The Zeitgeist

As the world's first move-to-earn NFT game, Genopets is making it fun and rewarding to live an active lifestyle.

Co-founder and CEO Albert Chen joins Brian Friel to discuss Genopets' unique approach to web3 gaming. 

Show Notes: 

00:56 - What is GenoPets?

01:33 - Tracked by Mobile

03:00 - Geopets similar to Tamagotchi

03:44 - Background / Why build on Solana

06:56 - User demographics

08:33 - Thinking about an in-game economy

10:57 - How to use GenoPets

14:00 - SFTs and Crossovers with other games

15:14 - Sustainability for in-game economy

18:35  - What's next on the Roadmap     

19:38 - Turn-based battles                

20:21 - A builder he admires             

22:02 - Contact info       

Full Transcript: 

Brian (00:05):

Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce our guests today, Albert Chen. Albert is the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Genopets, a revolutionary note, free-to-play NFT game that's on mobile and is already at 300,000 plus users. Albert, welcome to the show.

Albert (00:34):

Hey, thanks Brian. Great to be here. Huge fan of Phantom as well.

Brian (00:38):

Excited to be talking with you as well, big fans of what you guys have been up to. I think there's a lot of folks listening to this podcast who may have heard what Genopets is. They made a scene, a few Genopets flying around on Twitter. But for the uninitiated, can you give us a little overview of who you are and then also what is Genopets?

Albert (00:56):

Yeah, so Genopets is a free-to-play move-to-earn NFT mobile game that makes it fun and rewarding to live an active lifestyle. A Genopet is a digital pet that you own and it evolves and grows as you become more active in life. The steps that you take every day powers your journey through the Genoverse as you explore battle and evolve, and you have the ability to earn and create NFTs while you play it.

Brian (01:22):

That's super cool. And so this is all tied to mobile, is that correct? Essentially you're able to track steps, an end user, how active they are throughout the day and have that influence the actual NFT?

Albert (01:34):

Yeah, exactly. So we are a native mobile app that you can now download from the app store for iOS and the Google Play store for Androids. We have a clear separation of concern in terms of our mobile app and our web app. So we also have a web app, and that's our web 3.0 platform that you can access through the Phantom browser actually. We made it mobile first so it's compatible on mobile devices as well as your desktop. These two experiences are separated for good reason. The mobile game experience is targeted towards any gamers and/or any fitness fanatic because it's very easy to download and just get started.

(02:12):

Once you download the app, you can summon a Genopet by answering a survey. Then once you get your Genopet, you can start leveling up and evolving it and caring for it. It's not until you want to really explore the other side, the NFT side of the game that you have to create a wallet, connect your account on our web app, and you can buy a Habitat and do crafting. We consider web 3.0 an expansion pack to the mobile game experience.

Brian (02:37):

I love the phrasing of that. It reminds me a lot of something like a Tamagotchi if you were around in the '90s like that long ago, or Pokemon kind of being tied in with this pet that can do battles, but you have to care for it and it's reflective of you and you kind of develop your own personal relationship and. I think that makes a lot of sense to kind of tie on the web 3.0 NFT component as an added on bonus to that.

Albert (03:01):

Yeah, absolutely. It's funny that you mentioned Tamagotchi because the first phase of our game loop, we literally internally call it the Tamagotchi loop because it's about growing your pet, caring for it, and then when we come out with Augmentation, you can customize your pet to look however you want. So that completes a whole game loop of what we call the Tamagotchi loop.

Brian (03:20):

That's super cool. You mentioned kind of the early days there, you guys calling it the Tamagotchi loop early on. I'm curious to hear maybe a little more before we dive into Genopets about your background specifically. You have a really unique framing of, you have this web 2.0-like game with a web 3.0 expansion pack. What is your background specifically and what led you to want to build a game in this way? And then why also did you choose Solana?

Albert (03:44):

Me personally, I've been a web developer since, I mean as early as 1999. Back then I was just building fun web experiences. I guess back then you could call it web 1.0. We wrote Perl scripts and that ran on websites that allowed us to build discussion boards and guess books and such. That's where I really came from. And then I started doing consumer products such as houseware goods. There was a brand that my co-founder, Ben and I, created called Unbrands. It was a line of products that allow you to hang anything on the wall anywhere without the damaging your wall. So we did that and we had a whole eCommerce layer to it, and this was in the early 2010s. And because of that, we've been working together for over a decade now and got into blockchain together in 2017.

(04:32):

One of our dreams was to solve this crisis that we see in the next 50 years of humanity, which is a lot of jobs that used to have value are slowly taken over by Ai and we want to be able to allow people to earn passive income through one way or another.

(04:50):

When we discovered blockchain, we thought it was a really good way of unlocking that. So in 2018 we had a project on the EOS blockchain called GeneOs. GeneOS was a decentralized health data marketplace. Essentially we wanted to create this rental marketplace for health data that allows people to monetize it and rent it to pharmaceutical companies or researchers that needed. We won the EOS Global Hackathon in 2018.

(05:16):

What ended up happening was we realized that that model was too top down instead of bottom up. There wasn't a lot of demand for this kind of data, at least not now in the technology for it. It doesn't exist yet, it requires a lot of progress and zero knowledge, machine learning and stuff. So we closed that down in 2020. And Ben, my co-founder, had the idea that the health data doesn't have to be boring, it can be something fun. What if it was represented as a pet? And back then we originally, our idea was that your health data would be an NFT and your NFT, it was a more boring version of NFT where your NFT would just be metadata on what your health records look like. But it was his idea that we can make that health record look like an actual pet that evolves as you become healthier.

(06:06):

So that was a breakthrough. And in 2021 we decided to relaunch the project, and this time on Solana because when we were evaluating different blockchains in the spring and summer of 2021, Solana was just coming up and I was very impressed with the TPS and the community that was growing behind it at the time. And to this day, I still think it's one of the biggest successes in Layer 1 history.

Brian (06:28):

That's so cool. That framing too of using health data and making it actually fun and something that turning it from this kind of dull dead thing that you don't care about to now it's represented as this ever evolving pet that you have an emotional attachment to, you care about, you want to continue to nurture that. That's a really cool framing. I love that.

(06:47):

I guess turning back to Genopets now, can you give us a sense of who your users are, maybe where they're distributed in the world?

Albert (06:55):

Yeah, we have a pretty global audience. Everyone around the world, pretty much every country you can think of. But our largest communities are in Japan, US, France, Russia, and India actually. This is just by the amount of activity that happens in our Discord. We have a fairly large Discord community by our players. The demographics is interesting. When we did a survey a few months ago, 70% of our players did not have any prior crypto experience before coming onto our platform. So we really think that web 3.0 gaming is going to be the springboard to get people onboarded into web 3.0.

Brian (07:32):

Oh, wow.

Albert (07:33):

We call it a Trojan horse of web 3.0.

Brian (07:35):

Yeah, I've definitely heard that Trojan Horse analogy before. That's pretty wild. 72%?

Albert (07:41):

70%. Every time that we measure this metric, it's actually going up. So there's a metric that we measure internally, which is what percentage of our players have never touched the blockchain while playing Genopets. And right now it's 80% as of last week.

Brian (07:55):

Wow, that's wild. I'm curious. You have this global audience across a number of different countries. I'd say we see as well in Phantom, like the US, certain parts of EU and certain parts of Asia as well are like there's some fairly crypto native communities there. But then as you're expanding that global reach, it doesn't surprise me that you're saying almost 70 to 80% of folks aren't touching blockchains. How do you think about that when you're designing a game that has these economic components as well? I mean, I know that you guys are free-to-play. Is that a big factor into that decision making and how do you kind of think high level about creating an in-game economy?

Albert (08:33):

From the very beginning, free-to-play has been one of the key pillars of how we wanted to build this economy. The thinking is that there's a whole other meta game inside of Genopets that's optional for the player, and that's the ability to become a merchant in this world. What that means is when you're playing the mobile Genopets' game, you don't have to think about how your items are received. If you want to level up your pet a little faster or you want that really cool weapon or really cool body part that we call Augment, you can just buy it directly on the mobile app. And on the other side of that transaction will be the merchant class player that cares a little bit more about the earning aspect of the game that are a little more crypto savvy. They can then log into our web 3.0 portal, connect their phantom wallet, buy a Habitat, and start crafting all kinds of items that people can use in the game.

(09:30):

So we like to call this the seller central, as an Amazon, the seller central of our game experience. So you have the demand side of the economy, which is made up of all players in the world, the same as any free-to-play game. And then you have the supply side, which in traditional gaming would be the game publisher, but here it's a little different, right? So we have the players create items for other players to consume and we take a fee in that.

(10:00):

The idea is that when you start enabling that, then you kind of get into a flywheel where if more people play, then more people will want to craft items and then there will be more content for people to consume and drives the other side of economy and you have this network effect that happens. Now, the end goal here is that through the governance of the actual game itself, the community can create new items themselves with stats that people vote on and move them into the game and complete this entire loop and allow this ecosystem to grow by itself.

Brian (10:31):

That's super cool. You mentioned a couple terms in there, I just want to hit on real quick. You mentioned crafting, which I feel like is this whole extra element to the game. There's Habitats as well. Habitats though being distinct NFTs separate from your actual Genopets for myself and also for folks listening as an end user, if I wanted to come and check out Genopets today, what should I be going to first? How do I kind of orient myself in this world where there's all these different components?

Albert (10:57):

Your Genopet is the main character that you use to play this game. It does not have to be an NFT. If you want, you can just download the app and you can create a Genopet. Later on, we will enable the ability to mint these Genopets as NFTs on chain after it reaches a certain level.

(11:14):

But if you want to go one step further into the game economy, the next step is looking at Habitats. So what Habitats are, they are NFTs where your Genopets can live in. But its main ability is the ability to mint SFTs and NFTs. It can convert the energy that you gain by walking in the game into what we call our KI token. The KI token is the main utility token in our ecosystem that drives everything.

(11:42):

So this mechanic is already out on Mainnet. We have tens of thousands of people using these on chain programs every day. What's coming in the next few weeks is the crafting part of it. So right now your Habitats can refine crystals every day, and these are building blocks of the game. Eventually these crystals can be combined to create Augments for your pet or toys or energy boosts, and these are items that you must have a Habitat in order to create.

(12:11):

We've created this program, an on chain program, that utilizes randomness to create what we call on chain loot box system. So every time you craft it, we have a bunch of recipes. The discovery of the recipe components is fun in itself, but the main mechanic that we're using here is that every time you craft, there's a different possibility of what item you end up getting. You can get a rare item or a common item or an uncommon item. It's almost like a digital booster pack. So components or ingredients in, item out. That's what crafting is. And then the end item, you can use endgame for energy boosts or you can use it to customize your Genopet, change your color of your Genopet, or add attributes, add attacks or defenses, what we call moves when we eventually launch battle.

Brian (12:59):

That's super cool. And then all these that you just mentioned, you mentioned the energy boosts, a lot of these are SFTs on Solana today?

Albert (13:06):

That's correct, yeah. So the only NFTs that we have right now are Genopets and Habitats, and that's because they're all unique. Items are SFTs because they are semi-unique, let's say. So like earth crystals for example, one earth crystal should not be different from another earth crystal. So to save for a variety of reasons, engineering reasons, enforcement of training fees and all of that, we prefer and we decided to build all of these items as SFTs and it's been working very well for us.

Brian (13:39):

That's super cool. I'm curious, and this might be getting too much into sharing deep roadmap stuff, but given that these things are on chain, they're SFTs, there's a world in which they could compose with other programs outside of Genopets, have you guys thought about that as well? Maybe having crossovers with other games or other DeFi platforms of some kind?

Albert (14:00):

Oh yeah, absolutely. It's a huge part of why we even built this economy on chain, right? Without the composability aspect of it, there is no point. We could just use a private database. Right now we are in talks with some DeFi protocols. I mean the whole SFT trading platform was built on Serum with the help of Magic Eden. So Magic Eden composes Serum where our SFTs are trading. And because they are SFTs, they can be probably put into an AMM a lot easier and you can probably do some kind of staking with it. So that's all future roadmap stuff and we're going to see where it goes. But yes, absolutely. Composability. I know it's something that everybody says, but it is definitely a huge part of what we do.

Brian (14:43):

Yeah, that's super cool. Exciting to think that you guys are thinking along those lines as well. I guess switching back, you mentioned KI token as well. We hit on it briefly with the fact that you guys are free-to-play, but do you have any thoughts on maybe more broadly for if there's a game developer listening to this, any sort of principles you're keeping in mind for when you're developing kind of a sustainable in-game economy? We've seen a few examples with Stepn that gain massive adoption quickly and then fizzle out. I'm curious, did you guys have any kind of guiding principles that guide you on this journey?

Albert (15:15):

So I think sustainable at game economy is something that everyone's trying to figure out and nobody has really been able to get it correct yet. Our high level vision is what I was describing earlier. If you make it so that the economy is based on people trading with one another instead of the money being paid in by newcomers into the ecosystem, then it can be more sustainable. However, it's not as simple as saying just removing growth from the equation and all is good. You still need growth, but it has to be sustainable in a way that growth contributes to the game economy in a slow but steady manner.

(15:53):

So one of the things that we designed in the very beginning is that if you want to earn KI tokens, you have to pay into the economy somehow. So this whole concept of free-to-play to earn doesn't really exist in the sense that you can earn for free. You can play for free, but if you want to earn, then you have to invest in either a Habitat or someone has to terraform, that's the word we use for create. Someone has to create a Habitat for you to rent and convert your energy into KI tokens. So that's number one, which is you always have to have some kind of pay in.

(16:29):

The second part is making sure that the growth is sustainable. So we constantly measure our emissions versus burn. We've been doing a decent job at it. I think we are still under, in terms of the net KI emitted in the last two months. So we've been live, our earning part of the game has been live for two months now. We've had some ups and downs. We went through a three week period where it was a very high net emissions. Then we started changing some rules around.

(16:57):

One of the biggest rule changes that we made was that level 1 pets cannot earn as much energy as let's say a level 22 pet. Before, it was already the case, but the difference wasn't that high. And that meant that you didn't have to put in that much work to start earning the maximum amount, which was not sustainable. Once we've changed that, our emission schedule decreased quite significantly and it's looking fairly healthy. But as I said earlier, you can't just take growth out of the equation. We do have to still grow users. We still have to introduce crafting to make sure that there's demand for the content. And at the end of the day, if you have growing demand for content, then it would be sustainable in the long term.

Brian (17:40):

It's such a tricky problem that's above my head. It's all the gig of brains are figuring out the engineering, the economy around this. But it's really exciting that you guys are already seeing this kind of organic growth and excitement around this. I think it makes a ton of sense.

Albert (17:53):

Yeah. And it's super hard. Everything is hard mode right now because we're in deep winter, so no one's really speculating. No one's trying to buy thousands of dollars in NFTs thinking they'll make their money back in a few months. So you really have to get the fundamentals correct. Yeah, it's very different from Axie Infinity or a Stepn, the times have changed.

Brian (18:14):

Yeah, yeah. You guys get a chance to lay the right foundation though in the bear market. There's been many stories of that, even Solana being one of them, that generational crypto companies are built in the bear market.

(18:26):

I guess you hit on it a little bit with some experiments you guys are thinking around composability. Is there anything else that you can share with us for what's next on your guys' roadmap?

Albert (18:35):

Yeah, so like I mentioned earlier, I think on chain crafting is going to be a huge one. Once on chain crafting is out, there's a lot of composability elements that you can create just on chain. We'll leave that up to the creativity of the community. That's the biggest one because we needed to start completing our Tamagotchi loop, which ends with augmentation. Augmentation is when you craft an item that has a body part, you can switch out the body part of your pet and immediately reflect on chain and end game. So that's the biggest thing that's going to happen in the next two, three months. And then after that it's battle. So we're going to allow people to... I mean, once you start customizing your pet and your pet looks super cool, what's next? You obviously want to compete with other people. That will be our battle loop. The battle loop is something that we really look forward to because that will complete the second phase of our game, and that is likely when we will start ungating the game for the rest of the world.

Brian (19:32):

Is this battle loop that you're foreshadowing here, is this turn-based battle? Or is this more live action pet battles?

Albert (19:38):

It's turn-based battle. You can think of it as small mini games, reaction games, and then it's partly skilled based and then partly attribute based. So the stronger a pet is, the easier it is for them to win and battle. And there's going to be elemental parts of it as well so there's some strategy involved.

Brian (19:57):

I love it. Young gamer me right now is itching to get my hands on some Genopets right now, so we'll have to follow after the show on that.

Albert (20:05):

Yeah, that would be awesome.

Brian (20:06):

Well, Albert, this has been an awesome discussion. Really appreciate you coming on and sharing the vision of Genopets and what you guys have all been up to. One closing question we always ask all our guests, and I want to know from you as well, is who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Albert (20:21):

Yeah, so that's a great question because there's so many great builders in Solana, but there's one guy that I've worked with in the past for our KI token launch actually that I greatly admire, and that's Noah Prince from Strata Protocol. I just think he has a giga brain that's able to figure out one of the hardest things in the token launch ecosystem. And he did it so well and I haven't seen a protocol that's done it better since then. And when we worked together, there were some small bugs that we had when we were using their protocol and he just hopped on it right away and within a few hours fixed everything, submitted a pull request, and then we were able to pull from that and launch our KI token pretty quickly. So I got to say it's him.

Brian (21:05):

Oh, that's awesome. So you guys used Strata actually to launch KI?

Albert (21:08):

Yeah. Yeah, we launched KI on Strata. It was an interesting one because you never know what's going to happen. It was a three day sale. And the first two days there were almost no volume and you're like, "Ugh, God, we're not going to sell out. This is bad." And it turns out every, it's like a game of chicken. Everyone's just waiting. And as soon as somebody start buying, we had almost 2 million sold in a few hours. It's a crazy journey.

Brian (21:32):

Yeah. Market wide incentives like that happening in real time, it's pretty cool to see. And I totally echo the sentiment around him as well. I think he goes by @redacted_noah on Twitter. He was actually paramount to work with me when we were first getting SFT support in Phantom actually earlier this year as well.

Albert (21:48):

Oh, awesome. I didn't know that. That's fantastic.

Brian (21:51):

He's everywhere at once. We'll have to tag him on Twitter to let him know that. Shout out.

Albert (21:56):

Awesome. Yeah.

Brian (21:57):

Well, Albert, this has been awesome. Really appreciate you coming on. Where can folks go to learn more about Genopets?

Albert (22:02):

Yeah, they can go on our website, genopets.me or follow our Twitter, @Genopets, and they can get all the information there.

Brian (22:10):

Awesome. Love it. Albert Chen, founder, CEO, CTO of Genopets, thanks for coming on.

Albert (22:15):

Thanks Brian. That was fun.

Jonas Hahn, an established game developer who won the Phantom Track in the Solana Summer Camp Hackathon joins Brian Friel to talk about web3 gaming and his work Combining Unity and Solana with his project SolPlay.

Show Notes:

00:48 What is Solplay?             

02:16  What are Deep Links?                              

03:41  What was what attracted you first to Solana?

05:13  What is the state of gaming in Solana? 

06:17   Exciting things in crypto    

07:56  Tooling or developing infrastructure to make a breakthrough game

10:04 WebGL for building           

11:08 Future projects in the space 

12:12  Is Mobile the future of Crypto Gamin?

13:08   Advice to devs new to Web 3  

14:25  A builder he admires     

Links:

Unity-Solana SDK that provides a single interface for interacting with Phantom deeplinks and extension from a Unity environment.

Example game built with Phantom, Unity, and WebGL

Video tutorials for building Unity games with Phantom: 

Full Transcript:

Brian (00:05):

Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce our guests today. Jonas Hahn. Jonas is an established game developer who has won the most recent Phantom Track in the Solana Summer Camp Hackathon for his work with Combining Unity and Solana with his project SolPlay. Jonas, welcome to the show.

Jonas (00:33):

Hello. Super nice. Thank you for having me.

Brian (00:35):

We're super excited to chat with you today. We love the work that you've been doing, pioneering game development between Unity and Solana. I'd love to start off, what is SolPlay? What have you been working on these past few months?

Jonas (00:48):

Yeah, SolPlay is just a name I came up with when I started working on Solana games. Because everything needs a name and I heard everything in the ecosystem should be called something with Sol, so I called it SolPlay. And yeah, what's behind it is I started working on games with Solana. I started when I joined the Hacker House in Prague. And I already had a little app on my phone and I had a wallet, and first I wanted to make a Solana Pay where you can send Solana to other people. So I used the Solan Art Wallet and implemented that but then Solana Pay came out and I kind of stopped this and went back to games.

(01:26):

And then in Prague, I met a few other people and we started building a game, it's called World of Qro, and for that we built connection where we communicate with JavaScript directly from Unity. So we sent messages to the React app and then at some point I wanted to have it on mobile as well and that didn't work, that workflow. And then I was investigating how it could be done and then I wanted to build a deep link connection to a wallet and was trying to build my own wallet. And then Phantom came finally out, was there Deeplinks and I was super excited about it and immediately went on it and then I even noticed that there was a prize for it, so it was even more exciting.

Brian (02:03):

Yeah, yeah it's good timing, right? Then for those who don't know, can you walk people through maybe high level, what are Deeplinks and how has this enabled you to build a connection. Really one of the first Unity games that's on Solana.

Jonas (02:16):

The good thing about Deeplinks is like usually you have a browser extension or something, but of course on mobile you don't have that. But a mobile, different apps can communicate between each other using application links. And what the Deeplink does, it creates a secure connection using the 25-1-9 thing.

Brian (02:36):

Yeah, yeah. X25519 key pair. Yeah, that's not as important. But yeah.

Jonas (02:41):

So it has a secure connection and then if you want to do a transaction in the game, for example, send Solana somewhere or MinTON NFT, you just create the transaction in the app and then you send it over to Phantom. Phantom signs it for you, and then you get the signature back and it says, of course a big benefit that people who play the game don't need to write down the key phrase or something, but they can immediately use the wallet that they already have. So I think no one can be bothered writing down these words, and I think it's very accessible, a good feature.

Brian (03:11):

I couldn't agree more. We're super excited about its potential to break crypto out of this pure browser environment. We know with extensions now you can be doing this in mobile applications, you can be doing these gaming applications. You mentioned that you got started with this originally at Hacker houses, you visit Prague, you kind of got into the Solana ecosystem. What was it that first attracted you to Solana? You're a game developer yourself, you spent a lot of time in Unity. What is it that first caught your eye about Solana in particular?

