📺 Finding Common Ground | Solana, Avalanche, & Terra Panel

hey bankless nation we are back we are live streaming this special edition panel episode the theme here is finding common ground so we have some alternative layer ones some of the founders of solana avalanche and possibly tara we'll see if dokuan shows up in just a minute uh but david give us some context for this panel why are we doing it what's the uh the context going into this yeah i think the industry is still unpacking 2021 because it was such a crazy year definitely the craziest year in crypto's history like period uh and the the

mental model that i have for this is that the start of 2021 was really ethereum rising out of the bear market uh and having a lot of success and then a lot of that and then in the wake of that a lot of newer l1s to crop up on the scene with different design structures different blockchains also capture a bunch of users and there's been a ton of demand for users to do crypto stuff and a lot of these newer layer ones have innovated in new ways that have enabled a lot of new people to come into the crypto ecosystem and so we want to unpack uh just a

little bit about where we all have common ground with all of these different blockchains all blockchains are blockchains which means we have common ground somewhere and we want to find where that is and and then grow that ground grow that that area of real estate of which we all share so that is the panel that we are having today we invited uh anatoly emin and dough from tara solana and avalanche uh dough it was uh i don't know where doe is we don't know where he is right now yeah uh he's mia at the moment if he comes in the next

few minutes uh that would be fantastic otherwise we have anatoly and emin who's uh imminently about to show up uh right after we get through some of these other messages ryan what else do you have to say about this fantastic panel well uh i think i just want to say that the theme for this panel is good vibes only you know in in 2022 so we're going to have a productive conversation i think um crypto is a little bit tired of a lot of the the tribalism goes on so this is a great opportunity to not be tribal and just have a great conversation so that's what we're gonna do guys some other

announcements housekeeping things as we get in the first is we've got a conference coming up this is the permissionless conference i believe avalanche and solana are going to be there uh tara maybe too not sure but this is a fantastic conference coming in may 17th to 19th just wanted to let you know to get your tickets uh soon for this event tickets go up every two weeks and uh batches are released every two weeks as well so grab your ticket to this event both david and i will be there also wanted to give a quick psa

from our friends at xerion because they've incorporated some new layer 2 and multi-chain features in particular this is a xerion portfolio you see this david look at this what am i doing here what you looks like you're swapping networks ryan you can swap networks now in zurion all of your assets in one place one user interface really cool also uh tell them about bridging david because zurion enables some bridging as well yeah bridging is a very complicated world because there's going to be so many bridges of so many different types and that's why i'm kind of bullish on

the world of bridge aggregators or bridge obvious skaters where it lets you do exactly what ryan is doing right now which is not care about what bridge you're using and just simply being able to send your assets to the place that you want to go without having to worry about the details about how you got there and so that's what zirion is doing is making bridging easier so we can all become bridgeors in 2022. we are all migrating to layer two almighty grading to different side chains getting off the ethereum l1 that's the message here get on layer two

connect your wallet use xerion to hop across those bridges get started there's a link in your show notes to do that all right guys we're gonna be back with our guests in just a minute but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible slingshot is a decentralized trading platform that combines the performance and ease of a centralized exchange with the openness and transparency of defy slingshot aggregates liquidity from all of d5 in order to find the best price on thousands of crypto assets every token on slingshot comes with a price chart and trade logs to give you insights into the market's activity in real time

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in order to experience defy and nfts the way it was always meant to be fast cheap and friction free hey guys welcome back to the special panel edition this is the finding common ground panel with some alternative layer ones uh we've got two here that we're going to talk to first i want to introduce you to anatoly he's the co-founder of solana and also introduce you to emin who is the founder of eva labs we are missing our third panelist dokwan he might show up in the episode at some point in time and like if he does we'll just let him write

in and roll along with the conversation gentlemen it's great to have you on bankless welcome nice to be here thanks for having me all right this is going to be a fun episode i think and i think it's something the crypto world is craving and i just want to throw out some ground rules as we enter this conversation so i don't think this is really a debate i think this is about finding common ground that we all have some ground rules i think for our guests uh good vibes only this is the podcast we want good vibes only i think the crypto

