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Solana Foundation Ep #59 Mar 01, 2022

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In this episode, Dan Albert (Executive Director), Lily Liu (President) and Mable Jiang (Board Member) discuss the role of the Solana Foundation in advancing the Solana protocol and ecosystem with support and initiatives around the world. Austin Federa (Head of Communications, Solana Labs) guest hosts.0:43 - Intros / Roles3:13 - The appeal of working at the foundation level07:48 - Establishing scope for the foundation12:42 - What’s working in the ecosystem?20:01 - From the ecosystem to the foundation21:21 - Growing Solana in new markets33:50 - Shared Ownership of the network36:21 - Predictions for 2022 in crypto and web 3.0DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.Austin Federa (00:10):Welcome to the Solana podcast. I'm Austin Federa filling in as guest host today. We spend a lot of time on the show talking to founders and builders in the space, people building on the Solana blockchain or otherwise involved in the Solana ecosystem. But today we're actually going to be talking about a different component, which is the Solana Foundation. Today with us, we have Dan who's the executive director of the Solana Foundation. We have Lily, who's the president of the Solana Foundation and Mabel, who's one of the board members of the Solana Foundation. Welcome to the Solana podcast, guys.Lily (00:39):Thanks for having us.Dan (00:40):Great to be here.Mabel (00:41):Thank you.Austin Federa (00:42):All right, Dan, let's start out with you. Tell me a little bit about what the Solana Foundation's role is in the ecosystem.Dan (00:49):Sure. The foundation is really here to help foster the growth of the Solana network and really the Solana ecosystem kind of in broad strokes at the highest level, what can we do to make sure that the Solana network continues to grow in the most kind of sustainable and decentralized manner as possible? And how can we provide resources and help the community grow to onboard the next or the first billion users to the Solana ecosystem and crypto in general?Austin Federa (01:24):Lily, what attracted you to the Solana Foundation? And how did you get involved in it?Lily (01:30):Well, I've been in the crypto ecosystem for a little bit and I must confess that in 2018, 2019, I actually spent a good bit of time being a Bitcoin maxi. And then I even was part of Little Bitcoin Book and which is not to say, sometimes I feel like people in crypto are a little bit maybe too tribal, which is not to say I don't love Bitcoin. I still consider Bitcoin to be king. But when I took a little bit of time out of crypto, when I came back to crypto, I started just using a lot of the apps that had sort of emerged out of DeFi Summer and I was totally floored by using Raydium in April. I really could not stop talking about it for just about a month because it was very squarely Web 3.0 but it felt like Web 2.0 and it was just so obvious to me at that moment that this was going to be how the next billion people, if we were going to get a billion people into crypto, anytime soon it was going to be on Solana.Solana to me is just such a unique combination of being technically so innovative but at the same time, really understanding that to bring people into the ecosystem, it has to be a good experience. And sometimes for your end user, it really just is as simple as saying, "It's fast and cheap." And that's why ethernet is just better than 56K modems. And sometimes it just has to be that simple to the end user if you're going to appeal to a billion people.Austin Federa (02:48):Yeah, I completely agree with you. There's been so many of those moments I've sort of heard over the last year of people just trying something on Solana and having this experience of, oh, it just works. It's fast. It feels like a Web 2.0 application but it's delivered in a fully decentralized way. Just based on that, what was the decision in your mind to, tons of people have that experience, they go build something, they go work for a company building in the space in terms of a service provider company. What was the sort of appeal of something that's more at the foundation level?Lily (03:19):To me, I think that, I come from a background where I spent a lot of time, I originally started working in more traditional industries. I worked in McKinsey, I worked at KKR and I kind of fell into Bitcoin back in 2013, 2014, which at the time was not a very obvious thing to do. And so for me, I think one of the things that I maybe add to the ecosystem is helping run effective organizations and thinking about sort of how to scale a commercial kind of go to market strategy and having been in the ecosystem for a little bit. And so for me, what's always attracted to me to crypto and Web 3.0, is these kind of new ultimately end user experiences that you enable for, not just those of us who've been kind of nerding out over technical sort of minutia left and right but really making that accessible and available.Lily (04:17):Some of the things that I'm really excited about facilitating through the foundation is kind of new markets growth outside of the US, outside of Europe, outside of the parts of East Asia that are already very familiar with cryptocurrency. And to me, it's so clear that if these types of applications, call it DeFi or sort of more metaverse or social or NFTs are going to take hold, then it's most likely going to start on Solana first. And so just being a part of that and sort of making that more accessible to a broader rate of people is really what's exciting to me.Austin Federa (04:51):And Mabel, you tell us a little bit about your path to becoming a board member at the Solana Foundation.Mabel (04:57):I think among all the people here, I probably joined the board the earliest. I joined when the board started, the foundation started. That kind of history just goes back to when I think before the token launch of Solana happened to that Anatoly and Raj, they were in China and in East Asia. And then that was even before my time joining Multicoin. I met them, obviously at that point it was 2019 and then it wasn't really easy to raise fund for sure. But then we kind of just happened to hang out a lot in Shanghai, in Seoul. I think another places like Beijing and whatever. And then we spent a bunch of time over those three weeks and then talked about, oh, how do I think about or how do we usually think about go to market strategies for public chains? And then how do people really differentiate one smart contract from the other?When they go back to San Francisco, they ask, "Can you maybe write us some sort of expansion or kind of go to market plan for Solana in East Asia?" And I did that. That was right around the time when they're forming a board for the foundation. And then, that's also around the time when I joined Multicoin. They invited, it's like since you're part of the ecosystem and then you are pretty unique kind of position compared to some of the other board members, are you interested to kind of help Solana Foundation or raising the Solana awareness in a global sense? I was like, oh, that was really interesting in a differentiated way to contribute to the ecosystem so I said, yes.Since then, that was start of 2020. Since then over now, I've been doing quite a bit of things, always related to those lines, raising the awareness for Solana in China specifically because that's where I'm sitting. And also in some other places in Asia and also try to just kind of talk to different projects in multiple different ecosystem. And obviously now it's a multi chain world and then people would have different trade offs, like when to choose different things. But when they learn about Solana and learn about why they're optimizing certain things in the design, they're always willing to try it because back in 2020, there aren't that many people know about it. I think the first step really is just to having people understand how the system works and whatnot. I've been doing quite a bit of those. I think that's kind of my experience involved with Solana Foundation.Austin Federa (07:31):And Dan, as you kind of think about your role as the sort of executive director at the Solana Foundation, how do you define scope for an organization like that? What are the sort of things you're thinking about when you're thinking about initiatives that the foundation is engaging in or things the foundation is not doing and shouldn't be doing in your view?Dan (07:52):Yeah, that's an excellent question. Really, I see it as two primary areas of focus with kind of the overarching goal being broad growth of the network and the community itself without an eye towards turning a profit for the foundation. This is a nonprofit organization. We're not taking any equity investments or really taking the position to be picking winners. There's plenty of incredible innovation that's happening on Solana, lots of competing projects, lots of new stuff. And the foundation really wants to position itself to support, really talking how to provide support equally for everyone in the ecosystem. And so one of the primary thrusts, one of our main operational kind of focus points these days is really on growing the network itself from an infrastructure standpoint. That's really been my personal area of focus for really a long time now is how can we get the most number of high quality validator operators, the most humans running the most number of nodes, be it validators or RPC nodes, which serve as the API endpoints or API gateways for applications using the Solana network?And to that end, the foundation has rolled out a number of programs, really leveraging kind of the foundation's holdings of tokens, which are really allocated to grow the community and grow the network. Kind of as I see it, I don't know, maybe a bit of a personal tangent here. I originally started engaging with Solana in early 2019. I was working on the engineering team at Solana Labs and it was early stage startup. We hadn't even launched the Testnet yet, just kind of scrappy early days, trying to get everyone to understand and hey, proof of history is a real thing. We're really going to prove out this tech. And one of the things that was really hard was trying to get people to run validators. A lot of our early stage validators that helped us launch Testnet for the very first time and get Mainnet off the ground were a lot of them came from the Cosmos ecosystem.And so, we have a lot of these kind of OG longstanding validators who really helped get the Solana network off the ground came from standing on the shoulders of giants. The Cosmos ecosystem brought so much innovation to the proof of stake universe and kind of where this ties back to, in early days, myself and a couple of the early labs employees in true startup fashion, we were actually working out of one of the co-founder's basements and we hand built some of the first bare metal validators to run on the Solana network. Ordering parts on the internet, showing up in a bunch of boxes and just going forward kind of hacking on the hardware, trying to see how much performance we can squeeze out of these individual machines.We went and installed them in a data center here in the Colorado area and those nodes are still running today. Some of them are pointed at Mainnet, some of them are Testnet. And that was sort of the, I don't know, the genesis of, at least for me personally, a lot of my personal investment in seeing the growth of the validator ecosystem on Solana, having kind of physically hooked up and bootstrapped some of the first ones. And now having transitioned earlier this year to take on this role at the foundation, we maintain a program for anyone who wants to run a validator, can engage with tier one data centers all over the world that the foundation has. We've really kind of went to bat for our validator community and helped a lot of these infrastructure providers understand that, yeah, it takes a lot of horsepower to run a node on Solana and it can be hard to get your hands on some of these machines.And so in working with some of these execs at some of these older school, I'll say more traditional telco or infrastructure oriented companies, helping them to understand the value of what a powerful and secure and distributed Solana infrastructure ecosystem looks like, that's really been an exciting kind of growth track, I think for the foundation in helping to bring more hardware online and helping more people to learn to run it and get more nodes running and keep the network flying.Austin Federa (12:16):Yeah, I love the parallels to the Cosmos ecosystem being a validator ecosystem being early, early supporters of that because of course, Tendermint is also notoriously computationally intensive and runs better on bare metal than cloud so it seems like a very natural validator group to bring over in the early days.Lily, from your view, as looking over the ecosystem, what are the parts you see that are working really well in the Solana ecosystem? What do you see are areas, be it tooling, Dan talked a little about infrastructure, areas in which the foundation can make a difference in help evolving?Lily (12:53):What I think is going quite well right now is a lot of the interest in the energy and kind of the inbound on various stakeholder groups within the community. I think there's a lot of excitement from a general audience also because it's very accessible to a general audience. Again, as we were saying earlier, if it costs dollars versus hundreds of dollars to mint an NFT, that's a very meaningful difference to many people. I think general awareness has been amazing. I think there's a lot of increased developer interest and accessibility. And if you look at sort of the hackathons that we've had, probably every two or three months, three or four months in the ecosystem, the number of sort of people who are new to Web 3.0 that are starting with Solana, I think is really impressive and has grown tremendously in a very short period of time.We want to continue to extend that in various ways. And we've got a number of ideas as to sort of increasing the accessibility to even a retail audience, putting out sort of better documentation, better tooling to continue sort of onboard both maybe existing Web 3.0 developers who might be building in solidity or on sort of an EVM type environment. As well as, increasingly there's pretty substantial influx of folks coming over from Web 2.0 and thinking about where to get started and are starting off by making choices between essentially now it's really solidity or Rust and Rust, implicitly sort of Solana. And so I think that we can continue to invest in various ways of sort of helping people start within the Solana ecosystem. And I think that because Solana has grown so quickly in a very short period of time, there are also sort of ecosystem tools that are catching up righ…

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Payments Ep #58 Feb 08, 2022