Jonas (03:42):

So the thing is, I tried making crypto games for 10 years ago already. But it just wasn't possible, I had a game where people could play against each other in a tower defense game. And then I tried something with PayPal and something with a Bitcoin, but nothing worked. And then two years ago I had started trying a game called Township from Gala Games, and they were using Ethereum and I got a little fountain, like an NFT. That was my first interaction with these NFTs. And then I tried to sell it later. It was because it was worth 0.5 Eth. But then I noticed I had to mint it from this side chain, and then it was only Ethereum and I paid $60 to get it off there. And then I had to pay another $60 to list it on OpenSea, and all that stuff was very tedious.

(04:24):

And then I was looking off their other blockchains and at some point I noticed that there's Solana where transactions don't cost anything and the transaction doesn't take minutes or seconds, but it's almost immediately, at least if you just wait for it to be confirmed. And then for a game, it just is necessary that transactions go fast, otherwise it just doesn't make sense. You can't wait a minute for a transaction and that's why Solana is the obvious choice. It doesn't cost anything and is super fast. Short answer.

Brian (04:54):

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think there's a really natural pairing there. If you could summarize for developers who maybe are familiar with building Unity games but maybe aren't as familiar with Solana, what is kind of the state of gaming in your opinion on Solana? Both maybe from the games that are out there, but also as a developer, you know what tools you have at your disposal right now to start building?

Jonas (05:14):

It's super interesting because everything is still super early. There are a few games which raised a lot of money like last year or two years ago. And they are building their own things, but there's a lot of games coming up from indie developers and small teams and everyone is trying to build their own things. And that's why I also want to try to make it easier for people. I started making some YouTube videos where I explain Solana stuff and I started now working on the Unity SDK and also the Phantom Deeplinks. They are also now in the Unity SDK from the people from Garbles who build it and lots of stuff is coming, many little games and I am in contact with some and trying to support them.

Brian (05:57):

That's awesome. What would you say is the big selling point for game developers who are interested in Web3 in general. SolPlay maybe we can take that as an example. You're able to use your NFTs in the game, you're able to save your high scores to a blockchain, but what is it that excites you the most about combining both the gaming world and the crypto world?

Jonas (06:17):

Yeah, I've been in the gaming world for a long time already. It's a very competitive market and I'm super excited about the whole blockchain thing because now finally you can build a game again, which isn't reliable on some service that is online. You have your own backend, you don't need the backend anymore. I mean, you still use Solana as a backend. You don't need a payment provider anymore because all you need to do is you just make a transaction which sent you some SOL or the token or whatever you want.

(06:45):

And what's also super exciting is, also for games companies I think, is that they can save the 30% fees in the stores. On web, it's one hand, but of course everyone wants to be on mobile because everyone uses mobile phones and these 30% fees are very important in the very competitive mobile games market, which we currently have. And what I'm also excited about is that it will probably spawn whole new kinds of games. I think the big game hasn't been spawned yet, the big crypto game, but it will probably be there somewhere and will probably be something new that we haven't seen before.

Brian (07:17):

Yeah, I agree. It's such an interesting paradigm, having this open backend that other people can plug into and you have tokens that potentially could be mutable and your interactions on the chain also maybe impact what your experience in the game is. I couldn't agree more that I think we don't quite know what the end state of the is, but I'd like those two examples you gave, especially the one around the 30% payment tax that most developers in crypto know all too well, especially if you're building mobile games. You mentioned that the space is early. We're still waiting for that kind of real breakthrough game. In your opinion, is there any tooling or developer infrastructure that needs to happen before we can have that breakthrough game?

Jonas (07:57):

It would be good if most stuff is open source. Solana is very good at that already. Many things are open source, but what's missing is targeting the traditional game developers. For example, go to the A MAZE conference in Berlin, which has crazy indie games, or go to the Unite Conference from Unity and try to get the people there. Because many developers I talk to, they still think it's a scam. It doesn't really make sense. It's super expensive, it's low and there are no standards yet where I'm not sure if it's good or bad. It kind of is this open stage still where you can do whatever you want. And also it's nice that there's not this big monopoly of a company who organizes everything. Maybe you have to use Google and now for Solana you can use Phantom software, all wallets you can use Fractal, has a nice API and very many opportunities and a Saga phone of course, if this happens, that will be also amazing if you have a crypto phone that you can use.

Brian (08:57):

Yeah, I don't think it's a matter of if, I think it's a matter of when. And we'll be releasing this episode shortly before Break Point. I know that Phantom and then also Solana have some great news to share around the progress around Saga phone. I couldn't agree more that that will just continue to break down the barriers and make this a lot easier.

Jonas (09:14):

One more thing about that topic is that there needs to be some clarity about regulation about somehow. For example, if I mint an NFT, I still have no idea how I pay taxes on that.

Brian (09:24):

Right?

Jonas (09:25):

Or if someone sends me a USDC token, what is it? It's an income. What is staking? What do I do with the tokens I get? And if that is all cleared out at some point, which will eventually happen in the next one or two years, then more big companies will also start.

Brian (09:40):

Yeah, the fact that this is a global phenomenon doesn't make this any easier too. You and I'm in the United States as a recording, you're in Germany. Interactions between the two of us definitely don't make it any easier and I would not want to be a crypto accountant having to think through all of these things right now. So all this is really awesome. If you haven't checked out SolPlay, I would definitely recommend checking it out. It's a great game. If I'm not mistaken, you've also used WebGL in some aspects of this as well, is that right?

Jonas (10:05):

Yeah, it's cross platform. So I'm building an example game. Open source example game, which also has these Deeplinks in it and now it also has a token swap using the Orca tools and Metaplex for minting NFTs. And yeah, it's mostly an example game, but it also has this slipping mechanic where you can jump around and collect points and at some point I want to put in that you can give out token and rewards, so make it play to earn and then have some staking in it as well. So I basically want to make a suite where everything is in that you need to build a game.

Brian (10:37):

And then as part of this too, you know, mentioned your work. You've done great open source work around the Unity SDK, integrating Phantom Deeplinks that in particular you also have a great YouTube channel where you go in depth since really long tutorials on actually bringing up your IDE and showing this is how I built the game. Walking through all the steps of that. Taking all that into consideration, you've built these games, you have these SDK tooling, and then you've also gone on the developer education front. What are you most excited looking forward in spending your next couple months in the Solana gaming space?

Jonas (11:09):

I want to build the perfect example game, basically. Where everything is in and which is actually also fun to play. Put it on all platforms. It's so difficult to get into the iOS store. You wouldn't believe I get like six, seven points every time I submit. And they definitely leave minting NFTs within their purchases I think. So that's one of the things I want to build next. And then just to get this game on all platforms, it's biggest challenge and goal for the next months. It's already in the Play Store, but on iOS it's definitely harder.

Brian (11:43):

Even us at Phantom building a crypto wallet, we've run into kind of unexplainable headaches with the App Store review process sometime. It's definitely a very opaque process. Definitely resonate with that. You've spoken a lot about cross platform and your game being a platform as well. Is there any one platform in particular you're most excited about for Web3 gaming looking ahead? You mentioned everyone has a mobile phone that in particular seems pretty compelling, but do you think mobile will be the first explosive growth phase of crypto gaming or what are your opinions on that?

Jonas (12:13):

Yeah, I think it will probably be mobile and I think you can't ignore iOS, just too many people have iOS. That's why I'm so amazed that everything works for Phantom on all platforms the same. But there could be... Unity can theoretically export to all platforms. So theoretically we could make a switch game, which facilitates Solana somehow. I don't think there's a phantom bullet for Switch yet, but theoretically it could be on all platforms. That would be really nice.

Brian (12:38):

I would love that. Yeah, Phantom on One Switch I think is going to be the next catchphrase that catches fire on Twitter here. I love that.

Jonas (12:45):

Exactly.

Brian (12:46):

This is awesome. Jonas, if you were having to talk to a Web3 developer today who's listen to this, they're interested in this, they have some game experience, but they're maybe not sure how to best to get involved with the Solana gaming space. What would you recommend is the first step for a new dev coming into this? To learn the ropes of Solana game development and to get involved with potentially a project or some direction and connecting with other devs in the space?

Jonas (13:11):

There are quite a few good YouTube channels to learn the basics of Solana, which you probably should learn first. The channel of Solandy and Josh's DevBox and my YouTube channel of course as well. Although I recently heard that tutorials are still a bit too detailed and complicated, but I'm trying to get better on that definitely. And then yeah, I would check out some of the games that are already there. There are a bunch of games on Fractal, for example, that you can try out and then you can already experience a little bit with wallets. And then I would check out the Solana Unity SDK or my example game and then just try it out, see how it feels, deploy it on Android, try to mint an NFT, do some transactions from it in Unity. And I think then people will already get hooked and want to do more of it, I hope

Brian (13:57):

Yeah, I love it. We'll drop some links to all those that you just referenced in the show notes for folks as well. Jonas, this has been awesome. We loved hearing your story of how, you know, got involved with Solana and then we couldn't agree more that the future of gaming's really exciting on Solana. Phantom wants to be a big part of that, enabling developers to build cross-platform and make it just easy for folks. One closing question we always ask all of our guests, and I'd love to hear your take on this as well, is who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Jonas (14:27):

Oh, there are actually quite a few. I ran into a few of them at the Stockholm Hacker House and especially Jonathan Singh, Steven Laver, Steven Luscher, and they're just all amazing. Everyone actually who really built on Solana, the team, they're super amazing. I mean, not everyone in the NFT communities is always super amazing, but the people who really work on it are super nice. And then of course Anatoly, which I met in Miami and he's just such a nice, humble, genius person. It's really nice meeting him.

Brian (14:59):

Yeah, I agree. I think he really set the tone for kind of the culture of the developer community here on Solana. You mentioned some other Solana Labs employees as well, Steven Luscher, Steven Laver, and those guys, if you're not familiar with them, they're basically savants across all the open source initiatives. They're leading it all. They're doing the commits, they're doing the code reviews, the PR's, they're saying the strategic direction, they're speaking on stage. I don't know where Solana finds all these guys, but it's a really cool community to be part of.

Jonas (15:26):

It's crazy. It's so good what they're building with a mobile wallet now, it's so nice.

Brian (15:32):

I agree. Awesome. Well, Jonas, thank you so much. Congratulations again on winning the Phantom Deeplinks Track for the Solana Summer Camp Hackathon. We're really excited to see where you go from here and for the future of free gaming on Solana.

Jonas (15:44):

Thank you so much.

Episode Notes:

Solana Spaces founder and CEO Vibhu Norby sits down with Brian Friel to talk about creating crypto’s first interactive retail experience that aims to onboard the next wave of users to web3.

Show Notes:

Brian Friel (00:06):

Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist. The show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers for pushing the Web3 space. I'm Brian Friel, Developer Relations at Phantom. I'm super excited to introduce our guest, Vibhu Norby. Vibhu is The founder and CEO of Solana Spaces. The first in real life crypto retail experience. Vibhu, welcome to the show.

Vibhu Norby (00:27):

Thanks Brian.

Brian Friel (00:28):

Real excited to talk to you today. I think of all our guests, you have some of the most unique backgrounds of somebody who's now full-time in crypto. If you don't mind, could you walk us through a little bit about who you are and your journey to what is now launching Solana Spaces?

Vibhu Norby (00:41):

Yeah, I definitely do. Our team is a different type of team from what you mostly see. I used to be a respectable tech entrepreneur raising VC from tier one firms and building cool companies, writing code for Google. And then sometime over the last two years, like everybody else, I became a degenerate crypto guy. Pretty much my whole life, I have been writing code since I was a kid, and my first job was at Roblox. Funnily enough, I built their collectable system back in 2009.

Brian Friel (01:08):

Wow.

Vibhu Norby (01:08):

This was a long time ago.

Brian Friel (01:09):

Sneak peak to NFTs.

Vibhu Norby (01:11):

Yeah. I worked at MySpace. My big break came when I joined a startup called Nest, which was the smart learning thermostat company that Google acquired while I was there, and I was still writing code there, but I kind of got interested in what we were doing with retail. I got exposed to a couple of projects that the company Google was doing to build out an experience inside a Best Buy and Target an Apple stores and so on. And I fell in love with the idea of building a physical store for hardware products.

Vibhu Norby (01:43):

So I left Google with a bunch of other people, and directly prior to Solana Spaces for seven years, I built this national retail chain called B8ta. We opened stores all over the country. Japan, Middle East, at some point we owned Toys R Us for a good six months, which was a very interesting project.

Vibhu Norby (02:00):

And then a lot of people during Covid started getting interested in crypto. First Ethereum and then Solana, and at some point B8ta, this was a physical retailer that was super affected by Covid. So I started thinking about what I want to do next and I was pretty convinced that I want to get into this space. And I tossed around a bunch of software ideas. I'm not really, by my nature, a physical retail person, but by chance, met Raj in November last year. Although we had talked a long time prior to that, at that moment we connected around building a IRL Solana store. Both thought it was an interesting enough and weird idea that had a very small chance of being important, and those are kind of the best ideas to build. So between November and March we figured out a deal with the Solana Foundation and created Solana Spaces.

Brian Friel (02:53):

That's awesome. If I'm not mistaken, it looks like you guys are already live in New York. You're planning a store in Miami, is that correct?

Vibhu Norby (03:00):

Yeah. We opened Solana Spaces at Hudson Yards at the end of July and that was our first store, and the next location opens the first or second week of October in Miami. And these are two very different spaces. The first one is a 1500 square foot retail space, very much a store in a major shopping mall. The location in Miami, we call the Solana Embassy, because it is the craziest store on planet Earth I believe. It is a store, it's a coworking lounge, it's a nightclub, it's the best events venue in Wynwood, and it's all dedicated to teaching people about Solana.

Brian Friel (03:38):

That's awesome. So like me as an end user, let's say I was walking through Hudson Yards, I see this store, can you paint a picture and walk us through what can I expect when I walk into one of these stores?

Vibhu Norby (03:48):

The store is modeled around being your first crypto friend. That was how we designed it. And we asked for ourselves, how do people get crypto pilled in the first place? And pretty much everyone will share a story of someone in their life or someone they knew that got them a Phantom wallet and gave them NFT or gave them some tokens. So we wanted to build that kind of experience for people that maybe don't have a crypto friend yet.

Vibhu Norby (04:13):

So when you walk in, first of all, the space looks unlike anything you've seen in a typical shopping center because it's full of NFT artwork. And we have this crazy immersion screen that shows you what's happening on Solana in real time. And then we've got amazing merch products everywhere. So it's got this stunning welcoming look. And when you come in, there's two paths you take.

Vibhu Norby (04:37):

One path is, you can come and learn about how blockchains work, if you have more time. If you have less time, which is the average person, your first step is going into the Phantom Seed Phrase booth, which is a privacy pod where in three minutes you learn about how to keep your seed phrase safe and you get little cards you can write it down on, and then we drop you a PO App for completing that. And after you exit the seed phrase booth, you can walk around the store and scan your phone at all these different tutorial displays, and each one of those will open the DApp Browser in Phantom Mobile, and walk you through a tutorial about Orca, about Step'n, about MetaPlex, about Degenerate Ape Academy, about Form Function, or any number of our other partners. And once you've completed those learning materials, we give you another NFT. It's all gas list, no transaction fees.

Vibhu Norby (05:30):

Once you've collected enough of those badges, you show our store ambassador and we'll give you USDC. So basically we are paying people to learn about crypto in the store. And this is literally a micro version of what a good friend is supposed to do, right? Give you their wallet, give you some NFTs, give you some money.

Brian Friel (05:49):

Right.

Vibhu Norby (05:50):

And of course if you want to, if you're a degenerate like me, you can also spend that money immediately on the merch in the store.

Brian Friel (05:56):

The shoes. I want the Solana shoes. I see those on Twitter and I'm pretty jealous.

Vibhu Norby (06:01):

Yeah. We've got the Solana shoes, we've got the best socks in crypto, we've got hats and designer wear. And everything in the store is something that we designed and is exclusively available there, so you can only get it in the store. So it's kind of worth your time to come out of your way and try this.

Brian Friel (06:17):

That's super cool. And was there anything in particular from your experience founding B8ta, that impacted this vision that you had for Solana stores?

Vibhu Norby (06:24):

Yeah. If you know what we kind of did at B8ta, this is in many ways a direct descendant. It's a more fleshed out version of some of the big ideas that we were on to. B8ta was a... and my team hates that I'm always talking about it, but it was important part of my life. I started it when I was 27 and kind of grew up with it. We raised a hundred million dollars of venture capital, we opened stores everywhere and we had quite a large team and made a big impact on industry. We were the National Retail Federations retailer of the year. And the thing that made B8ta very innovative at the time was we had re-engineered the store business model to basically run auctions on top of space, like physical space, and we'd sell the space to the highest bidder. And so it was a more accessible way for newer brands to enter into a store.

Vibhu Norby (07:07):

And what we did here was we fixed a bunch of the things that we didn't like about that model, and benefit from everything from the rewards layer that crypto can offer companies to some very, very wild things that we're doing that we have not announced yet that we will soon. But in fact, the whole business model of this company we have not revealed yet to the public. And that business model is going to blow people's minds. That is probably the thing that is the most built on top of the learnings of my previous venture, and it's really a big idea on how quickly could you grow a retail business.

Brian Friel (07:42):

That's really cool. That's quite the cliff hanger. I'm tempted to press you on that but I won't because we have a ton of stuff to get through already on this. But I am curious, switching back to, you show up to this store, you walk in for the first time. I'm sure you're seeing both people are completely new to crypto who just think this store is interesting and they want to walk in, then you know have the crypto native degenerates like yourself, me and people listening to this podcast. But for the folks who are new to crypto specifically and they're coming into the spaces, what do you find that is resonating with them the most and maybe what is giving them the most friction about this crypto experience?

Vibhu Norby (08:13):

I think the hardest part has been teaching people about how the blockchain works. I think I was a bit more optimistic that people will be interested in the technology, but what clearly resonates to me is without a doubt, NFTs is one thing to kind of read the news about NFTs and write them off as write click saving, why would you need this? I'll just save this image to my computer. But it's another thing for someone to open up a wallet and see that this is something that's theirs. Even if it's a worthless NFT, people connect with those. And there's something called the endowment effect in retail, which is why most stores are loosely optimized around getting you to put your hands on the products, because once you feel a shirt in an apparel store or you pick up a video game, and nobody buys video games in real life anymore, but at GameStop, there's like a little part of your brain that doesn't want to give it back.

Vibhu Norby (09:11):

So our job in the space is give you things, tell you that you own them and get that endowment effect started. We've had some really cool experiences that have been shared with us. We had a guy that came from Ethereum and he walked into the store, this was a couple weeks ago, and he maybe had heard about it, but he didn't have any of the Solana tooling and didn't have a Solana wallet, and all of a sudden he was telling us on Twitter that he was investigating all the NFT projects and Solana and he had applied for y00t lists, and I feel like he was fully down the rabbit hole, right?

Brian Friel (09:45):

One of us. Yeah, that's awesome.

Vibhu Norby (09:47):

That story we've heard a bunch of times. So I think NFTs and then the merch, I cannot tell you how surprised we were how much people love merch. I don't know, it doesn't matter whether you know about crypto or not, you know about Solana or not, people are coming in and buying the gear. And that's a beautiful thing because I think what it says to me is crypto is really a community building tool, and one of the ways to be part of the community is to wear the stuff that community wears, and that's another way to kind of participate. So we really do focus on making high quality stuff that people want that's eye catching and interesting. And if you walked in and you didn't understand the crypto stuff but you like the products, that's a win. We'll take it.

Brian Friel (10:30):

Yeah, that's cool. And I guess taking that a little bit further, the store is really highlighting the whole Solana ecosystem, but for a given crypto project, say there's a crypto project that's building on Solana right now listening to the podcast, should they be thinking about in real life retail experiences? I think this is something that has been basically on no one's radar in the crypto space for a really long time and you're showing that there might actually be a reason for individual projects to pay attention to this.

Vibhu Norby (10:53):

I think there has been a lot of theory. I mean we can talk about payments for example. Payments are theoretically the very best use case of crypto, whether that's like remittances or that's paying a vendor, and not to shill Solana, but I do love me Solana.

Brian Friel (11:10):

I will note real quick, you're not actually part of Solana even though it's called Solana Spaces, it's a separate organization. Just to make that clear.

Vibhu Norby (11:18):

Yes. But we did call the company Solana Spaces and it's pretty hard to go back at this point.

Brian Friel (11:22):

Yeah, right.

Vibhu Norby (11:24):

Yeah, I think Solana particularly should be an awesome tool for payments because the fees are basically zero and that certainly isn't true with even credit cards. So I think that was a hypothesis, but making that come to life for somebody and building a mental model for other businesses has yet to happen. So I think if you're a store or you're a cafe, you absolutely should be looking at Solana pay. The question on that side is, how does it benefit the consumer and how do you overcome that acquisition cost and time of getting someone to download Phantom and fund it and swap it over to USDC and all that kind of stuff. It's a lot of steps today.

Vibhu Norby (12:00):

The two areas I think that are interesting, one is merch, and I have to talk about that, but I think every NFT community should be thinking very hard about what experiences they can build that represent and amplify their brand and their ethos.

Vibhu Norby (12:14):

If the first month of the store taught us anything, it was that there's an intense passion for these projects and I would love to see that problem space explored. In the Embassy, we have a Degenerate Ape Cafe, and it's an NFT coffee shop. We'll serve you hot coffee. It's all a roast made by a community member and it's got the monolith designer coffee bags and-

Brian Friel (12:35):

Nice.

Vibhu Norby (12:35):

... it's designed out of crates. And we have these cool branded cups. I don't know if this made it into production, but at the bottom of the cup there was going to be a QR code that you could scan and get a proof of caffeine NFT.

Brian Friel (12:47):

Oh, that's a cool little Easter egg. Yeah, finish your drink and get that.

Vibhu Norby (12:50):

It kind of starts that way, but then you can imagine that maybe you can take your proof of caffeine badge and next time you come back you get a discount on it. So you start to build the rails of loyalty. I was sitting there waiting for NFT collections to break into IRO experiences, but at this point, we're just going to build all of them for the Solana community. Whatever they want to build, IRL, they need to come talk to us because we are very much interested in setting examples for what this space will look like in the future.

Brian Friel (13:19):

So thinking five to 10 years out, I know that's a really big ask in crypto, but how do you see these two worlds converging? Right now, I'd say that most of crypto culture lives on Twitter and you guys are making really big inroads into the retail space. Do you see you guys really catalyzing that and most projects going through you? Do you see individual NFT collections spinning up their own entities to handle in real life venues? How do you see about five, 10 years out in the retail space playing out?