community wants to see good vibes from the leaders in this space including david and myself uh also plain speak we're going to try whenever possible not to talk technical the community has asked that we sort of speak at a plain speak language as much as possible not get too in-depth in the weeds and the third ground rule is letting people finish their sentences i know we're very excited have a lot to say let's let everyone have an opportunity to talk david you and i have some ground rules as well we are not representatives of ethereum

on this episode we are merely moderators not today so we're not arguing aside we're just here to be good hosts and move the conversation forward uh and uh be as hospitable as possible great to have you guys on bank list you ready to start yeah let's do it all right let's start with this first question i think this is an important um values alignment question and i i expect we'll have a lot of common ground on it and the question is why are you in crypto why are you in crypto anatoly you wanna you wanna kick us off with that

yeah i had this um idea that it's possible to use these byzantine fault tolerance systems to build an environment where there's no intermediaries for trading and this was because this was something that i did in my spare time i did it for fun i used to you know like connect to interactive brokers or a bunch of forex trading like uh platforms and trade via their apis and i was always uh feeling like my trades were getting in a

little later than everyone else's the data i was getting was a little slower than everyone else's and there was this barrier to entry there that was kind of impossible to cross as a hobbyist and when i kind of had the technical idea for what for building a system like solana that was the first use case that i thought of and that's really what drove the first i would say three years of development how we were thinking about the use case we're building and like everything we're trying to deliver is that okay hobbyists can connect to this

network with just a piece of metal and they're in the same level playing field as you know alameda or jump and that that was the the goal and still is the goal uh just curious anatoly a quick follow-up on that a lot of people came to crypto for like a you know sound money thesis right uh as a result of um you know uh what they would say is misuse of monetary policy and kind of the fiat world is that you or is that not no so like despite like but i totally get it and i thought that was a really

very like important thing that crypto could enable my family growing up in the soviet union saw the failure of government like to experience it firsthand myself included like my parents you know we they left in 1992 with uh 350 dollars to seven people that was that was it that was the only thing that the soviet union would let you leave with um so that was kind of i get it like i strongly get it in a very core sense and i totally appreciate the folks

working on that side but um what i was passionate personally was like bits and sitting these bits as fast as possible around the world and as fairly as possible which was where my skills set lies and what i was inspired to do and not trying to compete in the sound money thesis at all but definitely appreciate it evan curious same question to you why are you in crypto so i like building uh big big things that work and uh it comes from it comes from a different uh different kind of

background um i grew up in a at a time and in a country where things did not quite work you would go to the airport and you know the systems were down you would go to the bank they'd say come back the next day when you close the door it wouldn't close perfectly and completely now i remember going into my middle school at the time in american school and and seeing that everything actually perfectly matched the doors were no longer drafty and and that instilled in me a sense for things that that have a life of their own that that live on the

internal in some virtual universe subject to their own rules and continue functioning in a predictable perfect manner and that got me going into distributed systems and starting in 2002 with the karma system that we built um i started getting into digital money and the goal of course is to digitize all things of value to create a universe where anyone can digitize something send it around the world and trade it and then in so doing eliminate all the middlemen you should not have to get

permission from anybody you should not have to be beholden to anyone else's rules in uh transacting with your valuable goods guys i i think uh i find your uh quick background's actually really fascinating because i think both of your guys's backgrounds actually show up in the um in the blockchains that you you guys work on anatoly you talked about how uh uh you were working with you know trading and you just felt like you were getting you know front run by people with more access and better privileges than you and so that inspired you to make solana which uh i think has similar

properties that make sure that everyone can do that and so and emin same with you where um you know you like big things that work where perhaps how you the in the experiences that you had influenced why you're here in crypto and and and also the the nature of the blockchain that you guys are are building can you guys just speak a little bit to that about like um the values that that you learned when you were when you were deciding before perhaps getting into crypto and and how it came to actually shape what you

