Solana Co-Founder Anatoly Yakovenko: On-Chain Finance Will Change Everything
Summary
On-Chain Finance Vision: Anatoly Yakovenko envisions a future where the majority of tradable assets are on-chain, fundamentally reshaping finance by reducing risk, improving pricing, and lowering fees.
Solana Ecosystem: Solana, with a market cap of $110 billion, is positioned as a decentralized NASDAQ, focusing on high performance and efficiency in trading systems, leveraging its proof-of-stake model for value accrual.
Investment Insights: Yakovenko emphasizes the importance of value accrual mechanisms in blockchain ecosystems and highlights Solana's ability to generate robust yields through staking and validator rewards.
Decentralized Applications: Solana's application layer is thriving, with significant revenue generation from applications, particularly in trading, decentralized finance (DeFi), and payments, which are expected to drive future growth.
Market Innovations: The integration of AI and the development of autonomous agents are expected to accelerate smart contract development and market innovation within the Solana ecosystem.
Internet Capital Markets: Yakovenko discusses the transformative potential of internet capital markets, highlighting the ability to issue and trade securities on-chain, offering transparency and efficiency over traditional systems.
Regulatory Environment: Solana is actively engaging with regulators to ensure open and fair markets, aiming to provide users with the necessary information to make informed decisions without stifling innovation.
Mobile Strategy: Solana is exploring opportunities in mobile, aiming to create a new distribution channel for developers and users, challenging the existing duopoly of Apple and Google with a focus on on-chain digital content.
Transcript
I want to see the world where vast majority of tradable assets in the United States in the world are on chain. That's kind of the most exciting future because it'll fundamentally reshape finance. You will reduce risk. You'll make prices better for users. You'll reduce fees for users. All those things are good things. [Music] If you have any questions about how to navigate the current environment, Wealthon can help connect you with a vetted advisor to get a free portfolio review. Just click the link in the description below or head to wealthon.com/free. There's no obligation and it will just take a few minutes of your time. Again, that's wealthy.com/free. With a market cap of $110 billion, Salana is one of the leading blockchain ecosystems in the world. Today I'm absolutely honored to speak with Anatoli Yakaveno who's one of the co-founders of Salana. Anatoli, it's an honor. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Awesome. So Salana is known as the decentralized NASDAQ, but like I'm wondering if we should call NASDAQ the centralized Salana. I mean with what you guys have accomplished, it's been pretty impressive. But uh today's we want to just not only unpack the technology but really talk about it as an investable ecosystem and probably the best way to start is just to get a little bit of a background on you. Um you know how you got here uh would be would be a great way to start. Sure. So um I spend most of my career at Qualcomm um working on you know software on mobile phones firmware trying to optimize things trying to make them go faster. Um, and around 2017 is when I had this Eureka moment to uh, start Salana. And this is about when I think Ethereum started taking off and this idea of a smart contract platform came to the forefront. And what attracted me to the space was that this was a new place for software developers to write applications um, that do that do something unique. So this was, you know, I kind of saw the the birth of Linux and servers and kind of running the web as a as a platform and then I got to participate and be one of the early developers that brought mobile to the front before even smartones smartphones were around. Um, and this clearly to me seemed like a new way for for developers to write software that wasn't possible before. And this is because uh blockchains have this interesting property that's not available in other systems is that they can be verified. So you can go back and look at the ledger of record like you can with Bitcoin and you can verify that yeah when I transferred my Bitcoin from person A to person B that actually was recorded correctly and everyone agreed on that. Um, and the Ethereum generalized this, but Ethereum was at the time very slow. And I kind of had this, you know, as the legend goes, but this actually really happened. I had two coffees and a beer with a friend of mine and it didn't sit well with me and I was up till 4 in the morning and I had this Eureka moment that there's a way to adopt a lot of kind of these highlevel ideas from early cellular networks pre-qualcom even like called TDMA time division multiple access these are like 1G networks the first cellular stuff to how blockchain protocols work and my back of the envelope kind of calculation was oh man this is a thousand times faster than Ethereum. And that what got me to go and kind of put a team together and raise capital and and build Salana. So, I got to ask this one. Um, you were working there in Qualcomm, uh, which is down in San Diego. I used to live actually in Salana Beach. I was in the Marine Corps. I was working up in Camp Pendleton. Is that where you got the name? Yes. So, I knew it. Yeah. Me and actually two of the folks that ended up co-founders with me. We lived in Salana Beach. We would wake up, surf, electric cove, bike to work, bike home, surf again. This was our kind of dayto-day. And we just wanted to call it Salana because if you ever been down there, it is the most pictureesque perfect Southern California town. It's paradise basically. As far as far as I'm concerned, it's the best. I used to live across the street from the Delmar racetrack and uh yeah, what a wonderful place. That was always in the back of my mind. I'm like, I it has to be from Salana. That's so cool. All right. So, so you have this epiphany, uh, two coffees and a beer, you're in the middle of the night, not not a great night, and it just comes to you, boom, and you really focus on efficiency, TPS. Essentially, you're like, "Hey, I'm going to build the the the decentralized NASDAQ." Um, so, so where did you go from there? I mean, you had to build the team, you know. How did you scale this thing? Uh, and how did you get it to where it is today? Well, um, my gut instinct was that trading was one of these use cases that blockchains could be used for. And this was at the time when the only kind of really clear use case was Bitcoin, store of value. And um, it I didn't feel like I could compete with Bitcoin or build something that was Bitcoin++ or something like that. Um so I really wanted to focus something that I was good at and this is performance and making systems faster and where this has the biggest benefit is if you have trading and um all the kind of things that blockchain provide this idea of ver verifiability and availability of data everywhere these are all parts of trading systems if you kind of think of it from a super high level you know you you pay the your x million dollars to NASDAQ and you get to put a box in the Equinox Center in New Jersey, they'll actually give you a cable that's exactly the same length as everyone else. So, you don't have an advantage on latency, right? So, you can trade at in a fair system. That little data center that they have effectively provides these kind of verifiable guarantees that everybody has access to the same data, everyone can submit their trades in a fair way. And uh these protocols uh they're called Byzantine fault tolerant protocols. There's a kind of a big family of them. Bitcoin is one of them, but there's a whole bunch of other ones. They provide the same guarantees, but um at a without the need of a you know a NASDAQ or a single company to run it. So you just implement it in code. You build the software that can conform to this protocol and everybody that's that's running it can verify that they're getting a fair deal. And that idea of fairness encoded in a protocol and performance to me felt like the intersection of where trading should be headed to. So if we can you know decentralize gold and make this idea of verifiable digital store value as Bitcoin then Ethereum was more focused on settlement um I felt Salana was most suited for execution. Yeah. Um, so my brain was headed in that direction and kind of a lot of the design decisions and things we're building early on kind of led us down the spot. That makes a ton of sense. So, so if you're, you know, an investor, you're thinking about, hey, I I have a couple bucks. I want to invest in a particular ecosystem. Obviously, they look at fundamentals. How does value acrue within the Salana ecosystem from your perspective? Yeah, you can go look at the public data published by Block Works and other folks. Um, so I think in Bitcoin there is no value acrruel. Um, and it's massively successful. So you can this is I think kind of the biggest problem for me when I put on my investor hat. How do I analyze these systems? How or ecosystems and their performance? And I'm a huge fan of the intelligent investor book. Kind of the very fundamental basics is that there has to be some value acrruel mechanism in modern networks that are proof of stake based. And this is kind of a the family probably started with Cosmos with maybe the first one, but Ethereum is now proof of stake even though it started as a proof of proof of work chain originally. Solano is proof of stake from from the start. Um the nodes that create blocks, usually called block producers or leaders, um users will give them a tip like or a payment to include their transactions in a block. And the more uh underlying coin you have, Soul or ETH, the more blocks you can make and therefore you can earn more tips. But this effectively creates this value acrruel loop loop. If you own soul and you stake it and you run a validator that is high performance and you're a good block producer, this is a way to effectively acrue value to the soul that you have staked. Um, and this is very different from I think owning stocks in Apple because you're not really running a part of Apple, right? You're not like a little franchise of Apple that that's selling Apple devices. So you have to kind of think