Podcasts about toly

Argentine lawmakers have launched a movement to impeach President Javier Milei following a cryptocurrency-related controversy that led to the loss of millions of dollars from investors. Solana ecosystem is once again in the crosshairs of FUD.~This episode is sponsored by Tangem~Tangem ➜ https://bit.ly/TangemPBNUse Code: "PBN" for Additional Discounts!00:00 Intro00:16 Sponsor: Tangem00:54 Javier Milei denies $LIBRA02:30 Impeachment?03:10 JUP investigation04:44 KOLs coping + #istandwithJUP06:12 Solana is not all memes06:48 Toly needs better messaging07:43 "This time Solana is not coming back"08:52 Hester Pierce talks memecoins11:29 FTX will save the market?12:05 ETH vs SOL + ETH staking soon?13:06 SUI season incoming + Wen Walrus?14:44 Outro#Solana #Crypto #Bitcoin~Solana FUD Crashes Altcoins

Solana's (SOL) price surged almost 10%, from around $139 to $151, shortly after VanEck's application for a spot Solana exchange-traded fund (ETF). Meanwhile, Jupiter exchange and Helium Mobile are showing explosive growth.PRE-ORDER Saga 2 NOW! ➜ https://solanamobile.com/refer/paulbarron~This episode is sponsored by Tangem~Tangem ➜ https://bit.ly/TangemPBNUse Code: "PBN" for Additional Discounts!00:00 Intro00:27 Sponsor: Tangem01:10 Mathew Sigel Solana ETF chances02:34 VanEck Solana bear vs bull02:56 Jupiter Blinks03:15 JUP planetary call: jupiter going to the moon04:53 Voting in July05:30 Toly meme coins06:36 Solana Mobile crosses 140,00007:00 Nobodys talking about Helium Mobile growth08:23 Growth09:06 Vote on twitter09:39 Paul Barron Chapter 209:10 Lingo + Partner Brands + Presale10:52 David Hirsch fired12:20 Supreme Fail12:58 XRP next?14:10 Charts15:15 Outro#Solana #Crypto #cryptocurrency ~Solana ETF Filed by VanEck!

This week, Sale, Dave and Zen Llama get together for a Bullpen roundtable episode to discuss the recent run up in celebrity backed memecoins and whether they are a net positive for the space. We then discuss the rise of Ton and the potential future threat of high distribution blockchains, who won the Toly vs Justin Drake debate, and how Monad is starting to bootstrap its developer community. - - Time Stamps (0:00) - The Argument For Celeb Memecoins (14:17) - Where Are The Apps This Cycle? (16:15) - L1 vs L2 culture (22:35) - Will Eth Lose First Mover Advantage? (19:18) - Future of Stablecoins on Eth (23:25) - The Rise Of Ton and High Distribution Blockchains (35:58) - BNB Outperformance (38:57) - Sol vs Eth Value Accrual (42:56) - Is Economic Security a Meme? (49:12) - How Monad is bootstrapping it's developer community - - Podcast Resources Follow Sal: https://twitter.com/salxyz Follow Dave: https://twitter.com/SolBeachBum Follow Zen : https://twitter.com/ZenLlama Follow Unlayered: https://twitter.com/UnlayeredPod Subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or Google: https://unlayered.io/ Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UnlayeredPod

This week we are joined by Emmanuel Awosika, a prominent member of the Ethereum R&D community, to explore the ways in which Ethereum needs to improve to become more competitive with newer, high throughput blockchains. We discuss the current issues with Ethereum, including the challenges of interoperability between rollups and the ossification of Eth's "OG" culture, before exploring the solutions to help make Eth great again. - - Time Stamps (0:00) - Current Issues with Eth (5:22) - Why Build On EVM Stack vs SVM (9:23) - Why Would L2s Give Away Sequencer Fees? (14:01) - Toly v Justin Drake Thoughts (19:18) - Future of Stablecoins on Eth (23:06) - Can You Tokenize The World on Eth L1? (25:14) - Upcoming EIPs That Will Transform UX (36:10) - Eth's Need To Start Focusing on Apps (41:22) - What Could Eth Learn From Solana (51:50) - Timelines For Eth L2 Throughout To Be Competitive With Solana (59:57) - How To Prioiritze What Eth Needs To Focus On - - Podcast Resources Follow Sal: https://twitter.com/salxyz Follow Dave: https://twitter.com/SolBeachBum Follow Zen : https://twitter.com/ZenLlama Follow Unlayered: https://twitter.com/UnlayeredPod Subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or Google: https://unlayered.io/ Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UnlayeredPod - - Episode Resources Follow Emmanuel : https://Twitter.com/eawosikaaEmmanuel's Writings : https://emmanuelawosika.bio.link/

A daily update on what's happening in the Rocket Pool community on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and the DAO forum. Today's episode covers: tokenomics explainer almost ready, ethfinance critical of RPL, spot ETH ETF fee race, and the White House vetoes SAB121 0:00 - Welcome Rocket Pool news 0:44 - Tokenomics explainer draft complete https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/1215788197842255972/1246503241534017537 3:52 - Knoshua has proposal ideas https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/774497904559783947/1247193874548654081 5:55 - R/ethfinance gets critical of RPL https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1d65oxr/daily_general_discussion_june_2_2024/l6qnbtu/ https://x.com/drjasper_eth/status/1797260218792808567 10:45 - Hai vote to add rETH https://x.com/letsgethai/status/1797696270494228664 https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1247270095554871460 12:17 - Moist OwlBear gives and update on Ronin bridge LSTs https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1247126401652363334 14:34 - Ramana seeks cofounder for verifereum https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1246558798710181998 15:41 - Community rallies to hunt bots https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1246512567392931960 18:25 - IMC vote update https://vote.rocketpool.net/#/proposal/0x129eaa1779916b96fa1a34c7f9e24f87abad820c8fbe8ea2663f170891295e2e Ethereum news 19:56 - Ethereum roadmap website ethroadmap.com 23:50 - Spot ETH ETF pricing https://x.com/phoenixtrades_/status/1796604531113136408? https://x.com/BitMEXResearch/status/1797015617549083009 25:58 - Linea halted https://x.com/LineaBuild/status/1797283402745573837 29:21 - Matter Labs drops ZK trademark https://x.com/the_matter_labs/status/1797343779189403825 30:46 - Arbitrum overtakes Ethereum in users https://x.com/tokenterminal/status/1797003146964668534 31:44 - Ethereum marketing https://x.com/eawosikaa/status/1797434863462801519 https://x.com/iamDCinvestor/status/1797392333417165260 https://x.com/lex_node/status/1797115113846997250 https://x.com/eawosikaa/status/1797689134653542898 39:29 - JD v Toly debate https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1797666092661526959 https://x.com/MacroMate8/status/1797627685826633915 https://x.com/ufukaltinok/status/1797672974381916560 https://x.com/haydenzadams/status/1797748575092248752 In other news 41:29 - White House vetos SAB 121 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2024/05/31/a-message-to-the-house-of-representatives-on-the-presidents-veto-of-h-j-res-109/ 44:13 - Stock market glitches https://x.com/haydenzadams/status/1797653588111773917 45:26 - Rocket Fuel contributors raffle https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18T5w_w9uf6eOy5tt3GDNLFjNp7pr__1Z9IaW4RBCAQY/ https://harpocryptes.github.io/raffle.html

Gm! This week we invite Anatoly Yakovenko & Lucas Bruder to the show for a discussion on the current state of Solana. We deep dive into the transaction problem as on chain volumes have exploded in recent months. Toly & Lucas explore the solutions that could help to increase chain performance & what's next for Solana. Enjoy! -- Follow Anatoly: https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko Follow Lucas: https://twitter.com/buffalu__ Follow Mert: https://twitter.com/0xMert_ Follow Dan: https://twitter.com/smyyguy -- Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/43o3Syk Subscribe on Apple: https://apple.co/3OhiXgV Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3OkF7PD Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ -- 00:00 Introduction 01:54 Solana Chain Performance 12:05 Helium Mobile 13:08 The Criticism's Of Stake Weight QoS 24:59 The QoS Patch Rollout 27:31 Solana's TPS Problem 31:40 The End State For Priority Fees 35:00 Blocks Should Always Be Full 43:45 The Solana End State 52:33 Wen Dynamic Rent Fee? 58:54 Solana Restaking 01:05:07 MEV On Solana 01:08:54 Firedancer -- Disclaimers: Lightspeed was kickstarted by a grant from the Solana Foundation. Nothing said on Lightspeed is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mert, Garrett and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Gm! This week we invite Anatoly Yakovenko & Lucas Bruder to the show for a discussion on the current state of Solana. We deep dive into the transaction problem as on chain volumes have exploded in recent months. Toly & Lucas explore the solutions that could help to increase chain performance & what's next for Solana. Enjoy! -- Follow Anatoly: https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko Follow Lucas: https://twitter.com/buffalu__ Follow Mert: https://twitter.com/0xMert_ Follow Dan: https://twitter.com/smyyguy -- Try 3 months FREE of Helium Mobile with the code LIGHTSPEEDMOBILE: hellohelium.com Experience a new phone service that uses the Helium Network – a decentralized wireless network built by the people – AND the nation's largest 5G network. Drastically save costs while you enjoy unlimited talk, text, and data for just $20/month. Plus, you can earn MOBILE tokens for sharing where you use your phone the most. -- Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/43o3Syk Subscribe on Apple: https://apple.co/3OhiXgV Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3OkF7PD Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ -- (00:00) Introduction (01:54) Solana Chain Performance (12:05) Helium Mobile (13:08) The Criticism's Of Stake Weight QoS (24:59) The QoS Patch Rollout (27:31) Solana's TPS Problem (31:40) The End State For Priority Fees (35:00) Blocks Should Always Be Full (43:45) The Solana End State (52:33) Wen Dynamic Rent Fee? (58:54) Solana Restaking (01:05:07) MEV On Solana (01:08:54) Firedancer -- Disclaimers: Lightspeed was kickstarted by a grant from the Solana Foundation. Nothing said on Lightspeed is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mert, Garrett and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

A conversation with Toly, the co-founder of Solana Labs and the Solana blockchain.❤️‍

Anatoly needs no introduction. He is responsible for the creation of Solana and the emergence of high-throughput, next-gen blockchains. We had the privilege of covering a very wide variety of topics with 'Toly thoughout this interview. We start with ‘Toly's childhood, background, and the origins of Solana. We then move into some of Solana's core principles and how they differ from Ethereum. This serves as a natural segue into Solana's upcoming technical upgrades, changes to its fee model, learnings from other ecosystems, and what happens after Firedancer. ‘Toly also address some of Solana's key criticisms and open questions head-on, such as decentralization initiatives and moneyness properties. This must-listen episode is the most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the Solana blockchain from the man who built this ~$60B (and counting) from the ground-up. -        - Time Stamps (0:00) - How Toly's childhood influenced him (3:24) - Toly's route into crypto (6:15) - The origins of Solana (11:17) - Why POH's core value prop is different than originally envisioned (14:15) - Has Solana created a level playing field  for trading yet? (21:24) - Where will finance ultimately exist? (25:10) - Interplay between Sol and Eth ecosystems (27:29) - Solana's modularity (31:27) - Upgrading the fee markets (39:44) - How will Solana handle MEV over a bull market (43:46) - Is Solana ready for mass adoption? (46:27) - Next technical hurdle post Firedancer (48:52) - Integreting DePIN friendly features into the Saga 2 (51:30) - Is Crypto x AI overhyped? (58:16) - Teachings from other L1 ecosystems (1:00:42) - No 10x improvements possible over Solana's design? (1:02:02) - implications of a multi-validator client future (1:07:03) - Solana becoming an Eth L2 shared sequencer? (1:08:08) - Solana's moneyness properties (1:10:35) - When will Solana be decentralised enough? (1:15:21) - The end of the good old days? (1:16:25) - Which projects excite Toly (1:19:46) - How Toly touches grass (1:21:05) - Toly's advice for this cycle -        - Podcast Resources Follow Sal: https://twitter.com/salxyz Follow Dave: https://twitter.com/SolBeachBum Follow Unlayered: https://twitter.com/UnlayeredPod Subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or Google: https://unlayered.io/ Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UnlayeredPod -        - Episode Resources Follow Anatoly : https://Twitter.com/AEYakovenko

Escuchando Tus Beats Junto A Yai y Toly ( Nativos Music) --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/yosoyproductor/support

Is the demand for Christian higher education dying away? Noah Toly, provost at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, says that on the contrary, their enrollment numbers are higher than ever. He and Brian theorize about it and reminisce about their time as undergraduate roommates at Wheaton College. Follow The Common Good on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Hosted by Aubrey Sampson and Brian From Produced by Laura Finch and Keith ConradSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're so back.What's up everybody, this is Thomas Bahamas and you are here for another episode of Solana Weekly. Where it's my job to find the biggest stories of the week and try to figure out the implications of what we're seeing. We are seeing so much up only and I am having a great time. I would like to say that this episode is brought to you buy the massive pump of Bonk and the absolute chad holders at Quekz. Both are the quality assets we need and are the best examples of great projects on Solana. Sol price - 41.34 up mega, we are up 73% over the last month. Leading into breakpoint with news and releases dropping, combined with token drops and this thing is rocketing. SolEth - .023, up mega Solbtc - .0012 up! We passed previous resistance at .001 i was watching closely and boy we are not stopping. Well the theme of this episode has to address the overall upness of the market and just how pumped I am about it. Huge pumps everywhere, with Sol outperforming everything on the way up, holding higher levels, and the cherry on the top is Bonk pumping over 2x as well.It's not ending. Yes there might be local tops and some pullbacks, but I think we are starting to the beginning of the bull run. The timing couldn't be better, it's token season on Solana combined with Breakpoint coming up and tons of really good protocols humming along. The protocols that I'm most excited about all have tokens coming as well.Jupiter, drift, jito, kamino, meteora, margin, magic Eden, goose, isc have all had pretty serious rumors about dropping tokens and I'm here for it. I think Sol holders and all of us that have been here for years should be rewarded. We are the community and bring  value to these protocols. Spreading that would be the most crypto thing. This is how Ethereum has always won, they get their users rich and they never leave. I am here for it. Of course with all these great game changing protocols having really thought out drops, there are the memecoins with no thought as well. I'm seeing jeet, wen, and a whole slosh of other coins flood the market and why not. It's fun, some of them do okay. But I think the trash tokens are actually highlighting the insane difference between a token and all that Bonk has done. Bonk is built different and with a great drop to the community and integrations with almost all protocols it is the heart of solana. It was there for us on our darkest days after ftx rugged. It dropped on Christmas and Solana was like $8 and sentiment was trash. It was going to 0. I was sitting at my in laws and laughing at bonk and branche dropped that bonk was launching in degen mints and I aped some because I thought it was funny. I bought more because it was fun. Burning your bonk was hilarious. This was the start but they have continued to build this whole year. Great marketing, fun, and tons of use cases are all on the back of this rally and it feels good. If you're in nfts, pivot to defi. NFTs are doomed. Everything is down mega. I'm not sure when it stops. But I can say what has worked in the past is holding quality nfts that will do well. Maybe adding a couple more that are super bleeding. The only project excelling during these dark times are the Quekz! That's right, our ducks are the best ducks. I got some sick merch, the holders are absolute chads and it's going to 10 sol and wouldn't be surprised to find it at 100 sol. No one sells. It's funnier if you don't. As far as other quality NFTs, I'd urge caution, but famous foxes look free, they have a ton of revenue and run time and aren't going anywhere, smb gen 3 are free, Monkedao isn't going anywhere either. Empire pod and 1000x is maybe the best pod to think about the crypto markets. One of the hosts Jonah trash talked Solana and got roasted. Then they had Toly on and hes pretty onboard with Solana. How to play the pump: keep an eye on SolBtc. I have the urge to take a little profits on the way up. But the left curve is to just stake and hold. i have most of my sol staked and will hold. But i will keep an eye on the price of solana vs Bitcoin. When it tops I will likely look at swapping over. Because when Bitcoin runs it runs. Updated from breakpoint:Armani and Tristan and the lads are releasing an exchange! A centralized exchange for the people. Super pumped, and they also released a mobile app. Next breakpoint is in Singapore. Fire dancer is officially on testnet and hitting 1 million tps! Eth teases solana speeds, while solana tests unheard of speeds. Pyth airdrop is live. Squads is releasing a wallet called fuse wallet that's a multisig and super user friendly.AWS releases node runner.anyways sorry for the late episode, everything was pumping and I couldn't even keep up with the news. It's Halloween, get those pumpkins carved and enjoy some gains. 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

