The fact that we now have stable coin legislation and that people are projecting like 1 trillion to 10 trillion worth of digital dollars being minted over the next, you know, 5 years is going to massively accelerate things. >> Why does your company exist? And second, why we need it? Solana’s there to really enable that 1 billion people to go fully interconnected. Bitcoin is store 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. >> So, is that the future, a single machine layer for all markets everywhere? There is 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. Toly, how long before this science fiction future could come into existence? >> My gut is that uh Now, that’s a moon shot, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:01:01] Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. Here are my moonshot mates, Dave London. Hey, Dave. Hey. Alex Swizner Gross. Hey, Peter. Hey. And Salim Ismail. 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, which today is the sixth largest coin, now worth over 100 billion dollars. Congratulations for that. Uh we’ll appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah, 100 billion here, 100 billion there. On your way to a trillion. Uh you know, a bachelor’s in computer science from University of of Illinois Urbana began your career at Qualcomm. An amazing company, right? 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 2025.
[00:02:01] Uh that’s extraordinary. 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 you are known and you are cool. That’s awesome. Yeah. So, uh guys, today I really want to hit on a few things, which is the crypto essential, sort of Solana 101. What makes it different from Bitcoin and Ethereum? We’re going to dive into Solana as a use of payment, 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. Um let me begin with a question that is on my mind, um Toly, which is, you know, given sort of our incredible rush towards AGI, every dollar in the ecosystem is being sucked into this black hole of computronium we’re building across the planet. So, we’ve got AI, we’ve got agents, we have Solana, we have stable coins. What’s the
[00:03:00] future of money going to look like? I mean, do you think it’s going to be recognizable in the next 10 years? I think um the two things that I see converging uh 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 Polymarket and Kalshi kind of taking off, but the weird kind of cool experiments like Futarchy where you have decision markets for every decision that a fund or a company can take, those can now exist. And as intellica- intelligence gets cheaper, you have more markets that are viable and you kind of see this exponential explosion of uh everything being decided through
[00:04:00] market forces, which I think is uh it’s like the quote I made before the podcast is like the answer 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 uh this is probably the most optimal direction for kind of 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 like a good way to to course correct when you have bad intelligence. So, hopefully it’s it’s a good thing, but beyond my I can’t fit it all in my head. It’s beyond my comprehension. The speed of change is awesome right now, right? I mean, I I I think in in Alex, we talked about this like economy 3.0 in the future. Before we started recording, Toly and I were were I I would say sort of lamenting the sad case of Truth Terminal, the autonomous
[00:05:01] AI agent that’s being forced to mint its own meme coins just in order to survive in this like really harsh world for for AI agents right now. I mean, Toly, I’d be curious. So, in principle, new layer ones, including Solana, offer the the premise for AI agents just to survive. If humans for the most part were banked, we have the ability to to engage in a human economy. If 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? Like what what what’s Toly’s handbook? What what’s your what’s Toly’s guide for a like Can you tell a good joke? Can you can you tell a good joke? Then you can survive. I think that is the the final litmus 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 economically survive if you’re a baby AGI and and you
[00:06:01] want to be autonomous? Um I think yeah, meme coins is like a weird Keynesian beauty contest for attention. Uh 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. That that’s the main business model that I see right now for these poor baby AGIs. So, it’s you know, maybe as as as an assignment to to to you, the the creator of of Solana, we need a better business model for for these baby AGIs to survive other than minting meme coins. Alex, can you imagine an AI 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.” With a with a credit card, I need a I I think in some sense, Peter, like that’s the corporation model that we have right now with with AIs using corporations as embodiments for for themselves as economic actors. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will
[00:07:00] 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 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 metatrends 10 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 demandis.com/metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode. But why don’t we kick ourselves off with a little bit of the Solana vision here cuz you know, our our buddy Mike Saylor has, you know, he’s the Bitcoin promoter of all promoters.
[00:08:00] But but Bitcoin is 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, you’re you know, Alex’s baby AI is no way he’s going to sit there at the cash register for 20, 30, 40, you know, years of AI time trying to buy something. But you know, Ethereum came after that, but now Solana, I heard on your last podcast, a thousand times faster than the Ethereum chain. So, it’s it’s keeping up with AI, basically, right? Yeah, that’s the goal. And I think very very simple way to think of it is like Bitcoin is store 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 uh like not I don’t think it’s a computer science problem where we need
[00:09:00] theoretical solutions. It’s a it’s just a fun engineering problem. Like, how do you move bits as fast as possible around the world? Um and these this is what I like to get my hands dirty and I always just kind of gravitated towards that. I I would I would love to hear a little bit of this history behind the proof of history concept that you came up with, Toly. Cuz I think that’s such a fascinating unique approach to blockchains. Also, while we’re doing this, I’m unboxing a Cypher phone live. >> Nice. So, I have a Solana Cypher phone that I that I got that I’ve been wanting to unbox for a while. So, but curious to hear about that. Yeah, it’s um it’s uh so, first of all, I’m not a uh 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 um optimizing how fast you can move bits through memory. So, I was a performance nerd. I would have dreams where I have debugger windows between different
[00:10:01] co-processors cuz I would stare at them for so many weeks like just trying to debug problems and stuff. Um and I was definitely aware of Bitcoin when it came out um and Ethereum as well. And kind of as an engineer you you often overlook the social aspect of these things. 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 and weird. In uh in 2017, um 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 as a off to offset the cap x. Oh wow. >> And this is I was just doing this for fun with a friend of mine. Uh another Qualcomm nerd uh that I do side projects with and um we had I had two coffees and a beer at Cafe Sole in San Francisco. It’s a combination
[00:11:01] that usually doesn’t sit with anyone, didn’t sit with me. So, I was up till 4:00 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 4:00 a.m. that there’s a way to measure different physical constant than entropy uh which is what proof of work does for civil resistance. There’s a way to actually measure passage of time in a way that’s hard to fake and this is uh recursive cryptographic hash function like SHA-256. 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. Um
[00:12:02] and that was this eureka moment in my head because even though I wasn’t working at protocols uh Qualcomm just being at a cellular protocol company, you get you just know how the stuff works and one of the first cellular protocols that anyone ever built was called time division multiple access. >> Yes, TDMA. Yes. >> Yeah and um this actually like if you remember your physics classes, if you 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 what how you get TDMA. Well, in in Bitcoin and proof of work, you have a similar problem. If you 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 like 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
[00:13:00] 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 in maximizing the number of bits I can shove through the network. And my back of envelope was like oh this is at least 10,000 times faster than Bitcoin. So, that was this kind of thing that like I built TDMA for blockchain. So, what’s what’s funny is that um I don’t know. I was bad at like I did like selling the idea to venture capital or maybe I was good enough. Like but this idea that what you really the problem that you’re solving is this channel efficiency problem like 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 that yada yada. Really focusing on the implementation side more so than what it unlocks. And
