On Unchained, two co-founders of Solana Labs, Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, dive deeply into the Solana ecosystem, discussing everything from the price of SOL to the Solana network outage to the competition between Ethereum and Solana. Show highlights:

  • why Raj thinks SOL’s market cap grew from $86 million to $68 billion in less than a year
  • Anatoly’s and Raj’s background and how they found themselves working together to build Solana
  • why Anatoly thinks Solana will be a general-purpose blockchain rather than specializing in gaming or high frequency trading
  • Anatoly’s goal to make Solana the first billion-user blockchain
  • why Raj thinks NFTs on Solana have been so popular
  • why, in the opinion of Raj and Anatoly, Solana’s purpose has shifted away from high-frequency trading
  • how NFTs could replace ads
  • why “everything is DeFi”
  • how Solana Labs plans to allocate the recent $314 million funding round it raised
  • what lessons Anatoly learned from the 18-hour September network outage
  • technically speaking, what happened to cause Solana’s network outage
  • why Anatoly believes that outages, at this stage, aren’t necessarily a bad thing
  • whether “trading mercenaries” dominated at Solana Breakpoint
  • why developers are interested in building on Solana
  • how Solana and Ethereum compare as execution and settlement layers
  • why Raj doesn’t like framing competition between Solana and Ethereum as a fight
  • how Anatoly views the competition between Ethereum and Solana
  • whether the arrival of Neon Labs, which is bringing EVM to Solana, could lead to developers leaving Ethereum
  • how NFTs and Phantom wallets are bringing in new users for Solana
  • whether Raj and Anatoly would roll back Solana if something like Ethereum’s DAO hack were to occur
  • why Solana has the competitive advantage in throughput, according to Anatoly
  • what would happen if FTX cofounder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried gave up on Solana
  • their predictions for Solana five years from now

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Episode Transcript:

Laura Shin: 

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I’m your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto six years ago, and as a Senior Editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full time. This is the November 30, 2021 episode of Unchained. 

My book The Cryptopians Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Cryptocurrency Craze is available for preorder on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or any of your other favorite book stores. Go to bit.ly/cryptopians. That’s bit.ly/cryptopians and preorder today. 

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Today’s guests are Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, co-founders of Solana Labs. Welcome, Anatoly and Raj.

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Awesome to be here. 

Raj Gokal:

Thanks for having us. 

Laura Shin:

So, you and Solana have had quite the year. SOL started the year at less than two dollars, and it’s currently trading at over 200. The market cap went from 86 million dollars at the beginning of the year to 68 billion dollars. So, how do you guys feel about Solana’s trajectory so far in 2021?

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Pretty good, right? 

Raj Gokal:

Yeah. I mean. It’s good to see, you know, the thesis play out. I think the original one was that if crypto took off, and if it’s value propositions found market fit, and if any of the dreams of what, you know, a world computer, a global permissionless distributed ledger…you know, if any of those dreams could come true, then the demand would be a thousand or ten thousand X, what we had seen before, and it would happen really fast, and I think that’s what’s been happening over the last couple years, and Anatoly’s design for Solana, the network, is pretty well suited to that demand in all the use cases, and I think the best part is just seeing people have that like…I think of it as like the iPhone moment. That moment where you see the transaction propagate, you see an account balance change from one browser window to another or from a browser to your phone, and it’s just instant, and there were effectively no fees, and I think we’re going to have more and more of those experiences that just feel really magical, and I think that’s the most exciting part to me. 

 Laura Shin:

And Anatoly, do you want to add anything?

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Yeah. You know, I’m an engineer, so like it’s just really cool to see people use your work, and like the last hackathon having almost 600 teams form just blew my mind because that was more than all the hackathons combined. During our conference like so many developers just wanted to talk to me and shake my hand, and like it was just like I love those vibes, you know. I’m a nerd. 

Laura Shin:

Yeah. I get you. I’m a nerd. I’m not an engineer, but I’m a nerd. So, Anatoly, you were on the show before, and you kind of gave your background then, but maybe for listeners who didn’t hear the episode, why don’t you kind of give a brief recap of it, and then obviously, Raj, you have not been on the show before, so we can also have you give yours, and you guys can kind of talk about how you came together. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Yeah. The briefest background is I’m a Qualcomm engineer, the one that built high performance blockchain, and here we are. 

Laura Shin:

Okay. Okay. 

Raj Gokal:

Can I be brief too? 

Laura Shin:

Well, I mean, you haven’t been on the show before, so you can flesh it out a little bit more if you’d like. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

I met Raj along the way, and here we are. 

Raj Gokal:

Yeah, my background originally was in finance and venture capital, so I started at General Catalyst Partners in Boston. That was entrepreneurs investing in entrepreneurs. People that had built a lot of big internet companies and Lotus Notes, and you know, I’d seen like every cycle in the tech business before, and then I started a company in health tech called Sano, which is a glucose sensor company that’s going to be hitting the market soon. It got acquired later, and then I was at Omada Health which was an a16z backed company and sold into health insurance companies with behavioral health intervention, Connected Scale, Pedometer and Health Coach. So, I think really like before crypto, my journey was building products in the heavily regulated, you know, slow, really untouched by technology, like healthcare industry, and you know, seeking the wedge to rebuild that industry from the ground up the way that we had seen, you know, entertainment and media and you know, in newspapers and message boards and just everything get rebuilt so many times, I think I wanted to see healthcare get rebuilt, and then, you know, I left Omada thinking about building another health tech company and met Anatoly, and I think Anatoly gave me the confidence that all those weird engineers that I had talked to and all those experiments I had seen in crypto over the prior 5 or 6 years had a chance at really finding their moment and reaching a billion people, and that the world would look a lot better that way. So, my journey in crypto, jumping in, was just basically trying to get everything out of Anatoly’s way and helping build a team and get the funding that you know that could get this project off the ground. 

