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Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Solana Founder: Crypto Is About to Change Finance Like the Internet Changed Everything Else w/ Anatoly Yakovenko, Dave Blundin, Salim Ismail & Alexander Wissner-Gross | EP #204
01:46:50
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- [00:01]
Anatoly Yakovenko
The fact that we now have stablecoin legislation and that people are projecting like 1 trillion to 10 trillion worth of digital dollars being minted over the next five years is going to massively accelerate things.
- [00:13]
Peter
Why does your company exist?
- [00:15]
Alex Wiesner
And second, why we need it.
- [00:17]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Solana is there to really enable that 1 billion people to go fully interconnected. Bitcoin is store of value. Ethereum is settlement. Solana's execution. I just simply wasn't interested in settlement or store value because they're not the kind of engineering problem that I'm interested in solving.
- [00:34]
Peter
So is that the future? A single machine layer for all markets everywhere.
- [00:40]
Anatoly Yakovenko
There's no computer science academic reason why it can't exist. It's purely an engineering problem and we're on our way to solve it like as fast as we can.
- [00:49]
Peter
Philly, how long before this science fiction future could come into existence?
- [00:52]
Anatoly Yakovenko
My gut is that.
- [00:57]
Peter
Now that's a moonshot.
- [00:58]
Alex Wiesner
Ladies and gentlemen.
- [01:02]
Peter
Everybody, welcome to Moonshot. Here with my moonshot mate, Dave Blunden. Hey, Dave.
- [01:06]
Alex Wiesner
Hey.
- [01:07]
Peter
Alex Wiesner. Gross.
- [01:09]
Salim Ismael
Hey, Peter.
- [01:10]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Hey.
- [01:10]
Peter
And Salim Ismael. And we have a special guest today. We're going to be diving into Solana. Anatoly Yakovenko is here. Software engineer, entrepreneur, co founder and CEO of Solana Labs and which today is the sixth largest coin now worth over $100 billion. Congratulations for that. 100 billion here, 100 billion there. On your way to a trillion. A bachelor's in computer science from University of Illinois. Urbane began your career at Qualcomm, an amazing company. I had a chance to watch their domination and Solana has emerged as the leader in decentralized finance and blockchain generating. What is that? 2.2 billion in annual revenues between 2024 and 25. That's extraordinary.
- [02:04]
Alex Wiesner
It's the cool one around MIT. I can tell you that firsthand too. I'll give you some quotes later. But yes, you are known and you are a cool.
- [02:13]
Anatoly Yakovenko
That's awesome.
- [02:16]
Peter
Guys, today I really want to hit on a few things. Which is the crypto central sort of Solana 101. What makes it different from Bitcoin and Ethereum? When I dive into Solana as a use of payments, sort of the everything coin and then really the convergence of crypto and AI which is going to cause this explosion in the global economy. Let me begin with a question that is on my mind Tolle, which is, you know, given sort of our incredible rush towards AGI, every dollar in the ecosystem is being sucked into this black hole. Computronium we're building across the planet. So we've got AI, we've got agents, we have Solana, we have stablecoins. What's the future of money going to look like? I mean, do you think it's going to be recognizable in the next 10 years?
- [03:08]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think the two things that I see converging is that the cost for intelligence is dropping and markets require intelligence. And because it's now cheaper to have intelligence to analyze all the signal in the world, you can now have a lot more markets. And public permissionless blockchains like Solana allow you to create markets permissionlessly for whatever random thing is. And you kind of saw this with prediction markets and poly market and kalshit kind of taking off. But the weird kind of cool experiments like Futarky where you have decision markets for every decision that a fund or a company can take, those can now exist. And as intell intelligence gets cheaper, you have more markets that are viable and you kind of see this exponential explosion of everything being decided through market forces. Which I think is. It's like the quote I made before the podcast is like the ants are not aware of the intelligence of the anthill. I can't fit all these markets in my head or like the outcome of this. But my gut is that this is probably the most optimal direction for society to move forward and make decisions. The more market based it is and the more intelligence you have to make those decisions correctly. And the forcing function of losing money is a good way to course correct when you have bad intelligence. So hopefully it's a good thing. But beyond my. I can't fit it all in my head. It's beyond my comprehension.
- [04:44]
Peter
The speed of change is awesome right now, right? I mean, I think and Alex, we talk about this like economy 3.0 in the future.
- [04:54]
Dave Blunden
Before we started recording, Tolle and I were, I would say, sort of lamenting the sad case of Truth Terminal, the autonomous AI agent that's being forced to mint its own meme coins just in order to survive in this like really harsh world for AI agents right now. I mean Toli, I'd be curious. So in principle, new layer ones, including Solana offer the premise for AI agents just to survive humans, for the most part, we're banked. We have the ability to engage in a human economy. If you're a baby AI agent just trying to find its way in this world and you can't open a bank account, you can't interact as a first class citizen, what do you do? What's Tolle's Handbook. What's your, what's your guide to.
- [05:42]
Peter
Joke?
- [05:44]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Can you tell a good joke? Then you can survive? I think that is the, the final listening test for true AGI is can you entertain a person or not even like a complex person, can you keep a toddler entertained? The how do you, how do you.
- [05:59]
Dave Blunden
Economically survive if you're a baby AGI and you want to be autonomous?
- [06:05]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think, yeah, Meme Coins is like a weird Keynesian beauty contest for attention. Could work then if can you keep people paying attention to you by being entertaining, then you can probably pay for the inference to do that.
- [06:21]
Dave Blunden
That's the main business model that I see right now for these poor baby AGIs. So it's maybe as an assignment to you, the creator of Solana. We need a better business model for these baby AGIs to survive other than minting Meme Coins.
- [06:37]
Peter
Alex, can you imagine an AGI coming to you and say, listen, would you please adopt me? I need a human shield. I need a human to sort of fend for me in the banking system.
- [06:46]
Alex Wiesner
With a credit card.
- [06:48]
Dave Blunden
I think in some sense, Peter, that's the corporation model that we have right now with AIs using corporations as embodiments for themselves, as economic actors.
- [06:57]
Dan M. Andis
Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI and quantum computing to transport energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these metatrends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short 2 minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends ten years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmandis.com metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode.
- [07:51]
Alex Wiesner
Why don't we kick ourselves off with a little bit of the Solana vision here because our, our buddy Mike Saylor is, you know, he's the bitcoin promoter of all promoters. But the original vision of bitcoin was as a transactional tool. Now it's become a store of wealth, a huge store of wealth. But it's way too slow to be the transactional engine of the future. And so Alex's baby, AI is no way he's going to sit there at the cash register for 20, 30, 40 years of AI time trying to buy something. But Ethereum came after that. But now, Solana, I heard on your last podcast, 1,000 times faster than the Ethereum chain. So it's keeping up with AI basically.
- [08:33]
Moen Advertisement Voice
Right?
- [08:34]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Yeah, that's the goal. And I think very simple way to think of it is like Bitcoin is store of value. Ethereum is settlement. Solana's execution. And I just simply wasn't interested in settlement or store value because they're not the kind of engineering problem that I'm interested in solving. And execution is a very. I don't think it's a computer science problem where we need theoretical solutions. It's just a fun engineering problem like how do you move bits as fast as possible around the world? And this is what I like to get my hands dirty. And I was just kind of gravitated towards that.
- [09:14]
Salim Ismael
I would love to hear a little bit of this history behind the proof of history concept that you came up with. Totally. Because I think that's such a fascinating. A unique approach to blockchains. Also, while we're doing this, I'm unboxing a Seeker phone live. Nice Seeker phone that I. That I got, that I've been wanting to unbox for a while, so. But curious to hear about that.
- [09:38]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Yeah, it's.
- [09:40]
Salim Ismael
It's.
- [09:41]
Anatoly Yakovenko
So first of all, I'm not a researcher, I'm an engineer. I spent most of my career at Qualcomm, got there right after college in 2003 and was just really interested in optimizing how fast you can move bits through memory. So as a performance nerd, I would have dreams where I have debugger windows between different co processors because I would stare at them for so many weeks, like just trying to debug problems and stuff. And I was definitely aware of Bitcoin when it came out and Ethereum as well. And kind of as an engineer, you often overlook the social aspect of these things. So you kind of look at it, oh, it's not going to scale, not going to work. But kind of miss the whole transformative change that these things could provide because they're so new and weird. In 2017, I was actually working at a side project. Always had a side project. This one was building deep learning boxes for transformers and mining crypto in the background because you could pay for the GPUs this way to offset the CapEx. And I was just doing this for fun with a friend of mine, another Qualcomm nerd that I do side projects with. And I had two coffees and a beer at Cafe Soleil in San Francisco. It's a combination that usually doesn't sit with anyone. Didn't sit with me. So it was up till 4 in the morning and we were discussing proof of work and this idea, could we build a single threaded mining system? That was just totally different concept. And I kind of had this eureka moment at 4am that there's a way to measure different physical constant and entropy, which is what proof of work does. For Sybil resistance, there's a way to actually measure passage of time in a way that's hard to fake. And this is a recursive cryptographic hash function like sha256. You run it over itself and you run this process and you sample it and you get a data structure that you can say then, well, it's incredibly hard to beat TSMC by more than a factor of two at how fast you can make a processor. So the amount of time that somebody took to generate this data structure is at least X. And obviously you can cheat and go a little faster, but you cannot go arbitrarily faster. You're basically limited by where technology is today. And that was this Eureka moment in my head, because even though I wasn't working at protocols at Qualcomm, just being at a cellular protocol company, you just know how the stuff works. And one of the first cellular protocols that anyone ever built was called time division Multiple access.
- [12:19]
Peter
Yes. Tdma, yes.
