we have a very special guest, founder and CEO of Dialect, Chris Osborn.Chris (00:23):Hey Joe, it's great to be here.Joe (00:25):It's great to have you. So I'm really excited about today's episode because what you are doing at Dialect, I think, unlocks a lot of really interesting use cases in the Solana ecosystem, but first I think it might be useful for the listeners to kind of get a sense of who you are, your background and frankly, how you even got started with Dialect.Chris (00:49):So my background is actually in physics. I did my PhD in Atomic Physics at Columbia University. So this WAs like laser cooling and trapping of atoms, precision time measurements and quantum computing stuff. I learned pretty quickly that what I really loved to do is write software and build technology, so I knew after graduating that I wanted to move to the West Coast and work on some cool technology problems. I actually had an opportunity to split the difference and I worked at Rigetti Computing. I don't know if you're familiar, they're a quantum computing startup and got to work on almost every part of their stack, including a lot of software and technology.I helped lead one of the three teams that launched quantum cloud services, which was like AWS for quantum computing, and that helped me realize that I really love kind of like bridging the gap between hard tech and consumer problems and how do users interact with hard tech, and got the itch to build a startup. So actually I started this company outside of crypto and participated in YC. We were building a consumer investing product and pivoted the company actually last fall or early last fall full force induced Solana and started building Dialect.Joe (02:01):Yeah, that's great. I mean, can you maybe just in a few words, like what is Dialect?Chris (02:07):Yeah, so with Dialect what we're doing is we're building what we're calling a smart messaging protocol for DApp notifications and wallet-to-wallet chat. Those are the first two use cases that we're working on. And the best way to think about it is kind of like a decentralized inbox, a way to enable the messaging primitive between wallets. I personally like to think about kind of like hair on fire burning use cases, the things that people need today, and one of the major use cases here is giving DApps a way to connect directly with their users. And that's through the main mechanism that users identify themselves on the blockchain, which is with wallets.Joe (02:46):So cool. So, I mean, I remember meeting you many, many months ago last year and was really blown away because one of the kind of gaps that I was seeing in a lot of Web 3.0 Applications, irrespective of the underlying chain, was the ability to have like native notifications that are genuinely on chain and not using a service like Twilio or a Web 2.0 or cloud computing context. So the users kind of better understand what Dialect is and can enable, you can kind of walk through maybe some canonical use cases of Dialect?Chris (03:22):Yeah, absolutely. So the use case that got me into it right away like that first just really compelling use case is if you're using a collateralized lending protocol. You lend in token A and you borrow out token B and as prices move, if you become under collateral, the protocol or many protocols will end up liquidating your collateral on an underlying market. And in a world without messages and notifications, basically up until today, a lot of early DeFi users relied on just like a poll mechanism. Like I got to constantly come back to this product and refresh the browser and see how are my positions doing? And there've actually been some like kind of remarkable situations where when there were dramatic price movements, people could see that there was a wallet address on chain that was at risk of a very large liquidation and folks were like, "How do we get in touch with this user? How do we actually contact them and let them know that there's a problem?"And so there's no question that there's like a huge need here. Liquidations were the start, we're now working with projects across DeFi in various capacities, DAOs is another really big use case we can talk about in a little bit and NFTs. So alerts about really important situations, obviously those are kind of like that first use case, but the holy grail with messaging is user retention and engagement. So even if you get beyond emergency situations across whether it's like NFTs and more social, or whether it's DAOs and collaboration, there's just like infinite use cases for technology like this.Joe (04:58):That's really cool. I mean, I agree. It feels like almost every Web 3.0 project or protocol is going to need notifications in some capacity. I mean, I know myself I've been in those positions where I need to add more collateral to a position and I have to keep going back to it, or more recently using some of the structured product vaults that are out there where you can... if you want to say redeem some of your investment, maybe the interest that you've earned, you have to just kind of set a calendar invite.Chris (05:27):That's exactly right. That's right.Joe (05:28):Yeah. So to me that's some friction for end users, but it seems like a solvable problem and it sounds like that's what Dialect is doing. But I'm curious