Laura Shin:

Okay. So, at this moment, just in terms of crypto history, I’m sure you’re all very well aware that the ecosystem is just kind of diversifying in a lot of different ways in terms of the way this technology is being applied. You know, obviously, we started with kind of like basic transactions and payments, and then it started going to trading and DeFi, and NFT art, NFT gaming, DAOs…in the last week, suddenly everyone is talking about DAOs again…obviously, now social, with your announcement about Alexis Ohanian investing a hundred million dollars into building social media in Solana. So, I’m just curious. In general, do you see Solana as focusing in any of these particular niches, or do you just see Solana as being sort of a go to platform for all kinds of crypto use cases, and people will just do with it whatever they like? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

I think it’s general. I always have this dream of a billion people with self-custody signing stuff. Doesn’t matter what it is. Doesn’t matter what they are doing. I just want them to like have possession of those keys and kind of have that mental model. These are my magic words. I’m signing with them. It’s doing stuff in this one shared global experience that’s crypto-graphically controlled, you know. That’s like the overall kind of like vision, and it’s not super well-formed because I kind of feel it’s the same vision as like ‘90 ‘95 web people had about the internet. There’s going to be a billion people on the web. They’re all going to be publishing stuff and clicking links. What does that mean? Nobody knows, right, but we’ve got to build it. We’ve got to build it as fast as we can, and I think all the experiments like DAOs and of fees…all those things that get people to try this stuff. These are all like worthwhile to do. Like it doesn’t matter really right now what the use cases are as long as you’re engaging people, getting them to do this, and like getting them to self-custody, and like start participating in these networks.  

Laura Shin:

Raj, what about you?

Raj Gokal:

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s still so early, and even just the idea of people participating with, you know, art and collectibles and having a direct relationship to artists and then building communities around those art collections, and that being an on boarding path for most users to participate in DeFi for the first time or collect their money towards things like buying the Constitution. It’s too unpredictable to act like there is one vertical that’s going to dominate, you know, all crypto usage and adoption, and if Anatoly’s vision of unpredictable but beautiful things happening when a billion people understand their ability to sign transactions directly is the goal, then whatever path to get there, I think, is what we’re focused on helping get off the ground, and at this point, it’s not even, I think, Solana Labs or any one actor in the ecosystem that’s fostering these different use cases, they’re just emerging as fast as we can think of them, and as fast as, you know, one team can find product market fit for anything like a new gaming economic design, or you know, a new format for collectibles and bringing IP on chain. As soon as any of these finds value, I think what we’re finding is that that original thesis of performance mattering for every use case is just continually playing out, right? It’s always better if it’s cheaper and faster and higher throughput, and I think the part that we’re just starting to see is how composability between vastly different use cases creates more opportunity for serendipity and emergent use cases that may not have existed before.  

Laura Shin:

Okay. So, you’re not like trying to position yourself as the platform that is better for one of these use cases over another. Because I feel like early on it was kind of maybe a little bit more about high frequency type of things or just more about that throughput, but now you’re sort of like, well, whatever people want to do with it is…

Anatoly Yakovenko:

So, the high frequency finance…this idea of like a price discovery engine, blockchain at NASDAQ speed…that was always like…that’s the obvious. That’s got to work. Like if that doesn’t work, then we’re totally wrong, and that was the tip of the spear, but like we kind of realized as we were building this that what…like there’s this idea of the web being run by the ad exchange. That’s a centralized market. Steal your data, right? Then they’ll try to keep you on a platform and feed you data you don’t want. That loop is driven by the ad market. Solana runs markets, right? If we can replace that market with other markets, let’s say for people trading NFTs, then that’s also finance, right? That’s also high frequency finance because for that even to be a possibility, the decentralized market, that’s where NFTs need to be as cheap as the ad exchange. It needs to be at that like micro-cent, you know, level of transaction costs for that even to be a remote possibility. So, it’s not that I think we’re going to see NASDAQ shut down, and all the stocks sort of trading on Solana. It’s that the rest of the world that’s going to start using permissionless, decentralized marketplaces for coordination, for content creation, for monetizing artist directly…that’s going to grow so much faster that you’ll forget about the other stuff. It’s just going to be like the most boring place. NASDAQ is going to be the most boring place in the world. 

Raj Gokal:

The way that I think about it is, or I guess what I’ve learned, and I think Anatoly and I have learned together, and like the whole crypto industry is learning, is that everything is finance, and everything is a marketplace, and every marketplace can be dis-intermediated and made more efficient with blockchain, and when you do that, it’s better if it’s faster and cheaper. So, I mean, I think in a way like it’s still DeFi, it’s just we’re learning that everything is DeFi.

Laura Shin:

Okay. I like that. That’s interesting, and it makes sense to a certain extent which I’ll ask you about in a little bit, but I did want to ask, you know, if you’re saying that, you know, you’re not trying to target specific niches for the 314 million dollar fund that you guys raised this past summer. Are you focusing that in any particular area? Like I’m sure there must be a way that you’re allocating it, you know. So, I was curious about maybe the percentages?

Anatoly Yakovenko:

It’s not thesis. It’s really people driven. It’s like you find that founder that has that look in their eyes…I’m going to get a hundred million people to do this thing and watch it, and those are the people that like we’ve….those are the people we’re looking for. Those are the people we try to back, and all we try to do is just get stuff out of the way. If they need tech, we get the tech out of the way. If it’s funding, either we invest, or usually we don’t even get a chance to invest because there’s so many hungry PCs now making the same bets, and like our goal is to just like find those people and help them.

Laura Shin:

Okay. All right. So, I’m sure, and this goes back to what we were saying about, you know, fast and cheap is really good. However, obviously, Solana did go offline in September for 18 hours when you had these Bots that were spamming the network to try to get in on this initial decentralized exchange offering. What were your takeaways from what happened then? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

That people know who we are. The amount of tweets that I got from people that are enjoying other blockchains was insane. I got a lot of opinions about that. What was interesting to me as an engineer was how quickly the validators…because we stress test them all the time on this. Like the whole point of beta was that once the network runs, that they should be able to recover it no matter what happens. Like arbitrary failure. Something goes wrong. All the data centers are set on fire. These stake level of attacks that people talk about. There’s always some way to recover it, and we test the validators on this at least once a month on the Testnet, but it never got tested live, and this was them doing it on their own, and it worked, and that was like cool. We can actually…like it’s done. We can walk away, and it will keep running forever as long as people want it to keep running. So, that to me was really cool to see. 