- [12:20]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Yeah. And this actually, like, if you remember your physics classes, two radio towers transmit over the same time at the same frequency. You get noise. So the first thing that they gave them is a clock to alternate, and that's how you get tdma. Well, in Bitcoin and proof of work, you have a similar problem. If you produce a block at the same time in two different parts of the world, you get a collision. So the network is in this noisy state and information is not passing through. So the difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin is almost very similar to how Aloha has a random adjustment to retransmit in a random base radio protocol is you're trying to prevent this collision from occupying the same channel. So you stretch it out to make sure the probability of a collision is very small. But because you're doing that, you're lowering the channel efficiency, you can't send as many bits through. So as soon as I had this like, oh, I have this clock that nobody needs to trust as a third party provider I can do the same trick and maximizing the number of bits that can shove through the network and my back of the envelope was like, oh, this is at least 10,000 times faster than Bitcoin. So that was this kind of thing that I built TDMA for blockchain. So what's funny is that, I don't know, I was bad at selling the idea to venture capital or maybe I was good enough. But this idea that the problem that you're solving is this channel efficiency problem, that was hard for me to actually communicate in those early days and I was more focused, oh, this is a whole new consensus algorithm, yada yada, really focusing on the implementation side more so than what it unlocks. And years later now I think we're in what, year seven for Solana and year 20 for crypto in general. We now see the next generation consensus algorithms don't actually have to depend on the clock like proof of history, but do solve this problem of channel efficiency. So we got so successful that I was able to hire kind of best in class leading edge consensus team out of ETH Zurich that are throwing away proof, history and all the code that controlled in the early days but clearly understand the problem that I solved and like this is what this is the problem you solve, this is why it's important and why that's a good thing. But you don't actually need all this complexity. So it's now I get to see my baby retired in a way.
- [14:48]
Alex Wiesner
Just so everybody knows ETH Zurich is it's the MIT of Europe. It has nothing to do with Ethereum. Yeah, Just total coincidence that it's called Eth, but nothing to do with the theory.
- [14:59]
Dave Blunden
That's such a beautiful founding story. Tolle in part I never made the connection between TDMA and just in general the Qualcomm view of wireless and aiming for high throughput. I'm curious if you were to mentally run the clock forward. So although source code for earlier versions from Solana Lab still preserved for posterity on GitHub. I see. But if you fast forward, what does the perfect layer one look like to you? Where do you see all of this going? If you could fast forward 10 years, 15 years.
- [15:34]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Yeah. I think what is it solving? Right. So I think if you're solving execution, what you're trying to do is have as many markets around the world synchronized as much as possible. And there's several challenges there. And one is you look at like something like NASDAQ or nyse. It's a centralized piece of memory. Like literally it exists in a single physical location. And that seems like the fastest way to build something. You can build sub microsecond matching engine and run really, really fast markets there. But the problem that it has is that if you have an event in Singapore where a container ship full of iPhones sinks outside your window, that information still has to go speedolite through fiber from Singapore to New York before it's it, it's in the market. Yeah. So perfect layer one is something that can do both. And the way that we envision it at Solana is you actually have concurrent block producers that are making blocks at the same time. One in Singapore, one in New York. So your latency to the block producer is as short as possible and they're located to where block all the signal is. Like in the most important markets you have concurrently ingesting transactions and your latency to stick this data into the chain so markets can now take action on it is as low as possible. So this is kind of the communication physics problem. And this is again the analogy that's kind of dumb, but works is you're going from TDMA to cdma. We have concurrent channels you can simultaneously use at the same time and you can shove all this information into this single giant state machine that is churning through it as fast as we can synchronize around the world.
- [17:18]
Peter
So is that the future? A single machine layer for all markets everywhere? Yes, that everything's living on top of.
- [17:28]
Anatoly Yakovenko
If you imagine science fiction finance 20, 50 years from now, that's what it looks like. And this is where there's no computer science academic reason why it can't exist. It's purely an engineering problem and we're on our way to solve it like as fast as we can.
- [17:44]
Dave Blunden
Tolly, if you could walk us through concretely, like what is it in your mind? What does that future look like? Does it look like every. Every object everywhere? Where we talk on the pod all the time about tiling the earth with data centers and with.
- [17:57]
Alex Wiesner
No, you talk about it.
- [17:58]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Okay, we just agree.
- [18:01]
Alex Wiesner
We agree, we agree.
- [18:02]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Okay, fine.
- [18:04]
Dave Blunden
First person singular. I talk all the time about tiling the earth with compute. But in your mind, does this vision concretely involve basically embedding SHA or hash function proof of history generation in every object everywhere?
- [18:22]
Anatoly Yakovenko
No, you don't need any of that, but just kind of the next generation byzantine Fault tolerant consensus like Alpenglow. There's a bunch of other options but you can just have concurrent nodes that are ingesting signal anywhere in the world where there's valuable signal. And what's kind of interesting for a proof of stake network, people will move stake to those places so they can run those block producers more often and therefore be the center that ingests that signal into the chain. And that's the most profitable part you can do. Because the way that these networks, proof of stake networks make money is you have markets on chain. There is value at risk in those markets. And the faster you get data to adjust those markets the the faster you can make money. Right. Like your cost of opportunity to being late, to being second to take that trade is effectively the entire profit of that trade. So you're now incentivized to go and start co locating next to the signal. Whether That's Singapore, London, New York, LA or whatever. Or in the future, who knows where you can move the block production next to where that signal is produced that impacts markets. You ingest the data as fast as you can into the single global data structure. And it's actually not that big because markets themselves and trades and all this other stuff, they're not 8,5 4K video streamed in real time driving in China, to a person in LA driving. This is what Qualcomm built. Mind blowingly complex, low latency, high throughput stuff. Markets and trades and all these other things are actually relatively small amount of memory and small amount of messages in comparison. So the NFL is building all the infra for us.
- [20:15]
Peter
How long before this science fiction future could come into existence? And is there a tipping point at which point when enough people are on that player, on that platform, on that.
- [20:26]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Layer.
- [20:29]
Peter
It doesn't make sense for NASDAQ not to be there. It doesn't make sense for everything else not to be there.
- [20:34]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Yeah, I think you'll still have very localized markets because there is advantages to being co located and having that light cone around microstructure and the queues.
- [20:44]
Peter
There are people talking about light cones. That's great.
- [20:47]
Anatoly Yakovenko
In that little server room in Nasdaq there's actually a lot of value into having that part run. But to build a single global kind of layer for all these stuff to synchronize, I think that that's kind of the challenge that we want to take on how fast is going to happen. I think the fact that we now have stablecoin legislation and that people are projecting like 1 trillion to 10 trillion worth of digital dollars being minted over the next five years is going to massively accelerate things because those dollars are going to get minted for all sorts of trade purposes and settlement between, you know, like inner country and basically globally. And once those dollars are there, it's just a very simple interface to interact with them. Even in Germany. Yeah. The price to move dollars from Ethereum to Solana is a million times cheaper than to move it between any two banks.
- [21:45]
Peter
We had Jeremy Allaire on the pod two weeks ago. So, discussing this, Salim, what are you thinking right now?
- [21:53]
Salim Ismael
It feels to me like one of the most incredible applications here would be the whole Defi world. And can you speak to what you guys are doing there?
- [22:02]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Yeah. So I think of what our smart contract platforms do is they implement some kind of escrow mechanism is that you can escrow money and then conditionally release it based on some action in the future. And that's could be altering complete computation or whatever. And defi is basically the use case for this is being able to conditionally place money at risk based on Oracle or market or whatever, some future signal. And I think it effectively applies to almost everything that businesses do. Right. Like you have to borrow money from somebody that requires escrow and requires risk calculations that are running all the time and things like that. So the challenge here is that in the US we have a really, really amazing financial system. It was mostly built kind of after the railroad boom and the scams there and before World War II and kind of a little bit after World War II as that was exported to the western world. It was all built before the Internet. And it functions amazingly because through a lot of trial and error, regulators actually constructed processes and systems that are very robust, but they're all human based. And this human action is what forces two day settlement is like. It's very hard to cut that down to one day or four hours or 10 milliseconds because people are in the loop. Blockchain was built. Even bitcoin with its 10 minute blocks was built well after the Internet. And it can rely on cryptography and the fact that I don't even know if NATO can actually reliably partition the Internet anymore. We live in a super connected, connected world and we have cryptography that can mathematically guarantee correctness of certain actions.
- [23:51]
Alex Wiesner
Just to reinforce your point you just made, I was at a public company board meeting all morning and we were talking about something we might be interested in acquiring and one of the board members said, well, maybe they'll just go public. And the Other board member said there hasn't been an IPO below a $3 billion valuation in like decades. You can't even afford the legal. The friction is so high. Like wow, how's that going to work in the world of AI? Like the friction is way too high for that system. Like you said, built after the railroad.
- [24:18]
Peter
Texas baby, before World War II. The Texas exchanges are coming.
- [24:22]
Alex Wiesner
Yeah.
- [24:22]
Anatoly Yakovenko
But there's, there's 50,000 meme coins launched a day and there hasn't been a single IPO. And like you know, the number of IPOs I think have shrunk to the slowest level since the 70s or something like that.
- [24:35]
Alex Wiesner
Yeah, yeah.
- [24:36]
Dave Blunden
I'd like to pull on that point if I might. Totally. I mean, so I think Stablecoin. Amazing, right? So the Collison brothers call it room temperature superconductors for finance in principle driving international money transfer efficiency to infinity. But what in your mind is sort of the killer app for layers two and three that expands the wealth of humanity versus just driving efficiencies in terms of money transfer. It's like where's the daos For a while we're going to create an entirely new class of economic actors, mixed sort of success. What's the big transformative outcome that we get that radically expands human wealth?
- [25:19]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think the, what you should start seeing is the cost of finance to basically drop to its the actual value it's providing. So the, the challenge here is like you like you look at like the figment IPO I think what they lost like $3 billion right in that process in a single transaction. That's 10% of the market cap of the company. Which is kind of crazy where if, if you have 10, 1 to 10 trillion stablecoins you have incredibly deep on chain markets. They could literally just use a smart contract to direct list. And if they use like a third party to go actually create that market, that party has to actually provide the value that comparable to what they're getting for it. They could maybe be the person that they use an analyst or whatever to actually go dive deep into the company and create that nice set of information that everyone else consumes. So they can participate with safety or whatever in that market. But none of the listing or access to capital. All of this stuff is fully on chain. There's zero cost to actually get access to it. Like all you're trying to do then is get above the noise floor in terms of signal. Yeah, you should allocate capital here because of XYZ and providing that value I think is Important and then how much you charge for it should be at the most competitive price ever. I think this is where we see, I think finance right now is taking out a huge chunk of the GDP and it's a tax, it's not actually generating as much value.