In this episode, Austin has a freeform conversation with Anatoly Yakovenko about the state of Solana. Beyond the cliches of the past, present, and future of the network, Austin and Toly explore higher level ideas such as design philosophy, hardware limitations, balancing new features with network performance, AI and blockchain, and much more. DISCLAIMERThe content herein is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, options, futures, or other derivatives related to securities in any jurisdiction, nor should not be relied upon as advice to buy, sell or hold any of the foregoing. This content is intended to be general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional advisor.  Solana Foundation Foundation and its agents, advisors, council members, officers and employees (the “Foundation Parties”) make no representation or warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy of the information herein and expressly disclaims any and all liability that may be based on such information or any errors or omissions therein. The Foundation Parties shall have no liability whatsoever, under contract, tort, trust or otherwise, to any person arising from or related to the content or any use of the information contained herein by you or any of your representatives. All opinions expressed herein are the speakers' own personal opinions and do not reflect the opinions of any entities.  

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

What's up everyone! Welcome to Solana Weekly Episode 24. This is Thomas Bahamas and I want to thank you all for joining in on the fun. I skipped last week and need to apologize, I was recovering from the flu and every attempt to record turn into a coughing fit. Gotta give a shoutout to ItsLloyd on Twitter for keeping me honest. Feeling better now, and we're so f-ing back, and I'm going to hit you with two weeks of alpha in one. I've realized that a lot of podcasts seem to qualify the host with credentials, so I'll attempt a brief elevator pitch of sorts. I've been tinkering around on Solana the last two years, Eth and Bitcoin before that and I have a background working in account management and UX/UI at a B2B SaaS company. So a lot of my takes are centered around the unique experience that Solana can provide and tie in some fun that I've been having. Solana seems to be the only blockchain that actually focuses on this and crushes it, so I think that's the reason that it's so sticky for me. * Solana Price Update: Sitting at $20.99, down a total of 1.7% in two weeks. Some might say it's more stable than most stablecoins, but this chart is looking pretty bad. We went up past resistance into the 23's for a little but, but it rejected and haven't really turned it around. We're just kind of hanging out on support while Bitcoin and Eth look ready to dump. I'm hoping we hold steady, but my analytical mind is saying we'll likely hit a dip here. I will be a buyer under $20 for sure. * Solana vs. Ethereum: Down to .01122 with a minor decrease on the week so small we don't even need to go into it. But I'm seeing the narratives starting to shift on Eth with the transaction fees spiking. Eth L1 fees have hit highs of like $250, while L2's have seen $50. Not sustainable, and what we are seeing is basically an advertisement for a blockchain that settles at the speed of light for a fraction of a penny. * Solana vs. Bitcoin: Sitting at .00076 which is a small increase of a couple percent. I remain bullish on this chart. I remain bullish on Bitcoin and even more bullish on Solana outperforming it. So I'm keeping a bag of both, while more heavily weighted to Solana until further notice. I'm also seeing our favorite VC's Jump teasing a BTC product for what I'm hoping is on Solana through their bridge Wormhole. People have been calling for it. * Solana News: Fire Dancer teasing 1 million transactions per second and doing incredible work reworking the Solana client. I saw that Toly mentioned the third client will likely be AI taking both sets of software and creating a third. Insane. But Firedancer is the path forward and will be what get's Solana out of it's Beta stage. I'm pumped for the redundancy client and that this will basically remove downtime based on bugs. If there's a bug in one client, you simply use the other. This is the immediate benefit, but the efficiency increases in the code base and structure will be what leads to unlocking speeds that are unheard of. I hopped on a Solana team call, they opened it up to everyone and it was amazing. They had Armani talk MadLads and give details about his mint, they talked development and it was sick that they were able to allow everyone to join in. Excited for the next one to be quite honest.* Solana Mobile is a hit, I believe they sold out of the initial batch and have now opened up sales to Europe. I need to do more testing, but it's a sick phone. I am now comfortable with most things Android, and the UI for crypto is literally a game changer. Crypto native phones are a game changer. The dapp store is a game changer. This is huge and I'm loving all the attention it's getting. I have been starting to think that rather than complain about your privacy being taken, you should do something about it and Saga is literally doing that. I also am embarrassed by how hard it is to change everything over from my iPhone. I have my iphone stand I put my watch and phone on at night, during the day I have my Apple Air pods and use the case while working to prop it up a little bit, and I have a magnetized holder for my iPhone in my car. I'm still using it as a second phone, but want to make the switch. * Helium has officially migrated to Solana and has released their Mobile 5g service. I don't really know how it works, but I'm on the second wave of beta's and will let you know when I know more. I want to run my own node, but I don't think I live in a dense enough town for it to make sense. Still I'm going to research this. I think this is crazy because I remember researching setting up a node years ago when Helium first came out. The idea is awesome and they should be able to open up a lot of cool capabilities and I get a free month of service for buying a Saga. * I finally got to sport my new Mad Lad PFP of my dapper lad smoking a cigar with red background. Kind of pumped about it. * Sui launched and it seems like they are not quite getting the pump they were looking for. Real low float with a low percentage of coins on the market, with tons of lock ups coming out in a few months. I know there was a bunch of issues with their NFT marketplace for the Fuddies NFT launch, but I think it's doing really well still. They are trying to take marketshare from Solana and they'll get some, but I don't see it long term. They are trying to fake the amount of TPS they calculate by not using a signature as one transaction, so we'll see how this ends. But for now it has been pretty uneventful, and I actually find this bullish. The network should get some time to stabilize and grow. I might look to accumulate a little and think it's important to test out other blockchains. * Solana has faced a lot of criticism and I would say has made it through the one of the biggest storms it could. It launched in a bear, it pumped, it dumped, it survived FTX, and is strong af because of this, SUI needs to prove itself out. * Macro turmoil: Feds raised rates another 25 bps and immediately after we saw another bank start to fail. We're seeing some crazy things goin on and it's kind of what a lot of Bitcoiners have been talking about for years. The White House is talking about putting a stop to short selling on Banks while small regional banks fail and JP Morgan acquires more and more market share. I don't know where this ends, but it's worth bringing up because these crypto economies that we are building are outside the system. The current administration is attacking crypto at every stop, a 30% tax on btc mining was just proposed, on ramps and off ramps are being attacked, exchanges are being attacked. If you're in this game, you have to know what you're up against and protect it. We self custody and watch out for scams and bad links for airdrops, but now we also have to play hot potato with any on or off ramp and exchange. We're seeing Coinbase take a stand against the SEC by suing them for answers and opening up an offshore shop. If you are still here after the last year of blow ups, we probably have more coming and we gotta stay vigilant. Within this lies a lot of risk, but also a lot of upside. Solana stands to gain a lot, and is the only blockchain that I would consider usable at scale right now. So there is a bullish case here through all the mess, but we have to survive the mess to get there. * Memecoins, memecoins everywhere. Everyone is making generational wealth and I only made one sol flipping Wawa. I uh, am not a memecoin trader so I didn't get in. This started with Pepe going insane on Eth. Which led to Solana releasing a bunch of crap. We had king, guac, chips, Carl, and a bunch of other ones. It's insanely cheap to create an SPL token on Solana, and some influencers are capitalizing on that. Mixed feelings on this one. On one hand it's a great advertisement for how far Solana has come as far as tooling, scaling, low gas fees, and quick transactions, but on the other a bunch of people got fomo and are getting absolutely dumped on. * Couple more thoughts on memecoins: As you go down the risk curve you also go down the iq curve. It's mainly pump and dump and you gotta get in and out. This took a ton of liquidity from NFT's, and even from Bonk. I think it has mostly passed and I hope we made it out alive. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. * Gas wars proving out Solana's use case. Eth gas has been up to $250, and even Bitcoin has been showing really high fees. The mempools for these transactions are backed the f**k up. They are too congested, you have to pay a fat priority fee in order to do anything onchain in Eth. Because of people trading so much Pepe coin on chain. It's hilarious and tragic at the same time. Solana's gas remains unbothered, moisturized, flourishing at .00001. They have the scaling solution live. L2's aren't ready, it's still been up to $50 for transactions there. Solana crushing it. We had the same problems with mints slamming the blockchain and what the team did was create a hot spot for priority fees. Where if specific block space is being sought after (like a mint) there are localized priority fees to those specific transactions related to that contract. So the mint would have a higher transaction cost, you could set the priority fee higher and get to the transaction quicker. The fees don't get high though, it's more like .0001. I love this solution, it outprices actors that are using bots because it prices them out and allows us normies to pay slightly more and get what we want. * I've been using Chat GPT for asking dumb questions that I have about Solana and it's architecture and it's so valuable. Example: I came from Bitcoin where each token has an address, a UTXO, it's an unspent transaction. So I was wondering if solana did the same thing. I asked chatgpt and learned all about the account based model that Solana and Ethereum use. Where there is no UTXO to track tokens and their movement. You just know how many tokens you have in a wallet and movements between the wallets. Anyways I think that the massive tech barrier between users and developers can be lowered through this type of education.* New Podcasts on Solana and the rise of good media. So I mentioned that the quality of media has 100x'd and I meant it. The Unlayered pod is a new one that dropped and is great. Phantom does a great pod. I quit listening to Solana made easy because it's too much and I'm not going to waste all my time worrying about the next flip. I'm not a trader and I continue to think that finding quality projects and holding for a while with size is the way.* Phantom- released their multichain wallet. Kind of sick, but they did it and it impacted their core product. The wallet is slow af. If you're using a ledger as you should be it takes forever. They actually degraded performance of the best performing wallet in order to bring Eth and Polygon users to their platform. Nobody asked for this. The target audience is DeGods and y00ts and there is no way they should release a product that impacts performance for sol.Terrible product decision and I'm hoping they fix it. That was a lot, two weeks in crypto is about a year in the web 2 world so we had a lot to cover. I hope you enjoyed these couple weeks and had some fun trading around. It's funny to think about, but I didn't even bring up NFT's which is like the core of this pod and Solana. But we're seeing pullbacks across the board as liquidity flowed elsewhere. I'm hoping that changes and we buy the dip and stack some foxes in the meantime. This is Thomas Bahamas, and thank you all for joining in! 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

