I'm Taking My Talents to Solana | Max Resnick - Anza | Danny Nelson - CoinDesk |

Can I join that council? Uh nothing like spiritual consensus from a bunch of culty my ladies. Uh clearly there's some discussion about the EF's role in marketing and having Michael Saylor uh for Ethereum aside, I am all for participants EF or not EF uh to do brand hacks for Ethereum. The question is is who? Next up, we have Max Resnick from Anza uh and Danny Nelson from CoinDesk with I'm taking my talents to Solana.

Testing? Okay, it works. All right. Good morning, everybody. Uh we're I am Danny from CoinDesk.

I'm here with Max Resnick. He works at Anza uh which is building a client for Solana and he is formerly of the Ethereum world. Uh and so we're going to kick it right off. Max, I want to use this time to talk about the differences that you see between Ethereum and Solana and also really dig into your personal choice to move from this uh from Ethereum to Solana and I want to start it off with a tweet of yours from June uh where you still were working in the Ethereum world, you said, "I'm quote I'm tired of Ethereum losing to Solana. I want us to start winning again.

But that means we need to start playing our game, not theirs. Apple doesn't compete on price with 100 dollar Chinese Androids. They compete on quality. They simply build better products that people want to use and you continued, "We have an Ethereum you were referencing. We have better dev tooling, more decentralization, more security, and better mechanism design.

And we need to use these to these tools to deliver a compelling user experience. So, that at least in June of last year, they're pretty compelling statement that there's issues with Ethereum to against Solana. But, you were really positioning yourself on the side of I want to help Ethereum succeed. 6 months later, you know, you were moving to the Solana ecosystem. Just walk us through the progression of your thoughts, how you got from that place to where we are now.

Yeah, so I guess my kind of wake up call for, "Hey, something is really deeply wrong in Ethereum." was in May, I went out to this event in Sonoma County, California, where we had a bunch of EF researchers and a bunch of academics. And this was kind of the height of this complete frenzy about uh a tester proposer separation, which was this idea of separating out the role of attesting to the block, validating it, and proposing the block. And this is something that was pushed by Justin initially with execution tickets, but then spawned a whole uh stream of like 20 different uh ETH research posts. And I kind of thought, "Hey, this idea is going nowhere, and we're just spinning our wheels.

Meanwhile, we haven't scaled the chain, we haven't increased transaction throughput, we haven't done anything to reduce the block time." These are things that users actually care about, not basically doing esoteric mechanism design research that ultimately is not going to end up going into the chain in any way. And so, I just felt we were kind of spinning, working on the wrong problems. And then I started speaking out. I had this kind of like make Ethereum great again tweet.

And then, you know, I I did think we had a lot of advantages on ETH. Like, like I mentioned, like dev tooling, like we have better mechanism design. Still, there is better mechanism design on ETH and Solana, I will say. Although, I'm working to change that obviously on the Solana side. But, that doesn't mean that you can just rest on your laurels and sit tight, continue producing 13, 15 transactions per second while your competitors are doing thousands and hope for the best because ultimately, you may have network effects, you may have a lot of things going for you, but if you don't scale, if you don't make the chain faster, if you don't make it easier for users, they're going to leave.

And they did end up leaving, and now Solana's, you know, dominating ETH on all kinds of metrics including users and transaction volume and trading volume. And I think that will continue to happen. Was it inevitable that Ethereum would end up resting on its laurels in your opinion? I don't think it was inevitable. I think it was a conscious choice by leadership or lack thereof at the Ethereum Foundation and from I think Vitalik, my sense was he made a conscious choice to step a little bit back while the ETF discussions were going on.

And then, it seemed like he was ready to jump back in after those got approved, but somehow there was some stall there. It just didn't quite feel like the old Vitalik. Like, for me, Vitalik is really one of the smartest people in the space. And especially reading his early work from before the merge, kind of all that early work is really lucid, is very, very I felt like he's like almost the only person who was really getting it back then. But then, when I read the stuff he's putting out now, I feel like you know, it's not quite there.