Show notes

In this special Payments episode of the Solana Podcast, Austin Federa guest hosts a conversation between Jeremy Allaire (CEO, Circle) and Sheraz Shere (Head of Payments, Solana Labs). They discuss merchant payments, stablecoins and Solana Pay: the newly released, open, and free-to-use payments framework built on Solana.00:45 - What is Circle?03:35 - The use case for stablecoins and the mechanisms to build them09:34 - Solana Pay13:42 - Integration of USDC and Stable Coins18:45 - How could Solana Pay become mainstream? 25:27 - The Solana Pay toolkit27:39 - Can businesses operate without a bank account?30:05 - Looking at Data Privacy in Solana Pay and Circle 34:35 - Hopes for Solana hackathon outcomes00:39 - Intro01:51 - pencilflip’s background03:30 - Working at facebook vs. web 3.007:31 - How pencilflip got into crypto08:52 - Views on NFTs10:45 - Getting into Solana15:29 - Experience working in lower level17:56 - What was his method to learn Solana?21:01 - What’s the hardest concept on Solana?23:53 - How fast did he move from Rust to Anchor?27:35 - Building on Solana33:24 - Advice to people moving to Web 3.0DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.Austin: (00:09)Hello and welcome to the Solana podcast. I’m Austin Federa guest hosting this week. Today we're going to be talking about stablecoins, USDC and Solana pay. So we're joined today by Sheraz Shere, the head of payments at Solana labs and Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of Circle. Welcome to the show.Jeremy: (00:27)Thank you.Sheraz: (00:27)Thanks Austin.Austin: (00:28)Great. Well, let's start off with Jeremy, talk a little bit about Circle. Can you tell us a little bit about what is Circle and what's its role in the US DC stablecoin?Jeremy: (00:37)Sure, absolutely. So Circle is a global financial technology firm. We operate a suite of services to help businesses take advantage of digital currency in payments and treasury applications on the internet, which is all really a mouthful. But specifically we have a couple of really critical things. The first is we operate a stablecoin market infrastructure as we call it called USDC, and we'll talk, I know more about that, but USDC is a dollar digital currency that is an asset backed or fully reserved digital currency that can be used for payments and settlement on the internet. And it's already used really, really widely in the crypto economy.And so we run that infrastructure and provide that to businesses institutions, and through many, many of our partners out to tens or perhaps even hundreds of millions of end users that interact with USDC. And then we also operate a suite of services for companies to have payments and treasury management and other things that are needed to integrate this into the way that they operate. So almost like a crypto native bank account for businesses to store and transact, and then alongside that a broad set of API products.So basically Circle APIs that connect the existing fiat system, credit cards, bank accounts, bank transfers with stablecoins, with the custody, security, blockchain management, and other things that are needed to use that and integrate that into your own application. So lots and lots of fintechs, startups, companies like building on those APIs to kind of integrate stablecoins and fiat in their applications. So hundreds of companies use those and those are the key things that we do. And we've been growing with other products in what we call to treasury services. So Circle yield, which is a stablecoin yield product, which has been growing really fast too.Austin: (02:50)Yeah. I want to get into that kind of in a minute. So stablecoins, they're foundational to a lot of how DeFi has been enabled over the years. So there's lots of different applications for that. Sometimes it's just as a common transacting layer between multiple currencies. There's lots of different applications for it, but as you mentioned, there's more and more sort of enterprises and traditional companies, as well as fintechs that are in that space that are looking to use stablecoins in their business operations. At the same time, you have a bunch of DeFi Degens who are sort of the original core audience for a stablecoin. What does that decision making process look like at Circle when you're trying to balance such a diverse user base?Jeremy: (03:33)Yeah, it's a great question. And sometimes I'm asked "What's the use case for USDC," and my answer is sort of "What's the use case for a dollar?" Well, the use cases are incredibly broad, and we see that actually today, we see people who are making personal point to point payments internationally. We see people making micropayments for digital IP through NFTs, and at the other end you see institutions that are using USDC to settle half a billion dollar bilateral trades. And that's a pretty broad range of use cases that are out there. I think more importantly, conceptually when we built USDC and you can go back and read the original white paper behind it. And the idea of fiat backed digital currencies, our ultimate belief is that what's needed is a sort of protocol layer for traditional money on the internet.So you can have dollars and euros and pounds and yen and other currencies that just function on top of the internet, the same way that other protocols support the exchange of information and communications. And if we had that, and we could use those protocols at the speed of the internet with the cost efficiency of moving data, which is what I think blockchains hold that promise, Solana's executing really well on that, but hold that promise, that it could really unlock the storage of transmission of value to be a kind of commodity free service on the internet. And so ultimately our belief is that anything that any person or household or firm might need to do in the digital economy on the internet could be done with stablecoins.And so we definitely expect that to grow. Now, when we got started, it was anchored in what I call crypto capital markets. So it's anchored in market participants that, for all the work that they do and all the assets that they might be interacting with, they're all digital assets, and they all move at the speed of blockchains, whatever that is and the efficiency of that. And so they need their dollars to work the same way, and so that kind of gave demand for payment and settlement mediums that could kind of work at the speed of those markets and those blockchains. So, that was a good bootstrap use case, and that's really what brought a lot of this into existence. But now the way I like to describe it is stablecoins are both protocols and money formats. It's a protocol that works on top of a blockchain with assurance and security and finality settle a transaction, but it's also a particular representation of value of a dollar or a Euro or whatever it is, and protocols and kind of formats our network affects businesses.And so the more people who have that, the more valuable or more useful it becomes, and the more products and services that are plugged into a protocol, the more useful and in utility that exists. And so we're now seeing the spillover of the use cases go into everyday businesses more and more everyday businesses saying, "Wow, this is a very, very efficient medium. It's very inexpensive, it's very fast, it's secure. I know it's final and it works globally." So we're certainly seeing that pick up. And at Circle, as we think about use cases, we really believe that the acceptance of payments in a business context using digital currency like this is going to proliferate pretty significantly in the coming years, because it's got so many attributes that are superior to existing electronic payments methods.Austin: (07:12)Yeah. And so you touched on something that's really interesting, which I think everyone thinks of USDC as a protocol, but unlike most organizations that have launched a protocol, the underlying token of USDC is USDC. Its whole point is it does not fluctuate in value, it does not go up, not go down. It stays solid at an equivalent of one US dollar. But Circle, it obviously for-profit organization, what are the mechanisms there that actually allow you to run a business as an organization that has created USDC?Jeremy: (07:48)There are a lot of pieces. So the first is today USDC is approaching 50 billion in circulation, and Circle administers and reserves those assets. And so we generate income from that, from that $50 billion we generate income. And as that grows to be a hundred billion or 200 billion, we'll continue to generate income from that, and certainly in a rising rate environment, that's significant. The second is we run a whole set of, what we call transaction services and treasury services, and those are services that we charge fees for. So transaction services are taking traditional fiat payment methods, using our infrastructure to do blockchain, native, custody, and payments. And so those are kind of usage based and scale up kind of like a Stripe or equivalent type of transactional service.And then we also provide treasury services. So people who want to lend their USDC can lend their USDC in a self-service way through our platform, and get fixed term fixed rate returns on capital on USDC, and we generate a spread income from that as well. So we're building out this sort of suite of commercial services that are globally available increasingly, and that provide a lot of incremental value. So those are several buckets as well, that are really helping us scale our business.Austin: (09:14)So we were talking about transactional services. Again Sheraz, You have been intricately involved in building and launching the Solana pay protocol. Can you give us an overview of what that is, and how stablecoins are an important part of that system?Sheraz: (09:29)Sure. Yeah. So Solana pay is basically a new blockchain based merchant payment system. It's open, permissionless, and decentralized, and it's premised on enabling merchants to connect directly with consumers in a peer-to-peer fashion with no intermediaries. And it's really premised on the notion that merchants would accept stablecoin like USDC. Most merchants, unfortunately for crypto natives, don't really care that much crypto per se, they care about running their business. And that's why having stablecoins, US dollar denominated stablecoins are critical, because what this affords us is the ability to move digital assets at speed and cost of the internet, as Jeremy mentioned.So for Solana pay, what we're really trying to do is enable for merchants, things like instant settlement, near zero cost transaction processing, and something that's really important is the removal of intermediaries. If you think about it from a merchant perspective the most important thing a merchant does is collecting payments and engaging with their consumers with commerce, but there's a lot of friction tied to enabling payments of and commerce. And with friction comes intermediaries and with intermediaries come cost and the loss of control. So if there's one headline for Solana pay, it's really about giving power back to the merchant for the most important function, which they do.Austin: (10:48)So can you talk a little bit about that? Payments is obviously a many billion dollar industry globally. There's some big name that have reached some pretty astronomical valuations nowadays based off of providing credit card payment processing solutions and that sort of thing to e-commerce and non e-commerce business. What's the sort of difference of approach here? How would you compare something like Solana pay to a company maybe like Stripe?Sheraz: (11:15)Sure. Yeah. And Stripe, I would say that the removal of intermediaries doesn't mean that a lot of the traditional payments companies don't have a role to play. The actual act of moving a digital asset from a consumer to the end merchant, that's the piece where there isn't need to be a friction, right? So with the Solana blockchain and a stablecoin like USDC, the movement of digital currencies from a consumer's wallet to the merchant wallet should happen like an email going on the internet, it should happen instantly with no cost. However, once a merchant has accepted a USDC stablecoin or settled in a stablecoin, there's a lot of interesting services that are needed to be done that merchants typically don't want to necessarily do themselves. So setting up token accounts, doing treasury management, reconciliation, integrating into legacy bank accounts.So there's a lot of work in the core stack of post settlement of payments that traditional payment companies can be involved in. The protocol itself is just trying to simplify one component of payment processing, which is the most critical one, which is that the transfer of value between the consumer and the merchant. One of the interesting things that we're building on the spec is the ability to also have a bidirectional communication. The benefit of having a true peer-to-peer connection between a merchant and a consumer and not having an intermediary is that this allows the merchant to, for example, send digital assets back to the consumer. So what this could look like is something like, let's say you buy a new shoe, using this protocol the merchant can send you back an NFT of that shoe into your wallet, which you can now take into the metaverse. Just an example, but illustrating why the notion of a peer-to-peer, a true peer-to-peer interaction between a merchant and a consumer can open up a whole new set of new things.Austin: (13:09)So Jeremy, Sheraz was talking there about one of the pieces of the stack that Solana pay is trying to solve, that payment from a consumer directly to a merchant. You in Circle work with companies that have extremely complicated payment flows that are trying to bring USDC into. What are some of the areas that integration has been easy and straightforward for these companies, and what are some of the areas that are still challenges for enterprise adoption of USDC and stablecoins?Jeremy: (13:37)First of all, just to say, as you know, we're really excited to be supporting Solana pay. And we believe that the problem space here is a really critical one, and solving this problem of how to build a better connection between an end user and a business and building beyond just the underlying digital asset transfer and solving some of these problems is really, really critical. The way I would kind of answer the question is there's sort of the base layer of you've got a blockchain and you've got addresses and wallets and you've got this settlement finality mechanism of moving an asset like USDC as well. And that part is kind of fairly low level.Jeremy: (14:27)And so businesses that want to use this as a substitute for say, a card payment, they can implement that out with Circle APIs…

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Stake Pools Ep #57 Dec 14, 2021

Show notes

Vasiliy Shapovalov (Tech Lead, Lido), F.P. (Co-Founder, Socean) and Ella Kuzmenko (Product Manager, Stake Pools & Delegation Program, Solana Foundation) chat with Anatoly about the complexity and game theory surrounding stake pools, decentralization and censorship resistance.00:10 - Intro01:38 - Collaterals, maximizing censorship resistance07:40 - APYs and investors09:31 - How to get penetration across DeFi14:58 - Governance in a liquid stake pool18:23 - Automation vs. programmatic on-chain governance20:44 - Factors in selecting validators29:27 - Growing the validators set32:21 - Stake pool token in DeFi35:09 - Liquidity fragmented between too many pools41:01 - Who controls the network?44:46 - Increasing decentralization00:39 - Intro01:51 - pencilflip’s background03:30 - Working at facebook vs. web 3.007:31 - How pencilflip got into crypto08:52 - Views on NFTs10:45 - Getting into Solana15:29 - Experience working in lower level17:56 - What was his method to learn Solana?21:01 - What’s the hardest concept on Solana?23:53 - How fast did he move from Rust to Anchor?27:35 - Building on Solana33:24 - Advice to people moving to Web 3.0DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.Anatoly (00:10):Hey folks. This is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. I have a super exciting episode today, it's all about Stake Pools and decentralization and censorship resistance. And I have a group of guests that I'm going to let them introduce themselves, just to make it a little easier. So Ella, why don't you start first?Ella (00:29):Sure. Hey guys. Ella, I'm a Product Manager of Censorship Resistance at The Solana Foundation working on Stake Pools and the delegation program.Vasiliy (00:39):Hey. I'm Vasiliy, I'm tech lead at Lido. Honestly, I think that the person who should be here instead of me is someone, of course like Felix or [Uto 00:00:49] or maybe Brian, but they couldn't make it, so I'm here instead as a second best option.Anatoly (00:58):Awesome to have you. We'll take the second best.FP (01:03):Hi, guys. I'm FP. I'm co-founder and CEO of The Socean Stake Pool. Nice to meet you guys all today.Anatoly (01:11):Awesome. So censorship resistance Stake Pools, I've been pounding the table on this for two years as the most important thing and proof of stake networks, because I have this crazy belief that if we have liquid staking as collateral and DeFi than financial analyst to analyze systemic risk and these things, we'll actually prefer collateral that maximizes censorship resistance. And that is a crazy thing, because it would tie incentives for maximizing censorship resistance in the network to its actual use and primary use being DeFi. Is this real or not? Is this going to happen?Vasiliy (02:00):I probably got some experience to tell here because we were in production longer, not on Solana, but in general, longer than most liquid staking pools. And I can say that it's less pressure to decentralize than I thought it would be on one hand. On the other hand is much more pressure than we usually have as a stake provider, as node operator. I come from a stake provider, P2P.org that is pretty big itself. So about 4 billion stake of fire down depends on phase of the moon, the day.And people who usually stake, there is the kind of weak, very weak, but it's a prisoner's dilemma when people are incentivized to stake with best node operator. And when there is no clear best, they go by brand but there is a number of pretty good node operator that people are incentivized to stake with because these good node operator don't lose the mistake and give them good profits and stuff like that. And basically it leads to centralization because they are not incentivized very much to the centralized stake. And it's probably on goodwill and many stakers don't give enough thought to goodwill, but stake and pools always do. Basically, they're professionally obliged to do this and better holding up to hold the node operator accountable.I think in Lido, we have a better monitoring system for node operator around for us. And most of the big stakers like changes and funds and stuff that we're monitoring people who stake for us way better than most stakers. And I can say that the trade of is real here, when that liquid stake can token hold us, are not putting a lot of pressure on us, but they're putting some and we are well equipped to react to that. And we would honestly welcome more pressure on this front.Anatoly (04:14):So, Ella, has this been easy to convince people that censorship resistance matters or is it like they're just learning about it for the first time?Ella (04:24):Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think I definitely would second what Vasiliy was saying about how it's surprisingly harder than you would think. People definitely will follow where the rewards are. And I don't think that is surprising. I think there's an interesting opportunity for Stake Pools to play with that idea and give rewards while also touting the benefits of censorship resistance. So, "Hey, we will give you great rewards, but you can also get governance tokens and you can help us build the future together."And I think there's an interesting way that you can frame that discussion where you don't really have to pick one or the other. And I think to put a maybe crazy idea out there, I think we're only seeing the beginning of what can be built on top of Stake Pools. So it's pretty standard to take your Stake Pools tokens and you go stake them and then you earn some additional yield there. But I don't think we've really unlocked the potential of realizing that the underlying asset that you're staking will continue to accrue value every epoch and you should be able to build crazy financial things on top of that, that actually give you way better rewards than staking with an individual validator will ever do.And as the product person, I just put crazy ideas out there and wait for other people to build them. But I think we're at the very early stages of that. And so I'm super excited for a year from now, what crazy things people have built, where the rewards are actually way sexier in Stake Pools. And you don't even have to care about censorship resistance by the fact that you participate in Stake Pools, you will be helping that. So that's the future that I'm really excited for.Anatoly (06:09):What do you think FP?FP (06:12):So the first question was, what do we think about the efforts towards decentralization and I think we're getting there, but I think it's still early days. If you add all of our Stake Pool operators together, we may have 10 minutes all between us and that's less than ever stake. That's less than one validator. So there's still a long way to go. And they charge 8% fees. What's going on? So definitely it is not a rational choice. It's more of a possibly just like inertia sort of thing.And then I would say, to me, there seems to be a little bit of a trade off between Stake Pools and decentralization. And what I mean by that is even between Stake Pools, there are Stake Pools that decentralize more and there are Stake Pools that decentralize less. And in some sense, there is a trade off here because if you stake with too many validators, then you don't get good APY and people don't want to stake with you. And of course, if you only stake with the best ones, then you're not really doing your job as a stake pool. So there's a little bit of a delicate balance here, but I like what Ella said in the sense that there's interesting financial instruments you can build on top, which should make the APY discussion, it just falls out.Anatoly (07:30):So the APY is between all the pools and validators are pretty close. They don't really deviate by more than like 10%. Do investors actually optimize for that right now or participants? Are they actually looking at that or are they making a decision once and not even thinking about it later for months on end? What kind of behaviors do you guys see both as a normal stake operator and a pool operator?Vasiliy (08:00):As a stake operator, I can say that there is a lot of people who absolutely look at returns. We usually, when we go into network, we prepare profit reports for them and show them they are staking with us and we get better returns and stuff like that because that's one of the points that node operator can actually differentiate on. And there is not a lot of them, basically. We offer the same service to people.But as a liquid staking protocols, there is a lot more of thing that can be a differentiator, way lot a lot. The node operator selection is one thing. Other thing is the opportunities to use your stake token in DeFi and CeFi and financial use for it. And this stuff beats these 0.1% point difference squarely. People don't care about the 0.1% point difference. But when they can actually use your token in 10 more protocols than the other person. So I think like, that's going to play as a serious factor way, way in the future, not for the few first years of stake, the liquid staking.Anatoly (09:20):So this is the difference between stable coins. Is how much penetration they have across DeFi protocols or exchanges even. Do you think exchanges are going to start having liquid staking like Lido, so Lido token?Vasiliy (09:38):Yes. I know it'll happen. It's not the matter of I think, I know it'll happen. It'll be inevitable. It'll start with smaller changes that don't have capacity to develop their own stake, liquid staking and don't have the network effect to make it a good option for people to use their exchange liquid staking. And then it comes to basically everywhere, I think. There is a pretty serious trading volume on liquid staking tokens right now and it's growing bigger month by month. So eventually, it'll be stupid not to waste them.Anatoly (10:19):FP, is that what you guys are most worried about or most working on? How do you get penetration across DeFi?FP (10:26):Yeah. I think so. Something that worries me is a lot of the protocols giving out emissions and the TVL is growing and all that. But I just wonder how much of it is organic growth because Stake Pools are very different from AMMs like ORCA or trading Texas, Mango where whereby in ORCA, they make their revenues from you doing stuff, from you trading or doing stuff. But in a stake pool, you want to do nothing. I mean, what we want our users is just literally put the SOL in us and just do nothing.So it is a little bit of a different incentivization. And I wonder whether these incentives are sustainable, because look, if you're chasing the people who are farming short-term yield, these are not the people that you want in your stake pool anyway. You want people who are in it for the long haul. So I'm a little bit worried about this.Ella (11:17):Yeah. To piggyback off of that. I think something that's uniquely interesting for Stake Pools that is not true for staking to an individual validator is yes, you want them to just hold their stake tokens in your pool, but you also do want them to participate in the broader project. And what I mean by that is when you have of governance tokens, you have the ability to actually impact where the project will go. And you have the ability to be active in a way that you can't be, if you are, let's say, in CeFi buying an index fund from Vanguard. They're not going to ask you, "Hey, do you have opinions about where Vanguard should go next?" And I think similarly, if you're staking to an individual validator, like sure, they might be earning you great rewards. That's very important, obviously. But I think at some point, everybody gets to a point where they say, "Hey, more rewards would be great, but what I really want is a community."And so I think Stake Pools that lean into this idea of, hey, we're going to give you this governance token, yes, hold your tokens. Do whatever you want on DeFi. But more than that, tell us what you want to see in the community and where you want the future of this project to go. I think that's a very unique power to Stake Pools that will organically grow. We just have to figure out how to market that in a way that's appealing to people who are institutional investors, retail investors, total crypto newbies, who don't even know what a Dow is. Don't know what governance tokens are, don't know what a stake pool is. So there's a lot of work to do there, but I think we have our work cut out for us because it lends itself to this very unique dynamic between all of the stakers.Vasiliy (12:56):The way I think about that is it will be a lot more market driven than participation in governance doing. People are usually who are staking as node operator and provided most of them, don't care to make governance decisions. You can actually look at how it will works with Cosmos and other proof stake blockchains, where governance is a part of staking. And you can see that most people don't vote apart from how they validate the votes, where they do.They select basically a company that is aligned to them or maybe select the person that give them best returns. And then they don't take a look at governance usually. That's not true for all people, but that's a clear majority that delegates the governance power and it'll be pretty much the same with Stake Pools with liquid staking protocols. They won't be able to even to connect with most of the holders of the staking tokens, because they won't be like passionate enough to connect back, to understand what they want. So it'll be very indirect.There will be staking pools that gouge some of the governance decision from stakers, but not from all of it. Not even from most of them, like from 10% of them, by volume and not by number. By number, it'll be like probably not 10% like about 0.1%, but they will take much more or maybe about the same pressure from protocols that uses staking token from the stakeholders in the blockchain ecosystem that don't use a liquid staking token by important like develop teams, develop clients and researchers as an ecosystem and stuff like that. And liquid staking pool will be a nexus of governance that will try to combine all this pressure in the single direction from stakers, from protocols, from major participants in the ecosystem.Anatoly (14:58):What is governance in a liquid stake pool? What is the function of it for the community that owns the token? What should they be looking at?FP (15:08):First and foremost, the delegation strategy. I think the community needs to decide the delegation strategy. I don't think this should be left to the founders or the creators of the stake pool. It should be democratized. I think another thing is fees. So I think the community should decide the…