of it that because this is a protocol owning it or trying to acrue value to it means that you have to participate and and be part of it. But there is actually a full loop in something like Salana or proof ofstake networks. Yeah. And and the yield is is um pretty robust. It's clocking in around 8% maybe north of 8% right now. Is that right? Um, yeah. I mean, you have to take a look at which part of it is inflation rewards, which part of it is actual validator rewards. If you're looking for a simple, secure way to invest in physical gold and silver, check out Hard Assets Alliance at hard assetsalliance.com. And Wealthon together with SCP Resource Finance will be hosting a global silver conference this October in Toronto. Eric Sprat will be delivering the keynote and it promises to be a landmark gathering for silver investors. You can find out more in the details in the description below. Yes. Any as you start there's a lot of people who have this concept of like a fat protocol thesis it was called where you know you have applications but just buy the base layer by the blockchain the layer one as we call it because all the value is going to end up acrewing but would love for you to talk about you know those applications as well. um you know do you you know where which ones are you most excited about and how do you think about that from a val value acrruel perspective um I think so I think on salana if you look at the total revenues across the entire ecosystem applications I think get about 60% to twothirds of the revenue if you look at block works data um which is I think pretty awesome um I think the network can only thrive if the application layer does really well. And my guess is that the application layer in the future is going to kind of generate a larger the largest portion of the the value acrruel. But the protocol is maybe less risky because fundamentally the only way the protocol can generate value is um if you have a transaction that is so high priority that you're willing to pay you know enough dollars scalable with kind of the the value being transferred in there. um for a lot of things this is not true and like payments and things like that is actually very hard for the blockchain to capture value. So you can have a lot of payments activity, but because you don't when you send a payment, you don't really care if it lands, you know, in this 400 millisecond interval or the next one, it's not so latency sensitive. You're not willing to pay the super high tip to get it in right away. But for trading, you you do because you see a trade and there's a cost of opportunity to missing that particular trade. You're willing to pay up to that co that that opportunity cost. Yeah. On the trading side, you know, one of the areas that you've had absolute product market fit and domination is on memecoins. And people roll their eyes and they're like, "Memecoin this, memecoin that." Like, I personally find them incredibly valuable because I've never seen a better stress test of infrastructure than memes. I mean, they trade so violently that if you can handle memecoins, you know, you could you could handle anything. And I used to have to deal with this when I was running futures um back in the day. Um yeah. What do you think about that? How do you address that? Yeah, this was also kind of a huge surprise and in fact the first things that took off on Salana were actually NFTTS which I think were the precursor to the memecoins. Um and again similar stress test. People would run these really inefficient auctions that were just horribly designed. But in fact users wanted like the users wanted these really badly designed auctions because they wanted the opportunity to randomly get in early and kind of have this unfair like outcome. Um, so they were willing to willing to basically participate in an auction that I think if you're an economist, you'd be like this is like the the the worst design auction you can build. Um, and similar with memecoins, a lot of it is uh the activity is based around this like uh launches and during that launch period you have a lot of activity that kind of dissipates really quickly because memecoins are assets with only price and no value. there's no value acrruel possible in a memecoin. So all you're dealing with is this attention kind of game. Um and it definitely allowed us to uh um like the the infrastructure around Salana and trading like matured dramatically over the last two years um just from memecoin trading. And now when you look at you know uh just stable coin tra pairs or like even sold to USDC the way that these protocols have developed their um their market structure has optimized it to the point that I think in some cases the payers on Salana have tighter spreads than on Binance which is like a really remarkable achievement. Absolutely. Because Salana block times are four in a milliseconds. Binance is a centralized exchange that can run a 1 millisecond latency. But there's uh what folks don't understand is that there's just a massive amount of innovation with with having a effectively a giant programmable order book where each developer that wants to create a new kind of new market structure that's innovative can code it up on their own and plug it in and deploy it. So now, even though Salana might be much slower than Binance, because they've been able to invest a ton of in the the smart contract that effectively defines that order book, uh they're actually be been able to squeeze uh spreads tighter than Binance. So, which I didn't expect that. I thought that might start happening kind of in the next releases of Salana when we go to 100 millisecond blocks and things like that. But seeing that now has been like a really surprising and and awesome result. It feels like this line between DeFi and CFI is going to continue to blur and um it's pretty exciting. We're going to get to internet capital markets here in a second. But before we do, I know sticking to the app layer, if you will. You know, you guys are very successful in deep decentralized physical infrastructure. We I run a bunch of nodes um you and and and payments things of that sort. Can you talk through some of the other verticals that get you excited, you know, that you have product market fit in now and what you're excited about in the future as well? Um, so I think the main ones are trading and deepen and uh payments. I think the smaller use cases that you know I still have a lot of kind of a personal effort and trying to get them bootstrapped I would say is privacy based protocols. trying to see um and then gaming as well like um just having that in intersection of NFTTS and you know like loot boxes and games and casual games are more you know hardcore gaming and things like that. Um, and you start you start to see some of the kind of memecoin platforms like Pump start branching out into more like different businesses because um like so they're now building a streaming service that is effectively kind of a Twitch Tik Tok competitor, which to me seems really interesting because it um like fundamentally um you you think about how we consume information. there's more information in the world that you can possibly consume. So you need some mechanism to uh get rid of spam or or the information that you don't want. And right now that's mostly based on centralized algorithms. So either Twitter controls it or Tik Tok or whoever or or Google and they filter what what gets surfaced and what doesn't. Um, and that's uh I think works pretty well, but I think leaves a lot to like experiment with because you could have a totally market-based version of this. Um, it's just really hard to tie market-based ideas with things that people want. Like, nobody wants to to pay to to send you a message or to pay you to watch a video. That just doesn't work at scale. So I think with memecoins and and these attentionbased markets that effectively function the same way, I think there is an opportunity to build effectively like a truly nobody owns algorithm, but you still have good spam prevention and like good content being serviced to the top. If they can succeed there, I think that could be like really disruptive and really interesting. Yeah, I I love what the pump guys are doing. I'm starting to see them attract more and more quote mainstream crypto I guess media onchain uh which is really cool. What do you think about you know you're talking about algorithms what about the integration of AI into into the Solano ecosystem? You know we spent a lot of time at that intersection. How how do you think about it? Well I think uh where AI is where AI has definitely been transformative in how software is developed. Yeah. Um, so I think you should start seeing much faster time to market with smart contract development, audits, formal verification, those kinds of things are going to speed things up. So, it's not going to be, you know, a year-long project for a company to go build a new smart contract. Um, I think that could be pretty significant. Um, this idea where you have autonomous agents with a wallet that can that pay for stuff. um people built those almost immediately as soon as you know a you know a agents and MCP kind of services were out. I haven't seen those really take off and solve user problems with with PMF yet but um when that happens I think it'll be kind of obvious in retrospect but I think that's going to take a bit more time as really just a you know AIS and and things like that prolifate. Got it. So, so you have a very robust application layer. Um, that's acrewing value. You know, the base layer is acrewing value as well as you talked about. Let's pivot to like what gets me super excited and that's internet capital markets. And so, we're investors in Super State. We know the Galaxy guys well. Um, I think I may have mentioned this in the past on this podcast, but these guys just turned tokenization on its absolute head because the way it used to work is you you take a security, you lock it in a box called the custodian, you issue a token, and everyone's happy. So, you can kind of settle it. You know, it's kind of cute. But what these guys did is now they've taken a canonical equity. There's no equity in a box and they issued it on Salana. Um, to me, this is a gamecher. Um would love to get your I know you speak quite a bit about internet capital markets. Um to me this I don't think I think this is absolutely under reportported uh but would love your take on