Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy all Away. So Tracy,
Speaker 1: obviously we've done a handful of like Crypto Defy episodes
Speaker 1: in the last few months, obviously area of growing interest.
Speaker 1: I would still say, however, that for all the enthusiasm, like,
Speaker 1: by and large, I like it doesn't seem like anything
Speaker 1: Crypto Defy is like seriously cutting into traditional finance in
Speaker 1: a big way, yet like it still feels like a
Speaker 1: pretty separate universe. Yeah. Well, this is the point that
Speaker 1: you've brought up on a number of those episodes, this
Speaker 1: idea that we have defied. But so far it basically
Speaker 1: seems to be sort of self dealing in crypto and
Speaker 1: in various token There hasn't really been an extension outside
Speaker 1: of the crypto space, right. It feels like it feels
Speaker 1: very recursive, kind of like a snakey to gets tail,
Speaker 1: like some interesting proof of concepts about how market making works,
Speaker 1: or the idea of like an automated market maker, or
Speaker 1: sort of like collateralized lending. But yes, by and large,
Speaker 1: like you know, if you're to sort of look and
Speaker 1: say what banks are doing or trading firms are doing.
Speaker 1: At this point, the two don't seem to be intersecting
Speaker 1: all that much, or you know, I can't think of
Speaker 1: like many trading lines or business lines within finance that
Speaker 1: are like, oh, we're losing money to defy or two
Speaker 1: Crypto and something which kind of goes back to a
Speaker 1: wider point or one of the original criticisms of blockchain,
Speaker 1: which is that, you know, for all the excitement and
Speaker 1: all the hype, we didn't actually see that many real
Speaker 1: economy applications a blockchain UM and the fact that finance
Speaker 1: hasn't been able to make some of the technology from
Speaker 1: Defy work like kind of hints at that issue, although
Speaker 1: I mean, I have to say there are regulatory hurdles
Speaker 1: to actually doing UM defy type things if you're a
Speaker 1: regulated financial institution. Tracy, have you ever played around or like,
Speaker 1: you know, with you know a while ago, now, like
Speaker 1: back in the spring, we did that Hayden Adams won
Speaker 1: on unit swapped. Have you ever like going around and
Speaker 1: like playing around with unit swap at all or see
Speaker 1: how it really works? Yeah? I did. UM. I started
Speaker 1: like a meta mask account and was playing around a
Speaker 1: little bit, but like I gotta say, even starting a
Speaker 1: meta mask account from Hong Kong is a nightmare in
Speaker 1: and of itself. Like just getting money onto it UM
Speaker 1: took me like a full day to figure out. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, like it seems cool, and it is. It's
Speaker 1: actually very impressive, and it's like there's some interesting breakthroughs,
Speaker 1: but like it''s obvious, like it's not up to snow
Speaker 1: like for like anything that's sort of like actual like
Speaker 1: high performance finance, like you know, trade eating people are
Speaker 1: used to like executions, like millisecond scale executions. The cost
Speaker 1: of trading is for so many different assets virtually free
Speaker 1: and as everyone knows, you know, it's like I saw
Speaker 1: you you had a really good joke a while back
Speaker 1: about gas prices and you just swap. Like the cost
Speaker 1: of say like a trading on the Ethereum blockchain or
Speaker 1: whatever is like far above anything that would be like
Speaker 1: actual finance scale at this point, absolutely, and I mean
Speaker 1: just the knowledge that you need in order to dip
Speaker 1: your toes in it. And again, like going back to
Speaker 1: the metal mask account creation, like that took me ages
Speaker 1: and I know, like a little bit about what's going
Speaker 1: on UM and then actually doing defy you know, picking
Speaker 1: like what tokens you're interested in, and then making the
Speaker 1: calculations for how much yield you can earn versus the
Speaker 1: gas fees like it. It kind of boggles the mind.
Speaker 1: And it is worlds away from the kind of I
Speaker 1: guess service service, the right term customer experience that you
Speaker 1: would get on traditional financial applications, right and like if
Speaker 1: there's like a hot new n f T drop on ethereum,
Speaker 1: like gas fees, which I guess are more or less
Speaker 1: like the commissions like shoot to the moon. Like obviously,
Speaker 1: like if you're like I want a high performance trading
Speaker 1: environment like serious trading, it's obviously it's not there yet.
Speaker 1: It's super interesting. It might get there, but it's not
Speaker 1: there yet. Yeah, I would agree with that. So all
Speaker 1: of this is to say to get to our discussion
Speaker 1: today that I'm very excited about, and we're gonna be
Speaker 1: talking about a crypto blockchain initiative which is extremely hot
Speaker 1: right now, expure lots of interest, and it's kind of like, um,
Speaker 1: what I would say is it's going after sort of
Speaker 1: like Wall Street grade finance, grade finance, and by that
Speaker 1: I mean actually attempting to you know, the idea that
Speaker 1: maybe you can have a blockchain, but it actually is
Speaker 1: at the speeds the Wall Street is used to, actually
Speaker 1: at the trading cost Wall Street is used to. And
Speaker 1: you know, I think it's interest seen because one of
Speaker 1: the things that people say about blockchain, like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: a bad database. A blockchain is just a slow database,
Speaker 1: and for most use cases it's not what you want.
Speaker 1: This is We're gonna be talking about a blockchain project
Speaker 1: that actually is attempting to not just be a slow
Speaker 1: and efficient database, but to actually be high performance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's do it. I'm excited. All right, I'm super excited
Speaker 1: about this episode because it's super hot and people are
Speaker 1: into this stuff right now. We're gonna we have too
Speaker 1: great guests on um. We're gonna be speaking with Anatoly
Speaker 1: yako Venko. He is the CEO of Salona Labs, and
Speaker 1: he is the creator of the Salona protocol, which is
Speaker 1: this like smart contracting blockchain crypto platform that's kind of
Speaker 1: like Ethereum some similar ideas, and we're also going to
Speaker 1: be speaking to kind of Korea. He is the director
Speaker 1: of strategic Projects at Jump Trading, a well known trading firm,
Speaker 1: and they're doing a lot of interesting crypto stuff that
Speaker 1: will be getting in too, and so it should be
Speaker 1: an interesting conversation on the sort of like marriage of
Speaker 1: technology finance and an attempt to do crypto at true
Speaker 1: Wall Street grade of finance grade. So Anna totally and
Speaker 1: kind of thank you so much for joining us. Awesome
Speaker 1: to be here, Thank you, Jeff. Yeah, I'm super excited
Speaker 1: about this one. The timing is great. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like we're recording this August eighteen. Most of the
Speaker 1: big coins are still well below their highs, but people
Speaker 1: are super into the Salona and I think people are
Speaker 1: going to be excited about hearing this one when this
Speaker 1: comes out. But um, you know, like, so Anna totally.