Our guest this week is Mert Mumtaz, Co-founder & CEO of Helius, a vertically integrated developer platform offering a suite of tools to help easily build products on Solana. Mert joins Brian Friel to clear up common misconceptions about Solana, shares the latest opportunities for developers, and dives deep into state compression, which reduces the amount of on-chain storage required to store NFTs, resulting in lower costs for creators and buyers by up to 100 times. State compression on Solana is already being leveraged by projects like Dialect, Drip.haus, and Helium to help scale their projects. Show Notes:01:10 - Origin Story and background05:08 - How he started on Solana07:45 - How Helius began11:27 - Misconceptions about Solana      18:01 - What is he most excited about on Solana23:03 - How is Helius working with DePin25:34 - Opportunities for Developers on Solana32:15 - A builder he admires          Full Transcript:Brian (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 relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce my guest, the man who in Solana needs no introduction. Mert Montaz, the founder and CEO of Helius. Mert, welcome to the show. Mert (00:25):Thank you for having me, Brian. Brian (00:26):I've been looking forward to having a conversation with you here for a while. I don't know if you remember this, but way back in the day, I was getting my start on Solana by writing articles on Twitter, dev related articles, and you were one of the first people that took my article and said, hey, I'm an engineer at Coinbase. I can actually vouch that this is legitimate. And that actually got me in front of Chase Barker and everything. I don't know if you remember that interaction, but it's been a long time that I've seen you on Twitter. Mert (00:54):I do remember it. Brian (00:55):Thank you for that because that got me my stardom of three. Maybe that'd be an interesting place to start is I'd love to learn a little bit more about you. I know you were, previously before getting involved with Solana, you were at Coinbase. Can you share a little bit about your journey, what your background is and what led you to Solana? Mert (01:10):Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I do remember that interaction. I think it was a medium article about it was either voting or incremental counter, maybe a peanut butter sandwich or something. Brian (01:21):Yeah. It was like a simple app. Mert (01:22):Yeah, it was actually quite good. I was super impressed with it. I wish people kept producing those. I think we need more brine blog posts. Yeah. I guess maybe a brief intro of how I got started. I majored in math and communications engineering, communications engineering being satellites and signals and stuff like that. And I actually got to work at Blackberry as an intern. And so I got to see some pretty interesting engineering challenges at my earlier years about cloud infrastructure. I was on the team that ran the cloud for BBM, for example, which handled a lot of volume until it died, of course. Yeah, I mean after that I worked at the big banks in Canada, Canada's run by five big banks and I worked at three of those in some weird order where I did cybersecurity, I did payment systems, ATM withdrawals and stuff like that. (02:11):And I then joined a startup that got acquired, Shutterstock. It was about digital advertising and stuff like that. I'm sure some people are familiar with Shutterstock. And then I worked at Clear Bank on the treasury team where we were in charge of payment rails and stuff for funding entrepreneurs. And then we had this situation where we needed to send money to Australia and I needed to write the code that would handle doing that. And we met with a bunch of these vendors and stuff and it was all super complex for some reason that I didn't understand, you had to do these hops through various jurisdictions and stuff like that. And I was like, I mean you could probably just use USDC or something. And people just thought that was a scam. And at that point I was like, I wonder what the actual truth is here. (02:55):I did some digging and I was like, this is obviously not a scam, not even close. And in fact, it seems super interesting. I did a brief look into crypto in university where I thought I was maybe too academic and you need a PhD or something to do anything meaningful. Obviously quite wrong, but that was my first intro. And then a few weeks after that I was working at Coinbase. Actually it was interesting because I joined them slightly before they went public. And so they still kind of had the startup ethos and it was super fun working there and got to learn and build and talk with a bunch of really bright people. And that's obviously doing research on different blockchains. Obviously Coinbase is very EVM centric. Some times were good, some times we're bad. And somewhere in that line I found Solana and I just started digging around posting stuff, publishing stuff. And I really liked the approach that Solana had taken to be the pragmatic approach. I'm sure you hear this word a lot, but the practicality of the ecosystem as well as the ethos really resonated with me. (03:52):And the community was also pretty cool. You actually just mentioned Chase talking to you about something you posted. That was also my experience. Whenever I would posted something, Armani or Chase would hype me up and I was like, okay, that's pretty cool. And yeah, I mean it kind of just took off from there. Brian (04:07):Yeah. I love that framing of the pragmatic chain and you actually having that experience at a big bank just saying, why don't we just use USDC? It's settled in 400 milliseconds or whatever. And Solana really, I think, is the best example of that. That's pretty poetic that you found your way there. Mert (04:23):Mm-hmm. Brian (04:23):I remember a time though when you first were posting on Twitter, it was mostly around trying to help others understand what was happening on chain. And you mentioned Coinbase, very EVM centric. I think a lot of us who worked in crypto at the time, it was just EVMs the only game in town. And if you thought differently, that was just weird or a lot of people it didn't make sense. And I think my experience, one of the biggest barriers to getting people familiar with Solana was just wrapping their head around the mental model of just how stuff works on chain. It's just inherently different. Can you talk a little bit about that, how you got your start? What were you doing when you were writing these articles and helping others understand what was going on on chain? What did you have to build, what were you teaching yourself at that time? Mert (05:07):Yeah, that's a good point. Most people actually don't really know that unless they were early like you. At first what I would do, this was kind of during the peak kind of start of NFT season on Solana and basically a lot of influencer types or people who I don't think were very intellectually honest would post some sort of claim about, oh, the price of the NFT is going down because the price of Solana is going up. This is obvious and stuff like that. And I thought to myself, there's no way the markets are that efficient for JPEGs, right. There's other stuff there. If people were botting these NFTs and getting a high concentration on maybe dumping on retail and doing other sketchy stuff. And so I would just write scripts, goal length scripts or JavaScript scripts, whatever, and analyze the data. This is before any data analytics existed, really like Solana FM or I mean, Solana FM was there, but they did regular indexing, Solana floor and stuff. (06:09):Flip side, Nance, none of these actually covered Solana. I would just do it and then I would just write my findings in a Twitter thread with some charts and stuff. And I did that pretty regularly. I did it for a bunch of different stuff, including some upcoming projects in terms of gaming and where the potential is. And somewhere along the line after being armed with that knowledge of just doing it for a consistent amount of time, I came across a lot of people on crypto Twitter just really making unsubstantiated claims about Solana and its architecture and its scaling plan and all this stuff. And I guess I was in somewhat of a unique position where I was actually still at Coinbase at the time and somebody would post something and I had relatively okay knowledge of EVM, but also pretty good knowledge of Solana. (06:56):And so I'd usually be able to tell, okay, this is just not true what this person posted. Why is nobody correcting them? And it's because nobody actually just really knew both ecosystems that well. And sometimes in internal Coinbase chats, this would come up and people would be like, that is wrong. And I'd be like, yeah, that is wrong. Why aren't we doing something about this? And I kind of just started yelling at the people who were just lying or maybe spreading knowledge that was not grounded in truth, let's say. And I just never stopped doing that. And turns out crypto Twitter is full of these people, and so I never- Brian (07:29):Yeah. Your job's never done. Mert (07:30):Exactly. Brian (07:32):Is it fair to say that you arming yourself with this knowledge, you had to actually build the tools you needed just to understand what's going on-chain. Was this the start of Helius and essentially what you guys now offer? And maybe you can talk a little bit about that, how Helius began. Mert (07:45):Yeah, 100%. That's exactly right. The most common problem I ran across was when you're looking at on-chain data, the data is super cryptic, right. The instruction data is bortion coded or something. And unless you knew the schema of how it was encoded or maybe the idea which, especially in NFTs, in DeFi, it's not too bad, but especially in NFTs and other non-DeFi use cases, nobody has any idea what the on chain data looks like. And so I would have to hard code some weird methods, maybe parse logs, but also reverse engineer based on discriminators. Or I would even try to brute force it sometimes, which actually kind of worked. I would go on Magic Eden, and you would know this is before Magic Eden's programs were more readable. This is the first version. I would check the app layer. I would go to magiceden.io and I would see, okay, this NFT is listed for 20 SOL or something. (08:38):And then I would try a bunch of different decodings until I got that answer. And then I would do that with a bunch of different ones and I'd be like, okay, this is clearly the discriminator that I need to use. And so I would do that. I also did a bunch, go to the network tab, inspect source, and then dig through the entire minify JavaScript, unminify it, see the schema and try to use that schema when trying to decode the data and stuff. And I was like, this is bananas. This should not be done. And basically that's kind of where Helius came from and the first iteration of Helius was like, okay, we need to make on chain data read about Solana because it's particularly impossible. And then along the way, once we started doing that and talking to customers, it seemed like quite a few people were having other problems, especially around RPCs, which was surprising 'cause I thought RPCs were kind of okay, but after digging into it, it turns out that wasn't really the case. (09:28):And then you run into all sorts of other issues like streaming data on chain, at least in an inexpensive and reliable way. Solana has this problem with web sockets where you might lose data. Yeah, I mean just talking to customers just found a bunch of problems. And Helius is essentially now there to be this vertically integrated developer platform on Solana to essentially just help developers succeed on Solana. And we're not necessarily bound to Solana, but basically my philosophy on this is that I want crypto to succeed. I mean obviously we're all here because we're interested in crypto and believe in crypto's future. If you start from first principles there, I think given the options out there today, Solana's our essentially best shot at executing that vision. Obviously a lot of people disagree with that, but it's something I believe in. And so then my thought process, okay, how do we get more people to build on Solana so that we can have a better crypto future? Brian (10:19):No, I totally agree with that. I think that's been our ticket on Phantom as well, where it's like most of Phantom came from EVM folks and I think a lot of us independently kind of had this realization of we want crypto to succeed. Pragmatically thinking, what am I going to get my parents or my friend to use today? How are we realistically going to scale this thing in the next couple years? Solana also right now is the most pragmatic approach to doing that. I think before we jump in a little bit more to Helius in particular, what you guys offer and what you guys are up to, I kind want to take a moment just to talk maybe broadly about Solana because I think you are one of the most well known vocal defenders of Solana where there is a lot out there that's just blatantly wrong and you not only technically know how to rebut it, but you take the time and the energy to be out there and educating people. I want to know a little bit for where you sit at Helius, what you see right now, what would you say are some of the biggest misconceptions today about Solana that folks who maybe already know about crypto, maybe are already well versed in EVM, but maybe they just haven't gotten through to actually hear from somebody's boots on the ground. What would you tell them that they're misunderstanding about Solana? Mert (11:27):Maybe I'll take a more broad approach to answering this because it's kind of different segments, but in terms of maybe people from EVM, if you're already familiar with EVM and maybe you want to build on Solana and what are your kind of reservations, right. Some of the ones I've come across are, well, one, Rust is just hard to write. Solana has a diehard kind of fan base of Rust developers, but Rust is not easy. That is just a fact. Solidity, is somebody in high school could learn it easily, but Rust, I mean they'd be able to learn it, but I don't think it'd be easy. The concepts like lifetimes and for example, that stuff is not easy for somebody who wants to just prototype and maybe ship something. And so then you'll say, well, there's Anchor and stuff and Anchor is super helpful and probably my favorite tool on Solana, unless you know Rust, you're still going to be kind of flying blind and you know might need that to build your applications. (12:17):And if you're a determined developer, you'll get over that and then learn Rust anyways. But that friction alone is enough to deter a good amount of people is what I found. That's just one thing, and I know Foundation folks and Dev are working on this and there's some other teams, there's the Python seahorse stuff, there's a new type of Script One coming out. I think maybe there's even a Goaline One. It's also just a result of being early. Solana has really been around for two years, whereas EVM almost nine years now. It's hard to compare these things. That's one. And then two, and this is an interesting one, is developer optionality. As a developer, let's say at an entering focus from Coinbase, let's say you want to build a new product and  you're deciding between EVM and Solana. Well, the obvious kind of elephant in the room is, okay, if Solana has a problem, you are kind of done, right? (13:12):You don't have any other options. You can't port your code base over anywhere else. Whereas if you are the EVM developer and you build on Polygon, you can just use main net Eth, maybe you can, with some effort, use any of the other L2's or maybe another EVM for it, something like that. It's a much easier transition. It's less risky such that on a design doc that you want reviewed by product managers, most engineers are going to take the safe route there. Brian (13:37):It reminds me of that “no one gets fired for hiring IBM” phrase that they used to have back in the day, the safe route to get it approved by somebody. Yeah. Mert (13:45):100%. And it doesn't help that the Solana PR is so bad that everybody's even mistakenly saying, oh, Solana always goes down or Solana's all these different things. You add these up and then as an engineer, if you're at a big firm and you pick Solana, you have to religiously fight or justify your position. And most people just aren't going to do that even if they believe it. That's a big problem. One of the reasons why I think more SVM roll-ups that sell on other chains might be interesting here to give developers more optionality such that if you build on Solana, but Solana has something bad happen, but it's still settling on these other L1's or other data availabilities or whatever it might be. And then three, is of course, there are actual misconceptions about the reliability of the chain. (14:33):People think the chain has gone down 12 times or something, or multiple digits. It's actually gone down four times. People conflate performance degradation with outage. Performance degradation is just when you maybe have, you guys obviously notice at Phantom when you maybe aren't landing transactions on chain or maybe there's latency or something like that, that's the functional equivalent of fees getting higher on EVM. That's performance degradation. But an actual outage is actually relatively rare. In fact, the numbers, I think the last time I looked at them were 99.7% uptime, which isn't perfect, but it's also not bad. It's certainly not as bad as something that would go down every day or regularly. I mean there's a misconception there. Brian (15:15):Or reorgs in that matter too. Mert (15:16):Yeah, exactly. I mean we can kind of talk about that in maybe another part of this, but people don't realize that especially for an indexed company, maybe Coinbase where you're selling funds, those reorgs actually affect your architecture an insane amount because you need to add new systems to communicate, oh actually this block was not correct or something. Whereas on Solana, you don't really need to do that. I mean no block to my knowledge went back after being confirmed. Brian (15:40):Yeah. I was going to say I don't think there ever has been a... It's even, yeah, the optimistic confirmed, not even finalized as there's never been a reorg once it's been that. Yeah. Mert (15:49):Exactly. Some people think you need ridiculous hardware requirements to run these nodes and that's actually not true. You can run a node, depending on if you want an RPC node or a validator node for really anything from $200 to $800 a month. People think you need actual data centers to run it, which I don't know where people get that from. And then there's also light clients coming out now, right. I can talk all day about the misconceptions, but I think the first two are probably the most justified reasons from actual engineers that I've heard. Brian (16:20):Yeah. No, that's a really good take, I think, because one, there's the FUD, which I think is the back half of what you kind of just talked about, which I think that just comes with time and getting people to experiment with Solana and trying it firsthand and understanding there's no better teacher than that, otherwise you're fighting essentially Twitter algorithms. But I think that's a really nuanced take what you had to start, where you're saying the de-risking almost to get this buy-in because you know what it's like to work at these large companies and kind of proliferating Solana there. I also think what Jump is doing with Fired Answer is also just another benefit to that as well. Essentially just reducing the service area potential