because today in like a Web 2.0 Kind of cloudy world, push notifications, email notifications, in-browser notifications, they just seem so commonplace to implement. So why is it that you think that this hasn't really been a thing yet in Web 3.0 ? What's been kind of the blocker and maybe then we can talk about why you chose Solana?Chris (06:01):Yeah, this is actually a really... This is a super cool problem. The blocker is the following, and obviously nothing's ever truly a strict blocker, it's really just a question of sort of like what are your priorities and what are you working on? So in Web 2.0if you're like a typical startup, you're already running some backend service that's got a database and it's got some synchronous and asynchronous processes. And if you're building in Web 2.0, there's tons of Web 2.0 tooling to support you. And so right into one of those backend services, you can sign up for Twilio, get your authentication keys, store them as environment variables and then anytime there's a specific process where you want to send a user a text message, you just fire it off. Same exact kind of Web 2.0 SaaS system exists for Apple push notifications, Android, SendGrid email, all that. Where things get interesting in Web 3.0 is typically, and especially with like the more really Web 3.0 native projects, whether that's in DeFi, NFTs, wherever, your backend is the blockchain.And there's some basic things that are different with most blockchains like Solana or Ethereum, and that's that most information is public. So you can't store sort of like secret credentials on chain and then in addition, you can't make HTTP requests to some other SaaS. So like the SaaS model breaks down when you start building in blockchain, so if you want to support these use cases for your users, you basically have to like expand your engineering footprint, spin up some Web 2.0 services that perform two processes. One is monitor the blockchain for the events that you care about and then number two is decide that you're going to send messages accordingly, whether that's like Twilio, email or push notifications. So that's part one and then part two, to answer your question about why Solana, and this comes back to my personal journey in crypto.So a friend told me about Bitcoin way back in like 2011. Around that time, I was first exposed to the proof of work concept. It's like easily top five most incredible things that I've learned in my life. I didn't start working in crypto until now, but that had a huge impact on me and I've been following along with everything that's been happening in crypto since then. So heard about Ethereum in 2016 when it... I think it launched in 2016. And what Bitcoin did with proof of work decentralization and then Ethereum did for generalizing compute on-chain and in a decentralized fashion, I discovered Solana in late 2020, I think early October, 2020. For me what Bitcoin and Ethereum did, Solana's proof of history and how it scales technology for ultra fast transaction settlement times, ultra low transaction fee costs, that to me was as impactful. So I see that in the direct lineage of technology.So, that was like late 2020, and DeFi Summer was in full force. I was starting to use more and more technology like more and more Web 3.0 native apps. Over the course of that year I mentioned I was working on a separate project, I saw the Solana ecosystem just absolutely explode. It was like a literal Cambrian explosion. So by the time it was like late summer of 2021, I was taking a hard look at what I was currently working on and then I was looking at Solana and saying every extra week that I'm not working on solana is just a huge missed opportunity. And pulled the trigger and moved full force into Solana. Solana's transaction costs and speed opened up an enormous new design space that is really not feasible if you want to build a truly on-chain messaging system on some other blockchains.So if you're looking at fractions of a tenth of a penny in terms of the transaction costs and then subsecond, you know 400 millisecond block times, that enables a very large new design space. So what I saw at the time was this opportunity to build a whole new SaaS layers. So with Dialect we're building developer tooling, we want to provide this end user experience for developers to build into their own DApps. And when you have any orders of magnitude improvement in performance, it just opens up a very large new space to build in, so to me it was a no brainer. There was no question in my mind. So I've been a blockchain enthusiast for over 10 years, but Solana was that threshold. That was sort of that Rubicon where I just knew this is this, it's now time to build.Joe (10:22):Yeah. I mean, I feel like in other ecosystems, something like this... I don't want to say it's not possible, it just seems like it's impractical. And I think Solana's design where it has this incredibly cheap transaction fee and speed is perfectly suited for something like Dialect and on-chain messaging, if you will. But have you dug into say other chains like maybe something in the Cosmos Ecosystem or even just Ethereum? And did you evaluate whether or not this could be done or was it just kind of like at the baseline look, Ethereum is like pretty expensive for transaction and relatively