Fireside with Solana Dan Alberts l KBW2024

good to go hello uh thank you for coming uh my name is Mt and today we're going to talk about something that I never talk about which is salana um and to do that with me we have Dan here uh the executive director of salant foundation Dan do you want to give a quick intro sure hey everybody um thanks for coming um my name is Dan Albert um I serve as EXE director for salana foundation um I've been working on salana for over 5 years um really since the the very beginning of the project um I originally joined the engineering team at Solana Labs about a year before Solana mainnet was launched um at the time the whole world of Solana and Builders uh was about 15 people um and most of us fit into a single office and spent that first summer of 2019 building uh building by hand some of the first validators for salana um doing some of the initial uh performance benchmarks figure out how fast can this uh uh this crazy idea from anat actually actually run at the time um and uh we launched mainnet in early 2020 um and in middle of 21 um I transitioned um out of salono labs and stepped into uh my role uh heading up the salana foundation cool thank you yeah anat is pretty crazy um so one thing that I want to start with uh historically salana has been very us-centric in terms of ecosystem teams Integrations maybe even VCS and now we're in Korea blockchain week but breakpoint this year is also in Singapore and so we're seeing kind of a new uh Asia expansion can you talk a bit more about the thought process there yeah absolutely um I think it's it's very clear that the future of crypto is completely Global and I think is going to be centered around the asia-pacific region um of course many other important developments in in countries all over the world um but as we look at where the growth of users and developers um uh open-minded and Progressive um legal structures and Regulatory regimes um it's really kind of inspiring to see so much of that happening um uh in a lot of countries in Asia as well as um in other places around the world including in in the UAE and and others um you know the early Engineers or most of the earliest Engineers on Solana um you know we were uh from the US right I still uh live in the US um and because that's where the founders live Raj and and a toia live in the US um I think it was sort of natural that um we got a lot of that that uh kind of early attention um and just given how quickly Solana has grown how quickly the global Community has has blown up um it's it's really important to us um I think in the community more broadly and particularly within Solana Foundation um to make sure that all of the salon communities are are really um understanding what's going on and and know how to build on salana how to get connected um so to that aim uh we have launched uh this this program called super team which is a community and developer growth and coordination engine in local countries all over the world um currently we have I think 15 super teams um several in Europe we have a super team Japan recently launched we we've got super team Malaysia um looking to get super team going in Singapore and most uh importantly um we are actively in the process of spinning up a super team right here in South Korea um for anybody that's interested in the Solana Community Learning how to build projects um staying up to date um that is definitely like the the uh the the right approach yes super team is awesome when super team Korea uh ASAP we're we're we're actively hiring for uh uh or or looking rather um these are external uh grantees not not Foundation employees um we're actively looking for someone to uh startup and Lead uh super team Korea right now all right cool well let's maybe shift it a bit more to the tech side or actually before the tech side uh one thing that I've noticed is a lot of people uh recently have been using salana for a very specific purpose which has been uh aping meme coins or celebrity coins or you know whatever you want to call them um and there's a lot of kind of debate on both sides like are these good are these bad EXT itive you know um and the answer usually depends on who's answering obviously what do you think about them so I think as a whole um as a whole I think meme coins and celeb coins are really really interesting I think overall I think they're great um does that mean I think okay this one token is great and this other one is is horrible or whatever no um but what they what they do represent is sort of the next level of uh kind of pushing the boundary of experimenting with what we can do with a platform where you can you know create tokens transfer them assign some ultimately arbitrary value to them um and you know enable people to hopefully just have fun right I mean it's the same reason like why do you do stuff on the internet why do you watch streams on Twitch because it's fun people you know Meme coins are fun celeb coins are fun um now I I see that as like sort of a cyclical Evolution right what we had a couple years ago was like the nft boom right everybody was minting you know 10K nft collections for your profile pictures um they were a lot of fun there were all sorts of new nft minting platforms um prices were wildly volatile just like they are with memec coins um but first and foremost it was fun and it was that was like the kind of The Cutting Edge Tech at the time what can we do with this new type of token in and now similarly on salana um we have the network has matured it's faster it's more stable and robust than it ever has been um although I know you have many critiques about that um and you know you have this this environment that's only possible on Solana where we can you know create I think 20,000 new tokens we being minted a day um kind of earlier this year um and distribute them to a zillion wallets