Solana AMA with Anatoly Recap, 5th August 2021
Anatoly | Solana
How is everyone?
LB
Welcome @anatoly_solana 👋❤️😊 so humbled to have you in our group. Such a huge fan that I am a bit nervous 😳🤗
Bilo
It is my honor and privilege to welcome with us today, Anatoly Yakovenko; Co-Founder and CEO of Solana Labs.
It’s our pleasure to have you with us here today. I would also like to welcome you here on behalf of our entire community.
Could we begin with a brief history of yourself @anatoly_solana and your career that led you to where you are today?
Anatoly | Solana
So a brief history
Built linux from scratch for fun in high school, studied computer science at UIUC
ended up working on operating systems at Qualcomm for 12 years
was a really fun time to be in mobile, since hardware went from 16-bit devices to the 64bit super computers you have in your hand
Bilo
hahaha — I’m old enough to remember those times
Thanks for that
For those unfamiliar with Solana, how would you describe Solana if you were talking to someone unfamiliar with digital assets?
Anatoly | Solana
It’s like an Operating System, shares a ton of design similarities to those embedded real time OS’s that ran on early cell phones. But its design to run as a single global computer, and be as fast as possible
It’s useful for guaranteeing that everyone that is using it has access to the same information as fast as possible.
Which is obviously useful in finance, trading, exchanges, that sort of thing
Bilo
How did you achieve being the fastest blockchain with 400ms per block?
Anatoly | Solana
In 2017 I had a realization that verifiable delay functions could be used as a source of time in blockchains, just like time is used in TDMA/CDMA/LTE cell networks
That’s the fundamental design choice that we made, and everything is built around it.
Intuitively, if you remember your physics class, radio waves interfere, so two towers that send a signal at the same time over the same frequency would get noise
So cell networks synchronize clocks across all towers and alternate by time
In blockchain, if two block producers make a block at the same time, there is a fork, and the network is in a “noisy” state
Same thing really
Bilo
Nice — You certainly have an edge with, to say the least, the speed you are able to offer
Anatoly | Solana
If you can alternate them by time in a trustless way then you can get the same improvement
The goal for Solana is to propagate its state changes around the world at the speed of news which would make it competitive to NYSE/NASDAQ for trading but at global scale something like 80ms block times would do it, so we have a ton of work left :)
Bilo
😂
Aside from being the fastest blockchain, can you tell us about why you thought Solana needed to be built and what problem it solves?
Anatoly | Solana
Finance has a ton of middlemen
Everyone wants to take a few bips anytime information changes hands and central limit order books in NASDAQ is where price discovery occurs, and risk is really executed
As a trader, I was pretty frustrated with always getting my data a few seconds after the big guys, and not even having access to the same data as them
It’s basically impossible for a hobbyist to play at that level in traditional markets
Bilo
So true
Anatoly | Solana
So Solana’s seed deck said that “Solana is blockchain at Nasdaq speed”
Bilo
🔥
Anatoly | Solana
while the hardware is more expensive, anyone in the world can plug in to the network and be on the same level playing field as jump trading and Alameda research
Bilo
That really is amazing and you’ve managed to simplify why we love Solana so much ❤️
Why do you think that Solana can be the best choice to build deFi while there are all these other chains on the market?
Anatoly | Solana
It’s the only place that a central limit order book can run and those are the core components of defi
Building for that level of throughput, also makes it the lowest latency and cheapest place for users
Bilo
What is the $SOL token used for?
Anatoly | Solana
I suspect that market makers/bots will be 95% of the traffic, but the 5% can bring billions of people into crypto
Bilo
Excellent point
Anatoly | Solana
SOL is really “spam” prevention. it pays for transactions fees, storage, gives weight to consensus votes, etc…and provides quality of service access to the state, if you have 0.1% of SOL, you should be a block producer 1/1000 times etc…
Bilo
Where do you see Solana as fitting in to the larger blockchain ecosystem?