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Gateways to Public Blockchains Ep #56 Dec 07, 2021

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Live from Breakpoint 2021, Ali Yahya (a16z) moderates a discussion about wallets, custody and the User Control Layer with Brandon Millman (Phantom), Filip Dragoslavic (Solrise) and Maria Phillips (Slope Finance).00:10 - Intro02:32 - Custodial vs. Non-custodial models for keys holding07:11 - Education is key11:37 - Building on top of user-controlled layers16:48 - Unbundling Wallets20:04 - Mobile vs. DesktopDISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.Ali (00:10):All right, welcome everyone. So today we have a great panel to talk about the user control layer. So everything that has to do with UX, interfaces, wallets, how people use their private keys to interact with blockchains, and how all of that plays into web 3.0, and the things that are being built in DeFi, NFTs, et cetera. And we've got only 20 minutes, unfortunately, which is an egregiously short period of time to cover such a meaty topic, but excited for it. It's going to be a great conversation. I'm going to start by letting our panelists, maybe introduce themselves. Maybe one minute kind of introduction, and then we can dive in. Does that sound good?Filip (00:50):That sounds good. I'm Filip from Solflare. We actually built the first wallet on solana. That was actually before magnet, July last year. And Solflare was the first taking wallet, and right now we have over 20% of solana circling supplies stake through Solflare, and we are expanding onto all platforms. We have a web browser, we have a browser extension. We just launched mobile on Friday. And we are just looking to give all our users the opportunity to access Solflare from whichever platform they want to. And that's what we're all about.Brandon (01:37):Hey, everyone, I'm, I'm Brandon Millman. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Phantom. Just got started back in May, and it's just been such an awesome journey. I just wanted to say thanks to everyone in the audience and listening back at home for helping support us on this journey, and to hit 1 million users recently. Each and one of you are one in a million to me, so really appreciate it.Maria (02:03):Hi everyone. I'm Maria Phillips with Slope Finance, I'm head of communications. Slope Finance was the first mobile wallet on solana and we have over 150,000 downloads and an MAU of 95%. We are mobile first. Yeah, fantastic. Delighted to be here today.Ali (02:23):Amazing. Well, thank you guys. Well, let's start with, I think one of the basic questions about how user interfaces should interact with a blockchain. And that is the question of whether the keys should be held by the user, or if those keys should be held, or might be held by a company in the middle, like say a company like Coinbase or a company like that, where that would be kind of a custodial model versus having things being non-custodial and sitting at the edges. And I think we all kind of know what the ethos of this space is, but of course there are many trade offs. And so I'm curious to talk through how you guys think about those trade offs, and what are the kinds of things that we can do to empower the user as much as we possibly can.Filip (03:04):There's two different approaches like custodial and noncustodial. Noncustodial is in a true spirit of crypto where you actually control the keys. You control their finances and no one can actually take it away from you. I talked to someone from Algeria and he told me how important that is for them.Ali (03:24):Yeah.Filip (03:25):Since I don't live in a country like that, I didn't know that's so important for them because at one point in time, someone can actually get something from the bank account, they lose everything. But on the other hand, all people are actually used to, don't have that responsibility of just holding all their finances with them. So we have bank accounts, we trust banks with our money and it's going to be a long road to educate old people, to get from the custodial to the non-custodial thing. And I don't think that it's ever going to happen in a big way, but as all crypto people here are, we are like early adopters and we want to try new things, but the vast majority will always stay non-custodial. And there's always going to be those two approaches.Ali (04:19):Yeah. Makes sense. What do you think, Brandon?Brandon (04:22):Yeah, I'll start off by saying that at Phantom, our goal is to make the decentralized web safe and easy to use for everyone. And you know, what that means is expanding past like the very small number of users we have now to tens of millions and billions in the future. But you know, the thing is that giving private keys directly to users, is sort of akin to giving them keys to like a super car Ferrari, it's like super powerful, but not everyone needs all that power. And I'll say, actually, I think there's actually more than just this dichotomy of like non-custodial and custodial. It is actually a bit of a range of different techniques that are kind of somewhat in the middle. So I think there's things like social recovery, multi-party computation, premier secret sharing, tourists, those sort of things. And I think all of those techniques have not really been given the chance to really been taken to their like full extent. So yeah, we're really excited to kind of explore a lot of those options and sort of bring more custodial flavor, to non custodial tools.Maria (05:32):When we look at our user base, okay, number one, India, number two, US and number three, Malaysia. Everyone of our customers really are accessing via mobile, and that onboarding, and that access is a huge concern to us to make it as easy as possible. So we are looking at different innovations in this space. And especially because we're looking at being the gateway from web 2.0 to web 3.0, and being able to link activities in decentralized identity is what we're calling it. Being able to identify people in specific ways, according to their activities. And hopefully we're going to use that to lower the access and entry barrier for our customers to make it as easy as possible. And a better experienceFilip (06:16):Just wanted to add that actually education is so important and just getting people to know how crypto actually works and why is it so good for them? That's actually one of the things that, what we actually launched our sulfur academy. So we have blogs and guides to capture the users and tell them, okay, this is how works. Because there's a lot of scams out there. I mean, we both know that because before we actually launched mobile, we have caught three fake wallets. We actually met one of the developers who made those fake wallets reached out to us. And told us, oh, I'm so happy that you're using our wallet at the wallet that I made. And he was actually commissioned by someone else to produce fake wallets for Solflare and Phantom. So that was mind blown to us. He felt so bad, but he didn't know that. And so education is key actually to preventing users, for getting scammed and actually get so burnt that they say, oh, okay, all crypto is a scam. So that's why...Ali (07:22):I think this point of education is really good because I think there are two philosophies in this space. One of them is crypto wants to be seen. This is a line from Cavan, who's a founder of foundation. And his view is over time, people should become aware of what crypto is. People should become aware of the way that private keys work. They should become aware of the fact that holding your own private key is very different than signing into a web 2.0 service. And that's one philosophy that these things will become front and center. And that education will be a big piece of this and that you actually, as an application developer, should not be trying to hide it away, right. That you should not be trying to fully abstract it such that the user actually does not know anymore that they're interacting with a blockchain.Ali (08:05):And then a different philosophy would be more like a product and a very pragmatic point of view, which is people have a very hard time understanding how all of this works. And so instead, what you should do is you should abstract it away. You should make it look as much like a web 2.0 thing as possible, so that you can get people on board. And then over time, maybe you shift towards a more kind of web 3.0 native user pattern. And those are two very different ways of building a product. And I'm curious how you guys think about that. I mean, your point about education, how do you think about education?Filip (08:38):Yeah, I think educating users is actually the key to it. I mean, they don't need to know like 90% of it.Ali (08:45):Yeah.Filip (08:45):It's totally fine if they do the very basics and if they interact with, for example, much more complicated protocols, they don't need to know what goes on in the background.Ali (08:55):Right.Filip (08:55):But they need to know when the app says, okay, you're now signing a transaction, what end means on the blockchain. And this is the only thing that they should know. And we should actually push as an industry, users to educate themselves just in those basics.Brandon (09:15):I feel like none of us here really know what the final conclusion of all of this web 3.0 tech is really going to look like. And I think we're just so early in the vast majority of people who are going to use these centralized technologies have not really used it yet.Ali (09:30):Yeah.Brandon (09:30):But I agree. User education is super important. Support is another thing that we've seen that's super important. Unfortunately, the status quo nowadays is to kind of throw everyone into this zoo of a discord and let whatever happen. And unfortunately, a lot of projects basically just turn a blind eye to what happens in there. All these scams happen, people get DMed and whatever. So yeah, I think we really all need to take a much more user focused approach, not just in the applications themselves, but in, around just all of the surrounding infrastructure, support, education, et cetera.Ali (10:06):Yeah.Maria (10:07):Financial literacy and traditional financial services isn't great either to be honest.Ali (10:11):Yeah.Maria (10:12):But I do see this whole e-commerce space that we're involved in and looking at, I think that is a way to bring people into the space to understand it better.Ali (10:20):Yeah.Maria (10:21):If they start using cryptocurrencies or if they start using this in their normal daily shopping or activities, this is a way for them to understand that it's safe. You know, I paid for something, I got it. Yay. This is good. That's a real great way for them to understand and onboard in a really low level way, but get there.Ali (10:41):Completely.Filip (10:42):I just wanted to touch on the topic that Brandon actually mentioned, with support. We both did in our discords, people get scammed and stuff like that. So we tried everything. So we take this try and see what works approach. So we tried with telegram, we tried with discord. Yep. But people always get scammed. So I think we're launching periods to our live chat support on the website, but it's always like this fine line of, okay, how do you actually provide the users the best experience, but that they also feel still completely anonymous. It all depends on that fine line, and we need to see what works best actually.Ali (11:22):Completely. Well I think this actually segues well into how a user control layer application like a wallet or other kind of applications at that layer enable developers to build on top of them. Right. And I think that there's another kind of spectrum of different schools of thought or different approaches in that world as well, where you can think of meta mask or the kind of wallet that is very un-opinionated about how developers build things on top, as being on one end of the spectrum where you can really just sign anything using meta mass, you can sign just a binary blob because it doesn't provide you with very much context as to what it is that you're doing. And it's really on the developer to inform you as to what you're signing actually is.Ali (12:18):And then on the other end of the spectrum, can be much more opinionated about how the wallet integrates with specific applications, such that the wallet itself, the team who builds the wallet itself might integrate directly with a protocol that does lending. One example on ethereum world would be compound, you integrate with compound directly. And then there's a whole spectrum in the middle where a wallet could provide the tools for developers to build applications for it that are standard. And that give a little bit more structure and context for what that integration should look like, but it's not done by the team itself. And it enables an ecosystem to kind of emerge, to improve what the user experience might look like by enabling them to do things in a way that's more structured. So I think we need certain standards that help us build these applications in a way that are intuitive. And I'm curious how you guys think about this factor, or if you agree with it and, and where you guys kind of land on it philosophically.Brandon (13:19):Sure. Yeah. I can lead. Again, I'll preface everything by saying that we're in this mass experimentation phase where a lot of things are still being figured out. That being said, I feel like some of the walls that you've alluded to that have done more plugin type architecture. So namely origin, I feel like have sort of been left in the past a little bit, just because they were not really able to keep up with the explosion of all of these permissionless daps.Ali (13:50):Yep.Brandon (13:51):And, therefore were not really able to sort of participate in the network effect that gets created between daps and the users of those wallets. And so our opinion right now is to keep it very permissionless. Keep the current model going, as it has a lot of momentum and all of that. But again, that being said, I feel like we still have yet to see the final conclusion of all this, so things are always changingFilip (14:19):There's different trade offs between both approaches because if you integrated directly into the wallet, so firstly, the UX is going to be way better. And you could actually provide safe haven for all those new users because the permissionless world is the wild west. So you have like five great applications, you have five applications that will actually scam your money, so you could actually protect them. But on the other hand, you actually are gate keeping with your wallet. So this is why the panel is called whole user control layer. So the wallet actually dictates to which application the user can actually connect. And this may not always be in the best interest of the user because maybe that wallet has, for example, a business model with the dap that they have. So this is one par…