Speaker 1: I want to start with you. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: this cliche that people have said for a long time
Speaker 1: blockchains are bad inefficient databases, and I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people are just sort of accepted that it's true
Speaker 1: that there's like this like trade off that you have
Speaker 1: to make. It's like, Okay, you can like be decentralized,
Speaker 1: you can be permission lest, you can be censorship free,
Speaker 1: but the price of that is high cost of execution
Speaker 1: and slow cost of execution, and that more or less
Speaker 1: I would say, characterizes like bitcoin and ethereum at least
Speaker 1: right now, And it seems like Salana essentially attempts to say, no,
Speaker 1: we don't have to accept the inherent inefficiency. Like what
Speaker 1: is salana? What is the goal? And how do you
Speaker 1: think about that trade off? Yeah, so the trade if
Speaker 1: you described this kind of this thing that people call
Speaker 1: it trai lama, right dessentialization, performer and security, And that's
Speaker 1: tray lama really only applies if the network tries to
Speaker 1: exceed the bandwidth available to it. So bandwidth is you
Speaker 1: know what you get out of Cox, out of out
Speaker 1: of Time Warner or whatever, out of a well they
Speaker 1: give you one gig a bit at home and a
Speaker 1: lot of places in the United States now, and that
Speaker 1: that's that's really what they mean by bandwidth. Well, if
Speaker 1: you look at a theoreum and kind of like these
Speaker 1: these uh, you know, proof of work based networks, they
Speaker 1: weren't designed to maximize the amount of bandwidth that each
Speaker 1: system can use. They really weren't designed to soak up
Speaker 1: one gigabit. But that was really not something that they
Speaker 1: were built for. So my background, if you folks don't know,
Speaker 1: I spent most of my career Qualcom. I was there
Speaker 1: from like flip phone days when really like there were
Speaker 1: these dinky little devices two thousand three and when I
Speaker 1: left in like twenty fifteen, my team was like optimizing
Speaker 1: augmented reality and a supercomputer basically. So I saw this
Speaker 1: like massive improvement and hardware in just to span a
Speaker 1: ten years. And I've also saw what what real bandwidth
Speaker 1: looks like five g that we were you know, it
Speaker 1: was in R and D stages while I was there,
Speaker 1: is designed to give you one gigabit. Well to two
Speaker 1: people are driving one in China one United States, they
Speaker 1: should have a one gigabit by directional channel between them,
Speaker 1: and if you try to fit transactions over that channel,
Speaker 1: you can stuff about seven hundred thousand transactions per second
Speaker 1: like ethereum size Bitcoin size transactions. So the only thing
Speaker 1: that's missing really is the hardware to handle it. And
Speaker 1: that's the challenge, like can we build a system, a
Speaker 1: fast database that could both process these messages all the
Speaker 1: cryptographic signature verifications and retransmittim around the world as fast
Speaker 1: as possible, so that that's really what we set out
Speaker 1: to do. We had some you know, really clever insights,
Speaker 1: like using a verifiable delay function as a source of
Speaker 1: time before consensus, and you know, using GPUs and and
Speaker 1: a v X and a bunch of hardware optimizations for
Speaker 1: you know, how the runtime works, so the execution environment works.
Speaker 1: But a lot of these things are engineering, like you know,
Speaker 1: hardcore engineering, you know challenges, but not computer science problems.
Speaker 1: So this idea that you've sort of solved the trilemma
Speaker 1: or the idea that a blockchain can only outperform in
Speaker 1: two of three areas, so decentralization, security, and scalability. Can
Speaker 1: you maybe go into a bit more detail about how
Speaker 1: exact uly you do that. When you say it's more
Speaker 1: of a hardware issue versus computer science, what do you
Speaker 1: actually mean and how does the whole thing work? So
Speaker 1: you can imagine a single computer that's really fast, right,
Speaker 1: you send the transactions and gives your response back, Hey
Speaker 1: I'm done right, So that that's something everybody can imagine
Speaker 1: if there was one computer that did this work. So
Speaker 1: there's this thing called time division multiple access, which is
Speaker 1: how two G celler networks work. And the way the
Speaker 1: work is you have your channel, your bandwidth, your your
Speaker 1: physical frequency signal, and you have a bunch of subscribers
Speaker 1: that want to transmit at the same time over it. Well,
Speaker 1: if you allow them to transmit at the same time,
Speaker 1: you get noise because radio interferes. Same a blockchain, if
Speaker 1: you have two block producers, two computers, they're really really
Speaker 1: fast to try to produce a block in the ledger
Speaker 1: at the same time, you get a fork and it's
Speaker 1: the network is in a noisy state. So this idea
Speaker 1: that we had really early on using a verifiable delay
Speaker 1: function or proof of history. If anyone has heard anything
Speaker 1: about Salona, they heard of proof history. This is a
Speaker 1: clock that is outside of consensus and it rotates the
Speaker 1: button of when any block producer can transmit a block,
Speaker 1: and it does it in a very predictable, deterministic way
Speaker 1: and does it really really fast. So and experimentally we've
Speaker 1: we've done it in for na miloseconds every four na milliseconds.
Speaker 1: This button moves right now the slots are four in
Speaker 1: a milliseconds, but we moved the button basically every four slots.
Speaker 1: So you can think of this different really really fast
Speaker 1: computer around the world gets to be the next block
Speaker 1: producer every like roughly one point six seconds. And because
Speaker 1: everybody knows ahead of time, this is the really fast
Speaker 1: computer that's going to start there, you know, start creating
Speaker 1: these blocks. You don't run into a lot of the
Speaker 1: bottlenecks that you're on a ethereum proof of work networks
Speaker 1: and all these other kind of random based coordination networks
Speaker 1: and this this this is like two g celluer networks.
Speaker 1: This is stuff that like basically I had to learn
Speaker 1: as part of my interview at Qualcom. UH kind of
Speaker 1: why don't you come in talk to us a little
Speaker 1: bit about UM what you do jump trading with crypto?
Speaker 1: I mean jump trading. I think people may or may
Speaker 1: not know. Maybe you could just describe what it is,
Speaker 1: what it's doing in crypto and sort of like what
Speaker 1: the UM I guess to, you know, dovetail with what
Speaker 1: we're talking about on a toll. He has been talking
Speaker 1: about some of like what needs to happen for crypto
Speaker 1: to get to the scale where it's worth it for
Speaker 1: serious finance players to be involved in it. Jump is
Speaker 1: a coordinator trading film that was founded about two decades
Speaker 1: ago in the pits the CV and is one of
Speaker 1: the largest participants across traditional jucians markets, spanning most asset classes.
Speaker 1: UH and Joan's Scripto effort began as a Scumpbooks indoon
Speaker 1: project six years ago at the University of Illinois where
Speaker 1: Jump as a research lab. Uh and you know, our
Speaker 1: movement of the speed has grown pretty dramatically over the
Speaker 1: last six years. And you know, I kind of classify
Speaker 1: what we do probably in two buckets. So one is
Speaker 1: prop treading, which is, you know, exactly what we do
Speaker 1: on the other side of the house, where we connect
Speaker 1: to a lot of markets and participating very actively across
Speaker 1: the cryptal escape. The second piece where this conversation is
Speaker 1: probably more interesting, is the strategic bucket, where we've been
Speaker 1: involved in partnering with and investing in pieces of infrastructure
Speaker 1: across the cryptal space. And that you know kind of
Speaker 1: started with centralized infrastructure with exchanges, custodians, other pigs and shovels,
Speaker 1: and there's you know, involved into the much more exciting spaces,
Speaker 1: participating with on Jane protocols and projects such as Salana,
Speaker 1: and contributing in a much more hands on fashioned projects
Speaker 1: like the Pitt network, which which I'm trouble to get
Speaker 1: a chance to chat about a little bit of day.
Speaker 1: I guess tackling that question of you know what it's
Speaker 1: going to take to finance. Yeah, the crypto well, well,
Speaker 1: projects like the Pitt Network are definitely want piece of it.