Vibhu Norby (13:48):

I'm going to confess, I'm pretty much a token MAXI. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that every IRL business in... Five or 10 years is way too short. But if you fast forward it a hundred years, I think every IRL business, every fashion brand that matters, every coffee shop, it will have started digitally and we'll start with digital assets. Why not five to 10 years? Because everything physically just takes forever to be disrupted. It's just not even possible to move that fast. But over a long period of time, I do think that it's inevitable. The reason being, that every talented creative person on earth right now is either exploring NFTs, creating them, dabbling in them, and maybe it can extend to not just NFTs, but I think NFTs and token AMEX and all of the kind of interesting combinations of those things. Crypto is an incredible creative sandbox for entrepreneurs. And it's also the most accessible way for entrepreneurs to get started. The composability of the ecosystem and the tooling.

Vibhu Norby (14:50):

Great entrepreneurs are attracted to things that are accessible because it's so hard to build a business in the first place, that if someone else is out there offering a tool that makes life easy or makes it easier to monetize, they're going to find it. So you're seeing it right now. I think digital art... What's happening right now with NFTs on Solana is a historical thing. It is mind blowing how many NFTs are minted every day on Solana. It's actually crazy. And that's coming from still a very small audience. We're at a hundred-thousand plus a day. I think there was a day the other week that was like 300K in a single day. So not a stretch of the imagination to say that the next great coffee entrepreneur, the next great fashion designer, the next great retail entrepreneur, is going to start with an NFT collection, with digital art, with digital assets.

Vibhu Norby (15:40):

And what happens when you have a sandbox that's accessible to the greatest entrepreneurs, things are going to come out of that that are incredibly disruptive. Of course the hit rate will be very small, but there aren't that many massive businesses in the world. And so I think it's pretty likely that we're going to start seeing crypto companies picking off certain use cases and industries, obviously creating new ones as well. And you're going to see this fastest in the things that are most simple on the sensory side, that's why I think art. Art has already been massively disruptive. I've dabbled in traditional art collecting and that whole world has been turned over in the last two years completely. And to me, it makes sense that that was the first thing to go because I think from a form perspective, it's the simplest to represent digitally. I think the latest adopting things will be hard physical assets, things like commercial office buildings in real estate, these things are very, very difficult to bring on chain, but it will happen and there are smart entrepreneurs working on it today.

Vibhu Norby (16:42):

So I think if you think five to 10 years... Maybe it will happen faster than we think. But the whole tree of ideas around IRL is going to be explored in that time period. The question is just, how long does it take for those things to become very meaningful and very large. I think that's a much longer process. Starbucks was in obscurity for 20 years before they figured out the formula for scaling. So maybe Solana Spaces, is that right? You never know over a long enough period of time. But I just think that the greatest creatives are working in crypto. So I'm just very excited to see what kinds of ideas these people create and how we can support them.

Brian Friel (17:17):

That's awesome. Yeah, this is a very exciting future you paint. And you say you are a Token MAXI. I'm curious though, do you have any contrarian views on the current state of crypto?

Vibhu Norby (17:27):

Yes.

Brian Friel (17:28):

Do you have anything in particular that you think the space should be focusing on that it's not?

Vibhu Norby (17:33):

How many people do I want to offend?

Brian Friel (17:37):

I'd say go big.

Vibhu Norby (17:38):

This is going to piss everybody off that listens to this show, but so be it. I think token going up and going down is very bad. I think if Solana... We never talk about price by the way. We never talk about it as an investment vehicle and I very much think that that's caused a lot of problems. But I think if Solana never changed where it was, I think if it became a USDC level of stability, this would be the greatest boon for the ecosystem. Because I think that you have within every interesting crypto project, it's flooded with speculation from the very get go, and these teams get obsessed with the price instead of the experience. And in the earliest days of a company, you just want the founders to be obsessively focused on the product and just making the product really good.

Vibhu Norby (18:21):

And I've seen a lot of communities, they won't say it necessarily, but I think I've seen a lot of projects get focused on how these things perform as an investment, not just as a product experience. So stability in this arena would be very good. People will be mad at that because obviously everyone wants the tokens to go up, but the best companies will be built when the founders are able to focus on building great things only. So that's one thought there.

Vibhu Norby (18:45):

I think some of the ideas we've shared around fashion are kind of contrarian. I think it's the next thing to go. I think after art, because the fashion world effectively was built for NFTs. You have limited supply items, you have great design wins, you have provenance, you have intense loyalty and identity formed around fashion products, products from runway level stuff to the things that make into Macy's. You see the same thing with collections. They do collection one, becomes very expensive, they do collection two, they do collection three, and it becomes more accessible over time. That's basically how the fashion world works.

Vibhu Norby (19:19):

And we tweeted recently that fashion designers today, they don't go to the fabric store and select fabrics and then go home and put them in front of a sewing machine. They open up Blender, they open up 3D modeling software and build the fashion that way. So by default, the fashion world is already moving to a 3D and digitally native format. Definitely in the next five or 10 years, that category is going to be completely disrupted by NFTs. What I see and what the ecosystem talks about as merch, this is not merch, this is actually about modern fashion and it's about people connecting with the things that they own in a deeper sense. And so crypto merch is going to take over the world. Merch is how a hundred, 200 million people are going to find out about Web3. And we're not going to call it merch, it's just going to be fashion. I really believe that and I'm seeing that on the ground level in the store every day to be honest.

Brian Friel (20:12):

That's super cool. One last question we ask all our guests. You paint a great picture here of the future blending in real life experiences with crypto, how crypto and entities are taking over the art scene and then soon to be fashion. But looking ahead, I guess one last question we ask everyone is, who is a builder that you admire in the Salona ecosystem?

Vibhu Norby (20:33):

I don't know if this is a unique answer, I'm going to give you two people that are totally different ends of the spectrum. One is. I'm obsessed with Frank DeGods.

Brian Friel (20:41):

DeGods. Yeah.

Vibhu Norby (20:42):

I just don't think there's another person like him, like another entrepreneur out there like him. He's just a unique marketing machine that the world has never seen before. He basically broke the Twitter algorithm for millions of people for two weeks straight. And it's not unintentional. He's maniacal about understanding how people are going to react to things. And I know he's been taking a break recently, but I'm definitely a Frank Maxi. I don't own DeGods by the way. I don't have any financial interest in it. I just think that he's an awesome builder. I wish more people in crypto would be thinking about marketing the way he is because it is making a real impact. His fervor single handedly brought over so many people for me to take a look at Solana.

Brian Friel (21:25):

The y00t list has passed, so we know this is a genuine recommendation. There's nothing at stake here.

Vibhu Norby (21:31):

No, no, nothing at stake. No y00t list. And then number two is Akshay BD from Superteam.

Brian Friel (21:37):

Yeah, Superteam.

Vibhu Norby (21:38):

He's brilliant, but I don't think anybody else thinks like him. I've been observing how he's building Superteam Dow and very closely because, well I can't really share why I'm looking at that, but they are building the first truly decentralized entity. Every detail of how they built that company is just different from a typical company. To how you get employed, how they pay people, where the people are, I think is a much bigger deal than they get credit for. I'll give an example, they just launched this product called Earn the other day, and I posted a bounty on there and I swear, I had 25 people who just did the work and sent it to me without even asking. That's pretty dope. And I'm a big fan of his. He knows that.

Brian Friel (22:19):

Yeah, we saw something similar. Just to plug that if it's further. When I was first getting started on Solana, we started this Solana cookbook to help engineers share resources and Superteam Dow just took that and ran with it. And I'd say most of the heavy contributors were tied into that in some way. And it's really cool to see them organizing and leveling up the whole space. I couldn't agree more.

Vibhu Norby (22:37):

Both he and Frank, they're both cult leaders of different flavors. Akshay much more understated but true visionary, and Frank, completely the opposite. More obviously cult leader. But yeah, thanks for the question.

Brian Friel (22:50):

Yeah, that's awesome. Well Vibhu, this has been an awesome discussion. Really appreciate you taking the time to jump on, share your background and also your vision for the future of crypto and in real life experiences. If people want to learn more about Solana Spaces, where can they go?

Vibhu Norby (23:04):

You already know, at Solana Spaces on Twitter. It's the best Twitter account in Solana, if I do say so myself.

Brian Friel (23:10):

Beautiful. Yeah, I actually spent more than I'd like to share on Sunday trying to figure out your seed phrase like crossword puzzle. That was awesome that you guys did.

Vibhu Norby (23:18):

We do it every week. I have another one dropping this Sunday. I have another one dropping Sunday after. We're going to do a crossword pretty soon. Yeah, Sunday puzzles.

Brian Friel (23:26):

Super cool. Well keep us posted on when you guys are opening a store on the west coast. I'm pretty jealous of all our east coast friends who get to do what you're doing. But thanks for coming on. Definitely want to have you back at some point.

Vibhu Norby (23:36):

Thanks Brian.

Degenerate Ape Academy made history as the first major project to kickoff the Solana NFT phenomenon. Co-founder and head of product, CrassKitty joins Brian Friel to talk eggs, The Hatchening, and what to expect next in The Degeniverse.

Show Notes:

01:01 - Origin Story                     

04:45 - Why she changed her mind of crypto

06:27 - What is special about DAA?       

08:12 - The early days at DAA            

10:51 - Future of NFTs                   

11:52 - Projects DAA been working on     

15:31 - Bridging the digital and physical world

19:53 - Advice to new projects / Challenges in the space

21:52 - The vision for the future of DAA 

22:46 - A builder that she admires       

24:09 - Info / Contact           

Full Transcript:     

Brian: (00:05)

Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web 3.0 Space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer of relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce our guest today, Crass Kitty. Crass Kitty is the co-founder and head of product at Degenerate Ape Academy, one of the earliest and most well-known NFT collections on Solana. Crass Kitty, welcome to the show.

Crass Kitty: (00:28)

Hello, Brian. Nice to see you again. I hope you're doing well.

Brian: (00:32)

Likewise. Great to see you too. For those who don't know, Crass Kitty graced us with her presence at our Solana Summer Camp Hackathon in San Francisco. We'll be posting some of the workshops that she did to YouTube, but it's great to see you again. I'm really excited about this episode. For those of you who were around Solana last year in August 2021, Degen Ape Academy I think really kicked off the whole Solana NFT boom that we all know and love today. You guys have a ton of interesting projects in the works today as well, but before we dive into all that, it would be really great to learn a little bit about you. Who are you and how did you get started with Degenerate Ape Academy?

Crass Kitty: (01:07)

Man, who am I? I'm a product nerd who loves the color pink. You guys can't see me, but Brian can, and my office is mostly pink, including my headphones. Other than that, I jived a little bit into product after that with a company called Bebo, which was later acquired by Twitch to become Twitch rivals, using their machine learning to detect if you make kills on-screen. And from there, I worked at FetLife and later at NEAR Protocol, which is where I got my first venture into crypto.

Crass Kitty: (01:35)

I actually thought crypto was totally a scam. When I first was joining NEAR, I was like, "This is a scam. There's no way. This has to be a scam." And I was one of the first 10 team members at NEAR and towards two weeks into my contract, there was this pivotal moment and I realized that like, "Oh, shit. It's not a scam." Sorry. Am I allowed to curse on this podcast?

Brian: (01:55)

You are. Don't hold back. You're good.

Crass Kitty: (01:57)

Okay, cool. Good. Thank goodness. I am Crass Kitty after all. For those that don't know, crass means inappropriate, uncouth, likely to curse. Anyways, yeah. I worked at NEAR, launched an NFT marketplace called Pluminite, which was the first open-source NFT marketplace on NEAR. And when I left NEAR, I took a little hiatus, then started looking for my next role. And I knew I wanted to be in crypto. I had found a really deep passion here for product work in crypto and so I reached out to Solana. Got an interview with Stephen Hess who was head of product at Solana at the time and things were going great. Great interviews. And then I took a vacation and he took a vacation and three months rolled by and I was like, "All right. This has been a while."

Crass Kitty: (02:43)

So, I hit him up and I was like, "Yo, Stephen, what's up here?" And he was like, "We're taking a while because it looks like I'm going to be starting this thing called Metaplex." And I was like, "Oh, cool. Sick." And he's like, "Yeah, but there's these guys who need you." And I was like, "Oh." And he's like, "Yeah, they're called Degenerate Ape Academy." And I was like, "All right. Sounds fun. Can you tell me more? Is there a salary? Is there insurance?" He's like, "Nah, there's none of that." And I'm like, "Risky. I'm into it. Let's go." And so I get on a call with Monoliff. Monoliff and I have one call before I joined as a co-founder and a team member and head of product.

Crass Kitty: (03:13)

On this call, he's talking to me about all this. And I'm just like, "This sounds like the riskiest thing I've ever heard of." He's like, "Yeah, we basically just minted out on our second mint because we messed up our first mint" and I'm thinking to myself, "Okay, that's scary." And then he's like, "And I promised him this 3D academy" and I'm like, "That sounds cool." And he is like, "But also we made duplicates in the NFT collection." I'm like, "That does not sound as cool." And he's like, "So, we have to create lore and tell them that they get to earn extra perks for having these duplicates." And I'm like, "Okay, I like the story spinning." Anyways, this call is very enlightening for me.

Crass Kitty: (03:45)

I think a more sane person probably would've walked away at that point but, like I said, I'm not risk-averse and maybe a little bit less sane than other people. And I was like, "Yeah, sure. This sounds fun. Why not?" And so I joined and I don't think fun is the right word to describe my job. I think it is organized chaos in the best possible way and as somebody who has always described themselves as somebody who sits in the eye of a hurricane and coordinates it, it works really well for me. Product managers typically herd cats. I herd apes. It goes well-ish or as well as I can expect. So, that is me. That's how I got here, and yeah. That's my story.

Brian: (04:20)

I love that line, herding apes instead of cats. There's a lot of really cool stuff we can dive into with DAA but maybe before we get into all that, you have a really interesting journey. You hit on starting as a Twitch partner, getting into everything at Twitch and the gaming side of things, and then being really early to building NFT marketplaces, but you did mention at one point you thought crypto was a scam. What changed your mind on all that? And it seems like you pretty early gravitated to NFTs, maybe before a lot of the mainstream did. Was that related to you changing your mind on why crypto's a scam?

Crass Kitty: (04:51)

I've talked about this in other interviews. So, before I was a Twitch partner, I was actually a stripper and a cam girl. This is full disclosure here. And one of the biggest struggles that I've seen in that industry is that Visa and MasterCard limit who can get paid. They just say, "You can't get paid if you're a sex worker." Basically, if you get paid in PayPal and somebody charges back and says it was for camgirling, PayPal will freeze all your accounts and freeze your whole assets. So, I know that's 18-plus, but my moment for knowing it wasn't a scam was when I was talking to engineers at NEAR about what censorship-resistant payments meant and realizing that it meant that creators like adult content creators but also Twitch partners, anybody who is a creator in the creator ecosystem, would be able to get paid safely, ethically, and also without limitation.

Crass Kitty: (05:37)

And that blew my mind. It was just like, "Wait a minute. There's a solution to this problem that I've known about for literally a decade? What?" And so, that was really phenomenal to me. That's like ... I don't know, very near and dear to my heart. It's like the reason I joined crypto. It also feels like it ties the beginning of my origin story to the end or to the point where I'm reaching the hero arc, and that feels cool.

Brian: (05:58)

That's awesome. Yeah. That's a really unique perspective on the space. Diving now into NFTs, you started your own marketplace, I presume on NEAR. Then, you get involved with DAA at a time when they're trying to carve their own path. They're one of the first major NFT collections on Solana. Everyone's figuring this out. I think at this time Metaplex maybe was just getting started.

Crass Kitty: (06:19)

Oh yeah, barely.

Brian: (06:20)

You mentioned Steven Hess who's now the CEO of Metaplex, but at the time he was at Solana. So, in your own words, what is Degenerate Ape Academy? What makes you guys unique in the NFT space?

Crass Kitty: (06:33)

If you go to our website, it says our mission is simple and that is to fuck shit up. Put 10,000 degenerates on this planet and let them fuck shit up. And I wish I could say as a product nerd, that was not the case internally as well, but it's totally the case internally. Constantly as a product nerd, as a product person, it's my job to organize all the chaos. Probably some of the hardest organizational work I've ever worked on in terms of making sure that we've literally scoped out, probably, I don't know, eight different theories since we released the eggs in January of what we were going to do next. And we'll be in the middle of building it or in the middle of scoping it, and then a wrecking ball comes through that is in the form of a team member, and it'll be like, "Okay, this is cool. But what if we did like this?"

Crass Kitty: (07:17)

So, lots of fucking shit up basically. Degenerate apes though, as a culture, as a brand, as a project, as a company, I think ultimately, we're a place for those that maybe have always been a little bit on the edge of life. Maybe you are a cool person who gets along with everybody but have a more degenerate side. I think we're a home for everybody who identifies with that. And I think that's something that is a testament to our success is the fact that we not only are a home to that, but we lean into it.

Crass Kitty: (07:45)

I worked at FetLife. For those that know what that is, you don't have to dox yourself, but it's kinky Facebook basically. It's BDSM Facebook. I am a degenerate at heart and being able to work on a project that leans into, owns, and accepts their own degeneracies has just been an absolute delight.

Brian: (08:00)

So, what was it like in those early days when you guys were just getting started? There was basically no tools out there for NFT creators like yourselves. Like I said earlier, you guys were pioneers in this space. For those who weren't there in August 2021, walk us through those early days, what you guys had to get through.

Crass Kitty: (08:18)

So, we had just minted our second mint successfully-ish, but the first mint was kind of a mess up. Some apes snuck through, as we say, and those became the exiled apes. So, we basically in those early days were trying to figure it out internally while also trying to make sure externally that a story was always told. So, Monoliff was really good at spinning lore and spinning our mistakes into lore. So, in those early days, I would say our work from the product perspective was very reactive. So, it was like, "Okay, we have exiles. Now we have to create a dow so that they can vote on what to do with these exiles. Do we let them in the collection? Do we not? Let's put that into a decentralized autonomous organization organization." Which is the DAOO if you don't know. Organization organization twice is a personal enjoyment of mine that we wrote in a product requirement document.

Crass Kitty: (09:04)

Anyways, that was a thing. And then figuring out what to do with twins, because we had duplicated some of these apes in this 10002nd collection. And so how do we make those twins more valuable while also making sure that people don't feel like they got gypped because they got the same ape as somebody else? We pulled that off, but like I said, a lot of it was very reactionary work. I would say, as a company, as a product team, we are now very proactive, which has been an interesting shift.

Crass Kitty: (09:31)

If you've ever worked at a startup and gone from being reactionary to proactive, there's usually a rough patch there where you're trying to figure out, "Well, what do I not react to and what do I be proactive for?" We did have that rough patch. It's like we're in a horse race and the horse that was in the middle front was slowing down a little bit and then found a new burst of energy and rushed to the front. That's literally where I feel like right now as a product cycle. We're at this point where we're literally shipping things every couple of days right now internally for testing, things are coming along really quickly.

Crass Kitty: (10:01)

We've figured out our marketing strategy. There's something called love bombing that I don't even know if I'm supposed to talk about, but we're doing this where we give these teasers, give these moments, give these loving attention moments to our community, and then leave them with a little bit of chaos and wondering, "Why don't they love me now?" And so, we've identified this as our strategy and that's working for us. Moving forward with this proactive approach, it means that as we build products, I now actually get to share screenshots or progress pieces, and instead of delivering this perfect thing as a reaction to something that we fucked up before. Does that make sense?

Brian: (10:35)

Yeah. No. I'd love to dive into a lot of that now, too. I think we covered the early days, the wild west of the NFT space, but let's bring it forward to today. How do you see the current state of NFTs broadly? What's in the future for NFTs? And then, what are you excited about both maybe across the ecosystem and specifically with DAA and some of these upcoming product releases that you guys are working on?

Crass Kitty: (10:57)

Well, we are in a bear market. I think we can all acknowledge we're in probably one of the worst bear markets to be in because previous bear markets have existed, but there weren't a ton of builders at that time and so there weren't a ton of consumers of products that were being built. So, the disappointment for a bear market before, while big, was also not I think as widely spread on Twitter and social media and people you talk to in real life if you're lucky enough to know people in real life who know about crypto. So, now I think the reason I say it's one of the worst bear markets is not just the financial implication, but also the social implication.

Crass Kitty: (11:29)

We're in this really interesting period where people are aware of what's going on and they're aware of crypto and they're aware of NFTs and there's so many builders in the space and a lot of people are feeling scared and worried about the state of the world and also the state of the crypto market. And I think that's fair. Yeah. I think that's the current state of the market.

Brian: (11:49)

And then, I guess diving a little bit into DAA and some of the guys you were building throughout this bear, can you shed a little bit of light on some of those projects, what you guys have been up to?

Crass Kitty: (11:58)

Yeah. So, I mean, like I said, because it is a bear, pay attention to the builders in this space, pay attention to the people who are still here in five months, six months, a year. Those are the people who are building sustainable products and that's what we've really focused on. I think previously our methodology for income was based on royalties and secondary sales. That is not a sustainable method of income for a business at any point, including a bear market, and so we've recently done these crate auctions, which had been really fun to work on. Full disclosure, I think we had three, maybe two and a half weeks lead-up to the first auction on product and development life cycle including design. That was fun. But we pulled it off and we actually pulled it off with no bugs so I'm pretty stoked about that. Go Veritas and Dev Lock. My developer is really proud of them there.

Crass Kitty: (12:43)

But that being said, we've done these crate auctions, which are these one-of-one auctions for these crates that hold our eggs. And I mentioned the eggs previously as these things that the twins got to get when they bred in the bathroom. Long story. Anyways, eggs have been a thing that people have been waiting for us to hatch so we're releasing these eggs inside of crates that are more elite eggs is the way I would describe them. They're even better eggs than the other eggs, and the other eggs have tiers anyways. There's regular eggs and inbred eggs, which inbred eggs are for twins if you didn't catch that. But anyways, my point being, all of this is leading up, these auctions, these eggs, these crates. By the time this podcast is released, we'll be really close to the Hatchening, which is very exciting. It's so exciting. I'm so excited.

Crass Kitty: (13:30)

I mean, we've basically just been building, finding other revenue streams, and also working really hard on, like I said, being proactive in the bear versus reactive to the state of the market or our own mistakes in the past.

Brian: (13:41)

That's really cool. I love the creativity there of trying to spin things and keep users engaged. For an end user who maybe owns a Degen Ape, maybe they were lucky or unlucky enough to get one of these duplicates, maybe they have an egg, what can they expect from this? Will they be having to interact with these kind of things? How should they be thinking about some of these hints that you're dropping so far?