where we are and where we're going because this to me is the internet of the future, right? Like this is it. So yeah, so we're in the super early stages. Um and I think um folks have to understand that like US is a amazing robust financial system that was mostly developed some of it you know almost preWorld War I during kind of the railroad boom booms and busts and some of it kind of after World War II and all of these periods where there was kind of regula regulation and product innovation in that space were before the internet way before the internet. So a lot of the a lot of the role laws are designed around this idea that you know your neighbor says I have this piece of paper that says it's stock in some railroad across the country and they give it to you for money to protect investors to make sure that yeah you're actually getting a real stock certificate and all this stuff actually happens. Um, and I think even till it was I think it took 9/11 for the settlement of stock certificates to go from physically moving boxes of stocks to uh they used to wheelbarls actually back in the day wheelbarrow. Yeah. Yeah. So which is insane to me to to get that digitized. So I think once you have something working that system becomes very resistant to change. Uh but change is coming and what that change is is that just like you know when you go buy something in the internet you have that little lock screen that says you're cryptographically secure and you can input your credit card and you know it's not going to get stolen you know even though it's going through the open internet. Um, when Galaxy issues a stock on chain, there's a provable chain of transactions that going goes directly from the issuer to any owner of that stock throughout any peer-to-peer transfers. So, your neighbor could give you a transfer like sign a transaction in a ledger and that stock could be transferred to you and you could verify the entire chain of ownership and custody of that stock directly back to the issuer. So a lot of the things that folks were worried about in the you know the hundred years prior when they built those regulations no longer apply. Um, so you can actually have, you know, my my best example of this is I call it the Linux from scratch IPO where a founder that has the knowhow can use open source software, run a salon validator, run uh open source smart contracts and do a full direct listing IPO process directly on chain without any intermediaries. So they just use the use the software directly. They go and sell their token directly to investors all around the world and they don't have to pay any fees or a bank to underwrite this because even the um the structure to incentivize the markets to exist um things that you know require you know market makers and exchanges and all these other things that can be encoded in a smart contract and the fees that they pay right now to an investment bank could be incentives from for the regular users to provide you know capital for the market to to function correctly. Um this is the innovation that's been happening in crypto kind of in its own little sandbox with memecoins with you know DeFi summer kind of farming and things like that. All of those things can now be used in real markets with traditional finance. And the the results that I think we'll see should be substantial. Um, I think folks like you might be aware, I don't know if most folks are, of the the Figma IPO of the the difference between the price that the founders, the company got for their stock versus what people paid on the open market was like 5x or something crazy like that. So, in my mind to me that those founders lost 10% of their company in just one transaction, which is crazy. like the it the amount of money that they left on the table is basically 10% of the market cap of this $30 billion company which is nuts. You know, it takes insane amount of work to get to that stage to build a $30 billion company. I think that finance should serve those folks when they go to launch and minimize fees and actually make the process better because the retail would have gotten a better price and the company would have gotten more dollars per share. Yeah, 100%. What gets me so excited, people don't realize this. Salana is global. It's like naturally global. If you look at the US IPO market last year, I think the IPO in 24 amount of capital raised like 30 billion or something like that. If you look at the memecoin market cap, it's like 140 billion last year, right? Why? Because there's just like there's just so much appetite, you know, to participate in finance, etc. Like what's going to happen now when we actually have things of value that are open and accessible 24/7 to anyone in the world, you know, beyond stable coins like equities. Like I think it's going to be huge. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is kind of the future that the entire ecosystem is betting on 100%. So, look look and I think it's going to be great for the Salana ecosystem. All right. And I got to ask um we've been spending a lot of time focusing on DATs, digital asset treasuries. Um spoke to Kyle um recently about uh Ford Industries. I think I've got Marco coming on shortly. Um I'm a big believer that DATs are going to play an important role. How do you think about DATs fitting into the EOS the Salana ecosystem? So I think um you still have uh this wall the like as I' I've kind of described before Wall Street is built in this pre- internet era and I kind of think of it as this like fax-based paperbased API as a software AP as if it's a software API it's the underlying protocol is a fax that it's using uh which is very ancient and uh very slow but it works and it's regulated And for each company that wants to in Wall Street that wants to do something in DeFi, they'd have to go through a massive amount of compliance overhead. And to me, that seemed like the perfect place to basically proxy that and offer this Wall Street compliant API layer for Wall Street to interface with DeFi. And I think um the difference between, you know, folks ask me why Dad or ETF. I think ETFs are great products too, but they're a lot more constrained on what they can do. Once you kind of create an ETF, it has to stay constant. That product stays, you know, even if it's extremely innovative. This is a goto staked salana ETF that captures thing. It has to stay that thing, right? uh but Adat because it's a you know equity run company with a CEO they can actually be far more innovative and they can go deploy capital in Camino or if that seems to be like the best thing to do or switch to some other protocol and they much more flexible and can kind of effectively do what's best in the market in the medium to a long term. Do you have a favorite child? I got three three kids of my own. Those are my favorite kids. I think not a favorite. I'm Yeah, I'm I think uh I'm very blessed to have Yeah. like these amazing founders and folks working on these. I think each each one of these if that was the only one that we had, I would have been blessed and like singing their praises just on their own. But somehow we ended up with three um really really good ones. One of the things that strikes me about Salana is the resiliency in the ecosystem, particularly amongst the founders. Um, I mean, you guys went through hell after FTX. You know, I talked to like Armani over at Backpack. Um, to me it feels like that was almost a culturally defining moment that's really kind of built your culture from the ground up. Can you maybe unpack how FTX really all the terrible things that happened there like contributed to the culture that exists today? Yeah, we call it trauma bonding. So I was a Leman guy by the way and and I was in their offices in FTX when we went bankrupt. So like I I get it. Yeah. So I mean we were on a flight back from Breakpoint celebrating this awesome Breakpoint. We had like we it was our biggest event to date. So it was the biggest breakpoint we were through with the most developers kind of the biggest hackathon and um things felt like you know relative to the rest of the market we were crushing it and on this flight back basically collapsed during the flight. Uh yeah, it was uh kind of a stomach turnurning moment. My biggest worry uh we were blessed at labs that we hadn't plenty of runway. So I wasn't worried about labs in terms of um something happening to us, but I was terrified that a lot of teams u had their runway on FTX uh that they were using that to custody and if they couldn't get their funds out, I think that would have killed the ecosystem. Um and the vast majority of teams actually didn't. So Raj and I like the first thing that we did when we got to the states is we basically called every team and like do you have runway to build and things like that? Are you freak freaking out and leaving Salana? And um the feedback that we got was that you know this is definitely scary and Salana's being hit the worst during this collapse. But um either we build our own chain or we build on Salana and the vast majority of them basically decided to continue building on Salana which um I think spoke really well of the product and kind of the opportunity that we uh in like gave those devs to go build with a high performance chain. Um, you know, you mentioned Armani. Ironically, he was one of the folks that just did their series A, kept it all on FDX, and it was effectively all gone. Um, and instead of shutting down, they just worked harder. So this was been that was I I almost you know a lot of folks worked really hard but the turning point in my mind when we came out of the I think the doldrums of FTX and kind of really showed that Salana is alive is was actually their Mad Labs launch and it was this silly NFT thing that they built but they built a really strong community around it. It ended up topping the charts for like a whole week in terms of volume and attention and everything else. And it almost felt like um that was the turning point in in growth and after that like Salana was growing faster than everyone else. Yeah. And then we we hit some really tough regulatory times after that with Gary our friend Gary Gendler. Um but recently you've been able to attract some serious talent uh to the Salana Policy Institute. you know, Kristen Smith, Miller, that that crew. How do you think about regulation as we go into this next era? Is it it's now it feels like it's a tailwind. Are you really investing in