It's SOL Summer Again: Exploring the Solana Ecosystem l KBW2024

[Music] all right uh thank you everybody for coming uh today we're going to talk about something that I never talk about which is salana and um to to do that we have uh a bunch of smart folks with us so I'll let you guys kind of go one by one starting with Chris and intro yourselves and also what your company does all right hey guys um thanks for uh having me here my name is Chris Zoo I'm the co-founder and CEO of Sonic svm uh Sonic is the first atomic gaming chain on top of salana um so we call it Atomic because we are the first svm environment that is fully interoperable with base layer for developers to deploy on so any game developer that builds on top of Solana uh can also Deploy on Sonic and vice versa um so far we've been going to test n with the last 2 months or so uh and have achieved around 1.8 active 1.8 million active wallets uh for all of the gaming users across the globe uh and really building a isolated gaming environment on top of salana to avoid hotspots so that's a little bit about Sonic oh hey I'm Lynn I'm CU CEO uh we are a hybrid exchange uh hybrid interchange that we in in the sense that we have our own MPC wallet infrastructure um and then we have centralized liit Autobook um we've been we went live about nine months ago uh up to this point we have a decent uh active um decent amount of users and then we listed quite a few Sal projects and that's probably why I'm here uh yeah nice to meet everyone hey everyone hello oh it's working hey everyone I'm Cindy I'm a co-founder of drift we are the largest Perpetual decks on Solana and we also um launched prediction markets uh very recently so we've expanded from being a pure Perpetual exchange to borrow lend spot trading and now also prediction markets um we are essentially you know we've been in salana since 2021 and uh started off as a know virtual amm and now we have a hybrid um exchange structure where we have multiple liquidity mechanisms uh including just in time liquidity uh order book and um amm as well um our core thesis is that everything should be on chain and all trading should happen on chain uh salana is the perfect home for us because um we there's a multitude of assets on salana that are tradeable and usable as collateral so um that ties into our thesis that you can use any anything um as the collateral on salana to to be able to trade so yeah huge fan of um everyone here and excited to speak today cool yeah uh everybody should be on chain using heal this rpcs um so I mean s you already kind of touched on it here about why salana but I mean I think the theme of this is salana Summer and so let's just kind of start with Chris again and kind of talk about from first principles why you're actually building on salana instead of the other chains and uh Chris also uh let us know if you would like to call Sonic and L2 or network extension yeah um we'll answer the first part first um so our our entire team coming from a gaming background Electronic Arts net e by Dan uh we were all individually working on uh gaming or what we call digital asset distribution before there were you know crypto assets so selling content to a global audience was uh something that we were kind of endeavoring for for a while before salana um and in 2021 early 2022 we got introduced to salana Foundation through various means and um really kind of explored different platforms for asset launches uh so we helped a lot of games that were kind of venturing to web 3 launched their nft assets their token assets um or any you know other kind of standards that that you would have later on um during this mix we actually launched on openc we launched on Magic Eden and a lot of other platforms as well binance iGo when that was a thing um and what you realize is that there is a um really fundamental difference in the user experience of salana uh to everything else and that is for one reason because of the chain level uh innovations that that was um possible at the time but also because every single founder and Builder on top of the chain itself uh really valued user experience speed cost and all of those uh associated associ trades so that was the first kind of trade that led us into salana um and later on what we realized is that there are three major reasons that we stuck on top of the chain the first one is a decentralized natural uh or organic Community um that is not just run by Foundation itself but also by wonderful people as super team uh as solar in different geographic regions that are very very key to the project the second is that there is unmatched um onchain liquidity um you know enabled by folks like drift like Jupiter and like radium and a lot of other wonderful um people as well um and and three um a network that is uh we we think that in the early days it was a little wonky to build on salana the phrase was chewing on glass um and it it really felt like that um but it is very interesting that in this cycle in these couple years you hear that people only talk about only possible on salana now which I'm sure that you know mer contributed a lot to as well um so we think that there is a very uh very rapid development and iteration on top of the chain that allows us to build significantly faster than all the other gaming chain projects as well so that's uh why we stick with salana uh for me I'm in operations so uh my job is like C doing settlements day in day out and so fast and cheap is very important for me and that's salana uh when I settle onba it's a lot faster than on erc20 and it's also cheaper uh because we're on Exchange we do a lot of unchain activity so that's why it's like very very important for us and on top of that there's a great culture and also a strong Community within the ecosystem we always get support everywhere we go to like pretty much like every country there's always friends and family yeah for building a high performance uh low latency Exchange uh being on the fastest chain is extremely important um if you're trading with you know 10 100x leverage