The other takeaway, obviously, was like we did a pretty good job, I think, like with how fast people were able to respond and started debugging and like seeing the issues. I feel like…I don’t know…what other lesson did I learn? Do we need to move slower, or do we need to move faster? Probably should be moving faster. The opportunity to like on board the next billion users is just so huge that like the stuff, physics kind of might happen. It sucks, you know. There are people that know how to fix it, and you know, we’ve got to keep our eye on the most important target which is get people to use blockchains. 

Laura Shin:

So, the fix that you put in at the time was something like just making sure that the messages regarding consensus were always prioritized…and please, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Yeah. There was so much spam that some of the validators were starting to see like physical link line failures. Basically they were overwhelmed with spam before a block producer can create a block. So, a previous attack called the Shanghai Attack on Ethereum was actually an attack at the block level, but a block producer was making blocks that were so big that they were overwhelming the network. This was prior to that. Before a block producer could even make a block, somebody was spamming the networks with so many transactions that things were starting to run out of memory. It was taking so long to catch up, and effectively, as soon as more than a third of the nodes kind of ran out of memory and crashed and couldn’t catch back up to the network while the network was still trying to propose forks. The validators recognized again this may be unattemptable without us clearing out all of the dead forks, and just kind of like letting the network continue from the last confirmed point. If that makes sense. So, the fix was just better prioritization prior to creating these blocks and being able to drop messages when there’s a flood without losing consensus. So, yeah, effectively, what you describe. I don’t want to get into the details because you’ve got to go dig through to go to the exact actual changes. 

Laura Shin:

But was that fix sufficient for the long term, or was it kind of just a temporary patch, or like is there more that you could do now, or are doing now, to kind of prevent that in the future, or was that patch like pretty much it? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

As an engineer, I can tell you that there’s no generic fix that could fix all attack factors. There is specific fixes for just specific attack factors, and this one was actually tested. There’s been a bunch of other floods and attacks similar to that since that so far seems like we did the right changes, and so far things are working, but it’s unknown whether there’s some corner case that could also do another resource exhaustion and cause the network to stall. 

Laura Shin:

Okay. I actually don’t know because, you know, you mentioned the Shanghai Attacks on Ethereum, and obviously, what saved the blockchain at that time was that it had multiple clients, and I’m not sure in Solana, you know, what is the situation with that? Do you have multiple clients, or is there just a single one? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

There’s a single client, and eventually, multiple clients will be a thing. That’s just early days. 

Laura Shin:

So, the block reported that at Solana Breakpoint, which was your recent conference, that when asked about Solana going offline during that time that you said it doesn’t matter if the next block takes seventy-two hours to process, but it only matters for people who need transactions to happen in milliseconds. Can you elaborate a little bit more on your thoughts?

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Yeah. So, there’s like two issues, right? Like are my funds safe? Am I safe as a Bitcoin holder? Somebody from that use case, folks that care about just keeping their funds safe, those outages are a pain in the ass, but they’re not like…they never risk the person’s funds. If you have a bunch of USDC and there’s a network outage, it doesn’t really matter because Circle has custody of their ledger. That copy of the ledger is not effective, and the network can continue from arbitrary failures as long as there’s at least one node, like Circle, keeping track. Anybody in the world that has a valid copy that can repopulate the network and let it continue. So, no matter what, right? Stake level attack. Whatever people imagine. There’s always an escape hatch, but issues that works for like I’m just sitting on my funds and not doing anything with them, and I don’t care if I get to transact today or tomorrow, but reality is that all applications that are real world applications need to send their messages now. We need them to be cheap and fast and arrive, right, within a short amount of time, and this is why they even want to use blockchain in the first place. The reality is that like for real world use cases, liveness is the most important thing. That’s the thing that needs to be extremely high confidence with, you know, nine nines of uptime. 

Laura Shin:

Okay. So, I’m sure you probably saw this tweet, but at that time, Neha Narula of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative tweeted, if your validator community can easily coordinate for a network restart, what’s to prevent them from coordinating to block transactions or contracts when compelled to by the SEC. What’s your response to that question? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

I feel like people are saying disorganization is a requirement for decentralization. I think that’s a little strange. The thing is that like they are…the way that they operate isn’t a way to compel them to do anything. They don’t have a choice to like process one set of transactions or another. There is a block proposer with a set of transactions. It’s opaque to them what they are, right? At the end of the day, the folks that interpret those bits in the validator and display to the human that these are dollars, or these are coins, or these are securities or not securities, right? At that point of the interface, this is where somebody says this thing you’re trading or this thing you’re signing, that thing has value. That’s where regulation should occur. Not at like the AT&T network switch level, right? Because the validators are basically running a switch. They run a box. The box runs autonomously. They make sure that it stays up, and that’s it. Like what other actions do they take? 

Laura Shin:

Yeah. Raj, do you want to add anything to that? 

Raj Gokal:

No. I think the question has been answered about a hundred times on podcasts and interviews and Twitter. The most annoying thing about the outage is just the reception from people that aren’t actually using the network, and the way that they have chosen to conflate that issue with one that is catastrophic to the network, or that would result in a loss of funds, or one that would cause an exodus of users or developers, and we’ve seen none of that, right? It just hasn’t happened. I think of it in terms of the consequence to the network and the reputation of the network. I think it’s as significant as the Twitter fail whale was when Twitter was seeing its first big waves of explosive user growth. Yeah. There were days where it was, you know, all you see was a fail whale. It was an icon that said, you know, we couldn’t handle this much load this moment at this stage of growth of the network, but the moment it was back, everyone comes back. They’re using it. They’re prepared to deal with those fail whale moments, and over time, the platform stabilizes, and you know, the end state of growth and adoption is not a hundred times, you know, what it was two days before or four days before. At some point, you know, you’ve grown past those growing pains. I think we’re just seeing growing pains in the network, and when we talk to people that actually use the network, and that have built for it and have built, you know, some of the largest and most well adapted applications, these are not catastrophic or existential issues for them. It’s more the perception, and you know, how repetitive the narrative around it is that that starts to become an issue, but you know, there are worse things to deal with in life. 