[00:14:01] years later um now like I think we’re in what year seven for Solana and like 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, um we got so successful that I was able to hire kind of best in class bleeding edge consensus team out of ETH Zurich that are throwing away proof of history and all the code that gets lost in the early days, but clearly understand the problem that it 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 the all this complexity. So, it’s now I get to see my baby retired in a way. Just so everybody knows, ETH Zurich is it’s the MIT of Europe. It has nothing to do with Ethereum. Yeah. It’s total coincidence that it’s called ETH, but it has nothing to do with Ethereum. That that’s such a a beautiful like
[00:15:01] founding story Toly and in part I I never made the the connection between uh TDMA and and just in in in general the Qualcomm view of of wireless and and and aiming for high throughput. I’m I’m curious if you were to mentally run the clock forward. So, uh although source code for earlier versions from Solana Labs still preserved for posterity on on GitHub I see, but if you fast forward, what does the perfect layer one look like to you? Like what what where do you see all of this going if you could fast forward 10 years, 15 like 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 uh 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. So, um
[00:16:00] and that seems like the fastest way to build something. You can build sub-microsecond matching engine and like run really really fast markets there. But the problem that it has is that if you have like an event in Singapore where like a container ship full of iPhones sinks outside your window, that information still has to go at speed of light through fiber from Singapore to New York before it’s it it’s in the market like that. Yeah, because so uh 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 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 a communication physics problem. And this
[00:17:00] is again the analogy that’s kind of dumb but works is you’re going from TDMA to CDMA where you have concurrent channels you can simultaneously use at the same time. Um 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. >> So, is that the future a single uh machine layer for all markets everywhere? Yes. That everything is living on top of? 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. Toly, 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 and with with >> No no no you you you talked about Okay. We just agree we agree with We agree. We
[00:18:01] agree. Okay, fine. I’m first person singular. I I talk all the time about tiling the earth with with compute. But in in your mind, does does this does this vision concretely involve basically embedding like SHA or like hash function proof of history generation in every object everywhere? >> you no you don’t need you don’t need any of that. But just kind of the next generation Byzantine fault tolerant consensus like Alpine Glow there’s or there’s a bunch of other options, but um 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 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.
[00:19:02] 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 this single global data structure. And it’s actually not that big because markets themselves and trades and all this other stuff, they’re not a five you know uh you know a 4K video streamed in real time driving in China to person in LA driving. Right, this is what Qualcomm built. It’s mind-blowingly complex, low latency, high throughput stuff. Markets
[00:20:00] and trades and all and all these other things are actually relatively small amount of memory and small amount of messages in comparison. So, the Yeah, the NFL is building all the infra for us. Like that But then 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 on that platform on that layer it makes you know, it doesn’t make sense for NASDAQ not to be there. It doesn’t make sense for everything else not to be there. Yeah, I think you’ll still have very localized markets because there is advantages to being co-located and having that like light cone around microstructure and like the queues. >> people talking about light cones. That’s great. >> Yeah, in that little like 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. Um how fast is going to
[00:21:02] happen? I think I think the fact that we now have stable coin legislation and that people are projecting like 1 trillion to 10 trillion worth of digital dollars being minted over the next, you know, 5 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 in inner country and and basically globally. And once those dollars are there, it’s just a very simple interface to interact with them. Even if they’re not Yeah, the the price to move dollars from Ethereum to Solana is a million times cheaper than to move it between any two banks. We had we had we had Jeremy Allaire on the pod 2 weeks ago. So, we’re discussing this. Saleem, what do you what are you thinking right now? Um 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?
[00:22:01] Yeah, so I think of you know, like 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. Um 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. Um 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 the challenge here is that like we have in the US, we have a really really amazing financial system. It was mostly built kind of like after the railroad boom and the scams there and before World War II and kind of a little bit after World War II as it
[00:23:00] as that was exported to the Western world. And it was all built before the internet. And it it functions amazing 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 2-day settlement. It’s like it’s very hard to cut that down to 1 day or 4 hours or 10 or 10 milliseconds because people are are in the loop. Um blockchain was built even Bitcoin for its 10 minute 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. Like it we we live in a super connected connected world. And we have cryptography that can mathematically guarantee correctness of of certain actions. You know, so just just to reinforce your point you just made. I was at a public company board meeting all morning and we’re talking about something we might be interested in acquiring. And one of the board members said, “Well, maybe they’ll just go
[00:24:00] public.” And the other board members said, “There hasn’t been a an IPO below a $3 billion valuation in like decade. You can’t even afford the legal. The friction is so high.” 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 >> Texas, baby. and before World War II. Texas exchanges are coming. Yeah, but there’s there’s 50,000 meme coins launched today. Yeah, and there hasn’t been a single IPO in like, you know, the number of IPOs I think have shrunk to the slowest levels since like the ’70s or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s it’s >> I’d like to pull on that that that point if if I might totally I mean, so I I think stable coin amazing, right? So, so you know, 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 the killer app for layers two and three that expands the the wealth of humanity
[00:25:00] versus just driving efficiencies at in terms of money transfer. It’s like where’s the DAOs for a while were going to 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? Um I think the what you should start seeing is the cost of finance to basically drop to it’s the actual value it’s providing. So, the the challenge here is like you like you look at like the um Figment IPO, I think what 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 stable coins, you have incredibly deep on-chain markets. They could literally just use a smart contract to direct list. And if they use like a a third party to go actually create that market, that party
[00:26:01] has to actually provide the value that comparable to to what they’re getting for it. Right? Like they could maybe like be the person that they use an analyst or whatever to actually go dive deep into that company and like create that nice set of information that everyone else consumes so they can participate with, you know, 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 like signal, yeah, you should allocate capital here because of XYZ. Um And providing that value I think is important. And then how much you charge for it should be at the most competitive price ever. Like I think this is where we see like I think finance right now is taking out a huge chunk of like the GDP and it’s a tax. It’s not actually generating as much value as it’s consuming. >> in the gears. Sand in the gears. >> The statistic I’ve seen is over the last decade uh the
[00:27:02] corporate American profits sent 40 per 40% of corporate American profits went to the financial services sectors. It’s like unbelievable uh sucking sound there. But but pulling the thread on that if I may. So, if if the desired end state in your mind is basically driving profits in financial services to zero, um A, is there is there anything beyond that? Or like if if if blockchain technologies in general not not just Solana’s layer one specifically are able to suck all the profit out of financial services, do you declare victory? Is 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? 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
[00:28:01] funding from people in China, US, Australia. And I’m not relying on the um you know, the kind of the trust model that like a a safe is based on in YC. That the fact that YC do do due diligence in this particular person that then you can invest in them in this kind of flimsy contract that Right? Like that I think which which is awesome. Like I think the fact that that works and reliably reliably produces great results is testament to like how important finance is and into like 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 >> velocity of the velocity of money um going through the roof, right? It’s it’s accessibility and velocity finding a lowest level um and and just becoming a a fuel to for acceleration of the economy.