It's not the same level of sharpness that he was in 2019 where I think he was like peak Vitalik. He was just putting out all these extremely, extremely lucid posts. And I think it's partly just because he's not as interested in Ethereum today as he was in 2019. He's more interested in AI safety and other kinds of things. And when you don't put the time in in this like extremely complicated fast-moving industry, you start to kind of lose your edge.

And I think that's basically what happened. So, in my mind, that speaks to the importance of having a very active and engaged figurehead to get to get things through, which is interesting because in the Solana ecosystem, you know, you could make an argument that Toly inhabits at least at sometimes he has inhabited some of the same space as Vitalik. And yet, I heard as recently as a few weeks ago someone, you know, endearingly refer to Anatoly as at this point just a phone salesman and not really engaged and you know and in in spite of that or maybe because of it, it seems like Solana continues to progress. What what do you think of that? Yeah, I guess in training firms have this concept of bus risk.

So, if somebody gets hit by a bus tomorrow, does the firm go under? I think the bus risk on Solana is is much less bad, you know, like if God forbid something happened to Anatoly, I think we would continue chugging along making the chain faster. He is engaged still. He does work on technical problems. I talked to him almost every day about some of the work that I'm doing.

But, he's not a Vitalik-type god emperor figure. And I think that's extremely good for the network because it allows new voices to come along, new ideas. He Toly is kind of a person who I almost think of him as like an oracle where he kind of speaks in riddles. And so, if you take the time to really sit down and understand what he's saying, he there's a lot of nuggets of really important and uh not easy to find truth in them. But, it's not in the same way like I think if that's a very different world than Vitalik was almost like taking in a bunch of information and spitting out a summary that was accessible to everybody.

Whereas Toly is more like kind of the person doing the the riddles and then you have to kind of decode the riddle and and turn it into the nugget of truth and turn that into IBRL after that. So, he occupies a very different role. I think he's not as critical in the system, which is not to say anything bad about him. It just means that the rest of the system is robust enough that if that piece was removed, the whole tower wouldn't fall down. Mhm.

And walk us through the cultural and political differences between Ethereum land and Solana land. Yeah, I think the the Solana account on Twitter just put out a piece about how we have a lot of athletes. I think we have a lot of people who really, really like to win, who are extremely competitive. I'm somebody like that, too. I kind of grew up playing a lot of games, like competing and I it's so much better to lose with people who also want to win than it is to like lose when everybody else isn't trying.

I think even if we're going to lose, it's like, "Hey, I would rather have everybody on the same page grinding as hard as possible." And it also gives you the best chance to win. But I would say that's the biggest difference is like this competitive versus collaborative mindset. And it's not to say that one of them is better than the other, but certainly if two people are competing and one of them has a collaborative mindset and the other one has a competitive mindset, the person with a competitive mindset is going to eat the lunch of the person with a collaborative mindset. So, that's I would say the biggest difference is, "Hey, we're all competitors.

We're all kind of athletes and people who've done competitive things in their life." And we bring in that same energy to building the chain. Solana wins, IBRL, internet capital markets, all of that is like our sport and we're playing to win. And uh for for Solana for Ethereum, just this morning we saw some leadership changes at the top of Ethereum Foundation, but what's it going to take for Ethereum to turn the ship around in your opinion? Yeah, I've met Tomas, but I haven't met the the other co- uh ED.

I think Tomas is a smart guy, so we'll see. I I wish him the best of luck and hope he can turn ETH around cuz it's great for the ecosystem if ETH turns around. I do think it is a big mistake to have two EDs at a time like this because this is a time where Ethereum needs extremely strong leadership. You're basically like that picture of everybody in the race and you know, Solana and Sui and Celestia are all pointing like towards the finish line and like ETH is pointing backwards. And you need to turn that ship, huge unwieldy ship, all the way around.