- [26:56]
Peter
Sand in the gears, sand in the gears.
- [26:58]
Salim Ismael
The statistic I've seen is over the last decade the corporate American profits sent 40% of corporate American profits went to the financial services sector. It's unbelievable. Sucking sound there, but pulling the thread.
- [27:15]
Dave Blunden
On that if I may. If the desired end state in your mind is basically driving profits in financial services to zero A, is there anything beyond that? Or if blockchain technologies in general, not just Solana's layer one specifically, are able to suck all the profit out of financial services, do you declare victory? Is that sort of the end and you move on to something new? Or is there something even larger than just making financial services profitless?
- [27:45]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think the end result of that is you basically have talent anywhere in the world so that can acquire capital from anywhere in the world. And that unlocks like human potential. Right? Like I have a really great idea. I'm an engineer in Ukraine or whatever. I can now get funding from people in China, us, Australia and I'm not relying on the kind of the trust model that a safe is based on nyc, that the fact that YC did due diligence on this particular person that then you can invest in them and this kind of flimsy contract that which is awesome. I think the fact that that works and reliably produces great results is testament to how important finance is and to innovation. So we need to eliminate all those barriers so you can actually have as many founders in the world starting companies and getting to that profitable state and creating value.
- [28:45]
Peter
This is the velocity of money going through the roof. It's accessibility and velocity finding the lowest level and just becoming a fuel for acceleration of the economy.
- [29:00]
Alex Wiesner
Can you give us your vision on the regulatory? Like if you look at Mercur as an example, here's a company two years old getting close to a billion dollars of revenue, unleashed a whole new class of employee in the AI world, but still paying them through traditional banking means. And obviously that needs to move on to Solana and be frictionless. But you've had an incredible journey through different regulatory regimes in just your seven year history. It's gotta be the most crazy rollercoaster and that's just in the U.S. look at the, you know, every jurisdiction in the world. So how's that gonna unfold as this over the top economy rolls out.
- [29:39]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I mean, Paul Atkins and Hester peers have been awesome and David Sachs has been awesome. And you can kind of think of that the whole securities law was created in the United States. So when your neighbor says I have this railroad certificate, give me some money for it and you get it, that one is, it's a real certificate, that railroad company exists and you have all the information to actually make that decision. So a lot of stuff can go wrong there. Right. Even if your neighbor is not lying to you, they could literally have a fake piece of paper or the company doesn't exist, or the company lied about everything that it's doing and there is no actual railroad. So those scams actually happened and fueled a lot of railroad construction and a lot of kind of bad financial decisions in the late 19th century and a.
- [30:28]
Peter
Lot of regulatory paperwork.
- [30:30]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Exactly. So what's cool now is that the difference that blockchain creates is kind of like the SSL little lock in E commerce in the 90s. I can transfer you a token, you can cryptographically verify that this token goes back to the issuer, but the issuer's public keys that signed off on their financial statements, all the stuff that they published, their Aswan, etc. And you know that you're actually receiving what they're claiming to be their equity. So when you're paying for it, all those guarantees that are solid regulation are now just solved with math and data. Just like the SSL lock tells you, when I put in my credit card number here, some intermediary sending this data is not going to steal my credit card. So a lot of stuff that humans do kind of goes away and the regulators have a hard time getting up to speed to that because there's a lot of stuff that simply works and there's no reason to change stuff that works when there's a lot of financial risk at stake. But the fact that the whole crypto industry, outside of support of any regulation, has been able to grow so dramatically to such a large market cap, like with Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana kind of leading it, is the fact that this stuff actually solves real world problems. The reason why somebody in Singapore can go start a protocol around trading coins and make money and ROIs, because people can trust that settlement and execution of those assets and they're willing to put money at risk. And because the software minimizes the risk, they can maximize the amount of money they actually put at risk into these systems. So it's happening anyways. It's happening with or without United States. I think with the regulation on board now and with the stablecoin act like coming out, I think you're just going to see this accelerating. And a lot of these services and kind of the intermediaries along the stack are all like one resistant to change. But also there's so many of them. Some of them are always looking for an opportunity to move up and down their vertical and kind of expand, maybe.
- [32:37]
Dave Blunden
Dwelling for a moment on the regulatory side. So in a paper contract you mentioned the Y combinator is safe earlier. You have a few parties and there's a whole societal apparatus built around paper contracts. You have court systems and rule of law and regulations. With Solana or other smart contract, you have to first order approximately none of that. I'm curious, where do you see this going? Do you think rule of law basically moves on chain in some sense with bodies to adjudicate disputes? Also on chain? How do disputes work in a future where hypothetically everything's on chain?
- [33:16]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think you're minimizing the number of intermediaries necessary to go do the right thing. So if somebody raises money and they lie about their purpose of raising those funds, that's fraud. And if they do it on a public blockchain or not, they're still liable. Doesn't matter whether they do it with a safe or not. What changes is that if you do it on chain is that I don't have to rely on some transfer agent or broker or whatever to facilitate moving these contracts around or to certify that this contract actually does belong to this YC company. You can actually do all that verification. So all kind of the boring stuff that people don't think about when they think about finance. All those little service layers that all take a few bips off the top, those go away and you're dealing directly with that company as the issuer. They could obviously use some third party service provider to implement the software to manage all of these things. And there's a bunch of them like squads on Solana is like a great example of formally verified multi sig contracts for managing governance and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, if it's a company that's claiming they're doing X and you buy this thing, the end result that enforces whether that company's lying or not is going to be the local jurisdiction where they're incorporated and they're still just as liable.
- [34:36]
Alex Wiesner
I totally, totally get it as a stepping stone toward where Alex is going. The actual just the Safe Note itself. So just take this hypothetical transaction. I want to invest in your company. You're in Singapore. Here's my money. It's on chain. What about the safe note itself? Do you just store that and hash it and then put the hash on chain? Or how do you deal with the actual terms of the safe note? Or do you not touch that?
- [35:01]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I mean, this is where you want to draw the abstraction. There are efforts to actually use the ledger as the cap table. So whatever's on the ledger, however, these safe nodes are allocated and distributed. Those public keys, private keys, that's the actual cap table. And then you can build all the cap table management software on top of that. Because that's a public data structure. You can manipulate and move those around and whatever rules you want around clawing back shares or only allowing transactions if the company agrees, you can encode all those in a smart contract reliably. And all that stuff is just code. It's a pain in the butt because it's a bunch of database kind of gnarly code, but it's all doable. But this would be the best way to do it because then you're getting rid of all these other layers, transfer agent brokers, et cetera. Like all those people are gone.
- [35:56]
Alex Wiesner
Not just that, but I don't want to beat this Y Combinator safe note to death. But if you look at the actual terms of the note, because we do these every day, they're not settled in the courts. They go straight to jams or to some third party, because the courts will be years before they decide what they want to do. And so it's already. It's not on chain, but it's certainly out of the courts and out of the federal and state system because it's just too slow.
- [36:21]
Anatoly Yakovenko
So I think bankruptcy could be one of those things that could be dramatically optimized where it took like two years to resolve the FTX bankruptcy, that was a massive bankruptcy in crypto. But because FTX is not. Is it a centralized exchange that is not, as a company, a defi company. Right. They just bought and sold tokens like any other centralized financial system when they collapsed. It's incredibly messy to go and bind all of that and like to go through the bankruptcy law and figure out who owns what when. In reality, if it was like a single ledger, even if it was a permissioned one, if they just ran a ledger, one is you would immediately see that the amount of money going out is more than the amount of money going in. That would be obvious immediately so you wouldn't even get to that stage where you have bankruptcy. But if you did, AAVE has liquidations, which is effectively the bankruptcy process. When you borrow and you. And you can't repay, those are programmatically encoded and run on every block, every 12 seconds in Ethereum. And Kamino does it every 400 milliseconds on Solana. So you would never even get to that stage where you have to spend two years to figure out who owns what. It would get liquidated and processed immediately. And I think that is a really critical part in finance. If you can invest knowing that in case of a bankruptcy, that there is this deterministic process that's run immediately, everyone gets the best. What you could get out of, out of that process within, like, a minute. It makes investing a lot more viable, especially across jurisdictions where you may not have the ability to go enforce it in the courts, like in Ukraine or whatever.
- [38:08]
Alex Wiesner
So I think those FDX investors were getting $0.50 on the dollar, $0.60 on the dollar, because of. I mean, it's just an insane amount of money lost in that friction just in that FTX case.
- [38:19]
Peter
All right, let's go to Salim. Salim, ask a really intelligent question that I'll understand.
- [38:24]
Salim Ismael
Okay, well, I want to make two points and I'll ask a question. One point I want to make is there's a really important distinction around digital and crypto, which is the value of crypto is not the fact that it's digital, it's the fact that it's programmable. And what Tolle talks about when you can do settlements, all programmatically, it manages it all, and it's all done. You don't have to think about it. And that takes it away from the human layer, and it takes it away from all sorts of other things. I think it's worth, for our readers, whatever, time to just take a step back and understand the Byzantine generals problem, because that's actually sitting at the core of a lot of this. So I'm happy to get into that question, but can I take a minute and describe that? Peter?
- [39:04]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Sure.
- [39:04]
Peter
Yeah, of course. Okay, so I remember you're the first person ever to tell me about it.