slow block times, this is just going to work for say push notifications or wallet-to-wallet messaging?Chris (11:12):Yeah, so that's a great question. I would say the following: there are some wallet-to-wallet chat and communication tools on Ethereum and with many of them, what you do is you authenticate with your wallet, but the messages may be stored off-chain somewhere else. And that's not obviously a total deal breaker. In general, I think the authentication problem... I know it's not specific to messaging, but it obviously takes really like a front seat in messaging of who's sending these messages, and the general problem of authenticating with your wallet is just a fun design space. So we're personally really excited to see messaging come online on some other blockchains. If you really want to run a fully on-chain experience where the message source of truth is on-chain, Solana really has several orders of magnitude on a lot of these competing chains.Not that that's necessarily the future that exists long term, it may actually make sense for there to be more of a data centric L1 that stores these messages. And so the choice for us coming full circle on this question is Solana presented an opportunity for us to build relatively small architectural footprint. That means let's just keep as much on Solana as possible. We're decentralized first, we're not storing any messages in say fire base or any other Web2 services, and really provide that great experience, and it's really just a question now of where go.Messaging between wallet is such an important and compelling use case, and I think we're seeing a lot more projects come online now that this problem's inevitably going to be solved in a cross chain manner. We are excited about that future, but we're a hundred percent focused on Solana for now. We also say, I didn't necessarily explicitly say this earlier, but Solana's proof of history concept and the way that it works, some of the first podcasts I listened to about that in summer and fall of 2020, just really blew my mind. So another big piece of it is go where there's just exciting technology, where the developers are extremely talented and everybody's really enthusiastic. For us, there's just a no brainer, we a blast on Solana.Joe (13:15):I hear that very, very often these days, there's been quite a bit of interest from developers; in a lot of cases, developers who have never written an Ethereum app or any sort of other Web 3.0 app or just diving into Solana and loving it. So speaking of developers, as a developer, how do I use Dialect? Can you kind of walk us through the scenario? Is there an SDK? Is there a token I need to have? What is the kind of process if I'm a protocol or a project today that wants or needs on-chain messaging or notifications for my protocol or project? How do I get started?Chris (13:54):Let me answer in two parts. Number one is what you do today. Our messaging protocol is live and audited on the Solana main net, and we have open sourced our protocol and Web 3.0 client we build with Anchor. I really love anchor, it's one of our favorite toolkits we've worked with. So you can import that Web 3.0 client directly into your web app or some other process, some other service that you're running and you can get started sending messages right away. As I mentioned, even for DApp notifications, the primitive is wallet-to-wallet messaging. So in the same way that you might receive an email from a business, some kind of notification they're sending from an email address that they manages the business, the same thing goes here; you manage a key pair that you do your messaging with. So you can import our protocol and just start sending and receiving messages.The main way that most projects interact with our tooling is two-part though, two layers on top of that core protocol. Number one is if you're a DApp and you need to send a notification to a user or a message saying that they're at risk of liquidation, let's come back to this liquidation example. You need to be monitoring the blockchain to detect that there's this event where you then programmatically send the messages. The same thing goes historically with Twilio or SendGrid, you incorporate this code into your services. So like we talked about earlier, you need to be running these off-chain services that help determine that events are happening and to write messages. And we offer open source tooling around this, it's called our monitor framework and our monitoring service, which is our opinionated way about how to host that. And you can then basically spin this up yourself, or you can host with us and you use that to write the very minimal code that's specific to your protocol.So let's say you have some way to query for the users or the wallets obligations, which is a term that lending protocols use, and you can get your collateral health or your risk of liquidation directly from that data. Our monitoring service allows you to fetch that data, basically write the code that's specific to your protocol and then that gets piped into kind of like a reactive framework that we use to determine whether or not to send messages. So this is monitoring tooling that's specifically custom built for figuring out to send a message and it can work very flexibly with other kinds of