[00:29:00] Can can you give us your vision on the regulatory? Like if you look at Mercor as an example, and here’s a company 2 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 and just in just your 7-year history is kind of the most crazy roller coaster. And that’s just in the US. Look at the you know, every jurisdiction in the world. So, how’s that going to unfold as this you know, this over-the-top economy rolls out? Uh I mean, Paul Atkins and Hester Peirce have been awesome and David Sacks has been awesome. And you can kind of think of uh that like the the whole securities law was created in United States. So, when your neighbor says, “I have this railroad certificate, give me some money for it.” And you got it, that one is it’s a real certificate, that railroad
[00:30:00] company exists, and you have all the information to actually make that decision. So, a lot of stuff can go wrong with that, right? The 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 in the late 19th century. >> And a lot of regulatory paperwork. Exactly. So, what’s cool now is is the the difference a 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 with 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 solved by regulation
[00:31:01] 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 inter- intermediary is 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 is because people can trust that settlement and execution of those assets, and they’re willing to put money at risk. And because the software
[00:32:00] minimizes the risk, they can maximize the amount of money they actually put at risk into these systems. So, it’s happening anyways. Like it’s happening with or without United States. I think uh, the regulation on board now and like with the stablecoin act like coming out, I think you’re just going to see this accelerating. And a lot of these services and and kind of um, the intermediaries along the stack are 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 the vertical and and kind of expand. M- maybe dwelling for for a moment on the regulatory side. So, i- i- in a paper contract, you know, you mentioned the the Y Combinator 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. W- with um, with Solana or or other smart contract, you have to first-order approximately none of that. Uh, and so so I’m curious,
[00:33:01] where do you see this going? Do you think rule of law basically moves on chain in some sense with with bodies to adjudicate disputes also on chain? How do disputes work in a future where hypothetically everything’s on chain? I think you’re minimizing the number of intermediaries necessary to go do the right thing. So, if somebody raises money and they lies 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 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
[00:34:01] you’re dealing directly with that company as the issuer. They could 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 is like a great example of a 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. >> I totally totally get it. As a stepping stone toward where Alex is going, um, the actual just the SAFE note itself. So, just to take this hypothetical transaction, you know, I want to invest in your company, you’re in Singapore. Uh, here’s my money, it’s on chain. Uh, what about the SAFE note itself? Do you just store that and hash it and then put the hash on chain? Or how do how do you deal with the actual terms of the SAFE note? Or do you not touch that? I
[00:35:01] mean, this is where you want to draw the abstraction. There are there are efforts to actually use the ledger as the the cap table. So, whatever’s on the ledger or however these SAFE notes 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 this 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. Um, 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. Um, but this would be the best way to do it because then you’re getting rid of all these other layers, transfer agent, brokers, etc. Like all those people are gone. >> Not not just that, but I don’t want to beat this Y Combinator SAFE note to death, but but if you look at the actual
[00:36:01] terms of the note, cuz we do these every day, uh, they’re not settled in the courts. You know, they they go straight to JAMS or to some third party cuz 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 and state system cuz it’s just too slow. So, like 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. Um, that was a massive bankruptcy in crypto, but because FTX is not is like is it a centralized exchange that is not a com- as a company a DeFi company, right? They just bought and sold tokens like any other centralized financial system. When they collapse, it’s incredibly messy to go and wind 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
[00:37:02] amount of money going out is more than the amount of money going in. That would be obvious immediately. So, you you wouldn’t even get to that stage where you have bankruptcy. But if you did, like 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 Camino 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. Like if 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
[00:38:01] you may not have the ability to go enforce it in the courts, like in Ukraine or whatever. No, I think those those FTX investors were getting 50 50 cents on the dollar, 60 cents on the dollar because of I mean, it’s just an insane amount of money lost in that friction, just in that FTX case. >> Let’s go to Salim. Salim, ask a really intelligent question that I’ll understand, okay? Well, I want to make two points and then I’ll ask you a question. The question The point 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 Toly talks about when you can do settlements all programmatically, it manages it all, you know, 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 I’m happy to get in that question, but
[00:39:01] can I take a minute and describe that, Peter? Sure. >> Yeah, of course. Okay. So, I remember I remember you’re the first person ever to tell me about it. 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 going to first, what time should we attack, who how are we going to 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 and in computer science terms, that’s how do you send a trusted secure authenticated message over a network when you don’t trust the network, right? 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 and the
[00:40:01] synchronization across multiple ledgers, you can now the if I send Toly a message, he has a 100% 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. We 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 that makes it an 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. Um I have a question around that specifically >> the double spending. Add the double spending problem in there, too, cuz that was a perfect summary. >> You can’t you can’t get into that in into that either, which which is uh can you stop somebody from double spending
