#20 - Solana

Balaji (0:00)

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, it was starting.

Akshay (0:20)

Thank you for having me, Balaji. Yes, you know, it's funny that during the March crash, when actually the Mainnet, March 2020 crash, when the Mainnet launched, in the back of people basically saying, you should wait it out for markets to get better and things like this. But yeah, it's been quite a while since then. Hey, Lily. What's up, guys?

Balaji (0:39)

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 in DEXs, and you're number one in DEXs.

Akshay (0:55)

Yeah, that's right. Depending on if you're looking at DEX volume, that's right.

Balaji (0:59)

That's right. And I think on the order of 7,500 developers in 2024, which is actually more than Ethereum. So new devs 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 triggers and hooks that you could run on token sends, if I'm not mistaken. Then there was the Fire Dancer thing. So you basically rebuilt the validator, so you could blast through more transactions per second. Now, Deepin, I'd like you to talk about this. This is like decentralized physical infrastructure networks. I've been 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?

Akshay (1:55)

Yeah, I think that captures quite a lot of what is happening on chain. Essentially, it's like a high-performance engine for you to build anything from consumer apps to trading applications to, as you said, some of these more bespoke, decentralized, nuclear 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 these sort of networks, if you will. I think using crypto incentives to bootstrap sort of physical infrastructure or marketplaces are an alternative to using venture capital, right? And because venture capital was abundant in the 2010s, and because of low interest rates, you sort of were able to throw a lot of money at these marketplace style companies. Whereas 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 HiveMapper, where these folks who are driving to work every day, or they're maybe professionally driving on Uber, they will buy and install a dashboard camera, and that dashboard camera maps the roads in real time, giving you this sort of crowdsourced 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, Google Street View is sometimes as old as 10 years old, or it's super expensive for folks to access them. And so it creates this alternative crowdsourced 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 of the network. And so in some ways, they're getting paid in the ownership of the network.

Balaji (3:47)

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.

Akshay (4:00)

That's exactly right, yes.

Lily (4:01)

Balaji, 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 an 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.