that part of the business? Yeah, I think um the goal for us is to um just create open fair markets. Like I'm I really, you know, don't have strong opinions about what is decentralization, what it's not. What I care about is that users have enough information to have make their own decisions. You can go and look at all the trade-offs between all of these designs and figure out do I want to use Cosmos, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Salana, XRP like sure like do you have all the information to make that decision and if so go for it. This is this I think is the fundamental driver of innovation in United States is give the market a chance to go figure it out. Um and not have regulators be so opinionated about what technologies are okay and what are not. Um and it really felt like um the previous administration was against all of them but there because of political pressure they're willing to bl like one or two through the gates but shut everything else down which felt I think would really underserve users in the market and make would make it really hard for us to operate or our competitors even. Um so it's been like night and day uh kind of really surprising. I don't know if you how much you follow double zero, but yeah, they got Yeah, they had a no action letter, which is blown my mind. Like, why couldn't we get one of these at a very simple? Yeah, it's like I keep telling people and by the way, all this gray hair, I would have still not like why is it so hard to speak to a regulator and get feedback that you're good or you're not good? And that's exactly what they did. and they got um so I think they're launching a token and they went to the regulator and say hey can we get a no uh no action that this is a security and the regulator said yeah you got it and like that's how it should have always been um absolutely I keep trying to tell people like don't be gaslit like this is not a special time this is normal like all respect to Paul and or sorry chairman Atkins and and the team but like this is how it should be um and so it's just wonderful to see what they've been able to accomplish so uh that's Is is there anything that keeps you awake at night as you know you running one of the largest most important protocols in the world? What what do you think about? Well, the crazy thing is I'm not running it. Well, start fair enough. Yeah. Um what I think is really remarkable um well I I have the day-to-day stuff that I that I'm uh keeps me at like I wake up and these are the the things that I work on and it's actually very enjoyable right now. So we have uh this next generation protocol improvement like a consensus layer called Alpenlow that's yep um you know is is in is in development and hopefully by breakpoint should be on test net but you can look at the GitHub progress yourself and make that decision. Uh but they're getting close and um this that part of the my participation I'm almost like a principal engineer at a big tech company. I don't actually write any of the code myself because nobody wants me to write it because I'm a terrible maintainer. It's kind of too busy. But I get to talk to a lot of folks that are state-of-the-art, extremely smart, very forward thinking, and uh make sure kind of the all the cats are hurted in the right direction. Um the second part I think that um I get to worry about but again I think Lily at the foundation is is kind of been executing on is what are we missing? How are we where are we blocking devs or what use cases that are emerging that we could be like is there a startup already in Salana building it that kind of thing. So making sure we have all the bases covered um on that front and our job isn't like neither you know like laps launches products and they when they get mature they kind of go off on their own but Salana the protocol can't like operate uh a business. It is just a protocol. It's effectively like email. That's right. And it's got it's got a token to get rid of spam. That's it. Uh so the best we can do is just unblock other developers to go use it and go earn revenue. And sometimes they earn 99% of the revenue. Sometimes the protocol earns may you know more that those trade-offs are kind of up to the that particular project and the nuance of of that project. Um but we can't really get PMF beyond getting devs to use it for Salana itself. Um, so you know, a third of my time is just talking to early stage developers in that seed stage formation. So they're surprised that like they think of myself as some big uh super busy guy and I'm talking to a founder that hasn't even raised a seed round yet and just has an idea and I'm trying to get into the weeds with them and understand it and see if we can, you know, accelerate them or unblock them. That's also pretty fun and basically takes up a third of my time. Sounds like you're having a lot of fun that you found the right spot. Pretty cool. It shows. Um 10 years from now, 15 years from now, whatever. Um if you were to look back, what where do you think you're going to be as an ecosystem? I want to see the world where vast majority of um tradable assets in United States and the world are on on chain. So, I think to me that's kind of the most exciting future because um it'll fundamentally reshape finance. You will reduce risk. You'll make prices better for users. You'll reduce fees for users. Um and all those things are good things. They contribute to the growth of the world, the wealth creation of the world. Um you know, finance on its own doesn't do anything. It's effectively like a road, right? It's like logistics and all these fees and latencies and delays and opaqueness of of you know centralized systems. They're like speed bumps. They just slow everything down and kind of create a overall cost for the rest of society. I think we have an opportunity to you know this is kind of the best part of software eating eating the world. Software is eating finance right now through cryptography and these verifiable systems. we have an opportunity to greatly reduce the cost that finance has in the rest of the world. And um I think that's awesome. Totally. Like this is what got me into crypto for the first time is like oh my god like we're this thing is 100% global. It's not like McDonald's that started in California, moved to Chicago and slowly built. And we can take private property now and put it onto the internet for the first time. And it could be FX, it could be a stock, it could be anything. And like what you've done now is you said, "Listen, I'm gonna eliminate all the frictions, low fees, high speed, you know, large bandwidth. Let's go." Um, so that sounds like the vision going forward. Yeah, that absolutely cool. Um, any last thoughts today, sir? It's been amazing to have you on. I've really enjoyed the conversation. What did I miss? Um, what else? We didn't talk about mobile, but happy to chat about that. Yeah, mobile. Like, so you have a phone. That's one thing that uh yeah I I shame on me. Tell me about the mobile phone. Um yeah, this is my uh other my fourth third of my time spent is on mobile. So I spent most of my career in mobile. So I kind of saw the the rise in uh of I don't know if folks remember flip phones be I was one of the first engineers working in this operating system called Brew. one of the early engineers working on that and this was a platform for downloading application. This is before people thought phones should be computers. Um and I remember clearly when we went from like we got 2 million downloads for this little dinky bowling app to an iPhone being shipped six months later and revolutionizing the entire space. Um that was really kind of this this massive moment and really transformed the entire the world. Um, so I kind of see this kind of unfortunate side effect of what happened in the last 15 years is you have Apple and Google created this duopoly where their fees have stagnated. It's been 20 to 30% kind of rake on on the platform fees for the last forever, right? Basically 15 years. Um, and the feature set have basically stagnated a whole bunch of stuff that it feels like very stale. And to me, it seems like an opportunity to go give developers access to a new user base, a new distribution channel, a new platform. Um, and crypto is that opportunity. Um, and this is kind of uh weird to explain, but will make sense to you if you've ever traded NFTTS. So the difference between uh digital content on Apple and an NFT is that if I am, you know, Candy Crush and I make my app and I sell you a loot box, I can create infinite number of these loot boxes for free, right? It's just a number in a database. I will sell as many of those as people will buy. Um when Magic Eden or Tensor sell an NFT, that's a unique NFT. They cannot create any more of them. So Apple can charge Candy Crush 30%. And they will grudgingly pay that fee because they get to sell infinite number of things that cost them zero to produce. But you can't add that 30% fee in an NFT. If you have a $100 NFT, people are not going to want to pay 130 bucks for it in the iOS store, right? So, and Tensor can't eat that 30%. So you end up with this business model that is awesome for onchain digital content that just doesn't work in traditional mobile. Um so this is our opportunity to basically get a whole set of new users that are used to a whole different set of economics and get developers to start shipping apps to them. So you going to toe with Apple and and Google then? We'll see. Wow, that's pretty lofty. I actually think that um because crypto users are so spendy, they just spend so much more money on the internet that if we have a million of the right users in our platform, it's going to be a more lucrative distribution channel than Google or Apple. So, I think we're not too far. We had 150,000 sales for the Seeker. And you know, I didn't know how to get to 100,000 and we got there. now not 100% sure how to get to a million but I feel like there is a path that we can get there. Um so shameless shill then h how how can users buy the phone? Salana.com super easy. Awesome. So I hope uh if you're out there and and you know there you've been able to achieve if you're a holder of the phone a lot of airdrops and in many cases it's paid for itself, right? Yeah. So developers have an incentive to get you off I you know Google Play Store because if they give you this free content that they can generate and get you to transact through the alternative platform they can effectively move you off the 20% fee rail to the free rail. Yeah. Now that's the engine for airdrops. I think what I would love to see is if we get like a traditional gaming company, right, like Epic or somebody else to be like, "Okay, I got this and we're gonna start deploying apps here." That's pretty cool, man. I really enjoyed the conversation today. Appreciate your time. Um, ladies and gentlemen, Anatoli, thank you so much. Thank you. If you have any questions about how to navigate the current environment, Wealthon can help connect you with a vetted advisor to get a free portfolio review. Just click the link in the description below or head to wealthon.comfree. There's no obligation and it will just take a few minutes of your time. Again, that's wealthy.comfree. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you again next time. [Music]