Speaker 1: And and I'll say that are you know, maybe a
Speaker 1: little bit later in the interview, but like like and
Speaker 1: it only was you know, was mentioning there's a lot
Speaker 1: of scalability that's yet to be had and that's needed
Speaker 1: in order to come out of this this this sandbox
Speaker 1: that we've been playing in with for the last five years. Right.
Speaker 1: And so if you want to build a finance that
Speaker 1: can execute on an open order books and process a
Speaker 1: lot of transactions that before under bill of seconds, that
Speaker 1: you can facilitate a lot of meaningful response for you
Speaker 1: need a blockchain or you know, or something like Salana
Speaker 1: that can process and be that execution layer to facilitate that. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, there's there's a lot of the stuff that
Speaker 1: you guys touched on earlier in terms of using experiences, uh,
Speaker 1: and and other problems that have been talked about a bunch,
Speaker 1: but you know, I can I can tell you that
Speaker 1: through the course of part participation in this space, we've
Speaker 1: seen a dramatic improvement in the quality of access that's
Speaker 1: available and as more and more firms, you know, like us,
Speaker 1: get involved, and and and as more projects like Salana
Speaker 1: continue to reach majority and more capital continued during the
Speaker 1: space these at all kind of it might be pretty
Speaker 1: solva little problems that are that are being tackled. M
Speaker 1: m Anatoly. I'm curious just on that note, like when
Speaker 1: you originally set out to found Salana, what was what
Speaker 1: was the goal or ambition of the product. So a
Speaker 1: lot of people have described it as an ethereum killer.
Speaker 1: Was that the ultimate aim to create something that's faster um,
Speaker 1: that's more scalable, And exactly what applications did you have
Speaker 1: in mind for it? The slide deck, the seed level
Speaker 1: slide deck literally said blockchain at nas deck speed. That
Speaker 1: was the tagline. And we were going after like what
Speaker 1: I thought we would be going after are like these
Speaker 1: monopolies like Nazzac, like Nisy, like CME. Because you know,
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, I started trading on like Interactive Brokers
Speaker 1: and a bunch of forex sites, and in my experience
Speaker 1: as an engineer, I was always a little behind. And
Speaker 1: when I got the data, when I got the information
Speaker 1: from these from these places, and when my orders got submitted,
Speaker 1: they're always a little later than everyone else's. So I
Speaker 1: always felt like I was always getting screwed by somebody
Speaker 1: else that had access to this financial backbone and this
Speaker 1: core thing that blockchains are that different blocked blockchains from
Speaker 1: databases is the city of censorship resistance. So if we
Speaker 1: have a really fast blockchain and all you need is
Speaker 1: hardware to connect to it, and you're in the same
Speaker 1: level playing field as you know, Jump Trading or all
Speaker 1: the best traders in the world, that's really something that
Speaker 1: I felt would be good. You know that that's the
Speaker 1: product that I wanted. I'm blown away by the progress
Speaker 1: over the last year having folks like jump Trading, like
Speaker 1: you know, to have their engineers start building lists and
Speaker 1: really take this seriously in it. You know, it was
Speaker 1: a dream and kind of a silly idea maybe in
Speaker 1: a silly tagline and a slide deck, but now it
Speaker 1: really feels real, like there's I think there's a chance
Speaker 1: that financial execution trading could actually run on Salana in
Speaker 1: the next five to ten years from for the majority
Speaker 1: of things that are traded in the world. So you
Speaker 1: mentioned censorship resistance, and of course, like you know, this
Speaker 1: is like a core value like a bitcoin and when
Speaker 1: I think about it in the bitcoin realm, you know,
Speaker 1: the core cetocis vision, you know, I think about, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I could send a transaction from here in New York
Speaker 1: to Tracy in Hong Kong, and no third party needs
Speaker 1: to know about it, and no third party could say no,
Speaker 1: and no third party could say, oh, you're not allowed
Speaker 1: to send that much across borders to Hong Kong because
Speaker 1: it's gonna like there. You know, it's like that cypherpunk
Speaker 1: vision that it's just between me and Tracy and no
Speaker 1: one else is involved in the transaction. It feels like
Speaker 1: it means something a little bit different in the con
Speaker 1: in the sort of like pure finance context where you're
Speaker 1: talking about, oh, you don't like the fact that as
Speaker 1: a kind of interactive brokers, it feels like there's someone
Speaker 1: who maybe has a computer and a server room in
Speaker 1: New Jersey who's a millisecond closer to the exchange or whatever.
Speaker 1: Talk about what censorship resistance means in the context of like,
Speaker 1: you know, trading interest rates. So there's uh, you know
Speaker 1: this these transactions, it's especially trades. It's information that's propagating
Speaker 1: around the world, and you can think of it as
Speaker 1: kind of chasing news. So some news worth the event
Speaker 1: happens in Singapore, that news wire trades, you know, fires
Speaker 1: off to a trader that's looking at that Bloomberg terminal,
Speaker 1: and they may and they look at the market and
Speaker 1: then they make the trade. The goal for us is
Speaker 1: to have state transitions like transactions to propagate at that
Speaker 1: same speed speeder light through fibers, so by the time
Speaker 1: that trader looks at the markets, they see the exact
Speaker 1: same price CME or NISY. And because the how the
Speaker 1: information propagates, it's simultaneously to every computer that's part of
Speaker 1: the Salanta network, and anybody can join. That's thatt. It
Speaker 1: means that me is a Joshmo and a totally that
Speaker 1: wants to play around with deep learning and make my models.
Speaker 1: I get that data as fast as you know the
Speaker 1: best traders in the world, and therefore I can make
Speaker 1: my trades, you know, based on how good I am
Speaker 1: at at the same kind of level playing field. So
Speaker 1: it's really like I make this joke. It's kind of
Speaker 1: a maybe a little morbid, but I say, Salanta is
Speaker 1: really great. If you're building a nuclear first strike detector,
Speaker 1: you actually want to see the rockets launch and you
Speaker 1: want that signal to fire. Bitcoin is really great for
Speaker 1: after the that strike lands and you need to like
Speaker 1: rebuild society. UM, So how does that so? I mean
Speaker 1: there is a tension in with blockchain and regulated financial
Speaker 1: institutions that we kind of touched on earlier UM And
Speaker 1: of course we've seen Gary Gensler come out recently and
Speaker 1: talk about how a lot of tokens look a lot
Speaker 1: like synthetic securities. So I'm just wondering how does the
Speaker 1: permissionless aspect of a blockchain UM stack up against the
Speaker 1: highly highly controlled and regulated world of financial transactions. So
Speaker 1: a blockchain, especially like one like Salana, it's really like
Speaker 1: a very dumb packet switch. It's really doing nothing more
Speaker 1: interesting than a T and T does accept. It guarantees
Speaker 1: this censorship resistant piece that if I send a message,
Speaker 1: it's delivered to all the subscribers, and the fault tolerance
Speaker 1: and all these consensus algorithms guarantee that that part that
Speaker 1: there isn't any central party that can stop it. So
Speaker 1: that that is really like very dumb work. Right. The
Speaker 1: validators that do this, they don't they're not aware of
Speaker 1: the bits that are sending I feel like where regulations
Speaker 1: should step in is at the places where somebody is saying,
Speaker 1: these bits in this computer and this packet switch represents
Speaker 1: something of value, and I'm claiming that they represents something
Speaker 1: of value to the public, right because that that's the
Speaker 1: thing that is kind of like, you know, effectuating the
Speaker 1: bits into something that has you know, trust assumptions that
Speaker 1: people will look at it and say, Okay, is that
Speaker 1: really the unit swap token? Is that really the bitcoin token?