tooling. Maybe it's like you've got a Kafka messaging queue, or some other kinds of... Some projects actually have fairly sophisticated Web 2.0 infrastructure, but they're still interested in working with us because we handle the hard problem to just making sure at most one and just at least one message get fired off to a user.The second half is how do you surface these messages to users? So today what we're solving, what we're live with are what we're calling in-app notifications. So think about your favorite Web 2.0 product; you sign in, and maybe somewhere in the nav bar you see a little notification bell and it's a button and you can click to see that there are messages or something you need to know about from that product. Today, we offer basically like a single React component. We're prioritizing React, most projects, web apps are built in React, where you can drop that single component into the nav bar of your DApp and right out of the box if a user clicks that notification, they have the opportunity to fully onboard to the notification experience all within that single component. So it's like a model that pops up that allows you to say yes, I'd like to enable notifications for this app.And then once you've done that, you can kind of see what are you going to get notifications around. So it might be warnings about pending liquidations, it might be liquidations themselves, it might be actually more receipt style messages. So it might be an order filled if you're using a DEX where orders fill asynchronously, it can be things around DAO collaborations. So one of the major use cases that DAOs we've been speaking to have been interested in is engagement and retention on voting. So you might receive notifications from a DAO telling you that you have six hours left to vote on a proposal, or that there's a new proposal, or that maybe you're near a quorum on the voting threshold needed to pass or reject a proposal. So there's all these different use cases and really you get that right out of the box directly in your nav bar with this single React component. So that's in-app notifications.What's coming soon and coming back to this question of just the broader messaging thesis, we're launching support soon for email, Telegram, possibly text message, other kinds of Web 2.0 means because the reality is even if the thesis and the vision is fully on-chain messaging, we live in a world where many users rely on and really appreciate getting messages via Web 2.0. So email's a no-brainer, and a lot of projects have asked us to support that so that's coming online very soon. And then Telegram is a little more of like a Web 3.0 native messaging solution that's still off-chain, and a lot of projects have asked us for support on that. So you can think of the Dialect standard as both the on-chain messaging standard, as well as a suite of really out of the box tooling to allow DApps to reach their users however they want.Joe (19:13):What's really interesting about how you're thinking about building out your company and the protocol and kind of the suite of products is that it reminds me of kind of like early days of Twilio. So I wrote a blog post many years ago, probably 10 years ago now about how over-the-top messaging was really kind of this new platform play. We've seen through the myriad messaging apps and then kind of the power of iMessage on Apple and the blue bubble versus the green bubble. I think there's now a regulation coming out of the EU that all these messaging apps have to inter-op with each other. But that took many, many years and I think Twilio really captured a lot of the developer mind share around creating these kind of suites of messaging products and it started with SMS. And so you mentioned something like Telegram, which I think everybody in crypto lives and dies in Telegram. I can barely keep up with myself.Chris (20:17):That's right.Joe (20:17):I've written some Telegram bots and they're pretty easy if you have a fundamental understanding of how webhooks work. Is that something that Dialects will enable? Is that like maybe some arbitrary webhook could fire? Or is it something that needs to be actually he baked into the on-chain program itself?Chris (20:34):Yeah, so it's not actually for support. We want to keep the part on-chain as light and simple as possible and so you can think of these web two channels such as Telegram as really just parallel rails. So you have the detection of an event that a user wants to hear about and that's monitoring data on-chain, and then you have various channels which may purely be in one user's case, "Oh, I just want to get an email, or I just want to get a Telegram message from a bot that's managed by the project." The developer experience around Twilio and Telegram and whatnot are excellent, but what Dialect provides here, if a DApp is interested in reaching their users by these means is you just get it all out of the box right away. You write a little snippet of code that fetches the data that determines if a message needs to be sent, and then you say how you want each message to look and that's really all you have to think about.The user will choose how they want to be gotten in touch with directly through the front end tooling that we provide. I think it was actually you, Joe, who mentioned this