Description:
Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation, explains how Solana is building the fastest blockchain infrastructure for moving ...
Transcript:
Crypto is not just an asset class. It's an infrastructure for all asset classes. The strongest network effect that you could ever have is around money. Uh and I think over the last 1015 years looking at how tech has evolved is I think it's proven without a doubt. If you look at where application revenue has been the highest across the entire industry in 2025 year to date, that is Lana. >> What would determine for example if Bitcoin hits 200,000 versus coming down back towards 50,000? Um, I think >> our guest today is Lily Leu, president of the Salana Foundation. Uh, with Salana potentially days away from SEC approval for a spotty ETF. Institutional treasuries are now accumulating billions in soul and the network is processing more transactions than any other layer 1 blockchain to date. We're talking about the future of Salana and the future of blockchain technology and tokenization with our next guest, Lily. Welcome to the show, Lily. Good to see you. Thanks for being here. >> Thanks, David. Thanks for having me. I want to start before talking about Salana itself. Let's talk about the broader crypto landscape and demand for cryptos right now. As we're speaking today on the 6th of October, Bitcoin is almost at $130,000 125. It's come down a little bit from its highs. Just new all-time highs week after week. What is driving this demand right now, Lily? >> Sure. Uh well, the last couple of days aside, what we we've seen a huge run up in crypto this year, and I think it's probably for a couple of reasons. One is you've seen uh global warming around the world uh to this idea that this is digital gold. People really understand that uh and now that the interest in Bitcoin has gone beyond sort of fringe retail buyers into institutions and even to governments, it's really accentuated this thesis of digital gold. There's only 21 million, never going to be more, probably only fewer as people uh misplace their keys and misplace their wallets. uh and that's been driving a pretty positive reflexive loop. And I think that uh one thing that's also really uh stimulated that starting earlier this year is the addition of uh digital asset treasury companies uh to the crypto ecosystem. And many of the early ones were specifically focused on accumulating Bitcoin. And essentially what dig digital asset companies do or treasury companies do is they accumulate the underlying token with the intent to continue holding it. uh and that will uh have you know a very clear intention uh clearly intended impact on supply and demand uh dynamics. >> Do you feel like the um the motive for buying something like Bitcoin right now has changed from the last bull market whereas maybe the last one was mostly retail driven right now the race is to see who is accumulating more treasuries of Bitcoin. Is that kind of the narrative right now or am I wrong? Yeah, I think that Bitcoin uh you remember even 10 years ago, Bitcoin was seen as uh not just a fringe but potentially even a dirty or dangerous thing. Uh and so unlike uh many other trends, it started really on the fringes on the fringes. Um longtail sort of adoption of this asset. Uh and then it uh I think one of the milestone moments for Bitcoin was the introduction of IBIT and the Bitcoin ETF which was about two years ago. Uh and that really was a watershed moment making uh bitcoin more broadly accessible to the institutional audience and of course uh the potential buying size there and this and the institutional audiences uh is uh is huge right uh so step by step that opened up the door for smaller broader base of holders uh to institutions uh and now what you're seeing as sovereigns really see starting to see Bitcoin as a mustave um and with that the uh portfolio allocation over the last 10 years of how much should I allocate to crypto used to be less than 1% if you cross your fingers and if you hold your nose to 1% to these days it's uh rating in investment banks uh report the other day and now apparently they're guiding to 2 to 4%. >> I just want to share with you this 50-second clip or 40 secondond clip from CNBC. Uh take a listen we'll react together. Now, this rally comes as the US government officially shut down, a moment that has in the past boosted Bitcoin by shaking confidence in the dollar. Institutions have also been piling in close to $2.3 billion in spot bitcoin ETF inflows this week, adding fuel to the move. There was also bullish infrastructure news. The CME announcing plans for 247 Bitcoin and Ether futures trading by 2026. And Swift is working with 30 banks on a blockchainbased payments ledger built on Ethereum tech. Now, in terms of crypto pegged equities, Coinbase logged its best week since June. Robin Hood up almost 20% this week after CEO Vlad Tennvive called tokenization a freight train that will eat the financial system. And I am keeping an eye on Bitcoin. It is within striking distance of a new all-time high. Scott. >> Okay. So, let's just comment on well several things. I'll let you comment on the whole clip, but particularly uh Vlad Tennov's comment CEO from Robin Hood. His comments quoted by CNBC towards the end saying that tokenization is a freight train waiting to happen. And I wonder how that's going to impact the whole crypto ecosystem and specifically Salana. >> I think he's right and it's going to impact crypto, but more than anything I I think it's going to impact traditional finance. Uh what we see today is you have about $4 trillion worth of assets which are cryptonative assets. Uh more than half of that is Bitcoin and then much of the rest