Speaker 1: Who am I sending my money to? That's a perfect
Speaker 1: place to regulate the actual bits how they're transmitted. That's
Speaker 1: really like dumb packet switch work. You know, Like I
Speaker 1: think what we've seen, especially in the last you know,
Speaker 1: like during the discussions around the amendment in the INFRA bill,
Speaker 1: I feel like I feel like those folks got that
Speaker 1: part and actually started moving towards that direction. Maybe kind
Speaker 1: of maybe you could come in and talk about it
Speaker 1: from the perspective of a trading firm that has to
Speaker 1: think about regulations or think about what is securities and
Speaker 1: has regulatory obligations, because it does feel like, as Tracy said,
Speaker 1: it seems like it's going to come up more and more.
Speaker 1: It's like what are these are these are these securities
Speaker 1: properly registered? Like how do you see the playing out
Speaker 1: from your perspective? And maybe you could just yeah, give
Speaker 1: us jumps perspective or your perspective. Yeah. So, as you
Speaker 1: pointed out, Jump has a massive body of folks that
Speaker 1: are constantly monitoring the situation, uh, to ingest all this
Speaker 1: information as it comes in, and there's there's a lot
Speaker 1: of shades of right. Our participation in this space has
Speaker 1: very defined by a lot of the activities that we've
Speaker 1: been able to get comfortable with. You know, one of
Speaker 1: them being contributing data to the bit network as a
Speaker 1: very neutral again like like I don't know this thing
Speaker 1: like a dumb backageteresting. We're we're contributing data that's helping
Speaker 1: bring pricing information and a high fidelity fashion do the blockchain,
Speaker 1: and that's a kind of neutral piece of infrastructure that
Speaker 1: we leveraged to build a lot of things. You know,
Speaker 1: A very curious if you can talk a little bit
Speaker 1: more about this the PITH network, because um, you know,
Speaker 1: we had we did a DeFi episode I think probably
Speaker 1: about a month and a half ago with Tom Schmidt
Speaker 1: of Dragonfly Capital, and you talk one of the ways
Speaker 1: in which this space could move forward is essentially sort
Speaker 1: of like through kind of like synthetic assets that use
Speaker 1: outside oracles to bring in pricing, bring bring outside pricing
Speaker 1: onto the chain. Talk to us like a little bit
Speaker 1: about what that is? What do you what is pith,
Speaker 1: what are you contributing to it? And why like why
Speaker 1: are you contributing data to this uh to this network? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it is effectively a high speed Dinna bridge between
Speaker 1: the rest of the word and block chains and in
Speaker 1: this case specifically salt Right and so Blok chains for
Speaker 1: for all their strengths to or immediately have the ability
Speaker 1: to access data that lives outside the chain or off chain.
Speaker 1: And that means you can't incorporate this data in into
Speaker 1: the logics of smart contracts and applications. And that's that
Speaker 1: in a bits, you from being able to build a
Speaker 1: lot of interesting stuff. And so PIT is like almost
Speaker 1: like a decentralized marketplace or aggregator that enables first party
Speaker 1: producers and owners of this data to contribute this price,
Speaker 1: to help build this piece of infrastructure, to bring this
Speaker 1: state to defy and enabled application to all overstabuild stuff.
Speaker 1: The reason that us and you know a lot of
Speaker 1: beating firms and other and a lot of the other
Speaker 1: guys that have announced participation in the PIT network are
Speaker 1: really excited about this is you know, quanfirms have always
Speaker 1: been on the forefront of technological development, almost as a
Speaker 1: precursor of being relevant in this business right, and that's
Speaker 1: generally been more in the finance and kind of focus
Speaker 1: software space. But with the rise of blockchains and decentralized finance,
Speaker 1: it's an opportunity for us to be at the forefront
Speaker 1: of a completely new technological revolution. And we've you know,
Speaker 1: we've been in this space for the last six years,
Speaker 1: but a lot of the other participants, you know, have
Speaker 1: been evaluating coming in and vantage this different aspects and
Speaker 1: this has been a really great way for a lot
Speaker 1: of people to get their hands dirty or on a
Speaker 1: pair of private keys, send the transaction into the beer
Speaker 1: to pay network, and start building a better, better model
Speaker 1: for the space, because you can't really understand it before
Speaker 1: you before you do that. So that's kind of piece WAE,
Speaker 1: and then piece two is creating forms are generated a
Speaker 1: lot of data historically and managed over this data in
Speaker 1: in varread ways and exchanges. As I generally modeled them
Speaker 1: or just spintech platforms that are looking to leverage the
Speaker 1: technology enable building other cool stuff. And so when you
Speaker 1: have something like bit that enables people to contribute this
Speaker 1: data to effectively make a blockchain data play. As you
Speaker 1: know this, this auticle problem has become more and more
Speaker 1: predominant as like one of the white fields in the space.
Speaker 1: It's an opportunity to contribute to something in a neutral
Speaker 1: fashion and get exposure to the space and have a player.
Speaker 1: And that's why you know, everybody said and conspeak for
Speaker 1: cospeak for other people, but you know, through our conversations
Speaker 1: have been one of the reasons why a lot of
Speaker 1: folks have been excited about it. So one of the
Speaker 1: reasons people are very excited about Salona at the moment
Speaker 1: is because the native token, the price of it has
Speaker 1: basically gone kind of crazy recently. UM, I don't have
Speaker 1: it right in front of me, but I think the
Speaker 1: spike was like bigger than Bitcoin recently. Um, just a
Speaker 1: lot of outperformance there. Yeah, So I'm curious, like um Anatoly,
Speaker 1: when you look at the price of Salona and it's
Speaker 1: going up this sharply, what is it saying to you?
Speaker 1: Is it saying that people are seeing more value in
Speaker 1: the Salona network itself and they're willing to, you know,
Speaker 1: pay more for what is an effect like a processing
Speaker 1: storage fee or is its pure speculation um and people
Speaker 1: just sort of you know, having fun with crypto um.
Speaker 1: That's really tough, right, That's a tough question simply because
Speaker 1: I don't I think the crypto markets have matured enough
Speaker 1: to recognize value in smart contract platforms. And that value
Speaker 1: isn't in the isn't just in the processing or the data.
Speaker 1: It's in this like ecosystem, right, the shared state. Like
Speaker 1: the reason why ethereum is so valuable is because there's
Speaker 1: so many companies that have built products that people want
Speaker 1: on top of it, and there are these products people
Speaker 1: want so much that they're willing to pay these exorbitate
Speaker 1: gas fees to use them. Right, Like that that is
Speaker 1: the value of a theorem? Is that Like that happened? Right?
Speaker 1: So what I think, if anything, that I think the
Speaker 1: price is reflecting that the ecosystem in Salon over the
Speaker 1: last year has grown really dramatically, Like we saw that
Speaker 1: in our hackathons. Our first second On hackathon had a
Speaker 1: thousand registrations, not maximum of three thousand last one. Three
Speaker 1: in fifty teams actually launched you know something, um a
Speaker 1: bunch of them. I don't know the exact number, but
Speaker 1: I feel like it's getting close to fifty of race
Speaker 1: funding just during the hackathons. That means that there's now
Speaker 1: an ecosystem of teams, right, startups that are quit their
Speaker 1: jobs at Google or whatever and created a product and
Speaker 1: have raised outside capital to go then you know product
Speaker 1: market fit eat glass grow users. Right. That that's really
Speaker 1: I think where, if anything, that this is reflecting. Let
Speaker 1: me ask a question, and I think it could actually
Speaker 1: um be answered by both of you. I'd like to
Speaker 1: hear both of your perspectives on it. Because although we've
Speaker 1: talked about okay, ethereum, it's slower, um, it has high
Speaker 1: gas prices. There are the show called layer two solutions
Speaker 1: that people are building on top of ethereum. They're also
Speaker 1: building them on top of Bitcoin, which famously has the
Speaker 1: Lightning network, which has been around for a few years.