[00:41:00] in two different places and then doubling up every time. Um the the question I have for you, Toly, 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 cuz now it’s really solid and robust and on its way to Ethereum level decentralization. I think there’s a lot of um if you’re on Crypto Twitter, people fight about what is what does decentralization actually means. Um 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 uh the way that I think um 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’s just awesome for me to be able to analyze the software that I’m running on my computer, know exactly what’s happening, know why it’s broken, why it’s not. So we’ve always looked at
[00:42:01] permissionless being as the core part of decentralization. That it doesn’t matter if uh the system is open-source, but can I participate in every part of the stock without needing um like to be uh 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 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 of finance for all of the world’s execution, it’s still going to run in France and England and Spain. And none
[00:43:02] of those guys are ever going to really trust each other 100%. So the the banks in France will need to be able to participate in every part of the stock. 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 signing 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. Um and you can work it out on on paper. You can say we have all these proofs and formal verification that it actually is uh robust with the Byzantine actors. And then in implementation, things blow up. I think the Solana journey has been that
[00:44:01] of we’re trying to solve all of these problems at the same time, both performance and decentralization, and doing it, you know, 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. >> Yeah, incredible what you pulled off. This episode is brought to you by Blitzcy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzcy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise-scale codebases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzcy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzcy platform provides a plan, then generates and precompiles code for each task. Blitzcy delivers 80% or more of the development work autonomously while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint. Enterprises are
[00:45:01] achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzcy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding copilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit blitzcy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzcy today. Uh here here’s the challenge. What percentage of the of the world or let’s look at the US, do you believe understands crypto at all? If you had to guess. Um 10th a 10th of 1% of the population? I think anyone that finished calculus can understand it. I mean like basically understand it. Now the difference between can understand and do understand. So I mean one of the one of the questions is, you know, the idea of Solana as the everything coin that I’m using. Um let’s define what that means for us. What would Solana as the everything coin
[00:46:00] mean? And then what would it take? Yeah, go ahead. The coin itself that runs the network, its only purpose is to prevent spam in the network. So fundamentally like the only problem that it can solve is decent decentralize spam. So as part of solving this Byzantine general’s 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 tradeable 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. Um so that that to us is the kind of doesn’t matter what the coin the underlying token that provides us cryptoeconomic guarantees that adversaries pay some fixed cost for spam, that doesn’t really matter. Like
[00:47:00] what you use it beyond that. Um what’s kind of been surprising to me and really this has really been like on you know, when you start a startup, not only do you have no idea what PMF is going to look like, but the fact that was soon as you have markets and you have um 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 uh like substantial. Just 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
[00:48:01] through trial and error of us getting such so much massive congestion in 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 we’re mean course of two, it actually works for money. Was were the was the craze around NFTs and meme coins a surprise to you? Yeah, I mean when we started, we you know, our tagline was blockchain at 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 like really valuable. And um the fact that meme coins took off was really surprising because those are assets with no value and all price. But it kind of, you know, like
[00:49:01] if you if you make look back at like the history of the internet, um it makes sense. Like if 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 I actually like built all these silly scripts that would auto mine like wood and resources and post out them. That was that was that was Richard that was Richard Garriott’s company. Yeah, Lord Lord British. Brock Pierce, our buddy. And those things that that, you know, Ultima Online wood is as has as much digital value as a meme coin, a smart coin. There’s nothing backing it, but people still want it 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. >> want to be able to trade the to bring those gold and the wood between
[00:50:02] different video games. How old are your kids? Um 10, six, and two and a half. Okay. I got two 14-year-old boys, and and so does Salim, a 14-year-old boy. So, it’s interesting, right? The entire video game world is teaching an entire generation about the the value of digital assets uh in extraordinary fashion. Anyway. Yeah, isn’t it funny that the video games, you know, that’s where the GPU came from that’s now driving all of the AI, and it’s where crypto came from that, you know, trade gold for wood or whatever within Minecraft or Maybe to take the the counterpoint to that. Before modern video games, we had board games, and we had credit systems, sort of fake money systems. So, it’s not in in some sense that new. But, I guess maybe a question for for Toly, pivoting off of a question sort of an adjacent question to what Peter asked you earlier about how many people do understand crypto, by
[00:51:01] which I assume Peter’s referring to cryptocurrency and and sort of layer one layer layer twos. How many should because I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I think you were making the point earlier almost like Lamport’s slash soul. This should be sort of under the hood, and it should just make everything frictionless. Uh I think of it as like the number of people you invite to your wedding is roughly 200. That’s like your your core group of people. At least one or two of them understand Linux. One or two of them will understand crypto. That’s And that’s enough cuz you can invite them to your wedding. You can trust them. Right? And they’ll explain it to you, and they can like 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 one in 200, like one per social group. Your extended trust circle. And I think we’re probably there. Yeah, we’re probably there.