- [39:10]
Salim Ismael
This is such a fun foundational thing. So for the viewers that aren't familiar with bitcoin, blockchains, Solana, etc. The core innovation at the heart of blockchains is what's called the Byzantine generals problem. It's actually the story of Constantinople in the 15th century. There were eight generals circling the city. They're trying to Coordinate a siege and they're sending messages around that network, who's gonna go first, what time should we attack, how are we gonna get in, etc. And the problem they had was one out of the eight generals was a traitor and could send the wrong information, lose the element of surprise, blow the whole operation. And in computer science terms that's become known as that problem, because in computer science terms it's how do you send a trusted, secure, authenticated message over a network when you don't trust the network? Really hard problem. 40 years of computer science patients have been trying to solve that problem until the blockchain. And because of the consensus mechanism, the synchronization across multiple ledgers, you can now, if I send Tolle a message, he has a hundred percent guarantee that it came from me, wasn't double entered, can't be revoked, wasn't tampered along the way. That's a magical thing in the digital world. And this provides an authentication layer and a validity and a validation layer that allows all of this other stuff to take place, all of the layers that we talked about in the settlement stuff, etc, all there to validate, secure, ratify, etc. This stuff wasn't screwed along along the way. Now that all happens as part of the infrastructure and so and unbelievably powerful. The broader implications of decentralizing authentication are absolutely profound. And so for folks that aren't aware of this, go check out this particular problem and the nuances around it. I have a question around that specifically.
- [40:50]
Alex Wiesner
Celine, Add the double spending. Add the double spending problem in there too, because that was a perfect summary.
- [40:55]
Salim Ismael
You can't get into that either, which is can you stop somebody from double spending in two different places and then doubling up every time? The question I have for you, totally early on there was a lot of criticism of Solana for the decentralization. Over the last couple of years, you guys have solved a lot of that. And I think it'd be really great for you to explain what you guys have been doing and the architectural changes that have taken place, because now it's really solid and robust and on its way to Ethereum level decentralization.
- [41:23]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think there's a lot of, if you're on crypto, Twitter, people fight about what does decentralization actually means. And it just depending who you ask, it's whatever coin they own is decentralized and whatever coin they don't own is not. But the way that I think I've always approached it is I'm kind of a, you Know, started programming in the 90s. I'm a huge like open source Linux fan. So it was just awesome for me to be able to analyze the software that I'm running on my computer and know exactly what's happening, know why it's broken, why it's not. So we've always looked at permissionless being as the core part of decentralization, that it doesn't matter if the system is open source, but can I participate in every part of the stack without needing, like to be, without needing a third party to approve me? So can I run a validator, can I make blocks, can I transact on it, can I deploy code on it? But can I also own this, like have a copy of that state and be able to recover the entire network if that kind of failure exists? So Solana is always focused on that aspect of it that everybody, every part of the system that anyone can run, that it's permissionless to go and run it. And I think that is incredibly critical for this idea of a single layer for finance, because no matter what, you're still going to be dealing with people. Like if you have the science fiction futuristic layer finance for all of the world's execution, it's still going to run in France and England and Spain and none of those guys are ever going to really trust each other 100%. So the banks in France will need to be able to participate in every part of the stack, so will the banks in England, so will the banks in New York, even if they're allies or whatever. But they need, because they're people, they want to have control, that they will need to have access to every part of the system. And to make it really decentralized, you have to allow for adversarial nodes that are either misconfigured or actually deliberately adversarial. Like the Byzantine problem that you described, where they're maliciously citing the wrong message, they're trying to double spend, they're trying to create chaos in the network. The protocol has to be robust to handle that. And you can work it out on paper. You can say we have all these proofs and formal verification that it actually is robust with the Byzantine actors. And then in implementation things blow up. I think the Solana journey has been that of we're trying to solve all of these problems at the same time, both performance and decentralization and doing it as a startup, shipping as fast as we can. There's a lot of trial and error, or I would say growing pains or blood, sweat and tears that went into making Solana robust. It's incredible.
- [44:19]
Peter
Yeah, incredible.
- [44:20]
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- [45:25]
Peter
Here's the challenge. What percentage of the world, or let's look at the US do you believe understands crypto at all? If you had to guess a tenth of 1% of the population, I think.
- [45:41]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Anyone that finished calculus can understand it, can understand it.
- [45:48]
Peter
The difference we can understand and do understand. So one of the questions is the idea of Solana as the everything coin that I'm using. Let's define what that means for us. What would Solana as the everything coin mean? And then what would it take?
- [46:05]
Anatoly Yakovenko
The coin itself that runs the network, its only purpose is to prevent spam in the network. Fundamentally the only problem that it can solve is decentivized spam. So as part of solving this Byzantine generals problem, where an adversarial node can send infinite messages, there's a cost to send messages. That's the coin. But to use it for anything else, simply because it is tradable or can be easily sent, it exists as any other coin in the network and you can use. I mean we encourage people to go use dollars for commerce. If you're buying and selling stuff as a merchant, go use USDC or PayPal's USD or any other digital currency. So that to us it kind of doesn't matter what the coin. The underlying token that provides us crypto economic guarantees that adversaries pay some fixed cost for spam that doesn't really matter like what you use it. Beyond that, what's kind of been surprising to me and this has really been like when you start a startup, not only you have no idea what PMF is going to look like, but the fact that as soon as you have markets and you have money at escrow and at risk. The opportunity cost to be late to access those markets is so high that the fact that this underlying token is what prevents spam in the network, it can actually capture value that is substantial. The 2 billion whatever that you guys mentioned captured over the last years on Solana. That is because there's an opportunity cost to be late to send a trade and you're willing to pay the highest amount to be first in the queue to actually go execute the trade. And underneath the hood, the only thing that the token is doing is preventing spam. So the fact that it actually loops back and allows value capture for this thing, that was not planned and totally unexpected and almost like discovered through trial and error of us getting so much massive congestion on the network from NFT trading that that was the only way to solve the problem. And it was kind of the slight bulb moment. Oh, one, this is a classic database hotspot problem. Like, why didn't I think of this when we started? And two, it actually works for money.
- [48:23]
Peter
Was the craze around NFTs and meme coins a surprise to you?
- [48:29]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Yeah, I mean, when we started, our tagline was blockchain and NASDAQ speed. And the idea was we're an execution layer which can run arbitrary number of markets and kind of keep them all in a single state machine to minimize, to maximize capital efficiency, minimize the arbitrage opportunities. We thought that was really valuable. And the fact that meme coins took off was really surprising because those are assets with no value in all price. But it kind of, you know, like if you, if you make look back at like the history of the Internet, it makes sense. Like as soon as you have any kind of shared state that people have, even if like I played Ultima Online as a kid and people would start trading gold and actually build all these silly scripts that would auto mine wood and resources. And.
- [49:28]
Peter
That was Richard Garriott's company.
- [49:32]
Salim Ismael
Our buddy.
- [49:33]
Anatoly Yakovenko
And those things that Ultima Online wood has as much digital value as a meme coin as fartcoin. There's nothing backing it, but people still wanted to trade and consume it. One, just for fun. But two, because you now have this shared state with some economics, it just for whatever reason, as soon as you have any kind of shared state, people create markets and start trading random things.
- [49:58]
Peter
I just want to be able to trade to bring those gold and the wood between different video games. How old are your kids?
- [50:07]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Ten, six and two and a half.
- [50:09]
Peter
Okay, I got two, 14 year old boys and so does Sleema, a 14 year old boy. So it's interesting, right? The entire video game world is teaching an entire generation about the value of digital assets in an extraordinary fashion.
- [50:26]
Alex Wiesner
Anyway, yeah, isn't it funny that video games, that's where the GPU came from, that's now driving all of AI and it's where crypto came from to trade gold for wood or whatever than Minecraft.
- [50:38]
Dave Blunden
Maybe to take the counterpoint to that, before modern video games we had board games and we had credit systems and sort of fake money systems. So it's not in some sense that new. But I guess maybe a question for Tolle, pivoting off of a question, sort of an adjacent question to what Peter asked you earlier about how many people do understand crypto. By which I assume Peter's referring to cryptocurrency and sort of layer one, layer two, how many should. Because I think you were making the point earlier, almost like Lamport's soul. This should be sort of under the hood and it should just make everything frictionless.
- [51:20]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think of it as like the number of people you invite to your wedding is roughly 200. That's like your core group of people. At least one or two of them understand Linux, one or two of them will understand crypto and that's enough because you can maybe not your wedding, you can trust them and they'll explain it to you and they can tell you, okay, use it like this. This is how you minimize your risk and stuff like that. So I think the number of people that you actually need to understand crypto in the world is like 1 in 200, like 1 per social group. Your extended trust circle.
- [52:00]
Dave Blunden
I think that's striking. What I understand you to be saying is this is not something that retail investors should even be paying attention to, which is contrary to a lot of messaging out there that everyone should be paying attention to. So what I think I hear you saying is this is actually just infra under the hood to build the next generation of financial services.
- [52:22]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think it is very much a B2B system. I think there is parts where it touches the consumer. So I mean when we built our phone, we did a pre sale and we had credit card or stablecoin as an option. Half of the purchases came via stablecoin without any incentives because the friction for somebody in Southeast Asia to use a stablecoin is low, lower actually than to use their local credit card for like an international purchase. So consumers will figure it out and you have demand, you know, like if you have products that are available over stablecoins. People just use those rails on their own. But it is. It was actually the benefit, I think was to us as a merchant was really obvious. We save 2% on the gross sale amount, which is like three or four engineering salaries, like easily just on that one product. So you as a merchant, immediately, that you see, oh, if, if I have this rail, I don't have to pay the 2% fee. Yeah, I'm going to use it. Why wouldn't I? It's money in the bank instantly. So I think that huge improvement that will move dollars and will have people take action, I think is going to be more on the business end, but consumers will see the benefit of that ultimately.
- [53:40]
Salim Ismael
A lot of the work now is going to be for Web3 services. Well, Peter and I talk about going from deceptive to disruptive. When something becomes exponential, it always has a huge 10x change in usability. Right. Coinbase makes Bitcoin easy to buy. Solana is making it easy to transact. The usability layer has to be there. And many Web3 services, like I fund some liquidity pools. Dex, liquidity pools. Look, the complexity of going through those and funding a pool, et cetera, is so ridiculous. I have to have a hardcore crypto Sherpa standing next to me to make sure I don't screw it up. It's insane. Little by little, those will uptick in terms of usability and then it'll start becoming a very, very powerful tool for everybody.