Speaker 1: And these layer two solutions can actually can sort of
Speaker 1: solve this problem of extremely high throughput, low cost transactions.
Speaker 1: I'm curious from both of your perspectives what you see
Speaker 1: as uh the advantages of having it be on the
Speaker 1: layer one and why not just say, okay, well, if
Speaker 1: we want um, you know, security, and if we want
Speaker 1: high throughput, why not just use one of the layer
Speaker 1: two solutions on that are being built right now. On
Speaker 1: top of the theory, I think like the magic and
Speaker 1: crypto happens in this idea of composibility where everybody is
Speaker 1: in the same kind of state, right, We're all playing
Speaker 1: the same game on the same server. It's all basically
Speaker 1: super connected. Layer two's create these fractions, you know, and
Speaker 1: like you know, little shards of places where state lives
Speaker 1: and the Financially, it's very obvious that if you have
Speaker 1: a market that now has to be split between two
Speaker 1: different execution environments, different exchanges, that creates inefficiencies because now
Speaker 1: you have arbitrage between the prices between the two, and
Speaker 1: now you have to have capital and both exchanges right
Speaker 1: and manage that and that that's really not a great
Speaker 1: thing when if you have an alternative where everything can
Speaker 1: be in just one jan pot. So that's a very
Speaker 1: financial kind of explanation. But I think just developers, you know,
Speaker 1: use as an engineer, charting is a huge pain in
Speaker 1: the ass to deal with a bunch of different roll ups.
Speaker 1: We have to manage state from application. It's huge pain
Speaker 1: in the ass. All I want is like, oh my whatever,
Speaker 1: ten million users to not worry about any of the stuff, right, Like,
Speaker 1: as an engineer, it's just easier, right, you want, I
Speaker 1: want a single CPU with as much throughput as I can, right,
Speaker 1: ideally with a single core that's as fast as possible.
Speaker 1: Dealing with multiple cores is a little is still a
Speaker 1: pain in the ass, but still not as bad as
Speaker 1: dealing with a network of computers. And I have to scale,
Speaker 1: and that those problems are really like something that takes
Speaker 1: a lot more time for depths to build products versus
Speaker 1: entra you know. Yeah, just sticking backing off of that,
Speaker 1: you know, the magic world that people throw around in
Speaker 1: the cripple space offen is composibility, right, and that that's
Speaker 1: you know Granadolie was talking about in being able to
Speaker 1: leverage pieces of state within the shame leisure to very
Speaker 1: cool applications. And so you can take something like the
Speaker 1: prices the seater Mortar book, put them together in a
Speaker 1: build a derivatives trading platform and if you have shorted state,
Speaker 1: you know, those kinds of exciting applications are not possible,
Speaker 1: and that takes away from a lot of the fund
Speaker 1: that a lot of these have. These these platforms break.
Speaker 1: One thing that Slanas you know, also done really well
Speaker 1: and is investing in what's called cross change bridges, which
Speaker 1: are pieces of infrastructure that enable state to move between
Speaker 1: these changes and so Ethereum has all these network effects
Speaker 1: that exist across a lot of these dimensions, and I
Speaker 1: think all of them eventually convert in convergent to building
Speaker 1: very useful an interesting state, and you're able to use
Speaker 1: these bridges to then bring the state or the Salana
Speaker 1: and perform more interesting competitions of that state and create
Speaker 1: new state with very very interesting security properties. You know,
Speaker 1: that makes well there an Slona I didn't you know,
Speaker 1: in a lot more interesting. So I have a weird
Speaker 1: question um, but it's sort of related to the last point.
Speaker 1: But I think like there's so much excitement around crypto,
Speaker 1: and a lot of it is rooted obviously in excitement
Speaker 1: about technology and its ability to change the world. But
Speaker 1: on the other hand, there seems to be a lot
Speaker 1: of belief that once this technology is invented, like say bitcoin,
Speaker 1: it's not going to be replaced by something else and
Speaker 1: it's going to sort of exist forever. So I'm thinking
Speaker 1: how to phrase this. So you know, if you have
Speaker 1: something like bitcoin and then people say it's use cases limited,
Speaker 1: so they go ahead and then ethereum, and then people
Speaker 1: try to improve on Ethereum and come up with alternates
Speaker 1: like um Salana or like cardon. No, do you ever
Speaker 1: worry that like the next iteration of the blockchain is
Speaker 1: going to come along and um compete effectively with Salana?
Speaker 1: And then secondly, how do you sort of balance the
Speaker 1: tension between building a big network. So you want a
Speaker 1: sort of first mover advantage, you want lots of people
Speaker 1: to be using Salana, But on the other hand, you
Speaker 1: know you could have a new competitor come out of
Speaker 1: nowhere with a better proposition. My belief is that Salana
Speaker 1: is kind of like at a terminal design for censorship resistant,
Speaker 1: real time get the information bits as fast as we
Speaker 1: can around the world. There's Piretto efficient trade offs where
Speaker 1: if you're building something that is trying to survive, you know,
Speaker 1: as a monetary system after World War three, maybe bitcoin
Speaker 1: is a better design. But if you're building something for
Speaker 1: real time trading trying to disrupt NAZAC. I don't see
Speaker 1: a better path. So the network that's gonna beat us
Speaker 1: is going to be very similarly designed to us, but
Speaker 1: just executing faster. You know, people working harder. That that's
Speaker 1: what keeps us working as hard as we can. There's
Speaker 1: also I think kind of this other interesting aspect of
Speaker 1: this is that the tech itself maybe not as important
Speaker 1: as just empowering people with cryptography. That onboarding experience yet
Speaker 1: with unit swap that was really painful of metal masks.
Speaker 1: Imagine that, you know, we get to a point where
Speaker 1: you have to three million people that have done it
Speaker 1: and kind of get the idea of cryptography at the
Speaker 1: level of that people understand what a browser does, not
Speaker 1: nothing more than that, right, But if they get it,
Speaker 1: then you have that many people actually all now able
Speaker 1: to solve custody, all interact with any arbitrary blockchain. That
Speaker 1: space is going to be filled by technologies. You know,
Speaker 1: like somebody somewhere is smart enough to go build a
Speaker 1: network and get those people to go do something. You
Speaker 1: know that the tech is going to be less important,
Speaker 1: you know, like the actual getting those humans on board it.