is layer 1's as well as a longer tale of different assets. Uh crypto as an asset class today is about $4 trillion. But if you compare that to to traditional finance which is let's call it about a trillion dollars uh or sorry about hundred trillion dollars then what we're talking about is a huge base of assets uh that has the potential to be tokenized and brought on chain. Um and really crypto is not just an asset class. It's an infrastructure for all asset classes and it's only started with those cryptonnative tokens. uh is the first thing to go to market uh an asset class you cannot get anywhere else but that's really just the beginning of what crypto as a technology platform is supposed to be uh bringing to uh to uh future digital financial reals and so I think is going to happen is uh the assets uh from traditional asset managers from traditional financial institutions going to be tokenized and the revenue opportunity for that for asset issuers is typically let's call it something like 25 bips uh and the attractiveness of crypto is that this is direct distribution for assets. Uh the way that assets are distributed today is typically through uh sort of existing analog uh wealth manager relationships that have been built up over some part of the past century. Uh those are triedand-true sort of wheel ruts in the rocks. Uh and it's work it it works. Uh but what no individual network no matter how large, no matter how wholesale, can compete with today is the distribution of the internet which is to 5 and a half billion people that have access to the internet, therefore have access to basic cryptography, therefore have access to wallets and therefore have access to the whole range of whatever assets have become tokens. And that can be anything between at the most extreme let's call it a money market fund tokenized money market fund many of those today uh and then at the other extreme memecoins right so the way we think about it is um I think about it as uh there there being an asset spectrum and I think one way to characterize that is on one end you have assets that have value but don't really command price let's call it a money market fund and then at the very risky end you've got assets that have a lot of price but they have no value. The extreme version of that being a memecoin. And most most of crypto is actually on that end of the spectrum, which is more about price momentum than it is about value. What tokenization is doing is they're starting at the end the other end of the spectrum and bringing assets on that are more about value than price. Uh and once you start with money market funds, which everyone loves, finds useful, wants to hold, wants to buy, and that really includes a lot of people around the world that don't have access to US bills. uh then and that's basically you know the folks that are not living in the Europe or the US that don't have direct access through their brokerage account if they can have a brokerage account to T bills. So I think that's the that's the initial sort of pitch for why money market funds and once an an asset manager can tokenize a money market fund then there is a whole r a whole range of different fund products that one can tokenize recompose uh we often times talk about in crypto is this idea of defi and composable finance uh and the ability to sort of very quickly um and flexibly build uh or onchain structure products. So I think that's going to be a lot of the space of innovation that is going to come uh we already see that coming um as soon as we uh start to really run these tokenization engines. >> Do you think crypto is still following Bitcoin or are they are they diverging into different or divesting so so to speak into different narratives right now Ethereum or Salana where everything else moving on its own versus Bitcoin. >> I think there are two basic narratives in uh crypto from the be from the very beginning. There is the asset purpose of blockchain and then there's the infrastructure purpose of blockchain. Um the the purpose of digital gold as an asset I think is now apparent ready and apparent to uh to most people who are observing the space. And I think that the other purpose of blockchain uh look it's really the title of the Bitcoin white paper actually. It's a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Uh it's about creating uh financial infrastructure native to the internet that anyone on the internet can access. Um and so that is the infrastructure story which everyone outside of Bitcoin is building. People articulate it bu uh will articulate it differently but essentially you have Bitcoin which is based on proof of work and then you've got all of these other blockchains which are competing to be uh some aspect of financial infrastructure for the internet and that's all largely based on proof ofstake architecture. Uh so I think it I think it really just comes down to there's the asset there's the infrastructure. uh we think about it as Bitcoin is the asset and Salana's uh Salana is the infrastructure. >> So uh on that note just finishing off the macro aspect here uh what would probably be the biggest determinance of of price action for Bitcoin and hence the rest of crypto uh into the next year. So what would determine for example if Bitcoin hits 200,000 versus coming down back towards 50,000? >> Um I think that right now the macro trends seem to support continued price appreciation for Bitcoin. what you see what you what you've what you have historically seen is that when rates drop uh then uh alternative assets and higher risk assets seem to benefit from that uh and there's no secret that uh that the US government uh the executive branch at least is highly interested in bringing rates