All right, so I'm here with my friend Akshay, who is a very
senior person at the Solana Foundation.
As you guys may know, Solana over the last year or so has
sort of risen to become arguably the number three coin in the
world from essentially a standing start launched in 2020
in the depths of COVID, basically right as COVID was
getting locked down with starting.
Thank you for having me, Balaji. Yes, you know, it's funny that
during the March crashes when actually the main net, March
2020 crashes when the main net launched in the back of people
basically saying you should wait, wait it out for markets to
get better and things like this. But yeah, it's been quite a
while right since then. Hey, Lily.
What's up guys? Hey.
Hey, Lily. So we're with the network school
audience. She's a hardened veteran of both
the US and Chinese and now European Texians and very senior
at Solana. Last year I think you flipped
Ethereum indexes and your number one indexes.
Yeah, that's right. Depending on what?
Like if you're looking at dex volume, that's right.
That's right. And I think on the order of 7500
developers in 2024, which actually more than Ethereum, so
new dabs are going into Solana rather than Ethereum.
You had the Visa deal, PayPal deal, Google Cloud deal, a few
other deals I think of as fairly significant.
Token extensions are a big thing, right?
Where you went from just normal send and receive to confidential
transfers and like triggers and hooks that you could run on
token sends, if I'm not mistaken.
Then there was the fired answer thing.
So you basically rebuilt the validator so you can blast
through more transactions per second.
Now deepen, like I'd like you to talk about this.
This is like decentralized physical infrastructure
networks. I've been kind of skeptical
about this broadly, but I'd love to hear, let's talk about that
in a bit. Desai, of course, decentralized
science. And then there's some stuff like
AI agents and futures. Is that a roughly good summary
of like the last year or so? Anything else you'd add to that?
Yeah, I think that captures quite a lot of what what is
happening on chain. Essentially it's like a high
performance engine for you to build anything from consumer
apps to, you know, trading applications to, as you said,
there's some of some of these more bespoke decentralized
physical infrastructure networks.
We can talk about that if you like.
But basically it's the ability to use crypto incentives to
bootstrap physical infrastructure or you know,
these sort of networks, if you will.
I think the using crypto incentives to bootstrap sort of
physical infrastructure or marketplaces are an alternative
to using venture capital, right? And because venture capital is
abundant in the 20 tens because of low interest rates, you sort
of were able to throw a lot of money at these marketplace style
companies. Whereas, you know, in a world
where you don't have infinite venture capital, you may need
the participants of the network that you're building to accept
essentially ownership in the network.
Take some risk to build those out.
So an example of this would be something like Hive Mapper
where, you know, these are these folks who are driving to work
every day or, you know, they're maybe professionally driving on
Uber. They, you know, buy and install
a dashboard camera and that dashboard camera maps the roads
in real time, giving you this sort of crowd sourced map
mapping data that insurance companies can use, real estate
companies can use. It's sort of like a lot of these
enterprise use cases for real time mapping.
And today the yeah, Google Street views as old as sometimes
as old as 10 years old or it's super expensive for folks to
access them. And so it creates this
alternative crowd sourced mapping network that mapping
data that companies can use and access.
And in exchange, these folks who are mapping get paid in the
native tokens off the network. And so in some ways, they're
getting paid in the ownership of the network.
Yeah. So this is basically, this is a
dream. You were early Uber and one of
the dreams was riders and drivers could get a share of the
network and that would help bootstrap it.
And that was like the dream 10 years ago.
And now it's starting to come closer to reality.
That's exactly right, yes. Well, Jay, we were talking about
some of these things back in Earn.
Remember we were talking about the many machine market and then
IoT and like API marketplace, machine payments.
Yeah, people just use different words for a lot of these things,
crypto and AI. AI agents are going to be using
crypto to pay one another, obviously.
Yes, all that is now happening and actually a big part of it
was solving the theoretically or like conceptually simple
practically hard problem which is just being able to blast
events on chain. I mean, now I'm going to do my
obligatory plug, which is that you needed something like Solana
for it to work. The thing that's nice about
Solana is of course I love Ethereum, I love Bitcoin, but I
think it's nice about Salon is you can just blast events on
chain. You don't have to have other L
twos. And that means your conceptual
overhead of you don't have to, you know, have bridges and backs
and forths and so on and so forth.
Just hold all the relevant state on chain.
Would you agree with that? Is that roughly part of the
value prop? I think that's a big part of it.
I think another very simple analogy, No analogy is perfect.
It's kind of like remember when we are all on dial up modems.
I mean, I guess you and I are old enough to remember that.