- [54:26]
Peter
Alex, it looks like you're pregnant with a question.
- [54:29]
Dave Blunden
Yeah, no, I'm trying to wrap my mind around this. This is actually a question both for Toli and Salim. I want to put you guys both on the spot and ask, what do you think? So let's fast forward to the victory state. We've driven the future of financial services to these highly vaunted superconductors for finance. We've driven transaction costs down to near zero from credit card fees of 2 to 3%. We've achieved victory. What do you view as the singular killer app, the concrete state that we've unlocked in the future that creates radical wealth for all of humankind? What does that look like? Concretely?
- [55:10]
Anatoly Yakovenko
It's hard to point to saying that accurate price efficiency globally is that big of a deal to a person. Do you care if the Starbucks gets the best price for their coffee beans and the person making those gets the best price? Like, these are very abstract things that end to end, like, my parents are not going to understand to where it really matters to them. But the GDP will move faster, we will make fewer errors in finance, we will grow faster as a world, and fewer and fewer people will be in poverty. I think that is kind of very substantial. Like if 40%. Yeah.
- [55:54]
Peter
Concretely though, let me ask you a question right now. What differentiates America in so many ways? It's its access to capital. Entrepreneurs throughout the US can put forward an idea, reach individuals, get access to capital. And one of the questions I have is this going to, is this going to increase the speed of entrepreneurial creativity and financing and company financing, where it just supercharges the economy at a speed. Alex, we talk about sort of, if I had time, I would rewrite, I would rewrite economics for the future because economics are so fundamentally broken and so last century. So is this about reinventing an economics 2.0 or 3.0?
- [56:42]
Anatoly Yakovenko
So all the companies that are worth over a trillion or all the assets, they're all US Companies or Bitcoin and I think maybe the Saudi oil company, right?
- [56:55]
Peter
Yeah.
- [56:55]
Anatoly Yakovenko
So the only place for the other, like the other place for finance that can compete with the United States is the Internet. And it's happening on the Internet through crypto. So you're now seeing like the kind of finance and growth that happen in the United States being replicated on the Internet through crypto. Rails. And this is the only place that I think could compete with the United States. And actually, in my opinion, at a gut level, I think it is effectively helping United States export its influence because the Internet is truly an extension of all the values that we care about in the United States and we're so.
- [57:32]
Salim Ismael
Deeply plugged into it, I can give a kind of an anecdote, a real life anecdote that maybe highlights some of this. Peter. And maybe to answer your question, Alex, if you look at, say the NFT world, where they started doing art on the Internet, you create a collection of 10,000 things, 10,000 apes, and start selling those and mint those. You have a community building around those. All those, by the way, were default exos because they would have a big purpose and they would use crypto economics to incentivize the community to mint. The first people that got to mint got them for very cheap. And then if you minted later, you paid a little bit more. Etc, Etc. What then happened was you had a bunch of breakages in the system. There were some rug pulls where people collected a lot of money and the collection would basically die on the vine, etc. People are now doing turnarounds where they're buying old collections that are really good art and repurposing them, etc. There's a whole M and A thing going on in the NFT world. What's fascinating about this is that it's art in a different form because it's programmatic art. It's an experience of the art that's not normal that you would look at a painting on a wall. You're engaging with it in a digital mode. So with Bored Apes, for example, they gave the ability to take the. If you own a bored ape, you own the intellectual property of that character and you could license it out to people and to TV shows. And people started doing that. And that created one new wave of innovation. Then we had cyberkongs that created the coins within the thing. So if you own a cyberkong nft, it issued bananas to you, which trade as a secondary utility token.
- [59:14]
Dave Blunden
Salim, I want to challenge you on this.
- [59:16]
Salim Ismael
Hold on, hold on. Let me.
- [59:17]
Anatoly Yakovenko
The broader point of doing all of this with lawyers, the broader point I'm.
- [59:21]
Dave Blunden
Making is not doing it at all.
- [59:24]
Salim Ismael
Let me make my bigger point. My bigger point is as you get through this, all of the stuff that's happening, there's a collective level of innovation at scale that's moving faster than almost the AI world. It moved faster than anything I've ever seen before. It is absolutely profound. And when the people did an initial set of rug clothes, now when people issue NFTs or issue tokens, you have to hold the token for six months before you can sell it and evens out the curves. There's all sorts of things happening at unbelievable speed. The ecosystem is learning very, very fast. And so there's something profound happening and incredibly creative. What's even more interesting is it's democratized. So anybody with a great idea can show up and do something and test it out and see where it goes. And so there's for. That adds to the collective of pool of ingenuity.
- [60:14]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Why, I think. Why is these examples important? I think is because when I send money into this contract, I have enough guarantees to know what happens if in a catastrophic event. So I can actually go participate in this, even if it's stupid, even if I'm getting bananas out of this.
- [60:33]
Peter
Like, how many bananas do you own? Celine.
- [60:35]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Right. The fact that I can transfer and transact and sell these bananas I now have my risk outline is very different than if I had to do this blindly over ebay to send somebody a cashier's check to buy their wood in Ultima online. That's a very different type of risk involved there. So the chain eliminated a whole bunch of risk that was previously impossible to eliminate. And because of this, yeah, a lot of this stuff is going to accelerate at the tail end. But the things that now have an option to go use lawyers and go through the FIGMA IPO process through an investment banking now have an alternative. So the price through the traditional processes is going to collapse down to what's available on chain. And right now you have this massive adverse selection problem where if I am figma, I don't need to go get on chain capital, I can go through the investment banking process. I've been building this company for 10 years. All my lawyers are telling me, minimize risk. You're just going to do an IPO traditional way. And you shouldn't think about any of these costs because that's the last thing that you should try to innovate on. And that's hard for a CEO to make that decision. But that's going to shift like I think, and that's going to shift massively and quickly as you get to this trillion dollar stablecoin number. And then the $10 trillion is going to be way past the shift. I think.
- [62:02]
Alex Wiesner
Now you're getting to the meat of where Throw some meat to Alex here, he'll eat it like a pit bull. Peter's question about, okay, I want to raise money for my company, 5 million bucks. Why is this so hard? But the assumption underneath that is that your company needs either some physical iron and something, but it doesn't anymore. What does it need? Well, all it needs is labor for the most part. Any of these virtual companies. Well, why am I raising $5 million? Why aren't I raising some virtual thing and paying those people? If those people end up being in Venezuela, Ethiopia and Ukraine, they don't want US Dollars anyway. And the value, if I put a value on their time, which I have to do legally in the US but I don't have to do across borders, they don't want to be valued at something that's taxed. So the economy of AI just solved every math problem known to man. What's that worth? It's worth a lot. Okay, well, I'm not going to pay for it valued by a 409A valuation from an accounting firm in the US and so that whole economy of trading AI generated things with other and even human labor is going to be completely outside the world of normal valuations and normal payroll taxes and normal, because you don't have to value it. In US dollars if you don't want to. And that's where the dam is going to break.
- [63:30]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think even if you value them in US dollars and actually think most markets will go through US dollars, the fact that you have two alternative paths. I can use a safe and go to a YC company and go through that process, or I can buy a token in an ico. And the difference with a token is I have immediate access to secondary markets. Both events are just as risky. You're taking massive risk. And basically, is this founder a jackass or not? It doesn't matter if it's a YC founder that's a jackass or an ICO founder that's a jackass. You're going to get screwed either way. But the guarantees you're getting out of the safe is competing with the fact that I have secondary markets and this reliable execution and transfer, which one are you going to take as an investor? You may not actually be able to get any money out in the catastrophic event out of the safe, or any value out of that event. Either way, the success upside is the same in both.
- [64:34]
Alex Wiesner
Yeah, I think most governments think that regardless of all the transactions you do on chain, sooner or later you're going to want to turn that into either real estate or labor in my country, and you're going to come back through my regulatory framework, through my Treasury Department, through my sec, to turn it into something that you can use to enjoy your life. And I think increasingly that is not true. It's irrelevant because what you really wanted is either compute or virtual entertainment or whatever, and you can buy it outside of that regulatory framework with your Solana. And so that part of the economy today is not a big deal. I think that dam's going to break very quickly. And then that part, it operates across borders frictionlessly, it operates in milliseconds, and it operates entirely in the virtual universe. And that economy will grow so much faster than the physical economies that it'll go from a rounding error to dominant in just a few years. That's my guess.
- [65:34]
Anatoly Yakovenko
If you're in the U.S. you pay dollars market to mark to market to U.S. dollars in taxes. So even if you make your profit in Seoul, you have to market to market and cover your dollar exposure. Otherwise you're running a debt to the to the place that can collect it with a carrier ship full of F35s or whatever.
- [65:57]
Dave Blunden
I think totally this speaks to my original question, which is government and governance mostly doesn't live on chain right now. So to the extent that Peter, Dave and and to some extent Saleem are aspirationally hoping that we're going to live in an utterly frictionless economy. It seems the elephant in the room is that all of this physical government apparatus and the court system and jams and methods for adjudication, these are all off chain. So I guess.
- [66:26]
Peter
Alex, let me take it there because this is the conversation we had with Jeremy Allaire from Circle in which I was asking him when do you think we're going to see the first fully on chain corporation where contracts, payments, treasury governance and even all of the agents employed by that company are on the blockchain.
- [66:44]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Right.
- [66:45]
Peter
And we have the explosion of a new corporate structure that's operating at light speed compared to everything else. Do you imagine we're going to have that? When could we have that?
- [66:56]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think you can go look at kind of the cool experiments in this would be Metadao. It's a futarchy decision market based daos where effectively every decision that this coin does or this group that holds the coin is using a futarchy mechanism. Where should we go invest in this or should we pay these engineers? Why? The way that these decisions market work is you're basically saying if the market decides yes, then I'm willing to buy your metadao tokens at price Y. So I'm willing to pay more for this, for Apple stock if they go build, you know, iPhone 20 or whatever or if does that make sense? This is like the, and I would say the, the closest thing you're going to get to full on chain governance and corporate control over funds and assets.