to us, that one of the key metrics is time to success. Crypto is moving at just an absolute lightning pace and while every project that we've talked to really wants this tooling, it's never quite the first priority that they have. So what we're trying to do is really make that as simple as possible for these projects to integrate us.Joe (21:53):So let's talk about some of the categories that exist, not just broadly in Web 3.0, but I would argue is probably more suited towards Solana, particularly the payment space. So Solana Pay has launched, there's lot of people building a lot of really interesting stuff with Solana Pay from point of sale solutions to web apps and mobile apps, et cetera. Can you kind of walk me through an example of how say someone that wants to build something with Solana Pay would utilize Dialect. Chris (22:26):Yeah, this is actually a really fun topic. Ever since Solana Pay got launched, the team and I have just been super excited about the messaging use cases there. This is also a good template for talking about our smart messaging thesis, so I'm going to segue from Solana Pay into a broader discussion here, but I would start by saying the following: Solana Pay is a standard for being able to perform transactions, being able to perform transfers between wallets on-chain and there is a very compelling messaging use case here. If you think about some of the standards in Web 2.0 , whether it's Apple Pay for transferring, or Venmo or Square Cash, that kind of dynamic experience of being able to message between users and actually take action on the message. One of our key insights with Dialect is this smart messaging standard we're building toward, and you can think of that kind of like an interactive link preview.In every DApp that you use where you connect your wallet, you have signing privileges everywhere. And so where we're building and this... A few minutes ago I said, "Here's where Dialect is today and the question is where we're going." In this smart messaging future, we're allowing users to send basically interactive link previews and you can think of a transfer request as one of the simplest use cases there. So for example, if you want to send a transfer request by a Dialect message to one of your friends directly at their wallet address, you can send that and then they can take action right in the message, whether that's scanning a QR code that's rendered for them, or it's clicking a send payment message. Coming back to some of the use cases we talked a little while ago about such as liquidation, warnings or DAO proposals and voting prompts, the holy grail in user retention and engagement is being able to reach them and have them be able to take action right where you're messaging with them.In Web 2.0 beyond these app specific use cases, whether it's a Venmo transfer request or similar, most of the time if you get an email, there's a link in the email and you have to click that and go out to another app. And maybe you're not logged in on your phone so you say, "Okay, in five hours when I'm back at my computer I'll take care of this." Or similar with a text message. What's really unique about messaging in Web 3.0 is that we can build a standard where you can take action right in the message. So whether it's Solana Pay, whether it's a vote yes or a vote no on a proposal, or it's a quick deposit to top up your collateral to avoid liquidation, any of those things with Dialect and our smart messaging standard, what we're building toward is that kind of Web 3.0 native future. So the last thing I would say about this is, yes, it's true that messaging and notifications are this really critical missing piece of Web 3.0 and it's just a really known hair on fire problem. When we got started on Dialect, the question we asked ourselves is not just how we fill in that missing piece, but also how we take Web 3.0to a place that Web 2.0 can't as easily go. And this is because our thesis is Web 3.0 is going to reach mass adoption because of exciting and really compelling delightful new use cases that products are going to start to come online, whether they take advantage of universal authentication like we're talking about now, whether they take advantage of composability of sort of the global shared state of all the data existing on a single blockchain, those are the use cases that are going to make it really compelling for the first billion users to onboard to Web 3.0. This is our thesis with smart messaging and Solana Pay is a really key and interesting part of that picture.Joe (26:18):I'll be honest, that is fascinating because one of the cool things about what you're mentioning is that push notifications or in-app notifications become actionable. You can actually do something right there-Chris (26:33):That's right.Joe (26:34):... versus it being this sort of delayed or async process. And so the use cases really open up pretty dramatically because of the fact that these messages are now interactive and you can do things with them.Chris (26:50):That's right.Joe (26:50):And have you guys thought through maybe where this could potentially work in like the context of a video game or even like the metaverse? There's a lot of Web 3.0 games/metaverse type environments being created and I'm curious if sort of in-game messaging