Like the, the mystique of like Doo Doo, we do do right.
And then we do all we'd all be doing these cool things that
we're like, wow, this is gonna be amazing when we like download
videos and chat with our friends and be like, Oh my gosh, you can
see The Mirage on the horizon. But what had to happen is high
bandwidth Internet. So the whole like bridging type
of thing. It's like having a whole stack
of 56 K modems in your closet and be like, that one's gonna be
for chatting, that one's gonna be for watching my videos.
That one's gonna be for doing e-mail.
And that's just not the way it worked out.
Yeah, that's right. I think, I don't know, we may go
back to the future and there might be app chains or what have
you, but I think for a while a lot will happen on Solana.
The other thing I was going to ask is with the deep end stuff,
I've always been kind of skeptical about this is this is
like the idea of you have some physical infrastructure offline
and it's like mapped on chain and so on and so forth.
And you know, maybe the canonical example is not
infrastructure, but it's like gold, like physical gold bricks,
right? To me, the hard part was never
the on chain part. The hard part was the redemption
of actually mapping it back and forth and actually having
somebody who would take that on chain asset and map it for gold
or vice versa, right? And so like the hard part is
actually the legal interface and custody of those assets in all
these jurisdictions, not the crypto part.
That's why I've only been somewhat skeptical about DPN,
but maybe I'm wrong about that. Yeah.
Well, I think the, you know, whether it's in Hive Mapper's
case or Helium's case, you expect the person participating
in the network to run all the physical infrastructure.
And it's an if X then Y style sort of network where if you run
the physical infrastructure correctly, whether it's a
dashboard camera or it's a, you know, Helium hotspot that
provides mobile network coverage.
If you run that accurately and you provide resources to the
network that are used on the other side, then you get paid.
So all the all the responsibility of running the
physical infrastructure, just like Uber, right, where the
drivers are required to run their own physical
infrastructure. Uber does not run or maintain
the physical infrastructure, which is the cars in this case.
So the operators or the suppliers are expected to do
that in exchange for payment. Yeah, I think apology what
you're also getting at is the long running critique of of the
whole Oracle problem. Why is it that fractionalizing
houses on chain might not be a great use of blockchain?
Putting houses on chain doesn't make a lot of sense cuz you
could buy the on chain asset, but then who's actually living
in the house ultimately is going to prevail, right?
I think it's a little bit different with deep in networks
because the nodes themselves, meaning the camera, the the
Wi-Fi module, those are not the assets, those are part of the
infrastructure. So I think putting the
infrastructure on chain and using crypto to coordinate the
incentives around that infrastructure, that is
something I think that makes sense.
Whereas I agree with you a lot of the things around tokenizing
gold bars and tokenizing luxury handbags and tokenizing, you
know, fractionalizing the the houses on this block or
something like that, taking real world like physical assets and
tokenizing them. That one I agree with you is a
little bit more skeptical, but depends more about incentivizing
the hardware network, the infrastructure.
So the smarter the devices, maybe the more network E type
stuff it can do to kind of validate that it's actually
being used in a proper like a it's got an image or it's got
AGPS signal or it's something like that.
So you can track these assets, yeah.
Yeah, it's compute resource. Slightly switching gears for a
second. So we have actually a bunch of
people coming on campus in a few weeks for the Ignition month at
Network School. So do you want to talk about
this and like the Super Team Network School in May, so all
these builders and hackathon winners?
OK. So Super Team is a community
that is a group of developers, you know, engineers, marketers,
founders around the world that are building something on
Solana. And so they're typically
regional communities, India, the UK, Germany, Nigeria, pretty
much any country that has a technical bench strength and has
a crypto community will have a, you know, regional super Dean.
It's a way for people to learn how how to, you know, build
stuff on chain and eventually earn money right through it
could be through bounties, through jobs, through grants,
you know, funding projects. One of the awesome things about
crypto is it allows for a multiplicity of participants as
opposed to just you don't need to join the company to work on
the network. And so there are many ways to
contribute to the building the network out, whether you're an
individual or small project team.
And you can get funded through various means, all from bounties
to grants. So we really think that people
should earn their first script or not buy it.
Like that's the foundational philosophy of this and to earn
your first crypto, you actually need to learn quite a bit about
how this stuff works. And we think that that best
positions people to be long term contributors to the network
versus buying something, trading money and losing it, right?
So, yeah, so the the very excited to finally make this
collaboration happen between the network school and the Solana
community and super team. So we we host the largest
hackathons in crypto by numbers and every year the number of
participants has only been going up and to the right.