bugs that occur. Essentially if you have a bug in just one client implementation, adding a second one greatly reduces the chance it'll happen again. (17:09):Maybe one way we can take this is instead of fighting the FUD, because that could take all day, is from where you sit right now in Helius, say that you guys have a really interesting position in the space because one, you're super close to what's actually happening as Solana's roadmap evolves. I'd say part of being the pragmatic change is Solana's not afraid to push the boundaries, take risks, add new token programs, NFT compression, just constantly evolving at a fast pace. You guys are close to that and then you're also close to the developers who are coming into this space for the first time, like you said, the hobby weekend developer who's interested and they don't want to learn Rust and so they need some sort of abstraction layer to this coming in some sort of dead platform that's helping them in some way. What are you personally most excited about right now that's happening on Solana? Mert (18:02):Well, I mean Compression, I think, maybe is one that's gaining some steam in and an obvious one that I think most people are aware of at this point. But back when I was trying to show it, most people weren't aware. I think our job here is maybe done so now it can kind of take off, but Compression is super exciting because most people don't realize that Compression, actually, let me just explain what it is first. Data storage or state storage on Solana is quite costly. I don't know the exact cost, I guess I would need to look at that chart, but there's some articles on this and you can look at the Helius blog "shill" for seeing the comparisons for the numbers, but basically state storage on Solana is expensive and with Compression, essentially what you can do is instead of storing the data in state, you can store it on ledger. And that might sound a little abstract, but basically instead of needing it for consensus, you securely log it in transaction logs. (19:00):Basically it's what an engineer would call a stateless accumulator. I call them L2 because I like doing random marketing stuff, but Toly really doesn't like it. Do not call it an L2. Call it a stateless accumulator, which isn't very beginning friendly, but that is actually what it is. You just store a reference, it's a pointer by reference kind of thing. You store a reference to the data that's on the ledger on the state now instead of storing all the data on the state. And we do that via Merkel Trees, which I'm not going to go into here, but essentially you're able to get a few orders of magnitude and cost reductions. Now that's useful for digital assets and that's the first use case, NFT compression where you can mince thousands, millions, billions of NFTs. People will say like, oh, why do you need to mint a million NFTs, billion NFTs? (19:45):And it's like, that's not the point. The point is that we're not limited by technology anymore, whereas before we were, and we can maximize the design space and explore some things, right. You have Dialect doing sticker packs, Cross Mint using their APIs for all sorts of different cases, including loyalty programs, Helium migrating over to Solana for their hotspots using Compression, driphouse doing airdrops, Render potentially using it for their scene graphs, which is a super cool concepts, high map results even using them. And so it clearly has some use, but the cool thing about it is it's not actually limited to NFTs. Actually you can apply to any account, you can extend it to be fungible tokens and also just general account compression, which I think the guys at Gum are doing for some social graph formatives. It actually has quite a bit of potential there. (20:28):That's one of the big ones I'm excited about since my name is Compression Mert on Twitter right now. And then the Solana mobile, the Saga phone is awesome. I had a test unit and I've been an Android user my whole life after Blackberry Force and it's the best Android phone I've used and it's super snappy, very good build quality and it actually has changed my consumer behavior somewhat where actually, before I would explicitly shy away from mobile first or mobile crypto apps, I wouldn't use crypto at mobile at all. But now I'm like, okay, this is actually pretty cool. I can use leverage my secure seed vaults. We do need to work on that naming, but I can use that and have that confidence and that seamless integration. You have apps like Otter, Finance, Tip Link, Get Code or I guess just Code Wallet, which enables super fast kind of P2P payments, something like Venmo. And actually, I have used all of these to make payments to my family members and friends, so I'm super excited about that. (21:27):The thing I'm most excited about on Solana is this narrative of decentralized physical infrastructure or deepen taking off with not only do you have Helium now and High Mapper, you also have Render Now, Pollen Network, Genesis Go, Teleport and let's see who else we can get over. But I think this kind of intersection of P2P networks and using crypto to actually enable change in the physical world is super interesting and something that wasn't really possible before. Brian (21:56):That's super cool. I should say just for the listeners that we are recording this on April 13th, 2023, which is the official Saga launch day, so it's topical to bring that up. We're super excited about that too. I just think it's awesome that they're not afraid to push the boundaries on that. I mean for us at Phantom to not even have the ability to see a user seed phrase and it's just completely abstracted away at the hardware level, I think is awesome and a glimpse of where this is all heading. Let's talk a little bit about DePin too because I'm not as up to speed on that. I don't know if most of our users are. I think Helius migration is happening soon, TM, like this month in April. What are you guys seeing there? Is there any major changes to what you're doing on the infrastructure layer that's going to have to adapt for this? Do you foresee any major changes to end user behavior? (22:46):Part of what's interesting about Solana is the fee markets can adjust on a per piece of state level as opposed to if it was on Eth, you could see all of a sudden all your gas fees are increasing just like it would on a crazy NFT mint day. Can you talk a little bit about how you guys are working with this new DePin movement and what you guys are seeing? Mert (23:05):Helium particularly is interested in using Compression, or I mean they are using Compression to represent their hotspots and it would cost them just too much money to work with that kind of stuff on any other chain. And so Solana is what makes the most sense. And like you said, the independence of state, which causes individual account based fees as opposed to chain level fees, which doesn't make the UX horrible for one person here either. It's just you might have to pay extra. And so compression is something that they use the most, both High Mapper and Helium and also Render is, I believe, going to use it. They mentioned this in their GitHub migration paper. And so that's kind of the main driver, but also these teams generally have to subscribe to on chain events. And as a larger engineering firm or maybe independent of size, most people prefer getting data pushed to them instead of setting up some polling system to listen for events because there might be issues there. (24:02):They actually use our web hooks and then they kind of configure what events they want to listen to and then they kind of have this ease of mind where, okay, Helius will just stream me these events as they happen and I can just kind of plug, play and then forget. If anything happens, Helius will kind of let me know or maybe I'll get a page or something. The web hooks have actually been, it's interesting. When we first came to Solana, there was no web hook products on Solana and I'm not even sure if there was anything like that on Eth. It was just such an obvious thing and we built it and we shipped it and for example, Discord uses that for their integration into Solana. Their first actually Web3 integration, or actually I don't like the term Web3, their first crypto integration was with Solana and that was enabled with the Web hooks and we have some other big names using them now as well. (24:47):I don't think those are announced yet, but it's such a simple primitive, but just web hooks and listening to on chain data really helps some of these bigger firms who don't want to spend the time writing all this complex infrastructure code and they can just plug and play into some existing solution. Brian (25:02):Yeah. It's future-proofed, essentially. They can build once and they don't have to constantly be readjusting their implementation. Mert (25:08):Exactly. Brian (25:08):That's awesome. Turning this back to a developer who is maybe listening to this, familiar with EVM, looking at Solana, you guys do a lot, not just on the infrastructure side, but also on developer education, getting developers involved. We can talk about some of the specific initiatives there, but at a high level, what would you say are some of the biggest opportunities for a developer today who's looking at Solana? Where would you guide them to get started? Mert (25:35):Well, one thing I'll say is that Solana has maybe two main things that I would mention that might be interesting for folks coming over. One is that it's much earlier than the other ecosystems. And so there's a lot of low hanging fruit and underdeveloped tooling infrastructure, application layer stuff that exists in other chains in some form, but not on Solana. And so as a developer, let's just try to build something and you'll notice what's missing. You'll notice that the deployment workflows aren't great. You'll notice that maybe the monitoring isn't that great either, or maybe it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with certain types of smart contractors and stuff. You'll notice a ton of problems and that's just your opportunity to make something cool and fix those maybe as open source, maybe as a public good, maybe as a company. And so there's a lot of potential there. (26:22):Another thing is that Solana's architecture is, and so this almost kind of contradicts the first point, but not really if you think about it. The architecture of Solana is so different, right. It's functional based where you have actually a lot of modularity within the layer. You have independent state and logic, you have different accounts, localized fee markets, and so it's much more modular than something like ETH where state and logic are coupled. And also obviously the scalability features of Solana are quite different than anything else. And what that means is there's a lot of things that you can actually build that's only possible on Solana. Brian (26:57):I love that catchphrase by the way, only possible on Solana TM. Mert (27:01):Yeah. I've been a big fan of that one, let's just say. And it's totally true, right. Order books, for example, you saw it with Serum, you're seeing it now with Phoenix. This is before Fire Dancer and before 200ms block times, which will happen. This is the slowest it will be, it's only going to get faster from here. And so there's a bunch of things that are only possible on Solana. And I would strongly encourage people to think from first principles as a developer, look around, see what problems there are. They don't have to be Solana specific, they can just be problems, right. I don't know, maybe it's too slow to send your dad money or maybe it's too hard to offramp crypto, I don't know, something like that. And then usually if you are trying to look for a solution there for that problem, Solana will be able to handle it much more comfortably than others. (27:47):And the other important thing is it'll actually scale, right. You want kind of elasticity as a developer such that if your app takes off, you don't want to have to now migrate to another stack or something. With Solana, it's honestly just plug into a cloud provider, just kind of scales with you. But also a third thing I'll actually mention, which this really should have been number one, but I would encourage you very, very strongly to produce content, especially developer related content. Build something, learn from it and then write about it, make a podcast, produce a video, produce a tutorial, just write content. And not only will that obviously help you connect with other people who are in the ecosystem and like-minded and building other cool stuff, but also when you write stuff and produce content, you have to know what you're talking about, otherwise you won't be able to write it, right. It'll make you connect the dots and it'll point out flaws in your thinking. Brian (28:44):Yeah. It's the fastest way to get the right answer on the internet is to publish something that's wrong. Mert (28:49):Exactly. And so I guess maybe to go along with that is just have a high tolerance for looking, I don't want to say stupid, but just have a high tolerance for being wrong. You're going to be wrong a lot, but that's not a bad thing unless you're building the infrastructure for handling, I don't know, some critical payments or something. But you're probably not going to be doing that. Brian (29:10):Yeah. It's like the pursuit of truth. If you're open to that and you're excited to get told what's right, I couldn't agree more that's 100% the best way to build. Mert (29:19):Yeah. Sometimes I'll post something that I think is correct, but it's not apparently actually correct because Toly will comment and he'll gently say something that's slightly unrelated, but it's like, oh, okay, I'm wrong, I guess. I will retract this. And so honestly, it's just a fun way to learn and you do enough cycles of that and you are going to be doing that to other people and that's how we grow. Brian (29:46):Yeah, I totally agree. I think this ties in with what you were saying earlier of Solana being the pragmatic chain. I think part of the benefit, there's a knock, we talked about it, about, hey, Solana's new, it's different and you're essentially fighting network effects at that point. But part of the benefit is you get to build your own genuine kernel of a developer ecosystem and start from first principles and start from new and not be afraid to change things new. And I think that's been pretty eye-opening, even just to me personally. As Phantom enters EVM, we're looking at everything that EVM has inherited over the years. Most obvious one being even just how injected wallets play with each other on EVM is so different than Solana because Solana took a very first principles approach and said, we're going to do this in a way that you have a wallet, you can use it anywhere, it's going to scale forever kind of thing. And it's been pretty eye-opening to see the differences there. (30:36):That would be my only other thing I'd add to you is if you are a dev and you want to make it high impact on, it's probably the best place for it because you can post publicly about why you're doing what you're doing and you'll get people who are interested in listening and will back you on the basis and the merits of your ideas is what I'd say. Mert (30:52):Yeah, absolutely. Me, Chase and other parts of the developer system will help you the best we can. Basically the Helius tagline is actually “Where Solana teams succeed” because our entire goal is to help you succeed. That's essentially why I wake up and that's what I spend my entire day doing. And the Phantom founders, for example, are great example of this, right. They came from EVM and they saw what was possible on Solana and they built the number one wallet in crypto and it had such good UX and such good design and stuff, and you guys absolutely dominated. And then now you're actually transcending the change, right. It's actually becoming a product, it's not just a chain's product, it's just a product that you can use to onboard people onto crypto. I really like that approach from starting from first principles like you guys. You saw Meta Mask and you're like, okay, well we're going to do it differently. And you did it much better in my view. And so I think that's just an example of what's possible. Brian (31:50):Thanks. Yeah, I mean we love hearing that, but obviously love everything that Solana's doing and Solana's always going to be home. There's a lot to do on Solana. I'm excited to roll up the sleeves this year and get started. I guess, Mert, and as we start to wrap this up, one question we always ask all our guests, I'd love to hear this from you. You mentioned a lot of people on this podcast, a lot of teams, but I'd love to know, is there a particular builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem? Mert (32:17):Oh man. I mean, I do admire my co-founders, to be honest. I don't think they got that much credit because I'm kind of the loud one, but Nick and Liam are super, they're actually the driving force behind Helius and they do all of the engineering, and I do essentially nothing other than just larp on Twitter. Them for sure, but also, I'll give you my general approach on this, actually, maybe this is useful for someone, but my general approach to Twitter is whenever I see a founder on somebody's bio or something like that, or maybe a co-founder or something, I'll immediately follow them because those people are super inspiring to me. I pretty much follow all the founders on Solana at this point, I think. For example, the founder of Squat, Stephan Wright. I saw him, I was like, I'm going to follow this guy. (33:01):Turns out amazing dude, we're friends now. That's my general approach. I just respect all the founders in the ecosystem because they're taking big risks and they're trying to build cool stuff, and they're all trying to help the ecosystem. And so I have just huge respect for everyone there. Someones, I would probably point out specifically, would be obviously Armani and Tristan, huge respect for them. The founders of Gito, right, Sec, Fault and Buffaloo, I'll just say their pseudonym names. Co-founders of Squads, right, Margin, Drift, Zeta, for example. All the DeFi protocols. I'm probably just going to end up listing literally every single one. I would say if there's one particular one, it would be, I guess honestly just Toly, right. That's probably a cliche answer, but Toly just always keeps his composure under people just relentlessly slinging mud at his life's work essentially, and in a super unfair way. And he still gets up. And I mean, not only does he engage with the community, but he still builds cool stuff and there's so many different things. I have no idea how he does it, and I have a ton of respect for that. Brian (34:08):Well, I think that's the perfect answer. Having listed all the major founders in Solana, and then you go back to the guy who started it all, he sets the tone for the space and I think he makes it that drama free, practical, pragmatic, how do we build practical that's useful today. That's been my answer secretly too, that no one's asked me, but... Well, Mert, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. We'll have to do this again later once we've shipped all these crazy upgrades to Solana and check in again. But where can folks go to learn more about Helius? Mert (34:42):Yeah. Just helius.xyz. You can just go there or you can just @ me on Twitter. That's honestly how most people get in contact with me. Just tag me on Twitter on something and I'll respond. Brian (34:50):Awesome. Love it. Mert, the founder and CEO of Helius. Thanks so much for coming on. Mert (34:54):Thank you for having me.   