super fast super cheap um and see what comes out of it now unfortunately what one of the things that has come out of it is that um a lot of these tokens go to zero the the some of the platforms have been accused of being very extractive to the users and so we've ended up in this sort of I think kind of pretty uncomfortable situation where you know I don't want to see anybody getting getting hurt or getting burned um you know regardless of what they're doing and um I don't think it's wrong for people to you know shy away from new Explorations and experimentations with um you know a network that performs the way Solana does yeah so I want to get to those critiques in a bit but uh first maybe let's just highlight some underexplored use cases other than mem coins things like dpin payments that come to top of mind when you think about salana absolutely um so dpin is is a great example of a really a net new industry that could not exist without blockchain um and you know rather than seeing some application that is you know okay we could do this on AWS but instead we threw it on a blockchain because we can slap a token on it um deep in decentralized physical infrastructure networks like helium Hive mapper teleport um that provide um token incentives to both providers and consumers of physical services so helium um is a decentral Iz 5G radio network um they provide you know lowcost 5G cellular access to customers in the US and how how can they compete on cost is that the there is an incentive for um uh hotspot providers to set up a node that serves Radio Service um and all of those incentives and the rewards for when C people connect these are all managed on the back end on the blockchain on Solana um so I think there's a ton of other um interesting projects I think there are currently 78 uh I believe was the number 78 announced deepin projects on Solana which is more than any other blockchain ecosystem um and I think the interesting thing you mention you mentioned payments um I think payments is more than just a use case for blockchain it is the use case for blockchain everything that is an incentive um is some form of a payment right whether I just send you an nft or I send token to people or um I get an airdrop all of these things are um sending and receiving some form of payment and um now that we have the ability to settle transactions so easily and so cheaply on Solana um really looking forward to seeing um sort of a defi like uh proliferation of financial products that are based around payments um sending and receiving rather than just trading um settlement for the provision of of actual useful services that people care about yep well said there's a lot of cool Integrations with Visa the recent PayPal one as well uh but let's go back to the critiques uh let's keep it interesting um there is kind of this prevailing meme let's say uh about salana and outages even though the last one it's been quite some time since the last one um and it seems to be the only chain that has that narrative uh regardless of other chains actually having outages what do you think is the cause of that or what do you think about it um look outages suck for everybody there's no there's no way around that um it's you know absolutely the most important thing that we try you know should should never happen on on any chain right particularly not on one with as much use as Solana um from a narrative standpoint um it's a little hard to say I think Solana is um by a number of measures um you know on par with ethereum in terms of adoption traction um we've repeatedly seen um you know chain revenues Dex volumes um a lot of different metrics right the where Solana is is is neck and neck with Ethan basically all but market cap um and I think provides the only credible alternative to to um being the number one smart contract platform in the world and that puts a number of people who um have been around longer than salana I think on edge um and you know my hope is that we can all play positive some games right we're not just sort of uh you know trying to um fight over shares of a tiny pie but make the pie bigger um you know it's true true that um other platforms we've seen have have had outages or times of un unavailability just like Solana has um you know where is the narrative asymmetry I think Solana has the most users and so when something breaks you hear about it a lot more and it gets out to everybody right away um and that absolutely shouldn't happen anymore um but I think is in part why we've seen some of that uh narrative asymmetry and um one of the things that's being done to address the outages or just let's say chain performance and the kind of next step is probably the most exciting thing about slana this year which is the development of a new validat client called fire dancer uh being developed by jump crypto uh I know you're a big fan of fire dancer so can you briefly explain first of all what it is and why you're excited about it why it's important yeah so I think fired dancer is the single biggest development in the son ecosystem happening right now um and that's to not to diminish everything that you and your team have done or that a lot of people here have worked on salana have worked on um but so fired dancer is a new validator for salana right so the salana mainnet network has um today about 1,500 block producing nodes another two or three th000 full nodes RPC nodes um spread out uh over you know 400 500 locations all around the world and every one of those nodes runs basically the exact same software or a closely modified version of that software either the original Salon validator or jto um which is a a closely related Fork shares about 99% of the same code so if there is a uh a bug or a critical vulnerability in that in that code base that will affect the whole network that affects the whole protocol um and so