And so this upcoming hackathon will be 1, which also has a
physical node I guess where people can congregate and and
build. OK, awesome.
Yeah. So that's going to be May 20th,
then let's talk about Forma. Yeah.
I mean, Forma is the, it's a salon economic zone or it's
essentially a pop up, which it's like a pop up village, but it's,
it's specifically geared towards integrating crypto within the
local economy. And that involves, you know,
typical involves going to a crypto friendly jurisdiction and
working with local regulators, the local community, local
businesses, local developers to integrate crypto into their
existing infrastructure. And so the first one was in
Argentina, The second one is in Sri Lanka.
And and you know, we'll probably do two more this year with that
team. It's a very talented team.
And so we think that the best way to engage with progressive
countries that are pro technology, pro crypto is to
bootstrap a local sort of economy with them
entrepreneurials. So Salon is last year, it's now
number one in D5, it's now number one in devs.
It's done the form of pop up city.
It's got all these token extensions.
It's got very significant GDP, came all the way up from nothing
in COVID Lily and actually have built it out.
And in fact it's been very international.
It's been actually Internet first more than quote America
first, because it's been building out all around the
world as opposed to mainly only the US is actually the last kind
of spot for it in some ways, even though it was found in the
US. So I want to take some questions
from the audience, you know, questions on Solana, you know,
questions on Solana ecosystem. On crypto equities, because I
agree with you, it makes a ton of sense.
I'm curious for Lillian Akshay, do you guys have a strategy to
talk about internally for how you're going to actually
encourage companies to make that transition?
No, I mean, if you think about what Internet capital markets
are, right, it is the ability to do 2 things.
Well, it is to reduce the barrier to launch assets on the
Internet. So in five years from now, if
you're taking your company public, you're just going to
say, I'm going, I'm going public online.
Like where are you listing on the Internet?
What do you mean? Right?
Like that's sort of what it's going to be.
And so it's reduced the barrier for issuers.
And on the other side, it is to reduce the barrier for
investors. A great example of this is if
you wanted access to U.S. dollars outside the US, you
either needed to have cash or you needed to have an offshore
bank account for which you had to fill like the reams of forms
and eventually get approved. But today you download a browser
extension or a mobile wallet and you get a USD, right?
So that when you scale access to something, it fundamentally
changes the nature of that thing, which is, you know, you
don't need KYC anymore. You can just download a mobile
app and get U.S. dollars because you put it on the Internet.
So taking on chain equities on to the on on like taking
equities on chain is not merely tokenizing it, It is changing
the very fundamental nature of what it is, which is
democratizing access to ownership and creating a cap
table that you can scale infinitely effectively and trade
effortlessly and on on on the global Internet, right, like
changing hands and leaving titles effective effortlessly on
online. And so I think that's sort of
how we think about this class and in so far as to organizing
equities is concerned, I know there I mean Lily has a team
that works on this and so maybe she can talk to the more
specifics of it. But I but the most exciting part
about that is reducing barriers to issuance for for me
personally. Yeah, on the supply side, also
on the demand side, if you can even take 100 million people and
the liquidity that comes from that 100 million people and
pointed at this thing, it's going to go nuts.
In the same way that taking all the eyeballs of humans across
the world and pointing at various content made that go
nuts as well. And so now maybe we can get some
more quality things in there that are more deserving of that
time and tension capital. You know, another observation
that we encryptive made for a long time is in order to have
access to the better investment assets, you already have to be
rich. And it's those gating, those
gating factors, right? You're an accredited investor.
That means you either have a million of net worth and or
you've made $200,000 a year for the last two years and you've
got to like sign all the stuff and you want the really good
stuff. You got to be qualified
purchasers. You've got a 5 million of net
worth. How many people in America, much
less the world have access to those levels of wealth and
therefore the really cool bespoke unique investment
opportunities? Very few.
And so part of this is broadening, enabling the supply
of these things to come on in certainly and also broadening
just capital markets access not just for retail investors but
also for smaller companies. So you know, there are quite a
number of of high quality companies around the world where
you could say, let's say the best company in Brazil is
probably a better in terms of just a company asset market
position, so on and so forth, probably a better asset than
your mid tier US small business, right.
But because they're in Brazil, they don't have access to the
capital markets of America. And so therefore that asset gets
priced at a much lower multiple than your Heartland America
small business. Is that an efficient market?
I'm not sure about that. So part of this is getting non
accredited investors access to stuff, okay, in the US context.