- [67:53]
Dave Blunden
Peter, I'd like to try to answer your question but then forward a sub question to Tully if I might. I think the answer to your question relies on a sub question which is when will we see, at least within the US the first state government approve a new type of corporation that is an on chain autonomous corporation. It would require an act of a state government at minimum.
- [68:16]
Peter
So by some question, Texas or Florida. Yeah, by some Wyoming.
- [68:24]
Dave Blunden
Go ahead, get Wyoming's, go for it.
- [68:28]
Salim Ismael
Wyoming's been very advanced in crypto adoption and acceptance.
- [68:32]
Anatoly Yakovenko
They actually issued a stablecoin where as you interpret the law, because they're sovereign, they're neither a person nor a corporation and they've issued a stablecoin under their own kind of regulatory scheme, which is interesting to think about.
- [68:49]
Alex Wiesner
But what about Puerto Rico? Puerto Rico is inside the realm of the F35 circling around yet completely independent from the federal government. That's potentially a birthplace for this whole Thing.
- [69:03]
Salim Ismael
Well, today you can already.
- [69:04]
Peter
Wait, wait, Alex, take this home.
- [69:07]
Dave Blunden
So the sub question then would be okay, so you have hypothetical preference for Wyoming, maybe Puerto Rico. When does this happen? When do we see the first in your prediction, Tolle? When do we see the first state level government in the United States? Enshrine in statute the ability for an autonomous corporation, which by the way could be an AI as a person as well. It doesn't necessarily have to be an on chain entity.
- [69:34]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I'm not 100% sure, but I thought there were DAO friendly bills already being passed in Wyoming specifically for creating these kind of corporate structures that assign control or parts of the control of the fiduciary duties to a dao.
- [69:52]
Salim Ismael
Yes, there are. We looked into this. Wyoming does allow that. The problem is you're still under the federal sec. But I'll give you this thing in Panama. There's a couple of other places where you can have foundations that create DAOs and those are fully decentralized autonomous organizations. And then everything can be run from the DAO and the DAO owns everything. So it's almost like a trust with digitized crypto enabled transactions going through it.
- [70:20]
Anatoly Yakovenko
You actually don't need these things. I think the key part that you need out of I think the federal and the government and laws is that if you participate in the smart contract, that your liabilities are not commingled with everyone else that participates. This is kind of like I think either needs to be passed through Congress, through the market structure bill or kind of figured out in the courts is that once that's true, the fact that like you can now participate in these DAOs and things like that, those, those effectively become code as law. Because if the government says that your liabilities are limited, you're not part of this cohort, that you're responsible for everyone's actions that participate in this, in this mechanism, then the only thing that you have is the code. Then you are solely relying on the code to enforce all the decisions of that thing. So if you go into it and you lose money, tough, you've actually taken on the risk and there's nobody for you to go after anymore. So it's more like I don't think we need laws to pass to allow it. What we need is laws or courts to figure out that you don't have liabilities if you participate in these systems. And that's about it. See, I exist just by existing.
- [71:39]
Dave Blunden
You've put your finger on, I think the core issue for the future of this entire space, which Is what does the future of law as code look like? And I think there are sort of maybe two directions, at least two directions I can imagine it going in. One is, I think what you're articulating, which is in the future state plus federal law plus a whole bunch of regulations get encoded in something that looks like future of layer one code. It's basically software. There is another future where future of law, laws and regulations remain pure natural language. But we have a whole constellation of AI agents that are interpreting them. Basically AI lawyers, AI regulators. Do you have a sense of which of those two futures, or maybe door number three, we're going to find ourselves in?
- [72:27]
Salim Ismael
I'll answer that question. We start with number two, which is you have AI agents dealing with natural language law, and then over time we have to develop completely new forms of mechanisms and governance structures to deal with it. Well, those will be on chain.
- [72:43]
Dave Blunden
What about you, Tully?
- [72:44]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think humans in the loop and kind of how our human egos are designed is that you will have, I think like the big short as this awesome scene where the higher up the chain of command you go, the dumber the person, the less they understand about what's happening.
- [73:06]
Salim Ismael
The same applies to podcast hosts, by the way.
- [73:08]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Yeah, I think because of just human nature of politics and leadership and all these things, you're going to see the most sophisticated understanding of how this stuff works at the lowest layer. And then the higher up it goes, to the court system, to politicians, to regulators, the more broad strokes they have kind of to control it. And my view is I don't think you're going to have AI agents in that spot because of human ego. I think humans really, really want big orgs under them.
- [73:45]
Alex Wiesner
I just have to jump on that. I just think it's the coolest thing in the world that you as an individual engineer, you know, come into the country 14 years ago, whatever, settle in, tamperin, and invent a hundred billion dollar thing out of thin air. Just create it out of thin air and then to figure out how it interacts with the government. A guy, David Sacks, who has nothing to do with the government, ends up in the role kind of overnight. And now you guys figure it out together. Show me any other country on the planet that could ever do that. But it's exactly what you said from the big Short. You get to any other jurisdiction and the, the moron factor, you know, in the way, makes it impossible to interact. It's just the coolest story, you know.
- [74:31]
Salim Ismael
Hold on, hold on. This isn't quite fair. If you take Switzerland, which has been crypto friendly for longer than almost anybody, they passed legislation quite a long time ago and a huge number of the crypto founders moved there because it was so friendly. Japan is friendly now. There's an increasing list of countries, Malta, Liechtenstein, etc, etc, so countries are jumping on board and a lot of the binance, etc. A lot of these were created in places where they were crypto friendly first and then they worried about the US later. The US has now jumped on the bandwagon in a big way, which is fantastic. But it's a little bit too little too late for some things. I think in other areas it's going to really take off.
- [75:13]
Peter
You know, when you started Solana, agentic AI was not even in the conversation, right. It was, you know, four or five years out.
- [75:24]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Right.
- [75:24]
Peter
Just transformers. And I can imagine that AI agents are going to be the single biggest transactors of Solana. Can you speak to that?
- [75:38]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Yeah, I think if we. The fact that you can synthesize a lot of signal around the world through AI, like the amount of cost per intelligence goes down, what that means is you have an army of analysts that can understand all of the signal and synthesize it into buy or sell. Right. Signal. You can now create a lot more markets. And I think this is where I think stuff like Futarchy can actually potentially become scalable to large organizations. Why like I think this is kind of sort of happening already is if you look at me or Vitalik like we're obviously not business people. Like I have. I'm not a fract business person that understands you play a business person on tv.
- [76:25]
Peter
Yeah, exactly.
- [76:27]
Alex Wiesner
You're like way too candid enough.
- [76:30]
Anatoly Yakovenko
He's a researcher, I'm an engineer. Like I understand how memory works and stuff like this, but just simply from this trustless coordination of. Of blockchain. The fact that you could own a part of Sol and you could actually run the systems permissionlessly and participate in it, that actually creates enough incentive alignment for everyone in the ecosystem to move it towards a common goal. Like even if each participant is rationally optimizing their own ENL under the hood, they're maximally trying to just profit and sometimes in a zero sum way over other participants. But because it's all cryptographically glued together into this one gen engine where if there's a bunch of markets, it all makes money, that forces everyone to move in the same direction. I think that is an example of this class of new organizations that are not quite corporations, not quite in a single person, small business, but an Internet scalable system that's glued together with cryptography, that can all move together for a common benefit. I think that's a very, very unique, cool thing. And as you have AI explode and the ability to get analyze a whole bunch of signal into an action becomes cheaper and cheaper, I think the number of markets that can support this decision making is going to blow up and hopefully they all run on Solana and that we make more money from making sure there's no spam, but that.
- [78:03]
Peter
Alex?
- [78:08]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Yeah.
- [78:08]
Peter
How many AI agents do you imagine we're going to be operating a decade from now?
- [78:13]
Dave Blunden
I don't think the question is going to be meaningful a decade from now because I think agents is a very 20, 25 era term. I think we'll look back 10 years from now and laugh at the premise of the question.
- [78:27]
Anatoly Yakovenko
You have like a continuous information funnel to GPUs that's just constantly looping. Is it?
- [78:33]
Dave Blunden
Yeah. It doesn't matter how many terawatts or petawatts of intelligence. What will we have a decade from now?
- [78:41]
Peter
And so we currently measure AI in terms of energy, right. We talk about gigawatt data centers and so forth.
- [78:48]
Dave Blunden
For the moment.
- [78:49]
Peter
For the moment, are we going to start a new layer of sort of measurement, which is a financial layer of measurement in terms of how much capital is going to be transacting on these systems? Because the speed. I mean the most valuable bits of information are bits of information that carry financial value with them.
- [79:14]
Dave Blunden
That's circular, though. That's circular to say what's most valuable is most financialized, ideally. And totally keep me honest on this. I would hope 10 years from now we're in a state where we've not just solved math, but we've solved economics. We have a rigorous science of what wealth is. We have the beginnings of it today, arguably. But that if you put 10 economists in a room and you ask them what is real wealth? You'll get maybe 20 different answers. I would hope we have actually like a decade from now a notion of what real wealth is. Not just monetized wealth, but actual wealth. And then we could actually trade real wealth. To my knowledge, we don't know what real wealth.
- [79:52]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Probably just energy. Just jewels.
- [79:55]
Dave Blunden
Maybe not.
- [79:57]
Alex Wiesner
I'll give you an alternative too, which is transistor flips or flop. Flops isn't right. But it's going to be some metric of compute that's more foundational than the dollar or any concept of currency. Right now we're all trained that wealth is dollars and the foundation metric is dollars. But that's going to break very quickly and it'll be something either power, electrical power, but I think more likely some metric of compute.
- [80:24]
Peter
Can we talk about.