Speaker 1: I wanna go back to this idea of like okay
Speaker 1: competing against the exchanges blockchain at nasdack speeds. You know,
Speaker 1: one of the big ways that a lot of these
Speaker 1: exchanges make money is the licensing of data. That data
Speaker 1: is extremely valuable, and so I'm curious, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of from your perspective, but maybe from both of your perspective,
Speaker 1: is that an area that you see is like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is prime for disruption. A handful of very powerful
Speaker 1: exchanges really just controlled heavil hammer lock on this data
Speaker 1: and this could you could open this up? But also
Speaker 1: you know, I'm also curious, specifically, say from the jump
Speaker 1: trading perspective, and there's a bunch of trading firms that
Speaker 1: are involved in this, I know, like Virtue is one
Speaker 1: of them. What is the guarantee that the data you're
Speaker 1: contributing is clean or that it's high quality data? Because
Speaker 1: it's what you know, like, how do we How would
Speaker 1: I if I were a a user of PITH or I,
Speaker 1: you know, have designed a smart contract that was contingent
Speaker 1: on PITH data, How would I have any idea that
Speaker 1: it's clean, high quality data that's being contributed to it
Speaker 1: by you or the partner. A couple of questions in
Speaker 1: that one, you know, I'll go for the data model. Sure,
Speaker 1: I mean not have like the most exciting on SATA,
Speaker 1: but in the oaldy that I think the feeds that
Speaker 1: are coming out of exchanges are primarily consumed by two
Speaker 1: classes of participants. One our films like jump like we're
Speaker 1: do like GDS, i'll do a lot of other participants
Speaker 1: in the pit network that are ingesting this data execute
Speaker 1: on like high frequent secuting strategies that needed isspond in
Speaker 1: very New York time to allow these events, right, And
Speaker 1: modern matching engines have determinism on the order of microcycles
Speaker 1: and or or sometimes you know a lot flow and
Speaker 1: block change, you know by construction. And it only was
Speaker 1: just talking about like as long as you know, like
Speaker 1: theoretically as fast as is going to get because you know,
Speaker 1: you're limited by how quickly you can communicate to a
Speaker 1: global network of computers and come to consensus, especially over
Speaker 1: the public Internet. And so you're talking about like hundreds
Speaker 1: of millar cycles, right, and a microsycutitis two hundreds of
Speaker 1: millar syconds as a second is Stuart Day, And so
Speaker 1: you're talking about some pretty dramatic differences here, and so
Speaker 1: the data feeds that are coming out of these exchanges.
Speaker 1: The the thing that's probably not distracted by a blockchain
Speaker 1: based data feed is is the level of subscription that
Speaker 1: that a home and jump needs. There it consume interact
Speaker 1: with hyper constituting strategies. Now there is a second us
Speaker 1: of data consumers. There are more human time or modial time,
Speaker 1: right and these are the guy the analysts that are
Speaker 1: picking up the phone on the underdesk in providing commentary
Speaker 1: on the UK of its back office systems across the world,
Speaker 1: like all the classes of participants that don't need data
Speaker 1: every couple of hundred nanoseconds but don't really want a
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes to the right and that data model now
Speaker 1: now definitely you know, starts to starts to get distracted
Speaker 1: with with something like with something like it, what else
Speaker 1: canry out of that by saying is that what's far
Speaker 1: more exciting with a blockshain based data play like PIT
Speaker 1: is the en chain applications that as you know, you
Speaker 1: were talking about some of the guests that you had
Speaker 1: that we're talking about some of the applications that could
Speaker 1: be learned using this data. Uh and yeah, I almost
Speaker 1: think of the disruption of that second class of a
Speaker 1: data model as basically a side of act of what's
Speaker 1: being there. And then you know it's it's primary motive.
Speaker 1: And then what about the data quality part? How do
Speaker 1: we know it? They call that what Jump is contributing
Speaker 1: to is how do we know it's good data? Right? So,
Speaker 1: the way the system works is as a network of
Speaker 1: independent data providers that are effectively that are all publishing
Speaker 1: their prices as transactions into the Slana blanchain and just
Speaker 1: to get into the reeds a little bit here. Along
Speaker 1: with their prices, these data providers are also publishing uncertainties
Speaker 1: or confidence in the both associated with these prices. And
Speaker 1: you know what that and that's kind of a non
Speaker 1: ipuitive concept when it comes to the prices. But depending
Speaker 1: on the market structure, any given trade that you're seeing,
Speaker 1: or any given snapshot of the liquidities that you see
Speaker 1: on any given venue, inherently it's just an observation that
Speaker 1: has someone certainty on a waving price. It's like a
Speaker 1: measurement that you make in the lab. And these data
Speaker 1: providers are publishing this uncertainty and this price to the
Speaker 1: blockchain and over there, like Salana, there's an on chain
Speaker 1: program on Salana that's ingesting these inputs and doing some
Speaker 1: slightly intelligent aggregation to handle out lives, throw away that
Speaker 1: data and and and create like a final pith price
Speaker 1: and and an uncertainty that is that is like a
Speaker 1: that's on the price as a whole, right, and so
Speaker 1: developed buggers that are using these prices are basically seeing
Speaker 1: the aggregate of a lot of this of this data
Speaker 1: that's being ingested and ugially have this like extra field
Speaker 1: of uncertainty that has a degree of freedom and the
Speaker 1: applications that they're building with and having this big diversity
Speaker 1: of quotas is critically important. Right, There's a lot of
Speaker 1: reduced syncrasies that that come into player. Right. Exchanges are
Speaker 1: like creating forms could have technology problems. You could have
Speaker 1: flash crashes on any independent venue. You could have people
Speaker 1: who deputing game systems. You could have big fat finger
Speaker 1: prints that cause and you need you are you ideally
Speaker 1: want this auticle system to be highly robust to those
Speaker 1: kinds of events. The second thing that that the other
Speaker 1: thing that it does is when you have a net
Speaker 1: work of these first party data providers, it's a consolidation
Speaker 1: of indridenced across the entire landscape, right, and so depending
Speaker 1: on market structure of any given asset class, like the
Speaker 1: U S sequities, you have drag NMS that ensures that
Speaker 1: the so led to US equity values trade off the line.
Speaker 1: That's not the case for crypto effects treasuries, lots of
Speaker 1: other international equity markets, and that leads to fracture pools
Speaker 1: of liquidity that are often separated by geopolitical boundaries, right.
Speaker 1: And so pricing information that's being submitted by new new
Speaker 1: participants as they're coming onto the PIT network adds to
Speaker 1: a representation of like a global price for a lot
Speaker 1: of these sources. And so not only doesn't give you
Speaker 1: a good representation of the price, but also the distribution
Speaker 1: of those prices, which is potentially very interesting dat And
Speaker 1: you know, as we see like k g I and
Speaker 1: m g O and and FDx and like all the
Speaker 1: participants across Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, London, a lot of
Speaker 1: US venues coming onto the network. It's it's significantly shouldend.
Speaker 1: It's so that's kind of like you know a big
Speaker 1: piece of what makes the data very US very high
Speaker 1: quality and you know, much better source suppressing for for
Speaker 1: application to all of us to use. So I'm curious
Speaker 1: just going back to the beginning of this conversation where
Speaker 1: we were talking about how Salona actually works. So if
Speaker 1: most of this is about expanding the network, upgrading hardware
Speaker 1: versus actual improvements on the computer science that underlines it,
Speaker 1: like what is the next big thing for Salona? What
Speaker 1: are you working on right now? And like where do
Speaker 1: you see it going? So um, the innovation and the
Speaker 1: computer science part we just got lucky with. That's usually
Speaker 1: how it happens, if it works, uh, and that's been
Speaker 1: that's been you know, a blessing for us because we've
Speaker 1: been really focused stun the hard work of like realistically
Speaker 1: takes ten years to build a new operating system, a
Speaker 1: new database. The stuff doesn't happen overnight. And that's because
Speaker 1: you're trying to take this abstract idea and form it
Speaker 1: into real world CPUs, GPUs, you know network cards that
Speaker 1: have you know, their own behaviors, and to do that
Speaker 1: in an efficient way, it just takes a lot of
Speaker 1: kind of you know, blood, sweat and tears. So a
Speaker 1: lot of the development that engineers do at kind of
Speaker 1: the core protocol level is optimizations that you would see
Speaker 1: folks doing if they're working in a Linux kernel or
Speaker 1: you know database like you know, my my sequel or
Speaker 1: something like that, you know, looking at memory, looking at
Speaker 1: throughput block contention and trying to see where do we
Speaker 1: have bottlenecks that if a validator that isn't you know,
Speaker 1: working on software. If they add more hardware, they add
Speaker 1: more as systees and more network cards, they should see
Speaker 1: that improvement, you know, from from that right from that
Speaker 1: investment that that's really kind of like our our goal
Speaker 1: here is to make this thing elastic with a hardware
Speaker 1: that's given to it. I want to like, you know, zooma.