Solana Co-Founder Anatoly Yakovenko: On-Chain Finance Will Change Everything
Summary
Transcript
I want to see the world where vast majority of tradable assets in the United States in the world are on chain. That's kind of the most exciting future because it'll fundamentally reshape finance. You will reduce risk. You'll make prices better for users. You'll reduce fees for users. All those things are good things. [Music] If you have any questions about how to navigate the current environment, Wealthon can help connect you with a vetted advisor to get a free portfolio review. Just click the link in the description below or head to wealthon.com/free. There's no obligation and it will just take a few minutes of your time. Again, that's wealthy.com/free. With a market cap of $110 billion, Salana is one of the leading blockchain ecosystems in the world. Today I'm absolutely honored to speak with Anatoli Yakaveno who's one of the co-founders of Salana. Anatoli, it's an honor. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Awesome. So Salana is known as the decentralized NASDAQ, but like I'm wondering if we should call NASDAQ the centralized Salana. I mean with what you guys have accomplished, it's been pretty impressive. But uh today's we want to just not only unpack the technology but really talk about it as an investable ecosystem and probably the best way to start is just to get a little bit of a background on you. Um you know how you got here uh would be would be a great way to start. Sure. So um I spend most of my career at Qualcomm um working on you know software on mobile phones firmware trying to optimize things trying to make them go faster. Um, and around 2017 is when I had this Eureka moment to uh, start Salana. And this is about when I think Ethereum started taking off and this idea of a smart contract platform came to the forefront. And what attracted me to the space was that this was a new place for software developers to write applications um, that do that do something unique. So this was, you know, I kind of saw the the birth of Linux and servers and kind of running the web as a as a platform and then I got to participate and be one of the early developers that brought mobile to the front before even smartones smartphones were around. Um, and this clearly to me seemed like a new way for for developers to write software that wasn't possible before. And this is because uh blockchains have this interesting property that's not available in other systems is that they can be verified. So you can go back and look at the ledger of record like you can with Bitcoin and you can verify that yeah when I transferred my Bitcoin from person A to person B that actually was recorded correctly and everyone agreed on that. Um, and the Ethereum generalized this, but Ethereum was at the time very slow. And I kind of had this, you know, as the legend goes, but this actually really happened. I had two coffees and a beer with a friend of mine and it didn't sit well with me and I was up till 4 in the morning and I had this Eureka moment that there's a way to adopt a lot of kind of these highlevel ideas from early cellular networks pre-qualcom even like called TDMA time division multiple access these are like 1G networks the first cellular stuff to how blockchain protocols work and my back of the envelope kind of calculation was oh man this is a thousand times faster than Ethereum. And that what got me to go and kind of put a team together and raise capital and and build Salana. So, I got to ask this one. Um, you were working there in Qualcomm, uh, which is down in San Diego. I used to live actually in Salana Beach. I was in the Marine Corps. I was working up in Camp Pendleton. Is that where you got the name? Yes. So, I knew it. Yeah. Me and actually two of the folks that ended up co-founders with me. We lived in Salana Beach. We would wake up, surf, electric cove, bike to work, bike home, surf again. This was our kind of dayto-day. And we just wanted to call it Salana because if you ever been down there, it is the most pictureesque perfect Southern California town. It's paradise basically. As far as far as I'm concerned, it's the best. I used to live across the street from the Delmar racetrack and uh yeah, what a wonderful place. That was always in the back of my mind. I'm like, I it has to be from Salana. That's so cool. All right. So, so you have this epiphany, uh, two coffees and a beer, you're in the middle of the night, not not a great night, and it just comes to you, boom, and you really focus on efficiency, TPS. Essentially, you're like, "Hey, I'm going to build the the the decentralized NASDAQ." Um, so, so where did you go from there? I mean, you had to build the team, you know. How did you scale this thing? Uh, and how did you get it to where it is today? Well, um, my gut instinct was that trading was one of these use cases that blockchains could be used for. And this was at the time when the only kind of really clear use case was Bitcoin, store of value. And um, it I didn't feel like I could compete with Bitcoin or build something that was Bitcoin++ or something like that. Um so I really wanted to focus something that I was good at and this is performance and making systems faster and where this has the biggest benefit is if you have trading and um all the kind of things that blockchain provide this idea of ver verifiability and availability of data everywhere these are all parts of trading systems if you kind of think of it from a super high level you know you you pay the your x million dollars to NASDAQ and you get to put a box in the Equinox Center in New Jersey, they'll actually give you a cable that's exactly the same length as everyone else. So, you don't have an advantage on latency, right? So, you can trade at in a fair system. That little data center that they have effectively provides these kind of verifiable guarantees that everybody has access to the same data, everyone can submit their trades in a fair way. And uh these protocols uh they're called Byzantine fault tolerant protocols. There's a kind of a big family of them. Bitcoin is one of them, but there's a whole bunch of other ones. They provide the same guarantees, but um at a without the need of a you know a NASDAQ or a single company to run it. So you just implement it in code. You build the software that can conform to this protocol and everybody that's that's running it can verify that they're getting a fair deal. And that idea of fairness encoded in a protocol and performance to me felt like the intersection of where trading should be headed to. So if we can you know decentralize gold and make this idea of verifiable digital store value as Bitcoin then Ethereum was more focused on settlement um I felt Salana was most suited for execution. Yeah. Um, so my brain was headed in that direction and kind of a lot of the design decisions and things we're building early on kind of led us down the spot. That makes a ton of sense. So, so if you're, you know, an investor, you're thinking about, hey, I I have a couple bucks. I want to invest in a particular ecosystem. Obviously, they look at fundamentals. How does value acrue within the Salana ecosystem from your perspective? Yeah, you can go look at the public data published by Block Works and other folks. Um, so I think in Bitcoin there is no value acrruel. Um, and it's massively successful. So you can this is I think kind of the biggest problem for me when I put on my investor hat. How do I analyze these systems? How or ecosystems and their performance? And I'm a huge fan of the intelligent investor book. Kind of the very fundamental basics is that there has to be some value acrruel mechanism in modern networks that are proof of stake based. And this is kind of a the family probably started with Cosmos with maybe the first one, but Ethereum is now proof of stake even though it started as a proof of proof of work chain originally. Solano is proof of stake from from the start. Um the nodes that create blocks, usually called block producers or leaders, um users will give them a tip like or a payment to include their transactions in a block. And the more uh underlying coin you have, Soul or ETH, the more blocks you can make and therefore you can earn more tips. But this effectively creates this value acrruel loop loop. If you own soul and you stake it and you run a validator that is high performance and you're a good block producer, this is a way to effectively acrue value to the soul that you have staked. Um, and this is very different from I think owning stocks in Apple because you're not really running a part of Apple, right? You're not like a little franchise of Apple that that's selling Apple devices. So you have to kind of think of it that because this is a protocol owning it or trying to acrue value to it means that you have to participate and and be part of it. But there is actually a full loop in something like Salana or proof ofstake networks. Yeah. And and the yield is is um pretty robust. It's clocking in around 8% maybe north of 8% right now. Is that right? Um, yeah. I mean, you have to take a look at which part of it is inflation rewards, which part of it is actual validator rewards. If you're looking for a simple, secure way to invest in physical gold and silver, check out Hard Assets Alliance at hard assetsalliance.com. And Wealthon together with SCP Resource Finance will be hosting a global silver conference this October in Toronto. Eric Sprat will be delivering the keynote and it promises to be a landmark gathering for silver investors. You can find