Why Solana keeps getting faster — and what's next (ft. Jito Labs CEO Lucas Bruder)

**Lucas Bruder** (0:00)
Jito is the largest liquid staking protocol in Solana. We ourselves is the economic growth engine for Solana.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
What is your long-term vision for the future of Solana?

**Lucas Bruder** (0:09)
Basically, where all the finance happens on chain, I would say it's all done on a single state machine at the speed of light. You want to trade stocks on Robinhood. How many hoops do you have to hop through to do that? Send them your driver's license. There's a whole KYC process, and they limit you on how much you can purchase. It's like, what are we doing here? I think if it happens on Solana, you can download a wallet on your phone, press a few buttons, and then you have access to this whole financial system. Bitcoin is just kind of like a pet rock. Solana is doubling and continues to double capacity. It's hard to not be impressed with what Solana has achieved, and there's still so much work to do.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:49)
Lucas, thanks for coming on the show.

**Lucas Bruder** (0:50)
Thanks for having me.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:51)
Yeah. Okay. So tell us what you're working on with Jito.

**Lucas Bruder** (0:53)
Yeah. So Jito is the largest liquid staking protocol in Solana and we're kind of view ourselves as the economic growth engine for Solana. So we have a liquid staking protocol, and then we also build a validator client, which basically tries to optimize the transaction ordering on the network.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:11)
Why would we need such a service on Solana?

**Lucas Bruder** (1:14)
We started Jito in 2021 and we just had this thesis that there would be a lot of spam on Solana, just transaction spam, and a lot of-

**SPEAKER_2** (1:24)
There has been, because block space is so cheap.

**Lucas Bruder** (1:26)
Yeah, and transactions are super cheap. Transactions are less than a hundredth of a penny, so very cheap. Solana was pretty early back in the day. The tech has gotten much better, but back then it was a little simpler, which can be good and bad. For a while, it was pretty bad there.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:41)
Some outages here or there.

**Lucas Bruder** (1:43)
Yeah. I started doing MEV before then, so I was doing a little trading on Ethereum and fell down that rabbit hole for a few months. I was working my day job and then I go home and work on this trading bot. Discovered Solana, I think early 2021, and just fell in love with it.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:00)
What was it about Solana that attracted you having come from your background with Ethereum?

**Lucas Bruder** (2:06)
I would say it was just the very low level stuff. I studied computer engineering, so very low level, how the processors work. That team knew what they were talking about, like I could tell right away, and it was just a different approach. I think everyone was really focused on L2s and scaling through that method and some other methods, and Solana was just like, we think we can synchronize this entire state machine on one network versus many different networks. I started looking at the code and everything and just I was like, oh, this is a very cool network. I think it's going to scale. Probably going to deal with some spam in the meantime.
We started Jito in 2021 and built out this ValidAir client and this whole system that basically tries to help Solana filter spam, like a Cloudflare. I think that would be a good analogy.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:53)
Cloudflare recently, they've, well, they're this intermediary between the end user and websites. They grew up being this DDoS shield, and now they're saying they're going to filter out AI bots and things. That's where they seem to be transitioning. That's what Matthew Prince has been saying.

**Lucas Bruder** (3:09)
Yeah. I think that's a good analogy for the past few years of Jito. It's like take a lot of load off the network. I think we were pretty successful in that. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun building it.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:20)
How do you measure success?

**Lucas Bruder** (3:21)
I think there's the numbers, but I think it's just like we're so intertwined with the Solana network. We ship a valid air client, roughly 80-90 percent of the network runs that client. We're the largest liquid staking protocol. We have our own numbers that we care about like the numbers I just mentioned. But at the end of the day, it's like how many people are using Solana and how much trading volume is there. I think we have made pretty good contributions to Solana being what it is today. Obviously, the job is not finished, but Solana is doing the most DEX volume. The cool thing is that Solana is the cheapest place to buy Solana. The best place to buy Ethereum isn't on Ethereum, it's on Binance or Coinbase or these sexes.