you need to be able to confirm your transactions extremely quickly there's no there's no margin for error in um in a situation like per trading so salana being a super high perform train and not having to um you know trade off with the SEC security and decentralization was important um because thinking about it from like should we build a salana versus our own app train or L2 um made a lot of sense for us to consider being on a monolithic chain where security was not an assumption that we had to take care of as an app builder um so that that's kind of why we we stuck with salana throughout like the entire bear um it was the only chain that could actually support um what we were doing um you know no L2 could have done that without uh significant dis centralization trade-offs um and lastly you know composability is a is a huge um you know part of why y drift and Y salana as well um for instance our spot order books actually draw liquidity from other uh exchanges on Solana itself um so having a unified pool of liquidity uh instead of fragmenting ac across different l2s and um chains really made sense for us and um just like as I mentioned a huge asset selection there's a reason why meme coins have been launching on salana and not elsewhere it's the easiest and cheapest place to deploy so you get this very integrated effect of everything being in one place not needing to swap wallets and whatnot so um yeah that's you know why we've stuck with salana all this time cool um oh go ahead I actually want to hear your your take too Mark what was oh um why yeah uh I mean so I used to work at coinbase and um uh I was on the uh the developer platform team which Powers things like polygon uh so coinbase obviously supports all assets but under the hood you need to add apis and infrastructure support to support all those chains and um basically at that time this was roughly two three years ago now um I was super annoyed I mean I'm still super annoyed permanently at everything but uh at that time I was like you know where the hell are these apps that we need to actually take crypto mainstream and it was just kind of this infrastructure day after day uh and it's still kind of like that but basically I was like okay if if we are to accelerate crypto we need to build apps and I I I think ethereum and evm actually have a pretty good path towards this and so I have nothing against that um but at the time my thinking was okay for this to be successful they need to solve a lot of conditional problems so you know the merge had to go through uh the the blobs had to go through D sharting has to go through now there's fee capture things L2 have to get to stage two there's a lot of kind of S I need to solve still and I was like I I just can't wait for that and so why not just go to a chain that already works today and still has problems of course like outages and and other types of problems but at least there we can kind of build things to give app developers the tools they need today uh to build apps and basically so lack of patience would be my answer um but you know let's talk about something super serious now um meme coins so what do you guys think about meme coins let's start with Cindy this time and go uh the other way around uh what do you think about meme coins do you think they're extractive you know are glorious protocol Revenue they barbarus uh fee extraction um and do you think they're n good bad does it even make sense to think of it on those terms yeah I I think that Meme coins in general um are a symptom of just degenerate gambling at the end of the day and it actually democratizes uh coin creation and Market creation um so at the core of it I'm all for it because we love uh having you know new assets like people like to trade it creates um it basically is a an unbounded prediction Market at the end of the day to kind of bring it back to our recent launch it's um beam coins are a fundamental way to bet on what you think you know an outcome is going to be or a piece of news um so we kind of see it as like sentiment Market like you know if uh if a piece of news happens um 10 meme coins are created about it like and once it stops being relevant um the price of the me coin goes down so it's uh it's it's pretty interesting to tie That Into You Know attention culture and um what's what gets spun out of it but um I am a net fan of it because I think even though um The Pump N Fun style launches can be extractive for the ecosystem uh overall they they create trading volume it it puts the power in the hands of users and Traders to you know determine what's interesting what's not and um I'm very excited to see it actually being integrated in uh social apps better um because I I do think it tracks attention uh in a very pure way uh I agree with Cindy um I like the mem Point culture quite a bit uh I do think that it bring quite a good variety of people into the ecosystem uh but my concern is it's quite easy for a good meme coin project to raise money which actually quite distracting for like the real Builders um but overall I'm all for it um so we internally talk about m coins quite a bit um because of three major reasons in respect to our project the first one is we think of games and why web 3 games is important in that in that regard um because games are natural launchpads and hosts of assets so all kinds of assets that you can think of nfts token you know uh spl2 um meme coin such and so forth as long as there is a category of assets that exist games can host that asset um so you see you know PVP games with nft versus nfts spending games that can you know Shard these nfts and stick into um the platform itself and all kinds of kind of playability on top of it um so the more assets there are and different stand standards exist uh the more complex and interesting or Innovative uh play mechanisms can kind of exist on top of those games um the second reason why we like meme coins is because games um also uh kind of dabs is all about user acquisition uh at least that is one very large aspect of it uh and for