Laura Shin:

Yeah. I did see Chris Dixon tweet that there will always be more demand for block space than there is block space. I think he actually tweeted this in reference to some tweets about Ethereum, which we will discuss later, but I think it also applies in this case, and frankly, in a way though, you know, one thing that is interesting to me is that I do think the reason that Solana fell victim to this attack by bots is because the blockchain is so cheap. So, I don’t know if you have any response to that. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

That was the…the attack factor was prior before you could even check if the transactions that were being proposed by these bots could pay for the usage. So, it was really before a block producer could even like make a decision. Are these things valid? It didn’t really actually impact the block level, like level of constraints that you see in Ethereum or other EVM chain. So, even prior, before we could even execute things, there was just kind of a flood of messages across the network that started to grow in size because of the number of pending transactions to evaluate what’s just queued up. So, when all these queues blew up, validators ran out of memory and crashed, and that was the bug. The thing wasn’t like capped, and it wasn’t just doing some simple quality of service, and I can only blame myself…

Laura Shin:

But what about that point about how it was so cheap? Are you saying that now because there is a check on how much funds they have that then that kind of attack wouldn’t be possible, or I mean, it wasn’t a purposeful attack. It was…

Anatoly Yakovenko:

So, if the block producer had resources to valuate all those transactions, nearly all of them would be dropped because they were invalid. 

Laura Shin:

Oh. I see. Okay. So, basically…

Anatoly Yakovenko:

It was just basically pre-block…not like invalid transactions. 

Laura Shin:

Okay. So, that’s why at this point then this is no longer an issue. Okay. So, I also saw that CoinDesk reported that at Solana Breakpoint, a lot of attendees saw Solana as a chance to make money and don’t really care about decentralization, and the author called these people trading mercenaries…I’m sorry. I think it was the attendee…and they found other people like them that were there, and so, I’m assuming you probably don’t agree with that characterization of the community, but I was wondering, assuming that at least some part of that is true, how do you make this momentum that you currently have for Solana sustainable? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Just go hang out at the Hacker House or at the Dev, the developer’s side of the conference. That was where I was getting all my energy. Just like talking to all the folks building like these awesome apps that are growing in users. That was really, really cool, and like during the hackathon there were…I like walked into the house for the first time. It was packed with people just coding, and I found this white board somebody scribbled like a prize for like a 50 K prize to go build something. So, it’s that energy of people that I just want to build that’s there, and all the other kind of folks that come in and out of crypto. The coin enjoyers. It’s fine. It’s just part of life. I don’t know. 

Raj Gokal:

The event organizers maybe did too good a job of keeping all the speculators away from the hackers. You know, I think most folks who had that perception of Breakpoint didn’t even know that there was a Hacker House, or that there were two other venues where teams were forming and building, and it was just like sweat and tears and monitors and white boards. You know, a lot of those teams aren’t looking for funding, so they weren’t exactly trying to go shake hands and introduce themselves to a bunch of investors. But you know, I mean, speculation is absolutely a powerful force in the existence and the progress that crypto has made today, right? I mean, none of this exists without people speculating about the value that’s going to get created, and the speculators now have seen enough cycles to know that the place they should be spending their time is where developers are spending their time, and the reason there are a lot of speculators investing and interested in the Solana ecosystem is because the development for ecosystem is exploding. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t be here. They wouldn’t have shown up to Breakpoint. 

I also think…I would like to see the industry have a little more respect for people that are capitol allocators. You know, there have been years where it was difficult to do it and difficult to stick through, and I know the Solana ecosystem has had a lot of capital allocators that have been very patient capital, very thesis driven capital, and you know, if they’re still showing up, you know, flying to Lisbon and spending time with all these hackers and trying to be helpful, I think that is not something that should be shamed. 

Laura Shin:

When you talk to developers, what in particular attracts them to Solana over other smart contract platforms? 

Anatoly Yakovenko: 

That is a good question because usually our motto is you’re going to have to eat some glass to build an application. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it is a from-scratch rebuild of a high-performance blockchain. It’s all new tech, and that means it’s rough around the edges, and to some people that’s a hurdle, but to folks that are like this is cool, this is cool technology. I can see why you made these choices. I can see you’re principled about what you were doing, and they like get it. They actually want to build on top, and it’s an opportunity to like build off some things like Anchor, right? We didn’t build on SDK because we didn’t have time or resources to do so, and we just built a really, really fast blockchain, and when people saw that, one of those people was this awesome dev Armani that like moved mountains basically. Single handedly built like probably the like one of the most popular developer tools in all of crypto now just for Solana. So, things like that I think are, you know…engineers like you can’t really sell to them. It’s got to tickle their curiosity. You’ve got to show them that there’s something interesting there that they can use this as a tool to build the thing that they are imagining. Like they can barely reach and get there.

Laura Shin:

That makes sense. Yeah. I totally understand that. So, in a moment, we’re going to talk more about kind of where Solana fits in compared to some other similar blockchains, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. 

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Laura Shin:

Back to my conversation with Anatoly and Raj. So, as I’m sure, you’re very well aware, Solana is often seen as competitive with Ethereum. How do you see the two blockchains in the future? Do you just see them as co-existing? Do you see them as taking different niches? Do you see them as kind of like competing head to head, and one of them coming out of top? Like what does that future look like to you? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Probably all of the above. 