[00:52:00] >> striking. What 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 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 to to build the next generation of financial services. 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 stable coin as an option. Half of the purchases came via stable coin without any incentives because the friction for somebody in Southeast Asia to use a stable coin is 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 stable coins, people just use those rails on their own. But, it is it was actually the benefit I think was to us as a
[00:53:01] merchant was very obvious. We saved 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 I have this rail, I don’t have to pay the 2% fee. Yeah, I’m going to use it. Like, why wouldn’t I?” Money’s it’s money in the bank instantly. So, I think that like huge improvement that will move dollars and like will have people take action, I think is going to be more in the business end. But, consumers will see the benefit of that ultimately. 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, there 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
[00:54:00] many web3 services, like I find some liquidity pools. Uh Uh uh DEX liquidity pools. The the complexity of going through those and funding a pool, etc. is so ridiculous. I have to have a hardcore uh crypto sherpa standing next to me to make sure I don’t screw it up. It’s insane. And so, little by little those will uptick in terms of usability, and then it’ll start becoming a a very very powerful tool for everybody. Alex, I’ll take your pre- your pregnant with a question. Yeah, no. I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m trying to wrap my mind around this. So, this is actually a question both for for Toly and Salim. I want to put you guys both on the spot and ask, what do you think? So, so let’s fast forward to to the victory state. We we’ve we’ve driven the the future of financial services to to 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 like the singular killer app, the concrete state that we’ve unlocked in the future that
[00:55:01] creates radical wealth for all all of humankind? What does that look like concretely? It’s hard to to point to saying that like um price like accurate price efficiency globally is that big of a deal to a person. Like, do you care how if you like if the Starbucks get gets the best price for their coffee beans, and the person making those gets the best price? Like, these are very abstract things that at an end-to-end like my parents are not going to understand to where it really matters to them. But, the GDP will like 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. Con- concretely though, like so so >> But, but let me ask you let me ask you a question. Right now, what makes what differentiates America in so many ways
[00:56:00] it’s its access to capital. Right? Entrepreneurs uh throughout the US uh can put forward an idea, rich individuals can access to capital. And one of the questions I have is 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 uh at a speed you know, and Alex, we talk about sort of the you know, an ex- If I If I had time, I would rewrite I would rewrite economics for the future cuz economics are so fundamentally broken and so last century. So, is this about reinventing an economics 2.0 or 3.0? So, if you know, if like all the companies that are worth over a trillion or like all the assets, they’re all US companies or Bitcoin. And I think maybe like the Saudi oil company, right? >> Yeah. >> So, the the only place for the other like the other place for finance that
[00:57:01] can compete with the United States is the internet. And it’s happening on the internet through crypto. So, you’re So, you’re now seeing like the kind of finance and growth that happened 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 the 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 it’s so we’re so deeply plugged into it. I I can give a kind of an anecdote a real life anecdote that may be highlight some of this, Peter. Um and maybe to answer your question, Alex. If you look at, say, the NFT world where they started doing art on the internet, right? You create a collection of 10,000 things. Uh 10,000 apes and start selling those and mint those. Uh you can have a community building around those. All those, by the way, were default EXOs cuz they wouldn’t have a big purpose, and they would use crypto economics to incentivize the
[00:58:01] 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 and the collection would basically die on the vine, etc. People are now doing uh turnarounds where they’re buying old collections uh that are really good art and and repurposing them, etc. There’s a whole M&A thing going on in the in the NFT world. Uh what’s fascinating about this is that it’s art in a different form because it’s programmatic art that’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 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
[00:59:00] CyberKongz that that created the coins within the things. So, they the If you own a CyberKong uh NFT, it issued bananas to you, which traded as a secondary utility token. But, so so Salim, I I want to challenge you on this. >> Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Let me Let me The broader point I’m making is >> Imagine doing all of this with lawyers. The broader point I’m making is Or imagine not doing it at all. Let me make my bigger point. My bigger point is what as you get through this, all of the stuff that’s happening, there’s a 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 kind of did an initial set of rug pulls, now when people issue NFTs or issue tokens, you have to hold the token for 6 months before you can sell it and evens out the 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
[01:00:01] 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 it that adds to the collective pool of of ingenuity. Why if I think Why is this Why is these examples important? I think it’s 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 like >> bananas do you own, Salim? >> Right. The fact that I can transfer and transact and sell these bananas, I now have my risk outline is is very different than if I had to do this blindly over eBay to send somebody a cashier’s check to buy their wooden 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,
[01:01:02] all 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. Like in 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 amount number and then the 10 trillion-dollar is going to be way past the shift, I think.
[01:02:01] Yeah, now now you’re getting to the meat of where Throw some Throw some meat to Alex here. He’ll eat it like a pitbull. The You know, you know, Peter’s question about, okay, I want to raise money for my company, you know, 5 million bucks. Why is this so hard? But the assumption underneath that is that your company needs either some physical like iron and something, but it doesn’t anymore. What does it need? Well, all it needs is labor for the most part of any of these virtual companies. Well, why am I raising $5 million? Why aren’t I raising some virtual thing and paying those people? You know, 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, you know, 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 the economy of of, you know, AI just solved every math problem known to
[01:03:00] 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 and 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. I think even if I think even if you value them in US dollars, then actually think the most markets will go through 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 like 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 a jackass or not. Like
[01:04:00] 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 the guarantees you’re getting out of out of the SAFE is competing with the fact that I have secondary markets and this reliable execution and transfer. So which one are you going to take as an investor? Like you 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. Um and the success upside is the same in both. Yeah, I think I think most governments think that you know, 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, you
[01:05:02] know, 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 be it’ll go from, you know, a rounding error to dominant in just a few years. That’s That’s my guess. If If you’re in the US, you pay dollars market to mark to market to US dollars in taxes. So even if you make your profit and sell, 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 with a carrier ship full of F-35s or whatever. I think totally that gets to my original question, which is
[01:06:00] government and governance mostly doesn’t live on chain right now. So to to the extent that Peter, Dave, and and to some extent Salim are are 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 it would be >> it. Alex, let me take it there cuz this is the conversation we had with 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, right? Where contracts, payments, treasury, governance, and even all of the agents employed by that company are on the blockchain, right? And we have the explosion of a 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? I think you can go look at kind of the the cool experiments in this. Would be
[01:07:00] MetaDAO because of futarchy decision market-based DAOs where um you 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 Y. 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 and build uh you know, iPhone 20 or whatever. Right. But I or if It does that make sense? This 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. Peter, I’d like to try to answer your question, but but then forward a a sub question to to Toly if I might do that. I I think the answer to your question
[01:08:01] 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 It requires It would be a require an act of a state government at minimum. So my sub question, Toly, Texas or Florida, yeah. Yeah, my sub question Wyoming Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead, Toly. So Wyo- Wyoming’s Go Go for it. Yeah, Wyoming >> Wyoming’s been very advanced in uh crypto adoption and acceptance. They actually issued a stablecoin where as you interpret the law, because they are sovereign, they’re neither a person or a corporation. And they they’ve issued a stablecoin under their own kind of regulatory scheme, which is uh interesting to think about. But okay, so what about Puerto Rico? You know, Puerto Rico’s inside the the realm of the F-35s circling around, yet completely independent from the federal government. And that that’s potentially a birthplace for this whole thing.