Anatoly | Solana
We always thought of ourselves as the execution layer. Like in finance, I can name all the places where execution happens, NASDAQ/NYSE, but I can’t name a single place for settlement :)
So all the actual price discovery, risk engines, or even web3 user interactions can sit on Solana
Audius is a great example of a crypto app with a governance token on ethereum, but all the user interactions between fans and artists are on Solana
So this applies even to web3 consumer applications
Bilo
Thanks for that detailed explanation
Today marks the Ethereum hardfork. With all the news and recent justifiable hype surrounding Ethereum, do you see Solana as competition to Ethereum or complementary to it and if so why?
Anatoly | Solana
Everyone is competing. which is a good thing. It helps us all innovate faster when we can see other teams try something different. The goal is to onboard 7 billion people into self-custody and cryptography. It’s going to take a lot of work from all the ecosystems combined
Bilo
I’m loving your answers! Competition is certainly the strongest driver of innovation. Tell us about the Solana Foundation and its mission and governance process.
Anatoly | Solana
SF is focused on maximizing censorship resistance at the core consensus layer
For us to achieve that goal of global fair access to information, the network physically needs to be extremely real time censorship resistance and this is a bit different then POW/btc or POS/eth2
SF is working on maximizing the min set of nodes that add up to 33%, or the Nakamoto Coefficient,
So that requires a ton of internet/bandwidth/hardware/validators, etc…
and governance around the economics of the sol token to make sure that all those participants are fairly treated
Bilo
Kindly tell us a little more about the Solana Foundation grants and the vision behind this
Anatoly | Solana
Solana Foundation also does a ton of grants basically to anyone who has a vision on onboarding millions of people to self-custody cryptography
This effort really grows the entire crypto ecosystem for everyone
Bilo
Is the Solana tour de Sol still in action?
Anatoly | Solana
Sort of. TDS is our testnet, the network where we test new versions of the validator software. It usually has more nodes, right now over 2100 and the community can experiment with dynamic staking, stress tests, attacks, etc…
Bilo
I see. Thanks
Anatoly | Solana
The foundation gives grants to folks who run validators on TDS so we have a healthy testbed for development
Bilo
Are there mechanisms in place to reward people or communities for adding value to the ecosystem?
Anatoly | Solana
Yea, please send a grant proposal to the Solana Foundation, not everyone needs to be a dev
A lot of folks just participate in the Solana collective and help spread awareness
Bilo
Very cool 👀
Can anyone setup a validator node? If so, are there rewards to doing so? what’s needed?
Anatoly | Solana
If you run a node for TDS/testnet, foundation has a grant program
anyone can setup a node, and there are instructions on docs.solana.com
Bilo
@Bussi4Nicole
Nicole |Crypto Society|
I’m on it! 😉
Bilo
What are replicators and what function do they serve and why are they important?
Anatoly | Solana
Replicators have morphed into a collaboration with ARweave. It’s a way to store the entire ledger history on a persistent storage network. It allows anyone in the world to get access to all the historical Solana ledger and the validators can focus on generating that state instead of storing it as well :)
Bilo
Great segway for my next question
We researched and came to the conclusion that Solana originally planned to implement a network of Archivers, utilizing Proof of Replications to store ledger data. From what we understand, this solution has been stopped/closed and Solana has rather chosen to off-ramp blockchain data storage to Arweave. Is there any documentary or visual on how Solana’s blockchain data is ported/replicated to Arweave? If so please share a link, if not please explain the process somewhat?
Anatoly | Solana
This idea was so popular that a team spun out and is now implementing it for a lot of layer-1’s. https://kyve.network
Which is a great example of all the layer-1 competitors working together
There is still a challenge with cheaply proving if the historical ledger is part of the current observed state on the network.
Bilo
What is break Solana all about?