Laura Shin:

Well, some of these scenarios are mutually exclusive. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Not all at the same time, but there is, you know, like settlement is just a feature, right? Like all byzantine fault tolerant systems have smart contracts also do settlement, so when this idea that people talk about settlement layer for Ethereum, well, every blockchain does settlement. That’s just a feature, right? So, what does that mean for Ethereum? Those are like questions in terms of like where are people going to go? What chains are they going to use for the benefits and compounding your facts start to accrue? It’s hard to know where that stuff plays out. You can kind of see multiple features where there is a global settlement layer called Ethereum. There is a global execution layer called Solana, and those are symbiotic, right? But you can also see a future where settlement is just a feature. I’m going to deploy my coin at the cheapest possible settlement layer because I don’t want to extract any value from my users, right? Like you as somebody that’s building these decentralized organizations, where do you want it to work? Where do you want to collaborate? Where do you want to coordinate your community? That place you want it to be minimally extractive. Like do you want it to be the cheapest, fastest place or something else? So, those decisions people are going to make, and we’ll see how it plays out. Those are unknown unknowns. I know what we’re building is a really, really fast high performance execution layer, but settlement is a feature of that thing too. 

Laura Shin:

And Raj, do you have an opinion on this?

Raj Gokal:

Hard to know how the world ends up playing out. Yeah. I mean, Ethereum has like four times as much Lindy Effect as Solana, and that Lindy Effect has incredible value. So, you know, right now, most of the assets around Ethereum, and I think one of the biggest reasons for that is that, you know, there’s a first mover advantage. There’s an amount of trust that continues to build up over time as the network persists without any catastrophic failures or loss of funds, or you know, major consensus failures, and only time can make up for that, and Solana will always be younger than Ethereum, you know, at least the proof of work version of Ethereum. So, I mean, I think the biggest difference between the two right now is that one is proof of work, and one is proof of stake, and one came several years before the other. As long as that has value, and those two designs have different purposes and functions, they’ll both continue to be valuable. 

Laura Shin: 

And I know that you tweeted before that Ethereum cannot be killed. It’s impossible, and it’s already a beautiful force of good in the world, empowering millions and creating billions in wealth. Bitcoin is quite obviously the same, and this tweet was in response to someone who, I guess, had been framing kind of the competition between the blockchains said…well, basically, you finished this tweet as stop framing it as a fight. So, how do you prefer to frame what’s happening here where we do have these multiple smart contract layer ones kind of trying to all gain market share at the same time? It’s like Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche, Algorand and NEAR…which by the way is a former sponsor of my show…and then Ethereum. So, what’s your take on…

Anatoly Yakovenko:

They are all growing, right? Every single one of those platforms is growing right now, and we all still feel like we’re just at the beginning, right? I think we all feel like there’s possibility for a thousand X of the space in the next like year or two. So, you know, each of those platforms has a thousand X opportunity, and I don’t think any of them is going to capture all one thousand X of it, right? So, I think the thing we should be focused on is how do we make sure that one thousand X happens. What are all the forces that keep that thousand X from happening, and let’s make it happen as fast as possible, and you know, the same way that we trained billions of people to use QWERTY keyboards and mouse and you know, user names and passwords and subject lines and email addresses, right? It’s all complicated stuff. Like that’s the focus. Let’s get everyone learning this new complicated piece of technology that generally looks and works the same no matter what platform you’re on. Let’s get a billion people or four billion people using it as fast as we can, and the market will decide the division of value and market share for different platforms based on their performance characteristics or usability or cultural, you know, focus, but I think we should just be focused on, you know, making at least some of these blockchain dreams come true as fast as possible, and whatever technology, you know, helps people get there faster and get over that hump, I think, you know, we should all be getting behind, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, all the…everything else. 

Raj Gokal:

I’m not a competitive person. I like the competition. Not in the sense that I ever want to kill my opponent, right? I want to have a good battle, and I want to learn from it. So, I think like the really cool thing about crypto is…it’s so widely different than working at a big tech firm…is that everyone is really open, at least all the top chains, the folks he mentioned, they are all open source. Open source first. They publish their ideas. They want people to kind of get behind what they are building, their technical vision. They are effectively giving away their secrets, right? There are no trade secrets here, and they are not hiding their tech, and all of these things are now available to everyone else, right? There’s no reason why Solana couldn’t borrow the tech that the Ethereum folks is researching right now in implement charting. Not that I’m saying that will ever happen because I have my own vision, but there’s also no reason why the Ethereum folks can’t look at what we’re doing, what we accomplished through and shift and be like okay, this is actually a really good way to scale the execution layer, right? That’s all open, and that competition is really accelerating how quickly things get built, how quickly products ship, how quickly adoption happens. It’s awesome. 

Laura Shin:

So, Neon Labs is building an Ethereum virtual machine on Solana, and there are already a number of apps that plan to deploy on the Neon EVM. Once that’s in place, what do you think will happen to the theory of market share when it comes to DeFi? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

What do you mean? Like do you think Ethereum as it’s…do you think folks are just going to jump ship and leave Ethereum and go to Neon? I mean, I hope that happens, but…

Laura Shin:

Well…for DeFi on Ethereum, I do wonder that, right? Because if we’re just looking at throughput and block time, like all the things, like those are what I would imagine would be the features that would attract, you know, DeFi even more so than things like NFTs…I’m sorry…NFT art. NFT gaming is a different story, but you know, I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. It just sort of looks a little bit more purpose built for that use, right? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

I think that people like leaving Ethereum is just never going to happen. Like those folks that built Ethereum like ___ 00:42:56, like Stani, they are going to stay there, and that’s fine. Those applications may be multi-chained, but those are true Ethereum dev, and Neon can help them accelerate, right? There’s some people that are like I want to run Avaa on Neon, and that’s going to happen, and those folks will participate in those protocols, but I think reality is that what should happen is that the benefits of EVM on Solana is that you can start building the applications and solidity running any EVM that can now take leverage and participate in the broader Solana ecosystem, right? They can call out to Serum, and that’s a new set of applications that are going to grow on Solana. It’s just really rare that you see somebody like abandon and move, right? Like what you see or what real success looks like is when the new thing just outgrows the old. That’s far more likely. Does that make sense? 

