Akshay BD - Solana: Internet Capital Markets - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Uh I want to walk through what the future of Salana looks like and why we're excited about sort of building what we call internet capital markets and it's relevant to everybody in this room. If you're working in crypto, try that intersects some way in the things you do every day and it allows us to articulate better what we do as an industry. All right, with that let's get into it. You know, today's capital markets don't work for everyone, right? you've seen some version of this if you haven't, you know, we're in financeish uh finance adjacent, but the everyday person understands that there's something about their life that doesn't uh fit right in because they're not able to sort of realize the American dream in the way that or the regional version of that in the way that you used to or the boomers used to, you know, get a job, you can get married and there's like opportunities for family formation and so uh it shows up in different ways, right?

Like when Larry Frank talks talks to investors, it shows up as people being anxious about the global economy. When you survey the everyday person, they feel like they have u access, you know, fewer people feel like they have access to the uh American dream than even 10 or 15 years ago. And the reason for this is the over financialization of our society. And we'll get to that in a second. But it's really uh um it's really because your freedom is hyperinflating.

You know, this is a graph from a guy called Intra uh on on X, but it gives you a sense for how your freedom has quantitatively inflated. Why do we invest? We invest because we're trying to buy back our future time, right? You're you're saving into an asset class today. So, in 10 years from now, 20 years from now, you can retire and do whatever you want.

You know, in 1971, if you wanted to buy one unit of the S&P 500, you it used to cost you 25 hours of your of average wages. Today it costs you 195 hours of the uh to buy one unit of the S&P 500. That's how much more expensive your freedom is, right? And then if you look at the difference between labor and capital, you see this massive difference. And we've all experienced this, especially after the GFC, right?

Which is kind of why you feel like the, you know, the the standard path is not available to people anymore unless you're an asset owner. Uh you know, that's the average hourly wage is a percentage uh change since 1971. And then you have capital which is average hourly uh which has basically grown 8x faster than the average hourly wage. Right? So if you owned capital you did very well and if you didn't you kind of like got left behind and you know this is uh average hourly wage is a percentage of GDP and the which has gone down.

So as GDP has increased, average hourly wages as a percentage of that has gone down. Whereas the average net worth of the top 1% has gone up as GDP has increased. So gains are privatized, losses are socialized. Should definitely follow this account. It's interesting.

But this sets up the stage for where uh this is going. And you know, look, this is not intentional. It's an accidental outcome of the, you know, national debt that the US has where they need to keep interest rates artificially low to be able to refinance that debt. And that creates an accidental price bubble uh asset price bubble. And to add to that, you have AI, right?

You sort of like have this world where 80% of 80% of jobs can be automated in the near future, which means the those average wages you saw will be further deflated because there's going to be fewer people required in the workforce. So you sort of end up in this world where you have a fork in the road. you have you can either go the route of UBI which is like the welfare economy universal basic income where you airdrop some money to everybody's bank account once a month and then they go buy their groceries and you know pay for their bills through that um but you know you're sort of attached to the state in that world and and u I think there's a much more inspired future which is universal basic ownership which is the alternative which is anybody with a mobile phone should be able to own assets so you can join the capital class and then you can close the gap between labor and capital. Um, one example of this in the non-crypto world is the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation that, you know, it's a stateowned corporation that to takes all the profits from the, you know, the natural gas and mining uh, and and oil industry and then airdrops it to every resident of Alaska and they airdrop just a profit. So, it's not like a UBI style thing.

It's you have a stake in the enterprise of the Alaskan state. They got $1,700 last year in an airdrop. much more interesting. That's kind of like closer to the stakeholder capitalism where everybody can be an owner by default versus, you know, having to become an owner. All right.

So, internet capital markets, where does Salana fit in? We see a world where we want to reduce the barriers to asset ownership and reduce the barriers to asset uh issuance. Asset ownership. Let's talk about that. Like, you know, most private markets are private, right?

Uh a lot of those gains have been privatized because these companies don't want to go public. The private markets are deep enough that they can raise money from wealthy accredited investors. And so the everyday retail investor doesn't have access to data bricks, SpaceX. These are companies that have been private for so long that they choose to be private because you can buy one share of Tesla and sue Elon for his compensation. It's kind of like a headache to be a public company.