consider to be important inside the crypto industry uh we'll start back with uh with anatoly um so i spent most of my career quality i'm working on communications operating systems like moving bits around through silicon and that skill set is what i brought to sowana and the use case that i thought of was like this this system that i'm building it has to be good at something useful to humans that was like that was a prerequisite and there were plenty of people already working on the sound money thing and i and i was like i

don't i don't think i bring anything new to that space like i don't think i can build a better bitcoin or a better ethereum like so it never really thought of it like as something for us to go after and trading was something that i personally enjoyed as a hobbyist and had a saw clear reason why centralized systems always kind of tend to get to a kind of a corrupted state where it's not in the sense that it's corruption where you're getting screwed it's that

you gotta like you know pay 10 million bucks to chicago mercantile exchange for that preferred access and to even be able to do that you have to know the people to even like talk to them and be part of the part of the club and that to me always felt like just not not great it felt like i couldn't do what i was really interested in doing you know and i didn't think that initially i kind of thought you know maybe maybe these systems will actually flip cme and izzy

and we'll see equities being traded on these open decentralized systems but what i've realized lately over the last year is that the revolution that we're seeing is that everything is becoming d5 art is becoming d5 social networks are becoming d5 and that long tail of new use cases are going to is going to surpass all these old financial applications by you know 100 miles it's just going to outgrow everything so where if we've switched kind of you know ideas that like what we're building is

this thing for trading for price discovery but we need to start building tools for humans to actually use it in day-to-day activity that they do on the web and that could be nfts that could be using that nft to participate in a social network that's the monkey dow that's now sticking with the validate or whatever it is that they want to do right like it's kind of become much more consumer-driven like how do we apply this stuff to now consumers as opposed to jump trading or alameda or like you

know even trading hobbies even though i believe both of those joining together is really what makes the space really interesting and emin same question to you what about your experiences in your young professional life led into how you decided to construct avalanche or what you care about now that you're in the industry of crypto so um there are a couple of things that uh that struck me very early on um so one of the main things that i saw i saw in the 90s the very first attempts at digital cash and how they failed they

failed because the banks intervened you can't go through the regular channels and and do a revolution that's just not how it works uh you gotta bring something to the table that is multiple orders of of magnitude better than what's there you can't come in with like a 15 20 better thing and say hey this is this is going to change things so that made me stay in academia for actually a very long time i've been an og in the space for a long long time uh started out uh you know i remember single-digit bitcoins um so uh so you

know um i didn't actually initiate avalanche until i decided that there was something in our hands that was orders of magnitude better than what was there so that's one of them a second thing that characterizes my approach is to always build systems that are flexible that to not have i think this comes from my background as a graduate student i worked on operating systems you want to build a substrate something that lies at the bottom that enables other people to get whatever they want done you don't want to be

prescriptive you want them to be able to customize whatever they're building so avalanche has this notion of subnets that allows anybody to create their own chains with their own rules with their own virtual machines so that is something that's actually fairly unique to avalanche and it's it's quite different and um and it plays at the you know place to the heart of of our values the third and final thing is that uh that all along i was always human oriented not algo oriented so there were a lot of people especially in the early

days who were like oh you know bitcoin cannot be changed because you know the algorithm says 21 million coins etc etc and so they're right you know in what they're saying but they're missing out the fact that these systems have to be serving their constituents they have to be serving their users so that uh led us in a direction where we're building a system that is within given parameters uh admits uh governance and and modification on the fly by its users so all of these had a fairly big

impact on the ultimate design of the system we built i'd love to know who are your guys as like heroes in this industry who who do you who are like uh you know ancient four fathers or or four women who uh you guys think that have really like you know the cypherpunks of old for example like personally i really like look up to somebody like amin solomani ryan here might like say vitalik who do you guys look up to that are like the early ogs of cryptography or cryptocurrency or who who comes to mind i mean let's start with you

um let's see so one of the first people i would mention would be ron rivest he's the r in rsa he's a touring award winner came up with some of the the crypto that we use to sign our transactions uh he's also brilliant across the you know across the spectrum and uh you know every time i chat with them i come out go away enlightened another person that i look up to is barbara oliskov and uh she was a professor she retired from mit a brilliant brilliant researcher set the the path for uh for for

consensus protocols which are at the heart of all of these systems and uh so uh there are also some others of more modern so these are i think maybe two generations or three generations older than me a couple more people that i look up to is mike burrows um he's the person from alta vista i'm not sure if you guys remember this but it was one of the the big search engines back in the day probably the best engineered search engine of its day was just a fantastic builder all around and jeff dean someone that i went to graduate school with who's an amazing builder at google

a lot of the google infrastructure that you know we all use uh came from his vision or his his actual fingertips typing away at the code so that's sort of my you know go-to uh you know idols uh if i were to name them anatoly who are your idols or or people that you look up to um in the space i would say zaki from cosmos um he was one of the first folks that i talked to that was like a true like crypto he was like a true crypto developer and uh

he's one of those people that you can call in the middle of the night and he will calm you down is this is this something that you've done before natalie you can call me too you know yeah uh he's he's just an amazing person uh vitalik i like i haven't interacted with him that closely uh you know just a few times but i his writing i think is very crisp and succinct and he's able to describe really complex topics to uh to

like an engineer like i feel like he bridges that gap between academia and engineering really well um at a personal level there's a few folks that i worked with at qualcomm that really shaped my career in terms of like operating system design um brian kelly i don't know if you would be listening to this podcast but he was just the one of the senior directors there that was designing all the a bunch of the operating systems on arm while arm was moving from architecture to architecture basically it every year and it was such a

breakneck speed of development on the hardware that um i really kind of learned what it's like to code under the gun when uh when you're when you have like hardware that's shipping at a particular date and it's shipping with bugs and every every delay is costing like a company 10 million bucks or something like that you're under a lot of pressure to deliver and solve heart problems really quickly so guys now we get to uh get into the to the meat of this uh a little bit more and ask a question that i think is on

everyone's mind in the crypto community as um so you know some of us on in this panel represent maybe different tribes uh within crypto although we have just so much so much in common but i want to ask like the meta question of why do you think crypto is so tribal and does it actually have to be does it have to be tribal why is it tribal and does it have to be what do you think anatoly so i kind of came into tech in the 90s as a teenager and i remember people

arguing with passion and vitriol about linux file systems like the file system that you pick in your config and your kernel config when you're booting up linux people were tribal about that and turns out there was one evil file system but that's that's a different story the the thing that like i think what people get about these technologies like movements is that um when you when you participate in these you're thinking about all the future things that the singer will enable you're kind of putting a lot of

faith in these ideas and how it's going to change the world and that's almost a religious experience right like let's say you have an open source movement taking down microsoft that was a big deal right like you were battling a company that was like a giant monopolist run by bill gates that was just squashing everyone right and this fledging community of people are just coding for fun like you kind of get bought into this and i feel that's true about crypto we have we're trying to change the world right and we buy into these ideas and they and

you think about what is this gonna be 20 years from now how is this going to improve the world and change everything and that that is their faith that's faith right so we argue about it like we argue about religions it's part of the human do you think that yeah crypto is a bit more political than something like a linux file system by nature right it's kind of about decentralization as a as a political concept does that make it a little different i think at that time in the 90s the

open source was almost a political movement and a lot of folks actually became like try to interact with politics and governance and get us governments to adopt policies that taxpayer money should only be spent on open source software development and these were really like core important things to folks like they were they were fighting they took time for their own you know life to go do this right um and i think we're seeing similar things now with decentralization and open finance because

there is kind of not a single enemy like microsoft but kind of this you know you know this vampire squid that's like slowly sucking the blood out of everything both on the web through advertisement and those kind of negative loops and in finance through fees and everything else that people deal with and uh you know so that's these are powerful movements i mean like i i feel like i guess blessed to live through multiples of these like the web open

source and now crypto um but you know it's also a curse right to have that much so much change happening in your life emman what do you think why is crypto tribal and does it really have to be uh well uh it shouldn't be my dream is that we would stop fighting over the same pool of users and focus on growing the space you know some total we're about one trillion and some total there's about 700 trillion worth of assets out there and the chains that that win will not be the ones that you

know say the meanest things about each other they're going to be the ones that can absorb that growth that can make those use cases happen on top of their platforms so that's very clear to all of us and you're right uh despite that this area does attract a level of tribalism that i actually have not seen in many other areas i've seen the the uh the open source movement of course i have seen the the uh the editor wars emacs versus vi you know we've fought on the side of one of them that i'm not gonna name because then i'll lose half my

audience so um but uh well you know um but money is inherently political and it's so deeply ingrained in our consciousness everybody thinks they're an expert at it uh that's also another thing that that factors into this if you can balance a checkbook then suddenly you think you're an economist and um and it's uh and suddenly you know you've got all these people are finding on all sorts of technical issues that really ought to belong to uh to a couple of people who've done some measurements and ought to be resolved by science and so instead of scientific discourse we find

ourselves in vitriol and uh you know it's not a good look for for us you know for the industry for the space but i think we'll grow out of it um or maybe we won't i mean i actually don't think we're going to grow out of it entirely it's just always going to happen but the folks who absorb the message that hey moving on and expanding is the right strategy are going to be the ones that win that's cool uh thanks thanks for these answers guys we're gonna switch it up and throw some community questions your way from from twitter um the first is from yankee.ust

on twitter asked this question prior to the show do you see your chains as complements or substitutes to each other i think emin you were maybe advocating for a more expanded pie but at the end of the day is there some competition between these these chains is are are they are they substitutionary or uh are they are they i guess synergistic and complementary they are essentially complementary so first of all we just let's dispense away

with the killer word there is no killing done in in this space there are chains that are technologically dead anatoly knows this every techie knows this they ought to be dead and you know the horse is lying down on the ground with the four legs facing into the sky but yet they're traded they're round and they're not disappearing so even dead chains are actually quite alive and walking so uh so that's i think something that everybody needs to absorb there will be times when i will criticize anatoly for some technical choice and he will understand what i'm saying he might do

the same to me but but those are technical and technical discussions among technical people so uh in general it's not one against the other so all of these chains have a different vision and they have far more in common far more in common than they have against in opposition to each other for example avalanche and ethereum are working in the same evm space the more we have in the evm space the better it is for both of those ecosystems so solana is pushing the envelope in a variety of different areas

in terms of engineering in terms of building a community in terms of appealing to a different set of programmers you know their programming language is quite different so you know i'll name the other ones for example teslos is appealing to a functional programming environment so there are all sorts of different approaches to this whole thing uh that are that are essentially going to complement each other and and it's not a you know i i win a dollar by taking it from you kind of an environment there is so much out there that isn't digitized that hasn't come into blockchains uh that that's

where the real battles ought to be and are actually that's where we are fighting because avalanche at least you know my or ava labs certainly is spending its time coming up with new assets to build on top we're coming up with new use cases new virtual machines to build on top of our platform so that's i think the thing that's going to get us out of this more ass of people who are who seem to be inward oriented and at each other's throats at times so anatoly same question to you emin says there's no such thing as a killer there's no such thing as an eighth killer or a bitcoin killer or a solana

killer at some level we're all in this together but there has to be some element of competition right i mean somebody's gotta win what would you say to yankee usd's question compliments or substitutes um i think the killer part comes from if like the developers to stop building eventually that thing will die you know in theory right like as long as there's somebody working on this open source project over the weekend you can't really kill it and we

saw that with microsoft trying to kill all sorts of things that were much much smaller than any of these jains so that part i think is is kind of like just a a silly thing to think about but i think the there's definitely competition because there's overlapping use cases every chain can run nfts so now like how are you you know we're competing in that use case you know those projects that are built on top are now competing for the nft space and if the users nft enjoyers and that

competition i think is very healthy because that forces innovation at that like border between complicated technology and consumers how do you figure out key management how do you figure out what is a good ux for a wallet and all these other things you get to see a bunch of different experiments run and the best of those are the ones that succeed but they're not exclusive to that chain you start seeing people copy all the best practices like almost instantly um and that's really the driver innovation