Anatoly | Solana
It’s an application that we built at launch about a year ago to show the performance and scalability of the network. You can smash your keys and send smart contract transactions for each key stroke. Really makes it obvious that Solana is next gen
Bilo
hahaha brilliant!
How do you explain the rise and success behind Solana from a “relatively” unknown project less than a year ago to what it is today?
Anatoly | Solana
I think the speed is definitely a factor. Devs building on Solana can focus on building great products and not worry about price or UX of dealing with a slow network. We really want the experience of web3 to match or exceed web2
Bilo
🔥
Anatoly | Solana
The other one is accessibility, the tools that Solana users are much more common across the tech world, rust is the number one loved language voted by GitHub engineers
So a lot of folks coming into crypto from years of java/c++/.net are able to build using the tools they know
Bilo
How do you plan to solve the problem of the low number of devs who work on rust? Solana is a new blockchain, most of the code has to be written from scratch.
Anatoly | Solana
Professional engineers are not generally sandboxed into a language. I am not a “rust or c++” engineer, I am a “get shit done” engineer :)
You should expect to learn a new stack every 2 years
Bilo
Hahaha — Fair enough
😅
Lots of games are building on Solana. Why is that? Do you have any favourites?
Anatoly | Solana
To build out the core set of reusable programs, we had a concentrated effort to build reference products
tokens/amms/governance/lending
Bilo
🤓
Anatoly | Solana
these building blocks are what make up 99.9% of all the dapps right now
Bilo
Just want to make sure you caught my last question
Lots of games are building on Solana. Why is that? Do you have any favourites?
Anatoly | Solana
Well, gamers, and game devs are usually really sensitive to latency
also, most game devs know c++, and rust is a natural thing to pick up for c++ devs
Solana is cheap and fast, so it’s a natural place for game development
Bilo
Do you play games yourself? 😃
Anatoly | Solana
I’ve got a ps5
Bilo
My man — let’s play together 😁
Tell us more about your collaboration with Chainlink
Anatoly | Solana
I am waiting for them to ship more games for it, kind of slow :)
We are excited for Chainlink to ship a new kind of oracle, a streaming interface designed for low latency price feeds
We expect new kinds of defi applications to be built on top of it
Bilo
👀
Is Solana looking to add a Privacy layer/privacy features into its layer 1 protocol. If so, what technologies did you have in mind? Could you elaborate on if Solana would become private by default or offer optional privacy?”
Anatoly | Solana
We have a project that is working through bulletproofs for confidential payments
Right now, privacy is still in the r&d phase, people will point you to papers that are less than 6 months old as the “best” thing in privacy
Not a great sign for an engineer :)
Bilo
More need for innovation :D that’s great
Is(are) there a(any) specific reason(s) why Arweave was chosen opposed to other storage protocols such as Filecoin, StorJ etc.?
Anatoly | Solana
bulletproofs seem scalable to a billion people, so that’s the approach we are working on internally, but I think the space as a whole still has some work to do to find a mature implementation
ARweave worked when we tried it, and the pay once store forever model works well for NFTs and ledger history
Bilo
Excellent — Thanks
Just as a side note, I was very impressed by your leadership in posting monthly transaction reports dubbed “Transparency reports” on your website informing the community about last month’s token activity as well as current and forecasted token activity. Congratulations on this excellent initiative.
Anatoly | Solana
if things look planned from the outside, generally it’s just because we pick the thing that is working and iterating the fastest. that’s the only plan :)
Bilo
Can you share some info regarding staking and rewards? How and where can I stake my Solana tokens? Solana also recently published a tweet that staking pools were coming.
Anatoly | Solana
Solana has staking, like all POS networks. To scale staking to 10,000 nodes, we really need a way to aggregate and split stake amongst a large number of validators
No single person can monitor that many systems
Stake pools allow different users to trustlessly pool their stake together and use whatever custom strategy they want to maximize for rewards/network performance/censorship restaince
This is probably the hardest challenge in POS networks
There is no obvious mechanism to get stakes to distribute and to maximize censorship resistance
Bilo
I see — Interesting 🤔
Anatoly | Solana
Pools are tokens though, so they can be used as defi collateral
Bilo
Thanks :)
What are you currently working on and can you describe your future roadmap?