So fewer companies want to be public. In fact, you have 50% fewer public companies today than you did 30 years ago, which is insane, right? So uh a lot of the gains have been privatized. So we need to bring those back into the public markets in some way and you know we think Salana is going to play a material role in this. Um and then of course the number of tech companies going public has also reduced partially because the 2021 benchmark set a irrational valuation standard for a lot of the startups and they don't want to take a down round but partially because they want to remain private.

All right. But the public markets are saturated. Like this is like every valuation metric known to man. And it's it's I think we can all agree that they're that they're sort of overvalued in the in the traditional sense of it uh by every one of those metrics. Now, that is not a prediction of like when the bubble will pop or like what the prices are, but you're forcing retail to buy because they're saving to buy these assets at historically high valuations.

And by the way, because of the way passive investing works, you're supposed to invest in the S&P 500. How many of you do that, right? Through some passive vehicle. Okay, we have some responsible investors. The others are all degenerate just all port full port in in whatever uh you're doing in the Salana trenches.

But the the you're not as diversified as you think you are because the you know every for every dollar that gets invested in the S&P 500 index fund you know 30 cents of those dollar go into the mag 7 because of the way the fund is set up which is market cap weighted. So you're actually way more concentrated in those seven stocks than like the than you think. So um uh so where does this take us right? This takes us to a world where it's not all public markets though even though the number of private public companies are decreasing in the traditional financial markets. The number of tokens being launched is going up into the right on internet capital markets.

Now of course a lot of these are memecoins. A lot of these are governance tokens. There are lot a lot of these are valueless. But what it is simulating is an environment where you can issue assets and have investors participate in it and you can very easily with a few strokes of a pen change the regulations to allow anybody to issue productive assets on the internet natively allowing for a new regime of uh capital markets. Um by the way you know like a lot of these companies want to give stock out.

They want to you know Airbnb wanted to give their hosts some equity when they went public. Uber wanted to um you know give drivers equity but they couldn't do it because of this cumbersome securities law but guess what if you managed a cap table you know how hard it is add an extra row into that cap table it's a pain to manage more shareholders but a coin table you can scale that infinitely you can have a million coin holders and it doesn't matter right it's trivial so crypto simplifies compliance you know like we if you wanted US dollars outside the US you had to fill all these lendy forms get an offshore bank account, hope that you would be like accepted into the into the into the bank and then you would get uh a US dollar bank account or you'd get cash. Today, you download a mobile app that has a picture of a ghost and you get US dollar stable coin in your in your wallet, no KYC, right? It completely metabolizes all the compliance and procedural overhead into just a mobile application. This is where every asset is going to go as it comes onto Salana where you'll be able to get access to the price action of any asset that you want on a mobile phone with an internet connection right so and better by the way this is not new it's the old is new again where better assets have always been a thing you know in the when securities were early in their in their beginning in in their development when you used to have cert certificates like this where whoever owned own the certificates or possess the certificates was the owner of the of the uh of the equities.

Now, of course, they got rid of this because, you know, this is basically self-custody for securities. They got rid of this because they wanted to enforce a KYCO regime. So, you would be able to track flows of capital reasonable. But now you have public blockchains that do exactly that while retaining the self-custodial nature of these things. So you can reduce you can move KYC AML checks to issuance and redemption and let the assets trade freely between that.

Right? All right. So um and then you have alternative assets. You know these are these form a massive part of people's portfolios. There's no way you're going to get uh access to these assets on traditional capital markets.

They're trying but guess what? They're showing up on Salana before they're showing up on traditional capital markets. So whether it's gold, wine, whiskey, you know, sort of exotic real estate, that's all getting tokenized on Salana because the cost of tokenizing them is super low compared to say wrapping it into an ETF and launching it on cap in the capital markets in the US. Okay, so that's for investors, which means you should be able to open your phone and every year you should have new assets you can buy that you want you want to you want to access and it's all powered by Salana in the back end. And then let's talk about issuers.

