Guest: Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana founder
Hosts: Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman
2017 – was following crypto, wanted to build a faster crypto miner
Family left Soviet Union, saw the devastation of a bad currency and economy
Ethereum demonstrated an application platform
Qualcomm, Perl engineer who helped build platform for all those original mobile games
Mining crypto while building deep learning hardware
Had a eureka moment – encode passage of time as a data structure
At that time, it existed as a “verifiable delay function”
Quit job, met Raj Gokal
Raised $3M in seed, network price at that time was $20M – “thought it was ludicrous” – included Multicoin
5 cofounders, colleagues from Qualcomm
Built single node – was doing 100K+ TPS – prove potential of network
Raised $14M Series A in the “last vapors” of the 2017-2018 market
Competitors during that time were raising $100M+ (eg, Hashgraph)
Censorship resistance is like a communication channel – it guarantees delivery
Wireless protocols create a schedule – from X time to Y time, A gets to talk, then B gets to talk, etc
Very ordered and structured, gets you 100% utilization
Tendermint – 100 validators – each has 1 vote, there’s a known block producer who proposes a block, 2/3 vote on a block
Hired a lot of coworkers from Qualcomm who he worked with for 10 years
Solana thesis – smart contracts are good for finance, and finance depends on info propagating as fast as possible around the world
Solana data can move as fast as a piece of news travels
Currently ETH validators have same bandwidth requirements
With sharding the requirements will be reduced
Trustlessness comes from full nodes that can validate
Bitcoin and Ethereum see themselves as money – what about Solana?
Store of Value is a social construct, a meme, and important not to be tied to a sovereign (a nation)
The function of a token is to prevent spam
In PoS, once all full nodes have finalized, you can’t go back – you can only fork – which is a socially messy process
Store of Value that is awesome can be built on Solana, that can surpass bitcoin
How to bootstrap an ecosystem without piggybacking off Ethereum – was a huge unknown when Solana started
2020 – had 9-10 months of cash left, market crashed, thought they might be done
It was Solana’s second hackathon (Break Point) where he really believed they had something
Quality of builders went up, attendees went up
Solana was worth ~$100M at network launch
Thinks VC branding is dumb – most of the “crypto VCs” in last cycle were simply Ethereum ICO investors
Alameda’s balance sheet leak was first time Anatoly learned about the troubles
Sam had supported Solana a lot – especially saying they’d build Serum on Solana drove a lot of defi and builder interest
Bear market is a purge
Bitcoin supporters said Ethereum was full of mercenaries in early days — same criticism that Ethereum supporters had of Solana
“Getting through this phase sucks for sure”
NFT community is very thriving — second to Ethereum – very proud of it
Exhausted by negative news — want to see wins, see people building cool shit
David: Solana is one of only blockchains after Ethereum that has a second client (Firedancer + Jump)
Anatoly: you’re trading liveness for safety; Ethereum’s goal is 4 clients (can maintain liveness if 1 client goes down)
Still focused on monolithic chain with no sharding
Innovation in next 12-18 mos will probably be more than everything that’s come before in crypto
“Pretty sure” Solana can do more TPS than all ETH L2s combined