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Scalability and Cross-Chain Bridges Ep #55 Dec 02, 2021

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Live from Breakpoint 2021, Austin Federa (Solana Labs) moderates a discussion about the transfer layer and cross-chain bridges with Hendrik Hofstadt (Jump Crypto), Bryan Pellegrino (LayerZero), Alex Smirnov (deBridge) and Andriy Velykyy (Allbridge.io).00:10 - Intro02:50 - The importance of bridges not relying on Trust04:28 - Moving wrapped assets12:00 - Capital Efficiency of Bridges14:02 - Future of bridges16:28 - Integration of bridgesDISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.Austin (00:10):All right. Welcome guys. We're here to talk today about the transfer layer, scalability, cross chain bridging, the technical problems, the operational problem, the UX problems. This is just a panel of problems today, but it's also a panel on opportunities. We've seen a huge amount bridge over between other protocols in solana between other protocols and other protocols. We think of bridges as something new, but bridges are how DeFi has used Bitcoin as collateral for quite a long time at this point. It's kind of funny to think about how this started as we're taking an asset that's considered quite stable and solid that has no smart contract ability and being able to use that in Ethereum and that early day work really set the stage for, I think, a lot of what we're seeing today.Austin (00:55):But bridges go far beyond just this idea of how do I move something from chain A to chain B. There's roles in them as being decentralized ways to pass messages between different chains. There's a role for them in making users feel safe about trading across chains, and there's a role about them, about creating an exit ramp too. So that if you do something like buy an NFT for $69 million, you're not dependent on one chain to hold that. There's an ability migrate in a decentralized and trustless way. So we're getting into a bunch of that today. I'd say, let's just go ahead down the line and give a quick introduce to yourself and your project.Hendrik (01:31):Sure. I'm Hendrick. I'm with Jump Crypto and as Jump Crypto we're core contributors to Wormhole, which is a cross chain messaging protocol, connecting high value chains. And message passing in this sense means anything can flow between these high value chains, meaning assets and data. So your coins, NFTs, but also governance decisions and more information like as a base layer for developers to build on top of.Bryan (01:54):Bryan from LayerZero. Our focus is purely generic messaging interop. High level is connect every contract on every chain to every contract on every other chain.Alex (02:05):Hi everyone. My name is Alex Smirnoff and I'm co-founder of the deBridge Protocol, which is cross chain interoperability and liquidity transfer protocol. So the protocol itself allows to breach any arbitrary assets or data between any blockchains including solana of course, down the road.Andriy (02:23):Hi I'm Andriy from Allbridge, I'm a co-founder there. We currently support seven blockchains, and I hope that this number would increase to 12 by the end of the year. We started in July and since July, we bridged to solana one point half billion worth of assets.Austin (02:44):It's great to see. So I want to start out with just a level set question and Andriy, we'll start with you. Why is it important for a bridge to not rely on trust?Andriy (02:54):You see, when we speak about trusted bridges and trustless bridges, and that is the question, I suppose?Austin (03:00):Yes.Andriy (03:01):We have to consider that while we all here are building decentralized future, which should be completely trustless, in my personal opinion, sometimes we may sacrifice some layer of some level of decentralization to provide faster and better user experience. Because we are, in the end of the day, we are limited by the technology. And I have been thinking a lot about that because in the very end, we are building for our users and we want to create the product that would be used and used easily. And when we, in some cases, add too much of decentralization, that can affect user experience in a bad way. And this is something that we should consider as the owners of the business. So it is not so simple. I mean, as I said in the very beginning, I'm like a hundred percent over decentralization. I'm just saying, let's not forget about users. They going to use other product in the end of the day.Austin (04:08):Sure. So Bryan, when you're looking at something like this, is it possible... We talk about bridges, but these are more than just bridges. It's not like you're just, you take a bridge on a car, you're over the bridge, you're done, if the bridge falls down next week, you're still fine. You've gone over the bridge. But there's a different relationship here when we're moving wrapped assets. Can you talk a little bit about how users manage that and how you're thinking about that?Bryan (04:33):Yeah, I mean, I think that is the case when you do use wrapped assets, but I think wrapped assets are... You're always going to need wrapped assets for the primary chains. Because it's not like Ethereum can deploy a contract to mint Eth anywhere. But when you're talking about projects, Aave, Curve, like MIM, all these things, you're getting as projects move more and more to multiple chains, they're starting to deploy their token more and more on multiple chains and you have the ability to actually use native assets. So you can swap a real MIM for a real MIM rather than having four different bridges, which have four different versions of wrapped MIM coming in. And so I do think it's important to realize that over time the expectation should be that we do move away from wrapped assets. I don't think wrapped assets have to be the future for every project.Bryan (05:14):We've done it because we have something that's interesting on one chain and we want to create a synthetic on another chain, but these projects are starting to deploy wider and you will see much more of their own native. And especially when you have something, whether it's rebalancing or something like xSUSHI or [inaudible 00:05:32] any of these things. It's very important when you're getting a wrapped asset, you're getting like a Vanilla ERC20 equivalent where there is none of that and it creates a lot of issues. So I do think it's important to realize that move moving forward we will likely see or want to see native assets much more than wrapped assets.Austin (05:46):Yep.Alex (05:48):[crosstalk 00:05:48] I can adhere that wrapped assets is only kind of a gateway to get into the asset that user wants to get in because eventually cross chain interoperability will be all about the user experience. As a user, I don't want to know what is bridged at all. I just want to open my wallet like Fantom or MetaMask, I want to swap from one asset to another. And I don't care whether it went through wrapped asset or through some liquidity pools. I just want to receive the desired asset in the target chain. So I truly believe that eventually bridges will be kind of TCP/IP. What TCP/IP did for internet. So that's what true cross chain interoperability protocol will do for the internet of blockchain. So it's all about delivering of the user experience and yeah, the only point of interaction between user and DeFi will be the wallet or like decentralized applications, like 1inch or ParaSwap.Austin (06:42):Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm going to push you a little bit on that because every step in the wrapping process is a point of either failure or a point of trust. You could have Bitcoin that was originally wrapped onto Ethereum that's moved to Polygon, that's moved to solana, that's moved to Binance Smart Chain, that's moved back to solana. How do you simplify that chain of custody experience for a user? And how much should users actually care about that?Alex (07:08):I believe that users do not care about that. I mean the regular user. And as a wrapped asset, for example, what we do at deBridge, we have a wrapped asset in different blockchains, but if you bridge from the secondary chain to the secondary chain, so you basically burn the wrapped asset in one blockchain and you mint it in another. And of course there's kind of a additional risk of the consensus algorithm of the specific blockchain, but that the risk that user takes, because he know that he's going to bridge this asset to this blockchain and in case something will happen, like with the consensus algorithm in this specific blockchain, it's just the kind of collateral in this specific blockchain will be drawn. And that's the risk that user takes.Bryan (07:49):Yeah, I think the user doesn't care until something goes horribly wrong. And then the user cares a lot generally, but definitely.Austin (07:56):Do you think wrapped assets should trade a discount?Bryan (07:59):That's a good question.Alex (08:00):Of course not, I think.Bryan (08:03):I mean, there's some inherent risk depending on the wrapping mechanism. And I think likely over time, you could see that. I think demand right now, the value of a wrapped Bitcoin is... Well, all right. I don't want to trigger a lot of people, but you can generate yield on a wrapped Bitcoin that you can't generate in an actual Bitcoin. So there's actually maybe the argument that the wrapped asset should trade at a premium rather than a discount, but... [crosstalk 00:08:24].Austin (08:24):I love it.Bryan (08:24):I'll leave it there.Austin (08:25):I love it.Hendrik (08:26):I think the core assumption below that is really that notion of trust because that's essentially what the bridge establishes. The bridge establishes trust between chains that can't verify each other, or can't [inaudible 00:08:37] yet like verifying and proof of work chain, verifying different consensus mechanisms, all of these. In order to verify or establish trust between these chains, there's complex mechanisms that differ between any kind of chain. And I think that's what we all essentially bridge in the beginning at the very base layer. We establish trust between these chains and of all bridges I think the most important aspect should be establishing that trust and making sure that the bridge is going to be alive and the bridge is going to be secure.Hendrik (09:06):So the notion of [inaudible 00:09:09] and safety as the core properties of the bridges and then applications being built on top, but relying on this core aspect. And the risk that sits at this core protocol then trickles down into the applications built on top of the bridge, eventually wrapped assets. And that's where you could apply risk discount to wrapped assets. But that would hopefully be as small as possible if we all do our jobs right.Andriy (09:32):There is one more thing to that, like combining trust to the bridges and what we discussed before about the wrapped assets. So let's say we have an asset coming from Ether to Polygon. So it's being wrapped issued on Polygon. From Polygon we take this asset and rewrap it on solana. Then on solana, this asset, I'm speaking from experience, it's get on Saber our partners converted to the native asset on solana. So for user it is one seamless flow. It is good. It is all under the hood. But for us, it is sometimes scary because ultimately that means that bridges should trust each other. Because a point of failure before the assets come to my bridge can essentially affect my performance as well.Andriy (10:19):And it would not be my security problem. It would be problem of other bridge, but I will end up with the wrapped asset that is locked on my bridge, which due to the [inaudible 00:10:30] or something, it costs zero. So what should I do? And this is, again, the question, how can bridge trust each other? What should be the protocol? What can be the thing to unite us and resolve this issue?Alex (10:42):But that there is that liquidity providers actually [inaudible 00:10:46]. So it's not about like cooperation between bridges, but more like whether users are able to swap from like wrapped asset to any other asset within these specific ecosystem or like solana or Polygon, whatever. So, yeah, basically when liquidity providers provide liquidity in pair of like wrapped asset pair with a, for example, most liquid asset of these specific blockchain, they trust to bridge and they should kind of believe that bridge is truly the decentralized and trustless.Alex (11:12):So users do not bear so much risk, in fact. The risk is mostly on liquidity providers, but the question interoperability is not only about the swaps. First of all, it's all about the delivering of arbitrary messagings or arbitrary call data. Because what I personally would like to see is when protocols on Ethereum could be kind of composable with the protocols on Polygon. So let's say algorithmic stable coin on Ethereum opens up position on the Mango Markets to maintain its [inaudible 00:11:45]. And that would be awesome. And in order to accomplish that, we need to have truly decentralized channels to deliver messages between cross chains.Austin (11:54):Yeah. So Hendrik, you guys have been doing a little bit of work on that. I want to ask you two questions. The first is on the capital efficiency of bridges. And the second is on use cases for bridges that are not just assets.Hendrik (12:04):Yeah. I mean, right now, if we just look at the wrapped assets, I would say, of course they are in a sense capital efficient, but there could be more. Like there have been people talking about increasing capital efficiency by using the capital on the one side where it's locked into the bridging contract and then also using the wrapped asset on the other side. So essentially double yielding and double earning. I think that is something that is interesting, but I think that should live, obviously, above the base trust layer of the bridge. But this is something that is certainly interesting. But then when you're talking about should wrapped assets trade at a discount, you involve even more smart contract risk. You layer risk, risk, risk on top of each other. And they're the point of view X comes in that we've approached a couple times here.Hendrik (12:50):How does a user understand who they need to trust when I use this wrapped asset, when I use this bridge, when I use cross chain lending. And I think right now the user experiences do not really do that well. I think we've got a lot of work to do in educating users, giving them a reliable risk score, and then we can tap into these pools. But before, and especially as everything's moving so quickly, I'm kind of afraid in tapping into that. But as long as users are getting educated that this is happening, I mean, the bridges already allow that in a sense. Like for example, the Wormhole has message passing and you can add new layers on top, as we s…

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Brendan Eich - CEO & Co-Founder, Brave Software Ep #54 Nov 30, 2021