makes sense or if it's something that is slightly different?Chris (27:18):Yeah, in-game messaging I think is a fantastic use case, and we've spent a little less time talking to gaming projects. I think just because that's a little early on, as we have say, talking to DeFi, NFT, DAO projects. But one of the things I'm most excited about is sort of the universality of NFTs as assets and all of the infrastructure that's being built around the things that you achieve and the assets that you acquire in-game end up having a life and a value beyond that game. It's really compelling to us that there be interactive sort of like smart message experiences around that content, at the very least. So I think gaming is an incredibly exciting in use case.Joe (28:05):Awesome. Yeah, I could see a lot of really cool integrations being utilized there and they just kind of don't exist today. I mean, frankly, there aren't a lot of Web 3.0 games period, but I know a lot of them are coming online later this year. What about like the traction of the company and folks that you're working with today? I know since you pivoted Dialect into this smart messaging protocol business things have really started to heat up. Can you talk about maybe how many people you're kind of signing up or any projects that are currently utilizing your product today?Chris (28:38):Yeah, that's right. We're talking to a few dozen projects right now across a lot of the verticals that I mentioned earlier. We're going live with a handful of our first projects that we've publicly announced so far. So that includes Squads and meaning on the DAO tooling side, Jet Protocol on the lending side, Bridgesplit on the NFT and NFT fractionalization space. Oh, on protocol Friktion is another project, you mentioned structured products earlier and it's been a real joy working with them. One of the things that we believe is it's best to like dog food your own tooling to make it better. So we've just straight up been rolling our sleeves up to help build out with them, and that helps us get better and better at our developer tooling.Then there's just this other wave, as I mentioned, a few dozen other projects that we can't talk about quite yet, but are extremely excited to support. And to support all these projects, we've also been growing the team pretty quickly as well. So there's a lot going on right now and as we talked about earlier, it's an incredibly compelling use case. This technology has to exist, at the very least receiving an email or a text message or a Telegram message. But where things really catch and where we really have a great time with our conversations is around this smart messaging future that we're building out, and that's when I think folks get really excited about the opportunity.Joe (30:07):Yeah. I mean, I completely agree. It's really hard to imagine a scenario where an app isn't going to need some form of messaging or notifications. And given the direction and the future of the company and where you guys want to take the product and protocol, it seems inevitable that folks are going to be adopting this. So maybe talk a little bit about how you're envisioning the future. You know, you have a very specific view into what you're doing with Dialect, but by engaging with all these different projects and protocols, you can get like an interesting view into what things are happening, what things are coming out soon, and maybe where you see things heading. The space is evolving and changing so rapidly and quickly that it's hard to predict anything, but what are some things that you kind of see in the future not necessarily just for Dialect, but also you Web 3.0 in general and how maybe Dialect plays a role in that?Chris (31:05):Yeah. I think if there were a single theme and I'm not alone in saying this, it's just really what got me into crypto in the first place and it's incredible to see it beginning to happen. I would say the thesis here is composability, so any blockchain that really makes global shared state a possibility. I think it might have been Chris Dixon who said composability is like compounding interest, it just causes this exponential runaway in technology. And the things I'm most excited about and we are most excited about at Dialect is that composability. So whether it's being able to exchange information and perform financial actions between DeFi protocols or it's the financialization that's going into some gaming tools that are coming online, like you said, that rely on some DeFi infrastructure like... To me, this is why it's going to be the sort of killer consumer experiences that come of composability and global shared state that are really going to make for the next big wave in Web 3.0.Chris (32:09):And the way we're interested in that in our own small way with Dialect, and I didn't mention this earlier, is one of our visions here with smart messaging is creating a kind of decentralized inbox. So as we mentioned, our tooling today supports these on chain messages delivered directly to any given DApp where the user enables and then can consume those messages in the DApp itself. But those messages can be consumed by anyone and so there's this other half of the problem that we're working on that's coming online soon, where for example, a mobile wallet could have an entire