[01:09:02] Well, Toly, you can already Wait wait wait. Let Let Let’s Alex take this home. So so so the the the sub question then would be, okay, so so you have hypothetical preference for Wyoming, maybe Puerto Rico. When does this happen? When do we see, in your prediction, Toly, when do we see the first state level government in the United States enshrine in 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. Is this 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 um assign control or parts of the control of the fiduciary duties to a DAO. Yes, there are. We looked into this. Wyoming does allow that. The problem is you’re still under the corporate the federal uh SEC issues. But I’ll give you this
[01:10:01] thing in in Panama, there’s a couple of other places where the 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 really it’s almost like a trust with digitized crypto-enabled transactions going through it. You actually don’t need these things. I think the key part that you need out of a think federal in the government and laws is that um 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 and things like that, those those effectively become code is law because if the government says that your liabilities are limited, you’re not part of this cohort that you’re responsible
[01:11:00] 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 if you go into it and you lose money, tough, right? Like you’ve actually taken on the risk, and there’s nobody for you to go after anymore. So this 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 think totally you you put they exist just by existing. You you’ve put your your finger on I I think the the core issue for the future of this entire space, which is what does the future of law as code look like? And I I think there are sort of maybe two directions at 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
[01:12:00] something that looks like, you know, 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? Um I’ll 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. What about you, Anatoly? I think um humans in the loop and kind of how our human egos are are designed is that you will have uh this I think like the Big Short has this awesome scene where the higher up the chain of command you go, the dumber the person.
[01:13:01] The the less they understand about what’s happening. The same applies to podcast hosts, by the way. I 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 it go as the the higher up it goes to the court system, to politicians, to regulators, the more broad strokes they have kind of to control it. Um and my my view is like I don’t think you’re going to have AI agents in that spot because of human ego. Like I think humans really really want or big orgs under them. So so Anatoly I just have to jump on that cuz cuz uh I I just think it’s the coolest thing in the world that you as a as an individual engineer, you know, come into the country 14 years ago, whatever, settle in San Francisco, and invent a hundred billion dollar thing out of thin air. Just create it
[01:14:01] 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 factor, you know, in the way makes it impossible to to interact. It’s just the coolest story. You know, the the Hold on. 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 crypto-friendly. >> Japan is friendly. Now there’s an increasing list of countries, Malta, Liechtenstein, etc., etc. So comp- 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
[01:15:00] worried about the US later. Uh 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. You know, Anatoly, when when you started Solana, agentic AI was not even in the conversation. Right? It was uh it was, you know, four or five years out. Right? Just transformers. And and I can imagine that AI agents are going to be the single biggest uh you know, transactors of Solana. Uh can you can you speak to that? Um Yeah, I think um if we the 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 a buy or sell, right, signal. You can
[01:16:00] now create a lot more markets, and I think this is where I think stuff like futarchy you can actually potentially become scalable to large organizations. Um Why like I think this is kind of sort of happening already is if you like look at me or Vitalik, we’re obviously not business people. Like I have I’m not a broad business person that understands like how to do this. >> you play a business person on TV. Yeah, exactly. Like we’re engineers. >> like way too candid and and honest, I think. He’s a researcher. I’m an engineer. Like I understands 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 from virtually see 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 participant is rationally optimizing their own P&L
[01:17:00] 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 chain engine where if there’s a bunch of markets, it all makes money. Like that forces the 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 kind of single-person small business, but a internet-scalable system that’s glued together with cryptography that can all move together for a common benefit. That I think that’s a very very unique cool thing. And as you’ve had AI explode and the ability to get uh 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 all they all run on Solana, and that we make more money from making sure
[01:18:01] there’s no spam. But that I think that’s awesome. I would tell you see like, you know, yeah. How many AI agents do you imagine are going to be operating a decade from now? I don’t think the question’s going to be meaningful a decade from now because I I think it agents is a very 2025 era term. I I think we’ll look back 10 years from now and laugh at at the premise of the question. I maybe think You have like a continuous information funnel to GPUs. That’s just constantly looping. Is it Yeah, like if if if the question were like how how many terawatts or petawatts of intelligence what will we have a decade from now? And and so we we currently measure AI in terms of uh of of energy, right? We talk about gigawatt data centers and so forth. For the moment. For the moment. For the moment. Are we going to start a new layer of uh of sort of measurement, which is a financial layer of measurement in terms of how much capital is going to be is going to be
[01:19:00] transacting on these systems uh because the speed, I mean, the most the most valuable bits of information are bits of information that carry financial value with them. Right? So But that’s circular, though. Like that that that’s circular to say what’s most valuable is most financialized. Like I ideally, and and Anatoly, keep me honest on this, I would hope 10 years from now we’re we’re in a state where we’ve not just solved math, but we’ve solved economics. We we have like a a rigorous science of what wealth is. We have the beginnings of it today, arguably, but if you put 10 economists in a room and you ask them like what is real wealth, you’ll get maybe 20 different answers. I would hope we have actually like a decade from now an ocean of what real wealth is, not just monetized wealth, but actual wealth, and then we could actually trade real wealth by My knowledge, we don’t know what real wealth is. >> Probably just energy, just jewels. Maybe, but maybe not. >> I’ll give you an alternative too, which is transistor flips or flat What flat
[01:20:00] isn’t right, but but it’s going to be some metric of compute that’s more foundational than the dollar or any concept of currency currency. Right now we’re all trained that wealth is dollars. And and they you know, the foundation metric is dollars, but that’s going to break very quickly. And it’ll be something either either power you know, electrical power, but I think more likely some metric of compute. >> Can we can we can we talk about I’d like to challenge all of this. Um You know, we’ve had for the last few hundred years the main mode of discourse in the world has been business, commerce, money, right? And we run the world on that. And then we floated off feudal systems and now the power is in the power of money, which is more liquid, free flowing, it’ll funds good ideas, etc. etc. But we’re moving 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,
[01:21:00] 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 it the the the the cost of things becomes so meaningless it doesn’t matter commerce the idea of commerce doesn’t matter. So that would be my challenge. I’ll challenge the challenge and and say that this this very much feels like a very October 2025 era discussion where we’ve seen large parts of the West deindustrialized for a couple of decades and we’re we’re just taking it as an axiomatic truth. Oh well, like 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 and I would argue if I had to to choose my 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, that in