Show notes

Live from Breakpoint 2021, Brendan Eich sits down with Anatoly Yakovenko to discuss integrating Solana into the Brave Browser, the huge potential for a decentralized search engine and NFTs as an entry point to the metaverse.00:09 - Intro00:54 - Integrating Solana in Brave08:00 - Challenges with creating the browser09:23 - How to scale crypto to the general public11:57 - A Decentralized search engine14:46 - NFTs as entry point to the metaverse16:35 - Mobile vs. Desktop18:00 - Languages and smart contract development20:40 - How to grow crypto to mass adoption22:44 - Global Peer-to-Peer environment in CryptoDISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.Brendan (00:10):Great conference.Anatoly (00:11):I know. Thank you. I'm really excited to be on stage here with you. You're-Brendan (00:15):Same, [crosstalk 00:00:17].Anatoly (00:16):... One of my heroes. As a programmer, JavaScript is a language that really revolutionized how we do application development, how we build. It's the foundation of the web. And I often think of web 3.0 really just being the web, just part of the bigger web.Brendan (00:34):Yeah, me too. That's how the web grows, by evolution. So we think the web 3.0 browser should be the gateway to a billion crypto users. And we are therefore integrating Solana into Brave soon as we can. And here's the cool thing, this is an evolutionary path. We're going to make it so any dapp that is Solana enabled, wherever other chains, EVM compatible or Ethereum, whatever it supports, if it supports Solana as well, we'll make it use Solana by default. So dapp builders who build for Solana as well as other chains. In Brave it's going to use Solana. And that's going to just help, I think, pull all the dapps on the Solana.Anatoly (01:24):Super exciting.Brendan (01:25):You like?Anatoly (01:25):Yeah, it's wonderful. Yeah.Brendan (01:28):Let's see what else. What do we like about Solana? We like NFT games, we like DeFi a lot. We want to make it easy for users to earn and get yield without having to be super expert or do a lot of complex operations. So we're going to work on building that probably in the first half of next year into the wallet so that you can just robo-earn, robo-yield. And we want NFT galleries and NFT transactions to be super slick. I was inspired by the Jules Urbach talk earlier today, and the demo earlier here with NFTs, there were several of them actually, it's all good.Brendan (02:07):We want as many NFT marketplaces integrated as we can, so that's on the agenda. And yeah, [Radium 00:02:13] is there, of course. Radium's still earning, yielding good. The thing that we do now with basic attention token tends to have to settle on Ethereum and it's going to cost you gas. And our valued settlement partners like Gemini, Uphold bitFlyer in Japan, but once we're on Solana, I suspect that BAT, which is already reflected through Wormhole, proxied through Wormhole, might just find it's better to settle on Solana. What do you think?Anatoly (02:41):Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.Brendan (02:44):I'm giving you the softballs here. And we really do want to get this out to all users. We think, whether you're having a hard time in some part of the world where it's hard to get banks to let you save or borrow, or you're beyond banks like a lot of us are or want to be, Solana is the way to do it. And I mentioned auto earn already, got ahead of myself, but I think this is going to be huge. It takes some skill, you got to make sure if you get on the wrong side of yield farming, you go somewhere where the grass is greener, but we'll make it as automatic and easy as possible. And it's just so much better on Solana. I'm making you blush. And yeah, the dapp ecosystem is growing, but if we do this Solana default on multi chain dapps, I think we'll just pull every dapps that's really popular over that Brave users want, and I hope that's going to be every dapp.Brendan (03:37):So here's more NFT marketplaces. There are lots of cool projects in crypto, so we're not doing only Solana, we have obviously Ethereum, we're going to do Bitcoin in the new wallet. It's coming up fast, it's in the Brave nightly builds. And we might do other chains, but I think it's important to pick a chain as default. This is a lesson we learned the hard way with search engines, because when you make a search engine the default, first of all, you can get paid if you get a deal, not always true. And really the user expects to just type keywords into the address bar and search. We want the wallet to have a fast, good default and that's Solana. So enough said. And we're bringing it to mobile too. This is important. I think a lot of fragmentation has occurred due to how wallets are split across mobile and desktop. We're seeing some good mobile first or mobile also wallets. We want to do it mobile and desktop feature parody, evolve at the same time. And we're happy to do that with Solana's partner.Brendan (04:42):So the last bit of news is the BAT system is a triangular system that involves privacy preserving ads. And users opt into it to get 70% of the gross revenue. What we've built so far has a part of our BAT ad system requiring us to verify things, to be the trust third party, which is a security hole. And so we started a project called Themus and worked with several crypto projects to see if we could bring it to high speed chains that can do things, like you need smart contract systems for zero knowledge proofs, you need some part of it in the browser because you're measuring attention. You don't want to put your detailed attention log on any blockchain, however fast, because it'll fingerprint you. So we're using black box accumulators in the browser with Themus and we're then minting ZK proofs. And the cool thing about Solana is we can just put those on-chain, no aggregator, no trusted third party. So we're getting rid of ourselves, we're firing ourselves as a trusted third party. And that's something we're excited about.Anatoly (05:40):And that's awesome. That was, feels like two years of research. It took quite a while to get to that design.Brendan (05:47):And now it's going fast. I think now we've got good working relations with Solana and we can crank out the Rust Co, because we love Rust. Because I was executive sponsor of Rust at Mozilla, so I have a tear in my eye to see my little babies all grown up. And Amazon's hired a bunch of the Rust core team. It's okay, they need jobs. But yeah, we want BAT to be fast, low fee, DeFi base pair and for ads on Solana. So Brave and Solana are doing the new crypto and ad system and it's going to be awesome. Thanks.Anatoly (06:24):That's awesome. I'm a huge fan of the web, huge fan of all the work that you guys have done and Brave. And I remember pre-mobile days, I was working on Brew and I was trying to optimized the web and flip phones. And there was a brief moment where the iPhone came out, we had a browser, and it felt like the web has opened up. And then it just got away from us.Brendan (06:49):That's right. Jobs said when he did the iPhone one, he said, "The web finally works on a phone." And then the story I heard from somebody who would is that they had to port a bunch of games which were C++ or whatever, and they had to do native apps. And they never looked back after that. But I think the web can always catch up and should catch up. And web 3.0, if you have this evolutionary path with dapps and dapp triggers from webpages, then you just evolve into it.Anatoly (07:19):Yeah, that to me is the really exciting part, is there's now an opportunity to have cryptography power the next generation, how web is monetized. Whether it's through advertisement, like with zero knowledge proofs or through direct payments and micro payments. Do you feel like Apple's going to crush us?Brendan (07:41):People a few years ago were worried about this Facebook thing, Libra and now DM. And they got crushed because some politicians hate them. But Apple is very cautious, and if they're doing anything with blockchains, it's a ways out. And then when they arrive in, it's going to be the diva at the party at midnight, like, "Start the party now," and the booze has already run out. So we're going to drink all the booze first.Anatoly (08:06):All right. I'm down for that. What are some of the challenges with building a browser for general consumers, but also with cryptography?Brendan (08:17):This is the problem with browsers is they are universal apps. You spend a lot of your digital life or online life in them. And so if you make the crypto stuff be this expert only area, or it's scary. I use wallet apps, I use ledger hardware wallets, but it's a little bit scary because you feel like, "Did I forget my pin in or did I have to reset it and do the word list?" And there's some anxiety and fear of loss. We want to make crypto be a positive sum, that's why the robo-earn is important to us. Just like with BAT private ads, you could get 70% of the revenue.Brendan (08:53):So you're always building up your assets as well as spending or sending them. And it should be slick, it should be for e-commerce. You can even do things like dis intermediate Amazon. I won't give away all my secrets, but we think we can do that without having a bunch of JavaScript user scripts attack every merchant checkout flow. We think there's a way to get into the interchange charge and do it. And crypto everywhere. It should be slick, should be easy, should be comfortable, make you feel like you're going to win, not lose.Anatoly (09:23):What about custody and keys? How do I get my parents to understand this stuff?Brendan (09:28):Yeah, it's really a little different, but we're looking at Taurus, we're looking at various ideas for backing up your keys that don't just put it on paper and word list in the safe, which we've all been through. And in some ways, the old web went with username and password and had to add a second factor, which often had to be a temporary access number generator on your phone. So at that point you're almost as complex as self custody. I would say you just have this more conventional recovery path. You lose your phone, you know your email, you can try to prove that you're the same person to Coinbase or whatever. But I think self custody has a complimentary role and we want both. We want people to use self custody and be comfortable with it, so we're looking at all these usability challenges. And we think we can get it just almost as good. And then unfortunately the regulators insist, if you want to do Fiat on/off, you're going to go through a custodian.Anatoly (10:20):Of course. The challenges, that's the exciting part. No one has figured this out yet and we're going to dive right in and see, how can we actually scale crypto to the general public?Brendan (10:31):Make it easy for your parents.Anatoly (10:32):Yeah. Yeah, would love to see it. What do you guys see as the tension between the app store on the mobile device and the mobile web?Brendan (10:42):Discoverability is always a problem. And we don't want these brutal curators like Apple. So having lots of stores is good, but then you have the need for a search engine, which Brave now has, which is a private engine and also involve users opting into building the index incrementally, that's the web discovery project. So we're going to aim, because we're very crypto first and our ad sales teams, one of who's here, always looks at crypto options and NFT options, we're going to aim at making our search engine best for crypto. It already uses [inaudible 00:11:14] charting, and it's still in beta, but we're working out all the kinks, so I think search, the good old search we remember from 2004 when Google was great needs to come back and it needs to be the way you find stuff in marketplaces and crypto exchanges.Anatoly (11:29):That's awesome. What kind of information do you think users would want out of a crypto first search engine or curated environment that's different from the traditional web?Brendan (11:39):Search almost gets into, is somebody trying to SEO you and compete for keywords? We're aware of this problem and there's no silver bullet. But we think with crypto, you might actually have a better chance at mechanizing this and having a fair playing field, an automated system for finding the lowest fees and the best yields.Anatoly (11:57):Is there hope for a decentralized search engine?Brendan (12:01):Yeah. So I had a friend who was involved with pre-research, Rich Scrantom, and pre-research looks like it's running a bunch of nodes [inaudible 00:12:07] Google, which Google does not like. And if they're running on [inaudible 00:12:10] IPs, Google's going to shut them down or use their anti-bot team to take them out. We're building a legitimate search engine, but we can't decentralize the algorithm easily because search is sharing queries, looking for some kind of objective best results like page rank, the eigenvalues of the random walk. And decentralizing that is a research problem as far as I know. But we have an active team, we're evolving search and we need your help because we're trying to crowdsource the incremental indexing of the web, we're not trying to index everything from 1998 on. Only Google can do that. Hats off to them, but their time is passing.Anatoly (12:49):When I was growing up as an engineer, the web was just starting, I was really passionate about Linux. And I had this dream of a Microsoft-free personal computer. It feels like the web 3.0 is potentially a dream of ad exchange free, that parasitic Google free web. Is that possible?Brendan (13:13):If you don't collect the data you won't go wrong that way. There's still other ways that central powers can turn on their users and take advantage of them. But I think there is, and that means ultimately you might need hardware that's indie or that's user first. And Brave's not capitalized to do this yet, but I know people, including friends from Firefox OS, which actually after it folded at Mozilla, continued in [inaudible 00:13:37] OS. And there's an open source lineage that you can trace back. And people at Qualcomm, we both know-Anatoly (13:42):Of course, yeah.Brendan (13:42):... We are working on it at the time. So I think there's a chance for a new open source OS that has web 3.0 and none of this Java or swift native stuff. And JavaScript, web 3.0 All the way down.Anatoly (13:55):Are we going to end up building a phone?Brendan (13:57):Brave OS. I don't know, I'd have to raise some more capital.Anatoly (14:03):Yeah. Yeah, that's a way to nerd snipe me for a couple years.Brend…