Crass Kitty: (14:03)

So, twins have a higher floor price than our non-twins, which is kind of wild. Because like I said, they're duplicate NFTs, which is really funny from a product perspective, but I own a twin and I bred my twin and I got an inbred egg from that twin. And so twins got free eggs. They didn't have to pay anything to get an egg and they got a guaranteed egg. If you entered your twin into the bathroom stall, you got an egg. Congratulations. And you got a guaranteed inbred egg, which inbred eggs I believe ... I need to double check the price, but I believe inbred eggs are actually much higher than regular eggs. I want to say the floor for them is around 200 SOL and a regular egg is like 69 last I checked. Going to double-check that in my numbers really fast.

Crass Kitty: (14:42)

So, these eggs are going to hatch and on the Hatchening, as I said, which is a much more dark and sinister way of saying what's happening. Basically, inbred eggs have 175 floor and regular eggs have a 66 floor, but inbred eggs are going to have very different attributes than regular eggs when they hatch. Also, this is still in discussion, but I'm hoping it's going to lean towards what I say. We are actively discussing and I'm currently pushing for the idea that you can choose if you hatch your egg or not. So, it doesn't mean it's mandatory. I'm working towards this. No promises. If this gets uploaded and I'm wrong later on, don't quote me on it. You never heard this.

Brian: (15:22)

Love that. And so, are all of these experiences going to be things that live within the Degen Ape website? I see you guys have also been doing a lot of I guess in-real-life marketing pushes as well. How do you see blending maybe the physical world with what's digital so far? Where have you guys been focusing your efforts there?

Crass Kitty: (15:40)

Yeah. So, we have something coming out called homeroom and it'll be coming out a couple of days after this podcast does if everything goes according to plan. Nothing ever goes according to plan, so again, don't quote me on that, but homeroom is going to be your hub or your central place for your degenerate NFTs. That includes the eggs, what they hatch into, the apes, and the trash pandas. So, you'll be able to go into this homeroom experience and you're going to be able to do a lot of things that are coming soon. Namely, gold stars are going to be our new economy. They're not related to any real-life value. There's no US dollar that is equated to them. They're an inflationary asset. We don't believe in tying them to US dollars at all. But these gold stars are basically these really cool things that we're going to use to gamify our universe.

Crass Kitty: (16:27)

They're SFTS. They stack in your wallet. You get them in three different ways basically. Number one is roll call, which is where we check if your NFTs are listed. If they're not listed at random points in the year, we don't give you any warning, we don't tell you it's coming, it's just like, "Boom. We did a snapshot." If you're not listed at that point, randomly, we will award you gold stars that you can claim. If you don't want to claim them and you sell your NFT later, they go with the NFT as you sell them. Think Ape coin or Trash panda's rain token. It's kind of like that.

Crass Kitty: (16:59)

The second way you can earn gold stars is through homework. Homework is the idea of you pay attention and you get to earn things. So, if you see our Twitter and we maybe hinted the fact that homework is active somewhere in one of our comic book strips on our website that are coming and we tweet out the pizza emoji and a comic book gif, you may go look for a piece of pizza in the comic book on our website, click that pizza and then magically there's gold stars that are awarded to you for you finding that Easter egg.

Crass Kitty: (17:30)

These are active Easter egg hunts that we're putting all over our site and we're tweeting out, discording, and sharing information about stealthily. These are for people who pay attention and do their homework. And the last one answers your question of how we see physical and digital world interacting. It won't be coming for a while until after homeroom launches, but it will be hinted at in homeroom. Field trips. What's a field trip? I just saw your face light up there.

Brian: (17:52)

Yeah. I love the leaning into the mic for the name drops there.

Crass Kitty: (17:55)

Yeah. So, field trips are, if you've heard of Cupcake Protocol, it is the idea of NFTs being attached to NFC technology, which means you can tap your phone to it. Not scanning it with your camera, but literally tap the physical phone to a sticker or a card, and you can claim gold stars by tapping your phone to these digital scavenger hunts. Think Pokemon Go mixed with geocaching.

Brian: (18:19)

Yeah.

Crass Kitty: (18:20)

But for the Degenaverse.

Brian: (18:21)

That's super cool. I've always wondered who's going to make the first Pokemon Go experience in NFT Land. That totally took over San Francisco where I am for a couple of weeks. Super, super fun experience, so I'm really glad that you guys are thinking along those lines.

Crass Kitty: (18:34)

The really cool part about field trips is, if you have a friend who doesn't have a Degenaverse NFT, but you want to take them on a field trip, they are also able to claim gold stars. So, you do not have to have one of our NFTs to claim them on these field trip encounters. I'm really excited to be working on this and building this and able to show this to you guys soon. It's going to be probably a little bit after homeroom releases. I want to say between two to three months after the initial rollout of homeroom, we'll have field trips ready. This is the biggest alpha that I think I've released ever, and a preliminary call or anything, so I think I might get killed over this, so don't quote me on anything that changes.

Brian: (19:09)

I love it. The alpha here on the Zeitgeist Podcast.

Crass Kitty: (19:12)

It's like alpha of alpha, because a lot of it hasn't been fully finished if you know what I mean or committed to. So, like I said, if things change in the meantime, know that the vision is leading towards these things, but the implementation may be different.

Brian: (19:24)

Totally. Yeah. Now you covered a lot there. I think it's really cool that you guys are thinking about bridging those two worlds, the physical and the digital. You guys have been around the Solana space now for over a year or about a year now. I'd say there's a lot of NFT projects that are maybe just starting up. They're trying to build a community, emulating something like you guys have. Sitting in your position now where you have this large community, you've been through the ups and downs, now you're thinking about all these really cool projects, what would you say to maybe newer projects that are trying to find their feet in the ecosystem and what are some of the unique challenges that you guys face as a more established project in the space?

Crass Kitty: (20:01)

If you're new to the space, find yourself a damn good tax accountant because it's hard. It's a nightmare doing taxes in an NFT project and incorporate or form an LLC as soon as you can. We did not immediately do that and we did our taxes as a joint partnership. You don't want to do your taxes as a joint partnership if you're an NFT project. Just pro tip there. So, I know that's kind of a boring answer, but logistics matter, and I think we're so caught up in crypto sometimes that we feel like, "Oh, it's all decentralized. It's all cutting-edge tech. It's all gray areas. We can avoid being logistical."

Crass Kitty: (20:38)

Don't avoid being logistical. Set your early foundations to be structurally sound so that you can grow in a structurally sound way. It's like if you're building a house or any product, even digital, but you have a minimum viable product, which is the bare bones of what you're going to build on top of. If you look at your company that you're forming in crypto or the NFT space at this point, think about what your bones look like as a company. So, imagine your company is a product or is a house or is whatever it is that you're used to building, and if you're an engineer, maybe that's the structure of the code and your libraries and how you're setting them up.

Crass Kitty: (21:12)

You got to look at your company the same way, and I think this is where I see the most projects make the mistake is that they don't look at it like a company. They look at it like a project and they don't realize that they're going to get taxed like it's a company, they're going to get affected like it's a company, and they're going to get legal implication like it's a company. So, give yourself that foundation. And that's really important. I can't stress how important that is. I know it's a boring answer, but it's the realest answer I can give.

Brian: (21:36)

Yeah. No. I mean, that's sage advice having been through it. From where you guys sit today, we touched on it a little bit with your guys' plans for all these great projects, but how do you envision maybe years from now? What is the essence of DAA? Is multi-chain something in your future? Do you guys envision continuing to cross the physical and the digital worlds? Basically, what is your grand vision for Degenerate Ape Academy?

Crass Kitty: (22:02)

We're going to keep fucking shit up. And that can be a good thing and a bad thing. Fucking shit up could also mean fucking up the status quo or fucking up the way that things are traditionally done, and I think that's exactly what we're aiming to do. We're trying to be on the cutting edge, to change things as they're changing, and to push the boundaries of what's possible.

Crass Kitty: (22:17)

That being said, years from now, it's impossible for me to predict what we're going to be building because the market and the conditions and the state of the ecosystem changes so rapidly. Six months ago, I would not have told you that we were doing something like field trips because Cupcake didn't exist. So, as new technology comes out, we will adapt, we will build, we will innovate on top of it, and we will always aim to be one of the first builders that you're going to see in that space doing those things.

Brian: (22:41)

That's super cool. I got to say that Solana space is really appreciative of you guys being trailblazers here. I know there's a lot of NFT builders who look up to you guys. Maybe from where you sit, we ask this question to all of our guests, but who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Crass Kitty: (22:56)

So, I mentioned him earlier in this interview. I interviewed with him. Now we're really good friends. I've invited him to my wedding. Stephen Hess, CEO of Metaplex, is one of my favorite builders in this space. Having a conversation with Stephen when there's a mutual NDA in place and we can both be very transparent is incredibly invigorating. It's just talking to a fellow product nerd and being able to talk to somebody who thinks so expansively about what we're building, what we're all building, and someone who believes in open source technology the way that he does and providing solutions to builders the way that he does.

Crass Kitty: (23:30)

Every conversation I have with Stephen has me walking away with a giant smile on my face and an energy that usually keeps me up until about 4:00 AM writing product documents. So, if you ever get a chance to talk to Stephen at an event or anything, he's a very friendly dude. He's like seven feet tall or something. He's a giant. Looks scarier than he is in the sense that he's very tall. If you're short, it's kind of intimidating, but he is the gentle most wonderful, also very intelligent person I've ever encountered in this space, and just a delight.

Brian: (23:58)

That's really cool to hear. That's Stephen Hess, former head of product at Solana Labs, now CEO of Metaplex, which is basically the metadata company for all tokens on Solana. Crass kitty, this has been awesome. Really appreciate you taking the time sharing with us your vision, where things are going for DAA. Where can people go to learn more about all these crazy projects that you guys are up to?

Crass Kitty: (24:19)

Yeah. You can go to DegenApe.academy is our website. That's where homeroom will be deploying. You can go to our Twitter, which is twitter.com/i think it's Degen Ape Academy as well. Or discord, you can join that from our website. I mean, not to plug, but you can totally follow Crass Kitty on Twitter, Crass Kitty everywhere really. I've claimed stake to that name. My DMs are always open for a reason, and that is that if anybody ever has any questions about anything that I'm building or things that they're building and need help, if I have time, if I have bandwidth, I will absolutely give it, and if you just want to be onboarded in any general sense of the word to anything Solana or crypto, I do that passionately and also, as often as I can.

Brian: (24:57)

I love to hear it. Yeah. That's definitely been the spirit that I've seen from everyone thus far on Solana. Really appreciate you continuing to carry the torch there. Well, Crass Kitty, this has been really great. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll have to have you back out in San Francisco again for another branding workshop soon.

Crass Kitty: (25:12)

Looking forward to it. Thank you so much, Brian. Thank you for this.

Brian: (25:14)

Take care.

Brian Friel sits down with Star Atlas founder and CEO Michael Wagner to learn about what it's like building web3’s first giant strategy MMO on Solana.

Show Notes:

0:58   - What is Star Atlas?              

03:44 - Background / Founders of SA      

07:01 - Going for a AAA game             

09:32 - Phantom integration in Star Atlas

10:20 - Recent events, achievements and releases

15:08 - The DAO                          

19:27 - Interacting with the SA ecosystem

23:44 - Star Atlas, AAA gaming and Web 3.0

28:09 - Builders he admires    

Full Transcript:     

Brian (00:05):

Hey everyone. Welcome back to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, Developer Relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce my guest, Michael Wagner. Michael is the founder and CEO of Star Atlas, one of the most ambitious games being built on Solana and in web 3.0 in general. Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael (00:29):

Hey, Brian. Fantastic to be here and really looking forward to our conversation.

Brian (00:33):

I'm really excited as well. You guys are building something that a lot of people on Solana are really excited about. Anatoly, our first guest, actually quoted you guys as saying that he thinks you guys are "the most ambitious project being built on Solana maybe just outside of Serum." But for maybe listeners who are unfamiliar with Star Atlas, could you give us a quick breakdown on, what is, in your own world, what is Star Atlas, and how does it maybe differ from other crypto-based games that are out there?

Michael (00:57):

Yeah. Just on that interpretation of being the most ambitious project, I think that again, that is very subject to interpretation. It is a large vision. It's a very grand vision with a long roadmap ahead of us. Some people, I think, might be concerned about the grandiosity of the underlying vision itself. But we have a lot of confidence in what we're doing and the progress we've made and features and products we've launched and the success we've had to date. So, with that being said, let me just start with the flagship component of what we're building here at Automata, the studio behind Star Atlas, which is a grand strategy, space exploration, massively multiplayer online game.

Michael (01:32):

And we're building that in Unreal Engine 5. We've been building in UE 5 since early access and of course, building on the Solana blockchain. And one of the really pioneering gaming groups and projects to adopt Solana as our layer one protocol, going all the way back to 2020.

Michael (01:47):

Now, within this giant strategy MMO, you'll be navigating the stars, you'll be flying your ships. Which, by the way, all of the assets in the game are non-fungible tokens or NFTs. So, flying your ships and operating your land and outfitting your ships with crew members and components and modules, leveling up, progressing, getting new attributes and enhancements, and moving your way through skill trees. So, anybody who's a fan out there of MMOs will be familiar with these gameplay mechanics. But I do want to clarify that, although the Unreal Engine product is our flagship, it is our North Star, it's where we're focusing the majority of our energy, we actually develop across really five different segments within our business. And so, Unreal Engine or the fully immersive triple A game is one of those. We're also building out gameplay modals in browser as well.

Michael (02:32):

We're using Play Canvas as the game development engine there, and it's fully 3D-enabled, WebGL-based assets. And we actually have a release that's planned for this year; up and coming, anyway. And I'm sure we can get more into what that will look like, later in the conversation. But we also build infrastructure tools, architecture, primitives, that are essential to developing and refining the ecosystem and really encouraging innovation and development around all that we're building at Star Atlas.

Michael (02:59):

We have a marketplace that we've custom-created from scratch, built from the ground up. And then we also have a mobile gaming division as well. So, obviously a lot there; encompasses a lot. As I said, very big vision. But we're also very surgical in how we approach this and tactical in how we tackle these challenges that are in front of us.

Brian (03:15):

Yeah. No, I'm super excited about that. And you mentioned a call to arms for MMO-based players out there. I used to be a big wild player back in the day. I totally think this is a really awesome vision. Letting these end users level up in a way that they owning the NFTs that they have and having this be very user-centric, I think,

Brian (03:31):

Is a really revolutionary model. Before we dive into all of that, could you give us a little background on maybe who you are and who the rest of the founders were, and how did you all decide, "Now is the time that we want to build this game on Solana?"

Michael (03:44):

Sure. I'll be brief here. I will say my background is in traditional finance. Previously worked in portfolio management. I hold this chartered financial analyst designation, so really expertise in all things investment management and investment analysis decision-making. But the more exciting part of my life started back in 2013, when I got introduced to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and really SCRYPT coin mining with GPUs.

Michael (04:07):

Now, I grew up as a big computer nerd and part of a computer gaming group. Built all my PCs as I was growing up. And we would spend our weekends playing video games and drinking Mountain Dew. And those were our parties. So, one of my buddies from back in that era introduced this idea of building out SCRYPT coin rigs in milk crates. And so, it didn't take me long to essentially sink every penny I had into buying GPUs and just putting these rigs together and getting involved in the blockchain ecosystem. Terrible timing for me. It was immediately preceding the collapse of Mt. Gox in 2013, the largest Fiat on-ramp and exchange at the time.

Michael (04:43):

And we went through, one of many that I've experienced now, crypto winters and bear cycles. But my interest was certainly captivated. And I just spent the next couple of years learning as much as I could and by 2015 had made the decision to go full-time crypto. 2016 I launched my first company in the space, which was at the center of the legal cannabis industry in crypto, providing financial solutions there. And it was really through that company, and through a series of acquisitions, that I onboarded two individuals who went on to co-found Star Atlas with me. That's Danny Floyd, who's our chief product officer and Jacob Floyd, who's our chief technology officer. And also, along that path, I got connected with Pablo Queiroga, coincidentally, serendipitously, you might say, in Las Vegas, actually in a coffee shop. Just overheard him having a conversation about one of his ventures that he was working on.

Michael (05:29):

And that was in 2018. But really just fast forward a couple of years: 2020, we're in the middle of the pandemic. The company that I had previously founded, called Tokes, things were moving a bit slow. And just given where our passions, interests, and expertise lie, particularly with Jacob, Danny, and myself, who were all working on Tokes at the time, and understanding, seeing the trends that were moving forward across the crypto space, which was predominantly DeFi, NFTs were up-and-coming in a very nascent stage of blockchain gaming. We just felt that we could actually build something bigger and better. And that was the idea of, "Let's bring a AAA MMO to the blockchain." And by the end of that year, Pablo was fully recruited onto the co-founding team as well. And we had our formal debut in January of 2021. And the team is now about 240 people strong.

Brian (06:18):

Wow. That is seriously impressive. Like you said, January, 2021, I think you guys were one of the earliest, serious projects that planted your flag on Solana. I'm curious, shifting over to the product now, in addition to being earliest Solana, I think you guys, like you said, you're also early to bringing a AAA game into the blockchain context. In particular, I think you're one of the first major games that is building in Unity Engine 5 and trying to combine that with a crypto world that is normally very web-based. Like you said, you guys are doing some stuff in Canvas and WebGL as well. Can you talk a little bit about that decision to go AAA, to go to the top, Unity Engine 5, and how that implications are for your project?

Michael (07:00):

Well, I think one of the valid criticisms that exist in, really from the traditional gaming community, but even within this crypto ecosphere, if you will, is that the gameplay mechanics that were present back at that time and even persist through to this day is that they're relatively simple mechanics: a lot of turn-based games, a lot of card-style games. But more importantly, they emphasized the financial components of the gameplay. The idea of play-to-earn, the emergence of play-to-earn. Emphasizing the ability to earn, instead of emphasizing what we feel is most important, which is creating and entertaining an engaging gameplay environment. And so, making a fun game.

Michael (07:39):

And for us, we're extremely passionate about what we're doing. But a large part of that is we're building the game that we want to play as well. This is essentially living the dream, being able to create the product that we will one day be participating in as well. And we're just extremely excited about it.

Michael (07:56):

So, the choice at the time was really between Unity and Unreal Engine. Videos were coming out around UE 5, which was not yet released when we started conceptualizing all of this. But there's a couple of pieces of fundamental technology that are coming with UE 5, like Nanite, which is the way that assets are rendered. Polygons are rendered in the game environment. And what is going to be possible in terms of visual fidelity? And so, that was really important, as well as Lumen; is another technology that's new to U E 5, which is the way that light essentially reflects and reacts within the game environment as well.

Michael (08:27):

And there's a couple of additional pieces there. But what we saw was the potential to create an immersive digital reality, cinematic quality reality. UE 5 is the next generation of gaming, with or without blockchain. Now, what we are doing, adding the fundamentals of blockchain for true asset ownership for a digital asset native economy and for on-chain mechanics that can initiate ecosystem-wide contributions and development to the gaming product itself; we think that is absolutely incredible and will lead to an explosion of growth over time, beyond just the game product itself. But we just saw UE as the best game engine to build within, especially with the opportunities that were present at the time and into the immediate future.

Brian (09:08):

Yeah. Well, I love that philosophy of building a game that you would want to play and then choosing the right tool for the job there. From the Phantom side, we've definitely seen that interest as well. Just from the metrics that we see of who's using Phantom, what they're connecting to, throughout the last year, Star Atlas is always one of the top projects that people are connecting to. And they're wanting to view their ships, they're super excited about this, and I think you guys have a ton of great momentum into building with Unreal here.

Michael (09:31):

Big shout out to you guys, if I may just take a moment. Because Phantom came onto the scene. It wasn't the first wallet, but it was, and I think continues to be, the best UI web wallet for the Solana ecosystem. It was already in demand from our users. It was a pretty simple decision for us to integrate. And you guys see the data on your side. We see the data on our analytics. And I think something like 95% of the user base of a couple hundred thousand people across the Star Atlas ecosystem are using Phantom as a wallet. So, big credit to you guys for what you've been able to accomplish there.

Brian (10:01):

Oh, thanks. Let's keep it going. Let's get gaming on Solana for... I think there's a lot of folks who are really excited about this. I guess, following on that thread, it's been a really busy summer for you guys, across a lot of different aspects. Can you tell us a little bit about some of this events that you guys have had back in June? Specifically, I've seen a lot of noise around 426; maybe what that is, for some folks who are unfamiliar with that?

Michael (10:20):

Sure. Yeah. I guess just to preface it all, I will mention that we've built a lot, as I've said. We have a lot to continue to build. And we have a community that has been cultivated that is very passionate and enthusiastic, but that also we need to cater to. And so, it's very important for us to interact regularly with our community, engage with our community, keep them informed of the process. And this is truly one of the first times in history, I believe, where a large user base and community is getting the backstage access into the actual process of building a game as complex as Star Atlas.

Michael (10:53):

And so, a part of that as well is that we're really fostering this ecosystem for collective gameplay. So, guilds: encouraging the gamers to join forces to play across this universe that we're building right now.

Michael (11:07):

And so, the first event that we hosted this year was called COPA, the Council of Peace Assembly. And this really was a showcase, a place for guilds to highlight the innovation that they're bringing, their recruiting strategies, their intended methods of engaging with a game, of which there are many. We have 28 different career paths in the game that you can take and many different options for player vs. environment, single-player missions that are all scoped out, from deep space PVP with permanent death and destruction of your assets. And so, how you choose to engage is it's really entirely up to the user; there's plentiful options. But doing so with a community and group of other players is probably going to be to the benefit of everyone involved.

Michael (11:48):

And so, we're really looking to cultivate these relationships between members and help guilds recruit and bring more people in and create strong bonds with their members. And Council of Peace Assembly was an event that was dedicated exclusively to the guilds.

Michael (12:01):

We sent out a request to all the guilds across our ecosystem. We had 39 submissions from groups that wanted to present their vision for participation in Star Atlas. We had to narrow that down, so we selected 15, based on a set of criteria of presentation materials. And then we hosted an all-day event. We brought in some friends and family and existing partners and some new partners. Relationship with iBUYPOWER, which is one of the largest PC manufacturers in the world, for some custom-branded Star Atlas gear. We actually gave away a top of the line, 3090 Ti-equipped PC to one community member. It was an absolute beast of a machine. I'm kind of jealous, envious that I couldn't win it myself. But-

Brian (12:40):

Yeah. Yeah, right.

Michael (12:42):

... great PC. But in any event, the whole point is it was a eight-hour event. 15 different guilds presented, and we had some activities in between and sidetracks that people could participate in. But it was these guilds just presenting, again, their intended approach to Star Atlas, whether that's playing the game, creating a business, creating technology, and how they want to recruit and actually play.