the fire dancer project is an initiative to rewrite the entire validator code base in extremely high performance um perform um optimized code in C as close to the hardware as physically possible without basically writing in assembly or machine code um and so there's a couple benefits here the first one is first and foremost is safety um if there are multiple implementations of the validator code and half the network chooses to run the original validator and half the network chooses to run fired dancer or even if it's you know 90% 10% you always have um a back stop that if there's a bug in one there's extremely unlikely to be a bug in the other client and so you always have a more reliable robust source of Truth um hopefully most uh professional validators right helas included I I would hope you know would actually run both validators in parallel um and that way you can immediately uh detect if there's a Divergence between those two um so there's really beneficial um improvements for the Network's long-term safety um this would make Solana the only chain other than Bitcoin and ethereum to actually have a completely separate uh second validator um and in fact we have uh more than two there's also a third project um called Sig which is being built by the syndic team they are building a third validator from scratch in another uh in the zig programming language um and so these are massive massive engineering challenges um and the uh the fire dancer team has the benefit of you know they can look at the salana network and all of the technical debt and all of the features that had to be built while the network was in production and all the bugs that were fixed and sort of you know patch this or fix that over the years um and start from a clean slate and say okay if we were going to rebuild this thing from the ground up um how could we make it as absolutely efficient as possible as performant as possible um and the result is basically um a validator with performance up to a million TPS um and I'm just it's it's hard to understate um what a Solana with 100 times the performance capacity as what we're operating at today can look like um bringing the chain which is already the fastest chain you know Leaps and Bounds ahead of of a lot of our our peers in the industry okay so basically the tldr is much more secure optimized from the ground up for performance so it's going to be faster more scalable um yeah the million TPS number uh that would be that would be pretty insane for sure um what do you think the next or I guess maybe this is going to be this is going to piss off the fireing for folks but what do you think think about timelines here in terms of development will we see anything at breakpoint New Year um yeah so the the first version of fire dancer um which is called uh Franken dancer which is a a partial rewrite of the validator uses part partly fired answer code and um some parts using the the pre-existing validator um this has been live on testnet um uh it was actually announced last uh last year at breakpoint um that the first version of Fire answer has been on testet it's been in continual development um this early version of fired dancer um uh details TBD uh coming at breakpoint for the official announcement but um that first version uh Frankin dancer is live on mainnet today um the full version of fired answerer which includes the complete rewrite um which is like the the the really Holy Grail um is um just now hitting testnet um so hopefully we will see like the the full shebang um live on mainnet sometime in early 25 um and that includes a completely Rewritten Solana Virtual Machine written in C processing transactions um and getting the exact same results um as the existing Solon validator uh something I believe you got into a pretty spicy debate about if that was even possible the other day yeah that was that was a fun time on Twitter uh okay so it seems we have a minute and a half left so I think maybe a good closing point is you know in the audience assuming there's people who haven't really you know done anything on salana or you know downloaded a wallet and they just want to they're maybe just interested curious how would you recommend they start on salana what what should they do um yeah that's a great question um I think uh if you're looking to get started on salana as um a user um I think there's a lot of great apps um uh you know I think Jupiter is probably the slickest dii app um in in the industry check it out download um uh backpack or phantom um or some of the or Soul flare or some of the top Solon wallets um they've got really great user experience you can plug into um a ton of things in the ecosystem um as a builder if you're interested in um you know contributing to salana um we have uh a hackathon ongoing right now um it's called the radar hackathon being run by the team at coliseum um there's millions of dollars in prizes available um some of the biggest and and most impactful projects on Solana have come out of some of these hackathons um these are more than just coding competitions they are um the the goal is really to stimulate the formation of new products new projects um for people that might want to join or launch a business um or some sort of service on Solana um we've got great Community I think there's been thousands of registrants so far um so that's at uh col sol.com hackathon all right cool so basically you get a wallet Phantom backpack Soul flare maybe even coinbase um if if you're a user and go on something like Jupiter maybe pump out fun if you don't value your mental health um you could go on BET by drift and do some prediction markets uh and if you're a builder there's a pretty solid hackathon going on right now and you should also state with helus all right that is all we got thank you thanks [Applause] everybody thank you to our speakers for that engaging