Laura Shin:

Yeah. I mean, so, I didn’t necessarily mean…because you said like if, you know, he didn’t expect Stani would leave Ethereum. So, that refers to Stani Kulechov, who founded Aava, and Aava is going to deploy on Neon EVM, but I didn’t necessarily mean that he would stop building on Ethereum, but more that for whatever TVL…total value locked…is in Aava that we might see quite a big flow…or I don’t know…you tell me. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

It’s game theory optimal for anybody, you know, who now has a path to not have to port their development team and spread its focus over two different languages to be able to franchise their brands to any new chain where users are being acquired. Because if they don’t, then somebody else will do it, right? They’ll fork it. They’ll launch it on that chain. They’ll have a name that probably rhymes, and they will try and eat that new segment of users and market because the original team wasn’t going after it. So, I think it’s not a cultural question or a values question, it’s just game theory. It’s optimal for them to do that, but then, I think, you know, you’re on to something because if you look at Brave, you know, and what Brendan Eich has decided to do is even if there is a franchise of Ethereum based application on Solana that’s deployed on Neon, and it’s on multiple EVM chains, they’ve chosen to default to the Solana version in the Brave wallet, and the Brave swap interface because they see value in, you know, the user accounts and balances all being simple and unified for the end user. So, there is pretty clear value to an end user, and I think if you see more, you know, platforms taking that stance on Neon deployed versions of, you know, originally Ethereum-based applications, you could see some meaningful movement, but we don’t know yet, right? 

Laura Shin:

Yeah. Actually, when do you expect that that will be finished? 

Raj Gokal:

2022 sometime. You’re talking about Brave or Neon or…

Laura Shin:

No. Sorry, yeah. Neon. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Neon should be going live within a few weeks, I think. 

Laura Shin:

Oh wow. 

Raj Gokal:

They are in the final stretch…I hope I didn’t leak anything, but like they are in the final stretch…from what I can tell as an engineer, they’re basically just in the final stretch of getting stuff done. So, we might see it by like the end of the year. That would be good. That would be a good Christmas present. 

Laura Shin:

Okay. So, maybe I’ll get an answer to my question sooner than I thought. So, in contrast, when it comes to NFTs, I don’t know if you were aware. NFTs on Ethereum are…well, you probably are aware…are seen as higher value than those on Solana, and there was an NFT artist, who I interviewed for a panel that I did, where he said he got a grant to create NFTs on Solana, but his collectors were like oh, we wouldn’t want to buy in Solana. We prefer to buy in Ethereum, and I was curious what your take is on that. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

So, this is partly why I think this idea of like mass exodus from Ethereum is just never going to happen because you have core Ethereum users that hold ETH. To them, honestly, the gas prices are in ETH, they are not that expensive because they have a bunch of ETH. They don’t look at it as dollars spent, right? Because they are not speculated if their EQ says they have a bunch of ETH, and they are spending a small fraction of their ETH to acquire NFTs for much larger amounts of ETH. That user base is there. What you need to actually grow is a native Solana-based user base that is here because they like Solana. They like Phantom. They want to participate in this community and do stuff here. So, this is why, I think, like it’s hard to know where things flip, right? Like who’s drawing the users faster is probably the most important metric than who is able to get liquidity mining rewards and full TVL from Aava on one EVM chain to another. 

Laura Shin:

So, do you know who…I mean, how would you measure who’s getting more users faster? That’s really hard. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

We see our met checks, you know, the stuff that Phantom reports, and it’s over a million monthly active users and…

Raj Gokal:

One point four million now, so it’s bumping by like a hundred or a hundred fifty thousand a week. 

Anatoly Yakovenko: 

And those are not MetaMask users. So…

Laura Shin:

Well, some of them I’m sure are. 

Anatoly Yakovenko: 

But from what we can tell, some are, but like it’s hard to tell. That’s anecdotally what we see are new people coming into the space that are trying crypto for the first time through Phantom, and that’s their first experience. 

Laura Shin:

Wow. How do you know that they don’t also have Ethereum wallets? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

This is based on like feedback that I’m getting from folks on Twitter. So, I don’t know. This is like anecdotally. Like hey, this is my first time trying like doing self-custody, doing DeFi, the first time I tried it was on Solana, and I tried MetaMask, and oh my god, this is not what I want. 

Laura Shin:

Oh. Wow. Wait. They find MetaMask more difficult to use? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Correct. Yeah. 

Raj Gokal:

I think that’s been the most controversial, right? I’ve never seen negative feedback on Phantom. Almost one hundred percent positive feedback, and every time I’ve seen a review of it, you know, what I hear is that it’s the best wallet in the industry, and that’s never changed. Then I think, at some point like anecdotal, or I guess like survey data, but within developers and end users started to cross past the fifty percent threshold of like…more than fifty percent of the developers building on Solana had never written a smart contract before and same with end users. 

Laura Shin:

Wow. That’s great. So, then how are they finding out about…because like, I guess, I would have just imagined that a lot of people come to crypto through, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are the two main things that everybody kind of knows about, and then they kind of branch out. So, then how are they coming kind of more directly to…

Raj Gokal:

I feel like the whole industry knew this was going to happen for a like year and a half. That NFTs were going to be something that people would learn about before they even care that it’s on blockchain. Before they know it’s on Ethereum or Solana or anything. All they know is that there is some dank memes and pictures and collectibles, and you know, an ounce of culture and something important that they can own, and as they build that understanding and start to engage with those things…I mean, from what I’ve heard, a lot of people are interacting with Phantom, buying NFTs that their friends turn them on to using Solana, and they don’t even know what Solana is. They haven’t heard of Solana the network. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

They’ve heard of Phantom though. 

Raj Gokal:

They know Phantom because Phantom is the extension they open up, and soon they’ll know, you know, that it’s the app that they open up. That’s what people care about. 

Laura Shin:

That is great. I love that. Yeah. Because actually what I was going to ask you was, I don’t know if you saw this tweet, but that collector Gmoney tweeted that buying a Solana punk was like buying a fake Chanel bag. Okay. I’m glad you guys are laughing.