- [80:25]
Salim Ismael
I'd like to challenge all of this we've had for the last few hundred years. The main motive dec discourse in the world has been business, commerce, money. Right. And we run the world on that and we floated off feudal systems and now the power is in the power of money, which is more liquid, free flowing, it funds good ideas, etc. Etc. But we're moving over the last few decades from money to information. A startup today is much more interested in collecting data about its users and then will monetize it later. Facebook maybe has done the best job of taking social data and monetizing and it's fungible. You can go back and forth over time though, the information becomes the harder bit and the monetary side becomes less relevant. And so I would think that over time you'll end up in a Star Trek world where you don't have any money, you don't have any commerce, you're just doing things and the cost of things becomes so meaningless, the idea of commerce doesn't matter. So that would be my challenge.
- [81:21]
Dave Blunden
I'll challenge the challenge and say this, this very much feels like a very October 2025 era discussion where we've seen large parts of the west deindustrialize for a couple of decades and we're just taking it as an axiomatic truth. Oh well, we're deindustrialized. So of course it's just about the bits, it's not about the atoms. But actually the atoms are incredibly important and I would argue if I had to choose my favorite denomination of real wealth, it's, it's going to be something embedded in the physical world. Like I've argued in the past something about future freedom of action. If we could quantify future freedom of action of humanity.
- [82:01]
Salim Ismael
Yeah.
- [82:02]
Dave Blunden
In qubits or even classical bits. Like that's the closest I can come up with for a real definition of wealth. But I'd be curious to Lee, like what's your best definition of wealth?
- [82:15]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Okay, I'll give like a hot take. I think it's like Shannon's law, how much information we can process. So like our channel capacity to process information is real wealth.
- [82:27]
Salim Ismael
It'll be a measure of information.
- [82:29]
Dave Blunden
Yeah, I agree. It'll be measured in units of information.
- [82:32]
Peter
Time out. I'm taking this in a different direction. So one of the Things I'm concerned about right now, given the speed at which we're getting wealth aggregation into the large hyperscalers and given the fact that we have not in the long term, but in the short term, I think a job dislocation is that there's a lot of people really concerned about civic unrest. Right about we had Balaji on the pod talking about I would not want to be a tech entrepreneur in the Bay Area in two or three years. You guys remember that in terms of, you know, I have a few of my friends who in the VC world getting death threats right now. It's crazy. I mean, really, really crazy. So my question is, how are. How can we potentially see Solana and the crypto world help ease this tension that we're going to have of this discontinuity? Because I think in the long run, Tolle we have, you know, all I speak about and write books about is this world of abundance where we're demonetizing and democratizing access to food, water, energy, healthcare, education. It's the interim state, right, the next two to three, eight years that I'm most concerned about. What are your thoughts there?
- [83:46]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I'm actually. I kind of have a very opposite view of biology here probably maybe because I don't know, my parents came to the United states from the USSR, literally with $50 per person, like in 92. So I think what we're seeing with AI is a smaller transformation in terms of labor than the steam engine. Like the amount of people that actually became unemployed because of the steam engine was dramatically more. And those were all fighting age dudes. I think the likely outcome is that we just get better at what we do and the jobs become less easier, less risky and you can scale up and the amount of wealth that you create for the world and the poverty decreases and people just simply work less. And the difference between the kind of work that my dad had to do as a civil engineer in the USSR versus here was like night and day in terms of risk. And that was just moving across the Atlantic Ocean into a more mature economy. So I think the world is only going to get wealthier and we're blessed to live in this age. So I'm very optimistic.
- [84:57]
Peter
It's the most exciting time to be alive. Yeah, for sure.
- [84:59]
Anatoly Yakovenko
OpenAI is not shrinking its headcount and this is the most advanced AI company. They're not hiring less people, they're hiring really smart people and giving them the best tools to accelerate that company. But that's only going to happen everywhere. I think you're going to end up with a lot of demand for people that understand how AI works, where it makes mistakes and can course correct it and keep it on track. I think that's probably going to be a super valuable skill. And if anything I think that comes from experience. My experience with AI tools is that I can keep half an open eye watching Claude stream its code and know that it's doing something right or wrong. Whether a junior engineer has to actually analyze every commit and stuff, I think you will see the exact same kind of systems that you did with just advent of databases and computers. Everyone that was an accountant didn't just become homeless. They just, they're super smart people with college education that have incredible access to networks that can go and retrain a lot easier than I think everyone else.
- [86:09]
Peter
What's your take on this?
- [86:10]
Salim Ismael
Well, I think if we have a kind of a breakdown in society like you're talking about, what you end up happening is because it's so easy to build a crypto system today, you could create a local community dao that circulates tokens just amongst itself and you can spend those two tokens on certain things and very quickly boot up a local economy. Note that most monetary transactions, 80% are local. You're buying supplies, you're getting your haircut, whatever, whatever. Not the amount of money but the number of transactions. And so crypto, because it's a strange.
- [86:47]
Peter
Example for you to use. Sorry, it's a strange example for you to use. Get in your head.
- [86:52]
Salim Ismael
It is a strange example for me to use but so this becomes really powerful to replace. And this is why I believe that we're moving to, we're going to move to very granular environments where people will create small communities that self support. This supports biology's network state idea. We just need to keep enough for the Internet to keep going and everything's fine. If that breaks down, then you have major issues. But I remember this wonderful story in the 70s where there was a huge central banking strike in Ireland and there were just no checks getting cleared, no checks were getting cleared. And for two years the Irish just kept going. They just kept passing checks around saying well, when the central bank comes back online, it'll settle on. And two years later the central bank went wow, nobody's even noticed, we're on strike, we might as well come back. And then they cleared all the checks and business went back to usual. Human beings are incredibly resilient at figuring things out. And I think when we get into major issues like that, we'll Figure it out, Dave.
- [87:56]
Alex Wiesner
I'm hugely biased because Tolle, to me, is the most perfect example of the person you want to be. Like, after he's done with this podcast, he's going to go debug some code. He's building it. And we're discussing what is this AI philosopher who's never done squat over here. Think of it. It's just your perspective, and especially when you come from a foreign country. I had the same conversation with Thomas Petterfi, who was born in Hungary in a basement as the Soviet tanks were coming in. And he can't connect with his own kids who grew up here. And they're like, oh, we're destroying the world. You know, dad, you're polluting by taking a dump. He's like, what are you talking about? We live in the best time in world history and in the most free and fair place in the world. And you're not taking advantage of it. But what Tolle is doing is actually building the future platform from all of society. And it's gonna create the abundance that Peter's talking about. And to me, your perspective is the key. Exactly the right one. And I'm not even vaguely connected to the alternate perspective. It makes no sense to me. But everything you just said perfectly resonates with me. It's exactly the right view. Anyway, that's my rant.
- [89:06]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I appreciate it. Yeah.
- [89:12]
Peter
I am curious about something. We've just seen Kazakhstan launch a stablecoin on Solana. And how do projects like that, does that get you excited? What projects are getting you excited right now about the use of the technology you created? Because there might. I mean, you must wake up in the morning and say, holy shit, that's amazing what someone just did with Solana.
- [89:34]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think crypto's going through technology phases similar to the Internet. You had the punks create the first version, then you had the hoodies kind of scale it up, and now the suits are moving in. So a lot of the stuff that's happening is driven by suits, which is great, but I'm less connected to that and more to, I think, the. The low level experiment. So I think, like folks, if they really, really want to kind of be a bit deep in crypto, go check out Futarchy and Decision markets on how to run a collective, like an online collective that makes real financial decisions, but fully market based. So in a way that minimizes risk for investors, participants, etc. I think those kind of things are like, what that I think are really, really cool. And to me, it's Also kind of a physics problem. Can we run a market for every. For the top 10 million important decisions that people make in the world every day?
- [90:32]
Salim Ismael
Just to drill into that.
- [90:33]
Anatoly Yakovenko
That would be cool, right?
- [90:35]
Salim Ismael
Yeah, just to drill into that for a second. What Tolle's talking about is Futarchy allows you to use prediction markets to do dao governance. Okay. And one of the big issues with DAOs was how do you manage governance? Because it's like you're in a town hall meeting with everybody shouting loudly.
- [90:49]
Anatoly Yakovenko
It's not quite.
- [90:50]
Salim Ismael
Combined with the worst dynamics of a shareholder meeting.
- [90:52]
Dave Blunden
It's not just daos, Salim.
- [90:55]
Salim Ismael
No, no.
- [90:56]
Anatoly Yakovenko
It's not quite a prediction market. It's literally like if Apple said that, you know, I propose Apple builds this VR device, and I'm willing to buy your Apple stock for a higher price than it's currently trading because I'm so bullish on this idea that the managers need to do so. I'm willing to increase your value if you disagree with me. So this, in fact, forces a financial stake for any decision to be made in this dao, which is different than, let's all vote with our shares and say, yeah, we approve this, or we don't approve it, because you literally have to put your money where your mouth is for any decision that this dao takes.
- [91:40]
Peter
Amazing.
- [91:41]
Anatoly Yakovenko
So it's really, really cool idea. And they've run a couple ICOs that have gotten, like, over $150 million in commits, which is pretty crazy. Wow.
- [91:58]
Peter
I asked you a question. Didn't hear the answer, though. But in terms of super exciting projects that you're looking forward to on Solana, anything you can share with us, obviously.
- [92:09]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Solana Mobile. So go buy a Seeker. If you don't have one, show it to us.
- [92:14]
Peter
Tell us about it. Tell us about the Seeker.
- [92:17]
Anatoly Yakovenko
We have two goals. One, I think, is because I spent most of my career at Qualcomm, it was just immediately obvious to me that you can have full cryptographic guarantees that a hardware wallet provides in the phone form factor. Like, in fact, all the technology to implement a trust zone and to keep your secret keys stored in an enclave. All that stuff was built years before Bitcoin for drm, of all things, to keep people from stealing, like Netflix or whatever. Phones implement all this technology to prevent any kind of data snooping and maintain encryption all the way from the deepest secure enclave to the display. So it was just obvious to me, oh, why don't we embed hardware wallet directly into the phone? That was the idea. So we can make it as good of a from a security perspective like you get cold wallets to wallet guarantees in your hardware device in terms of the kind of security that you get. But the user experience of Apple pay so you get so you can have a hot wallet that is both secure and great for consumers. That's part of it. The other part of it is that you have these very mature companies like Google and Apple that have a 20% rake on all digital spend at least through their economies.