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Calvin University Provost Dr. Noah Toly, as well as CLT's own Katie Prefontaine, who is an alumna of Calvin. They discuss the mission and history of Calvin University, campus traditions and culture, and the university's commitment to the liberal arts.

I tried to record last week but I was at the beach and it sounded terrible. So we're bringing an episode with two weeks of alpha shrunk into one. Solana Price - Ranging, we are at $23.50, hit as high as $26, and dipped down to just under $20. SolEth - Sitting at .014, not bad. Toly on Bankless, gets a fair shake.SMB bought out by HGE and given to HadesDAO, in spite of MonkeDAO negotiations. Gotta dive into that. Overall it's good for holders, unbelievable opportunity for Hadeswap, kind of shitty for all the contributors to MD. Gambling! We talk Rollbit, SolCasino, and how this is hitting product market fit on Solana. I don't think it's going away. Altcoins: RLB, Bonk seeing some rise, Hades seeing a dip. Wallet Security - up it, Kevin Rose hacked for 2 mill +, we got tons of great solutions. NFT's on Bitcoin? That's right. Tooling on Solana - ZachXBT bashes it, hopefully Mert from Helius saves us. DeGod's Female Deriv - the Solana NFT lifecycle in a week. Pump, rug, de rug, pump. amazing. Regulation - Binance US and struggle with USD deposits, Kraken lawsuit for 30 mill in regards to staking. Decentralized staking becoming vastly more important/ appealing. Have to talk Lido protocol and how important they are. Balaji new podcast - legend, and his importance on the last cycle was massive. 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

Follow the @SolfatePod show on Twitter for updates. Thanks for listening frens :)Notes from the showNick finally got his Saga test unit and he is blown away. The gents talk specs and the pure beauty of the Saga phone, from hardware to software.Nick lectures James on the importance of a hardware wallet, and his strong feelings about them. And compares other Android phones in the market to the Saga.Huge shout out to Jeffrey Ando (@ser_ando) for the amazing AI generated cover art!Full show notes available at https://solfate.com/podcast/5Links from the showSolana podcast episode with Toly talking to Jason Keats, the founder OSOM (the hardware team behind the Saga phone)@creativedrewy (from the Solana Mobile team) talking about the Solana Mobile Stack (this is that “wonderful video chat from someone from the Solana Mobile team Nick could not remember…)Solana foundation announced the Grizzlython HackathonHackathon hype video from Solana's twitterSolana news from the weekTweet thread about the Grizzlython HackathonToly has on the Around the Block podcast with Brian Armstrong (founder of Coinbase)Not directly Solana, but Amazon announced an NFT initiativeSuperteam held their Solana Community Call #2, with special guest BalajiFollow us aroundNickfollow on twitter: @nickfrostyfollow on github: github.com/nickfrostywebsite: https://nick.afJamesfollow on twitter: @jamesrp13follow on github: github.com/jamesrp13

Solana price -dipped down to $21, sticking in the range around $24 now. Steady, not pumping too hard and keeping our nft values up there. SolEth .015 - steady light gains against eth. Aptos caught a freaking bid - over a 3x, bad launch but seems to have more legs than we thought. Couple topics I want to cover:Overall why it's so fun to root for Solana :You don't have to be cheering the end of the world in order to pump your bags. Btc, even eth is guilty of assuming they are going to take over because of how shitty everything is. Solana is more like let's play NFT games, dog coins, you can use our network with dollars and it's cheap and fun.I quite like it. When you say the fun chain it's because we aren't trying to replace things, we are rethinking what you can do with blockchain based on innovations. Wallet security -The great Kevin Rose hack must be talked about. Huge fan of Kevin, him and Tim Ferris have a pretty big influence on why I'm in crypto so to see him get his vault wallet drained to the tune of 2 mill is terrible. It goes to wallet security, he signed one malicious transaction and it drained his wallet. Even if it was a hardware wallet this could have happened. We have to do Better.This isn't an eth thing, this is a cross the board. Until there are better solutions we have to do what we can to protect ourselves. Hold multiple wallets, multi sig wallets, hardware wallets, use the damn horcrux method where you don't have everything on one wallet. Wallets are free! Toly challenged Armani to build a cold wallet that can't interact with smart contracts and can only send to wallets and he did it in a day. I'm going to revisit back pack and do what I can. I use a ledger for almost everything. But it's not good enough. Will be splitting everything. Up. 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

Price talk: 2x'd this week, 3x from bottom baby. SolEth doubled to .0142 - we love to see it. Explanation of why we care. Bonkz- fomo is real, reveal early next week, the art has been fire. Smol Coin - dream big, think smol, total supply: 1. Sharky.Fi Review of first week using. 2 loans paid back early, 1 big one soon?Dialect out, great for a morning GM.Toly says no fees for the robots. Lollipop Burns his Brero Monke? Crypto Duck Punks talk - sweep and burn baby.Shoe Ventures - weird presence in the space, botch a bonk drop to their project?Bullish on Polygon even though they aren't acting in good faith, it will rise all tides and we gotta chase the liquidity and dump on those bozos. Solana = Fun Chain confirmed. Thank you for joining me in the Bahamas, this is Thomas. 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

GM, GM all! We're riding the high from last week and getting noticed. Huge mint yesterday of BONKz, crazy performance out of Solana, crazy amounts of volume, and I'm loving it all. I would say the best part of this was that the market stayed relatively flat as a whole, but Solana caught a bid and wicked from mid $13 to mid $16 in a heartbeat. We've had crazy rain and flooding in California, but Solana is saying hold my beer and making it rain harder. Current price we mellowed out at $16 after hitting a high of $17.34, and I'm hearing this being described as a continuation to the short squeeze. It's the most interesting sector of the crypto market, and everyone is paying attention to it because this has been such a big move. I think this comes down to traders chasing volatility and with no easy trades or setups, attention goes to where volatility is. Come for the volatility, stay for the vibes? They damn well should, the vibes have been great. Bonk airdrop continues to have people integrating Bonk and figuring out fun ways to burn it and drop the supply. Meme coins are all over the place with Fronk showing up and the disgraced DeGods trying to meme it into a thing. Spoiler: they didn't and it dumped to 0. I just think they did a really good job getting the community together. I'm still sitting here waiting on that Bonk drop for quite a few projects, but not sweating it. Nom if you hear this, us whales at Crypto Duck Punkz are willing to burn a quek or two when we get the drop, please sir. SolEth is getting a little recovery with this as well, hitting up to .012Topics: BONKz - hyped drop. Mint in Bonk, burn that bonk, get yourself some sick art from some 1/1 artists that Bonk. It's a beautiful thing. We've got Degen Poet, John Le, Basket from Basket Fellas and more that came together under the OmniCollective that is connected to the Gods (formerly known as the SolGods.) I had whitelist because I'm holding that bonk, but so did over 100k others lol. So it was shitshow. It was launched on Magic Eden and we got some thoughts on that marketplace we'll get to. I spammed transactions from my phone and my browser for the whole 25 minutes it took to mint the project out and only got 1. I called this a Solana stress test and we won boys, pack it up bears. Magic Eden was the launchpad, they used their “open sourced” smart contracts to launch these on that protect their royalties. They also made it so that I couldn't mint and the one I did mint I couldn't send between wallets. This is not the answer. It's such a shame that a community driven project like Bonk is getting represented with a potentially sick NFT project, but it's basically not your NFT. It can only be traded or sent through Magic Eden at this point. It's terrible. I get that artists need royalties, but this just feels terrible. The best part? That the 4% royalties are going to a project that has no team, dao, discord or anything. So they are going to burn 2% and the rest goes to a fund. Not great. Backpack and privacy- Solana wallet from Armani, multiple accounts being inside the wallet that you can keep somewhat separate. Implications of safety when we get our Solana Phone's and how Backpack will be leading this charge. Google cloud buying millions of Solana? Maybe, sources? I made it up and read a tweet from a rando named Marty Party. Defi is pumping - Kamino and Orca pools for Bonk are almost maxed out again and TVL is getting pumped up. It's decided, defi is so f ing back. I've been getting more and more interested in NFT defi. I'm in on Frakt. I'm staking a Frakt NFT, hold some tokens, and I'm lending SOL for like 20% in one of their pools. It's great and it's an interesting use case for NFT's that's creating liquidity for people needing it, and generating yield on Sol. I've also been dabbling in Sharkyfi, and it's great. I used to hate it and dumped my sharks after seeing their terrible web page. But you can get passed it and get some killer deals. You can make short term loans to holders of NFT's at 40-60% of the loan to the value of the floor of the NFT, and get interest in the range of 100-240%. So you either get interest and your Sol back, or you get interest and the NFT back at a fat discount if they liquidate. I like it. My man Lolli who has been absolutely destroying the Bonk moves put out a manifesto this morning that I want to finish with. A community take over of sorts of the Solana blockchain moving from the economic incentives of the Solana Foundation to shift it towards the community being the focus with social consensus. It's insane, but also maybe a little brilliant. We washed out all the worst actors, grifters, and sociopaths, why not put a community standard in place? Rather than just follow along with a foundation like the Ethereum community, why don't we push for something radical? I like it, it's almost like building a DAO to help with the direction of the future of Solana. I would say that Toly is pretty hands off with this part actually, he's not pushing narratives, he's solving problems and enabling economic activity. This could be the part that takes us passed just another fast blockchain into a movement. Dream bigger my friends and let's see where we can go. That's why we chose Solana, and the big swings are starting to pay off. I'm hoping we can keep these levels and the excitement going. Until next week my friends, this is Thomas Bahamas and you've just listened to the 9th edition of SOLANA WEEKLYYYY!. 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

Gm, Gm all! It's a bear market, fud is all around us, crypto market is down, Solana is down, NFT's are mostly sideways, but still tons to go over. I've been debating the idea of how we move the space forward and have actually come around to the Web 3 narrative and think we should all get behind it. Why? It rebrands crypto, gives a much more positive connotation and also puts together all these different factions of crypto communities giving us one big central idea to push. All the different communities and coins and protocols are too much and the infighting does nothing. I normally cover what's the biggest fud, and it's the internal fighting. It's Eth vs BTC, it's Eth vs Sol, it's Solana NFT projects bickering about royalties. It's actually the biggest users and biggest bulls that aren't doing themselves any favors. I think a lot of these discussions aren't meant for the public and are boring af. A lot of this is arguing about the wires that power the internet, not the beautiful applications of the innovation that we can cheer on. I don't know how we go about changing this, but we gotta start with ourselves and choosing positivity over fud. Solana is a positive add to the web 3 space, and we need to be promoting digital assets that are fun and can be wholly owned and secured. * Solana Price - We're sitting at $12.19, we had a high of $14.70 and dumped to $11.70. The crazy part about this is that I can't even tell you why. It got scary on the lows, we recovered, but you know everyone is out there calling for sub $10. * Sol/Eth - nothing burger - sitting at .0100, still down bad.* NFT News - Mara's minted out yesterday, strong community and dope art from Near, Knittables are minting today and it looks like they are having some issues with the mint page being down. I gotta bring up the Trump drop. He dropped his trading cards and it was a smash. On Polygon. 45,000 individual pieces and they 10x'd before dropping. How do you bring about mass adoption? Bring in the niche communities and show them they can make money. Maga hit a 10x. They are a powerful community with 45 million votes for Trump as president. A former president (whether you like him and his politics aside) launched an NFT project and you're not bullish on the space? Come on! The way it was done was smart, it was a digital trading collectible. Easy to digest, pay $99, use a credit card if you want, and you get a digital card. Whether they will be able to actually find their wallet is yet to be determined. This proves that the more that we can simplify the wording, narrative, process, the better off we are. Growth is growth. * Defi news - Drift Protocol version 2 is live to everyone. I tested it out and it's clean AF. I think we need more of these and hope to see them succeed. I also got red pilled on Lifinity and their Flare NFT project as well as their defi protocol. I love everything about this, lock up your NFT for 6 months, earn yourself some tokens, lock those tokens, earn more. Also while you do that you are earning some of the revenue of the defi protocol. So it's not actually a ponzi, it's distributing profits. The team seems solid, community has been super welcoming. I also have to bring up some conversations that Toly has been having. He's been advocating for building out a CEX on Solana. I don't really know how this would work, but the idea would be something like a centralized organization having all reserves and addresses on chain so that you never have another FTX. I could see this being huge because the centralized experience is generally so much better. I watch Toly's Twitter debates like an avid sports fan that doesn't fully understand the sport, like it's rugby or something but it's my college so I'm rooting regardless. One of the main guys at Orca actually chimed in saying this is something they will do. Bullish. I tried pinging him in MonkeDao's Defi channel in Discord but haven't heard anything back. They also discussed this on the Unchained Podcast in the Episode with Cobie and Chris Burniske. * The quicky of the current thing - Trump, Polygon, multichain, L1's even profitable, NFT smart contracts being open sourced or siloed to Magic Eden, bear market, Bitcoin development, boredom, DCA. * Best FUD - I think that everyone's fudding, but everyone is just downbad. I think the biggest fud is people leaving the space because it's just not as fun. We're going to be down for a while, find some areas you can contribute to and add something positive. Or just DCA and work. Another thing I've been thinking about is how I'm going to actually use the Solana Phone. They start shipping Q1 and I'm an iPhone guy. I'm ready to upgrade my phone and debating getting a new iPhone or just going 100% Solana. I'll probably keep the iPhone because I don't want to have those green messages in the group chat and ruin it for everyone when someone likes a post. But we'll see. Anyways, this is Thomas Bahamas bringing you an okay recap of the week in Solana. 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

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. 

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

In this episode, we go further into the Solana NFTs discussion. Joining me to discuss things you should know if you wish to start a project on Solana, is Solana NFT Projects Adviser and Co-Founder of Alpha DAO and Thug Monkez, NFToly. Toly and I sit down to discuss Solana NFTs in detail, we talk about the blockchain and debunk a couple of assumptions about Solana. We also speak about the current market and what projects on Solana are a good buy. Always remember that this is not financial advice and always DYOR. Hosted by Toni Payne - Special Guest NFToly - https://twitter.com/SolNFTs. If you enjoy this episode do subscribe and don't forget to follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/NFTTalkShow

