Solana Summer: Pit Vipers and Boomtown Vibes - George Harrap (Step Finance) - TOKEN2049

well i hope you like the uh the name of the presentation there i thought we got to keep it interesting right so i if only i did have my pit vipers i did order them they haven't arrived yet um a lot of blockchains have brands uh and in solana the pit vipers are certainly the brand for solana right and in bitcoin you've got a bunch of angry people uh in ethereum you've got lots of magical unicorns so uh so this is uh what it's all about at solana but today i think i just want to give a bit of a background on solana you know there's i'm probably i haven't really met too many celina people since i've been here so maybe i'm the token representative but um you know it's obviously something that's very hot right now especially in the d5 world so uh let's just go a bit of an overview uh i'm the co-founder of step finance step finance we say is the front page of solana essentially we're a portfolio aggregator for everything that's happening in on the d5 solana world so we have integrations with pretty much everyone doing pretty much everything so if there's anyone which can be at the center of this ecosystem i definitely think it's us but uh let's get into it uh pit vipers and boom town vibes i mean obviously it's been a bit of a boom town at the moment uh this chart which i've got here i look i could have chosen any chart right like uh okay let's let's go tbl uh tvl from like 0 to 10 billion like in three four months something like that uh that's very well that's doing very well and it's just continuing to go up so uh great but what i've got here is a number of transactions uh i think that's probably a relevant metric right because it kind of means people are actually using the system so uh so here like number go up great uh it's all good but um look the solana ecosystem itself is is growing very rapidly uh we our project actually emerged out of a hackathon at the start of the year and there's been quite a few celina hackathons as well and look there's literally hundreds of projects uh many of these hackathons the last one i think had 10 000 participants uh signed up which hey that's amazing does that mean ten thousand engineers and developers well maybe we'll get to that um as i say tbl zero to hero nfts here's another good one right so look we talk a lot about nfts in this space and a lot of people obviously ethereum's the the primary location for that but to actually have a two dollar nft literally impossible okay go to openc try and do that you're gonna pay like 45 in fees just to approve a transaction so um okay maybe they exist on l2s possibly or they exist on l1s which are really fast and accessible and growing so what we're actually seeing is the nft space and solana's doing really well and uh look we're really pumped with that in terms of the ecosystem node growth there's over a thousand validators last time i looked and uh 2.5 million unique accounts which we'll get into in a moment but as i think it was there's that meme of the microsoft guy what is it uh i forget his name but he's like developers developers developers that's kind of what it's like um and and it's celana celina is not evm based right so the previous presentation with the polka dot and moonbeam fantastic ethereum uh also uh obviously the pioneer of the evm based chains and you've got a bunch of others around the ecosystem too it makes it easy for developers to maybe switch across with an evm chain but people often say well hey because rust is not evm is that bad well here's the thing rust itself is a programming language very similar to c plus plus there's literally more rust developers in the world than solidity devs and there's a lot of people that are coming from it uh from the c-plus plus world and just going straight into slaughter and hopping in in fact most of our team i came via that route so look rust is not solidity and that's okay that's one of the key messages um but also you know what we're seeing i think at the moment is there is a massive premium for for engineers in the solana space like take whatever they're owning at google or facebook and then add 50 um and that's that's kind of the going rates right now i wish it wasn't the way as someone which really wants to hire um but uh look it is what it is builders make ecosystems uh i mentioned before some of the different hackathons probably most of the good projects have emerged from hackathons um that that's kind of what you see it's it's a bit of a trend and we've got this tweet here from uh from ciao and uh look i mean he's seeing that a lot more people are coming into d5 alliance one of the accelerators that is coming from solana and there's a couple of other similar uh you know uh people that have said the same thing so um replicating eth or something new all right check out the meme i created that myself thank you very much um it's uh it's not the best but uh look dca contracts this is how we got started uh in solana so actually we set out to be a dca platform and what that means it's dollar cost averaging right so we wanted users to be able to put in say some usdt uh check a time period maybe once a day and you'd be able to nominate the coin that you want to buy and then for you to be able to contract to just do it right now we started off on ethereum uh and we built the contract there uh if we had six users it would cost 180 in transaction fees completely unviable so then we looked at say matic there was no liquidity at the time a lot of the wrapped coins didn't exist um but uh when we actually looked at solana we were like hey all of the wrapped coins which or all the coins which you care about and the rest of d5 your sushis your wi-fi's all of these things they're wrapped in their own salina and by the way they're liquid because the world's largest market maker alameda is market-making for them so um so that was a really good thing and our business model could literally exist on solana but pretty much nowhere else so you know that's one unique aspect is if you're building something which