Speaker 1: One of the things in the whole crypto space is
Speaker 1: each generation accuses the next generation of being insufficiently decentralized
Speaker 1: by some metric. Right, so big cooiners look at Ethereum
Speaker 1: and they say, oh, Ethereum has a vitalic, and we
Speaker 1: is like, okay, no one knows who Setoshi was, he
Speaker 1: has no influence anymore, though people try to still like
Speaker 1: understand his writings. But then Ethereum they say, oh, you
Speaker 1: have vitalic. He's the leader of it and there's consensus
Speaker 1: and that foundation and also an individual can't run a
Speaker 1: full note like we can on a Raspberry Pie, so
Speaker 1: it's insufficiently decentralized. And then the ethereums look at Salana
Speaker 1: and it's like, well, you have and it told you
Speaker 1: who's a CEO. We don't even have a CEO, but
Speaker 1: there's a CEO, and you need a big data center.
Speaker 1: And even maybe it's a little bit more tough to
Speaker 1: run a note on a theorium, at least theory, it
Speaker 1: could still be done. You need you can't. Really, someone
Speaker 1: can't run a full UH Salona node on their home computer.
Speaker 1: You're insufficiently decentralized. And so I'm curious, like, how concerned
Speaker 1: should one be or what, let's put it this way,
Speaker 1: why shouldn't one be concerned about the lack of decentralization
Speaker 1: on Salona That here's a company. You're the CEO of
Speaker 1: Salona Labs. I get that's different than the protocol, but
Speaker 1: obviously you have a lot of influence and there's no
Speaker 1: way I could run a full note UH at home.
Speaker 1: So why shouldn't I be worried about Salona decentralization? You
Speaker 1: could run a full note at your local day son, right,
Speaker 1: Like okay, So so I've always felt that it's not
Speaker 1: about like lowering the berry to entry. It's about making
Speaker 1: the thing on the other side so valuable that you're
Speaker 1: willing to kind of, you know, crawl through broken glass
Speaker 1: to get there. So in this case, right being having
Speaker 1: access financial data, access to the network where you can
Speaker 1: trade and participate in the next generation of finance at
Speaker 1: the same speed as jump trading. Like for me as
Speaker 1: an engineer when I was working at Qualcom, I would
Speaker 1: have drove to like, you know, Hurricane Electric and set
Speaker 1: up my note like that day, like as soon as
Speaker 1: I would learned about it. Right, Like, that's not a
Speaker 1: big deal for for somebody that wants to do it.
Speaker 1: So what I in terms of decentralization that question specifically,
Speaker 1: The way we look at it is we try to
Speaker 1: address all the quantifiable variables that we can uh and
Speaker 1: the specific one that we care about is this mac
Speaker 1: maximizing the minimum set of independent parties that can get
Speaker 1: to thirty of the stakeweight in the network. And that's
Speaker 1: a very specific thing. Bology talked about it, calling it
Speaker 1: the Nakamotico efficient. You kind of look at the network
Speaker 1: and you try to find what is the smallest set
Speaker 1: of parties of participants. However, you slice this network that
Speaker 1: if they all collude it at the same time, that
Speaker 1: could shut it down. So they can never steal funds
Speaker 1: because the layer one doesn't take custody of your funds,
Speaker 1: your cryptographic keys that you own, those things actually help
Speaker 1: hold custody. But if you're talking about trading, right, or
Speaker 1: even payments, like a big big payments company right starts
Speaker 1: using Salana for payments, what they care about is that
Speaker 1: the service never gets interrupted, right, it stays fair and
Speaker 1: transparent and censorship resistance. It's far more important trading. But
Speaker 1: also in any financial use case, interruptions cost money. Right,
Speaker 1: So maximizing that minimum set is a quantifiable measurement of decentralization.
Speaker 1: You can start slicing it by data centers, by geographic locations,
Speaker 1: worldwide distribution routers, b GP routing routes, right like everywhere
Speaker 1: you look at it. How do we make sure that
Speaker 1: that problem is as hard for an attacker to pull
Speaker 1: off as possible? And in that sense, it's going back
Speaker 1: to this like nuclear strike analogy Byzantine fault tolerant nuclear
Speaker 1: strike detector. How do we make sure that it's as
Speaker 1: hard as possible for an attacker to disrupt service, so
Speaker 1: that that form of decentralization, I think is is like measurable,
Speaker 1: and if we succeed there, then we can deliver value
Speaker 1: to in our humans. That that's the real form of decentralization.
Speaker 1: How many humans actually care about this thing being alive?
Speaker 1: I just have one more question for you, uh and
Speaker 1: totally um. You know one thing that we haven't mentioned.
Speaker 1: Sam Bankman Freed is a was an early investor, right
Speaker 1: and we've had him on the podcast twice in one
Speaker 1: it's like the year of SBF. Like f t X
Speaker 1: is exchange has done incredibly well. You know, Alameda has
Speaker 1: trading hedge fund. I think they've done phenomenally well. Can
Speaker 1: you talk a little bit about his role and his
Speaker 1: contribution to Salona and how helpful that has been This
Speaker 1: sort of like the dovetailing with f t X, I
Speaker 1: think everything that gets you know, every new launch on
Speaker 1: Salana seems to get traded there very quickly. The is
Speaker 1: a a token called Mango, they're just launched, it's already
Speaker 1: trading there. How talk about the sort of the synergies
Speaker 1: and the significance of that. Yeah, So um, FTX was in.
Speaker 1: Our connection with Sam really started about a year ago,
Speaker 1: not not like super early in the life of Salona
Speaker 1: simply because we know, you know, we got connected to
Speaker 1: them even before that, but they were looking for something
Speaker 1: that worked. They don't really care about our theoretical claims,
Speaker 1: like when is the Singing to be live? Was like
Speaker 1: the first question out of out of Sam's mob Um.
Speaker 1: And after we launch, we had this little game called
Speaker 1: break You you know you've connected the network, it sets
Speaker 1: up and you pay a little bit of fees, like
Speaker 1: a few sounds, and then you can smash to your
Speaker 1: keyboard and you see transactions fighter off and get confirmed
Speaker 1: on your screen. It's incredibly dumb, but it really like
Speaker 1: show to their engineers that like, Okay, this thing is
Speaker 1: really live. These are real smart contracts. You can go
Speaker 1: and build whatever you want on it, and it's fast
Speaker 1: and cheap. And that's why kicked off there and kind
Speaker 1: of internal team to go incubate Serum built a central
Speaker 1: limit order book, which is something that they really wanted
Speaker 1: to do for years, Like really as soon as they
Speaker 1: started trading on crypto and building ft X, there was
Speaker 1: this like how do we do this in a decentralized way, Well,
Speaker 1: we don't want to do something cheesy like an Ethereum
Speaker 1: layer two that like doesn't really like do do like
Speaker 1: a full censorship resistant chain. So that was really symbiotic
Speaker 1: really from day one, from that moment because the engineers
Speaker 1: saw how cool what we built and that it actually worked.