And it's just really hard to do that with two people in the room rather than one. And so I think I would have liked to see a figure like Danny Nelson. I think um you know, Tomas is also probably going to be good, but I I really dislike the decision to do two instead of one and I think other people have commented on this. We'll see how it works. I wish them the best of luck.

Um some change was needed, but I don't know if it was the right change that they had did end up making. Yeah. You had a tweet, I think shortly before you publicly went over to Anza, where you were calling for Ethereum to be on a war footing and you actually uh tweeted a picture of Amsterdam and I think it made something some joke along the lines of, you know, we could we you could bomb this one little spot, take out a bunch of validators, and Solana would be over. It's maybe a little bit of an exaggeration, but you know, the effect of that is to say uh Ethereum really needs to take this challenge more seriously. Is that right?

Right. I think there was a I mean, at some point I said, "If Solana is the first credible competitor to Ethereum." And everybody like laughed at me and they're not laughing now. You know. They're they're crying looking at the the volume and the REV charts and everything on Twitter.

Um I really thought we could have probably made some changes earlier before all this shift happened on and and been in a much better position. Uh but if you ignore the problem, it doesn't go away. It just gets bigger. Mhm. And the longer ETH waits to scale the L1 and make necessary changes, the more problems it's going to have, the more it's going to have to compromise its values if it wants to win.

And and we're starting to see that. Yeah. And with so the those changes that Ethereum can make, there's the Pectra hard fork coming up. Uh we're talking about exchange a little bit about that. Just bring the audience up to speed, you know, on that debate.

What's the big changes that that could be coming and maybe should be coming? Right. So, if you listen to the optimist version of what ETH is going to become in the next 5 years, it's like we're going to have thousands of gigagas rollups all settling with Ethereum DA and with synchronous interop. Okay. So, none of those things are true.

The math does not add up on that. Right now, ETH for for context does about uh 1.5 to 2 megagas per second. Base does 26 megagas per second, which is million gas. And you know, we're saying we're going to get to 1,000 gigagas rollups.

Of course, this is not happening. 26 megagas on base per second is already half of the total ETH blob capacity right now. So, we're going to double ETH is going to double blob capacity in uh Pectra. And then they're going to do another increase in Fusaka. But still, you want to know how many gigagas rollups you're going to be able to support on Fusaka level of blobs?

1/3 of a gigagas rollup. So, this is not coming anytime soon. I know Jesse likes to say he plays long-term games with uh long-term people. Well, he's going to be playing a very long-term game waiting for blobs to scale to the point where he wants them at. So, I expect a lot of rollups will be moving over to alt DA soon enough because ETH just is not moving fast enough on the scaling roadmap to be able to provide what they're asking for.

And like why is it do you think that ETH isn't scaling fast enough? Could it is it is it possible to scale ETH fast enough? Are the right people not working on this problem? Are there are the right people there but they're not doing the right things? Um I think it's a combination of a lack of talent.

I think there's been considerable talent outflows from ETH because people who actually have the ability and the understanding to provide scaling solutions are kind of disillusioned with uh you want to go somewhere which rewards scaling solutions if you're into providing good scaling solutions, right? So if if you are in a system where when you propose something new a validator in the Sahara desert running on a Raspberry Pi says, "Hey, uh excuse me, sir, like I have 5 megabit upload. I'm not going to be able to participate in this. Like we should probably kill this idea that you have that's going to make the chain better because I want to continue running my hobby validator in the Sahara." You're going to go to another ecosystem because it's just not good.

Like it's just not fun to be in that environment. So part of it is solo stakers are like so funds if you've if you read like Dark Forest or or Three-Body Problem. They're just like killing the chain, killing the culture of the chain and they need to go. And the other is I think a lack of engineering talent because they haven't hired for that. There are some teams the Reth and the Nethermind team are incredibly strong.