If you're an entrepreneur and you want to take your company public or you want to not take your company public but at least allow for a healthy secondary market, how can you benefit from what Salana is building? Um well, if you want to go public in the US today, there's like basically it cost you anywhere between $10 to $20 million, right? Which obviously sets a minimum valuation bar uh which has to be high enough to warrant that kind of expenditure. And so then companies going public tend to be larger. the the medium and small enterprises that could go public are not going public because they're not being serviced by the banking industry to do so.

We think this is an opportunity for them to list directly on Salana. Um, you know, there's obviously competition for exchanges in the US. You have something called Y Street in Texas. You also have London Stock Exchange. So, there are alternative venues to list, but these companies prefer not to list there because not they're not as liquid.

You know, you don't have the rule of law guarantee that the US capital markets have. So um we think that the internet succeeds the US capital markets not any specific region and that'll be the internet capital markets. Um by the way you can which means so founders here should be able to raise on the like you should just be able to share a link on your ex or LinkedIn if you're still on that and then just start and just raise money from your professional network. This all all of the regulatory infrastructure to do this exists today. It's just not used because it's cumbersome to implement.

you know, uh here's an example of previous experiments that have, you know, that have partially succeeded but eventually shut down because of CO and other reasons. But this is kind of where we think the world is going. When you have a model that heavily incentivizes private equity groups to basically be building these cookie cutter development complexes, dropping in a Whole Foods, dropping in a papyrus store, you're creating an economic development on paper that doesn't actually feel like economic development when you're walking down the streets of these communities themselves. My name is Nick Matthews and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Main Invest. Small businesses are the foundation of the American economy and access to capital is the number one challenge that small businesses across America face.

Mainst gives communities, not corporations, the ability to build the main streets they want to see. Mainst isn't crowdfunding. Mainst is investing. People are coming on not just to support local businesses, but also as a means of diversifying their portfolio into a new asset class.

It was very difficult to get funding for restaurant. And so this was a great starting point

that gives you a sense for like that was a company called Main West that was trying to get people to invest in main street businesses, right? Um and we think that Salana is purpose-built to be able to handle this kind of load. The future is not just 2xing the IPOs. It's 10,000xing the number of IPOs every year. Which means in five years from now, if you walk into a coffee shop and you're like, "This is an awesome coffee shop.

I'd like to be a patron." You today, you would leave a tip, right? That's how you would acknowledge good service. In 5 years from now, there's going to be a QR code on the wall. You're going to scan that and it's going to give you a few tokens that entitles you to ownership in the coffee shop.

And they're streaming your dividends every uh every month, right? So you're going to have, you know, 10x the not just 10x but 10,000x the number of assets that you can access through a wallet interface as you know time rolls on. So it's not just as you saw you know it's memecoins now but every time there's a new season of coins that what that means is there's new assets coming on chain. All right so what's the end state? I really like this tweet uh which kind of describes somewhat humorously the the end state of what all this ends up looking like.

It's like tech finance is embarrassingly vanilla. The greats of Wall Street were the true innovators. You know, Milton gave us junk bonds. Simmons gave us quantum and algo trading. And Silicon Valley gave us YC safe notes with a discount.

Boring. Wake me up when I can buy defense junk tech uh bonds collateralized by Andrew securities and then so on. You see like this complex sort of financialization that cannot exist on traditional markets because the cost of making them available are super high, but the cost of doing them on on a blockchain interface is massively low. And so that leads to net new assets. And so we think that it is not just important it's imperative as a society to create these investment opportunities or we've seen from you know millennia of research like uh where you know researchers have concluded that if you don't if the wealth gap keeps increasing in society you sort of have these extremist politics you have you know sort of civil unrest.

And so it's it's going to be a policy mandate as we enter this next decade to make people in society owners of assets. And we think Salana is going to play a critical role because the only tech technology stack that is capable of doing this along with of course our peers who are building uh you know who are building competitive products on the uh within the blockchain ecosystem. But I think the only internet native finance layer today are public blockchains. And so we're very excited to be able to contribute to that. And uh thank you very much for having me today.