Michael (13:02):

Moving forward, just towards the end of July, we hosted our first product launch event. And that was called 426 Live. And this is something that is a bit memetic. I won't go too deep into the background of it but in working with the community so closely and trying to provide as much information as possible to them about anticipated timelines for product rollouts, we often refer to the next release coming in four to six weeks. Didn't always or frequently hit those timelines. And so therefore, four to six just became the community meme whenever a projected target date was released.

Michael (13:39):

And so, we just embraced that. And we've launched the 426 Live. And we think it's really appropriate, just given we had real products coming out. So, on this last one, we rolled out a brand new marketplace program as I described earlier. And one of the biggest releases of the year so far is the official rollout of the Start Atlas Dow. Baseline functionality of the platform with locking in emissions, using the Tribeca framework as part of that overall suite. We launched a Web 3.0 affiliate program; referral program for people that are bringing new members in. We call that Star Path. And then we also, again, solidified the relationship with IBP, iBUYPOWER. And we do have options available now for people to go out and buy Star Atlas-branded PCs, mouse pads, headphones, peripherals. And just really cool to see this Star Atlas-branded gear. And that whole relationship, by the way, just came about because King, the representative there, happened to be a member of our community. And he's just really excited about what's going on across Star Atlas and wanted to get us involved.

Brian (14:34):

I can't think of another project, I don't think, that has this level of a rabid fan base that wants to be engaged in this key decision-making at this kind of a level. You mentioned a lot here, between all the guilds and the conferences you had around that and the 39 guilds wanting to all present their vision here and the referral programs you guys have; now also, Star Atlas Dow. Let's focus a little bit on the Dow in particular. What is this Dow? What impacts in decision-making do they have on the game as a whole? And who can participate in this? Can I just come in one day and show up? What are the mechanics to this Dow?

Michael (15:08):

Yeah, I think the concept of Dow's decentralized autonomous organizations, in general, are pretty radical in ideology and what they propose. I would say, even more so in the case of Star Atlas. Here we are, spending enormous time and resources in creating out and building out intellectual property in the form of a gaming product, with the sole intention of taking this ecosystem. And it really does emerge into, as I said earlier, immersive digital environments; the idea of the metaverse. The idea of a place where people can go outside of reality. They can get themselves involved in social aspects and work in education, in commerce; do your shopping there. All things that you can do online today, I think, in some way, are going to live in the metaverse.

Michael (15:50):

I think it will displace a lot of industry. And I think gaming is one of the core applications there. But we're taking this idea of building the centerpiece of all of that, the gaming product and the ecosystem, and ultimately transitioning control over to the Dow. Which again, in my opinion, very radical proposal to essentially just transfer all of the value that's been created.

Michael (16:08):

In terms of who can participate, this is, I think, a pretty commonplace model. We have a governance token. It's called POLIS. It's actually a dual token ecosystem. Atlas is our in-game transactional currency, and POLIS is the governance token. But anybody, of course, can acquire POLIS and participate in the Dow. And what I would extend that beyond is, what we've released now is really the universal Dow, the pinnaculum Dow. This is the top level of a hierarchical structure.

Michael (16:35):

There are elements within the game, within the lore, where political strategy becomes important. And that's at the faction level, it's at the regional level, and it's at the local level. And you can think of this as a county, city, state, federal government, if we were to think of it in modern context of the way that politics is structured. And so, there are gameplay elements that will be influenced. And then there's really the universal Dow, which is just released. And that is to govern the future of Star Atlas itself.

Michael (17:03):

Now, while I think that this is a paradigm shift and almost antithetical to the way that most companies are built, I also fundamentally embrace fully the idea that significantly more value can be created through these decentralized ecosystems, by opening the pathways to be bidirectional, as opposed to trying to capture all value, retain all value, and create protective walled gardens around it. This is why layer one protocols are succeeding. This is why Solana is succeeding. The idea that you can create primitives in a base layer protocol, that other people can build on top of, is mutually beneficial. It's symbiotic. And we want to do the same thing with the metaverse.

Michael (17:43):

And so, that's really the idea. That's the vision. We take the idea of the gaming product that attracts people in, it builds this digital society. And then many different functions, features applications, programs, and economies can be built on top of, around it, and tangential to it.

Michael (17:58):

And so, that's where we're going with this. Now, this is not a short path. America wasn't founded in a day either. So, we have an ethos and a philosophy behind the path to decentralization and how we get from a point where a lot of the content is directed and governed by us, as a more centralized entity at Automata, to one in which Automata is really just a contractor to the Dow. We actually work for the community. We work for the Dow itself. And the Dow is making decisions. Final point I'll make here is that it's specifically because of this philosophy that I think a product like Star Atlas has an indefinite and perpetual life cycle. Because now you're not reliant on the studio to build the 2.0 version and the 3.0 version. It can actually be something that is constantly evolving over time by every contributor around the world that wants to participate in this.

Brian (18:49):

Yeah. I love that analogy to a layer one blockchain. That opened up my eyes originally, with seeing that anyone from community could just open a GitHub issue and, if they were technical enough, share their vision on how this could improve. And Solana's very open to that. And seeing you guys also position yourself in that way, I think, is really cool, especially as it relates to a AAA game. It's turning the whole industry on its head there.

Brian (19:09):

So we deep dove a little bit into Dow. You also mentioned a couple other components that you guys have live today, being Star Path. Also your new marketplace. How can end users today interact with the Star Atlas ecosystem, as far as those two respects? And is there anything else that they should be aware of as far as interacting with the Star Atlas ecosystem today?

Michael (19:26):

Well, first and foremost, I encourage everybody to be informed and educated on what we're doing, what the vision is, what the road ahead looks like. Because I emphasize this all the time. It is a very long journey ahead. We have many years of development. However, our philosophy to development releases is also not conforming to that of a traditional studio. So, we're not building the whole game for 10 years, in isolation, and then rolling that out. We're rolling out components. And I'll speak to one of those in just a moment. But first things first, I would encourage people to read through our white paper, read through our economics paper, read through our quarterly State of the Economy report that was published last month. And also, go check out some of our cinematics, some of our studio trailers, some of our in-engine trailers. It'll really give you a sense of the quality that we're developing too, and what the lore and story behind this is.

Michael (20:15):

So, that's the first thing. Once people are comfortable with that, options do exist to purchase ships on our marketplace. That's the predominant asset that's out right now, even though land and crew members and components and buildings and structures and all of these things will be available in the future. But for now, the ships are the core asset that people can purchase. They can do that through our marketplace. And it was important for us to get the first, even if simplistic, admittedly simplistic, gaming feature out, which we did on December 17th of last year.

Michael (20:42):

And we call that SCORE, or Faction Fleet. Score is Ship Commissions on Remote Expeditions. But Faction Fleet. And this is a utility driver for those assets that people have already purchased. It's a way to support your faction through sending or loaning your ships out to the faction, is the story behind it.

Michael (20:59):

And the player is responsible for managing a set of four different resources. And to the extent that they are keeping those restocked, then the play-to-earn economy is actually activated. So, those players are earning Atlas today. That's one thing you can do.

Michael (21:12):

I would also encourage everybody to get in Discord because a lot of conversation and strategy and guild formation and guild recruiting, these things are all taking place right now. A lot of speculation around what gameplay mechanics are going to look like, but the Automata team are there as well. And we're interacting frequently and giving guidance and feedback and giving just our current thinking on state of affairs. But going forward, the timing of this podcast is fortuitous. Going forward, very soon, we'll make some announcements around the next 426 Live event for this year.

Michael (21:43):

And I don't want to reveal exactly what's going to be announced there, but people do know that we have a couple of things in the pipeline, which includes the first Unreal Engine client. And that's called the Showroom. And this is the first time you'll have access to a downloadable client. You can run it on your PC, enter into the Unreal Engine-immersive world, summon your ships, inspect your ships, walk around them, see them at scale. And for anyone that's seen our videos and trailers related to Showroom, I'm sure they can attest to this. But seeing something like a Pure Sex 4, which is a two meter-long air bike, essentially. It's like a hovering motorcycle. Next to some of our largest ships, the Commander class ships that are 300, 400, 700 meters long, you get a real sense of the value of the asset that you've purchased and what it's going to be capable of in-game.

Michael (22:30):

So, that's up and coming. A new locking mechanism for Atlas, which provides benefits to the marketplace. And last thing I'll add here is, we've also been spending quite a bit of time developing the underlying story behind Star Atlas. And we do have a couple of releases this year, including a graphic novel, which is a comic book format, comic book style, written media that tells the story of Star Atlas before the current era, at least in-game current era, as well as an upcoming podcast sometime this year, which is a storytelling podcast. Not interview style, but it's a storytelling-style podcast that speaks to another aspect, another region in the Star Atlas universe. So, a lot of exciting things up and coming. But I think join the community and read through some of the materials and just have a good time with us in Discord.

Brian (23:19):

That sounds great. I won't press you for any more spoilers there. We'll wait for the next 426 event. The showroom in particular sounds really exciting. I'm stoked about that. Zooming out now, a little bit longer-term view, you've spoken a little bit about this in your guys' role in merging the AAA gaming and the Web 3.0 worlds, but how do you see these two worlds, that are pretty separate today, converging? And how do you see Star Atlas' place in both of those?

Michael (23:44):

Well, as a long-time gamer, I see immense value in Web 3.0 gaming, not only for the true asset ownership, not only for the play-to-earn, but again, this idea that you can mutually benefit through co-creation of some idea. I think it's enormous. That, in and of itself, is a paradigm shift that traditional studios would need to get comfortable with. The idea that, "Hey, maybe it makes sense actually for you not to create and retain all of the value, but share in that value and enable a community to co-create that value with you." I think that that is going to be a challenge for almost every traditional business, not just studios, for that matter. Moving into the era of decentralized governance and Dows, and again, Web 3.0, just broadly speaking.

Michael (24:28):

But again, referring to being a longtime gamer and spending probably tens of thousands of hours in games over my life, it's great to be able to recapture some of that valued, even just through the asset ownership itself or through the account progression, as opposed to being inherently restricted and prohibited from being able to turn around and sell gold that you've farmed or sell a character that you've leveled up. We actually encourage that. We want to facilitate that. You created the value; you get to keep it.

Michael (24:57):

So, I think Web 3.0 Gaming is absolutely the future. I think that incorporating elements like NFTs and cryptocurrency-based assets into the gameplay add an enormous amount of value. I think for blockchain in general, gaming is going to be a massive contributor to mass adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrency. I think one of the big issues with crypto today is that it's great at attracting the speculator. Anytime you have a high volatility environment, people that have the risk tolerance will enter into the ecosystem to try to capture some portion of that.

Michael (25:30):

DeFi was a good step, by the way, in more utility-driven functionality, although still a large speculative component. Gaming is different. Gaming is the entertainment value. You cannot overlook the utility. In economic terms, you cannot overlook the utility that is derived by a sense of escapism when joining a game environment. Now, whether or not blockchain was a part of that and whether or not play-to-earn was a part of that, if you create a great product, if you create a great game, people will come to play it. And so now, what we're doing is focusing on that great gameplay and that escapism that people desire out of engaging in video games, but then also enhancing that and saying, "Look, if you want to take it a step further, you can actually derive true financial benefit from this as well. And that's a component that you can layer into your gameplay strategy or not. Play as simple as you want or as complex as you want."

Michael (26:20):

But I do want to emphasize this idea of, really, development methodology that we use across Star Atlas, which is actually abstracting logic from a game engine and building that logic on the blockchain, using smart contracts. And this exposes the world to the whole idea of permissionless systems and censorship resistance and self-sovereign ownership of assets. The true inception of this philosophy was with the creation of Bitcoin, 12 years ago now, I guess, or 13 years ago. And so, because we're taking game logic, like in the case of Faction Fleet, all of your resource management is done on chain. There are already guilds out there that are creating their own programs, in their own UI, that interfaces with ours and interacts with that and adds more utility to our players. Now, our players can go use a third-party service. And there was no contractual relationship between us and that provider.

Michael (27:14):

So, the idea that you can initiate this type of innovation, because we're using blockchain as, really, the backend server technology, to me just creates enormous potential for growth. So, I think it's definitely the future. I think the way that we're doing things at Automata, and for Star Atlas, really attempt to capture all of the potential value. Humbly, I feel that we've been leaders in the space, that we have presented a big vision. But I also feel that we've executed well to date. And we will continue to do so. And we will continue to be leaders, not only on Solana, but across blockchain and Web 3.0 in its whole.

Brian (27:50):

That's awesome. I think that's a great way to wrap things up here. I agree. I think the Solana space is lucky to have you guys as pioneers in pushing forward AAA gaming on Solana. One question we always love to ask anyone, at the end of our discussion here, is: who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Michael (28:09):

I almost don't want to answer the question just because picking out one is so difficult. I think, realistically, what we've seen on Solana is, in and of itself, an explosive growth, a Cambrian explosion of innovation. Especially thinking about the early days in the late 2020 and the early '21, where we had to build a lot of the tools that we needed ourselves. And how so many tools are coming online. And you and I were chatting, just before this, about the Solana summer camps and the hackathons and 18,000 submissions to the latest summer camp for project proposals.

Brian (28:42):

Pretty unreal.

Michael (28:43):

It is absolutely unreal. So, it's very difficult to isolate one. I think what Metaplex is doing is phenomenal because they're developing some of those same primitives that I'm referring to, that we're actually developing as well, in a different capacity. Magic Eden has done a fantastic job with the marketplace and with the NFT and the PFP drops and cultivating an environment for NFT purchases for industries like gaming as well. So, I think they're doing great. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Phantom. You guys are awesome. So, maybe I'll just close with that and say I absolutely am thrilled about the Solana ecosystem. Any challenges that we are facing, I am sure, are short-term. And I think Solana's done amazing job, just cultivating a great environment for warm, welcome developers and great innovation.

Brian (29:26):

I couldn't agree more. Michael Wagner, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's a really great discussion. You mentioned a lot throughout here about how folks could get engaged with Star Atlas. Make sure you join the Discord, join the website. Any closing thoughts here?

Michael (29:38):

No, that's it. But please do stay tuned. Our 426 Live event is coming up soon. I didn't even mention it, but we have this web client that's coming out this year as well. And we'll probably speak to that at the 426 Live event. We're pretty much @staratlas on any of the socials or staratlas.com. And you can find all the links there. But yeah, I look forward to meeting some new people in our community soon.

Brian (29:58):

Yeah, we'll have to have you back on to talk about that web-based environ and more exciting announcements for 426. Thanks so much, Michael.

Michael (30:05):

Thank you, Brian.

Brian Friel sits down with Famous Foxes Federation Co-founder DraxxTS to hear how he built one of the most admired NFT projects on Solana.

Show Notes:

01:19 - Origin Story / Background        

06:41 - What is Famous Fox?              

08:15 - The importance of the community  

10:01 - The Team                         

13:08 - Top utilities available to users  

17:47 - How Famous Fox approaches collaborations 

20:33 - How to decide what to build?    

23:21 - The future of NFTs               

27:08 - Builders DraxxTS admires              

28:09 Info and contact        

Full Transcript:

Brian (00:06):

Hey everyone. Welcome back to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers and designers who are pushing the web three space forward. I'm Brian Friel developer relations at Phantom. Today, we have a very special guest, the co-founder and general of the Famous Fox Federation, DraxxTS. DraxxTS, welcome to the show.

DraxxTS (00:27):

Thanks for having me, Brian. Appreciate it.

Brian (00:27):

Thanks for coming on. I'm really excited about this episode today. You guys are a well-known NFT collection that has really come to embody the builder spirit on Solana. Before we get into all that, I think it'd be great if you could walk us through a little bit about your background, who you are and how you got started with Famous Foxes.

DraxxTS (00:44):

Yeah. Excellent. I'd love to, so my name DraxxTS, co-founder of Famous Fox Federation, like you had pointed out. As far as my background goes, my degrees, if you will, an undergraduate in electrical engineering and actually my graduate degree is in business and finance. And realistically, I've been in the web3 space slash-like involved with crypto since like early 2017. I've always kind of had a passion for investment products and such. And so late 2016, I actually had gotten more into Bitcoin Ethereum and just like the concepts of them, but didn't dip my feet in until early 2017 and really just been part of different groups for trading crypto and such in last year had just seen so much of a general interest happen with NFTs. I was around when CryptoPunks first came out, never bought any, unfortunately.

Brian (01:37):

You and me both, don't worry.

DraxxTS (01:38):

Yeah. And there were a bunch of them, but at the time, to me didn't really make much sense just like what they were. Who's going to spend $50 on a picture? In hindsight, obviously it was a mistake, but last year, part of one of the crypto groups I was in, actually, it kind of started up like a little bit of a fund for like trading NFTs and someone was a designated trader and everyone else just funded them and they were trading CryptoPunks and they were making like almost an ETH profit power. And that was when punks were like around 10, 11, 12 ETH or something like that. So they were doing quite well with it. And one day, I think they had eight punks in total. They all sold out and the trader didn't want to get back in. So they dissolved it and paid everyone their profits and that kind of went on.

DraxxTS (02:20):

And for me, the idea that they all sold out on a day and the floor price had pumped them kind of like, why? These things were going for 20, 30 ETH and didn't make any sense to me as to why people were paying so much money for it because I just really didn't understand what NFTs were about. And so since that time frame, that was probably early summer of last year, of 2021, just kind of wanted to learn more about NFTs and about Ethereum and about like the way that the chain works and all that kind of fun stuff and had met Dev and at the time our artist for creating our collection through just trading groups that we were part of for crypto. We talk often and understood that we have a pretty diverse skill set between us to possibly make something that's worth value to the space.

DraxxTS (03:12):

And that's really where Foxes were born. We actually were planning on doing our collection on ETH because we really wanted to do Solana, but at the time Solana seemed more of a country club and mints were quite challenging to do since it was so brand new. I think most of the original collections had minted early August. And so we determined that we were going to start doing a project around that time and we really wanted to be on Solana. Because we saw the benefits of the chain, the speed you could do the pricing of transactions. There were just so many benefits to it from really what we determined could be our strong suit from a builder's side, but we still thought there was enough opportunity on ETH to get involved, looking at how L2s were working and developing.

DraxxTS (03:57):

We just saw there was a potential opportunity there. And I think it was like midway through September, just saw an opportunity open up and Solana became a little bit easier to get onto. And so we just pivoted our marketing towards SOL. I think we probably did onboard some ETH people into SOL at the time. And then from there we just built out our product. I mean our roadmap one, which I know we'll probably talk a little bit more in-depth on some items we far surpass that. As far as the under promise over deliver aspect, that's always been part of our ethos. And once we had created our project, we just wanted to be as creative as possible and to create as much value as we could have.

DraxxTS (04:37):

And our Mint price was one SOL at the time. I think SOL was around $160 and originally it was two SOL, we cut it in half and then air dropped out part of our collection for folks that had minted originally, but we just were not priced properly in the market. And we've kind of been just building out really unique tools and a fun way of building out our brand through some of the other pieces such as missions, which I think are one of our most popular benefits for our collection as far as Fox holders go. And yeah, so we've kind of had an idea for what we wanted to do on our roadmap V one and we've far destroyed that. And then for our roadmap V2, we wanted to get more buy-in from our community. We got a ton of buy-in and we've been exceeding that one as well. We still have some items left open on our roadmap V2, but the builder aspect for our products has for sure been our strong point. And I think it's kind of garnished a lot of trust and respect within this Solana ecosystem.

Brian (05:34):

Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned, this time going back to summer 2021, I think a lot of people first recognized Solana around that same time. It was right in this crazy way where the mainstream world was discovering what NFTs were. You mentioned that prices were doing these ridiculous things. Some people decided to leave projects around this time. You guys came in and really buckled down and built a project that has really built this lasting community on Solana. In your own words, what is Famous Foxes? How would you describe it to somebody who's maybe not familiar with the NFT space at all?

DraxxTS (06:06):

So my definition for Foxes kinds of changes every once in a while. And I think it just really depends on how much we've built and seeing the value that we've created for the space. Right now, I kind of almost consider us like a Swiss Army knife of NFTs within the Solana ecosystem, both from a creative side that we just kind of develop really unique tools for folks to try to make their life easier. We've been early for a lot of different tools that we've created. And then at the same time we have a sustainable model to be able to give a good bit of benefits to our holders outside of just our tool usage. Because I think that kind of concept has been an interest in a lot of projects and once they run out of funds then that project kind of really does end up dying for the most part.

DraxxTS (06:57):

And so for us, I would kind of consider us like a Swiss Army knife of Solana tools. I think our community is amazing. I think they're probably our largest asset realistically within the space and we're very flexible, adaptable, creative, and I think a very well, trusted brand if I will, within the Solana ecosystem. Whenever we put out a new tool, people don't really question it for the most part. If it's something that they've been interested in trying to use, they just go in and use it and we usually get really good feedback for it.

Brian (07:30):

Yeah, no, that's awesome. I think, me personally, the a-ha moment that kind of clicked for me with NFTs – I used to be a bit of a wild gamer growing up. I think a lot of folks in this space have some sort of like MMO gaming experience, but this concept of having a guild, like a community that you kind of trust that you kind of build tools together and use these tools together, you can go further in this, exploring a new space then that you can on your own.

DraxxTS (07:55):

Yeah, 100%. I

Brian (07:56):

I don't know how you feel about that.

DraxxTS (07:57):

Yeah, I was going to say I actually was a RuneScape player.

Brian (08:00):

Okay. There you go.

DraxxTS (08:01):

I've put in probably close to 4,000 hours in RuneScape from back in the day. So yeah, 100% agree with you and I think that's a really good way of looking at it. A lot of products really just refer to them as community, but I really do think it is more so like a guild when you look at certain projects like ours, for example, even though we are primarily like a utility project currently, we have a lot of the branding for our PFPs and such.

DraxxTS (08:27):

And so it also promotes our brand by having people use our NFTs as their own individual identities within the digital space. And I think that's kind of critical for a lot of projects because when you look at most utility plays, they aren't primarily a PFP project or that have PFPs associated with them. So, knowing who's part of that community can be kind of challenging. And then also the people that are in there as they represent that brand, it does reflect what you've been creating as well as a project creator.

Brian (09:04):

Yeah, totally. No, I think it's a very internet native phenomenon, but it's a way that you can recognize people online, know that you have these shared experiences and know you're working together cooperatively, which is pretty cool to see. You mentioned back in the day it was yourself, I believe, was it two other co-founders, Dev, and you also had an artist as well, is that correct?