does rely on these uh these low-cost fees and and liquidity pools particularly then uh you know that's a good use case i've got the uh the club dexers or central limit order book uh exchanges now that's another thing which i think is unique to solana is essentially you know in other blockchains you have lots of uh siloed liquidity pools i often call them world gardens but you have like uni swap has a bunch of liquidity sushi has a bunch of liquidity balancer has a bunch of liquidity and uh and in most cases a lot of them are accessible on the l1 some case it's a little bit fragmented and some are on the l2 some are here some are there some are on a side chain so liquidity is a little bit more fragmented in that sense but with salani you actually have this speed and the ability to create one limit order uh decks for the entire chain that's addressable from every contract in exactly one call so uh i think that look that's a lot more efficient way to do it is if you don't have these solid liquidity pools and what you see is people building certain applications like that rely on just having access to that one liquidity pool so so that's great i mentioned the low-cost nfts before look it opens up new business models if you can mention nft for three cents uh you know that's that's something which is uh opens up a whole new way so i i think like what are nfts going for i think eventually you'll get an nft with your big mac right or pepsi will have it scannable on the bottom of a can so if you want to go to that scale and a lot of these corporates get in they form a win they go oh all the young people are using these nfts what are we going to do we're going to make nfts and we're going to put them on our pepsi cans so in order to do that you really need a scalable system to do that low cost and look i think solana's showing that as well um and uh here's another thing is that first time users often have no other frame of reference so this is often an overlooked thing where people go well look uni swap has been around for years everyone knows uni swap in the d5 world you know they're the pioneers fantastic um but a lot of new users they they have no idea about that they don't know what uni swap is and when they come for the first time a lot of these 20 2020 2021 users that are coming on board uh you know because they have this no frame of reference from prior history they just think oh okay you're telling me about this thing called uni swap on another chain where it costs fifty dollars to transact why would i do that um so on solana it's actually kind of starting fresh and new that can be a good thing it can be a bad thing uh obviously history matters having a reputation matters things which actually work matter um but uh look i think that that's something that we're seeing quite a lot as well is a lot with a lot of these new users i alluded to it a little bit before but the l1 is the l2 so in this case what i'm trying to get across here is essentially look because everything is addressable on the same chain on the same level every contract there's no walled gardens it makes things just a lot easier to deal with whether it's nfts that are trying to be composable into an amm that is then being used to be lent out on some other lending protocol it just makes it a lot more easier so look we're building contracts that are composable maybe a couple of layers deep a lot of other people are as well and you often see with some of the other layer twos out there say uh arbitrarium optimistic roll-ups that's a seven-day wait period in order to go across the bridge right zk rollups love it it's great uh it's fast and quick but again these are still siloed so having it just addressable on the same chain is is fantastic and uh yeah i mean look i think we'll we'll sort of end with this and maybe we've got some time for some questions as well but um you know as i said we're from step finance we're kind of the one page where people can see all of their positions across everywhere they can execute transactions across a lot of these d5 projects and uh yeah what we're what we're trying to see is uh we're seeing a lot of new builders coming into the ecosystem uh we're seeing a lot of newbies that have never transacted before some coming from bsc uh some coming from other l2 chains somewhere but look a lot of these people as i said have no frame of reference so their first time is really experiencing solana and that's really great to see and yeah look i say here some teams can talk to humans and some not this is another thing that we realize uh here at step is that because we have to have conversations with everyone we have to be integrated with everyone we also kind of realize the shortcomings of everyone as well and some people do really well but um i what this space is really lacking and it's probably not a solana thing it's probably industry wide is uh is people that can actually convey a message to other humans in a relevant and succinct manner and not be as if you're talking to a robot or you're just going way over people's heads uh so a lot of engineering focused teams are like that though unfortunately um and often that can be the to their detriment of getting traction their product you can have the world's best product and it's fantastic and it you know you think it's great but if nobody can understand it nobody cares so the point is that uh you need to have more people in the industry which uh which can can take that message documentation something absolutely needed um so look as i said it's continuing to get built out this year we've seen a massive boom in solana uh we've got a lot of hackathons coming up got the conference in lisbon coming soon as well uh we've got people like alameda who are main market makers for the chain and uh it's it's very exciting so creating something new uh there's new possibilities there uh everything is fast and cheap and we're i think a lot of the projects as well are trying to learn from the lessons from the past you know i bought synthetics very early i love the synthetics team and their product but