down as soon as possible. So that is one tailwind and it looks like the Fed is likely to comply with that and it's really just a question of timing and time frame. Uh so that's one. Uh I think another one as we saw in the clip from CNBC just now uh typically Bitcoin has been a bit of a bit of a counter trade to uh to um uh sovereign stability. And when you see something like a government shutdown, people are also reminded of some of the original tenants of Bitcoin which is this is state free money. uh and this is something which is independent of white of what might result from uh governance discord uh unbalanced governance and its potential to create economic instability both in monetary and also fiscal policy. So both of those would be uh would be uh momentum uh would be things that would add momentum to let's call it Bitcoin trade. Um and on top of that you've got the existing uh presence of uh Bitcoin ETFs. IBIT is the leader of that. uh you also have quite a variety of different DATs now uh and I think there's now become over the last five years last couple of years in particular quite a bit quite a bit of interest in a product like an MSTR. So what I think we see uh being replicated across the crypto ecosystem more broadly is this pairing of you've got an ETF and you all you've also got a leveraged some form of yielding um uh equity asset as well such as an MSTR that has broader uh little bit of a higher risk exposure and those two products are things that are uh starting to appeal to an ever greater uh uh uh part of the investor audience. >> There's this um trend happening right now on the internet. People have been talking about the four-year cycle being broken. This is Mike Novatrat, CEO of G at Galaxy Digital, uh that went on media saying that uh perhaps the new um regulatory changes specifically citing the stable coin genius act and the clarity act uh these acts that are being um or have been signed those will break the four-year cycle, he said. He noted in the past the market followed a predictable pattern primarily influenced with Bitcoin having cycles um every four year having events every four years rather. However, with new legislation in place, he believes the market may no longer adhere to this cycle. With those two bookends of legislation, it's going to unleash a tremendous amount of new participation in crypto. I think this uh goes back to what you were saying earlier about the different the two different use cases of blockchain. Um, and so I >> Yeah, I'll let you. >> I would broadly I would broadly agree that there are a broader set of catalysts today than uh maybe four years ago or 10 years ago with regard to the impact of regulatory changes on the crypto ecosystem. I think that those that those changes, those regulatory uh tailwinds are going to acrue more to the infrastructure oriented blockchains than Bitcoin is the asset. Um, and the reason why I would think that is because as you see more and more adoption of stable coin usage, trading use cases onchain, tokenization, and really they're just being this flowering of utility both in terms of asset availability as well as use case um as use case breath onchain, then more and more people are going to be using these blockchains. And the way that these uh proof of stake sort of the the infrastructure blockchains actually acrue value uh is through usage. And so much in the way we saw it with the internet, right? People would track usage for a while and see how app downloads, users, ma, DAUs, which transl translate into value creation. The way that mechanism here works in blockchain is such that usage generates some combination of a base transaction fee as well as a priority transaction fee. Those fees acrew to validators and validators share some portion of that um in some cases much of that with stakers. Stakers are of course holders that choose to stake their tokens with a validator. So that is a mechanism through which usage and adoption uh results in value capture that uh occurs to both validators and stakers. Um I think it's a really important point to make uh because I think the value creation model of the asset that one is a reflexive lindy asset with a fixed supply uh uh underwritten by the um the cost of proofof work mining right that is the uh let's call it the for lack of a better word the business model of bitcoin the asset uh store value assets uh but then the business model of infrastructure chains is fundamentally different and that is how you draw the the the loop between usage and value creation and value capture. >> All right, going back to Salana now. I mentioned in the beginning that we're potentially days if not weeks ahead uh were before a uh an ETF approval for Salana by the SEC and a lot a lot of funds and companies are in the process of launching Salana ETFs. What would that change for Salana if anything? >> Sure. Uh I think that uh what we see now is we see this pairing uh if you take Bitcoin as an example, you see this pairing of there being an available ETF uh which has seen quite a bit of demand and then also with a variety of different uh Bitcoin DATs and having this uh pairing of different products available to the traditional finance world uh and riding on the distribution rails of equities which is uh quite broad uh and a very deep market is something that is uh quite beneficial. for uh the various crypto ecosystems that are represented in those in that pairing of products. Uh so I think that it's a it starts to build out some uh diversity in sort of equitybased uh equity based financial products for folks that want to get exposure and that means that there's uh potentially a broader um set of ways to appeal to prospective investors uh depending on what they're looking for. What is the next major milestone for Salana that we can look forward to? Let's start there. >> Sure. Uh I think there's several. Um I typically think about the I think about uh an ecosystem in sort of three component parts. One is around the network layer. That's actual core protocol itself. Uh and that's the foundation for everything. Of course, there's also the app layer and that's where builders are building unique applications only possible on web 3. Uh and then there's also the asset layer. We talked a lot about tokenization, a lot of assets coming on chain. Uh so if I start with the network layer, I think what we're super excited about is look, we're always tech first. Nothing happens without unique technology. We're always pushing the boundaries of uh as uh as one of our co-founders, Anatoli, likes to put it, pushing the boundaries of physics. Uh and so there we've got a huge network upgrade uh anticipated in about a year or so called Alpenlow. And that is going to make the network ever faster, ever cheaper. Uh we're already the fastest and cheapest, the most used, um more used than all of the other chains combined uh by multiple. And right now, if we're at around 400 milliseconds, this is going to bring uh this is going to bring uh block times down to about 150 milliseconds. And that's really powerful while also maintaining decentralization and one of the highest Nakamoto coefficients in this industry. Uh so that's very very powerful. Uh and what that's going to unlock is you know already we've always had this vision that you have one single layer for all financial markets uh interoperability composability you don't have to go through interop between different chains because you're already in the same execution environment uh and the way to maintain that and really make that globally scalable is to continue to increase bandwidth. We talked about increasing increasing bandwidth and reducing latency. So there's a lot of cool stuff happening at the network engineering layer. Uh that is um you know that is opaque to some folks but that is really the foundation of what we do. Uh and then I think uh with the app layer some of the things that we're really excited about is leveraging that differentiated technology at the network layer to build uh really unique trading systems on chain. And so what you're going to see later this year is you're going to be uh seeing you know people are talking about per dexes these days. There are 10 different ways to architect a pers deck. So you can call it all per decks. Uh but some they're not all created equal. And one of the things that we're working on as a salon is the Salana ecosystem is really innovating at the at the bleeding edge of trading microsstructure in ways that uh are suitable for decentralized finance where the one thing you cannot control in DeFi is to have colloccated servers as you do in traditional finance. Uh so uh so keep an eye out the end of the year for uh some pretty cutting edge uh trading uh trading um uh trading applications and trading architecture that I think is going to be uh pretty unmatched in the industry. And then on the asset side uh we're super focused on stable coins and and RWA issuance. Our vision there is to really become the default settlement standard for this industry. uh when people think about moving money they obviously want to do that as quickly and as cheaply as possible uh where there's also depth and liquidity and if you just look at that handful of things then there's nowhere better than uh using Salana so that's one thing that really focused on as well >> people have been commenting on when Salana is going to get to the level of web 2 throughput via Visa for example keep at peak capacity processes up to 65,000 transactions per second and uh the question is whether or not Solana can't get there. Technically speaking, what would be the bottleneck to preventing that from getting there um immediately? Yeah, >> sure. So, some of the network upgra upgrades that I talked about, Alpen Glow, uh that should um that should be out in about a year, year and a half, that's really going to elevate performance to be at that throughput as for example a Visa. Visa is also a partner of ours. Uh and uh we've worked a lot with Visa in the past. Uh and they're also uh um so they're also excited about what we're doing on that front. Um and I think that when you look at web 2 throughput and web 1 throughput, uh what you experience as a consumer is not actually the reality of how money moves efficiently or I should say not efficiently at all in the background. So what you already see with quite a number of B2B uh payments processors for example is a deep interest in using stable coins uh because the ability to move money truly 24/7 365 uh within a fraction of a second for a fraction of a cent is just something you cannot do anywhere even if it seems like that uh in a web interface. So we're seeing tokenization happen like I mentioned um earlier on a really rapid scale. It's growing fast tokenized treasuries real world assets is growing fast on polygon and ethereum also lots of projects launching on Salana as well uh financial products that is why should an institution choose Salana as a base layer. Uh I think that so first of all I think the best assets are going to want to be everywhere and I think that is different from in the past when we were looking at application builders and application builders should not want their backend to be everywhere. Uh and so I think that we need to think about builders, innovators, entrepreneurs differently from asset issuers. Um that's uh uh that's you know a bit of a bit of a separate point. Um but then I think that the reason why institutions consistently decide to build on Salana oftentimes what we've seen them do is they go to uh they huddle and study for a year sometimes longer long longer than a year all the different uh various blockchains and uh many times they've come out and said okay Salana is really uh the only one that um that we think is the long-term partner for us. Why is that? uh because first of all the the simple things it's fast and it's cheap. Uh it is a unified environment and one of the first order requirements of financial markets is to have unified liquidity. You want to have as deep financial markets as you ever possibly can. Um that is a first feature requirement of building technology for finance. uh and really nowhere else across the industry do you have that uh that perspective from day one that you need to build a single execution environment that can unify liquidity one uh and also accompanied by uh the performance to be able to enable that over time as well as the breath and depth of different assets. Uh so our perspective always been that uh blockchains fundamentally are about technology for finance and you've got to build that technology platform to maximally serve financial markets and that definition is actually quite a broad one that is the whole range of different assets from as we were talking about earlier money market funds all the way to uh you know high-risk cryptonnative assets and then also you've got to build a platform that can unify the whole range of use cases for how people might want to use their money. Everything between moving money, let's call that a payment in its B2B, B TOC, C2COCC forms. And then on the other extreme, highly leveraged highfrequency trading types of applications. Uh what we've seen with content on the internet is the utility people get when they're able to access all of their content through single rails, right? If we all use the same internet infrastructure uh with infinite numbers of applications, but you essentially have one infrastructure portal into that world of content. Uh and we've experienced how that sort of explosion of content and the ready access to it has been very powerful. No longer are you going to one portal for books, another for newspapers, another for TV. It's all now just data that is accessible at your fingertips. Uh and so I think that is an appropriate analogy to draw to what blockchain does for financial markets. It takes all of the assets and all the ways to use those assets and puts them into a single environment. So you open your wallet uh anyone who has an who has access to an internet connection which is about 5.5 billion people today. Uh in your wallet you can hold simultaneously a money market fund, a memecoin, a US dollar stable coin, a non- US dollar stable coin uh wrapped bitcoin you choose. And that is the broadest potential financial access that I think one will have about 5 years from now if not sooner. >> Do you think that uh going forward real world assets will be more dominant for use cases on salon in particular than let's say DeFi itself? >> Um I think that RWAs real world assets and DeFi these are complements to one another. Um, DeFi is the range of use cases through which you can put your assets to work and rwas are a you know some uh some uh subset of the hundred trillion dollars of uh traditional finance assets. Um so I think that these are uh these are necessary to actually really work together and what we already see happening on DeFi today is uh people are taking their RWA putting it into lend borrow credit markets onchain in DeFi and uh using that as a way to leverage their yield off of their uh tokenized for example private credit fund. uh and uh and that is a use case around a uh um a what's called a traditional finance asset that you cannot do in even the most sophisticated financial markets in the world today unless you are a very large wealth client. Uh so what you can now do is you can take a tokenized let's call it private credit fund. you can deposit that into a lend borrow dollars against that and uh and first of all you can just do a single collateralization and uh and that introduces collateral value instant collateral value to practically any asset that you might have in your wallet. So that's something that uh that's something which is very unique that only DeFi can add to the world of RWAS. Uh and for folks that are looking to uh trade off a bit of risk and yield, then what you can do is you can borrow, let's call it dollar stable coins against your RWA, loop that back and forth. And what you see people doing today is in certain cases, uh and in certain market conditions being able to get 30 plus% yield off of stable coins. Um so, you know, certainly there's a a range of risk appetite in there that is going to be appropriate for some and not others. Uh but that introduces now uh a whole sort of new range of access to ways to use your assets that you can really only do on DeFi. >> One of the um other developments that we've seen in the past is Gameify. It's um not really active now, was very popular in 2021, but now there's rumors that the that one of the most popular franchises, Grand Theft Auto GTA, may be using crypto payment systems for GTA 6, which is scheduled to be launched next year. Um this is still a rumor. We don't know if they're going to develop their own hidden house token or they're going to accept crypto as payments for uh in world purchases, but if this were to happen, this would be the first major and perhaps the biggest game ever to be involved in the gamify space. Um is there a future for Salana in gamify? Uh I'm not specifically knowledgeable about gamify um but I can comment on uh the use of stablecoin payments in a whole variety of different applications. Uh and I think this is if for folks who remember a few years ago there was a big uh narrative cycle around gaming. Uh and one of the most sustainable uh reasons that blockchain is useful to gaming is actually really about on and off ramping. um value into and out of games. Uh and so I think that um this example sort of highlights that and the reason why that is interesting for online games is because often times their uh their player base is uh inherently online and therefore around the world uh holding any variety of different currencies and uh one common denominator for uh many of those players potentially is access to stable coins. um and easy to implement implement API there you are um send receive almost instantly and that's quite powerful um so I think that um the what we're going to see is we're going to see uh stable coin payments integrations into practically every online experience um and some of those are going to be supporting very consumer and nature experiences uh I think it's going to be a little bit longer before that happens but what we're seeing um being adopted at speed right now is B2B crossber money uh money movement use cases where uh where uh both sort of B2B sides of that understand the value of being able to move money practically free practically practically instantly as long as the internet is on. >> Currently Salana validators validators earn rewards through inflationary issuances of Salana. I think the question here from some people in the Slana community is how do we maintain a sustainable business model going forward such that validators are rewarded but we don't have heavy token inflation. How would you respond to that? >> Right. So inflation is already programmatically decreasing about 15% every year or exactly 15% every year. Uh so there is a programmatic decrease in inflation uh that has been in place since 2020. Inflation actually used to be much higher. uh there were times when you were getting 8 n% uh on staking your staking your soul. So it's already decreased today to probably around 6 and 6 and a half%. And it was always anticipated that the reward for stakers uh and just as a reminder of stakers uh that activity of staking your tokens is what helps secure the network and having a secure network is in everyone's benefit. Uh then the what was imagined is that over time usage of the the network would translate into fee generation both a combination of base fee which is a fixed amount attached to every transaction as well as priority fees where priority fees are typically generated off of trading activity where uh where users or traders are competing for best price execution. Uh and so I think the vision over time has always been that base fee, priority fee and potentially other sources of protocol revenue would step in in the form of block rewards and balance out what folks have relied upon uh up until now to sort of solve the cold start problem which is inflation and seeking rewards. I pulled my audience people just want you to give a price estimate for Salana. I'm not going to ask you that. But what I will ask you is uh is what ultimately will drive demand for Salana? basically your future your your future vision for Salana. Um I think you've talked about the fact that it's going to retract institutional capital. It'll improve on network infrastructure. It's not just going to be like Bitcoin which is a store of value. So ultimately in 5 10 years what will be the dominant drivers and use cases of Salana such that it will potentially move the price. >> Yeah. Um the number one uh network effect the strongest network effect that you could ever have is around money. Uh and I think over the last 10-15 years looking at how tech has evolved is I think it's proven without a doubt the strength of network effects around something as verticalized as e-commerce as ride sharing. Uh and the biggest network effect really of all is around money. That's what we see with the US dollar and its usage around the world and the difficulty of displacing the US dollar. That's what we're also starting to see around Bitcoin and the inability to uh to dislodge Bitcoin from being digital gold or for that matter just regular gold. Why is gold gold? It's a social construct. It's because everyone else thinks that gold is going to be valuable and has some facial use for utility both in an industrial and also a decorative setting. Uh and so what I think is um what I think you're going to see is uh that's the asset world. on the infrastructure world, you're going to see that same network effect building around uh around these technology platforms for the mo for the movement of money and assets. uh and I think you already see that today where that's the reason why Salana is the most the most used chain out of the entire industry more than all of the other chains combined and then multiplied uh by two to three uh and uh and as you see that usage and adoption both in number of users number of wallets number of transactions number of fee paying transactions number of priority fee paying transactions what you see is issuers look at this and they see distribution right? Uh they see uh I there are 100 million potential wallets who are going to buy my asset and they just do the quick math. Um I distribute that asset on this infrastructure 25 bits management fee. That's a simple way to think about it. Uh application developers also look at Salana as not just a protocol revenue chain but the application revenue chain. If you look at where application revenue has been the highest across the entire industry in 2025 year to date that is Salana. Uh, and that's powerful because what builds these open source ecosystems is the builder and the developer community that wants to come create applications for people to use to increase the over utility of the ecosystem. And of course, they are entrepreneurs. They are capitalists. They're not doing that for free. Um, and uh, and what we see is application builders make more money on Salana than anywhere else. So what you've got is you got this flywheel of the network continuing to be the most scalable, most performant uh uh and ever more so network that can support all financial applications and the existence of all assets in a single market. Uh so you already have the technology that can support that network effect. You've got the best place for developers to be building and you've also got the best place for asset distributors to be issuing. uh and that is those three components together are going to be creating a network effect that we already see as uh being uh difficult to compete with and that is something that is really just going to extend its reach over time as well. >> The the future of Salana being where it needs to be um what are some of the technological innovations that needs to happen for it to become the fastest most scalable blockchain in the world? you've me you've already mentioned a few of them uh but technically speaking what what needs to what needs to improve from now on >> sure there's two things I would point out we already talked about alpunlow uh and how that's anticipated to bring uh block times down to 150 milliseconds um one of the ways that's happening is there's a couple of things happening under under the hood um but probably the the headline one of those is multiple concurrent leaders so what you have right now is uh you've got one leader assembling every block within Salana And uh and the one of the original innovations of Salana is something called proof of history uh that allowed parallel execution and this is one way you could think about multiple concurrent leaders as a way of really supercharging that and that's one of the core ways that block times are being brought down pretty substantially 400 to 150 milliseconds. Uh another one is uh you know this has always been about pushing net performance to the edge of physics uh with the one thing that the one constraint you accept being that look it's a decentralized network so you never know where the leader or the leaders are going to be around the world. So the one thing that you're optimizing for is the permissionless neighbor uh uh the permissionless nature of the network and the fact that um anyone can join and leave the network and that leader could be really anywhere around the world. Right? So what that means is that some of the physical limitations now come down to physically the fiber and how quickly you can transmit information really around the world. Right? If server one is in Tokyo, server 2 is Chicago, that's going to be a different latency um uh profile than Tokyo to Hong Kong, right? Uh and so uh the second thing I'd want to point out is recently launched D0. So double zero is uh creating um uh fiber network around the world uh making that available to blockchains to uh make uh this dedicated uh dedicated fiber for transmitting blockchain uh transactions around the world. Uh and instead of today everyone is riding on publicly available fiber. uh but really if you look at the most performant uh centralized computing networks whether that's for finance or whether that is for uh consumer applications, social applications or otherwise typically those are all writing on private fiber and this is a blockchain take on making that available for blockchain transactions. So that's on the reducing latency side. Oh, sorry. Um, I was going to say some critics may point to the fact that perhaps decentralization and speed are opposing philosophies. Is there any sort of contradiction here? In other words, are you sacrificing decentralization for higher speeds? >> Um, I think that decentralization is not a single monolithic kind of definition. I think uh there are some people that would say decentralization is measured in the total quantity of nodes that you have and so therefore anything less than being able to run a light client on your Motorola flip flip phone anything less than that is less and maximal decentralization that's decentralization maxi kind of one end of the spectrum um and then others see decentralization as uh you know a lot of people look at the Nakamoto coefficient which is a measure of how many nodes would have to be corrupted at the same time in order to exceed 33% of the network and uh and corrupt ledger history, right? Um and so I think that that would be the range of different ways that people measure decentralization. Um and so you know up to different people to uh to you know pick where they what they think is the true uh is the true definition um the meaningful definition of decentralization. uh and I think actually if you take a look at the Nakamoto coefficient which is a very pragmatic uh definition of uh of decentralization then Solana has been uh near or at the top of the major proof ofstake blockchains uh certainly over the last four years that I've been involved. >> Okay, excellent. Thank you very much Lily. Appreciate your time and I appreciate your um >> uh education. Where can we learn more about the Salana Foundation in the meantime? >> Sure. You can always follow Twitter handle Salana. That's a simple one. Um, and happy uh to have folks follow myself as well. I'm ca Lillyoo. >> Okay, good. We'll put the links down below. So, make sure to follow Lily and the Salana Foundation there. Thank you again. We'll speak again soon. Take care for now. >> Thanks, David. >> Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe.