DraxxTS (09:25):

That is correct. Yeah. So we were three original co-founders and we had at the time, I want to say about 10 or so, like moderators and other folks had helped our team out for our marketing and community management and all that kind of fun stuff. The team has kind of shifted around quite a bit since then. I want to say right now we're probably pushing 15 total between marketing, creatives, additional developers, system admins, and then moderators as well. So yeah, we've got quite a sizable team, but we're also now only two co-founders that are left for our project at the top.

Brian (10:03):

That's really cool. And how have you gone about assembling this team? Are these folks from the community that you've engaged with? I think building an NFT team is a bit of a new field and you guys are a bit of a pioneer here. Do you have any advice for other teams who are looking to grow their project? How have you guys gone about assembling your team?

DraxxTS (10:23):

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. For the most part. The answer there is yes, it's folks from our community. I think that's what we've come to understand. The people that are the most interested. If you look at the way structures are, I'll say with most NFT projects, they're not really able to offer equity in a company or what have you to people that want to participate. And usually that's an incentive for people to participate more because then they get more of a reward from it.

DraxxTS (10:54):

So we just see a lot more value for people that have been a part of our community. Even if they've only been doing it for themselves, from a creative angle, from a marketing angle, from a developer angle, people can be involved in other projects and things might not work out, but if they've been part of our community, they understand our core OGs that we have, they understand the structure, they understand the way that our community typically is being helpful and respectful on the space and having a little bit of a builder's mindset, because everyone in our space certainly likes to provide feedback on ways we can improve what we've created.

DraxxTS (11:31):

And I think that's kind of critical for us as a brand to keep continuing to have that general mindset within our team. I think it's kind of important. I think you can bring on outside people. I think you just have to be a little bit more mindful as to who you're bringing on and you know, as long as they understand your core business, they're dedicated with what you guys are doing, then they're going to be a perfect fit. And I would highly suggest that too, especially for folks that are building new brands or new products within the space, you want to have someone that's more than just an advisor. And if there are ways you can give them a little bit more skin in the game, you definitely want to try to do that as best as possible.

Brian (12:39):

Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about some of these features that you guys have built. Famous Foxes is quote, unquote, "famous for building so many features and utilities into the project." If you go to your guys' website, you can see tons of tools that let you do easy minting, swapping, sending raffling messaging, all kinds of things that can extend the functionality of apps. And while it's like Phantom, you guys have also built missions into your guys' site. What do you guys see as some of your top utilities and features that your community is most excited about?

DraxxTS (13:09):

Yeah, that's awesome question. So for us, we do kind of see ever evolving metas. So I'll go with, based off what is currently true for our project. I think the number one utility from like a SOL volumes perspective would be our peer-to-peer swapping platform, Foxy Swap. So that's been something that we've also had to create a separate Twitter channel for. And it's one of our oldest utilities that believe it's actually the second utility we've created for our project, but on any given day, we can have up to 10,000 -ish SOL of NFTs that get swapped on that platform. So it's a way for a trusted peer-to-peer way for people to swap. We don't have a platform that's created to find these different individual trades.

DraxxTS (13:55):

Everyone finds them on their own. It's not to miss out on anything in particular, it's just for people seeking different NFTs and a lot of times too, you'll have swaps from NFTs to NFTs or like a combo deal might be like a five for one kind of deal. Based off the way a transaction is created on Solana, you can have up to six NFTs in a single transaction. So that way it doesn't have a chance of partially filling and failing or anything along those lines. So it's been quite utilized, I'll say like consistently, since we've created it, but it certainly has ramped up, I'll say over the past few months.

Brian (14:29):

Yeah. That's a ton of volume just for OTC. That's really cool.

DraxxTS (14:32):

A ton of volume. Yeah. It's a ton of volume and it's interesting too. Because a lot of communities... I mean, we don't just onboard like every single project that wants to be on there. So we do get buy-in from communities as well to be on there. And there's certain communities such as Okay Bears that have their own separate area on their discord for doing OTC trades as do the DeGods and a bunch of others. So, projects are definitely aware that people will do OTC trades and they want people to do it in a safe fashion. And we've also kind of seen a tick up in like people trying to scam each other saying like our site isn't working or something along those lines when that's not the case, like we would send a message out to everyone to let them know if there's any issues on our website, which has not been the case.

DraxxTS (15:17):

But yeah, it's very interesting to see that meta exist. And you know, I think it's just based off of current market sentiment, my personal opinion. But yeah, that's what I would say is probably our most heavily used tool right now. Second to that, I would probably say as our raffle tool that we had created. So that's where anyone can create their own raffles. It's by no means a perfect product. People set their own prices. It's SPL tokens that have been integrated into that platform. Projects actually will kind of commit a number of FOXY to be added onto that platform. So it's like a business to business service if you will. But it also benefits our collection by also taking out of some of the emissions from our system. And outside of that, I mean, I would probably say, as an underdog, is Ding!, our messaging platform, a lot of people use it for different reasons. We've seen anything from people accidentally setting NFTs to wrong wallets and getting them recovered to messaging, I'll say [messaging] celebrities and actually getting a response back from them.

Brian (16:19):

Shaq.sol

DraxxTS (16:20):

Yeah, basically. And so also for projects, such as DeGods, when they were on their initial rally to break 333 floor, there was somebody that had one listed, I think at 330. And I don't know if there was like no one interested in buying it, but a bunch of their members had sent dings to that wallet to basically tell them that they can sell it, but just to re-list it at 3:33. And so they peer pressured them to move it up. So I've seen a bunch of different use cases and of course people will send messages to low ballers and all that kind of stuff. But we do have a browser extension for Chrome that you can access. And I think it's got over well over a thousand people that have it enabled, but you can go right directly from Magic Eden and send a ding to someone. You know, if you wanted to shoot them a message to try to get them to lower their price or to do an OTC trade or anything along those lines. So I think ding is probably our most underrated utility, if you will. And actually our very first one that we created.

Brian (17:19):

Oh, no way. That's really cool. That's the whole array of really creative projects that you guys have built. You mentioned a couple things in there about collaborating with other projects. Okay Bears maybe being on the OTC platform, I've seen, you can use other tokens like DeGod's dust for the raffles. How have you guys approached these collaborations?

DraxxTS (17:40):

Yeah. So we've done it in a bunch of different fashions. I would say the earliest collaborations for us was actually pre-mint and that was really to kind of just co-mingle communities. I think, to just find more people that are in the space. I think that was probably one of the more difficult things back in September. And after that, it's kind of just been around what we've created. And I think primarily what really started us getting deeper in collaborations, almost like partnerships was our missions. So we have missions that I didn't really talk too much on, but our staking has kind of evolved from just a regular stake it into a wallet and forget about it to a more active staking environment. So for our missions, you send foxes out for a six day mission. They come back with experience, which we call fame, to be the most famous fox.

DraxxTS (18:29):

And then on top of that, you also get like a chest which can have different kinds of rewards in it. Anything from FOXY, which is our native token that we have, to NFTs from our collection to rooms for dens to NFTs from other collections via orange BOX or golden BOX. And then we've also been adding in on a weekly basis. That's not including weeks. We do our monthly raffle more expensive entity. So the very first one we did was with Blocksmith Labs and we did Degen Ape Academy. And the last one we did was a Cats on Crack. And so we kind of approached collaborations, a plethora of ways. For the most part, a lot of projects that reach out to us and say, "Hey, we just created a project or there might be a more popular project in the space."

DraxxTS (19:15):

We have a token we'd love to integrate it into, your different platforms and we've created forms where folks can fill them out. And then I would also suggest to DM myself or someone else from the team just to kind of get the ball rolling. Because there are some forms that have just been inundated with requests that can kind of be like helpful, not helpful. And you know, it really doesn't take too long to integrate onto our platforms. Within 24 hours, for the most part, we can get any other SPL token integrated into our system to add collections is kind of the same way we've had to kind of be a little bit careful with adding collections just because we have to make sure there's like a certain number of volume and a certain amount of like people that are part of that community.

DraxxTS (19:55):

So that way people can't just like change a mutable NFT to look like something else and possibly scam someone, our platform. So that is one thing that we've had to kind of be a little bit more conscious of, especially in the current environment. So yeah, we approach collaborations in many different fashions, especially for like newer projects that are coming out that are popular. You know, we'll also reach out to folks as well. And you know, it's been very fruitful for both sides. Being able to have the utilities that we have into another project where they might not want to wait a month or three months or spend a whole lot of money to get it integrated. They can kind of reach out to us and we can try and strike up a deal and get them involved in one way or another.

Brian (20:38): 

That's awesome. You know, you guys have built a ton here. I got to know, or I got to know from you, how do you guys decide what to build next? Are these ideas that come from the community? Do you guys have a big roadmap as part of your team that you're sticking to? How do you guys decide where to put your resources in all this building?

DraxxTS (20:56):

Yeah. Yeah. That's, I'd say probably that's probably the number one question that I think a lot of projects would be interested in knowing about. Yeah, primarily that's exactly right. It's community driven for the most part, I would say two thirds plus of our utilities have actually been suggestions from our community. And I mean, realistically, our community has more eyes on everything else collectively than what we do as a team. You know, even for a 15 person team, if we have a community of 3000 plus people that are fairly active in the space, they're going to have a lot more opinions and eyes and different things that exist in the whole ecosystem than we ever could for being 15 people. And our original roadmap when we had created it, we've destroyed everything on that in short order. And we do have a current roadmap version, 2.0, that's out again, majority of the items on that were suggestions from the community.

DraxxTS (21:53):

Most of those have been completed will actually be putting out our merch, this coming weekend. That was another item on our roadmap 2.0, and then we have a few other items that we're building out there as well. That should be coming out shortly, such as our attribute upgrades and our Boom Box, which is our music NFT marketplace, which will be coming out shortly as well. And we really, for our like roadmap 2.0, we just basically shot out like a discord thread. And we said, show us ideas. What, what are problems that exist in the space that you think we can solve better? And we just got a ton of suggestions. A lot of times too, they might be smaller ideas that might be more beneficial for just our community or certain things such as missions, which will integrate over time.

DraxxTS (22:39):

But for us, we kind of really looking for like big ideas, like Hype-o-Meter as an example where we can kind of leverage our community to do different tasks. And at the same time, try to garnish some kind of a reward for a specific set of people. And it doesn't have to be like an actual NFT. It can be a reward such as a trait teaser for our upcoming attribute upgrades or anything along those lines. But yeah, I think getting the buy-in from our community and suggestions from our community has been monumental in our success so far.

Brian (23:12):

That's really cool. I can tell that you guys are going to be busy for the next couple months here. You guys have no shortage of things to do on your roadmap. You know, we mentioned kind of at the start, like at a very high level, this concept of internet community, we talked about guilds. How do you see NFT collections evolving over the next, say like three to five years? Where is this space heading? And, and what's in the future for Famous Foxes?

DraxxTS (23:37):

Yeah. Three to five years is a very tough timeline, I'll say, to kind of gauge, but realistically, I mean, we do kind of look out that far. I mean, from a project standpoint, that's kind of what we want to do. We don't want to just look at what's going to happen in three months in my personal opinion. You know, I think in the next three to five years, I mean, I think there will be a lot more people that will be concerned with and interested in the ownership side. I think NFTs will kind of bridge a little bit of that understanding, but also crypto too into owning what is actually yours. I think that'll kind of be a really big thing, in my opinion. I think too, like you had mentioned the community side, I think you're starting to see a lot more interest in people that might have a large fan base, but little connection with those individual fans on a regular basis.

DraxxTS (24:27):

And it could be anyone from the music industry, from the sports industry, from just general celebrities and things that might be interested in having their own hub for users to come into and chat with them if they're interested, not everyone's interested, but I think that too is going to be a pretty decent portal. We're already starting to see that kind of trend exist in the space. But I think having direct access to people that you are interested in, like learning more about or asking questions and then tying NFTs into it by added benefits of being able to maybe talk to the person once a month or once a quarter or something like that, or to even have like one on one time with someone like Gary V or anything along those lines.

DraxxTS (25:13):

I mean, I think you're going to start seeing a lot more of those utilities initially, and then it's going to kind of fold into more where you then have airlines offering NFTs for like mileage and different kinds of rewards and free upgrades on seats or free baggage and stuff like that. I've already started to see local businesses have NFTs that I think are just like a promotional item currently, but I could see them also integrating that into, like food offerings that they have or some way of kind of building it more into like their actual physical products.

Brian (25:47):

Yeah. Loyalty programs. Yeah.

DraxxTS (25:49):

Loyalty programs. Exactly. I was kind of surprised to see that as local as it is like literally down the street. I just kind of found that quite funny, just one day random happenstance, but you know, I think NFTs personally, I think the one thing that people look at is that Bored Apes and such are kind of like such a big picture if you will as like the face of NFTs, but they don't all have to be very expensive. They don't all have to do all these crazy things. You can literally have like free NFTs. Like I think when people branch out of just the Ethereum chain, even on our site you can mint an NFT using our Foxy Mint and it costs like 0.012 SOL. So you're talking like a few cents to kind of create their own NFT and then you can do whatever you really want with it.

DraxxTS (26:35):

I mean, there's just so much opportunity with how you can integrate it into your own website, your own platform. You can just do nothing with it, just make it for fun. There's just so many options out there that I think it'll become more and more popular for people to do or to be involved with. And worst case scenario, I mean people get involved with whatever level of money they want to get involved with, but again, you don't have to come in with hundreds of thousands of dollars or anything, get involved with it. And also you don't have to stay around discord 15 hours a day and all that fun stuff. It's as much as you want to get out of it, you can. And I think that's kind of the beauty of web three is that it exists all the time if you want, and you can kind of take it as bits and pieces as you go along.

Brian (27:17):

That's really cool. Well, DraxxTS, this has been a really awesome discussion. One question we always ask at the end to all of our guests, and I would love to know this from you, given you guys this prolific building history is who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

DraxxTS (27:33):

Ooh, that's a good question. Who's a builder that I admire in the Solana ecosystem. I have to say I will 100% throw this out there, not to sound ignorant, because I'm not 100% sure who the actual creator was, but the mercury platform from blocksmith labs I would say is the most impressive thing to me in my personal opinion from what's been created and the level of integration that happens with that tool itself with other projects and people that exist in the ecosystem, I think is probably one of the best other tools that are out there outside of our own. So I will apologize for not knowing the actual creator for it, but that's who I would certainly tip my hat to.

Brian (28:16):

No, that's a great shout out. And I think you're the first one to shout them out on the pod. So we'll have to get them on as well to hear their story.

DraxxTS (28:23):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You'll definitely have to get Blocksmith Labs on that for sure.

Brian (28:26):

That's great. Well, DraxxTS , this has been awesome. Thank you so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about Famous Foxes and get involved?

DraxxTS (28:33):

Oh, 100%. So our website is famousfoxes.com. Twitter is @FamousFoxFed. And our discord is also a vanity link, which should be Famous Fox Fed as well, but you can also get to that, those different items from our website. So I would say famousfoxes.com is probably the best one stop shop for finding about Foxes.

Brian (28:57):

Awesome. DraxxTS , thank you so much.

DraxxTS (28:59):

Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Friel sits down with Solend founder Rooter to hear how he built the largest lending protocol on Solana.

Show Notes
00:41 -  Origin of PFP                    
01:27 - Origin Story                     
03:26 - When did they settle on Solana?  
04:36 - The Journey of Solend            
08:19 - Dealing with the Whale and Governance Proposals
14:23 - Time Frame from whale discovery to governance proposal
16:06 - What were the proposals?         
19:06 - The third proposal               
21:31 - Thoughts on governance and decentralization
23:46 -  What would he do anything differently?
25:36 - Advice to other founders on governance
26:49 - Isolated pools                   
31:24 - Onboarding onto DeFi             
32:57 - Permissionless pools             
35:39 - What's next for Solend           
36:33 - A builder he admires        

Full Transcript
Brian (00:06):

Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web three space forward. I'm Brian Friel, Developer Relations at Phantom. I'm super excited to introduce my guest, Rooter. Rooter is the founder of Solend, the largest decentralized lending protocol on Solana. Rooter, welcome to the show.

Rooter (00:26):

Hey, thank you, and thanks for having me.

Brian (00:27):

I think everyone on crypto Twitter will recognize you by your iconic profile picture. It looks to me like a aardvark that's shedding a single tear. Can you give a little background on what is that animal in your profile pic and how you came to rock that as your PFP?

Rooter (00:41):

So it's actually Pequenino, which is a fictional species from a book called Speaker for the Dead, which is part of Ender's Game series.

Brian (00:52):

Oh, I love it.

Rooter (00:52):

Basically, I was looking for a profile picture and this is one of my favorite sci-fi books. I found a frame in a comic and thought it was unique to have the character crying. Took that frame and ended up getting a custom artist piece made.

Brian (01:08):

That's an awesome backstory. I even seen some derivative pieces of that made now that you're a judge on the latest Solana Hackathon that's become a very iconic image in Solana lore.

Rooter (01:18):

Yes, it's funny.

Brian (01:20):

For folks who maybe aren't on crypto Twitter, would you mind giving us a little background on who you are and how you became to be founding Solend?

Rooter (01:28):

Sure. My background is in software engineering. Basically, I've been working as a software engineer for multiple years. Been doing smart contract development for a few years as well. Started off in the Ethereum space, did a startup in the past, which ended up getting acquired. And basically last year, I was looking at what to do next in crypto. And it was very clear that building something on a scalable version of Ethereum was the way to go because it would cost hundreds of dollars to do certain operations which would add up to thousands very quickly. Basically, at the time, Solana was one of the only alternative blockchains that provided good scalability and was actually live, since a lot of what was out there was just not live yet.

Brian (02:13):

And how did you settle on a decentralized lending protocol, in particular?

Rooter (02:17):

I was always quite fascinated by lending protocols. I read the Compound white paper when it first came out and was super excited about it when it first launched, I was a user. I always felt like there was something missing in the lending space, namely that not enough assets were supported. During DeFi Summer, there were all these different old coins launching like YAM, and PASTA coin, and whatnot. One thing I really wish I could do was short a lot of them or at least farm and hedge the risk, but there were no lending markets that wanted to list these coins because they're too risky and it imposes risk on the rest of the protocol. So I really felt isolated lending protocol was needed, which eventually came in the form. It was Arari launched Fuse. It was always like really want to see this in the market. The opportunity that Solana presented was perfect since basically, Solana was a fast-growing blockchain, and the ecosystem was rapidly coming together, and there was not yet any leader in lending. It just made sense that someone would need to lead that space, and why not be us?

Brian (03:27):

When did you guys settle on Solana as the chain that you were going to build on

Rooter (03:31):

At the very start, I just want to learn about different technologies so I was looking at Optimism, which hadn't launched yet. Polygon was live, aka MATIC, and I had dabbled around with that a bit. Basically, I want to mess around with Solana a little bit, see what the developer experience was like, and it turned out to be pretty good, which I guess some people might be surprised to hear. It wasn't terrible, terrible. We built the first version of Solend prototype during the Solana Season Hackathon, and we saw from that experience how powerful it could be and that there was a lot of potential. After that learning experience, we decided to double DAOn on it.

Brian (04:13):

That's great. And so you guys essentially went from a Hackathon project to today, one of the largest DeFi protocols on Solana, the largest lending protocol. You guys are facilitating hundreds of millions of dollars in loans every day. Walk us through that journey. What do you attribute that success to? And how big is the Solend team? You guys started, I assume, mostly just you in a Hackathon project. What's that journey like?

Rooter (04:37):

So in the start for the Hackathon, it was about four of us I think, and then we became five for launching the Mainnet, stayed around that size for a couple months. More recently we started growing so we're up to nine people now, mainly engineers still. And as for what I would attribute the success to? I would say, a lot of our success was on this pivotal moment which was when we launched our liquidity mining program and our token, that's when we saw a really huge spike in deposits. Basically, I think it was timed well.

Rooter (05:12):

Liquidity mining is just a really great way to bootstrap liquidity, which in lending you need that liquidity for it to be useful because if there's only a couple hundred thousand dollars of liquidity in assets, a lot of users just ... It's not useful to use it. If you're doing any size, you would be moving the rates too much. If you borrowed the rates would spike due to the algorithmic nature of it. I'd say that was definitely a pivotal moment since ... When we launched it I think we had $200 million in deposits, and basically, in one or two days we jumped up to $2 billion so that was quite a wild day for us.

Rooter (05:48):

Before that, there was a lot of anticipation to our token launch and our liquidity mining because I think we just did a good job with our branding and our UI. To this day, I think we have the simplest UI for a lending protocol that's the most easy to use and just straightforward. And, of course, coming from myself, take it with a grain of salt but I actually really do believe that. And we spent a lot of time going back and forth with a designer who is really, really talented, and coming up with this design that we felt was improving upon existing models. We tried to design it from the ground up, especially having used these products a lot. What are the pain points and what do we want to improve on?

Brian (06:28):

It sounds like you guys took a lot of your learnings too from DeFi Summer, as you mentioned that being a inspiration for you guys and how Compound's COMP token really kicked off that whole scene. I definitely agree that a well-timed liquidity mining event can really spur some pretty crazy liquidity in a bull market here.

Rooter (06:45):

And actually, I would add another thing, which is that we've built up this reputation of doing what's right by our users. Multiple times there have been issues, whether it's Oracle issues, where wrong prices are printed, and then there are some wrongful liquidations that happened. Or, at some other occasion, the Solana network went DAOn for quite a long time, which meant that some people couldn't pay back their loans when they wanted to, and as a result, they got liquidated so we've refunded people for all of these issues. And also, there was a vulnerability disclosure from Neodyme at one point, and we worked with them to get them a million-dollar bug bounty payout. No users have ever lost money due to anything that's out of their control really on Solend, and I think that goes a long way as well.

Brian (07:39):

I think that's a great segue. I think a lot of folks who maybe aren't users of Solend might have heard Solend for the first time back in June, this was around when much of the crypto market was experiencing cascading liquidations. Solend was trading around 25, $26 today, at the time of this recording in July, just a month later it's back up to $40. Around this time, there was a pretty big whale on Solend who was at risk of liquidation, and Solend initiated its first three governance proposals all in rapid succession. Could you walk us through what events were going on at that time in your own words? How the situation was affecting Solend?

Rooter (08:20):

I'll rewind a little bit. So basically, we first noticed this whales activity back in February when they deposited around $200 million worth of Solana at a time when we had around $2 billion. Or, maybe it was closer to one billion actually. Basically, they were a very large position but it wasn't anything super crazy, and also, they weren't borrowing anything at the start. And basically, what happened is, over time they started borrowing USD against their SOL position until it got to a point where they were borrowing $100 million.