inbox and messaging section. And now you're talking about no matter which DApps you've enabled, you're receiving a true iOS or Android push notification directly to that mobile messaging experience that you have there, and that's just yet another example of composability. And so, like I said, I'm not alone in being incredibly excited about this but it really is, I think, the kind of compounding developer experience that's just going to create a whole new set of really exciting consumer... Like a new kind of internet consumer experience.Joe (33:18):That's awesome and I agree. I think one of the areas that is no short of discussion in Web 3.0 is NFTs. I've talked about this on some Twitter spaces and other podcasts where right now we're just kind of in the infancy of what NFTs can unlock. You know, there's obviously the art aspect of it, there's in video game assets, et cetera, et cetera. But one of the things that I am interested to hear your take on, and maybe how this correlates to Dialect is NFT is in a person's wallet, it's on chain, but the person interacting with the wallet is a customer, a user, and I think a lot of companies want to be able to engage with their customers and users more directly. So is there a scenario where I have an NFT in my wallet and depending on the NFT mentor or something, maybe it's a brand, maybe it's a company, maybe it's an artist, maybe it's a musician, has a way to either via the NFT directly or utilizing Dialect, be able to kind of communicate with me directly?Joe (34:31):An example I always give is imagine Starbucks wants to airdrop, I don't know, some seasonal loyalty program thing, right? Christmas, Easter, or whatever, spring break, you name it, and it's for people that have this NFT in their wallet and they want to airdrop them something or be able to communicate with them. Is this something that Dialect would unlock or do you think this is something that's more kind of NFT specific?Chris (34:55):To be honest, I thought you'd never ask about this. This is this third part of smart messaging that we are just beyond excited about. It touches on a few different things, but maybe I'll just say briefly that another key aspect of Web 2.0 messaging that I think to many of us feels very broken is this question of sort of like cold inbound and marketing and spam. With Web 3.0's inherent financialization, there is this very natural situation where you can basically tokenize messaging and create markets around how different entities communicate with each other. And on the two extremes there, or maybe let's talk about three, two to three points on the spectrum here. If you Joe and I just want to message with each other, there's sort of mutual opt-in in the exchange of a token and we can just message with each other.Similarly, if there's a business that I really love and I want to opt-in let's say, like you mentioned, I think you said Starbucks, I'll opt into that and there may be some implicit under the hood kind of exchange of a token that allows for that messaging. There's also scenarios where businesses want to get in touch with individuals that they think are high value, and that's a cold inbound scenario. In that scenario, a business might need to actually buy one of these tokens of yours on an exchange in order to engage with you.By financializing that component of cold inbound, I think one, it creates a much more harmonious kind of like cold messaging experience in Web 3.0 that in many ways is a bit much in Web 2.0, but in the mutual opt-in scenario or the messaging is effectively like vanishingly small cost or effectively free. And powering all of this, kind of coming back to your point about NFTs, is the NFT primitive. So this is a technology in an architecture we're exploring right now and it's very likely that NFTs will serve that use case. It's a kind of technology in a use case that we're just like beyond excited about.Joe (36:59):Fascinating conversation today with you, Chris. I really appreciate it. The future's bright for Dialect, the use cases that you've outlined are kind of no brainers, but what I'm really excited about is what we unlock in a Web 3.0 native context for smart messaging. I want to thank you today for joining the Solana Podcast. How can people actually get in contact with you? Are you on Telegram or Twitter? If they want to contact Dialect and get in touch, what's the best way of doing that?Chris (37:26):Yeah, the best way to get in touch with us is on Twitter and our Twitter handle is @saydialect, that's S-A-Y D-I-A-L-E-C-T. We love engaging with the community. Developer feedback, we live and die off of that, and so if you have complaints about our technology, have feature requests, any of that, send it our way. We're also on Discord. We have a Discord community, you can join that from our bio in Twitter. And then the last thing I would say is we're hiring, and so if this technology is interesting to you, we would love, love, love to work with you.Joe (38:02):Well, you heard it here first folks. Chris Osborn, computer scientist in the quantum physics space turned smart messaging protocol engineer and architect. Chris, thanks so much for joining the Solana Podcast. Looking forward to chatting with you again soon. See ya.Chris (38:18):Thank you very much, Joe. It was my pleasure.