Anatoly Yakovenko:

I don’t agree.

Raj Gokal:

I mean, it kind of is. Yeah. But I think the Solana Monkey Business and the Degenerate Ape Academy is different. It’s not copying. Like there’s originality there. The communities are doing original things, and to someone coming in as a newcomer, they are experiencing what a DAO can do, and how a collective organizing force of a similar profile photo can permeate through all their social networks, and they can feel like they belong to something, even if they are moving between Twitter and Redditt, and you know, Xbox Live. Like that’s the powerful thing, and those communities are doing…you know, I mean, they are not sitting around just asking what did Cryptopunks do, and let’s just copy that, right? I mean, it’s inspired for sure, but it’s a whole new product line. It’s a whole new set of experiments, and it’s diverging very quickly. So, ETH OGs are…they are not paying attention to this stuff. It’s kind of crazy to me sometimes talking to people who obviously are loving their time experimenting and continuing to be a part of the culture of Ethereum, but they literally have no idea that these things even exist on Solana, right? Like they don’t know that, you know, there are celebrities that are joining these communities. The communities are huge. The discords are giant. A lot of these people are experiencing cryptos for the first time. I don’t blame them because there is a lot going on in Ethereum, and it’s hard to keep track, even of just what’s happening in Ethereum, but like comparing it to like, you know, the third NFT project that ever came up on Solana that was just a straight copy of something in Ethereum is like not focusing on the right thing. There’s been twenty-five hundred new NFT, like ten thousand NFT collections, launched on Solana since that, right? So, the world changes very quickly. 

Laura Shin:

Yeah. And I saw People Pleaser did one on Solana which was really cool, I thought. It’s sort of like a gamified version, and you could kind of like get better NFTs if you bought all of them, and it was very fair the way that everything was priced. Like it was very cool, I thought, the way it was structured. 

All right. So, at this point, we’re going to turn to a few questions that I got off Twitter when I told Twitter that I was going to be interviewing you guys, and some of these were kind of fun. One was if the DAO happened today on Solana, meaning fourteen percent of all SOL were stored in a contract and hacked, would you decide to rescue the funds, meaning to do a hard fork to do that? And for your answer, why or why not? 

Raj Gokal:

That’s a good question. I think under similar…I would say Solana validators would have to make that decision. The way that process works is there’s like a proposal process to push PRs, and then the feature activation in which the super majority of the validators have to vote, and it’s their decision to make those choices. Me, personally, I would probably make the same decision as Vitalik in this like early ecosystem that I see this like tiny baby just about to walk and like get hit in the head. Like I’ve got to save it. I’ve got to save this baby, but like we don’t have the power to do so, and it’s going to be, at the end of the day, up to the validators, and the folks that could shut it down are, you know, Circle exchanges. A bunch of different participants could just say no, we don’t want to accept this fork, and the community will figure it out. 

Laura Shin:

And then there will be Solana Classic.

Raj Gokal:

Maybe. Who knows, right? 

Laura Shin:

Well, that’s what happened when the exchange…

Anatoly Yakovenko:

I tend to agree with Vitalik that the ultimate power is in the hands of the people that are running these things, and the whole point of crypto is really to empower people. The way we can do that is with cryptography, giving them self-custody, giving them the ability to run nodes, and then those tools allow them to make these complex decisions and move stuff forward, but it’s ultimately them that get to do it, you know. I don’t worship the machine. 

Laura Shin:

And Raj, do you have an opinion on this?

Raj Gokal:

I say let it ride. You know, I mean the ledger is the ledger, and yeah, the validators get to decide whatever they want. If they wanted to roll back the ledger, then, you know, that’s up to them, but I wouldn’t be fighting, I think, to make that happen and create a fork, and yeah, so, I don’t know. Maybe this is where we split, Anatoly. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Well, I wouldn’t be fighting to make that happen either. I think that’s maybe…I actually don’t know how things went down with Ethereum, but there’s this like legend that Vitalik wrote the code, and it happened to force the change, and then like all this stuff spread. 

Laura Shin:

No. No. No. That’s not what happened. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Exactly. So, the fact is that like something catastrophic stake failure is going to be up to the validators and all the different like people, parts of the community. The best that we can do is just kind of guide them and say like based on my engineering analysis, if you made this full request, I think it’ll do the thing that you want, but I’m not going to be the one to push for it. 

Laura Shin:

Okay. And Raj, just wanted to clarify since, you know, like I said, it would be fourteen percent of all SOL, and there is a proof of stake element in Solana, so despite that still wouldn’t kind of…

Raj Gokal:

I would want to see what happens. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

The percentage of the SOL that gets destroyed or gets locked up or frozen or whatever, it doesn’t matter whether it regards to core selection or voting because whatever amount of SOL you use for the quorum, it’s some percentage of that is what matters. How the weight is distributed. So, that actually doesn’t have that much impact on the network itself. 

Laura Shin:

Okay. All right. Well, we’ll have to see if anything happens in that regard, and then who knows. Maybe afterward it’ll be Raj in charge Solana Classic and Anatoly in charge…not in charge, but you know…kind of the figure head for Solana. So, we’ll see. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Who’s the figure head on Ethereum Classic? Is there one?

Laura Shin:

Wait, what? 

Anatoly Yakovenko: 

Is there a figure head for Ethereum Classic? 

Laura Shin:

No, because it was kind of more the exchanges that drove the rise of that. So, yeah, it wasn’t like there was an Ethereum…one of the honchos that was driving that. So, but yeah, if the two co-founders on Solanas split on this issue then we could see that happen. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Do it. 

Raj Gokal:

If it means I get to stop working with Anatoly, I’m in. Let’s do it. 