Rooter (08:52):

At the time, it was almost 90% of the USDC borrowers in the main pool, and their so deposits were 95% of the deposits in the main pool. Over time, they gradually became an extremely large user on our platform. When we saw this, we tried to contact them so we did a couple of things. First, we went through our own private networks. Asked investors, "Hey, is this you or do you know who this is?" Didn't get any success there. The next thing we tried was sending an on-chain message and posting on Twitter a public announcement like "Hey, is this anyone out there, please reduce your position." I

Brian (09:33):

I remember seeing some of your tweets saying, "We're trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty jokes."

Rooter (09:39):

Definitely tried to use some humor to make it go more viral so that we could have a better chance of getting in contact with them. And the issue is that they're borrowing so much that their liquidation price was $22.30 cents, and SOL was trading at $26 and had just come DAOn from $100 just a month ago or something. If it continued to go DAOn, as was a trend, what we were worried about is that they would get liquidated which would cause such a massive amount of SOL to come onto the market in a sudden way that we were really concerned about the side effects of that. Specifically, on Solend, generally, the way that liquidations work is, there are bots that will liquidate someone and sell the assets on chain in one transaction. Basically, if that transaction is not profitable they're just not going to do it. If it is, then they will.

Rooter (10:37):

And typically this is fine because Solend has partial liquidations of 20% so only up to 20% of your position can get liquidated. And usually, positions are relatively small so it gets handled with ease. But this would be an unprecedented size of liquidation where basically, around $120 million would become liquidable in around $21 million chunks, which if you try to market sell $20 million, especially on DEXs on Solana, you're just going to crush the market.

Brian (11:09):

There's no liquidity to support that.

Rooter (11:11):

Exactly. If you try to sell one to $2 million, there would be 5% slippage. At 20 there's just no liquidity or tank it by maybe 50%, and doing this over and over again would cause a lot of issues. A couple of things there. One, it's a super lucrative liquidation transaction that Boss will be incentivized to spam so much to try to win, right. And two, it would create a very large arbitrage opportunity on the DEXs for people to ARVE between other venues. Both these combined would cause such incentive for a lot of bot activity that we were worried that it would potentially overload the Solana network. At the time, Solana was experiencing a lot of network issues, transactions would fail.

Brian (12:00):

This is the pre-1.10 release.

Rooter (12:04):

It's gotten so much better since then, thankfully.

Brian (12:06):

Was there any risk at this time to say just your average depositor in Solend, "I have a couple hundred USDC, I just want to deposit in Solend for a yield? Was I at risk here based on this mega whale's actions or failure to respond?"

Rooter (12:22):

So usually other users are not at risk, but given the size of this user and the fact that they could move the market with their liquidation, then other users were at risk because what could potentially happen is the Solana network could go DAOn, and in the worst case it would go DAOn for a couple hours. And in the worst case, the price of SOL would also continue to drop, and so liquidations would not be able to occur, or even if they did they potentially wouldn't be able to happen fast enough which would leave bad bet on the platform. Basically, when the collateral is not worth enough to cover the loan then there's a mismatch in liabilities and that would mean basically that some users who withdraw last would not be able to withdraw. Solend has an insurance fund to repay these bad debts, but there's a chance that our insurance fund of $20 million would get depleted, and on top of that users would lose a bunch of money.

Rooter (13:20):

Basically, what we were looking at is, do something about it and avoid gambling for the outcome where users would lose maybe $100 million dollars and Solend’s treasury gets depleted and basically spells the end for the land potentially, or do nothing and hope for the best. We're being proactive, and we looked at this situation and felt that it would make sense to do something about it. The solution that we came to was basically a very large market sale is extremely hard to do on chain but it's a lot more routine to do so OTC. So we made a governance proposal of this so then one, and basically the proposal was to liquidate these assets OTC, over the counter, to minimize flippage, get better execution, et cetera. Minimize impact to the market rather than doing so on chain. There was a lot of controversy around that.

Brian (14:20):

And I just want to set the stage here a little bit because I think this is a really fascinating case study for everyone who's interested in decentralized governance. I've been in the space for a couple of years now. Maybe thinking back to March 2020, but even then having governance issues that were so important. Solend being the lifeblood of the lending ecosystem on Solana, this being like you said, a potential existential question, but then also the fact that it's time sensitive. Can you just recap real quick how long you guys had from essentially finding out that this was an issue to turning out your first governance proposal?

Rooter (14:56):

So I think we first noticed this on June 15th, and a couple tweets trying to get in contact the 16th and around that. And then it was a couple days later that this proposal happened. And basically, we were looking at the sold charts and it's a very volatile asset, right. It actually dipped to $25, and I think in the high 25s for some time, which meant that only around a 15% drop would cause liquidations to happen, and doomsday scenario could happen. For SOL which dropped 80% in a very short period of time, a little 15% dip is not unfathomable, right.

Brian (15:41):

Walk us through some of the strategies here. You mentioned the first governance proposal involved taking control of the user's account in the event of a liquidation to handle this over OTC. The thinking being that OTC desk can provide better rates than the liquidity that's available latently on decentralized exchanges, there'd be less impact on users. Walk us through that proposal and then some of the subsequent proposals that followed.

Rooter (16:08):

That was essentially the proposal is to temporarily move the assets such that they can get liquidated over the counter and then move them back into the user's account. One common misconception is, people thought that we were taking their funds or stealing them or what whatnot, which is definitely not the case. Basically, they were just to get liquidated. And that money is still their own money it's just would be converted from SOL to USDC with the best execution that we could find. Better than what would be on Dex's. Of course, there's a lot of controversy around the method of doing that. Following that, there's a ton of controversy. And thankfully actually, the price of SOL started to recover which bought us some time. And re-evaluating the situation we thought okay, now that we have more time we can consider some other options potentially.

Rooter (17:01):

We made a second proposal, which rolled back the first one. We were listening to our community and the general community at large of crypto. It was definitely unpopular. Although one interesting fact actually is, it was definitely very controversial in the general sphere, but for our users that had money stuck in the platform and who were just waiting for a train to come and hit them, they really wanted us to do something about it. And we would get a lot of messages like F the haters, just do something. Don't listen to them. Just try to appease a bunch of people on Twitter and let us lose our money.

Brian (17:41):

And these are messages on Realms, the voting platform, is that right?

Rooter (17:44):

Realms and in our Discord just talking to users directly. One additional piece that I forgot to mention earlier was that, due to the utilization of the pool being so high because all of the USDC in the platform was borrowed out. That meant that people couldn't withdraw their USDC anymore because basically, the funds are not within the platform

Brian (18:08):

They're not available. Right.

Rooter (18:10):

Users were stuck in their position. They were frozen in and they couldn't exit so that was an additional thing that was exacerbating. The whale was causing real problems, it wasn't just potential.

Brian (18:20):

The borrow rates must've been crazy then.

Rooter (18:24):

I think USDC was at 60% APR and USCT went up to 200 something.

Brian (18:31):

Wow.

Rooter (18:31):

It was quite crazy. Some people were happy to collect that interest, but definitely, I think most people were sweating a little bit.

Brian (18:40):

Understandably so. Okay. You mentioned that the first proposal was around the OTC liquidations, in the event it came to that. Luckily, it didn't come to that, the price rebounded, then you guys initiated a second proposal which essentially gave your team more time to reevaluate, introduce the minimum one-day voting period. And then you guys also launched a third proposal which passed. Can you walk us through a little bit about what that third proposal entailed?

Rooter (19:07):

So the third proposal basically implemented new liquidation rules for extremely large accounts so basically, it capped the borrows of any account to $50 million. It would start off the cap at $120 million and gradually decrease it by around 500,000 per hour. Two things there. One is we don't want any single user to be a systemic risk for the platform and so there should be some sort of cap. I think this makes sense and there's pressing for it.

Rooter (19:39):

If you go to a bank and you ask for 100X leverage on a trade, or if you go to a crypto exchange like FDX or Binance, for a very long time you could do 100X leverage if you had say $100 dollars in your account. It's just a gamble, it's a lottery ticket or whatever. But if you go to them and you have $100 million and you tell them, "I want to get 100X leverage," they're going to tell you no, right. They're not just going to give anybody that crazy amount of leverage so you have to consider size. In the same way here, we don't want extremely large users until the platform can absorb it. As Solend grows, we can increase these caps.

Rooter (20:16):

And then the second part was this gradual reduction. Basically, the intent there was to spread out the liquidation over time so that we don't get a sudden $20 million sale that could cause chaos. We have them in much smaller chunks, such that the liquidations could get absorbed. If you sell a little bit on the decks it'll cause some slippage but not a crazy amount, and then it can get armed with centralized exchanges and other parties. It'll happen over the course of a couple days rather than just a couple hours or less.

Brian (20:48):

This third proposal passed as well, this was the latest proposal. Thankfully in hindsight, none of this actually had to come to the test. SOL rebounded, I assume the whale is no longer in imminent risk of liquidation. But I'm curious because you mentioned throughout this, one of your guiding principles is doing right by your users. You guys have done a number of different initiatives outside of that to prove that. And then you also mentioned your users were among the most vocal asking for you guys to take action here. I'm curious, where does governance come into play? What is a good time for enacting governance as a protocol founder? What decisions can you guys make as a team? What times do you actually need to bring in the community vote in situations like these?

Rooter (21:32):

One last thing to wrap up the whale thing. In the end, we actually were able to get in contact with them. Basically, they heard the news and someone had reached out to the Binance team ... Or, we had reached out to some people who helped us get in touch with the Binance team who then forwarded our message along to the whale. Shortly after proposing SLND3, we got in contact and talked about some mitigation strategies. In the end, they reduced their position on Solend and the price of SOL rebounded, as you mentioned. We were in the clear after that. Moving on to the question about decentralization. Basically, my thinking there is that it's better to build something worth decentralizing than to decentralize nothing. And it takes time to get to that point where you have something valuable that's worth decentralizing. My thinking basically is, if you're fully decentralized from day one it makes things extremely hard.

Rooter (22:26):

I don't know if you've participated in many DAOs, but if you have you would know how extremely inefficient they can be and how oftentimes there's a lot of this bystander effect where people do nothing, just stand around waiting for others to do something. I believe that there needs to be some spearheading entity that gets things done and then gets it to a point where it can be decentralized to the community and governed by the community later on. But the whole startup maze of discovery and pivoting to find product market fit and reacting to changing market environments, that's very hard to navigate as a DAO.

Rooter (23:04):

I don't remember who put it out at the beginning, but this idea of decentralization over time, and we're embracing that. We are working on a decentralization roadmap, which we're going to release soon. And basically, it'll outline what are the milestones on the way to decentralization? And what are the steps that we're going to take? I mean, even Bitcoin wasn't decentralized on day one, right. At the beginning, most of the hash power was owned by Satoshi and his associates and whatnot, his friends, and, it took a while for the hash power to be, as we would call it, sufficiently decentralized.

Brian (23:42):

Is there anything that you would do differently looking back on this whole situation?

Rooter (23:46):

That's a very tough question. Looking back in the situation that we were at, we were in between a rock and a hard place, and we were faced with a real-life trolley problem where one option is we gamble with our users' funds and potentially let them lose hundreds of million dollars and the life of Solend. And the other is doing something controversial that doesn't sit well with a lot of people. It was very tough and definitely hope to never have to make this decision again, but I think what we would do is we would always put our users first I think. Having users lose money is the worst thing that could happen so we would do everything we can to prevent that from happening.

Brian (24:28):

I commend you for your composure in responding to that situation. A lot of people like to chirp on Twitter. I think a lot of people who are working in Web 3.0 or founders of projects know what it's like to be in the arena there, and definitely don't envy your position but also, I think it's great that you guys have that principle of doing right by your users.

Rooter (24:50):

That was definitely tough. There was a lot of criticism directed directly at us as well. And the frustrating thing was, none of these people were users. None of them had ever touched Solend's, maybe never even touched Solana, but they were just criticizing from the sidelines. A lot of them had something to gain sort of. Maybe they were maxis or they have a platform where controversy and engagement drives metrics for them. It's an ugly reality of things.

Brian (25:23):

One last point on this. For any founders who are thinking about starting their own project in Web 3.0, generally, maybe listening to this podcast, is there anything you would tell them about governance as a whole or what you've learned so far in your time at Solend?

Rooter (25:37):

It definitely helps to be proactive and to set things up, and discuss things with people as early as possible. But at the same time, I think if you're just starting out a project, I wouldn't suggest to spin up a DAO immediately unless it's a DAO-specific project like X DAO or whatever. NOODLE's DAO or some fan club. If you're working on a startup, which happens to be crypto-powered, I would definitely suggest to figure out your place in the market first, figure out some product market fit before spending too much time decentralizing. Because if you spend all of your time and effort on the DAO piece and your startup ends up failing because it can't find product-market fit, then what's the point? That would be my advice.

Brian (26:25):

Well said. I want to switch gears here. I know we've been talking a lot about your guys' plans with decentralization over time. I think that's really exciting. You guys also have a number of other product launches though related to Solend. And recently, you guys announced the launch of your isolated pools product. Can you give us a quick overview of what these isolated pools are? I know STEPN has been a big example here. Can you walk us through how end user might interact with some of these pools?

Rooter (26:51):

An isolated pool is basically a separate pool of assets that can be cross-lent and borrowed. And this is in contrast to the main pool that we have on Solend, which was the first one that we launched with, and every time we list an asset it would go into that main pool. But the problem with that is, if you list an asset with low liquidity that is, therefore, more easily manipulatable, it opens up the entire pool to attack, not just that asset. To take one simple example. Let's say there's some token and an attacker was able to manipulate the price such that Oracle's believe that it's a million dollars a coin, then a user could deposit some of these tokens and borrow millions of dollars worth of assets against it. Millions of dollars worth of USCC, SOL, et cetera, and then just let the price fall back DAOn to say pennies and just walk away with the debt not intending to ever repay it.

Rooter (27:50):

Basically, yes, you need to be very careful about which assets you list. And everything in the main pool has to be of extremely high-quality, and not manipulable, and not just mintable willy-nilly. If someone could just print an infinite amount and deposit and borrow against it, that's also a big issue that we want to avoid. What isolated pools does is, we can set up these separate pools that we can then list riskier assets. And if there is an issue, it would be isolated to that pool. So we're not saying there's not going to be any issues ever, potentially at some point there would be issues, but users are opting into that risk when they enter into an isolated pool.

Rooter (28:30):

Some of the interesting things that we've done with these in the past is one, it's called the Turbo SOL pool so it's a pool with only SOL and USDC in it. And basically, since we have only these two really high-quality assets, we're able to increase the loan-to-value ratios for these assets. So rather than being 75%, so you can only borrow 75% of the value against your collateral, here you can borrow 95% which lets you get 10X leverage. So that's a pretty interesting use case. If you only want to leverage trade SOL versus USCC then you're better off using the Turbo SOL pool where you can get higher leverage or you can just have a lower liquidation price.

Rooter (29:13):

And then the other side is, listing long tail assets. One very interesting one as you mentioned was a STEPN pool. We have this pool where there's GST, which is the token that you earn from walking, and GMT, which is the STEPN governance project token. This has been an extremely popular one where it was growing a lot. The number of users in this isolate pool was our fastest growing for some time. And it opened up some interesting use cases which showcases the power of DeFi and composability. So basically, STEPN just launched their token, they don't have anything to do with lending markets or whatnot, but we are able to just launch that permissionlessly and provide a product for users to use to do a couple of things.

Rooter (30:01):

One is, they can hedge their entry to STEPN. Rather than paying $500 for a pair of shoes to start walking, you can borrow a bunch of GMT or GST and sell it to US dollars and then buy the shoe with that. And what that does is, if STEPN as a whole doesn't do well, for whatever reason, and the price of its shoes go DAOn, probably the price of GST and GMT is going to go DAOn as well so you end up saving that money since you didn't make such a big upfront investment so you can hedge your entry costs. And another interesting thing you can do is you can borrow GST to level up your shoes and pay it off later so it's level up now pay later. Buy now pay later.

Brian (30:49):

Buy now pay later but for STEPN.

Rooter (30:50):

Exactly.

Brian (30:52):

That's awesome. How have you guys seen this DeFi component fitting in with the general onboarding funnel for something like STEPN? I think STEPN's fairly unique. It brought in maybe a lot of users who weren't familiar with crypto for the first time. Do you see this as something that's more of an advanced feature today or could this potentially, in its own way, be a bit of a gateway drug to onboarding on the DeFi directly getting new users who might not have ever had a wall before to open up wallet and deposit in Solend because of the yields that they see?

Rooter (31:24):

It's definitely a more advanced feature. Users that use this have to be aware of their liquidation risk and they have to manage that which is pretty tricky and ideally would understand how markets work. What's an order book? Just those basics. I think a lot of people in crypto take it for granted because they've been just breathing it, eating it for breakfast every day for so long, but it does take some time to learn these concepts. The one beginner feature is you could just deposit your GST or GMT and lend it out for yield, that's pretty simple. It's good to understand the risks involved as well, but that's a much simpler product than borrowing against and managing liquidation.

Rooter (32:04):

And, by the way, the interest rates on GST and GMT were historically extremely high, something like 500% API which made it very exciting. And that definitely brought on a lot of people, which a lot of them were beginners to DeFi, hadn't really used crypto products much but were attracted by those very high yields, especially those that were holding GST anyway because maybe they were saving up for the next big purchase and why not earn 500% API per year?

Brian (32:33):

That makes a lot of sense. 500% though, I think that starts to ... Maybe some folks who aren't familiar with crypto, that starts stirring a too good to be true. For those who were around in DeFi Summer, that's small fry numbers. I think a natural extension of this concept of an isolated pool gets at something that you guys have hinted a little bit called permissionless pools. Is there anything that you guys can share about this?

Rooter (32:58):

As I mentioned a while ago, when I was using lending protocols and then DeFi Summer, there are a bunch of things that I wish there were lending markets for. I really wish that I could just list my own, but it's a lot of work to start a whole lending protocol, and get usage, and get network effects, and whatnot. As you mentioned, the natural next step from isolated pools is allowing anyone to list their own. And this has been something that I've wanted to get to for a very long time and so it's very cool to finally be seeing this come to fruition. Basically, quite soon, maybe by the time this pod airs, we're launching permissionless pools, which anyone can list whatever asset they want. I think it's quite a powerful concept since on day one that an asset list gets launched you can have a lending market for it so you can short anything on day one, you can leverage long anything on day one, you can use anything as collateral for a loan on day one, all powered by the community.

Rooter (33:57):

Going back to isolated pools, we've been launching one isolated pool about once a week, but even then we only have ... Right now we have 40 something assets and around 16 different isolated pools, but it's going to take us forever to list everything in Solana ecosystem, right, there's thousands of tokens. And at this rate of once a week, even though that's a pretty decent rate we're just never going to get to everything. I guess borrowing some lessons from Uniswap, they have permissionless listings and it made sense that they could list everything under the sun without having to spend any engineering time on it.

Rooter (34:34):

And in contrast to that, centralized exchanges like buying that through Coinbase, they have to spend maybe a week of engineering's time to set everything up, especially if they have legacy systems that are not designed from the start to be rapid listing machines. Coinbase, for example, as a startup, it was only for buying Bitcoin, and then they added Ethereum later on. And then now there's hundreds of assets but it took a really long time to get there, and it takes up a lot of engineering time. In this way, we're able to provide a market for everything on Solana, and we're removing ourselves as a gatekeeper and as a blocker for having these markets.

Brian (35:13):

That's really cool to hear. I do think that is one of the main selling points of a decentralized protocol like this is just capturing the long tail of all assets in a really efficient way. I think this dovetails pretty nicely too with what you mentioned with this hint at what your guys' plans are for decentralizing long term. I guess looking ahead, what are you most excited to build with Solend? What do you envision is the end state for how Solend fits into the broader Solana ecosystem?

Rooter (35:40):

One of the big parts that we're encouraging is developer usage. Solend at the end of the day is a platform. We have Sea Tokens that make it extremely easy to integrate with. Sea Tokens are just like any other SPL token that represent your deposit. And basically, we want Solend to be pretty deeply integrated into the ecosystem and be used across various different use cases. Lending is a core primitive of DeFi and it's a building block that should be used as much as possible. I really see ourselves at the base layer of Solana as a primitive that's used in many different other products.

Brian (36:21):

That's awesome. Well, I think you guys are definitely well on your way to being there. Rooter, this is a great discussion. Thanks for your time. One last question we ask to all our guests. Who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Rooter (36:34):

I really admire the Orca team. Yutaro and Grace inspired me to build Solend right at the beginning because ... I knew Yutaro from his Orion days and I knew he was a very talented dev. Seeing him jump into Solana was definitely a factor for me to take a second look at it. If you haven't already had them, I would definitely recommend them.

Brian (36:58):

Couldn't agree more. We had Orion for I believe our third episode that we launched. They do a really great job of setting the UX bar very high in crypto, especially when it comes to DeFi projects, as you guys do as well. Well, Rooter, this is great. Thanks so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about you and to learn more about Solend?

Rooter (37:18):

So for myself, you can follow me on Twitter, I'm at 0xrooter, most active there. For Solend, Solend.fi is the website and Solendprotocol on Twitter where you can find all of our updates. From there you can find all the links to everything else like our documentation and whatnot. Developer, portal, and whatnot.

Brian (37:38):

Perfect. Thank you, Rooter.

Rooter (37:39):

Thank you.

TJ Littlejohn (mtnPay CEO) joins The Zeitgeist to discuss how mtnPay is enabling real-world crypto adoption by innovating on the payment user experience.

Show Notes
00:42 - Background                        
01:53 - Story behind MtnPay              
03:42 - Other participants at MtnDAO          
05:53 - From white paper to actually building
08:56 - Congressman interaction          
10:22 - What is MtnPay?                    
12:22 - Future Features for MtnPay
14:40 - Winning Riptide’s payments track                  
15:33 - Developer resources              
16:40 - The Photobooth                    
20:34 - Solana's architecture            
22:10 - The Future of Payments on Solana  
24:33 - The future of MtnPay              
25:40 - Builders TJ admires              
27:18 - Where to learn more about MtnPay  

Full Transcript

Brian (00:06):

Hey, everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer of relations at Phantom and joining me today is TJ Littlejohn. TJ is the founder and CEO of mtnPay. A Solana API for payments. TJ, how's it going today?

TJ (00:24):

What's up, dude. Thanks for having me on.

Brian (00:27):

Thanks for coming on. We're real excited to give you guys a little bit of spotlight here. You guys have built some great products that have integrated with Phantom and some really cool ways. Before we dive into all that, do you mind giving us a little background on who you are and how you became to be building on Solana?