Vasiliy Shapovalov (Tech Lead, Lido), F.P. (Co-Founder, Socean) and Ella Kuzmenko (Product Manager, Stake Pools & Delegation Program, Solana Foundation) chat with Anatoly about the complexity and game theory surrounding stake pools, decentralization and censorship resistance. 00:10 - Intro01:38 - Collaterals, maximizing censorship resistance07:40 - APYs and investors09:31 - How to get penetration across DeFi14:58 - Governance in a liquid stake pool18:23 - Automation vs. programmatic on-chain governance20:44 - Factors in selecting validators29:27 - Growing the validators set32:21 - Stake pool token in DeFi35:09 - Liquidity fragmented between too many pools41:01 - Who controls the network?44:46 - Increasing decentralization Anatoly (00:10):Hey folks. This is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. I have a super exciting episode today, it's all about Stake Pools and decentralization and censorship resistance. And I have a group of guests that I'm going to let them introduce themselves, just to make it a little easier. So Ella, why don't you start first?Ella (00:29):Sure. Hey guys. Ella, I'm a Product Manager of Censorship Resistance at The Solana Foundation working on Stake Pools and the delegation program.Vasiliy (00:39):Hey. I'm Vasiliy, I'm tech lead at Lido. Honestly, I think that the person who should be here instead of me is someone, of course like Felix or [Uto 00:00:49] or maybe Brian, but they couldn't make it, so I'm here instead as a second best option.Anatoly (00:58):Awesome to have you. We'll take the second best.FP (01:03):Hi, guys. I'm FP. I'm co-founder and CEO of The Socean Stake Pool. Nice to meet you guys all today.Anatoly (01:11):Awesome. So censorship resistance Stake Pools, I've been pounding the table on this for two years as the most important thing and proof of stake networks, because I have this crazy belief that if we have liquid staking as collateral and DeFi than financial analyst to analyze systemic risk and these things, we'll actually prefer collateral that maximizes censorship resistance. And that is a crazy thing, because it would tie incentives for maximizing censorship resistance in the network to its actual use and primary use being DeFi. Is this real or not? Is this going to happen?Vasiliy (02:00):I probably got some experience to tell here because we were in production longer, not on Solana, but in general, longer than most liquid staking pools. And I can say that it's less pressure to decentralize than I thought it would be on one hand. On the other hand is much more pressure than we usually have as a stake provider, as node operator. I come from a stake provider, P2P.org that is pretty big itself. So about 4 billion stake of fire down depends on phase of the moon, the day.And people who usually stake, there is the kind of weak, very weak, but it's a prisoner's dilemma when people are incentivized to stake with best node operator. And when there is no clear best, they go by brand but there is a number of pretty good node operator that people are incentivized to stake with because these good node operator don't lose the mistake and give them good profits and stuff like that. And basically it leads to centralization because they are not incentivized very much to the centralized stake. And it's probably on goodwill and many stakers don't give enough thought to goodwill, but stake and pools always do. Basically, they're professionally obliged to do this and better holding up to hold the node operator accountable.I think in Lido, we have a better monitoring system for node operator around for us. And most of the big stakers like changes and funds and stuff that we're monitoring people who stake for us way better than most stakers. And I can say that the trade of is real here, when that liquid stake can token hold us, are not putting a lot of pressure on us, but they're putting some and we are well equipped to react to that. And we would honestly welcome more pressure on this front.Anatoly (04:14):So, Ella, has this been easy to convince people that censorship resistance matters or is it like they're just learning about it for the first time?Ella (04:24):Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think I definitely would second what Vasiliy was saying about how it's surprisingly harder than you would think. People definitely will follow where the rewards are. And I don't think that is surprising. I think there's an interesting opportunity for Stake Pools to play with that idea and give rewards while also touting the benefits of censorship resistance. So, "Hey, we will give you great rewards, but you can also get governance tokens and you can help us build the future together."And I think there's an interesting way that you can frame that discussion where you don't really have to pick one or the other. And I think to put a maybe crazy idea out there, I think we're only seeing the beginning of what can be built on top of Stake Pools. So it's pretty standard to take your Stake Pools tokens and you go stake them and then you earn some additional yield there. But I don't think we've really unlocked the potential of realizing that the underlying asset that you're staking will continue to accrue value every epoch and you should be able to build crazy financial things on top of that, that actually give you way better rewards than staking with an individual validator will ever do.And as the product person, I just put crazy ideas out there and wait for other people to build them. But I think we're at the very early stages of that. And so I'm super excited for a year from now, what crazy things people have built, where the rewards are actually way sexier in Stake Pools. And you don't even have to care about censorship resistance by the fact that you participate in Stake Pools, you will be helping that. So that's the future that I'm really excited for.Anatoly (06:09):What do you think FP?FP (06:12):So the first question was, what do we think about the efforts towards decentralization and I think we're getting there, but I think it's still early days. If you add all of our Stake Pool operators together, we may have 10 minutes all between us and that's less than ever stake. That's less than one validator. So there's still a long way to go. And they charge 8% fees. What's going on? So definitely it is not a rational choice. It's more of a possibly just like inertia sort of thing.And then I would say, to me, there seems to be a little bit of a trade off between Stake Pools and decentralization. And what I mean by that is even between Stake Pools, there are Stake Pools that decentralize more and there are Stake Pools that decentralize less. And in some sense, there is a trade off here because if you stake with too many validators, then you don't get good APY and people don't want to stake with you. And of course, if you only stake with the best ones, then you're not really doing your job as a stake pool. So there's a little bit of a delicate balance here, but I like what Ella said in the sense that there's interesting financial instruments you can build on top, which should make the APY discussion, it just falls out.Anatoly (07:30):So the APY is between all the pools and validators are pretty close. They don't really deviate by more than like 10%. Do investors actually optimize for that right now or participants? Are they actually looking at that or are they making a decision once and not even thinking about it later for months on end? What kind of behaviors do you guys see both as a normal stake operator and a pool operator?Vasiliy (08:00):As a stake operator, I can say that there is a lot of people who absolutely look at returns. We usually, when we go into network, we prepare profit reports for them and show them they are staking with us and we get better returns and stuff like that because that's one of the points that node operator can actually differentiate on. And there is not a lot of them, basically. We offer the same service to people.But as a liquid staking protocols, there is a lot more of thing that can be a differentiator, way lot a lot. The node operator selection is one thing. Other thing is the opportunities to use your stake token in DeFi and CeFi and financial use for it. And this stuff beats these 0.1% point difference squarely. People don't care about the 0.1% point difference. But when they can actually use your token in 10 more protocols than the other person. So I think like, that's going to play as a serious factor way, way in the future, not for the few first years of stake, the liquid staking.Anatoly (09:20):So this is the difference between stable coins. Is how much penetration they have across DeFi protocols or exchanges even. Do you think exchanges are going to start having liquid staking like Lido, so Lido token?Vasiliy (09:38):Yes. I know it'll happen. It's not the matter of I think, I know it'll happen. It'll be inevitable. It'll start with smaller changes that don't have capacity to develop their own stake, liquid staking and don't have the network effect to make it a good option for people to use their exchange liquid staking. And then it comes to basically everywhere, I think. There is a pretty serious trading volume on liquid staking tokens right now and it's growing bigger month by month. So eventually, it'll be stupid not to waste them.Anatoly (10:19):FP, is that what you guys are most worried about or most working on? How do you get penetration across DeFi?FP (10:26):Yeah. I think so. Something that worries me is a lot of the protocols giving out emissions and the TVL is growing and all that. But I just wonder how much of it is organic growth because Stake Pools are very different from AMMs like ORCA or trading Texas, Mango where whereby in ORCA, they make their revenues from you doing stuff, from you trading or doing stuff. But in a stake pool, you want to do nothing. I mean, what we want our users is just literally put the SOL in us and just do nothing.So it is a little bit of a different incentivization. And I wonder whether these incentives are sustainable, because look, if you're chasing the people who are farming short-term yield, these are not the people that you want in your stake pool anyway. You want people who are in it for the long haul. So I'm a little bit worried about this.Ella (11:17):Yeah. To piggyback off of that. I think something that's uniquely interesting for Stake Pools that is not true for staking to an individual validator is yes, you want them to just hold their stake tokens in your pool, but you also do want them to participate in the broader project. And what I mean by that is when you have of governance tokens, you have the ability to actually impact where the project will go. And you have the ability to be active in a way that you can't be, if you are, let's say, in CeFi buying an index fund from Vanguard. They're not going to ask you, "Hey, do you have opinions about where Vanguard should go next?" And I think similarly, if you're staking to an individual validator, like sure, they might be earning you great rewards. That's very important, obviously. But I think at some point, everybody gets to a point where they say, "Hey, more rewards would be great, but what I really want is a community."And so I think Stake Pools that lean into this idea of, hey, we're going to give you this governance token, yes, hold your tokens. Do whatever you want on DeFi. But more than that, tell us what you want to see in the community and where you want the future of this project to go. I think that's a very unique power to Stake Pools that will organically grow. We just have to figure out how to market that in a way that's appealing to people who are institutional investors, retail investors, total crypto newbies, who don't even know what a Dow is. Don't know what governance tokens are, don't know what a stake pool is. So there's a lot of work to do there, but I think we have our work cut out for us because it lends itself to this very unique dynamic between all of the stakers.Vasiliy (12:56):The way I think about that is it will be a lot more market driven than participation in governance doing. People are usually who are staking as node operator and provided most of them, don't care to make governance decisions. You can actually look at how it will works with Cosmos and other proof stake blockchains, where governance is a part of staking. And you can see that most people don't vote apart from how they validate the votes, where they do.They select basically a company that is aligned to them or maybe select the person that give them best returns. And then they don't take a look at governance usually. That's not true for all people, but that's a clear majority that delegates the governance power and it'll be pretty much the same with Stake Pools with liquid staking protocols. They won't be able to even to connect with most of the holders of the staking tokens, because they won't be like passionate enough to connect back, to understand what they want. So it'll be very indirect.There will be staking pools that gouge some of the governance decision from stakers, but not from all of it. Not even from most of them, like from 10% of them, by volume and not by number. By number, it'll be like probably not 10% like about 0.1%, but they will take much more or maybe about the same pressure from protocols that uses staking token from the stakeholders in the blockchain ecosystem that don't use a liquid staking token by important like develop teams, develop clients and researchers as an ecosystem and stuff like that. And liquid staking pool will be a nexus of governance that will try to combine all this pressure in the single direction from stakers, from protocols, from major participants in the ecosystem.Anatoly (14:58):What is governance in a liquid stake pool? What is the function of it for the community that owns the token? What should they be looking at?FP (15:08):First and foremost, the delegation strategy. I think the community needs to decide the delegation strategy. I don't think this should be left to the founders or the creators of the stake pool. It should be democratized. I think another thing is fees. So I think the community should decide the fees that a stake pool should charge. And the last thing I would say is, we would like a lot of the associated infrastructure to be run by the community as well.So for instance, the program, the upgrade authority is already given to the community. Treasury decisions are already given to the community, but there are still things like the front end or paying for a custom RPC note and things like that right now is centralized. And we would like that all to be on chain eventually. So I think that's all quite important.Vasiliy (16:02):My thought here is that the role of governance in a good liquid staking protocol is to drive itself to extinction. So it won't be easy or it won't be fast, but essentially liquid staking is walking in the outermost part of the security of the protocol. It touches the most important parts of the protocol like censorship, resistance, and decetralization and security and all of that. And if it gets a significant power in this parts and if it's not credibly neutral, it's like a great thing.It should be credibly neutral and you can't be credibly neutral for long when your governance is overpowered. It's a natural thing for all governance to take too much power and use it in not a great way. So it basically has to, in order to be accepted by stakers and ecosystem as a ligand liquid stake protocol. The ligand part of staking, it should be self-depreciating to a point that where governance power are time locked and very light and mostly algorithm driven.Anatoly (17:27):This is interesting point because I think the goal of governance of a layer one is also to obsolete itself. Is how do we build the structures? And part of the reason of building out Stake Pools was because the foundation was running its own delegation program. And it really felt like why don't we get the community to do its own delegation programs. And then how do we get zero to one thing working, how do we now go want to earn? And that's always a way to disintermediate yourself from the governance work and then eliminate it all together. I think it's interesting that like inherently there isn't a drive to eliminate it from the community. We just want to push it out of the foundation and have you guys figure out what does that fine line between automation and having everything be programmatic to on chain governance?Vasiliy (18:32):Well, not yet. It's a work in progress. We are working on maybe systemizing the ways we can... What inputs do we have, is this programmatic governance, to understand where we can get the signal from, what we can use as a strong signal. We can't get rid of the governance entirely. We can just make it in a way that... Well, like I said, the role of governance in the mistaken is to take all this input from protocols and ecosystem and stakers and the outside water is large and fabricator of consensus out of it.So part of this can be automated because we can have the signals in bits and bites and we can use algorithm to aggregate this signals into party of decision maybe. Right now, we're looking at stuff like what is objectively good characteristics of a node operator for example, for selecting node operator like up time and special risk and the reputation that is proxy by amount of stake can all the other protocols that they are staking.And this is a strong signal. We can look at like time of operation within Lido, which is roughly correlate with reputation and outside Lido as well. We can look at stake as preference and the stake token can hold the preference to understand what they want, which is also a proxy for reputation, which I don't have. The things I don't have a good solution for getting into account, what people who run protocols think and what people who are major in the ecosystem think, because it's not directly correlated to a stake in stake pool. And we don't have a good way to get these signals yet, maybe ever.Anatoly (20:29):You guys like Lido and FP have two different approaches from what I can tell in terms of building out the validator set and the delegation strategy. FP, what are your thoughts on this? What are you guys driving most as the number one factor in selecting validators?FP (20:48):So I think it's important not to have a white list of validators because I think this is exclusionary. I think it's important not to dictate what fees validators should charge, because I think fees are only important in so far as they affect performance. So in some sense, we don't want to control validators. I think we shouldn't. We shouldn't dictate how validators... That being said, of course performance over time is very important. I think if not the most important. Yeah.And the other thing I would say is, the decentralization, obviously we shouldn't be staking to nodes that are in the MSG, they have too much stake or nodes that are in one of the data centers that is in the MSG. So one of the top three data centers. But that being said, there also a middle ground. You don't want to spread your stake among, let's say, 600 validators, for example. And the reason why you don't want to do that is because then you can't make a meaningful difference in decentralization. You want of do want to reward validators that are doing well, that are also out of the security group. So yeah, I would say it's a bit of a balancing act here.Anatoly (22:13):Vasiliy, you guys have a totally different approach. I'm excited too, why did you guys come up with that system? And what is the Lido way?Vasiliy (22:19):To expand a bit on what the system is, we've got a wide list of node operator that run with Lido and charge the same commission and get the flat amount of reward. What the reason behind this, the whitelist selection is done by basically a peer review. We've got a lot of node operators, already validating Lido in different protocols in Ethereum, in Terra and now in Solana. And we have a submission process where people submit, they want to stake for Lido and we get the node operators. They took a look at them at the setup they have and historical performance in Solana and other blockchains, especially in Solana and stuff like that. And community participation and select that the next five or so participant of the whitelist when we need to expand.The why we do that because we want to have good stake distribution that will be good for Solana and that's not the best, but it's easily achievable way to do that. Because that way we can guarantee that node operator are good because they're selected by the community of node operator essentially. And we can guarantee that they have enough stake to run the operations and have enough profit that say that. So they really want to keep this good business going. That's a good business for them. That's what they want to do. They are not arranged by scrap. They are paying their DevOps engineers handsome salary and stuff like that, so that they can afford to be honest.It's not great in the sense that it's a process that allows us to select the distribution folks, but it doesn't allow people to come in fresh and grow. And that's not great. But as a temporary thing, when there is a good community of node operator that are just like not selected yet, it works, I think very well.FP (24:36):I think part of the reason why Lido does it is from what Vasiliy said, it's meant to make sure that the node operator are reliable and performant. And I would put forward that there's a very easy way to look and to see if a node operator is performing, just look at their API. So in some sense, I mean, I don't want to make any implications, but I believe this peer review process is a bit nepotistic. It's like if you're in our secret cabal and if we know you and and we like your DevOps engineers and blah, blah, blah, then will onboard you. Of course, that's not the case, but it's what it seems like.Anatoly (25:15):This is the most controversial Solana podcast we've ever had.Vasiliy (25:21):I wouldn't say that's not true. It really does not allow newcomers to come in easily because there is a community of node operator that been through thick and thin via market, like Greeks through this days, when we all worked like in the red four years, that was what happened. We used make way less money than we earned, like with P2P, which was a pretty big one even this time. Like I said, it's not great, with this process, we can't get in people who didn't build this reputation and track record and stuff.What I don't agree with you that you can easily estimate how good is node operator, but looking at their performance, that's just not true. That's not how you estimate a node operator. You don't only evaluate performance. You also evaluate tailor risks. And tailor risks, you can't evaluate by performance. You should understand that these folks have bus factor of more than one. They don't have a single guy running all this stuff because if this guy gets sick, your validators get stuck.You should understand that they will stay up at night when there is an upgrade. You should understand that if there is a via market, they will stay to the blockchains they're running and they don't all run on Hetzner. So because that's, at least used to be the easiest way to get APR is to run the same data center as everyone. That's how skip rates they used to work in Solana.There is way more nuance in selecting a good set of node operator than just looking at performance. The geographical distribution, the jurisdiction distribution, the track record, other blockchains, which runs the reputation and community participation being in discord or running projects for Solana and stuff like that. There is way more stuff about node operator that is not easy to understand from just on chain metric. On chain metric is like the 20, 30% important stuff of choosing validator, because there are a lot of validators with good on chain metrics, but there are differentiated by stuff that is not seen by most people at all.Ella (27:44):I would say if somebody is staying up all night to make sure that their validator is running and they do restarts within the first five, 10 minutes, they're going to have better rewards. So I would say, it's more than 20%. I agree that being decentralized and being in data centers that are different from other people are doing community projects is super important. But I do think that rewards are a good proxy for how active the validator is actually running their node.Vasiliy (28:13):You can say that, that's a prerequisite. If you have good bad performance, you're not a good validator. That's true. That's not what makes your excellent node operator because excellent node operators run explorers, for example. And there are certs basically, for example. You can't say that this guy has the same performance cert, so they're as good. That's not true.Ella (28:35):But I mean, I would say there are maybe like 10 community members who run dashboards and different tooling. And I think there are way more than 10 stellar validators. So sometimes it's just not within their area of expertise. They could be excellent DevOps people and run validators across many blockchains, but they're not a web developer. That's just not their skillset, but I wouldn't say that they don't contribute to the community.Vasiliy (29:01):Yeah. What I'm saying just there is much more nuance, especially when you don't have 300 places for a node operator, you don't have enough money to pay them for 300 validators and you need to select 15 or 20 or 50.Ella (29:18):Unless a hundred million SOL gets stake to Stake Pools, then you can expand that list to 3,000 validators and everyone will be profitable.Anatoly (29:26):So this is the challenges. How do we grow the validator set? And it almost in my mind is like, you need both, you need people that are driving, we need higher quality. We need due to proof points that you know how to manage keys, but we also need people that are like, okay, just on board and figure it out and try it. Yeah. This is a tough problem. And I think part of the reason of not wanting the foundation to do it and push out this technology, a stake fulls is because we don't know. You guys are both sound very much validator operator focused, but these things like, I think are some form of financial, like DeFi application too. How much of your time are you thinking about like how these things actually work in DeFi?Vasiliy (30:22):I think I'd say a lot. That's what makes or breaks the liquid staking, the whole point of liquid staking is that it's liquid and usable in finance. I actually don't think a lot about a lot of time about node operator because I used to work here. I'm working as the staking provider since like 2020, early 2020. So I'm just have strong opinions because I do it right. But I have to think a lot about DeFi because that's uncharted, it's new.FP (30:58):So yeah. I mean, I think as Toly points out, I think the validator operator stuff is important, but really it really is just a baseline. And I think what we do with it next is the thing that's more important. So the question was, how do we think about how it's composed with DeFi? It's just the beginning. So right now what are the main things that you can do with your stake pool token? So you can put it in an AMM and provide liquidity that way, you can do lending and that's about it, I think.I mean, there's lots of stuff you can do and you want to use the stake pool stake SOL in any occasion where you can use regular SOL. So whether it's just buying from a marketplace or doing some more exotic stuff, like options trading, that sort of stuff and not just putting it in liquidity pool or borrowing or lending or leverage yield farming. So yeah. I basically want to expand the ways in which stake pool tokens can be used. And I think that's going to be a big draw for people to start staking with us.Anatoly (32:18):How much work is it to get that adoption or to have a specific stake pool token used in a DeFi?FP (32:27):I think integration takes time. I mean, it really depends on the partner which you're integrating with. And I think some things just haven't been built out yet actually. So Ella and I have been talking about how we can use these stake pool tokens in the NFT marketplaces, for example. But none of this stuff has been built out. So, yeah. So we'll get that, but it's not there yet, I would say. So we have to build it.Vasiliy (32:57):There is two parts to the answer. One is how long does it take to build. The other is how long does it take to convince people to build? The first is, faster than usual for financial products in traditional finances, but still long because we know that shipping is hard and convincing is also can be pretty, pretty complicated. For example, we started the integration process on MiCA, I think in February this year. And we only now getting an executive at least take things on MiCA, I think around next week or so. That's how long it cost with MiCA. And it's very similar amounts of time with a major protocols on Ethereum that are by now pretty conservative. Solana is not conservative yet. Most of the protocols on Solana make fast and break things, move fast and break things. So I don't think it'll take like this long stake Solana tokens to be a major participant of DeFi, but it's still time.Ella (34:12):Yeah. I would say the technical integrations, they're not technically challenging, you're integrating an SPL token. So that part is pretty easy or not as challenging as you would imagine. I think in the early days, when the TVL was very small, it was maybe hard to convince platforms that they should care about this weird stake pool token thing. Now that TVL is close to $2 billion US dollars. They maybe will now take those meetings and be like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, let's integrate all the stake pool tokens."And maybe whereas before they would have some liquidity requirements say, prove that users actually want this on our platform. Why should we spend the time integrating it? I think hopefully the script will flip and they'll be like, "Hey please, can we integrate your stake pool token?" But I think it just, realistically it takes a couple of months to get at that traction. And hopefully we have some momentum now and we can push forward more of those integrations.Anatoly (35:08):Is there kind of danger of liquidity being fractured between too many pools?FP (35:14):Hey, I seem to recall asking you this exact question on discord back in September, Toly. Yeah. I wondered this myself to be honest because I think there is a happy medium. You don't want one stake pool taking all of it because there are protocol risk there as it ends points out. Yeah. And if they fail it, that's dangerous. Well, on the other hand, it's going to be really difficult to integrate a hundred different stakes pools.Although that being said, there are things we can do to mitigate it. One of which is to enforce some sort of standardization. So one good step would be, for example, to use the Solana reference recommendation instead of... Maybe it's too late now for some of the existing Stake Pools. But that being said we were talking about adapters. I don't know if you recall some sort of adapter, some sort of layer that makes sure that the Stake Pools can all interoperate with one another. I think that would be really good.Vasiliy (36:14):I think it's inevitable that a single representation of staked Solana to be the major player here. So that's basically Lido thesis and I'm seeing it play out in the Ethereum and in the LUNA and in the entire ecosystem. So I think it's going to happen. It doesn't necessarily mean that it'll be one stake pool, but the alternative here is just another layer of aggregation. One thing for example, was proposed by Michael from Curve where like basically a stable pool of multiple liquid staking tokens was used and LP token from this pool was proposed as a basically unit of account. I'm not sure that it will happen, but I am pretty sure that there will be one aggregate stake Solana token, that will take the majority of the market.Anatoly (37:20):I actually think that these things are far more fluid because it's all people based at the end of the day. And people will do promotions and get communities together and have fun or get excited about a thing that some innovation and you will see liquidity move from one thing to the other simply because it's exciting. And it feels like it's just a little too static for there to be only one token. This is not how normally people operate, but we'll see.Yeah. It's at any given moment one winning token maybe is a better way to put it. So it doesn't mean there will be one token for eternity, but at any given moment, there will be a clear winner except maybe the moments of flipping that's how I see it.FP (38:14):So I worry a little bit about that actually. I worry because we talk about increasing decentralization. And that was the reason why Stake Pools were created in the first place. And it's true that if you have one stake pool controlling all the stake, that solves a particular kind of centralization, Nakamoto coefficient. But then it introduces a new kind of centralization. And maybe there are risks that can be mitigated that way, but still this worries me a little bit. So I'd rather have an ecosystem with a good number of different Stake Pools.Ella (38:51):That's where the education piece comes in. You got to let your delegators know the importance of censorship resistance and decentralization so if there is a sexy new aggregated stake pool token, they don't just gravitate towards it because it looks good without thinking about the consequences of that.Anatoly (39:09):But the yields are so high.Vasiliy (39:15):I don't like the dynamic at all, that there will be one lean stake token, but I think it's inevitable. And what we can do is not oppose it, but we can build protocols that will be a net good for the system anyway, even if this happens, hence the self depreciate of governance and in liquid stake and stuff like that, that's all flowing from there.Ella (39:40):I wouldn't say I'm oppose to it, I think in an instance where you have 10 really small stake pool operators, let's say universities decide, hey, we want to run the Yale stake pool and the UDab stake pool. And they have very fragmented liquidity. I think it makes total sense for there to be an aggregated university stake pool token, support university students help them get their pizza and ramen. Great. That's a fun way to do it. But that's a very specific use case where you're trying to make sure liquidity isn't fragmented.But I think every stake pool today has more than 600,000 sold deposited into it Solana. So I wouldn't say that's a huge fragmentation. It seems like people have chosen the pool that they like and they're happy with the performance, with the project. And that's the one that they picked. And so I don't know that they would be attracted to something that tries to average everything out and is just a generic token, but I could be wrong.Vasiliy (40:38):Yeah. It's so very interesting to see the play out.Anatoly (40:40):So are you guys worried about if these are used collateral, like liquidations rapidly moving stake from the lenders to the people collecting to the traders, is that going to change the dynamic of the makeup of who controls the network over the long-term?Vasiliy (41:05):Not reallY. How I've seen it work by, in liquidation that happened in Terra and similar ones that there were not exactly strictly liquidation, but more of fire sale events in Ethereum when the price of weather went down and people were going out of stake teeth as well. The dynamics here is that people who have low time preference are selling at low prices and people who have higher time preference, they are buying. So then they went of the liquidation, the price goes down and people with more foresight and more patience are getting the discounted stake token. So if anything, that looks like stake token getting in the hands that smarter and are in for a longer game, usually. So not always the case, but very much looks like this.FP (42:05):I don't know. I mean, that being said, when you have all these incentive programs and emissions coming out. That doesn't that see to incentivize people who jump around pools, trying to find the best ones. And they're getting rewarded by lots of governance tokens at the end of the day. So what do we think about that?Vasiliy (42:25):I don't think that it's something to really think about, I don't know. Jumping around and getting this governance tokens and it is a natural way to get some money for people who like money. I don't know. That's not a bad thing. If you like some juicer smart contract risks and rockeries in your life, that's a very exciting way to spend time.Anatoly (42:55):Yeah. There is I think a danger, but I don't know how big it is in that normally for like a validator to receive more stake, the best they can really do is offer 0% commission and then they can start bribing people. And it's hard to bribe people, but with liquid staking, it's a lot easier. You can just simply say, when you stake with this pool, you get so many more rewards than you do anywhere else, because you can min this new reward token. And is that a dangerous, scary thing that could result with a third or more of the stake, all moving towards this hot, shiny thing? I don't know.This is the part of where I think it's very critical for DeFi to mature and to have real analysts and people analyzing these things and looking deep and giving a ton of pushback on things that look a little fishy. It naturally happens, but only happens on crypto Twitter and still so much stuff sneaks through.Anatoly (44:06):So we'll see what happens, but thank you guys for joining. Super excited to have this actually being live now and making so much headway and growing so rapidly. Honestly, if we actually get to a point where DeFi is incentivizing censorship resistance, we're kind of done. We built it. We can actually take a break. So I'm looking forward to that.FP (44:41):Is that the biggest concern for you as a creator of the layer one, the increasing this decentralization, would you say that's the biggest concern?Anatoly (44:49):Yeah. This is the thing that I'm most worried about, because I think to do it in a sustainable way, it means that you need to have a use case which benefits from decentralization. You need to have external users that have a benefit that exceeds the cost of running the network. It can't just be self-sustaining tokens moving around. So to truly succeed there means that, we build something useful to the world. And that's the ultimate goal.What else are you an engineer if not to build something useful? If that's what you care about, then you should be an artist and that's a totally different thing. Yeah. Awesome to chat with you guys. Thank you for being on the show and thank you for all the hard work everyone is doing, Ella, Vasiliy, FP. Just thank you guys.FP (45:48):Thank you so much for having us today.Vasiliy (45:49):Thank you.Ella (45:49):Thank you.