But then there's also a big part of it which is you could call it
non accredited that small businesses around the world that
want global liquidity. And that's a whole other part of
the supply side that every time you talk about this
internationally, people are like, I am listening.
Yeah. And one of the things Belgium
would say is I think you've talked about this, this IPO
crisis, right? Like the number of public
companies have actually gone down over time.
And today the, you know, the reason like this wealth gap
exists in the US is because the average retail investor doesn't
have the ability to own the growth in public companies
anymore because these companies are staying private longer.
You know, Bill Gurney has talked about the sort of like the tech
IPO crisis as just a lack of, you know, like some of the best
tech companies just prefer staying private as long as
possible because private markets are infinitely liquid, right?
So, and as a result, what you're ending up with is people
suggesting things like Ubi, right, Universal basic income,
whereas actually the solution should be something where it's
universal basic ownership versus income where you can have the
ability for people to own assets with the push of a button.
And I think that is the fundamental sort of outcome that
that putting capital markets online will achieve.
I'm curious. Oh, sure.
I mean, I think this is the third AI in crypto kind of like
trend that we've seen now. And I feel like for a while it
was render and it was GPU compute networks.
What do I think about these? I think that with all of these
like kind of trends that last for three or four months,
there's always this heat of truth in there that is going to
play out at some point, whether it's in three years, six years,
nine years, whatever. And so I think this is probably
one of those AI agents who are going to automatically pay for
your help, you figure your bills, pay your bills online, do
your e-commerce for you, whatever.
That's cool. And I think it's I think it's
yet another one of those times where there's a seat of truth.
You're gonna have a huge amount of focus as an industry and a
lot of companies start in this period of time and then and then
they will get winded out and there's gonna be a crash at some
point as well, right? This is the same thing with
render and IO net in 2324. We're gonna see that now with AI
chat bots. It's interesting.
Do I think but now forever it's going to be like straight line
up of adoption interests? No, because we've seen that so
many times in crypto now still. The majority of the applications
even the Solana ecosystem made for a desktop when if it was for
a mobile phone, phone first application, maybe the detail
wouldn't be that much interested.
In So basically her question is, if I had to paraphrase, why are
there not more good mobile phone apps for the Solani system,
specifically in crypto in general?
Yeah. I mean, I think the the apps do
exist like the, you know, like I think Solana by far has the best
sort of product community in crypto and and you know, whether
it's Phantom or these other apps that were held back on the App
Store because of some of the App Store sort of regulation.
So I think we're just going to see more of that.
And the other thing that'll end up happening is like a lot of
fintech companies that already have really slick user
experiences and, and apps will start to integrate stablecoin,
you'll start to see more of that.
It really depends on sort of what your, what kind of apps
you're talking about. But on either end of that
spectrum, you're sort of seeing a mobile app first experience on
the, you know, sort of like the functional fintech side of it as
well as the more crypto native crypto economy type apps.
I can give some color on that as well, which is Apple is very
small C conservative, right? And so they have never been a
big fan. Their culture is not a crypto
culture, right? Their culture, well, first of
all, even with other technologies, they're often the
last mover on it. They adopt it last years after
everybody else. And the App Store is a very
hermetically sealed environment and a lot of Web 2 and tech
people just didn't get crypto and still kind of don't get,
roughly speaking. Web 3 is to Web 2 is Web 2 was
to Microsoft and Redmond, right? Like the whole PC ecosystem,
only some of the people made the leap conceptually to the
Internet, right? And only some of the people
conceptually from the Internet companies made the leap to Web 3
because it's a mind shift shift. It's a first.
It's a geographical shift, for example, from Redmond to Silicon
Valley and then to the Internet. It's a back end shift from like
a local PC to a database to a blockchain.
It's a like revenue model shift from like selling like, you
know, disks to selling SAS to selling an asset.
It's like so many different shifts at once that most people
can't flip that many parts of their experience, right?
And so Apple was small. I mean, there's some funny
story, lots of funny stories and lots of unfunny stories, but
they would just use their guidelines in a very peremptory
way. And so bit by bit, the things
that got through were the exchanges where there were
enough exchanges, they had enough collective so you can buy
and sell an asset and so on and so forth.
And now you have Farcaster and you have a rainbow wallet, you
have a bunch of wallets and stuff, a lot of exchanges and
wallets. This is great.
Any parting words besides go to solanaandandcheckoutsolana@solana.com.
Well, you can you just send, can you just tweak the word Solana
Let's. That would unfortunately that
would get a lot of engagement of the wrong kind.
But yeah. Go ahead.
All right. Great guys.
Thanks very much. Thanks.