Laura Shin:

By the way, for people listening on the podcast, hilariously they each kind of like raised their fists at each other when they were doing this. It was funny, but anyway, okay. So, another question was about scaling. Someone tweeted at me if the SOL single use case has a higher throughput than ETH and SOL will kill ETH, what about SOL competitors, like Kadena and AVEX, that claim a higher throughput than SOL. Will Kadena and AVEX kill SOL? Is this a race to the bottom on throughput? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Not unless they implement Solana. So, the way that we’re scaling right now, and the usage that you see right now by sheer load of just the applications that are using the network, it’s somewhere like seventy million transactions per day, and that’s roughly around seven hundred TPS. That’s more than all the other EVM chains combined, and that’s just current load. That’s not the capacity. So, for the network to like hit capacity limits, for actual…for any congestion control to kick in, we have to have to blocks that have more than half of their remaining capacity for fees to double. It’s kind of how our congestion control works. There’s not a dynamic option for who gets to go first. There’s a governor that looks at are you using fifty percent of the remaining capacity, then double the fees. So, if some of the spam bots go away, right? So, at twenty-five thousand TPS that’s running for, I think, 6 blocks or whatever, fees are going to double, then at thirty-seven and a half, fees are going to double again, and every time the remaining capacity drops by half, fees double. So, for that to happen, we still have a lot of ways to go in terms of like usage of option because it’s expensive to generate that many valid transactions.

Laura Shin:

Okay. All right. Next Twitter question was from Tegan Kline of the Graph. She asked what happens if Sam Bankman-Fried leaves the Solana ecosystem? And I was curious about this just because I’m not sure what his current involvement is. So, why don’t you illuminate us? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

What is his involvement? 

Raj Gokal:

What is his current involvement? I don’t know. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

So, we have an awesome relationship with those folks, but it’s because they move fast. This is what I’m trying to tell people is that like of all the people in crypto that we worked with, the people that tend to end up in Solana, are the ones that just like no frills want to get stuff done, and that’s the foundation of that relationship, and like it’s really rare to find them. Sam is one of those people. He is like okay, we want to build the stacks. Let’s just move mountains to get it out, and us and them and everybody in the ecosystem moved those mountains, and now Serum has like…a bajillion startups are building on top of Serum now. So, that happens because people just want to get stuff done. What does it mean for Sam to leave? He’s not like a mercenary trader. He’s a builder. Is he going to build Solana himself? He doesn’t want to do that. It already exists, right? He wants to build products and get users to use stuff and like have FTX grow, and those are like…you know, the only reason he would leave to go somewhere else is because we screwed something up, and we stopped being hungry, and we stopped building things, you know, at that same pace. But likewise, if he gets lazy, there are plenty of other hungry people out there.

Laura Shin:

There are plenty of other crypto billionaires to…

Anatoly Yakovenko: 

No. It’s not the money. The money is never the problem, right? Like there’s always an infinite amount of capital, like right now especially. It’s like do you have the drive to go build a product, to grind through all the paid parts, get it to market, grow the user bits. Those people are extremely rare, and the amount of capital when it grows…the number of those people stays constant, right? And this is why seed level evaluations jump by factors of five like in a matter of like six months. This is why it’s so hard to find those founders, and like why growth is hard for the entire ecosystem, right? You think, there’s like two trillion dollars of capital floating around in crypto, why can’t we get people to use it? Like money doesn’t solve all those problems. You actually need to find really, really good people to build stuff. So far, like, Sam wants to get a billion people into crypto. We want to get a billion people into crypto. If you are listening, and this is your dream, like just go start building, and you know, we will end up in the same ecosystem because this is how hungry we are. 

Raj Gokal:

I think the world hasn’t like caught up to exactly how many people are building on Solana, and how big and fast-growing the ecosystem is. Like the value that Sam brought…by extensively by being the highest profile, most visible, and most deep pocketed person that was able to stand up as a leader inspiring others to build on the network, and that was maniacally focused on user experience and building something with crypto that normal people could access, that value can’t be put back in the bottle. Like it already catalyzed hundreds of other teams and builders, and now, I have more of those maniacal builders than I can keep count of, you know, and like, they are not all just sitting around saying well, what’s Sam going to do? What happens if he leaves? They’re acquiring users. They’re building products that millions of users…they are thinking about how to get to ten million users and then a hundred million users. Like it’s living in the past to ask that kind of question. 

Laura Shin:

All right. So, just to wrap up, where do you hope to see Solana go in the next year? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

One year. Man, that’s the hardest prediction to make. I can predict six weeks and five years. 

Laura Shin:

All right. Well, give me the five years. I’m curious. Like what’s your vision for what Solana will be at that time? 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

I think there’s a hundred-million-person DAO that’s organizing capital, like very large capital allocation decisions, governance decisions, that have real world impact all on Solana. 

Raj Gokal:

I think there will be many of those, not just one, one hundred-million-person DAO. 

Anatoly Yakovenko: 

There’s going to be at least one hundred-million-person DAO. 

Laura Shin:

Wow. Within five years? 

Raj Gokal:

Easy. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

When that happens, right, like that shift, it’s a hockey stick shift, right? As soon as people get it, it starts growing like wildfire, and it’s not a linear thing. You’re not going to see it happen. Like, oh my god, we’re going to add a million people a month. It’s going to be like hard work, blood, sweat, and tears, right? Like optimizations on UX, and like use cases in all these things, and all of a sudden, boom. So, I think that boom is going to happen within five years.

Laura Shin:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s fascinating. I will say…DAOs definitely have captured my imagination, and I’m sure for a lot of people, but I think that is kind of what I’m most excited about coming up. All right. Well, where can people learn more about each of you and Solana Labs and Solana? 

Raj Gokal:

Twitter.com

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Solana.com or like especially if you’re a DAO, there’s links, documentation. There’s going to be another hackathon. So, just like stay tuned. If you want to know what I’m thinking every thirty seconds, follow me on Twitter. 

Raj Gokal:

Aeyakovenko is his, and Rajgokal is my handle. 

Laura Shin:

Okay. Awesome. Thank you both so much for coming on Unchained. 

Anatoly Yakovenko:

Thank you. 

Raj Gokal:

Thanks, Laura. Bye.

Laura Shin:

Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Anatoly, Raj, and Solana, check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Anthony Yoon, Daniel Nuss and Mark Murdock. Thanks for listening.