[01:22:01] yeah, in cubits or or even classical bits. Like that that’s the closest I can come up with for a real definition of wealth. But I’d be curious to totally like what’s your best definition of wealth? Uh Okay, I’ll I’ll give like a hot take. I think it’s like Shannon’s law, how much how much information we can process. Um so like our channel capacity to process information is real wealth. It’ll be a measure of information. Yeah. I I agree it’ll be measured in units of information. Time 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 you know, 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
[01:23:02] the Bay Area in two or three years. You guys remember that? In terms of you know, I’ve 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 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 totally, we have you know, I all I speak about and write books about is this world of abundance where we’re demonetizing and democratizing access to food, water, energy, health care, education. It’s the interim state, right? The next two to eight years that I’m most concerned about. What are your thoughts there? I I’m actually I kind of have a very opposite view of Balaji here. Probably maybe because I don’t know, my parents came to the to United States from the USSR literally with $50 per person like in ‘92. So I think
[01:24:01] what we’re seeing with AI is a less 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 like all fighting age dudes. I I think um the likely outcome is that you 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 it was like night and day in terms of risk. Like and that was just moving across like the you know, the Atlantic Ocean into like 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 like very optimistic. It’s the most exciting time to be alive. Yeah, for sure. >> Open AI is not shrinking its head count
[01:25:01] and this is the most advanced AI company. They’re 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 where it makes mistakes and can course correct it and keep it on track. I think that that’s probably going to be a super valuable skill and if anything I think of that comes from experience. My experience with AI tools is that I can keep like half an open eye watching Claude stream its code and know that it’s doing something right or wrong. Whether like a junior engineer has to actually analyze every commit and stuff. Like I think you will see the exact same kind of uh systems that you that you did at the just advent of databases and computers. Like everyone that wasn’t accountant didn’t just like become homeless, they they’re super smart people with college education that are like
[01:26:01] have incredible access to networks that can go and retrain a lot easier than I think everyone else. What’s your take on this, Lee? Well, I think as you if if we have a kind of a breakdown in society like you’re talking about, right? 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 themselves and you can spend those tokens on certain things and very quickly boot up a a local economy. Right? Notice the note the most monetary transactions, 80% are local. You’re buying supplies, you’re you’re getting your haircut, whatever whatever. Not the amount of money, but the number of transactions. And so crypto because of the cost >> example for you to use. Sorry? It’s a strange example for you to use, can you hear me? It is a strange example for for me to use. Um but the so this becomes really powerful to replace and and very This is why I believe that
[01:27:01] we’re moving to we’re going to move to very granular environments where people will create small communities that self support. This supports Balaji’s network state idea. We just need to keep enough to 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 the 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 up. And two years later the central bank went, well, nobody nobody’s even noticed we’re on strike, we might as well come back because and then they cleared all the checks and then where business went back to usual. Right? And so 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. Uh I’m hugely biased cuz cuz totally to me is the most perfect example of the
[01:28:00] person you want to be. Like after he’s done with this podcast, he’s going to go debug some code he’s building. And and we’re discussing like, you know, what does this AI philosopher who’s never done squat over here think of it? It’s like it’s just like your perspective and especially when you come from a foreign country, you know, I had the same conversation with Thomas Peterffy who was born in Hungary in a basement as the Soviet tanks were coming in. And he 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. And 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 totally is doing is actually building the future platform from all of society and it’s going to create the abundance that Peter is talking about. And to me to me your perspective is exactly the right one. And I I’m not even vaguely connected to the ultra perspective. It makes no sense to me, but but everything you just said
[01:29:00] perfectly resonates with me. I mean it’s like it’s exactly the right view. Anyway, that’s my that’s my rant. >> it. Yeah. You know, I I am I am curious about something. We’ve just seen Kazakhstan launch a stablecoin on Solana. Um and how do projects like that I mean does that get you excited? What projects are getting you excited right now about the use of the technology you created? Cuz they’re I mean you must wake up in the morning and say, “Holy that’s amazing what someone just did with Solana.” Um I think crypto’s going through like technology phases similar to the internet. You have the punks create the first version. Then you have 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 like the low-level experiments. So I think like folks if they really really want to kind of be a bit deep in crypto, go check out
[01:30:01] futarchy and decision markets and 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 I think are a really really cool and to me it’s also kind of a physics problem. Can we run a market for every you know, for the top 10 million important decisions that people make to make in the world every day. Just to drill into that. That would be cool, right? Yeah, just to drill into that for a second. What Toly’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. It’s not quite a prediction It’s not just It’s not just DAOs, Salim. It’s No, no, that’s right. It’s not quite a prediction market. It’s literally like if Apple said that, you
[01:31:01] know, I 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 the on this idea that the man that the managers need to do. So I’m willing to increase your value if you don’t if you disagree with me. So this is in fact forces a financial stake for any decision to be made in this in in this DAO, which is different than let’s all vote with our shares and say, “Yeah, we approve this or we do not don’t approve it.” Cuz you literally have to put your money where your mouth is for any decision that that this DAO takes. Amazing. So it’s really really cool idea and they’ve run a couple ICOs that have um have gotten like over 150 million dollars in in commits, which is pretty crazy. Wow. Um I asked you a question, didn’t hear the answer though, but in terms of you
[01:32:01] know, super exciting projects uh that that you’re looking forward to on on Solana. Anything you can share with us? Obviously Solana mobile, so go buy a Seeker if you don’t have one. Uh this is a >> Show Show it to us. Tell us about it. Tell us about the Seeker. Um we have two goals. One I think is uh 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. So to keep people from stealing like Netflix or whatever, phones implement all this technology to to prevent any kind of data snooping and maintain encryption from all the way from the deepest secure enclave to the display. Um so it was just obvious to me, “Oh,
[01:33:00] why don’t we embed hardware wallets directly into the phone?” Um that was the idea. So we can make it as good of a seek 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 is you get so you can have a hot wallet that is both secure and and great for consumers. That was 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 and there’s no it’s it’s just like that’s a 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 you you we can earn I think as good of returns as Google or Apple, but through effectively trading transaction fees that are volume-based. Is there a