user Acquisitions to happen especially in this cycle you see inflows from ETFs you see inflows um from traditional Wall Street Traders going to uh you know Bitcoin um but for salana you know a large extent to to which we have been kind of growing our ecosystem is actually from the meme coin Acquisitions as well um so the wealth effect is one part of it uh but the memes that is kind of underlying the the coin itself um has very very wide uh verality and allows us to get a lot of new users actually if you see um the early kind of early endings of the SPO cycle a lot of the growth actually came from from um coin coin bases wallet uh or from other centralized exchange wallets that you know listed those meme coins um and then the third aspect of mem coins that we value internally a lot uh is that we think about this economy as a attention economy and we're trading attention ultimately um and memes have the highest condensed Information Form uh to any type of community that is kind of capturing that that attention um so you know a line of text on X might Cod uh certain bits bits of information but memes um carry a lot of emotional value and Community value uh inherent with that you know dog with hat right so uh those are the three reasons why we like it cool uh well I mean you guys are all working on some pretty exciting stuff um so I want to talk about kind of what's next what you're excited about on your own protocols but also maybe Salan as a whole uh Cindy you guys just launched bet I believe it's actually called just bet right yeah yeah and uh it's a prediction markets platform similar to poly Market but on salana and you guys already have quite a bit of liquidity and I think somebody told me you might put up a market about me getting arrested in Singapore uh from doing nicotine and so you know pretty useful stuff um what what what should uh first of all how should people get started and why are you so excited about prediction markets and then let's kind of just go down and talk about why we're excited about Cube and and Sonic and in the future yeah um for us as a trading platform um you know we care a lot about extending uh tradability to to assets and we we want to stop at just crypto assets right like yes we love betting on the price of Soul going up but uh if we extend that concept of what is actually tradable um bringing any anything any outcome or world event uh into the mix is what we want to do and that's why you know extending the concept from meme coins to prediction markets that actually settle to the the value of an outcome um was a very interesting next step for us um because we're essentially taking you know what is on salana to what is happening in the world uh everything from you know who's going to win the US elections which is our biggest markets right now to small markets like um you know it's isart going to get arrested in Singapore um we recently also launched breakpoint debate markets um you know Iggy igy Zia and Eric Wall are going to be debating on Celebrity meme coins um and it's it's very interesting to capture these like small um you know audiences and micro micro groups uh that all have vested interest in the outcome of the asset so yeah we're very excited about that because you're essentially bringing true rwas um on chain via the creation of prediction markets um and yeah to get started you know we we just launched uh two weeks ago with um already 3 million in liquidity and 25 million U cumulative traded already um you can just go on app. trb and yeah start placing vets uh for cube we um try to expand more it's all about user acquisition um and know my top my what I really focus on is liquidity uh in Sal and the Dex is are doing so well that's almost it's hard to compete uh especially on the longtale assets um the other one is we try to Target different region and start what's going to be be with latam and then Asia um our other focus is uh on our mobile app so we're going to have a mobile app very soon and the goal is to make sure that's like it's user friendly we want to make sure this web three experience is more like a web two experience where uh people don't have to like re-enter private Keys every time and so on yeah uh for Sonic there are three uh key mous stones that we're aiming for the first one is um 3 million active wallets uh we're currently at 1.8 um so that's the next goal the second is main net main net main net um and hopefully by uh the next quarter uh we should have uh mainnet ready um and then the last Milestone that we often think about is the number of gaming uh teams as well as gaming users that we onboard into the ecosystem uh and I wanted to Circle back to Mer's question I totally blanked out uh didn't want to avoid that so we sometimes call ourselves an L2 to the retail users in Asia that you know do not differentiate between a svm rollup or a svm L2 or a network extension uh and we sometimes think of ourselves as a network extension when we think about the utility Sonic svm brings to salana uh basically bring gaming as an entire economy or ecosystem into salana which previously uh have great teams um working on but not so EX extensively so um we ultimately think that the words here matter differently to different people um but we're just trying to build a gaming ecosystem on top of salana cool all right so we have 29 seconds it's in the red I'm getting scared um let's do a very quick flash lightning round most underrated app on salana that is not anybody here's protocol let's start with Chris most underrated yeah most underrated apps on salana just just one I think pump is still underrated uh it might be a hot take okay okay there's this app it's called at of moonwalk or Moon Fitness I forgot about the name but it's supposed to count your step and then put it on Mark yeah moonwalk on Smart contract so I like that very much yeah um I think there's like a sleep to earn or a vape to earn project that just launched I forgot the name but that's that's pretty cool and my answer is helas all right thank you that's all [Applause] [Music]