This week I'm welcoming Anatoly Yakovenko to Next with Novo. Toly is the founder and CEO of Solana, an open-source, decentralized blockchain. Initially released in 2019, Solana has grown to become the world's first web-scale blockchain. Taking me back to the beginning, Toly explains his core innovation: Proof of History, which moves everything forward in both speed and capacity. Nowadays, there's a large tradeoff between speed and security. Toly explains where Solana fits into this problem, and the promising opportunities to make hardware even faster. With rivalries growing, Toly hopes that blockchains remain diverse, maintaining a healthy level of competition and accelerating progress. Follow Anatoly on Twitter @aeyakovenko For more on Solana, check out Solana.com Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube and Apple Podcasts channels so you don't miss out on future episodes, and follow me: Twitter: https://twitter.com/novogratz YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/mikenovo/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sdPneD Next with Novo is the go-to resource for what's new and what's next. In this series, Mike Novogratz, influential investor, Wall Street Veteran, and CEO at Galaxy Digital, invites viewers to learn with him from the brightest minds behind disruptive businesses, prolific social movements, and technologies powering permissionless innovation. This podcast was recorded on September 30, 2021. The Next with Novo podcast is for informational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast constitutes an offer to buy or sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, any securities. The information in the podcast does not constitute investment, legal, or tax advice. The host is an affiliate of Galaxy Digital (host and Galaxy Digital together, the “Parties”), and the podcast represents the opinions of the host and/or guest and not necessarily that of Galaxy Digital. The Parties do not make any representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of any of the information therein. Each of the Parties expressly disclaims any and all liability relating to or resulting from the use of this information. Certain information in the podcast may have been obtained from published and non-published sources and has not been independently verified. The Parties may buy, sell or hold investments in some of the companies, digital assets or protocols discussed in this podcast. Except where otherwise indicated, the information in this video is based on matters as they exist as of the date of preparation and will not be updated.

I chat with Noah about his deeper thoughts about life and being a motivated person. We speak about how his life changes have led him to desire deeper conversation and expression of thoughts and feelings (which in turn has led him to want to start a podcast hoping to find such conversation.Check out Painfully Divine on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/6mLqq4F5Znd0M75SSfykN3?si=qiE0bIubTxGO3W8vcrf1fA&dl_branch=1

I recently sat down with Claude Noelle, the co-founder of West Village, French-sourced Pottery and Antique Store - Le Fanion. Claude Noelle describes her journey from the South of France, studying political science, her 1980's rites of passage trip across the US in a world before the internet and social media, that led her to living, working, and eventually running her own small retail business in the West Village. Claude Noelle explains the backstory to Le Fanion and opening in 34 years ago with her business partner William to import pottery, art and antiques from the Provence Region of France. She also explains the changing fabric of the neighborhood, a microcosm of New York and the world, in the face of globalization and gentrification. Claude Noelle explains the challenges and resilience in the time of Covid, the importance of a supportive landlord, loyal customers and doing business over Facetime and Instagram. We discuss the escalating rents that hit the neighborhood in recent years, her hopes for the future of retail of the West Village, need for collaboration with landlords to attract retailers of interest and character and retain the attraction of the neighborhood. And the growing appreciation for authentic and artisanal products by a new generation of consumers. Finally we talk about ideas for building better community between local retailers.