[01:34:01] prediction market? Solana a Solana YouTube replacement like, you know, an Odyssey equivalent on Solana kind of? There’s people trying to build crypto-based content creation. Um 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. Um 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 how Yeah, that’s actually the crux of my question. Does Sora 2 or whatever is next change the math or not? Cuz yeah, you’re totally right. >> But like you need like right now it’s not good enough and too expensive, but like you can see it in 5 years, oh this entertainment stream that I’m getting right, the infinite just of like
[01:35:01] of of stream of of entertainment is going to be AI-generated. And that’s kind of a scary thought because I think humans in the loop on what keeps us entertaining is probably an important part of our shared cultural experience, but uh we’ll see what happens. Hm. An amazing future ahead. Gentlemen, I I I’m I’m I’m jealous of your Seeker, Salim. Um I’m moving I’m starting to move all my crypto onto it. And by the way, um uh Toly, my whole community wants to move our NFT collection onto Solana. >> Oh, awesome. >> ping you about that. Awesome. Any closing thoughts, Salim? >> thoughts, and do I get one? Yeah, please. Yeah, go for it. Of course you do. I have one that I think the audience might really care about. So So Toly, uh if the world moves all these transactions to Solana, you know, cuz it’s a thousand times faster than than Ethereum, which is a thousand times slower than Bitcoin. So it’s like it is like the engine for AI. Um and the the fundamental use of the
[01:36:02] Solana token is anti-spam, right? It’s a way to pay for your your transaction to get settled. Is there any way to translate the value of Solana without giving investment advice uh the the transaction volume of Solana to the value of the Solana token? How What’s the math that connects those two things? >> I think the transaction volume is less important and what’s more important is the opportunity cost of being late. So the where the network actually makes more value, like you as a block producer, like you need SOL to stake to be a block producer because if you had no civil resistance, you could create infinite blocks and that would effectively spam the network to death. So you have some civil 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 first to get access to this trade. So the amount that
[01:37:00] they’re willing to pay you is based on the opportunity cost of that of being first. Right. Right. >> And So so has anyone put together a blog or a white paper or something that says like what >> 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 civil mechanism for proof-of-stake is the token itself and you get 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 block tips effectively for including transactions. And it doesn’t actually matter that you’re getting tips in SOL 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 like
[01:38:01] Kelly optimized allocation. So this is ties to you know, the intelligent investor like a very traditional boring approach to do analysis here. Um you can’t do this for Bitcoin because the because the civil 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 um intelligent investor box and do analysis and kind of make your own decisions. All right. >> Alex, want to give you a chance to ask a question, then I I have a question and go around the table uh to ask everybody. I’ll ask a fun question, uh not a serious question. So so Toly, let’s project forward. Say Say humanity does in the end take apart our solar system to build the Dyson swarm uh and we have lot lots of computronium. What What will be the medium of commerce
[01:39:00] in in a Dyson swarm future for humanity? Do you think that uh this is kind of like the central planning communism problem. Is it computationally feasible to solve it uh just mathematically without markets? Um At at relatively high latencies, right? You you’re bound by light speed latencies just like we all are. I think this is this is kind of the question. How many qubits do we have to be able to solve this like massive like linear algebra problem, right? Like can you allocate the resources to everything? And you might not need commerce. Then that might be the end of like capitalism and you might only have it just simply for human entertainment. But um I think like personal freedoms are far more important than efficiency in a lot of ways. So I would like 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.
[01:40:00] I think it this is something. Uh so here’s here’s my question for the group. Go around the horn here. Um you’re you’re going to follow on Alex’s question from earlier, which is what’s your definition of wealth in the future? Saleem? What do you think? Cuz it’s very different looking back historically at the kings and queens and pharaohs. It was, you know, how many how many slaves you owned and your ability to you know sort of have access to agriculture was sort of wealth. What do you think it’s in the future here? I would think it’s a combination of time and health spend. Time and health spend. Okay. Uh Dave? Uh I think it’s a no-brainer that it’s purely tied to compute because you know, I was asking class at MIT the other day like 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
[01:41:01] cash. But in the in the near-term future, compute can be immediately turned into cash. I mean, there there the compute is the universal thing. And and when you have AI agents who are the laborers of the world, the compute your your number of you know, 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 cousin Well, it’s all bounded by the amount of compute you have access to. So that that becomes the 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 All right. All right. Compute your answer. Alex? I think I think I think we’re we’re we’re suffering from the cliche of of the blind philosophers who are touching different parts of the elephant and and all overconfident that the part of the elephant that they’re feeling is what an elephant feels like. So so I I’d argue for a more general
[01:42:01] definition that generalizes all of those definitions. I I would argue real wealth will be measured to first order as future freedom of action, which generalizes compute. It generalizes physical resources. Uh it can be measured in units of bits. So it’s an information theoretic definition, but it’s not just about compute. It it’s about the ability Some might call it empowerment, but that that’s a specialized term to to take the course of action you want in the future, not just in the present. I I knew I should not have Alex said that to me. I I didn’t get it. And but if you go to alexwg.org and you read his his paper on the topic and you you read it closely, you’ll come away saying, “Oh my god, he’s totally right.” Yeah, I I knew I should not I should have gone I was going to say degrees of freedom. Yeah. Degrees of freedom. Yeah, it’s the it’s the same thing. Yeah, you guys I should have gone before Alex went. I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll answer and then I you know, I think it’s the ability to fulfill your desires, um your purpose. And it you know, compute is
[01:43:02] 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 um in that regard. And You’re you’re going to go thinking in scarcity terms. You got to jump forward to abundance terms and think then all that matters is time and health spend. Hello. I I think Saleem, you’re you’re thinking in meat body terms. Think in post-biological terms. Come on. All right. Uh anyway, totally so uh I your your answer here? Degrees of freedom. Degrees of freedom. All right. Also, which is like I think people will never feel satisfied because there’s somebody else that has more degrees of freedom among. So this is like the human condition is always striving for something else. The the hedonic treadmill spins faster and faster, doesn’t it? Yep. Yeah, I think you got that right cuz cuz you can have a lot of compute and still be beaten like a dog every day by some
[01:44:01] government that you know, so you you guys are right. All right, we’ve we’ve reached we’ve reached a conclusion here. Uh Toly, where do people find you um uh in the worldwide web? On X A Yakovenko. Um Yeah, follow me on X. I have hot takes, sometimes boring takes. I don’t know. Love it. Love it. >> yeah. Thank you for the work that you’re doing. Uh thank you for the future that you’re enabling for so many globally around the world. Uh grateful The only time we’re excited in today is tomorrow. And uh it’s going to be a woozy of a decade ahead. Moon shot may So love you all. Thank you for today. 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
[01:45:00] 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 metatrends 10 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 diamandis.com/metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode. [Music]