out more in the details in the description below. Yes. Any as you start there's a lot of people who have this concept of like a fat protocol thesis it was called where you know you have applications but just buy the base layer by the blockchain the layer one as we call it because all the value is going to end up acrewing but would love for you to talk about you know those applications as well. um you know do you you know where which ones are you most excited about and how do you think about that from a val value acrruel perspective um I think so I think on salana if you look at the total revenues across the entire ecosystem applications I think get about 60% to twothirds of the revenue if you look at block works data um which is I think pretty awesome um I think the network can only thrive if the application layer does really well. And my guess is that the application layer in the future is going to kind of generate a larger the largest portion of the the value acrruel. But the protocol is maybe less risky because fundamentally the only way the protocol can generate value is um if you have a transaction that is so high priority that you're willing to pay you know enough dollars scalable with kind of the the value being transferred in there. um for a lot of things this is not true and like payments and things like that is actually very hard for the blockchain to capture value. So you can have a lot of payments activity, but because you don't when you send a payment, you don't really care if it lands, you know, in this 400 millisecond interval or the next one, it's not so latency sensitive. You're not willing to pay the super high tip to get it in right away. But for trading, you you do because you see a trade and there's a cost of opportunity to missing that particular trade. You're willing to pay up to that co that that opportunity cost. Yeah. On the trading side, you know, one of the areas that you've had absolute product market fit and domination is on memecoins. And people roll their eyes and they're like, "Memecoin this, memecoin that." Like, I personally find them incredibly valuable because I've never seen a better stress test of infrastructure than memes. I mean, they trade so violently that if you can handle memecoins, you know, you could you could handle anything. And I used to have to deal with this when I was running futures um back in the day. Um yeah. What do you think about that? How do you address that? Yeah, this was also kind of a huge surprise and in fact the first things that took off on Salana were actually NFTTS which I think were the precursor to the memecoins. Um and again similar stress test. People would run these really inefficient auctions that were just horribly designed. But in fact users wanted like the users wanted these really badly designed auctions because they wanted the opportunity to randomly get in early and kind of have this unfair like outcome. Um, so they were willing to willing to basically participate in an auction that I think if you're an economist, you'd be like this is like the the the worst design auction you can build. Um, and similar with memecoins, a lot of it is uh the activity is based around this like uh launches and during that launch period you have a lot of activity that kind of dissipates really quickly because memecoins are assets with only price and no value. there's no value acrruel possible in a memecoin. So all you're dealing with is this attention kind of game. Um and it definitely allowed us to uh um like the the infrastructure around Salana and trading like matured dramatically over the last two years um just from memecoin trading. And now when you look at you know uh just stable coin tra pairs or like even sold to USDC the way that these protocols have developed their um their market structure has optimized it to the point that I think in some cases the payers on Salana have tighter spreads than on Binance which is like a really remarkable achievement. Absolutely. Because Salana block times are four in a milliseconds. Binance is a centralized exchange that can run a 1 millisecond latency. But there's uh what folks don't understand is that there's just a massive amount of innovation with with having a effectively a giant programmable order book where each developer that wants to create a new kind of new market structure that's innovative can code it up on their own and plug it in and deploy it. So now, even though Salana might be much slower than Binance, because they've been able to invest a ton of in the the smart contract that effectively defines that order book, uh they're actually be been able to squeeze uh spreads tighter than Binance. So, which I didn't expect that. I thought that might start happening kind of in the next releases of Salana when we go to 100 millisecond blocks and things like that. But seeing that now has been like a really surprising and and awesome result. It feels like this line between DeFi and CFI is going to continue to blur and um it's pretty exciting. We're going to get to internet capital markets here in a second. But before we do, I know sticking to the app layer, if you will. You know, you guys are very successful in deep decentralized physical infrastructure. We I run a bunch of nodes um you and and and payments things of that sort. Can you talk through some of the other verticals that get you excited, you know, that you have product market fit in now and what you're excited about in the future as well? Um, so I think the main ones are trading and deepen and uh payments. I think the smaller use cases that you know I still have a lot of kind of a personal effort and trying to get them bootstrapped I would say is privacy based protocols. trying to see um and then gaming as well like um just having that in intersection of NFTTS and you know like loot boxes and games and casual games are more you know hardcore gaming and things like that. Um, and you start you start to see some of the kind of memecoin platforms like Pump start branching out into more like different businesses because um like so they're now building a streaming service that is effectively kind of a Twitch Tik Tok competitor, which to me seems really interesting because it um like fundamentally um you you think about how we consume information. there's more information in the world that you can possibly consume. So you need some mechanism to uh get rid of spam or or the information that you don't want. And right now that's mostly based on centralized algorithms. So either Twitter controls it or Tik Tok or whoever or or Google and they filter what what gets surfaced and what doesn't. Um, and that's uh I think works pretty well, but I think leaves a lot to like experiment with because you could have a totally market-based version of this. Um, it's just really hard to tie market-based ideas with things that people want. Like, nobody wants to to pay to to send you a message or to pay you to watch a video. That just doesn't work at scale. So I think with memecoins and and these attentionbased markets that effectively function the same way, I think there is an opportunity to build effectively like a truly nobody owns algorithm, but you still have good spam prevention and like good content being serviced to the top. If they can succeed there, I think that could be like really disruptive and really interesting. Yeah, I I love what the pump guys are doing. I'm starting to see them attract more and more quote mainstream crypto I guess media onchain uh which is really cool. What do you think about you know you're talking about algorithms what about the integration of AI into into the Solano ecosystem? You know we spent a lot of time at that intersection. How how do you think about it? Well I think uh where AI is where AI has definitely been transformative in how software is developed. Yeah. Um, so I think you should start seeing much faster time to market with smart contract development, audits, formal verification, those kinds of things are going to speed things up. So, it's not going to be, you know, a year-long project for a company to go build a new smart contract. Um, I think that could be pretty significant. Um, this idea where you have autonomous agents with a wallet that can that pay for stuff. um people built those almost immediately as soon as you know a you know a agents and MCP kind of services were out. I haven't seen those really take off and solve user problems with with PMF yet but um when that happens I think it'll be kind of obvious in retrospect but I think that's going to take a bit more time as really just a you know AIS and and things like that prolifate. Got it. So, so you have a very robust application layer. Um, that's acrewing value. You know, the base layer is acrewing value as well as you talked about. Let's pivot to like what gets me super excited and that's internet capital markets. And so, we're investors in Super State. We know the Galaxy guys well. Um, I think I may have mentioned this in the past on this podcast, but these guys just turned tokenization on its absolute head because the way it used to work is you you take a security, you lock it in a box called the custodian, you issue a token, and everyone's happy. So, you can kind of settle it. You know, it's kind of cute. But what these guys did is now they've taken a canonical equity. There's no equity in a box and they issued it on Salana. Um, to me, this is a gamecher. Um would love to get your I know you speak quite a bit about internet capital markets. Um to me this I don't think I think this is absolutely under reportported uh but would love your take on where we are and where we're going because this to me is the internet of the future, right? Like this is it. So yeah, so we're in the super early stages. Um and I think um folks have to understand that like US is a amazing robust financial system that was mostly developed some of it you know almost preWorld War I during kind of the railroad boom booms and busts and some of it kind of after World War II and all of these periods where there was kind of regula regulation and product innovation in that space were before the internet way before the internet. So a lot of the a lot of the role laws are designed around this idea that you know your neighbor says I have this piece of paper that says it's stock in some railroad across the country and they give it to you for money to protect investors to make sure that yeah you're actually getting a real stock certificate and all this stuff actually happens. Um, and I think even till it was I think it took 9/11 for the settlement of stock certificates to go from physically moving boxes of stocks to uh they used to wheelbarls actually back in the day wheelbarrow. Yeah. Yeah. So which is insane to me to to get that digitized. So I think once you have something working that system becomes very resistant to change. Uh but change is coming and what that change is is that just like you know when you go buy something in the internet you have that little lock screen that says you're cryptographically secure and you can input your credit card and you know it's not going to get stolen you know even though it's going through the open internet. Um, when Galaxy issues a stock on chain, there's a provable chain of transactions that going goes directly from the issuer to any owner of that stock throughout any peer-to-peer transfers. So, your neighbor could give you a transfer like sign a transaction in a ledger and that stock could be transferred to you and you could verify the entire chain of ownership and custody of that stock directly back to the issuer. So a lot of the things that folks were worried about in the you know the hundred years prior when they built those regulations no longer apply. Um, so you can actually have, you know, my my best example of this is I call it the Linux from scratch IPO where a founder that has the knowhow can use open source software, run a salon validator, run uh open source smart contracts and do a full direct listing IPO process directly on chain without any intermediaries. So they just use the use the software directly. They go and sell their token directly to investors all around the world and they don't have to pay any fees or a bank to underwrite this because even the um the structure to incentivize the markets to exist um things that you know require you know market makers and exchanges and all these other things that can be encoded in a smart contract and the fees that they pay right now to an investment bank could be incentives from for the regular users to provide you know capital for the market to to function correctly. Um this is the innovation that's been happening in crypto kind of in its own little sandbox with memecoins with you know DeFi summer kind of farming and things like that. All of those things can now be used in real markets with traditional finance. And the the results that I think we'll see should be substantial. Um, I think folks like you might be aware, I don't know if most folks are, of the the Figma IPO of the the difference between the price that the founders, the company got for their stock versus what people paid on the open market was like 5x or something crazy like that. So, in my mind to me that those founders lost 10% of their company in just one transaction, which is crazy. like the it the amount of money that they left on the table is basically 10% of the market cap of this $30 billion company which is nuts. You know, it takes insane amount of work to get to that stage to build a $30 billion company. I think that finance should serve those folks when they go to launch and minimize fees and actually make the process better because the retail would have gotten a better price and the company would have gotten more dollars per share. Yeah, 100%. What gets me so excited, people don't realize this. Salana is global. It's like naturally global. If you look at the US IPO market last year, I think the IPO in 24 amount of capital raised like 30 billion or something like that. If you look at the memecoin market cap, it's like 140 billion last year, right? Why? Because there's just like there's just so much appetite, you know, to participate in finance, etc. Like what's going to happen now when we actually have things of value that are open and accessible 24/7 to anyone in the world, you know, beyond stable coins like equities. Like I think it's going to be huge. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is kind of the future that the entire ecosystem is betting on 100%. So, look look and I think it's going to be great for the Salana ecosystem. All right. And I got to ask um we've been spending a lot of time focusing on DATs, digital asset treasuries. Um spoke to Kyle um recently about uh Ford Industries. I think I've got Marco coming on shortly. Um I'm a big believer that DATs are going to play an important role. How do you think about DATs fitting into the EOS the Salana ecosystem? So I think um you still have uh this wall the like as I' I've kind of described before Wall Street is built in this pre- internet era and I kind of think of it as this like fax-based paperbased API as a software AP as if it's a software API it's the underlying protocol is a fax that it's using uh which is very ancient and uh very slow but it works and it's regulated And for each company that wants to in Wall Street that wants to do something in DeFi, they'd have to go through a massive amount of compliance overhead. And to me, that seemed like the perfect place to basically proxy that and offer this Wall Street compliant API layer for Wall Street to interface with DeFi. And I think um the difference between, you know, folks ask me why Dad or ETF. I think ETFs are great products too, but they're a lot more constrained on what they can do. Once you kind of create an ETF, it has to stay constant. That product stays, you know, even if it's extremely innovative. This is a goto staked salana ETF that captures thing. It has to stay that thing, right? uh but Adat because it's a you know equity run company with a CEO they can actually be far more innovative and they can go deploy capital in Camino or if that seems to be like the best thing to do or switch to some other protocol and they much more flexible and can kind of effectively do what's best in the market in the medium to a long term. Do you have a favorite child? I got three three kids of my own. Those are my favorite kids. I think not a favorite. I'm Yeah, I'm I think uh I'm very blessed to have Yeah. like these amazing founders and folks working on these. I think each each one of these if that was the only one that we had, I would have been blessed and like singing their praises just on their own. But somehow we ended up with three um really really good ones. One of the things that strikes me about Salana is the resiliency in the ecosystem, particularly amongst the founders. Um, I mean, you guys went through hell after FTX. You know, I talked to like Armani over at Backpack. Um, to me it feels like that was almost a culturally defining moment that's really kind of built your culture from the ground up. Can you maybe unpack how FTX really all the terrible things that happened there like contributed to the culture that exists today? Yeah, we call it trauma bonding. So I was a Leman guy by the way and and I was in their offices in FTX when we went bankrupt. So like I I get it. Yeah. So I mean we were on a flight back from Breakpoint celebrating this awesome Breakpoint. We had like we it was our biggest event to date. So it was the biggest breakpoint we were through with the most developers kind of the biggest hackathon and um things felt like you know relative to the rest of the market we were crushing it and on this flight back basically collapsed during the flight. Uh yeah, it was uh kind of a stomach turnurning moment. My biggest worry uh we were blessed at labs that we hadn't plenty of runway. So I wasn't worried about labs in terms of um something happening to us, but I was terrified that a lot of teams u had their runway on FTX uh that they were using that to custody and if they couldn't get their funds out, I think that would have killed the ecosystem. Um and the vast majority of teams actually didn't. So Raj and I like the first thing that we did when we got to the states is we basically called every team and like do you have runway to build and things like that? Are you freak freaking out and leaving Salana? And um the feedback that we got was that you know this is definitely scary and Salana's being hit the worst during this collapse. But um either we build our own chain or we build on Salana and the vast majority of them basically decided to continue building on Salana which um I think spoke really well of the product and kind of the opportunity that we uh in like gave those devs to go build with a high performance chain. Um, you know, you mentioned Armani. Ironically, he was one of the folks that just did their series A, kept it all on FDX, and it was effectively all gone. Um, and instead of shutting down, they just worked harder. So this was been that was I I almost you know a lot of folks worked really hard but the turning point in my mind when we came out of the I think the doldrums of FTX and kind of really showed that Salana is alive is was actually their Mad Labs launch and it was this silly NFT thing that they built but they built a really strong community around it. It ended up topping the charts for like a whole week in terms of volume and attention and everything else. And it almost felt like um that was the turning point in in growth and after that like Salana was growing faster than everyone else. Yeah. And then we we hit some really tough regulatory times after that with Gary our friend Gary Gendler. Um but recently you've been able to attract some serious talent uh to the Salana Policy Institute. you know, Kristen Smith, Miller, that that crew. How do you think about regulation as we go into this next era? Is it it's now it feels like it's a tailwind. Are you really investing in that part of the business? Yeah, I think um the goal for us is to um just create open fair markets. Like I'm I really, you know, don't have strong opinions about what is decentralization, what it's not. What I care about is that users have enough information to have make their own decisions. You can go and look at all the trade-offs between all of these designs and figure out do I want to use Cosmos, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Salana, XRP like sure like do you have all the information to make that decision and if so go for it. This is this I think is the fundamental driver of innovation in United States is give the market a chance to go figure it out. Um and not have regulators be so opinionated about what technologies are okay and what are not. Um and it really felt like um the previous administration was against