Full show notes at the publisher

Daffy Durairaj - Co-Founder, Mango Markets Ep #53 Nov 23, 2021

Show notes

Daffy Durairaj is the co-founder of Mango Markets and is currently working full time as a developer in service of the Mango DAO.00:28 - Origin Story04:44 - Seeing the order book10:20 - The idea behind creating Mango Markets15:38 - Going from creating smart contracts to creating Mango17:32 - How big is the DAO?20:01 - The Launch29:15 - VCs and the launch32:43 - Decentralization and getting stuff done34:55 - Will DAOs ever compete with big tech companies?40:43 - What’s next for Mango Markets?DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.Anatoly (00:09):Hey folks, this is Anatoly and you're listening to the Solana Podcast, and today I have with me Daffy Durairaj, who is the co-founder of Mango Markets, so awesome to have you.Daffy (00:20):It's great to be here.Anatoly (00:22):So origin story, how'd you get into crypto? What made you build Mango Markets?Daffy (00:30):How did I get into crypto? So, I started off really not wanting to get into crypto. I was really interested in algorithm training. I did that in college and did some competitions that I did well in, and I wanted to trade equities, but it turns out if you have not enough money, if you have a few thousand dollars it's just not allowed. You're not allowed to algorithmically trade. There's a patent day trader rule, and I was infuriated and I was just looking around and I found Poloniex where you can do anything you want. The thing that actually hooked me first to Poloniex was the lending market because immediately as soon as I saw an open lending market, I was like, "Oh wow, I have to buy some bitcoin, and I have to lend it out." And, Poloniex was all bitcoin, and then it gradually got into just the meat of it, which was algorithmic trading and everything about crypto seemed exciting, but I actually didn't want to hold bitcoin. Poloniex was all bitcoin, but again, I think the government sort of pushed me in the right direction.I was like, "Okay, I don't want to hold bitcoin, I'll hedge off my risk on BitMEX, but again, not open to US persons, and so I was kind of reluctantly holding bitcoin and thinking, all right, I have a few thousand dollars if things go bad in this whole bitcoin thing. I'll come out okay. I'll get a job or whatever, but just never got a job, just kept holding bitcoin and continue to trade crypto, and I did that for about five years. Then, I wanted to actually start trading on chain because I thought this was probably for a lot of the reasons that you built Solana, the censorship resistance, and the global liquidity of it, and the openness of it, the fact that you're not excluding people that have a few thousand dollars. I wanted to build on chain and I was just not very bullish on a lot of things, so I kept going back to trading, and then I saw Serum DEX, and I was just hooked. I placed a trade and it felt totally natural and normal. It wasn't like $40 and takes 20 seconds and you don't know if it... And, then MetaMask was jammed and you're like, "Oh, but how do I cancel this?" So, that was a long-winded way of saying I was a trader and then I saw Serum DEX and then I had to start building the tools that would make Serum DEX even more fun.Anatoly (02:59):That's awesome. I got into it by trading. Basically, I set up like an Interactive Brokers IRA account, and that let me kind of bypass the rules.Daffy (03:11):Really?Anatoly (03:13):With a very small amount of money. I think they probably closed these loopholes already. I wrote a bunch of stuff on top of their Java STK and started trading there.Daffy (03:22):I remember I actually got started that way too. I did a bunch of stuff for their Java, and we can tell you we're both programmers. We wanted to build this money machine. It's so fascinating, and it's a machine that-Anatoly (03:40):It prints money.Daffy (03:40):It does things and it prints money. What more could you want? So, I got started with Interactive Brokers, but I guess the whole IRA thing... Because I was a college student, and so even talking to an accountant would take a huge dent out of my net worth.Anatoly (04:01):Totally, it's all really not designed for... The whole financial system in trading in the US is designed to funnel retail towards an app like E-Trade or Robinhood, which takes a cut, and then sells that trade to somebody else, who will take a cut, and then 10 other people until it gets an exchange, and that's how everybody's protecting their neck. They're all taking a little slice, and I think what's cool about crypto is that even centralized exchange like FTX is 1,000 times better and less extractive of the users than anything in traditional finance, simply because they can guarantee settlement. Such a very simple thing.Daffy (04:49):You feel it right from the beginning. You go to Poloniex in 2016, and it's like, oh, you have an email, you have deposited bitcoin, and now you're just lending to people. So, just talk about not being extractive. To see the order book through Interactive Brokers or Ameritrade or whatever costs you a lot of money and it costs them a lot of money to provide it, and I don't think I'd ever seen an order book. This was my passion, this is what I love to do, and I've never actually seen it.There's that story of the blind men who are touching this elephant, and so I had kind of figured out maybe what the order book looks like, but then on Poloniex, you go there and you just see the order book and you see all the lights flashing and you're like, "Oh, this is it. This is where the trades are happening." And, that's free, and of course, a big part of Mango Markets as well is you can see the order book. That's it, that is it, there's nothing more, and it's all on chain and all this stuff. So, in terms of not being extractive, it's a really big piece of what motivates people to come in.Anatoly (06:02):I don't know if you ever tried to get data, real data. I wanted timing information when a bid comes in or when an ask comes in versus when it's filled. How do I get access to it? Because when you get data from any of these places, basically it's like a little better than Yahoo Finance, which is like every five minutes they give you a low and a high.Daffy (06:27):I don't know, did you ever succeed at doing that in Interactive Brokers?Anatoly (06:32):No, I recorded some of it, but it just never had that fidelity and it always felt like a gamble. I'll build some models and sometimes stuff would work locally against my simulations, but then whenever I would actually try to run it, I'd see that fills take a little longer than they should and all this stuff really feels like you're not interacting directly with the trading system, that somebody when they see your order they're like, "Well, maybe I'll put my order ahead of yours or do whatever or slow you down a bit." It just sucks.Daffy (07:16):It feels very opaque, it's like a black box, and of course, this is all for people like me who are kind of looking on the outside looking in. So, if I had gotten a job at Citadel or somewhere, then I could probably see what's actually happening, but the fact that the vast majority of people are going to look at it and not really know it's actually happening, not everyone wants to see an order book. That's an important fact, but there are a large number of people who need it to be a little bit transparent to be involved.Anatoly (07:49):What I hate about it is that there's a lot of people that make a lot of money from you not seeing, that they're in the business of information assymetry and fuck them.Daffy (07:58):So, it's not a family friendly podcast, so it's good. I was going to ask that. So, there's a funny story on RuneScape. I don't know if you've ever played RuneScape.Anatoly (08:17):I played Ultima Online, which is I think similar vibes in the early days.Daffy (08:22):Yeah, so on RuneScape, just like on the point of no one being able to see anything, on RuneScape, also they had an order book because that's the most natural thing to do, and I actually had to figure it out from first principles. I would place a trade and I would see that sometimes it would get executed and sometimes it would not get executed, then I realized, okay, if I place a trade for these water runes or something or oak logs or something, and I put the price really high it gets executed at some price that's not the price that I said, and then I was able to form this concept of that's the asking price. I didn't even have the terminology for this, and then I did the same for set the price to zero for a trade and now I found the bid, and now I can make a lot of money actually underbidding the best asker and overbidding the best bid.Anatoly (09:18):So, you're market making.Daffy (09:20):Yeah, so it's funny, I was reminded because you said there's a lot of people who make a lot of money in you not knowing, and I was just minting money. It took me years to accumulate like 1 million gold pieces in RuneScape and then I was able to just 30X it in a month.Anatoly (09:46):Too bad RuneScape is not a crypto currency. Whoever is running RuneScape, you're missing a huge opportunity right now to just go full crypto.Daffy (10:00):There was some talk about some NFT or something on Twitter. Somebody was trying to encourage Jagex, the company, to get involved in crypto, and of course, I tried to signal boost it, but eventually everyone falls in line.Anatoly (10:17):How did you end up with the idea for Mango Markets?Daffy (10:21):So, I have to give credit to dYdX. It was like 2019 and I hadn't really considered that this was possible. I was heads down writing, trading algorithms and trading crypto just kind of holding all of my wealth in bitcoin and I was borderline bitcoin maxi on that, and just seeing dYdX do it in those early days... Now of course, they're way more successful now. Those early days seemed that you could do leverage trading on chain, and they kind of showed it as a proof of concept, which I just kind of started pacing back and forth like, oh my God, this is changing our worldview completely.Ethereum was slow and whatever, so years went by. Actually, maybe just like a year, and then I saw Serum DEX where I felt finally, okay, all the pieces are in play and also I wanted to market make on Serum DEX, but I really need leverage. I don't really need leverage, it just makes market making dramatically more efficient and safer. Leverage is just this tool that people who are involved in the financial plumbing really need, and it wasn't there. I was like, "Okay, this is the time and I have to learn how to code smart contracts," which sounds like a very scary and daunting task, but it was not that bad.Anatoly (11:54):The scary part was that you guys were building on a platform that was really rough around the edges at the time.Daffy (12:02):Well, no one told me that shit was really rough around the edges at the time. That was actually maybe important. You come in and there was nothing to do, this was August of 2020, things were not locked down necessarily here in the United States, but people kind of scattered. No one was hanging out in the major cities, they had kind of went to go live with their families, as did I. I fled San Francisco and went to the rural part of North Carolina. So, there was nothing going on and you just have all the time in the world and bitcoin is doing well, so that's funding you in a way.Bitcoin is this big, or crypto in general, it's all the people who bought it or own some crypto, as long as it's going up, it's kind of funding whatever zany side projects you have in mind. So, this is just a side project. Wouldn't it be cool if I could access this part of the world or this technology? And so, that's why chewing glass... You probably coined that term, I don't know, that's why chewing glass wasn't so hard because that pressure to... You have all the time in the world basically.Anatoly (13:30):Basically, COVID and lockdowns were so boring that chewing glass to learn how to code smart contracts with Solana was like a reprieve from the boredom.Daffy (13:45):And, I've heard you kind of say, okay, a bear market is when everyone is coding. To give the opposite perspective, I feel like a bull market, unlike much more chill, oh yeah, nothing really matters. Crypto is going up, it doesn't matter what I do. The rent is going to be paid for, everything is going to be fine, might as well engage in high variance new ideas, new projects. In a bear market, I'm very I got to grind, I got to squeeze out a couple of more bips out of this trading algorithm because I got to pay rent. So, that's the bullish case on bull markets.Anatoly (14:30):That you can try something crazy. That is the point where people enter this space is in a bull market. It's that they kind of start coming in droves because they're like, "Everything is crazy and I can also be part of the party." But, it's hard as a founder to stay focused because you are in that high variance, high risk taking kind of mindset.Daffy (14:58):There's a trade off of during a bull market there's a lot of things looking for your attention, and a bear market is very calm, or it can be. If you built up a lot of liabilities during the bull market, now you have to stay afloat during the bear market. Maybe it's calm in the external world, but internally it's not calm. You're like, "I got to do X, Y, and Z today every day." There's that natural pressure.Anatoly (15:32):So, you decided to learn coding on smart contracts on Solana. How did you end up going from there into Mango?Daffy (15:39):Initially, it was called Leverum. Not it, there was just an idea and there was a command line tool where you could... The YouTube video might still be out there, and Max was out there somewhere on the internet and he saw it and he thought it was a great idea. And so, he reached out to me and we did some other things like speculative about a prediction market, and then we were like, "Okay, no one is going to build margin trading." A lot of people are saying it, but it doesn't look like if we just wait it's just going to happen in the next couple of weeks or something. It's probably we just have to build it.Not we just have to, but we totally should. This is clearly a very important piece of the Solana ecosystem. So, we started building it. Mango was just we were thinking alliteration is good. Everybody loves mangoes, it's a fruit that I have never heard of anybody who doesn't like mangoes. It's probably the high sugar content and Mango Margin was the idea, but then we got the domain Mango.Markets. It's kind of evolved now. When you're starting off with something, you have kind of a narrow scop…

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Alexis Ohanian - Founder, Seven Seven Six Ep #52 Nov 16, 2021