you're seeing some of the platforms that are building pretty much the same thing within like one month because a lot of the lessons having been learned previously are now being adapted much quicker it's kind of the china strategy i lived in china for six years but uh yeah so look i i think it's uh it's an exciting space so open to questions if anyone's interested thank you very much awesome george thanks so much for that great presentation as i said i really loved uh the title so uh now having met you i understand why and maybe let's just open the floor if anybody wants to ask any questions um to george about step finance or more importantly any solana um just raise your hand let's go wow everyone just that it's solved george what were you doing before you uh set up step what was your background and how did you get involved with the solana guys yeah so i actually started the first remittance company uh on in crypto like six seven years ago uh called bitspark so uh yeah my my back background i guess i've been in crypto for 10 years uh i was one of the first miners i was one of the first fpgas one of the first asic owners um so i've kind of been around the bush i've seen it all um but yeah i think building on defy is so much easier the the thing is when you're dealing with on and off ramps all over the place and building an exchange you have to talk to banks you have to talk with regulators blah blah blah it's very difficult um but uh look if you're building on d5 the back end pretty much you know it does all the work for you from a service standpoint you're not you know calling up aws and having these servers in a centralized uh ecosystem so no look selena is just way easier to build on and we're really happy to be there it's great to see you going from central strength we've got two questions uh ladies first so let's kick it off here and i'll be right with you after sir thank you um i'm samantha from yap global um for those who because there's so many different blockchains right like for those who want to get involved with solana like where do you even begin because i think people are more familiar with ethereum but not so much solana absolutely look at the best place is obviously the solana website but it depends who you are like who are you are you a developer and you want to get involved are you someone who's not a developer non-technical and you want to get involved are you an investor so it really depends on the type of person but look developers there's a lot of developer resources now not as much as on ethereum that's definitely one con um so uh so look that's getting built out but yeah look join the discords uh you know go and talk to some of these projects get involved i always say you know there's a couple of people that have come to me and they're like hey i want to get a job and this sort of thing it's like okay well what do you do what can you can you actually go and do something and then everyone will realize that you're awesome at that thing and then then you'll get hired like instantly so um yeah look i i think just get out there get involved and uh yeah try and connect with some of these people uh gentlemen had a question here yeah hi um sandwich attacks mev all this stuff okay less than an ethereum i guess but is it completely impossible and so now sorry the question again um front running on the mempo is that possible on solar now impossible is that just less than ethereum or is it or is it impossible i think it's less i think anatoly did a write-up about this a while back he's one of the founders of solana so i don't think anyone has really solved the front-running problem the way that blocks get ordered in solana is essentially there is a random validator who has selected each block period in order to be the person who verifies that transaction so unlike some of the the minable extractable value stuff which happen on ethereum where if you can co-opt enough miners to secure your block and before other people then maybe you you get in and you can you can front run people um on solana you can't really do that because you can't predict uh who's going to be the next person to verify the block so there's that but it's not completely solved i don't think anyone's really solved it but you know what it's probably a a smaller issue than people make it out to be so yeah what do you think the project pipeline looks like going forward and what type of uh sectors within the crypto space do you think those projects will be in yeah so for us we see a lot of uh the obviously the yield farming aggregators right like that's usually how a lot of new chains bootstrap themselves is if you have no liquidity on your chain nobody cares so you've actually got to have some incentives for people to want to come there so look i think there's going to be more of that but there's a lot more interesting i think derivative products as well we're seeing perps happening on chain uh within the the layer one of solana so perps are addressable uh you know between every other contract which is gonna be awesome um but uh yeah look i think it starts with financial products it starts with liquidity and then who knows where things go like gaming there's a couple of gaming platforms which are doing really well so um hey maybe that's uh maybe that's something to look at and you mentioned uh synthetics and you were an early investor in that i was also a very early investor in synthetics but it used to be called haven and this was before they pivoted into that they had a stable coin so it's nice to see those guys do some well but uh i think actually kane is here if anyone's got a chance to heard him speak earlier on um where can we find out more about you how can we keep in contact with you what's the best websites or twitter handles um yeah i'm uh george underscore harrop on twitter uh search step finance we're also there that's probably the best way otherwise yeah feel free to meet me after and we can exchange telegrams i'm it's great to see a crypto conference where everyone's just exchanging telegrams because that this is the way so yeah