Uh also we had some incredibly strong devs at ConsenSys on the Besu and Teku team. But you kind of need all five clients to be up to speed on that rather than just two of them. And so I think E- ETH would be considerably better off if they just abandoned every other client but Reth and Nether- Nethermind. And uh maybe like Lighthouse or something on the ConsenSys side and Prism. And basically if you You do that and you just remove all the slowness and and you would probably be way better off and be able to scale.

Uh and one thing I would just say is like look at the Monad hardware specs. These things are not unreasonable. 32 GB of RAM, 100 megabit upload download. Uh 2 TB SSD. Are these unreasonable?

No, that's like a what? $1,500 gaming computer from last generation. I think the most expensive thing on there is like the the latest generation Ryzen consumer CPU. That's like not an unreasonable place that ETH could have gone to and look at what they're able to achieve with that in terms of how much throughput and how the latency that they're getting. I think that could have been ETH if they just didn't get on this L2 train.

Mhm. Is it a problem of ETH is too decentralized, too many power centers, too many clients? Like what's going on here? Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think it's also it's like a cultural issue.

It's a difficulty of getting anything done. I think Vitalik for a long time was sucking up way too much political capital and it was impossible for anybody else to kind of muscle in and be that force for driving progress. Um now I think he's less of that figure that's kind of god emperor and and taking up all the space, but it's kind of left a power vacuum that's that's not even not good either. I think the the cleanest thing to do would have been for Vitalik to basically say, "I'm anointing this person basically my successor and they are going to push the chain forward and we're abandoning the L2 road map cuz it was never right in the first place and we're going to scale the L1. Sorry, made a mistake.

I'm out. It's your chain now." What were your priors on Solana, let's say 2 years ago? Like how did you what was your perspective on it and how do you think that you were wrong about what you thought back then? I mean I guess I'm presuming some things here, but you definitely worked in Ethereum and you were in Ethereum I don't know if you'd say maxi, but you really were pro Ethereum and now you've at least changed your perspective.

Yeah, I think you know, the network effects of Ethereum were holding strong for a long time. It took a really big shift. It also took a lot of improvements that have happened on Solana in terms of a technical perspective, which I think often get swept under the rug or people don't see them. The Solana chain performance today is way way way better than it was in March of this of last year. So about a year ago.

And that's just because of like incremental improvements by really cracked devs at Anza and firedancer just making the chain better every single day and just optimizing. And we see it in every Agave release that we do we get, you know, lower memory calls, lower CPU, we're faster. We could probably go to 350 millisecond block times right now actually on chain, you know, we're at 400 milliseconds. Uh these kind of things are just like constantly happening and over time those compound and you get a chain that works really well. The the best example I would say is like our current fork rate is really really low.

And that just means the chain is just humming along really really nicely. We could probably go to shorter block times and have have nothing break because of that. And and so I think basically we've just been scaling and doing incremental pro progress and you're not following you don't realize how much has been done cuz it's like these little small changes that add up over time. And then a final rapid question for you. What are ETH maxis most wrong about?

I would have to say the L2 thesis. I think Basically there's an idea in ETH world that you cannot scale a single chain and it's wrong. It's just scale issue wrong. They haven't thought about it enough. They haven't talked to people who are smart enough to solve a problem.

They kind of try themselves and they're like, "Well, if I can't do it, nobody can do it." Well, no, actually, you can't do it cuz you're not smart enough. Other people are going to do it, and whoever does it is going to win. So, I think that whole thesis of one chain can't scale enough. 1 million TPS easily easily achievable in next 3 years for Solana.

We're going to get there. That's four times the total transactions per second of Nasdaq, New York Stock Exchange, CME, AMX, MasterCard, and Discover, and Visa. That's four times all those transactions per second. And it's all possible on one single chain. You can't really say that one chain can't scale at that point.

So, I guess we'll see, like we'll prove them wrong when we get to 1 million TPS and we do end up doing that level of volume. But, it's just the kind of thing where you kind of get on that train and then you stop exploring the other side of the fork, and it's it's hard to get off that train once you're on it. Well, thanks for joining us. Thanks. Collab beats controlled till the whole damn law.

Whole damn law.