Speaker 1: And at that time people remember like about you know,
Speaker 1: a year and a half ago, f t X was
Speaker 1: not like the juggernaut at this today. Right like the
Speaker 1: it was a much smaller exchange. There were an up
Speaker 1: and coming exchange. Everyone loves SAM, but it was much
Speaker 1: much smaller and I you know, we started both kind
Speaker 1: of taking off. Right around when Serium launched UM, a
Speaker 1: lot of developers started looking into Salana. The tools were
Speaker 1: really rough at that moment, you know, that time and
Speaker 1: the work that the Siriam team put in and just
Speaker 1: building things and showing okay, this is how things work,
Speaker 1: this is this is how the libraries work, and how
Speaker 1: you get started. That had tremendous effect on onboarding new developers.
Speaker 1: Just simply having another another experts start generating you know, code,
Speaker 1: These are examples, this is how you interact with Sirium
Speaker 1: and of course you know through that participation, UM you know,
Speaker 1: Jump and Pith and all those guys. Really I think
Speaker 1: their eyes open to that. I think there is it's
Speaker 1: possible to build on next generation of finance and a
Speaker 1: essentialized way. So you know, as much as you see
Speaker 1: Sam on Twitter, the folks at that fifth and Jump
Speaker 1: have been doing as much of the work behind the scenes,
Speaker 1: just not as loudly. Uh well, an a totally and
Speaker 1: kind of. It was a fantastic discussion. Really appreciate both
Speaker 1: of you joining us and thanks for coming on odd lot. Yeah, thanks,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you so much. Cheers. I thought that
Speaker 1: that was really interesting. You know what, actually, I think
Speaker 1: what really struck me is I mean there was a
Speaker 1: lot there's a lot there on Untillys Point, you know.
Speaker 1: He he said, well, it's like anyone can go set
Speaker 1: up a Salona note at their local data center. And
Speaker 1: at first when he said that, I was like, well,
Speaker 1: that's some sort of like weird joke because I'm never
Speaker 1: going to do that, But actually, I guess the idea
Speaker 1: it does kind of make sense. It's clearly like not
Speaker 1: a network that people can look run like as a
Speaker 1: hobby or like on their laptop. But as his point,
Speaker 1: it's like, well if anyone can do it equally, and
Speaker 1: we know that this is a problem in finance current
Speaker 1: which is this sort of like perceived inequality of who
Speaker 1: has the faster hardware or who has an antenna tower
Speaker 1: somewhere in New Jersey closer to the NYC Data Center
Speaker 1: or whatever. If anyone could do equally, it may not
Speaker 1: be available to everyone, but that does seem like an
Speaker 1: interesting potential solution or interesting potential reimagining of how finance
Speaker 1: could be made more fair. Well, on a related note,
Speaker 1: I thought his point about, you know, it's not really
Speaker 1: about the technological innovation but more about getting people acquainted
Speaker 1: with cryptography and getting people to understand that interesting too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was very interesting, although I gotta say, like without
Speaker 1: some sort of improvement in the interface, um, I just
Speaker 1: I find it hard to imagine that like millions of
Speaker 1: people are going to be doing deep but um but
Speaker 1: you know that could come in time. But and of course,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, if you have the networks like Jump,
Speaker 1: in Vertue and a bunch of others, then you know
Speaker 1: they're interacting with the protocol at the sort of like
Speaker 1: the API level, as opposed to like the you know,
Speaker 1: the unicorns on the Unicorn Graphics on unit swap. Um.
Speaker 1: You know what it's interesting is like, you know, thinking
Speaker 1: of hearing from hearing about this from jump perspective. I
Speaker 1: thought it was super interesting too, because it's like there's like,
Speaker 1: you know, there's serious muscle in this space. Though, like
Speaker 1: anyone who thinks this going away or a fad or whatever,
Speaker 1: I think at this point is like missing missing a
Speaker 1: pretty big story. Yeah. I mean, it seems like so
Speaker 1: many um well, so much money and so many people
Speaker 1: are tied up in the industry now that it would
Speaker 1: be very, very difficult for it to go away. I
Speaker 1: agree with that. Yeah, No, I think that, you know,
Speaker 1: and again I I think like this idea, like for years,
Speaker 1: this idea I always sort of just took it for granted,
Speaker 1: like the idea of blockchains have to be bad, blockchains
Speaker 1: have to be expensive, they have to be slow, And
Speaker 1: it's interesting that in that I'm gonna tell you just like, no,
Speaker 1: they don't. There's a different way to do it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm just thinking, you know that notion that like it's
Speaker 1: not so much about innovation in the computer science anymore,
Speaker 1: but on the network and hardware side. I mean I'm
Speaker 1: kind of well, look, I'm not an engineer, so what
Speaker 1: do I know, But like I know that technology changes
Speaker 1: sort of all the time, and so I do wonder
Speaker 1: if something could come. I mean this, this to me
Speaker 1: is like a tension in the crypto space because you're
Speaker 1: trying to build a network and you want the network
Speaker 1: to be as ubiquitous as possible. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: people are trying to build better networks all the time
Speaker 1: and then make those bigger, and it just seems like
Speaker 1: it's I don't know, it just seems like you're sort
Speaker 1: of getting constant change at the moment, and I don't
Speaker 1: know when we're going to settle or coalesce around one thing. No,
Speaker 1: I think this that was a great question, and I
Speaker 1: do think that, like it is a question for some
Speaker 1: of these like so called like layer one, like smart
Speaker 1: country acting contract platforms, like the barriers to entry in them,
Speaker 1: because like you know, and I'm sure like if we
Speaker 1: talk to an Ethereum person, they would say, like, oh,
Speaker 1: Ethereum has like ten x as much you know, fift
Speaker 1: x as much money involved, and you know, a thousand
Speaker 1: more um you know, a thousand x war developers, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But it's not obvious to me, like the degree of mode.
Speaker 1: I guess motives, motives the word I'm looking for, Like,
Speaker 1: how do we know that a sustainable mode exists in
Speaker 1: this space? And it's not obvious to me that like
Speaker 1: we know where that is or that that's been established
Speaker 1: by anyone yet. Yeah, totally I would agree with that. Um, okay,
Speaker 1: shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This
Speaker 1: has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy
Speaker 1: Alloway and I'm Joe Wisn'tal. You can follow me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at the Stalwork and follow our guests on Twitter
Speaker 1: and a totally yaka Vanka. He is the CEO of
Speaker 1: Salana Labs. He is at a E. Jakovenko and follow
Speaker 1: kind of Korea. He's a head of New Initiatives and
Speaker 1: Crypto at Jump Trading. He is at Korea kind of
Speaker 1: and be sure to follow our producer Laura Carlson. She's
Speaker 1: at Laura M. Carlson. Followed the Bloomberg Head of podcast
Speaker 1: Francesca Levi at Francesca Today and check out all of
Speaker 1: our podcast at Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening.