Solana is Winning Right Now | Anatoly & Austin

bankless Nation I'm coming to you from salana breakpoint in Amsterdam this is the third breakpoint that has ever happened in the year 2023 and this one is a little bit different the the first breakpoint happened in 2021 in the second half of the Year absolute Peak froth of the bull market uh in Lisbon uh followed by the second salana breakpoint in 2022 also in Lisbon which happened right before the collapse of FTX and here we are uh at new venue new city Amsterdam uh for salana breakpoint

number three uh and this one has a little bit different of a Vibe this one is deep into the bare Market perhaps coming out of the bare market and this salana community has been cultivated as such as you would imagine the people that went to the 2021 salonic breakpoint when so price was over $200 a lot of them didn't make it the third salana breakpoint uh instead what you have left is the lowlevel deves that comprise the majority of what I would say is the salana community over the last year or so I've dabbled with salana

uh being salana curious I guess you would call it mostly fighting uh but I've definitely learned that if I want to learn about salana it's not going to happen through the filter that is crypto Twitter or probably not inside of any of my ethereum native circles either but since I'm on my way to eth Lisbon I'm taking a flight here shortly uh I decided to pop over a little bit early to Amsterdam to check out salana breakpoint for my myself in this episode I talk with Ani the founder of salana and Austin of course from the salana foundation just to kind of get a Vibe

check over the Arc of salana breakpoint what this conference means to the salana community and overall what people are getting excited about as it stands today in salana Anatoli is persistently busy of course so we had him and Austin for the first 30 minutes and then Anatoli had to run uh and so then me and Austin had a chance to chat about all of the different rabbit holes and things that are going on in salana uh do my best to compare them to what people on this podcast might be familiar with in the ethereum world so for example that they have uh salana fire dancer and in terms

of significance that's kind of like uh EIP 1559 or the ethereum merge at least in that it's a big protocol upgrade that the salon Community are interested in and so I do my best actually I do the only thing that I know how to do which is compare uh evolutions and progress in salana and kind of use ethereum as a frame of reference just to gain my own understanding and since you are likely a longtime listener of this podcast it's probably useful for you as well so if you are curious about what is going on in the state of salana or you weren't able to attend breakpoint and you just

want to kind of Catch A vibe this episode is for you with anat and Austin of the salana ecosystem so let's go ahead and get right into that conversation with Anatoli and Austin but first a moment to talk about these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible especially Kraken are preferred exchange for crypto in 2023 if you not have an account with Kraken what are you waiting for the bull Mark is about to get started and you need a centralized exchange like Kraken to buy some of your crypto assets there is a link in the show notes to getting started with Kraken today Kraken knows crypto kraken's been in the crypto game for over a decade and as one of the largest

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with arbitrum experience web 3 development the way it was always meant to be secure fast cheap and friction free what's up B station we're coming in from Amsterdam at breakpoint number three uh anat Austin how's it going guys it's great thanks for having us here yeah thanks for coming yeah so uh we're pretty far out of the city this I don't think we're actually in Amsterdam we're in uh Zam Dam some some other like local Netherland City uh the campus is phenomenal uh who has more information about how a breakpoint came together

this one probably awesome yeah I'm out of loop at this point yeah so we loved Lisbon for the last two years I mean Lisbon year one we can get into that later how that happened but we really wanted to not do a distributed multiven conference where you had to take you know a shuttle bus to go between it um and then also like quite frankly we didn't want to end up in sort of a soulless Hotel complex um and so this campus just ended up being an awesome spot to keep things in Europe but also give us a little bit of feel of

like the first two break points you had different venues with different characteristics so just starting at the very Basics what's breakpoint oh man uh it is a conference this Foundation puts on every year that is meant to bring the community together to sort of galvanize uh talks and conversations around some of the biggest um issues and topics that we're facing it's first and foremost a developer conference um but we've got a bunch of news and announcements that sneak into that as well but you can probably talk more about the original vision of why

even do a conference well I mean we had like soulon 2019 this was part of we threw basically a Meetup with some beer and pizza at Devcon in Tokyo and that was soulon that was really the our first attempt at a conference like 20 people showed up um you can literally see photos of that of like just me being the only person in the picture in the crowd while while somebody's presenting and so like the salana ecosystem of course has grown immensely

since then when did um breakpoint number one happened and that that was in lisban correct yeah okay when when was that and how many people attended that that was 2020 right 2021 oh 2021 yeah um and so we had you know it was just coming out of coid and this is sort of like the origins of the Salo Network or main net launched in the depths of Co right just as the world went into lockdown and so the thinking was sort of in Spring of 21 could we find somewhere in the world that enough people could travel to that

we could actually bring everyone together who's really only been building together online most of these people have never met in person before and we had this crazy idea that we could get 2,000 people to come to Lisbon um right after Co with this basically Network that no one knew about a year ago it it was like the only country open too for yeah it was it was wild we were we were looking through the list of like where can people get to that is easy for visas they feel safe traveling to that like we could also throw a conference in

and Lisbon was like the perfect spot MH and okay so that was 2021 what what part of the year was that in uh was it November early November it was November okay okay so let's see that that's like that at the highest point of the market right where so like what what was the vibe of breako one it was like very much like consensus 2017 okay yeah yeah that kind of vintage um and like uh but there were like some devs there were some developers there and some folks to

connect with we like you know we gave a bunch of talks on security and programming and like all the smart contract development and there was like a crowd of people that was like kind of staring at like the Nerds and trying to figure out what they're doing uh and those nerds when all of them like hung out in one house that we all called The Hacker House like jokingly uh and it like worked out so well that um a bunch of people just wanted to keep running these like little hacker houses right

after a breakpoint just keep going with it and that's really like I don't know if you've been to any of the hacker houses or like you heard of salana hacker houses it was just really that like we wanted to capture that Vibe of all the developers that are just like nerding out in a in a single place and just run with it so we threw a bunch of these like little events through around the world um and like yeah post Peak the price is dropping but like the developer engaging is rising and like people are

shipping code and like building products and stuff so like it like I think during that year we formed like a really strong core of like the community like all the security companies like neod all those guys that kind of became what they are today dur during that year and like all a bunch of the products that you know on Salon launched that through through that yeah so okay so if this was at the top of the market 2021 and there was like a lot of there's like a lot of the tourists in the industry as a whole but you're saying there was also the kernel of what

later became the Community well like just what were the lessons that were pulled out of the 2021 uh breakpoint that that have continued forward I think you could like the tourists and stuff they will show up during a a a bull cycle there it's not like you can like keep them away right like we're not going to like even if we tried right like you can't like tell them not to come and that's fine I think um for Founders or people that are trying to build a community you really got to like be principled and really

focus on those like nerds and like the people that are actually building stuff in there for the Long Haul as much as you can um so that takes some focus and like takes like your internal team to not get like uh you know um get confused or like what the what the mission is and stuff like that and like we have an awesome team and and those folks really pulled it together um and you could see like the next break point we had a year of of like everything going down right uh it was a bunch of devs it was like mostly Developers mostly like companies

trying to ship product um and kind of like the same thing happened again right like I would say this last year right the last break point and the flight back like the worst possible thing that I could have ever imagined happened and if you were have told me then that like this is what it's going to be like a year from now I would have like probably punched you at that time okay but the second uh salonic break point what you're referring to is the second salonic break point was like right before FTX but like retroactively didn't the salon breakpoint was just a

salon breakpoint like FTX happened right afterwards but like the conference itself was totally isolated yeah it was awesome we had like um I don't like 60 game companies showed up for game day they were like all like launching like games and stuff we had I don't know a bunch of devs registered for that Hacker House I think like 1,500 which is like insane um like the energy was great and people were building building stuff and then like right at the end of it right I think at

like the closing party effectively I'm seeing all these tweets about FTX imploding it was LE it happened at the end not right before yeah yeah exactly so like uh it was I don't know I I think the reason why we're still here is because those developers stuck around they weren't tourists right they actually see some value in this technology and they continued building that's what kind of really that's I I think the goal of all these conferences all these events and hacker houses is to

like get that you know the social glue that's going to like Fork the network when something bad happens you need to actually build it it's not just going to like happen automatically and you got to get those folks in and uh like it or not I think those people have to be pretty technical they have to understand how the system works it's usually going to be your pool of developers or validators so like you got to invest in that mhm so we're at breakpoint three now in in 2023 um and understanding that some people attending breakpoint 3 have been to all

three breakpoints and you know at some point like three plus years you're seeing the same three fa like the same faces three years in a row now you know in in other spots in the world but also at breako for some people in the salon's Community is going to feel like that's home for them uh and so you know three plus years that's a that's a lot of time as a as a community together how would you describe the evolution of break point to where we are today like what what would be the the the like the sentiment around breakpoint three yeah you know one of the things that's great

about this year is we had something called Mev Camp last year which should have spontaneously popped up a bunch of validators and the mango team and a few others and jto decided last year oh we're going to do a pre- breakpoint event and that a lot of people who attended that said that was one of the most high value things they got out of the year was like that Community focused on high perform and blockchain and so they actually ran Mev Camp here formally as part of break point Point um block zero was a validator conference that kicked off beforehand IBC Amsterdam came

here and did a whole conference on blockchain uh connectivity in in day one and so we're seeing like breakpoint go from something that like was 90% organized by the foundation to something that's maybe 65% organized by the foundation this year and maybe next year it's 45% organized and it's that long journey to say that like the foundation and its role here is really a part of it it's not the whole thing and to start handing over bigger and bigger core components of this conference to the ecosystem and that's where that like to

know that the ecosystem of developers and Builders is strong enough to actually organize big events that draw their own crowd is uh is really awesome to see MH that's my biggest takeaway at least what's yours yeah they want to do less work no but that it it's really cool like I mean every breakpoint there's somebody trying to do something on their own and like throw events that like surprise us and like I think um it's important that like the folks of the foundation recognize that and try to incorporate it and like kind of run with

it cuz all the good ideas come from the community you know we're we're we don't know what we're doing is the aesthetic of breakpoint I think is is pretty interesting was it it's very Appley the the the apple design is like very very prominent in breakpoint 3 was that it a lot of the stuff I think comes from Raj like I would say he's like the spiritual designer of salana like it doesn't come from me I can tell you that was was breakpoint two and one like that or is that a relatively new like

design design kind of vibe we had um more time this year than we've had with breakpoint one or two so I think there was a bit more focus on you know visual design and sort of the the animations you see on the main stage and that sort of thing and and Ross our creative director at the foundation like has a huge hand in in working with Raj and making sure that stuff comes together well um this is also the we have a events director Ellie at the foundation and you know she came from Netflix and ran a lot of really high-profile events for them and so um you the conference is

growing up in a lot of ways it's growing up through more participants and greater decentralization and all these really awesome things we get to do but it's also growing up from a production standpoint too and that like you know the the first hacker house you were talking about it was literally like a bunch of folding tables in a room and like bunch of power cords being run over the ground and like I'm sure it was totally not up to code that's awesome but at some point you know it's like all right well we have a few months to plan this thing let's see if we can do it a little more right what about the the composition of who is attending breakpoint 3 like who's coming

here um it's I would say like just from talking to random people it's a lot of like like people that have been around in the community for like a year or two like I think it's folks that have kind of stuck around but I also see a bunch of new faces um mostly developers at least the people that come up to me it's MH and like it's mostly dos which is pretty cool like I think that's that's like the goal right get get a bunch of Engineers together MH um get folks talking and like meeting each other and build those relationships MH yeah and

there's more Engineers from other ecosystems here too I mean you're here Justin bonds is here definitely not an engineer but but but we're starting to see more more folks who are more engaged in sort of the research community and other networks start to look more seriously at salana and that's just huge foding to see like R is here as well from maker so it's a good collection of folks yeah especially this last year I'd say from at least from my procession like this has been the Year may maybe you guys can be more informed about this but the year like Salon chude glass

through through the bar Market how has that like impacted just like the the cultural Vibe and and what this event means for the community I have a lot more gray hair me too yeah this was uh I would say like the hardest year for me like kind of the most pain F cuz it was such a slog it's it wasn't like you know an outage or something you know happens you like work through it you know the engineering problem and then you're you kind of it's behind you but like um it was really cool to see like how many

people like again surprising like people just stuck around they're like you know they're like oh yeah FTX collapsed I guess that happened I'm just going to keep shipping my code and like sh shipping my product because that's what they're focused on so that was awesome to see like it really means that people do see something special about the technology and really want to continue like investing in it in it um and those are the folks that really create all the value like if create the community they kind of carry the carry the the whole

network um so I don't know it was uh it's cool to see them cool to shake hands with everyone I'm like Greatful for everyone that's showed up mhm anything anything from you about your the evolution of the iSonic Community here yeah you know uh to what toally was saying about folks just continuing to build and ship I think what what I've seen personally is like salana defi this year like all the stuff that was being worked on through 2022 like it just shipped this year and it's been really incredible to see like new versions of

Jupiter coming out and what they're able to do um like margin fi and some of the stuff they've been building um the new Orca product that's launching this week like there's a lot of really good sort of I don't if you call it defi 2.0 but like some new generation of like Sal Defi and like the work squads has been doing on Multi sigs and like those hardcore real code-based projects like that was the real test for me when I was like oh all these folks are still are still fully committed to salana they're still building here they're still shipping awesome stuff um and they they

did what everyone always tells you to do which is build through the bear but like they actually didn't you know what what would you say is the thing that uh or the the handful of things that really excites the salonic Community as a s to day like what what are people looking forward to um I mean like I think uh you can you can kind of tell the focus between the salana like conferences in ethereum there's a lot less scaling talks right like a lot of companies are focused on consumer end things and it's

like it's I guess our Vibe like I'm probably coming from like myself and from from everyone else like at least my message is we got scaling taken care of you don't have to worry about it so like the kind of people we attract are the ones that at least believe in it or at least like can verify that where it it mostly works and can focus on like consumer and products um and that's pretty interesting I think like there's a lot less um like it's it's harder it's really it's much harder to build like

consumer and products it's easier to build infra right and to like raise for it so a lot of the folks here are like really grinding for product Market fit like in in the trenches really trying to get users and a lot of the conversations that I have with devs are like and things that I'm not an expert in I can tell them everything about like systems engineering and and stuff like that but what they really care about is how do I grow how do I get like users where do I like um you know like what advice can I give them in terms of product development so that's like a ton of

learning for me as well what's your perspective Austin what's getting the community excited these days yeah you know there's a lot I will say it's definitely the consumer focused applications are like there's this understanding in the salonic community that like we've been waiting for Consumer facing applications to hit like oh it's been a ux problem oh it's been a UI problem oh it's a regulation problem oh it's a scaling problem Oh there's no good self- custody Solutions like that's been sort of and this is not you know

specific to any network but there sort of been like an excuse mindset I think in crypto for a number of years that like oh we were ready to build consumer applications but usdc isn't available in New York so suddenly we can't do it and there's just a lot of Founders attracted to the salana ecosystem that sort of say eh I'm just going to build it and like it's not my perfect vision like sling launched yesterday here it's peer-to-peer venmo built on you know US dollar stable coins and it's not available in New York and they're just like yep it works in 30 countries doesn't work in New York like too bad MH

and that is like a thing that is just like like this there's this Vibe of just like build and ship and like we can figure it out later and something you see in a lot of web 2 companies is that people seem to be really worried about building the perfect product before they ship it and there's like a willingness to experiment in production that's always been part of the crypto ethos for non-consumer applications and we're seeing that move more into the consumer side I think wait is there what kind of consumer applications are are going around that uh are worth noting if people want to go

and explore some yeah so I I would say sling um which just launched is really pretty interesting what drip house is doing with sort of free nft collections that are time limited as opposed to being um number limited th those to me are particularly interesting what helium is doing with their $5 Mobile plan um fuse uh account abstracted wallet uh it's pretty cool so you can like basically no seed phrase you set up multiple devices that are part of your own multi right um so that's pretty cool to see like I I those are like the

features that I think like take a lot of design work and and uh folks to really think through all the really really complicated ux challenges and and like put it together in a product that um improves security and usability you rarely see both of those happening at the same time sure yeah I've been impressed with squads V4 yeah cool and it's to so every time I see you you're running around pretty busy uh once breakpoint ends what are you going to go do what's like the first thing that you're going to focus on um going to hang out with my family and kids I had

to miss like Halloween with the kids which is they were so sad that I wasn't there that they saved me candy a that's nice that's nice okay but but what about inside of the salana ecosystem like what's first on your agenda here um I like uh it's like I'm as a Founder right you're often like do whatever whatever is necessary right you jump in and you're like I will you know help people to Brand I'll like do messaging and

stuff like that the ecosystem is mature enough Foundation is mature enough and like all these things are actually getting uh filled with experts that are much better than me at like all the things except systems engineering so I get to actually do some some of that again so I'm like working on the multiple concurrent leader design like stuff like that like trying to make sure ai2 and like all the runtime changes uh land and like a robust so like I get to

nerd out which is pretty great yeah as a Founders grow and their their project grows they tend to go into this like an operations role where they're they're not really actually doing the thing that made them successful in the first place they are now managing how much of that how much are you like managing and operating that was like the last two years like uh you kind of like the last three years I would say like as soon as we launched I couldn't do systems work at all like I was like basically running around you know talking to everyone

almost like a sales roll I would say and like now like there's just so many other people that are much that are much better than me at like all these other functions so it's pretty great okay so pivoting the conversation to something completely different what would you guys say is the long-term uh relations between salana and ethereum Austin I'll throw this one to you uh I mean I don't know exactly what there's a lot of different ways that could go I would say like to start I don't think we directly view ethereum as

a competitor right I think there there's very different approaches to what's being built on ethereum what's being built on salana um I know to's got some fun ideas about using salana as a sequencer um for nl2 um but there's a lot you know I think at the end of the day like what I would love to see is that folks who are using ethereum for what ethereum is great at they use salana for what's great at too like the class example of this is there's no reason the apoin air drop should have been on ethereum right now yes you could talk about all floating that until lir

too but you could have dropped apoin on salana and people would have been able to spend basically zero doar on gas fees and then Bridge it back over their convenience if they want to instead of paying $3,500 to claim an air drop so I think there's a lot of um technology synergies that can happen between them I hate to use that the s word synergies yeah what you think yeah what's your um I think like there's like this nice narrative that I keep in my head and I I don't know how true it is is that like

Bitcoin is like stateless money ethereum is settlement and then salon's execution it like sounds good in theory but like there's obviously feature overlap right like ethereum is also great stateless money right and salana also implements settlement and there's going to be tension between all those things right and that's fine right like there's going to be competition Some people prefer one or the other and like to me that's great cuz like that forces Innovation people have to think through hard problems and like figure out like you know how do I

build this maybe the same thing in a different network it actually does spark ideas and moves moves the industry forward so like it'll it'll be competitive it'll be somewhat like uh open source you know like BSD devs and Linux devs compete but they share ideas it's it's all good right yeah I would also say that like we have this human brains are really bad at uh not competing when you put a chart up so the fact that we have a market capture there's a leaderboard leader board right

and like Bitcoin didn't need to fail for ethereum to succeed and ethereum doesn't need to fail for salana to gain Mass adoption right and like salana failing would not give ethereum any more adoption and globally we're just dealing with such a tiny fraction of the pie that currently uses crypto that like there's all of this like PVP one group punching each other in the face like that is just totally unnecessary and it's just because we have a leaderboard yeah that's a good point I've never really considered the leaderboard as like the uh the instigator of so many

fighting fights I I think like as long as people don't do personal attacks people arguing about tech and vision all that stuff is fine I think that is like part of our search for truth right we're trying to figure out what what makes sense what doesn't um I don't see a world where Sana succeeds and ethereum fails I think that's just like ridiculous right like um ethereum is awesome I think the reason that their technology is moving in that direction is because of the success that they had they're kind of like in a specific spot

if I was in involved in the ethereum community I'd probably be arguing for the exact same design decision as they're doing now because that's the natural path right to go um so like I think it's totally fine the competition's great right like I think it's awesome you know I hope like the optimizations that like Kevin Bowers did for like 256 bit multiplication end up you know you know increasing evm through that' be great like it's all open source code it's it's all good sure I think there's one thing I've uh just learned

from just chatting with the people here at breakpoint is that there's a certain archetype of of type of person that comes to the salana community and it's like this like lowlevel uh lowlevel devs right like the X Teslas the X like SpaceX type of the Google type of people that I like so you find some of these people in ethereum but really there's a lot of these people that's salana attracted that I don't think would have joined any Community because of just the nature of how that blockchain was built versus salana there's something about like the way that salana the the emphasis on hardware