Show notes

Live from Breakpoint 2021, Alexis Ohanian sits down with Raj Gokal to discuss web3 and the $100 million fund to support decentralized social media projects on Solana.00:10 - Intro2:20 - Announcement of Seven Seven Six and Solana Foundation collaboration9:53 - GM, Twitter, #FreeRaj14:31 - Discussing Web 3.0 and the future of decentralized social media18:04 - User experience and building on Solana22:48 - New types of governance and delegation25:59 - How crypto can change the way we see the worldDISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.Raj (00:10):(silence). Ooh, beautiful.Alexis (00:11):This is fun. Hey everybody.Raj (00:13):It's electric.Alexis (00:13):All right. All right. Nice to see you all too. Oh, there we go. Okay. This is big. This is just the building of a new internet. Probably nothing.Raj (00:26):Probably nothing. It's such an honor, Alexis, really, to be on stage with you. It's like a dream. I've been a power user of Reddit, and I saw the way that you created that and the intention that you brought into it, and the intention you've brought into how we build technology that connects people together, and the conviction you have about how you want it to connect them for good. Not pull them apart but pull them together. Three things that connect them, their interests, their common grounds, and give them the tools to do that.Alexis (00:59):Thank you, man.Raj (00:59):Yeah, it's been really awesome.Alexis (01:00):I feel grateful. I was a dumb college kid in 2005, starting Reddit. The inspiration were like message boards. And I ran a PHPBB forum. Shout out PHPBB. I think those bulletin boards are still cranking somewhere in parts of the internet, but it was a hope for a more connected internet. But I really had no idea what would come from it. I'm obviously grateful. Hopefully a few of you all are Redditors. Any? Couple, one or two? Thank you. Thank you for all of your upvotes and thank you for also admitting you're the least productive people here. So thank you for your candor. I got so excited as crypto started taking off because Reddit is where I dove in. R/Bitcoin is the community that inspired me to first invest in Coinbase back in 2012. R/Ethereum was the community that got me really excited about what could actually be done with programmable money and this concept of building an internet that was decentralized and truly in the hands of all the people creating content. And now what I am seeing here, especially within the Solana community, is nothing short of awesome.And we can just cut to chase and one of the reasons why I'm here is to announce a collaboration that we're doing. I have a venture fund called Seven Seven Six. We're earmarking with the Solana Foundation $50 million to invest in the next wave of social built on Solana. Because I think this new world... We were debating whether to do the announcement at the start or at the end, I'm happy we did at the start. It's good vibes. But my job these days is with our team to look for the next big thing, put our money into it, give our support, our advice, our feedback, and help build businesses that'll be even bigger than any of the ones I've created. And it's exciting because this actually fulfills ambitions that I remember having 16 years ago but that we just couldn't execute on because the technology did not exist. And so I'm going to take you down memory lane a little bit. We'll fire up some slides.This is actually the very first version of Reddit that went live in 2005. I was not a great web designer. I was not. I'm really proud of Snoo, our mascot. I created that while I was bored in marketing class. But this was the first version, and a couple of things to notice, karma score, absolutely stole that from Slashdot. But I realized, okay, if we can get people to be incentivized to post good stuff, we can get more people to post more good stuff. And we'll just use internet points. It'll just be made up. And so if you got an upvote, you would gain a karma point. If obviously you were downvoted, you'd lose one. As you can see here, I posted the first link to Reddit, the Downing Street memo, and I was promptly downvoted because my co-founder is a dick. I knew exactly who it was, because it was just the two of us in an apartment. I knew who did that, and I have -1 karma. But internet points were the way we got people to come together and produce high-quality content.If you could believe me, in 2005, no one believed me when I said that people would spend all this time on the internet creating content, sharing content, commenting on content, but clearly it worked. And as we saw more and more progress, I obsessed over even designing the up and down arrows. I probably did like 10 iterations. I'm embarrassed by how many different versions of up and down arrows I designed. But this was all with the idea that we could reward people and get them feeling like their contributions mattered and encourage the best behavior. You'll notice the leaderboard there, the stats. That little janky link was one of the most important part to the website back in 2005 because the top submitters cared so much where they were on the leaderboard that when the stats thing went down, we would get a flurry of emails from people saying, something's wrong. Fix the stats leaderboard. I grew up playing video games, probably like a lot of you, and this seemed like a pretty obvious mechanism to just motivate people to keep posting content.But again, we're talking about internet points that outside of the community don't really amount to much, even awards. So once karma points exceeded their value, because once people got far enough along on Reddit, a new user would come on and feel demoralized because the idea of one day getting a million karma points seemed impossible. So I had to create new games. These awards, I was inspired by GoldenEye on the N64 because the end of Deathmatch, even my friends who were terrible at the game and never won would still get a little fun award at the end, like most cowardly. And we would ridicule them for that. It turned out that's like you spend the least amount of time on the screen of other players during the match. And it was these novel awards that inspired the Reddit awards today. I literally have people who introduce themselves, not by their government name, not by their username, but by the fact that they are a 12-year Redditor or a 14-year Redditor.These badges, these awards that were just a game mechanic that I created 16 years ago without much thought have become a sense of pride. But I look at all these things and I think, damn, if only there was value beyond this world of this ecosystem, because there's clearly value there. And everything I've seen in the last few years, the reason I'm so excited about Web 3.0 is this is all the same mechanisms, except with real ownership. With real value gained by the people who did all the amazing work to make these platforms function. And then I can't not talk about swag. This was Reddit's original business model, and it was actually the first fight we had. So the first two months of Reddit, we got into a big fight because I really wanted sell merch. I knew that even though we had this burgeoning user base, that random strangers on the internet would want to buy t-shirts with our logo on it as a way to show solidarity with our tribe. It was a huge fight, finally won it, and I built a store. And this was before Shopify, before Stripe.This was like a janky PayPal. It was really hard to take money from strangers on the internet back in 2005, okay? But I get this janky storefront up. I filled the bedroom with probably like 300, 400 t-shirts and put it online, and within 24 hours, sold out. And then I spent the next day stuffing envelopes and taking garbage bags full of these t-shirts to the post office. And with every one of them I sent out, I felt a little bit validated because random people on the internet wanted to show their pride by making their torso into a billboard for us, and give us money for that privilege. Today, just seeing someone change their profile pic is an even bigger statement of that tribal solidarity. And again, maybe if you have one of these original 400 Reddit shirts, you could probably fence it on eBay for a few bucks, but you didn't actually capture the real value. There was tremendous value in being one of those early adopters and signing up to say, yes, I am a part of this. I want you to believe.And everything I see play out, even the most basic profile pic project, is a reminder that this is like the core atomic unit of building community online. And I just can't help but get even more excited because the rate at which this will grow is... it is hard to overstate. And even just thinking about where you all were, we were reminiscing backstage a year ago or two years ago with how far the Solana ecosystem has gone, I'm just very excited. So I'm thrilled to be announcing this fund with you. I hope we can do some amazing stuff together and fund the next generation of the social web.Raj (09:45):I think we totally will. It's totally going to happen.Alexis (09:47):Are you going to do that? Are you down with that?Raj (09:53):It's going to be incredible. I don't know if anyone was paying attention yesterday. Something interesting happens, right before Alexis and I went onto a... I think it was Fortune interview to talk about this... or Forbes, one or the other, to talk about this fund, I had gone on Twitter... GM everyone, by the way. GM.Alexis (10:20):Yes. Good morning.Raj (10:22):So someone who happens to be a good friend of mine, Sam Lessin, he used to run product at Facebook. I've known him for 10 years. He's the first person I've seen negatively respond to the idea of us all saying GM in crypto. And we all love GM. It's just good vibes, right? And so I went on Twitter and I said, "I'll kill you." But this wasn't me threatening Sam. I've known him for 10 years. We trust each other. Sam talks a lot about how... he was in the room when Venmo made the trust feature. I should be able to trust Alexis to be able to take as much money from me as he wants. We have a relationship. We should be able to flag that, right?All these little features, the nuances of how we connect with one another and how we trust each other and how we have relationships should be reflected in social. But right now there's only little pieces and it's the pieces that happened because one platform that becomes monolithic decides which features it's going to differentiate on. And so, yeah, I guess I should have expected this, and my comms people tell me that I should have expected it, but I got suspended on the first day of Breakpoint. And it was actually amazing because I'm super addicted to Twitter. This is the first time I've spent 24 hours not on Twitter in probably years.Alexis (11:44):Jack just wanted you to have a respite from [crosstalk 00:11:47].Raj (11:46):Jack's a meditator. He wanted me to just meditate on my feelings and beliefs and my actions, and I did. Just another point on this, it was a joke. It was a reference to this Costco founder who, when the CEO talked about increasing the cost of hot dogs, he said, "I will kill you." So this was sort of two ideas to get other in one tweet. There's a lot of nuance, like I said, in social. Sam and I know each other, so of course I would never kill him. And also if you know this joke, it's the idea that there are some things that are sacred, that are positive, that are inherently good. Like a chief hot dog for everyone that comes into Costco is like part of their belief system. GM is like part of our belief system. We should wake up every morning and talk to each other with good intentions. And if you're going to threaten that, I will kill you, right? And that joke...Alexis (12:47):Like a Costco hot dog.Raj (12:49):Like a Costco hot dog. And that joke, Twitter doesn't get it. The rules don't get it. It's going to be hard to regulate these things and moderate these things. But when all of it comes from one place, we just see that nobody's happy. Jack's not happy with the rules that he's been forced to put in place, which is why he's deciding to turn Twitter into a decentralized protocol. I think my fear, and I don't know if you agree, but Facebook's going to do the same thing. And Reddit's going to do the same thing. Everyone's going to do the same thing, but these things happen pretty slow, and there's opportunity to build from all directions. It doesn't have to be the old social platforms converting. We can build new ones and it doesn't have to be competition and it doesn't have to be winner take all.There will be hundreds of successful social media companies that are protocols and clients to those protocols, and choices will be made in programmable, modular ways between communities, just like Subreddits do that in certain ways. But it'll be much more fluid and we'll be able to govern these rules. I kind of see this pretty clearly, but I only see like maybe five or 10 companies trying it and building it. There should be 100. There should be 100 like tomorrow. So as we were talking with this reporter yesterday, it was a flurry of thesis. And even backstage, we just couldn't stop talking about all the ways that this future is going to happen. And I think it's going to happen quickly. And I realized $50 million is not that much for the number of teams and stabs at this problem that I think can happen in the next 12 months. So we're going to increase it to a $100 million.Alexis (14:31):That's right. See that, we lured you in with the 50. Surprised you with the hundo. And look, this is real. Normally, incumbents have had, and Zack has taken full advantage of this, incumbents have had a huge unfair advantage with the distribution. As social evolved, Facebook can gobble up, Instagram can gobble up, WhatsApp can get the economies to scale that distribution. But I would argue in Web 3.0 it's actually a liability because the intention with which you're building these new protocols and these new communities starts from the very beginning. It seeds the foundation of how people think about the platform. And the baggage of Web 2.0 infrastructure and the Web 2.0 precedent is that you're ultimately just harvested for an advertiser. And that factors into product decisions. That factors into design decisions.And what's really exciting is that there's a whole new slew of founders who have a chance to jump into a very energized community and actually start building something with a very different business model in mind and very different product instincts and very different design focus, and that's compelling. And I think we could see new platforms emerge very fast. We talked about Discord back…

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Tommy & Taylor Johnson - Co-Founders, PsyOptions Ep #51 Nov 02, 2021

Show notes

Tommy and Taylor are the founders of PsyOptions, a DAO developing the leading options primitives on Solana.00:09 - Introduction and Origin Story04:04 - What are the challenges / improvements in Solana?11:49 - Integration of Serum v314:32 - Adoption of PsyOptions17:19 - Architecting the system22:11 - Liquidity mining vs. options trading26:27 - Background in trading options28:05 - DeFi vs. Traditional finance products30:56 - Gaming as a market32:56 - Exciting things out of the hackathon34:09 - Announcements for PsyOptions37:53 - If Solana could change one thing?DISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.Anatoly (00:09):Hey folks, this is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have with me Tommy and Taylor, co-founders of the PsyOptions protocol. Awesome to have you guys.Tommy (00:18):Thanks for having us.Taylor (00:19):Thanks for having us.Anatoly (00:21):Cool. So what's the origin story? How did you guys get into crypto and what made you build PsyOptions?Tommy (00:27):Crypto, it goes back to... I remember watching the Ethereum ICO, just being a broke college student, but felt we were too broke to actually throw anything into and that's a big regret, but that shaped up how we got into Solana later on. Really dove deep into everything back in 2017, right before the summer hype. And then in the summer hype, tried developing a little bit on Ethereum, doing some solidity development in the spare time, but I never jumped full time into it until PsyOptions. Taylor has a little bit of a different history with crypto.Taylor (01:03):Yeah. I've actually been full-time in crypto since late 2017, after Tommy and I shut down a previous business we started in school. We were looking for different things to do and I knew crypto had a lot of hype in 2017. I was like, "All right, this is definitely an industry I could see myself being a part of." I eventually took a job at Blockfolio and then as well as doing some freelance solidity development and then been full-time ever since.Anatoly (01:27):How did you guys meet? What was the genesis for you guys to go build PsyOptions?Tommy (01:32):Well, Taylor and I are twins, so we met a long, long time ago. We've always been hacking on ideas and stuff. And I guess, Taylor had his eye on Solana from 2018, right Taylor?Taylor (01:47):Yeah, pretty early on. I remember Multicoin writing about it. I was like, "Oh, this is actually a really sweet architecture, solves a lot of problems that we saw in Ethereum." And kept following before Mainnet beta was launched.Tommy (01:59):Yeah. And so we had been tinkering around, created a GitHub organization last summer, like the same one we're using now and just started reading the documentation. And then had a few projects we tried in the fall that never really took off. And then in October we were surfing with Tristan from FTX and he was just talking about Serum and everything that they were working on. So we knew what was in the pipeline and had that in the back of our mind. We did the first hackathon, did in place, built a trusted third party Oracle. And then after that had an issue with TradFi, trying to get API access to automate a options trading strategy, and that was what kicked it off. We were for fresh off that first hackathon, wanted a fresh idea, had our feet wet in Solana. And it was like, "Taylor, what if we just built options into the blockchain? We can get this API access built in. We have the order book already there, there's some basic infrastructure." And that was the genesis.Anatoly (02:59):That's awesome. Limited access to data was one of the reasons I started building this thing. Because I used to try to build stupid deep learning models on interactive brokers and you never have access to data. It's always even the quality is really suspects. It's like, "Do I really know that this is where things got executed? Or did they just copy and paste stuff from a database with a bunch of errors?"Tommy (03:26):Yep.Taylor (03:26):That's terrible. Yeah. If you want good data quality, you have to pay up for it. That's why Bloomberg Terminal is what 20, 25K a month. And if you're just the hobbyist or just trying stuff out, it's just not feasible to pay that much.Anatoly (03:41):Yeah. This is to me I think part of the beauty of the space right now, is that you can build up a lot of what finance is with just a bunch of hobbyist. It's like Linux. Linux in the '90s, you're competing with Microsoft, billions of dollars of engineers buildings stuff, but it's just a bunch of people over the weekend can compete. It's crazy.Tommy (04:03):Yeah. It's wild.Taylor (04:04):I think that's one of the best parts, all that coordination.Anatoly (04:07):So what are the challenges? You guys are one of the earliest I would say teams working on Solana. What have you guys seen, or what were the real painful points? What got better? What still sucks?Tommy (04:18):Oh man. All right. This first Solana season hackathon, the one that we won, we wrote everything in Solana native. I remember pinging [Armani 00:04:29] back in February saying, "Hey, I hear you're working on some framework, can I poke around? And checking out the repository." But it wasn't anywhere near complete or, I didn't dive in enough to use it for the hackathon. So now I rewrote the entire American option protocol in Anchor and it took me very little time to actually write that. So the development life cycle and just ease of getting up to speed, has improved ridiculously.Taylor (05:07):Yeah. And documentation has improved too.Anatoly (05:07):That's awesome. What is Anchor doing for you guys that Native, Rust isn't?Taylor (05:13):It's helped simplify our integration tests. So that's one thing that we try to do when we first started was, we wrote our own integration testing framework in Rust. I guess I wouldn't even call it a framework, it was pretty rough. But Anchor takes care of that. You're just writing your test in JavaScript, it's pretty easy to get up and running. And then also handling a lot of different edge cases that you wouldn't have to think about, checking account addresses and other things just to bring safety in. And it removes a lot of those headaches that, if you're just getting started and trying to hack something together, you're not really going to be thinking about.Tommy (05:48):Yeah. I think the account, de-serializing accounts, token accounts and things like that. You just have your accounts structure, passing that into the context and it de-serializes all that. The amount of little issues we had just because oh, we mis-ordered one thing in the array when we were refactoring, the accounts array, and it's like, "What the hell is going on?" And then you're trying to debug and add messages and stuff, because you're just like, "Oh man. And what is..." And then it all turns out to be a typo or you fat fingered moving one line up or, and it was... So the account structure and dealing with that is just incredibly easy. You don't have to de-serialize anything yourself.Well, anything that has a token, SPL token program or even some of the DEX infrastructure. And it makes cross program invocations a lot easier. I've been working with some teams for this hackathon, and wrote a bunch of cross program invocation examples for these teams to get up and running with PsyOptions pretty quickly. And it was just seamless for them to use our data structures and serialize it, de-serialize, because as long as we're all using the same framework, it works.Anatoly (06:56):Yeah. This was is my decision, so you can blame me, but I really didn't want to build a shitty framework. And until people started building on Solana, it was really hard to know, what do they need? I think it would've been worse if we built a bunch of code that nobody could build with, because it would've been incomplete. I'm going to say, it takes a lot of discipline to do that, versus laziness.Tommy (07:22):It makes sense to offload it on to the actual DAP developers. It's a different beast when you're programming the underlying system versus the actual just Solana runtime program. So it makes a lot of sense how Anchor came out and who really is leading it.Anatoly (07:40):Can you guys tell me what worked really well? Or what features or anything for any other Devs that when they're coming into building on Solana, what stuff actually feels like a superpower?Taylor (07:52):Well, one thing that's improved a ton is the SPL token program and how you manage the token accounts and whatnot. That's definitely something that a lot of the new developers on Solana don't have to deal with. But back then we were building into our UI the ability to have multiple accounts for the same SPL token and it was super frustrating and whatnot. So using those associated token accounts and other kind of, I guess you could call them rapper programs or things like that, that just improve the UX significantly. Understanding those and why they're there is pretty important when someone's getting started.Tommy (08:30):I think taking it a step further too, how does the associated token program work? And what's really under the hood is the program derived address. I put together some documentation for people starting to onboard to PsyOptions or related protocols. And I'm like, you need to read up all these Twitter threads, these documentations on PDAs, because there's just so many things you can do with a PDA that's very unique. You can get a mapping just to accounts, you can create a unique constraint. So for PsyOptions, there should never be... Right now, there's no reason to have more than one of the same option and the fungibility of those options are based on the expiration date, the strike price, the asset pair. And so we just have a PDA that is seated with those parameters and it creates this unique constraint.Anatoly (09:24):Oh, that's cool. So you encode the constraints as, basically hash it into the address.Tommy (09:30):Exactly.Taylor (09:30):Exactly.Anatoly (09:31):And the taker then has to satisfy those constraints to be able to take that trade.Tommy (09:36):No, not on the trade level, just on the general structure for creating the option. It's like, okay, if you want to spin up a BTC 70,000, USDC strike for the October 29th expiration, just that structure that creates that... because that's structure is the core structure of PsyOptions, the Psy American program. And that's what then controls the option TokenMint and writer TokenMint and how you dull out those option tokens. And so it's just there can never be more than one of those specific to those constraints. So it's separated from the trading concerns.Anatoly (10:14):Got it.Taylor (10:15):Yeah. I think you thinking of your stateless escrow. I thought that was a pretty cool proof of concept.Anatoly (10:21):Yeah. I wasn't sure that you guys already built... I think this idea has been around in crypto for a while, so I wouldn't be surprised if you guys use it too. But I like that idea that, because you don't want to generate infinite number of these markets, if everybody enters the same data, then it's going to spit out the same BTC month increment whatever, like May 2021 option or whatever you want.Tommy (10:47):Yeah. And we've seen it too. It's really useful to have these deterministic ways to look up an account address. So it's like, "Look, I can just check if this option market already exists by using these parameters, the PsyOptions market exists." And we also ran into some issues that we had to hack together, on the client side, because Serum doesn't have these kinds of constraints. And an adversary could come in and spin up multiple Serum markets for the same asset pair. And then when you're pulling that data from the chain on the client, it's like, "Well, which one is your UI using? Which one are these automated traders using? All that kind of stuff. How do you sync them up?"And so that was a pain point, and we had to whip together a package. But now with Serum's permission markets and some other stuff, we can now use PDAs to say, "This is deterministically how the UI is going to determine the market. Here's how everyone else should do it. These are the seeds." And then it keeps everyone in line in a more decentralized way, rather than having to have some NPM package with metadata and it's painful to maintain.Anatoly (11:54):Got it. That's cool. What actually runs the market? Is it a Serum Q, a Serum V2 or V3 Q?Tommy (12:03):Serum V3 right now, for the Americans. Yeah.Anatoly (12:05):Awesome. Man, that's super cool. How was that integration? Is that blood, sweat and tears still, or are the tooling itself around Serum getting better?Taylor (12:15):It's getting better.Tommy (12:16):Blood, sweat and tears.Taylor (12:17):Yeah, but it was definitely blood, sweat and tears. I think that's what took us the longest part in the original hackathon that we won, was doing the Serum integration. And we weren't even doing any cross program invocations to Serum at that point, it was literally just client site integration. And that was really difficult. No documentation, got to read through the source code. I think we even found some bugs in their type script package and had to patch it ourselves. So yeah, definitely blood, sweat, and tears there.Tommy (12:48):There's still room for improvement. I'm like drop in list every time as hackathon participants start asking, or users are complaining about settling funds. I'm just at a constant stream of, "Hey, we should document this and add a flow chart for that." Because all the customer surface is offloaded to the people using the Serum stuff, so we get that inflow of feedback from users and other developers building on top.Anatoly (13:12):Yeah. People don't realize how strapped every team is.Tommy (13:16):I agree.Anatoly (13:17):It's literally like three, four engineers at best to, no customer service, no nothing, just pure software, open source software. It's not like when you look at a market cap of something, you think there's a equivalent to market cap S&P 500 company with 30,000 engineers just all cranking away. Thank God it's not, honestly.Tommy (13:41):Yeah.Taylor (13:42):Yeah. It's got its ups and downs. At least you can move fast, it's not a bureaucratic process. But at the same time, customer support definitely dwindles and I think 70% of people are probably testing in production. So the end users are just going to have to deal with that and understand that's just the way things are done in crypto right now.Anatoly (14:03):I guess, how close are you guys to launch and what are the next blockers?Tommy (14:07):S…