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202. Solana Partners with PUBG: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Studio for NFT Games | Solana Pay Takes Off

Metaverse Insider

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 24, 2022 23:16

Krafton, the South Korean gaming giant and the company behind the popular PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) game, is expanding it crypto empire by partnering with blockchain startup Solana Labs to develop play-to-earn crypto games. The business agreement with Solana Labs includes plans to make blockchain games that allow players to earn NFTs (non-fungible tokens). On this episode, we're taking a look at Solana's massive partnerships as well as Solana Pay slowly taking over retail payment.~This episode is sponsored by FTX US ~FTX US - Support our channel by using our link (limited time 10% off fees!) ➜ https://bit.ly/FTXappPaul#Solana #PUBG #NFT~Solana Partners With PUBG: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Studio for NFT Games | Solana Pay Takes Off~⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺⎺Become a Diamond Circle Member FREE! ➜ https://bit.ly/PBDiamondCircleSubscribe on YouTube ✅ https://bit.ly/PBNYoutubeSubscribeFacebook

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#EP108 - ¿Youtube NFT? Otro juego bajito..

Los Mangos Que Hablan

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 11, 2022 71:46

En esta ocasión los mangos que hablan comparten opiniones sobre Youtube NFT, Solana Pay y Bombcrypto? Bajito..

nfts otro juego solana pay

Payments Ep #58

BlockDrops com Maurício Magaldi

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 8, 2022 36:15

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.

EN :: Cleveland Cavs NFT, NintendoVerse DAOs and NFTs on Bitcoin, and more

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 6, 2022 18:37

Drop 1: Cavs locker NFT experience https://coinrivet.com/cleveland-cavaliers-launch-my-cavs-locker-nft-experience/ Drop 2: NintendoVerse? https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/02/nintendo-has-interest-in-nfts-and-the-metaverse Drop 3: Bitcoin DAOs and NFTs https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninabambysheva/2022/02/03/bitcoin-veteran-raises-150-million-to-bring-daos-and-nfts-to-the-first-cryptocurrency/ .. BSTX exchange approved in the US https://www.blocknews.com.br/financas/regulador-dos-eua-aprova-a-bstx-bolsa-de-titulos-baseada-em-blockchain/ Solana Pay is out https://solana.com/news/solana-pay-announcement MyCrypto joins Metamask https://blog.mycrypto.com/mycrypto-is-joining-metamask Bitso viabiliza a primeira transferência de jogadora de futebol com criptomoedas https://twitter.com/Bitso/status/1488369329250971649 Australian Aboriginal CBDC debuts https://forkast.news/australian-aboriginal-sovereign-cbdc/ Digital Rupee in India + crypto taxes https://exame.com/future-of-money/india-vai-lancar-rupia-digital-e-pretende-taxar-criptomoedas/ Minerva usa Ecotrace para tipificar gado https://www.portaldbo.com.br/minerva-foods-implanta-tecnologia-para-automatizar-a-tipificacao-de-carcacas/ Coachella lifetime passes on NFT https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/coachella-auctions-lifetime-passes-nfts-1293682/amp/ Syngenta HSBC paperless trade operation https://www.tradelens.com/post/syngenta-and-hsbc-complete-paperless-trade-finance-transaction-on-the-tradelens-platform Mirror announces web3 Plugins https://dev.mirror.xyz/P0iUQ2DPCcZXLlAcv-akmm5W8UYdSf4PpD2_QeeI3k4 Ferrari NFT https://bitcoinist.com/ferrari-is-launching-collection-of-nfts/ Lambo NFT https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/27/lamborghini-nft-from-space/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/blockdropspodcast/message

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Cleveland Cavs NFT, NintendoVerse, DAOs and NFTs em Bitcoin, e mais

BlockDrops com Maurício Magaldi

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 6, 2022 18:05

drop bitcoin nfts coachella cleveland cavaliers daos solana pay

533. Solana a Lost Cause or a Great Buy? | $SOL Updates & Endless Hacks