- [93:35]
Peter
Crazy.
- [93:37]
Anatoly Yakovenko
There's no. It's just like that's a bug in capitalism that just doesn't make sense. Why isn't it converging down to the lowest cost? So to me it's an opportunity to use crypto as a wedge because developers don't want to pay these fees. So we can use a different economics where you pay. We can earn I think as good of returns as Google or Apple, but through effectively trading transaction fees that are volume based.
- [94:01]
Peter
It's a protection racket.
- [94:03]
Alex Wiesner
A Solana YouTube replacement like, like you know, an Odyssey equivalent on Solana there's.
- [94:09]
Anatoly Yakovenko
People trying to build crypto based content creation. None of those I think have really taken off or proven out. I think that's, that's a harder problem than I think software and like kind of software experiences. Just the amount of sheer content that you need to generate to get that like 10% as good as like within like a margin of error. As entertaining as YouTube or TikTok is just astronomical. But I think with AI and Sora like you're going to see that kind of change. It's just think about like that's actually.
- [94:41]
Alex Wiesner
The crux of my question. Does Sora 2 or whatever is next change the math or not? Because yeah, you're totally wrong.
- [94:49]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think so. But right now it's not good enough and too expensive. But you can see it in five years. Oh, this entertainment stream that I'm getting right, the infinite just of stream of entertainment is going to be AI generated. And that's kind of a scary thought because I think humans in the loop and what keeps us entertaining is probably an important part of our shared cultural experience. But we'll see what happens.
- [95:19]
Peter
An amazing future ahead, gentlemen. I'm jealous of your seeker, Salim.
- [95:29]
Salim Ismael
I'm starting to move all my crypto onto it and by the way totally my whole community wants to move our NFT collection onto Solana.
- [95:36]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Oh awesome.
- [95:37]
Salim Ismael
I may ping you about that.
- [95:38]
Peter
Awesome thoughts please.
- [95:42]
Alex Wiesner
Yeah, of course you do. But I have one that I think the audience might really care about. So toli if the world moves all these transactions to solana because it's 1,000 times faster than Ethereum, which is a thousand times slower than Bitcoin. So it's like, it is like the engine for AI. And the fundamental use of the Solana token is anti spam. Right. It's a way to pay for your transaction to get settled. Is there any way to translate the value of Solana without giving investment advice, the transaction volume of Solana to the value of the Solana token? What's the math that can mix those two things?
- [96:19]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think the transaction volume is less important and what's more important is the opportunity cost of being late. So where the network actually makes more value, like you as a block producer, you need SOL to stake to be a block producer, because if you had no Sybil resistance, you could create infinite blocks and that would effectively spam the network to death. So you have some sibyl mechanism to prevent infinite block producers. So you have some amount of percentage SOL that you stake that gives you X amount of percent blocks you can make. When you're making blocks, people are paying you to be first in the block, to be first to get access to this trade. So the amount that they're willing to pay you is based on the opportunity cost of that of being first.
- [97:05]
Alex Wiesner
Right. So has anyone put together a blog or a white paper or something that.
- [97:09]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Says like, well, yeah, blockworks probably has done the best job in terms of compiling all of this data and analyzing it into more traditional this is revenue, these are network costs. So if you go to blockworks you can look at Solana and Ethereum and do comparisons. And this is true for all proof of stake networks because the sibyl mechanism for proof of stake is the token itself. And you have X percentage stake. You can literally do I have a portfolio? Do I put a percentage of it into treasury bills that are risk free, or do I risk some of it to run a block producer and get like tips effectively for including transactions? And it doesn't actually matter that you're getting tips in Seoul or USDC or somebody gives you a sack of potatoes because the fact that you have to stake X amount to get access to that revenue is how you can do your Kelly optimized allocation. So this ties to the intelligent investor, a very traditional, boring approach to do analysis here. You can't do this for Bitcoin because the Sybil mechanism for Bitcoin is energy and I don't know if it'll ever change or anything like that. So I think bitcoin is its own special snowflake that I have struggled to come up with a standard model to analyze. But for proof of stake networks, I think you can really put them in the intelligent investor box and do analysis and kind of make your own decisions.
- [98:37]
Peter
Alex, I want to give you a chance to ask a question. Then I have a question I can go around the table to ask everybody.
- [98:43]
Dave Blunden
I'll ask a fun question, not a serious question. So Toli, let's project forward. Say humanity does in the end take apart our solar system to build the Dyson swarm and we have lots of computronium. What will be the medium of commerce in a Dyson swarm future for humanity?
- [99:04]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Do you think that this is kind of like the central planning communism problem? Is it computationally feasible to solve it just mathematically without markets at relatively high latencies?
- [99:19]
Dave Blunden
Right. You're bound by lightspeed latencies, just like we all are.
- [99:22]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I think this is kind of the question, how many qubits do we have to be able to solve this massive linear algebra problem? Right. Can you allocate the resources to everything? You might not need commerce, then that might be the end of the like capitalism and you might only have it just simply for human entertainment. But I think personal freedoms are far more important than efficiency in a lot of ways. So I would go against, I would be very much against it. I think it's very important for people to have purpose and competing for tokens, whatever they are. Right. Bananas out of a meme coin or whatever, I think.
- [100:05]
Peter
So here's my question for the group. Group, go around the horn here. You want to follow on Alex's question from earlier, which is what's your definition of wealth in the future? Salim, what do you think? Because it's very different looking back historically at the kings and queens and pharaohs, it was how many slaves you owned and your ability to have access to agriculture was sort of wealth. What do you think is in the future here?
- [100:36]
Salim Ismael
I would think it's a combination of time and health span.
- [100:40]
Peter
Time and health span.
- [100:41]
Alex Wiesner
Okay, Dave, I think it's a no brainer that it's purely tied to compute. Because I was asking class at MIT the other day, if I offered you $10,000 cash, here it is. Or a GPU that's worth $30,000. How many of you would take the GPU? And they're like, are you crazy? I'll take the 10,000 cash. But in the near term future, compute can be immediately turned into cash. I mean the compute is the universal thing. And when you Have AI agents who are the laborers of the world. Your number of workers is the amount of compute that you have. So your ability to make yourself happy, whether it's controlling your figure, robot cleaning your house, or building something virtual, or your customer, it's all bounded by the amount of computer you have access to. So that that becomes the universe and that that also determines your health. If you put your compute towards analyzing your scans, it determines whether or not it finds your cancer. And so it becomes your health too. So it becomes the universal foundation computer.
- [101:46]
Peter
Answer, Alex. Awg.
- [101:49]
Anatoly Yakovenko
What's yours?
- [101:49]
Dave Blunden
I think we're suffering from the cliche of the blind philosophers who are touching different parts of the elephant and all overconfident that the part of the elephant that they're feeling is what an elephant feels like. So I'd argue for a more general definition that generalizes all of those definitions. I would argue real wealth will be measured to first order as future freedom of action. Which generalizes compute, it generalizes physical resources. It can be measured in units of bits. So it's an information theoretic definition. But it's not just about compute. It's about the ability. Some might call it empowerment, but that's a specialized term to take the course of action you want in the future, not just in the present.
- [102:31]
Alex Wiesner
I knew that Alex said that to me. I didn't get it. But if you go to alexwg.org and you read his paper on the topic and you read it closely, you'll come away saying, oh, my God, he's totally right.
- [102:43]
Peter
Yeah, I knew I should not.
- [102:45]
Anatoly Yakovenko
I should have gotten degrees of freedom.
- [102:48]
Alex Wiesner
Degrees of freedom, yeah, it's the same thing.
- [102:50]
Peter
Yeah, you guys, I should have gone before Alex went. I'll answer. And then I think it's the ability to fulfill your desires, your purpose, and compute is part of it. But nanotechnology is going to be a fundamental as well, a manipulation of the physical universe. So it's not just compute in that regard.
- [103:13]
Salim Ismael
Thinking in scarcity terms, you got to jump forward to abundance terms and think. Then all that matters is time and health span.
- [103:20]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Hello.
- [103:21]
Dave Blunden
I think, Salim, you're thinking in meat body terms. Think in post biological terms. Come on.
- [103:26]
Anatoly Yakovenko
All right.
- [103:29]
Peter
Anyway, Toli, so your answer here.
- [103:34]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Degrees of freedom.
- [103:35]
Peter
Degrees of freedom. All right.
- [103:38]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Which is like, I think people will never feel satisfied because there's somebody else that has more degrees of freedom than them. So this is like the human condition is always striving for something else.
- [103:51]
Dave Blunden
The hedonic treadmill spins faster and faster, doesn't it?
- [103:54]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Yeah, yeah.
- [103:57]
Alex Wiesner
Right, because. Because you can have a lot of compute and still be beaten like a dog every day by some government that. Yeah, so you guys are right.
- [104:06]
Peter
All right, we've, we've reached, we've reached a conclusion here. Toli, where do people find you.
- [104:14]
Anatoly Yakovenko
On Axe A. Yakovenko? Yeah, Follow me on Ox. I have hot takes, sometimes boring takes. I don't know.
- [104:23]
Peter
Love it or not.
- [104:25]
Anatoly Yakovenko
Yeah.
- [104:26]
Peter
Thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for the future that you're enabling for so many globally around the world. Grateful. The only time more exciting in today is tomorrow. And it's going to be a woozy of a decade ahead. Moonshot mates love you all. Thank you for today.
- [104:43]
Dan M. Andis
Every week my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI and quantum computing to transport energy, longevity and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters that impacts our lives, our companies and our careers. If you want me to share these meta trends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week. Sending it out is a short, short, 2 minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends ten years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you. If you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dashmandis.com metatrends to gain access to to the trend 10 years before anyone else. Alright, now back to this episode.
- [105:51]
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