all of them but there because of political pressure they're willing to bl like one or two through the gates but shut everything else down which felt I think would really underserve users in the market and make would make it really hard for us to operate or our competitors even. Um so it's been like night and day uh kind of really surprising. I don't know if you how much you follow double zero, but yeah, they got Yeah, they had a no action letter, which is blown my mind. Like, why couldn't we get one of these at a very simple? Yeah, it's like I keep telling people and by the way, all this gray hair, I would have still not like why is it so hard to speak to a regulator and get feedback that you're good or you're not good? And that's exactly what they did. and they got um so I think they're launching a token and they went to the regulator and say hey can we get a no uh no action that this is a security and the regulator said yeah you got it and like that's how it should have always been um absolutely I keep trying to tell people like don't be gaslit like this is not a special time this is normal like all respect to Paul and or sorry chairman Atkins and and the team but like this is how it should be um and so it's just wonderful to see what they've been able to accomplish so uh that's Is is there anything that keeps you awake at night as you know you running one of the largest most important protocols in the world? What what do you think about? Well, the crazy thing is I'm not running it. Well, start fair enough. Yeah. Um what I think is really remarkable um well I I have the day-to-day stuff that I that I'm uh keeps me at like I wake up and these are the the things that I work on and it's actually very enjoyable right now. So we have uh this next generation protocol improvement like a consensus layer called Alpenlow that's yep um you know is is in is in development and hopefully by breakpoint should be on test net but you can look at the GitHub progress yourself and make that decision. Uh but they're getting close and um this that part of the my participation I'm almost like a principal engineer at a big tech company. I don't actually write any of the code myself because nobody wants me to write it because I'm a terrible maintainer. It's kind of too busy. But I get to talk to a lot of folks that are state-of-the-art, extremely smart, very forward thinking, and uh make sure kind of the all the cats are hurted in the right direction. Um the second part I think that um I get to worry about but again I think Lily at the foundation is is kind of been executing on is what are we missing? How are we where are we blocking devs or what use cases that are emerging that we could be like is there a startup already in Salana building it that kind of thing. So making sure we have all the bases covered um on that front and our job isn't like neither you know like laps launches products and they when they get mature they kind of go off on their own but Salana the protocol can't like operate uh a business. It is just a protocol. It's effectively like email. That's right. And it's got it's got a token to get rid of spam. That's it. Uh so the best we can do is just unblock other developers to go use it and go earn revenue. And sometimes they earn 99% of the revenue. Sometimes the protocol earns may you know more that those trade-offs are kind of up to the that particular project and the nuance of of that project. Um but we can't really get PMF beyond getting devs to use it for Salana itself. Um, so you know, a third of my time is just talking to early stage developers in that seed stage formation. So they're surprised that like they think of myself as some big uh super busy guy and I'm talking to a founder that hasn't even raised a seed round yet and just has an idea and I'm trying to get into the weeds with them and understand it and see if we can, you know, accelerate them or unblock them. That's also pretty fun and basically takes up a third of my time. Sounds like you're having a lot of fun that you found the right spot. Pretty cool. It shows. Um 10 years from now, 15 years from now, whatever. Um if you were to look back, what where do you think you're going to be as an ecosystem? I want to see the world where vast majority of um tradable assets in United States and the world are on on chain. So, I think to me that's kind of the most exciting future because um it'll fundamentally reshape finance. You will reduce risk. You'll make prices better for users. You'll reduce fees for users. Um and all those things are good things. They contribute to the growth of the world, the wealth creation of the world. Um you know, finance on its own doesn't do anything. It's effectively like a road, right? It's like logistics and all these fees and latencies and delays and opaqueness of of you know centralized systems. They're like speed bumps. They just slow everything down and kind of create a overall cost for the rest of society. I think we have an opportunity to you know this is kind of the best part of software eating eating the world. Software is eating finance right now through cryptography and these verifiable systems. we have an opportunity to greatly reduce the cost that finance has in the rest of the world. And um I think that's awesome. Totally. Like this is what got me into crypto for the first time is like oh my god like we're this thing is 100% global. It's not like McDonald's that started in California, moved to Chicago and slowly built. And we can take private property now and put it onto the internet for the first time. And it could be FX, it could be a stock, it could be anything. And like what you've done now is you said, "Listen, I'm gonna eliminate all the frictions, low fees, high speed, you know, large bandwidth. Let's go." Um, so that sounds like the vision going forward. Yeah, that absolutely cool. Um, any last thoughts today, sir? It's been amazing to have you on. I've really enjoyed the conversation. What did I miss? Um, what else? We didn't talk about mobile, but happy to chat about that. Yeah, mobile. Like, so you have a phone. That's one thing that uh yeah I I shame on me. Tell me about the mobile phone. Um yeah, this is my uh other my fourth third of my time spent is on mobile. So I spent most of my career in mobile. So I kind of saw the the rise in uh of I don't know if folks remember flip phones be I was one of the first engineers working in this operating system called Brew. one of the early engineers working on that and this was a platform for downloading application. This is before people thought phones should be computers. Um and I remember clearly when we went from like we got 2 million downloads for this little dinky bowling app to an iPhone being shipped six months later and revolutionizing the entire space. Um that was really kind of this this massive moment and really transformed the entire the world. Um, so I kind of see this kind of unfortunate side effect of what happened in the last 15 years is you have Apple and Google created this duopoly where their fees have stagnated. It's been 20 to 30% kind of rake on on the platform fees for the last forever, right? Basically 15 years. Um, and the feature set have basically stagnated a whole bunch of stuff that it feels like very stale. And to me, it seems like an opportunity to go give developers access to a new user base, a new distribution channel, a new platform. Um, and crypto is that opportunity. Um, and this is kind of uh weird to explain, but will make sense to you if you've ever traded NFTTS. So the difference between uh digital content on Apple and an NFT is that if I am, you know, Candy Crush and I make my app and I sell you a loot box, I can create infinite number of these loot boxes for free, right? It's just a number in a database. I will sell as many of those as people will buy. Um when Magic Eden or Tensor sell an NFT, that's a unique NFT. They cannot create any more of them. So Apple can charge Candy Crush 30%. And they will grudgingly pay that fee because they get to sell infinite number of things that cost them zero to produce. But you can't add that 30% fee in an NFT. If you have a $100 NFT, people are not going to want to pay 130 bucks for it in the iOS store, right? So, and Tensor can't eat that 30%. So you end up with this business model that is awesome for onchain digital content that just doesn't work in traditional mobile. Um so this is our opportunity to basically get a whole set of new users that are used to a whole different set of economics and get developers to start shipping apps to them. So you going to toe with Apple and and Google then? We'll see. Wow, that's pretty lofty. I actually think that um because crypto users are so spendy, they just spend so much more money on the internet that if we have a million of the right users in our platform, it's going to be a more lucrative distribution channel than Google or Apple. So, I think we're not too far. We had 150,000 sales for the Seeker. And you know, I didn't know how to get to 100,000 and we got there. now not 100% sure how to get to a million but I feel like there is a path that we can get there. Um so shameless shill then h how how can users buy the phone? Salana.com super easy. Awesome. So I hope uh if you're out there and and you know there you've been able to achieve if you're a holder of the phone a lot of airdrops and in many cases it's paid for itself, right? Yeah. So developers have an incentive to get you off I you know Google Play Store because if they give you this free content that they can generate and get you to transact through the alternative platform they can effectively move you off the 20% fee rail to the free rail. Yeah. Now that's the engine for airdrops. I think what I would love to see is if we get like a traditional gaming company, right, like Epic or somebody else to be like, "Okay, I got this and we're gonna start deploying apps here." That's pretty cool, man. I really enjoyed the conversation today. Appreciate your time. Um, ladies and gentlemen, Anatoli, thank you so much. Thank you. If you have any questions about how to navigate the current environment, Wealthon can help connect you with a vetted advisor to get a free portfolio review. Just click the link in the description below or head to wealthon.comfree. There's no obligation and it will just take a few minutes of your time. Again, that's wealthy.comfree. 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