Anatoly | Solana
DeFI applications must have censorship resistance to function, so what we should see as the space matures is that DeFI apps will prefer and promote stake pools that maximize censorship resistance at the core network level
Our roadmap is “fire driven development” :)
It takes 10 years to build a database or an operating system, so the core eng team is iterating on the performance of the validator software, testing that it can scale to 1b to 10b accounts
Really making sure that Solana keeps getting cheaper and faster
Bilo
That’s really great to hear ❤️
Are there any partnerships in the works that you would like to tell us about?
Anatoly | Solana
Just follow us on Twitter to get all the latest and greatest announcements
We tend to only promote things once they are live
Bilo
I was about to ask you a follow-up question but now I don’t know if you will oblige me 🥺
We only live once — here’s the question
Is there any exclusive breaking news about Solana that you could share with us here today?
Anatoly | Solana
Haha, not really. breaking news: tons of work left
Bilo
I tried… (sad face)
Anatoly | Solana
Folks should checkout https://neonlabs.org
Just launched, it’s a port of EVM as a Solana program
Bilo
👀👀👀
Anatoly | Solana
Really shows off the fact that Solana is an operating system
EVM runs on Solana just like it runs on linux
Bilo
I will take that as my “breaking news” 🤓
Do you wish to let us know anything else that was not covered in the questions above?
Anatoly | Solana
Thank you for having me!
Bilo
Thank you for your time in answering our questions here today. We are all very appreciative of your time and of the answers you have provided.
With this, we will open up the chat for those who wish to personally thank you for your time with us here today and for those who wish to ask their own questions.
Anatoly | Solana
Awesome! this was super fun
Bilo
With this we will open the chat for the community questions
Anatoly | Solana
> Solana is fast, cheap, and easy to use. However, is Solana Network well prepared already for lots of active users? What if many people suddenly people want to use Solana Network and come from other networks, can Solana system handle this heavy load of people ? Do you prepare for something like this?
100% it is what the network is designed for. The work that we have done to scale this is also in the awesome rpcpool.com project that is running 400+ rpc nodes for all the teams building products on Solana
> How Solana manage sustainability of nodes providers with negligible fee structure, what is the incentive mechanism.
Fees are there only to prevent spam on the network. Inflation rewards are there to pay for nodes. We should see stake pools grow as a larger portion of stake since the pools can be used in DeFI and can cover 1000’s of validators
> How do you intend to communicate your understanding of the project to people in other nations who do not speak English as well?
We have a community run Solana collective with many non-English speakers.
> How do you intend to communicate your understanding of the project to people in other nations who do not speak English as well?
Checkout metaplex.com, artists can spin up their own NFT store fronts like Shopify/WordPress
> What are Solana’s long-term goals and vision? In order to achieve the highest efficiency of the set goals, what is Solana’s roadmap in the near future, what will be the goals that Solana will focus on developing this year?
Really be the place where 1 billion+ users with self-custody all interact with defi and web3
> There are already many Projects which works on scalability with Both Layer-1 and Layer-2 solution ! So, why Solana would be Best choice ?
It’s done! our hackathons see devs go from idea to product and raise funding in 4 weeks without ever having to think about scalability.
Bilo
Ok thanks @anatoly_solana for
Your time with us today and for answering all the questions. We hope you join us here on a regular basis as there is much love for you and your project in our community.
Relevant Links
Solana Website: https://solana.com/
Solana Telegram: https://t.me/solana
Solana Twitter: https://twitter.com/solana
Crypto Society Chat: https://t.me/cryptosocietyy
Crypto Society Announcements: https://t.me/CryptoSocietyyy
Crypto Society Twitter: https://twitter.com/cryptosocietytg