This month Jodie is joined by one of the most interesting men in the world of classic cars, Toly Arutunoff. From running the first Ferrari dealership in Oklahoma to racing coast-to-coast across the States and in Italy's legendary road rally, the Targa Florio, Toly has seemingly done it all. During this episode, Toly discusses a life lived to its fullest, as well as his remarkable collection of one-off classics and what drew him to them. For more information on Chubb go to: www.chubb.com/theinterviews See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

**Editor's Note: Mild swearing in this episode** Toly Vasilyev is a multi-time Russian and Canadian national champion representing both Team Canada and Team Russia in various world tournaments as well as playing for Toronto GOAT and Toronto Rush. Toly has won 6 Russian national championships with Jupiter and Shadows and two Canadian Ultimate Championships with Toronto GOAT. With Team Russia, he won a mixed championship at the 2019 European Championships of Beach Ultimate. With Team Canada, he won a world championship at the 2008 World Ultimate and Guts Championships defeating Team USA in the gold medal game in Vancouver. Toly has done multiple projects in the ultimate world including starting a lifestyle clothing brand (Flatball Collective) and the Disc One 4 One project which has brought ultimate to 2,400 kids in Russia and Ukraine. In this interview, hear Toly share about his beginning in ultimate in Russia and his move to Canada where we learn about some opportunities and stories he has playing for Toronto GOAT and Team Canada. Toly also shares some practical tips including how to get more hand blocks and we learn about Toly's various projects including Flatball Collective and the Disc One 4 One project. Segment #1: Toly's journey (3:49) Segment #2: Daily life in ultimate (31:35) Segment #3: Toly's memorable games as a player (42:10) Segment #4: Rapid fire questions (47:29) Toly's social media contacts: Instagram (@toll18) Flatball Collective social media contacts: Instagram (@flatballcollective) & Website (flatballcollective.com) Disc One 4 One Project: (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/disc-one4one#/) 2008 World Ultimate and Guts Championships Open Final Team Canada vs Team USA: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHmTo9Ybp3o&ab_channel=DISCHighlights) 2017 Canadian Ultimate Championships Open Final GOAT vs Winnipeg General Strike: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5zYxK7g3rM&ab_channel=UltimateCanada) Photos: (photo on left) (Brian MacKenzie) (photo on right) (Focus Ultimate) This episode is brought to you by Away From Keyboard. AFK is a lifestyle brand that believes in reconnecting with humanity and our planet. Whether that's tossing a disc on the weekends or hanging out by a campfire, they're dedicated to getting you to explore and grow in your own backyard. Join the adventure and check out their website at www.awayfromkeyboard.co and @get_afk on Instagram. Keep an eye out for the next episode where I interview Dena Elimelech, Ultiworld's 2019 Female College Player of the Year and 2019 USA Ultimate Women's college champion with University of San Diego Dragon Coalition. In this interview Dena shares about the rise of the UCSD program and the beginnings of her ultimate career as well as the amazing ending to her college career when she won a national championship.

Inês Bringel is a member of Portgual's mixed team, a player-coach for Ultimate Frisbee Algarve, and a two-time EuroStars tour participant. She was runner-up for Ultiworld's 2019 European Female Defensive Player of the Year and runner-up for Ultiworld's 2018 European Mixed Breakout Player of the Year. She has represented Portugal 6 times internationally including helping Portugal achieve a 4th place finish at the European Championships of Beach Ultimate in 2015 and at the World Championships of Beach Ultimate in 2011 and 2015. Inês has also played for Cosmic Girls out of Russia helping them come in second at the 2019 European Ultimate Club Finals. In this interview, Inês shares about the success of Portugal beach ultimate and its increasing growth in the grass game. She also shares her experience on the EuroStars Tour and the opportunity to grow and play against strong competition. We also have a chance to talk about the adjustment she had to make coming from high-level swimming over to ultimate and the desire she has to grow women's ultimate in Portugal. Segment #1: Inês's journey (3:19) Segment #2: Daily life in ultimate (28:10) Segment #3: Inês's memorable games as a player (34:28) Segment #4: Rapid fire questions (39:42) Inês's social media contacts: Instagram (@inesbringel) and Facebook (@ines.bringel) 2019 European Championships of Beach Ultimate Mixed Bronze Medal game Great Britain vs Portugal: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuT6oeppG5g) 2019 EuroStars Tour vs Brute Squad: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3oTpRefbW0&ab_channel=AUDL) (you can find other games on the AUDL YouTube channel) 2015 World Championships of Beach Ultimate Mixed Russia vs Portugal: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ui8hWhPrbs) Photos: (photo on left) (https://theshowgame.co.uk)(The Show Game: Andrew Moss) (photo on right) (Edgar Pl ácido) This episode is brought to you by Flatball Collective. Flatball Collective is an everyday apparel brand inspired by our favourite sports of ultimate & disc golf. Designed by players from around the world (who also happen to be talented artists), each item represents a unique perspective of the sport. Be proud of your passion & rep it every day even when you are off the field. Pick up your favourite item today online @flatballcollective on Instagram or flatballcollective.com. Use code WANANDONLY15 to get 15% off your order. Keep an eye out for the next episode where I interview Toly Vasilyev, player for Toronto GOAT who has represented both Team Canada and Team Russia on the world stage. In this interview, hear Toly share about his beginning in ultimate in Russia and his move to Canada where we learn about some opportunities and stories he had playing for Toronto GOAT and Team Canada.

In this episode of The Mountain Life Lynn and Pete's guests are Tana Toly and Mary Lou Toly, granddaughter and grandmother from a family that has been in Park City since the 1930's and own the longest running family owned business in Park City -- Red Banjo Pizza on Main Street. They join the program for a new series, "Living a Mountain Life" which delves into the stories of those unique perspectives in our quaint town.

Christ's blessings upon you, children of God! Our Podcast includes a: Gathering (00:00), Opening Prayer (00:30), Psalm (01:14), Scripture (02:51), Prayer (04:41), Dr. Noah Toly (07:48), Blessing (08:43), End (09:15). You may find the full daily scripture reading (Psalm 123; Judges 2:6-15; Revelation 16:1-7) at Daily Revised Common Lectionary. We are praying for you!Discover more of Noah's work:Cities of Tomorrow and the City to Come: A Theology of Urban Life (Ordinary Theology)The Urban Climate Challenge: Rethinking the Role of Cities in the Global Climate Regime (Cities and Global Governance)Understanding Jacques EllulKeeping God's Earth: The Global Environment in Biblical Perspective

Biblické zamyslenie od Grega Laurieho

Anatoly (Toly) is a photographer livin the van life! California is burning to the ground. So we're chatting bout that. And we talk about the sacrifices we make to gain freedom. Whether that be living in a van, or whatever chances you might be taking. We get into some of the deets of being a photographer; capturing people's stories and their moment - freezing the moment. Getting these sacred glimpses into the lives of others is such a beautiful thing. Hello Humans! :-) Welcome to Episode 9 of This Human Thing! Toly brought me a watermelon as a gift when he came over. excited to eat that. We met when I dropped a tray of glasses at a restaurant. And now he's here on the pod. So... let's get into it. The pros and cons of livin in a van. The freedom. The inconveniences. We talk about being a master of one thing versus the mediocracy of being well-rounded. We talk about sharks. The Dalai Lama. We touch on his upbringing - in Russia and in Buddhism, and the life events that led him from those beginnings to where he is now: #nomad. a free bird. "I paused the other day and was like... what AM I doing? I just feel like its Groundhog Day everyday. Like ughh I have to do this every day just to survive. And that's why something like van life is so attractive because I realize oh I don't have to work SO hard just to pay rent. And yeah I give up some of luxuries, some conveniences... but guess what's not convenient or luxurious... not being able to do what I love. And for me, I would sacrifice anything to do what I love." Those pauses are so important: to question our experiences. To not get sucked into the grind. sucked into survival - whether that be social, physical, emotional - to pause and question your choices. Because wherever you are is ultimately a choice; and you can choose to make sacrifices to rearrange your life circumstances for what you love and who you love. Thanks for being on the show Toly!

www.gbdentalnorman.com

Studna slova: Efezským (1/82): Význam a téma epištoly. Autor a čte: Jiří Hurta. Moderuje: Jitka Vyležíková.

Květoslava Domincová strávila jako šestnáctiletá konec války v provizorním krytu, ve štole vyhloubené do kopce Záruba u Kuřimi. Její vzpomínky stále plné emocí. Dodnes ji děsí zvuk sirény a dojímá česká hymna. https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/ivysilani/1181680258-tyden-v-regionech-brno/320281381890111-tyden-v-regionech/obsah/743261-pametova-stopa-vzpominky-na-valku

Dr. Noah Toly is Director of the Center for Urban Engagement and Professor of Urban Studies and Politics & International Relations. He also serves as Non-Resident Senior Fellow for Global Cities at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and teaches about cities and urbanism in the Free University of Berlin’s Center for Global Politics. Dr. Toly currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Thriving Cities Project, and is a frequent speaker on cities, urban life, and the environment.

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1. Salif Keita vs. Martin Solveig - Madan (Haipa Remix) 2. Heart Saver - Funky Streets 3. A$ap Rocky ft. Skepta - Praise The Lord (Da Shine) (Savin Remix) 4. Will Smith - Party Starter (Nitrex & Ice Remix) 5. RoelBeat - Don't Tell Me 6. RoelBeat, Vika Tendery - No Cry (The Bestseller Remix) 7. Savin - Way Tonight (No Hopes Remix) 8. Tomy Or Zox - My Desire (Pitchugin Remix) 9. David Guetta, Chris Willis - Just a Little More Love (Gumanev & Tim Cosmos Deep Remix) 10. Sofi Tukker - Purple (Vadim Adamov & Hardphol Remix) 11. Merdy - Speaker (The Bestseller Remix) 12. Nexeri, DJ Antonio feat. Moonessa - Boom Boom (RoelBeat Remix) 13. Toly feat. Eric Zayne - California Fever (Filatov & Karas Remix) 14. Leonid Rudenko - Rain & Sun 15. Steve Aoki, Backstreet Boys - Let It Be Me (Denis First Remix) 16. Ali Gatie - It's You (Kolya Funk Remix)

Noah Toly joins Uncommontary Host Marty Duren to examine what it means for people to engage the environment.

Este Diálogo con el Productor Toly de Nativos Music fue para la historia y super interesante. Hablamos de sus comienzos en la música, sus primeros pasos y su infancia en Springfield, Massachusetts, como llega a Puerto Rico a sus 17 años y se une a Yai para crear el Renombrado Dúo de Yai & Toly #NativosMusic, su magnífica y retante carrera en la música, sus increíbles éxitos "En Su Nota" Don Omar la historia detrás de este tema, sus éxitos "Changueria" "Beso en la Boca" entre otros con "Los Rastrilleros" JKing & Maximan y sus temas con Yaga & Mackie Ranks, Cheka, Guelo Star, JAlvarez, Alicia Keys, Zion & Lennox, Jowell & Randy, Kennoly, Brray, Arcangel & De La Ghetto y su último éxito "Síguelo Bailando" de Ozuna que fue Certificado Disco de Diamante por la RIAA entre otros, su próxima etapa como empresario musical, por que se tomó un receso de la música, que saldrá pronto de Nativos Music y muchísimas historias del género que no se pueden perder que los dejarán sorprendidos. Sigan a Toly- Nativos Music en su canal de YouTube y Redes Sociales: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/NativosMusictv Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tolynativo/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/tolynativo?lang=en REDES DE LUIS OTERO & DIALOGO CON LUIS OTERO: Instagram: http://instagram.com/dialogoconotero Twitter: http://twitter.com/dialogoconotero Facebook: http://facebook.com/dialogoconotero Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6zvf7cAgqDENIaoqHZvqFt iTunes Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dialogo-con-luis-otero/id1475406334 Email: dialogoluisotero@gmail.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dialogoconluisotero/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dialogoconluisotero/support

In this episode, we speak with the co-owners of Le Fanion about sourcing, street parties, the evolution of the West Village, how to maintain a successful partnership, and how to sell the Picasso family broken pottery for a dollar.

Burt “BS” Levy is known as the World’s Fastest Novelist. He is an award-winning motorsports journalist, an infamous author, a lifelong British car nut, and notorious racecars ride mooch who has earned over 80 amateur and vintage race wins. He is the author of the celebrated cult classic 1950s sports car novels The Last Open Road, its sequels Montezuma’s Ferrari, The fabulous Trashwagon, Toly’s Ghost, The 200 MPH Steamroller and his utterly hilarious short story collection, A Potside Companion. Today Burt returns to Cars Yeah to share his latest venture, The Last Open Road audiobook. A true automotive entrepreneur, Burt is sure to fill our ears with his humor and iconic “BS”, so hide your car keys and listen up. Burt was first on Cars Yeah way back on August 3 and 4, 2014, and he was my first two-part show being guest on episodes #47 and #48.

the artits .....mixed Toricos - yesterday (NEW) Soulcool - bliss (NEW) KOMODO - ( i just ) died in your arms - extended club mix Luigi Egitto Angelo Draetta Daniele Cella - in riva al mare (NEW) Russell small & DNO P - when somebody Anton Ishutin - show me - Toly braun remix (NEW) Ilya Garbuz - clocker (NEW) Stéphane Deschezeaux Springbok Kiki Kyte - mystery - the family's jam remix (NEW) Miguel Campbell - trendy (NEW) Angelo Ferreri Moon rocket Bel-ami - from disco to disco geoM - missing you

VJ aka the Brown James Bond is joined by the Fake Filipino Guy + Toly aka T $ Malone. What is the fear of success? Being comfortable is death. Watching people's dogs. VJ got invited to a podcast. Iraq + Phoenix = same temperature. "Wanna watch Borat?" Chicks play too much. Coffee + chicks. "If she gives you a good vibe... take it..." VJ's neck hurts. The right angles for girl selfies. Naked pics. Gucci Mane is out. Lil Boosie. The Dermatophagia episode just came out. The Psycho Pshow can actually help people? People don't notice sh*t. Russian chicks vs US chicks. Waving people through in traffic. Private IG thoughts? VJ hates this AZ dolphin aquarium. Does prison reform work? A fly infestation that Toly is fighting. A dog dies on an AZ balcony. Celebs in prison. Star from NYC radio. Toly picks up the phone on the Pshow again. Toly's expensive shirt game. PLEASE FOLLOW US AND SUBSCRIBE!!! Pshow and art produced by VJ aka the Brown James Bond: instagram.com/ItsMrVJ twitter.com/ItsMrVJ facebook.com/ItsMrVJ SnapChat: ItsMrVJ The Psycho Pshow: instagram.com/PsychoPshow twitter.com/PsychoPshow facebook.com/psychopshow Please SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW on iTunes, Stitcher and YouTube! Thank you, love you and stay up!!!