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Larry Cermak - VP Research, The Block Ep #50 Oct 26, 2021

Show notes

Larry Cermak joined The Block as one of the first employees with the mission to provide professionals with accurate information about crypto. He now leads a 30-person research team that delivers insights to institutional customers.00:09 - Intro00:20 - Larry Cermak’s origin story / His work at The Block08:25 - The fundamentals of Bitcoin16:03 - The value of SushiSwap19:35 - Investing based on Memes23:42 - Market Value for future gains in Crypto26:12 - Will NFTs be backing internet money?28:44 - Thoughts on Algorithmic Stablecoins31:00 - Regulation in the US34:47 - Decentralization and tokens in the context of regulation39:45 - Volume of users / social networksDISCLAIMERThe information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.Anatoly (00:09):Hey folks, this is Anatoly, and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today I have Larry Cermak, who's the VP of Research at The Block. Awesome to have you, man.Larry Cermak (00:18):Nice to be on, it's a pleasure.Anatoly (00:20):Yeah, so tell me your origin story. How'd you get into crypto?Larry Cermak (00:24):Yeah, it's probably slightly longer. But really high-level, I got involved in late 2016, I was in college in the US and was thinking about what to do my thesis on and Bitcoin seemed like one of the more obvious options, to not make it incredibly boring, so I just decided to go with that. And throughout the research process, I just kind of found that there isn't good research about Bitcoin, just in general crypto. There was either the super bullish people that were like all in on Bitcoin, or super bearish academics, and there nothing in between, and I felt like I can fill the gap a little bit.So after I published that research, I shared it publicly as well with a few people, and based on that I got my first job offer to work at Diar which is a research company, focusing only on crypto. So I worked there for a couple of years, and really just tried to focus on data driven research, which now it sounds kind of obvious, but back then it just wasn't very common. Most people were just looking at the really simple metrics and munging data, but mostly it was just price discussion, price predictions, all that stuff. And we were really looking at just analyzing the market a little bit more fundamentally, that sounds even more silly now looking back.And I got lucky that in 2017 when I joined full time, like early 2017 I joined full time, and that's when everything popped off massively, and it was just a bunch of shit ICOs, like a lot of sketchy stuff. I consciously started looking more into these projects, so I was one of the people that were kind of cautioning against some of the ICO stuff, and it was a lot of fun but I was quite skeptical back then still. So actually, a lot of people who have followed me for a while, they know initially I was a no-coiner, I had no crypto, and I was convinced that initially actually that a lot of this is just kind of hype mania, it's just all like overblown massively. But something really drew me into it, and it was mostly the permissionless nature, ability for anyone to participate, but what really I didn't like was just the hype around it, the marketing, the emptiness, and all that stuff.So I over-focused on that I think initially, but after some time, I realized that that's probably not what this is all about. Initially, I didn't think that it was necessarily important for most projects to have tokens and I was very skeptical that most tokens need a project, and I started massively changing my mind on this with the DeFi beginnings. So early 2020 my mind started completely changing on most of the space and I stared allocating a little bit more, and now I also do seed investing privately. And obviously, I lead the research department at The Block which is now 25 researches, probably the largest research team in crypto.Anatoly (03:33):So you went from Bitcoin skeptic to full shit-coiner.Larry Cermak (03:38):Kind of, yeah. It's a little bit concerning honestly.Anatoly (03:42):In four years.Larry Cermak (03:44):Yeah, I don't think I was really a massive Bitcoin skeptic, I was just skeptical of everyone is just so positive, and Bitcoin maximalists, I just could not handle that. When you just start using really bad arguments, just kind of shit-post and being really negative about everything other than Bitcoin and not being open-minded, that really pissed me off and I wasn't open to it.Then I was like relatively active in the Ethereum community early on and DeFi. We had Teo on the team initially who was one of the people the most involved in DeFi early on, he's now the Director of Strategy at Uniswap, and he definitely showed us all on the research team why this makes sense. And when I really started understanding that these tokens are not just useless, they can actually be used for real things, and they do get closer to almost equity in some ways, even though obviously a lot of them try not to, but when you have some sort of a claim and some sort of cashflows, that's when it gets interesting to me. And governance obviously as well, but that's when I really completely started flipping.Larry Cermak (04:57):But yeah, you're kind of right, I went from a skeptical no-coiner to then kind of a shit-coiner now, like spreading seed investments that I like.Anatoly (05:06):Do you still believe in this idea of sound money, or?Larry Cermak (05:10):So a lot of Ethereum community members think that Bitcoin is just a meme, it's going to go away, I actually don't believe that myself. I do believe that what's really powerful about Bitcoin is that it's been around for the longest time and it's very hard to compete against what it has, which is basically just the belief of a lot of people, and it's difficult to break that. And then you also have a lot of buy-in recently from, not only hedge funds, but also larger institutional investors, and that counts for a lot more than just blockchain, even though it sounds silly, something that's established as internet money and a lot of people pushing for it is really powerful.So yeah, I still kind of believe in that and I don't think that Bitcoin is going to be surpassed by Ethereum anytime soon, I actually have a bet going with Kyle from Multicoin about that. But yeah, generally I believe there is some merit to it, but I definitely also believe that people should be more open-minded, and because a lot of people are close-minded, they are missing on a lot of really obvious opportunities. Really my bread and butter is exploiting these things, when people underestimate something, and when there is actual merit to it that they don't see because of some reason or another, that's when I usually perform really well.Anatoly (06:35):Yeah, that's digging for alpha man, that's real work.Larry Cermak (06:40):Yeah. But yeah, The Block's research team, when I started obviously it was just two people, and now we have 25 full time researchers that a lot of them digged that up for me now thankfully. It is a lot of hard work like doing a lot of that myself, but now there's a massive team behind me. It's going really well, like we're reaching a lot of institutional customers as well, and the market just exploded massively this year for institutional access.Anatoly (07:08):That's amazing. So 25 researchers at The Block, how many people total?Larry Cermak (07:15):Around 70 or something, 75 maybe. But The Block initially, even when we started, I joined one of the first employees like 2018, and the vision was always to go through all the noise and bullshit and price predictions, and SEO plays and all the click bait nonsense, and try to go through that and have more data driven, research oriented coverage on the news side. We started with that and then eventually turned into actually a research product that just mainly focused towards institutional customers. But obviously, the news part is still a really important part of the business, it's what most people know, the institutional product is not really accessible for regular retail customers.And it's been a really, really fun ride, just going through this in the last three years. I don't think people realize how really difficult it is to go from nothing to building a media company that's recognized by people and somewhat respected. It's something that took a lot of hard work, and it's a very thankless business, like media, it doesn't usually make too much money, it's something that's really undermonetized in a lot of ways. So that's why we're going more into research, more into data, and just going after the institutional customers because they just have deeper pockets and they're more sophisticated, which is easier.Anatoly (08:44):What are the fundamentals with something like Bitcoin, something like money? It's just such a dumb idea for somebody that's like a value equity investor that's looking at the Amazon.Larry Cermak (08:56):It's a really good question, a lot of it is just a common belief that this is worth something. If you ask the same question about a lot of other things, you're going to arrive at the same answer, it's basically like the value is because a lot of people believe in it. Similarly with gold, like who's using gold for stuff, very little people for jewelry and chips and all that. Most people don't care about that, most people use it because they believe it will retain value and because they believe there is some sort of a scarce supply that's somehow protecting their investment.And it's Bitcoin, it's something similar, where you have a lot of really, really religious supporters who are the holders of the last resort who are just never going to sell, that creates a pretty powerful price for a lot of these things. And then on top of that, you also have guaranteed fixed supply, which obviously I think there are going to be some issues about in the future, but it is a meme that people buy, it is a meme that people believe in, and I think that in itself is more powerful than-Anatoly (09:58):But people don't write research reports on gold, or fundamentals of gold, or how gold is going to get more gold.Larry Cermak (10:06):... Yeah, no, I agree. And I think it's like funny, we started the research firm three years ago, and since then what can you really research about Bitcoin? We've done obviously a few research pieces about mining, and few like micro looks basically on how Bitcoin is performing, but ultimately there really isn't much you can research. It's more so about just like enough people believing, and the better the buy-in is and the longer Bitcoin survives, I think the better the likelihood that it will continue surviving, is kind of my thesis. But there are a lot of issues obviously, like it's still not exactly figured out how everything is going to incentivized when there is not many subsidies anymore, and a lot of people just don't want to answer these things right now, because they just put it off.But generally, yeah, there isn't much to research, we don't research much. What we also do from time to time is just explain what Bitcoin is, explain how it works, to just institutional customers that want to learn just fundamentally what it is. But generally yeah, if you want to dig a little bit deeper, really like Bitcoin mining is the only thing where look at a lot of data and analyze how that's going, everything else not much honestly.Anatoly (11:19):Part of this research right is to give you some ability to predict price I would imagine, like why would I care about Bitcoin, is because I hope that it doesn't crash or it goes up, something. So where does that come from?Larry Cermak (11:36):It just comes from people that... and I think that this is somewhat justified, let's see what's going on around us for the last two years and see that inflation is spiking while a lot of people have been denying that this is going to happen. It's just like this belief of finally having control over something, something like being programmed before, is a powerful concept that a lot of just hedge fund investors and institutional investors just buy into.Anatoly (12:02):Is it like a fundamental though? Are we going to have accounting standards for how much of a religious belief is spread?Larry Cermak (12:15):I think that by itself is somewhat fundamental, like why are people investing in gold, you can be asking the same questions. Central banks have some gold, but ultimately it's just because enough people believe that it will retain value, and it has done that relatively well historically. And as we are moving, everything as you know is now moving to the digital world, everything that used to be physical is somehow transforming into the digital world, and there's probably no reason why that shouldn't happen to money either.And I think fundamentally, there also is some value to Bitcoin not changing that much. A lot of people make fun of it and I think it is kind of funny as well, there is not much innovation in Bitcoin, but also that it's one of the benefits, where you have something that's totally predictable, you have something that you know what to expect from. I kind of buy that as well, I think Bitcoin is one of the most boring things that you can invest in, but it's also the thing that usually gets people in the door, and it's always when friends come to me and when they say what they invested in, it's almost always Bitcoin first, just because it's talked about the most.It's kind of like also the most safe, if you think about it. Everything else is kind of still unclear, even Ethereum, even Solana, it's not totally clear if all this is going to end up working out and if there's ever going to be some larger issues. Whereas with Bitcoin, it's a lot of more guaranteed that if people keep having this belief and if something is digitally scarce, it will probably retain the value in the future. So yeah, it is kind of ridiculous, but almost everything is a meme recently, so why not Bitcoin as well.Anatoly (14:02):Well, I mean it's weird, again, we're not looking at a company even like Google or Facebook, which has people and memes, or Twitter, but they still have like cashflow.Larry Cermak (14:14):Yeah, but Bitcoin was the first as well, which in itself has a lot of value. For every project, if you look at everyone who was always the first, even in crypto, there is always a big premium to that. And I don't think it matters too much if there are cashflows and if there are real people, it just matters if enough people believe that this will retain the value in the future and if enough people do.I think like Tesla was a massive fundamental shift, like we saw that with our customers on the research side, it absolutely exploded after the announcement, just institutional interest, more companies inquiring into what Bitcoi…

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