TJ (00:42):

Yeah. So like you said, my name's TJ. Background's just as a developer historically, I'm an iOS developer. I did that in college, was really into hackathons, after school went out to SF and worked at Apple doing iOS development there. Kind of wanted to do something a little more impactful, joined some startups, found Solana maybe at the end of last year, I noticed there was an opportunity to build and I couldn't ignore it. There was a lot of foundational things popping up. I think Phantom had just got going within the last couple months. And NFTs were usable, but there was still a massive vacuum for other things and so it kind of jumped in and exploring what to build really.

Brian (01:23):

That's awesome. And so a lot of people when they hear the name mtnPay, the first thing that comes to their mind is mtnDAO. And for those that don't know, mtnDAO started originally as this small little co-working space in Salt Lake City for some Solana builders to come together. Now it's evolved, let's say it's basically a movement. It's kind of the epitome of Solana developer culture in a lot of respects. What is the kind of founding story there? How did you get involved in mtnDAO? And what was the original idea for what is now mtnPay?

TJ (01:54):

Yeah, mtnDAO like you said, it's a co-working space. Month long co-working space in Salt Lake City. I got involved to go there because of my friends that brought me into Solana. I had a couple good friends, Edgar and Barrett who were into this space a lot earlier than most people were. And they were just some really cool builders and had a lot of great friends that were developers and entrepreneurs. And so I think they had done this the year prior where it was called the mountain compound. And they just had a bunch of people come out, they rented a ski house and just kind of built for a week or so. And then naturally it was like, cool, they were going to do it the next year, and so that was what became mtnDAO.

TJ (02:32):

And everyone was invited, I was friends with them, I was definitely going to go. Kind of popped off and a lot of people showing up. And so we were there in this co-working space and there was just ... I was looking for stuff to do. And it was a random, fun idea to build a point of sale. Solana Pay had just came out, the spec and with being bored I was reading it. And it was a night before a party and I was grabbing a Red Bull because I was really tired and there was a point of sale there that was a self-service checkout thing. We were like, what if we just rebuilt this and added Solana Pay? And that was it. There wasn't much more past that, and it was oh, we can make this for our friends for the full month. And we jumped all over that.

Brian (03:13):

That's awesome. Starting small, now it's basically this whole movement. You guys have a couple really great integrations, but with the NFTs I saw, being able to just push transactions on the end users and Phantom. I guess before we dive into all that a little more, just to talk a little bit more about mtnDAO, you mentioned Edgar and Barrett. I believe that's Edgar and Barrett from Cipher Protocol and Margin Five. Is that right?

TJ (03:33):

Correct.

Brian (03:34):

What were some of the other builders there? Do you still keep in touch with folks who were in that early house and how has that kind of scene evolved on Solana?

TJ (03:42):

It's crazy. There's been so many wins that came out of that month. Nick from Cronos was there. They're an incredible project and he ended up winning the Riptide Hackathon. My friend Jeff spent the month there and he's been experimenting with a bunch of different Defi opportunities since. Cavy, now works at Genesis Go. I know that John now is at Coral. I don't know if there was any correlation of him up there, but just shows how sick we build, he was just hanging out there all month. All the people from Cashmere was there. They were awesome to have around. Jeremy Cardinal, literally everyone. I know [inaudible 00:04:29] came through the whole time, VCs like Alex from Delfi or Cal Samani was there. Just the raw crew, you know?

TJ (04:36):

So that was I think really cool and inspirational and you're around those people and it just makes you want to be better and elevate yourself and be around some sick builders. Mika, I think a lot of the Phantom people came in through too. I think that was the first time I met CK. And I think honest, meeting CK there enabled a lot of the mtnPay stuff because I had this open line of coms just to pester him when Solana Pay was coming out. The new versions of Solana Pay were coming out like dude, I need this. When's it coming? When's it coming was able to work in parallel. Ended up if I think getting connected to you through that probably, was pestering you a bunch. A lot of crazy opportunities came through man mtnDAO.

Brian (05:16):

Yeah. I wouldn't call it pestering, but no, it's a super organic developer movement here. It's something that definitely originally drew me to Solana in the first place. Just the positivity and the sheer number of people just show up to a house in Utah and start hacking on things. So you mentioned the founding stories. You're sitting in this house in Utah, there's this square terminal where you could check out maybe buy some snacks, buy some Red Bulls late at night. Was it just you who was working on this idea? How did this come together? You mentioned that the Solana Pay spec was released that day. How did you go from, Hey, I see this essentially a white paper, maybe a GitHub to actually deciding this was something you're going to actually spend some time on?

TJ (05:53):

Yeah, totally. So had the idea randomly. I was reading the spec early in the week, knew about it. Literally what you said was at the point of sale, like had the idea like, oh, it'd be sick to rebuild this, but add Solana Pay. But obviously there's more that kind of follows up there. That was on Friday night. And so my boy Scott was in town. We kind of knew we wanted to go out Friday, go skiing Saturday and then started hacking on some stuff because he was there through I think Wednesday maybe? And so we had floated a couple of ideas around on what we could possibly be working on. And that was just one of them. And then we ended up on Sunday, at the shop, which is the co-working space that mtnDAO was at.

TJ (06:30):

We probably were whiteboarding five to six ideas dealing with stuff with Game-Fi or tokens for Twitch creators or ... It's funny, like one of the early ideas was like tokens for merchants. And then another one was just this one of doing the point of sale for this. And we're like I feel this is the most digestible and that we could hack together and it fit our skill sets. I'm an iOS developer. Scott's done some stuff on the back end before. And so he could handle a lot of the integration, the square stuff and I can do the Solana front end stuff and it just made sense. And so we grinded it, we stayed up super, super late, most nights, but it was a 48 hour turnaround because we also didn't even start it on Sunday, like that actual idea until five, six o'clock. I actually looked the other day because I was going back to some of the mtnDAO tweets. We did it on February 8th. Which was sick. So a lot of it came out on the first. So it was really fast.

Brian (07:27):

And no inside knowledge to the time right? You basically found out the same time everyone else did.

TJ (07:32):

Yeah. No inside knowledge, but I think Jordan from Solana Pay will boast that there was no insider knowledge. The repo was public since November. So anyone could have known.

Brian (07:43):

Alpha hiding in plain sight there.

TJ (07:45):

Exactly. Obscurity by just putting it on GitHub. I did feel I had insider knowledge afterwards though. I remember Nick from Cronos, it was super on payments now, was super on my radar, we had that video go kind of viral. Then Nick from Cronos came back from the Seattle Hacker House and I think he met someone there and learned about the transaction request back. And I remember in between that is when I met CK and I was like, dude, if we can figure out how to make this work for any transaction on Solana, it's over. This changes everything. And I was so sure of that, but I had no idea how you could do that. And then I remember Nick coming back and showing me the spec and I never felt like I had such insider info in my life. But again, it was just probably on the GitHub. But man, I remember reading it and just being like, this is different. This changes things.

Brian (08:41):

Yeah. No that's super cool. I remember that video you mentioned, I think it was at three in the morning, you guys filmed it with Scott and he's there checking out his Red Bull on mtnPay. I think you guys even had somebody who was a governor or a Senator that came by and checked out with it. Who was that?

TJ (08:56):

John Curtis. I believe Congressman John Curtis. That was fun too. He came another time. We had a couple of minutes in between when he was meeting with people privately or something or had a small round table with some folks. And when he was going to do a larger chat and so just got to get down with the stuff to him, which was really cool because that's a lot of what mtnPay going to do in the near term is just demo what's possible. It's kind of like a chicken and the egg thing. And so I don't think there's a massive surplus of people waiting ready to pay, but I think we have an opportunity to demo and move conversations along. And so that was just a really good example of that is how we can show the decision makers, what is actually doable and what things look like and feel like.

Brian (09:42):

Yeah, it's kind of like you said, the whole protocol could be sitting there on GitHub for anyone to go see, but there's very few people in the world who are going to dig into that and actually build something. And you guys are actually building products that makes this tangible, make this real, you get someone like a Congressman to come in and actually use it and buy something for real and have it show up in Square. And as a line item ran right alongside using a credit card or something like that. You hit on a couple things earlier. You mentioned that originally at this point of sale integration, but then the second evolution of this spec came along that enabled transaction requests. And so you guys have built some really great products around that, how would you describe what mtnPay is today holistically?

TJ (10:23):

At our interface layer, we're an API, right? So we want to be able to be pinged by anyone that has an internet connection and can make rest API calls. On the back end what we're doing is we are doing the grunt work of integrating with a bunch of different protocols and tying their functionality together for use cases that make sense to consumers. I want to pay for this, please build the transaction that does that. Or I would like to use a coupon that I have in my account and get a discount on this item I am purchasing or it doesn't necessarily have to be payment stuff. Like you said, we have some cool stuff we do with NFTs. For another example, we integrate with Magic Eden this week and have a feature where you can have a QR code that sweeps the floor of a given NFT collection. And that was done by using like of their APIs that maybe weren't intended to be used exactly together. But then we did that and then we can open that up for other people to use in whatever way they want to compose with this product.

Brian (11:31):

Yeah. And so this is all leveraging at the end of the day that Solana Pay spec and that transaction requests are part of that. I feel like the Solana Pay is a bit of a misnomer at this point because, originally, it's a similar evolution you guys have took, starting out payments point of sale. Now you're able to scan a QR code, sweep the floor. I even saw that Greg, one of the mtnPay team members, actually printed this QR code and put it on a shirt and has been walking around. So you can scan a shirt live in person and sweep the floor. It's pretty cool. What are some of the things that you think people aren't maybe thinking about when it comes to transaction requests? Most people know transaction requests from either just a tutorial or sending someone an invoice or something that they can pay. You guys I think are pushing the envelope a little bit here. What are some of the things that you mentioned that the sweeping the floor, what are some others that you have in mind here?

TJ (12:22):

I think the mental model shift that you need to hit is that a transactional request can literally just do anything you can do on Solana. So anything dApps are doing today where they're building transactions, you can do that with transaction requests. But the cool thing is you can do that on a servered environment. And so you start to separate the entities that are involved, the group that's building the transaction doesn't have to be the group that's generating the QR code, which doesn't have to be on the same device that the user is trying to grab the transaction and sign it. When you start to break up this stuff, really cool interactions can happen. And so when I had that unlocked from seeing the spec, my mind was just running and I was like, what cool things can we do with this?

TJ (13:10):

One of the really early ideas that we had, and a lot of it centered around what can we do that's like fun here? What do we think is unique and whatever, and so one of the really early ideas we had was Degen coin flip. Could we wrap up Degen coin flip and put it on a projector at a party and just have people doing Degen coin flip and do a cool UI. And everyone can just like get hyped when someone wins a bunch of money, that's fun. Or the next idea there was the photo booth we built. Those ideas both came from the Austin community hacker house that happened in March. I wanted to build those out for that hacker house.

TJ (13:50):

But the timing didn't line up with when transaction requests was going to be live in the app store. And so we had to wait on that, but that was really fun. We did the Magic Eden sweeping thing. We've done candy machine minting, just wrapping up protocols. Notice how in here we didn't build any core protocol piece ourselves or even the way to interface with them. We just go on their open source repos and just look at their front end and try to grab the pieces that call into their smart contracts. Then wrap that up in some cool ways. And to me that was a big aha moment, it was like, oh shit, you can do some stuff here.

Brian (14:28):

Yeah. It's pretty unbelievable that you guys have built all this without even writing a single line of rust or deploying your own program on Solana. I think you guys even won the payments track of the last hackathon, is that right?

TJ (14:40):

Yeah. We won Riptide, of the payments part of Riptide, shout out Cronos, Cronos won the whole thing. But yeah, we won the payments track. We were super stoked about that. It's given us a couple of opportunities and some eyeballs, which has been really nice, but you know, it's starting to become old news. Solana summer camps here, I think a new wave of peeps with eyeballs and whatever's going to come up. And so we've just got to keep going, keep innovating, keep building. And we're stoked to do that. Just got to be like, what can we integrate with next?

Brian (15:10):

I think it's a great story though, for all those new builders who are coming up on the new hackathon that you can build this incredible company that does all these different things without even having to get into the whole program side of Solana. There's so much that's already out there. It's so composable with one another, you can do a lot of work just on the client. You can do a lot of work, building APIs, building wrappers around all this stuff that just makes this easier for everyday people.

TJ (15:33):

Yeah. And there's so many developer resources out there now, too. It's getting to a point where it's easier to just look stuff up and some actual solid answers are out there. Some of the resources being yours. I believe I've had that happen recently where I'll be looking for ... We've been trying to do some things onchain. There's some really cool stuff we can do when we start moving the infrastructure onchain, it gets safer and more powerful. And in trying to do that, I came up across a lot of your articles. And so I kind of wanted to shout those out, those are really cool to see.

Brian (16:03):

Appreciate that. It's great to hear they're still relevant after all this time. Some of those might be outdated, so listener beware. You mentioned the photo booth as one of the applications you guys have built. For those that haven't seen it, photo booth is this actual in person kiosk, you have an iPad, you could use any sort of device here, but what it basically lets you do is take a photo just like you would in a photo booth and in a few easy steps, you can mint this as NFT on Phantom Mobile, and your favorite wallet, all seamless, all running on mtnPay APIs. What was the inspiration for the photo booth? How did you guys originally even come up with this idea?

TJ (16:39):

I think it was a lot of things. I think people talk about, I don't know, there's that thing of founder fit or whatever, or hindsight's always 20/20 or whatever. But there were so many little things that had happened to me from January to March to get to the photo booth happening that it's crazy that it actually did happen. So the photo booth idea came about when I was thinking about what stuff can we do with Solana Pay? I think pretty early on, I was like, oh, you could mint NFTs. I had done stuff with ... Back in January, my passion project was a custom candy machine contract where instead of minting NFTs that were directly linked to a JSON file, that was on some CDN.

TJ (17:31):

I was going to point it at a serverless function. And then that serverless function was going to query onchain data and then return JSON back to the user there. And so would, it'd be this cool, dynamic NFT based on onchain data. And so that was the first time I learned serverless functions, which I needed for mtnPay the photo booth. That was the first time I was digging into the candy machine code. And then thinking about fun stuff I can do, it went from the Degen coin flip on the wall to an iPad up on the wall that took the picture, uploaded it, and then you could use Solana Pay to mint the NFT and all of that was only possible because I had those different pieces of context. And then the last thing being that my friend Nick just dropped the transaction request back in my DMs.

TJ (18:22):

And I don't know if I would've run into it other than that single moment. And so that was kind of how the idea started to come about. And then we built it out. It's actually funny, I was actually focusing super, super hard on the point of sale app, but I thought that was the thing we were going to do. And so I was trying to put all of my time there, we were trying to do a merchant pilot and get IRL merchants onboarded to this thing. So I felt I had so much to build, but I knew that the photo booth could be this fun thing. So at first I thought about just having someone else build it, I was reaching out to some people asking for grants or like, Hey, do you want to sponsor this thing?

TJ (19:01):

And I could get like 3000 dollars from someone then give it to a developer friend to help build it. And I could guide them how to build it, but I couldn't source any money. And so I just had to use one or two nights of my own time away from mtnPay and just build this thing. And then after I built the first version of it, I was like, oh shit, this is kind of crazy. The idea is one thing, but when you actually get to use it, I don't know again, I feel it's kind of like a mental unlock for some people myself included. It was like a big shift.

Brian (19:37):

Yeah. I would definitely say it's a bit of a light bulb moment. I think the first time I saw it was Solana Miami, I think you guys brought it out and I think it was the first time you guys had also bought this inflatable cover around the photo booth.

TJ (19:50):

The marshmallow.

Brian (19:51):

The marshmallow. Yeah. Since then, I think it's gone through a few different evolutions. I've seen some cool plans in the works too for how you guys thinking of upgrading this thing. But you know, personally, I love it. We've brought it around at Phantom to a couple different places. I know we sponsored at the hacker house in Austin and then on the Degen party and there's a couple other places as well. It's been a huge hit, we see even folks who maybe aren't necessarily crypto native. It's a great excuse for them to download Phantom, download a wallet and scan this thing, submit their first NFT, especially because a lot of folks don't even know but with Solana Pay transaction requests, this can be free mint to users, right? You guys can essentially make this so someone can just download a wallet, scan a QR code, and then next thing they know, they have an NFT in their wallet without paying any Sol.

TJ (20:34):

It's crazy. The architecture of Solana is very composable or gas has to be paid, but it doesn't have to be paid by the user that's minting. I think that's one of the problems honestly, or not the problems, but one of the challenges is a wallet, right? Phantom, it's such a productized thing. I think Phantom's done an incredible job productizing this wallet to be easy to use. And it makes sense for consumers and holds this stuff. But reality, a wallet just is your private key. It's the software that holds your private key and then it's the actions that a user can do when the private key exists. And so you think like, oh no, I'm sending this Sol, or I'm minting this NFT where really, it's an action is just requires my signature and the signatures here so I can do that. And so as part of our infrastructure, we can sometimes pay for NFTs, we can pay for rent, we have wallets on our backend that we can sign for transactions. There's really, really cool stuff there. So anyone out there listening, that's doing stuff for the Solana summer camp, you have questions on how that works. Please reach out. Happy to walk you through that. You can do cool stuff though, I guarantee I haven't thought of.

Brian (21:45):

I love it. That's awesome. You hit a lot here with transaction requests, what's capable across the Solana protocol, also the founding story of mtnPay really was in this point of sale app. What do you think is the future of payments on Solana? You mentioned that we're kind of in this still experimental phase. What do you think are some of the next big hurdles that we as an ecosystem need to conquer together to make payments more real?

TJ (22:10):

I think it's a couple things. I think a lot of things have to happen for payments to go to scale. I think the first thing that has to happen is something like mtnPay has to exist and we have to have infrastructure in the hands of the merchants that enable them to accept non-custodial funds that is not locked into any single platform. To me that's a given, which is why I'm so stoked to be building this. But I think there's a lot of other pieces. I think protocols just in general have to exist. I think novel ideas have to be created and people have to build them out stuff like dialect, right? Where it's just a raw messaging protocol. Stuff like Cardinal, where they're adding functionality on top of NFTs for anyone to use. Really cool lending protocols need to exist.

TJ (22:59):

And then our job is to kind of grab those and wrap those together for product use cases. And then I think just other things totally separate from payments have to exist. I think Game-Fi, to be honest with you is going to be a massive catalyst of payments on Solana going well. I think you need users here that have a balance in crypto for reasons other than payments. And then they can start using those balances for payments as well, which is why I'm so stoked about something like the Saga, because I think it's going to start to get a lot of those early users in the ecosystem doing things that just aren't related to payments.

TJ (23:37):

A lot of times I like to think about it in terms of how Apple, right, the Apple ecosystem's so great because your iMessage with your FaceTime works with your photos. It's how I think like Solana kind of goes, but people get to build the different pieces. And so that's what I think the world looks like if this goes well and it sounds like a fun world. And so I hope that it happens and we're going to do our best to see that.

Brian (24:02):

Yeah. Well, I would say that it's already a fun world here in the Solana developer ecosystem. You know, you've seen both the worlds. You mentioned Apple, but having worked on the inside Apple, they build incredible products, but I haven't seen an ecosystem quite like Solana has where it's just so open. I mean, you mentioned Nick from Cronos, you got the Cardinal guys, all in the same chats, all showing up the same house in Utah. It's a really awesome environment where we can kind of build this composable layer together. If you had to summarize, where do you see mtnPay going from here?

TJ (24:33):

Yeah. We're going to keep leaning on our infrastructure piece. We want to compose with more protocols, get some integrations. We have stuff in the pipeline with Dialect. We've spoken with the Cardinal folks a handful of times. I think we can compose with them without being super hands on with them and so we're going to do that in the near term. We're in a big integration phase, try to bring these things together. And then the other side of that is the distribution. So we have some cool distribution paths that we're not ready to talk about just yet. That's kind of both sides here that we need to be super careful about. It's making sure we have a really cool set of infrastructure, but how can we go and get that infrastructure out there to as many people as possible? And so that's the real two focuses that we have.

Brian (25:15):

Well, I look forward to inviting you back on the pod or you can unveil a little more news there about the distribution and all you guys are up to. TJ, we ask this of every guest at the end, we want to know who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem and I got to say that our last guest, Steven Laborer, gave you a shout out. Everyone knows your energy and the space is infectious. But everyone listening wants to know who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

TJ (25:39):

Can I just say Steven back? No, I'm just kidding. Love Steven. That's not who I'm going to shout out today. I'm going to shout out, I don't even know his last name, but his Twitter name's Jacob dot soul. Jacob's a sick developer. Have you met him before.

Brian (25:52):

Yeah, I've interacted with him on Twitter a little bit, but I don't think I've met him in person.

TJ (25:55):

He is really cool. He is an incredible developer. He is a lot of fun. He's part of the photo booth story where initially we were using candy machine for the photos, for the photo booth and Solana wasn't doing great that day. And so my program wasn't deploying to main net and so an hour or two before we went live, he sat down and helped me rewrite a bunch of the minting stuff for the back end. And I had interacted with him at mtnDao, but didn't know him super, super well. And so he's just a super giving dude, super talented. He's out there building. Have you seen Feeble Labs yet?

Brian (26:33):

Yep.

TJ (26:33):

The lambs or whatever. You have to interact with their Twitter or your NFT dies. It's incredible. That's where you get my respect is if you're out there doing something creative with no ask, right? They're giving these things away for free. They're doing Twitter spaces all the time. He's just one of the real, actual, creative builders out there. So I have a lot of respect for Jacob. I look up to him a lot.

Brian (27:01):

That's awesome. I think that encapsulates the spirit of Solana, pushing things forward, trying out new tech, experimenting, and then also being really open and helping others at the same time.

TJ (27:11):

Totally, totally, totally.

Brian (27:13):

TJ, this is really great. Thank you for your time. Where can people go to learn more about mtnPay?

TJ (27:17):

Yeah. So go to at @mtnPay on Twitter. M-T-N-P-A-Y. And you'll see that there. Or you can follow me TJ underscored Littlejohn, because I talk about it a lot as well. Those two spots you'll find all of our other stuff from there.

Brian (27:31):

Love it, TJ Littlejohn. Thanks for coming on the show.

TJ (27:33):

Dude, thanks for having me. Appreciate you. It was a lot of fun.

Steven Laver (Solana Mobile Engineering Lead) joins The Zeitgeist to discuss how Solana Mobile Stack and the Saga phone will enable the user experiences and rich ecosystem that we need for the future of Web3.

Show Notes

00:05 - Intro
00:45 - Background
01:27 - Before Solana
02:24 - Why mobile and SMS?
04:12 - What is SMS ?
06:15 - Seed Vault
08:39 - ARM TrustZone
10:06 - Security with Seed Vault
11:44 - Restrictions with Seed Vault
12:46 - Importing and exporting keys
15:02 - Mobile wallet adapter
21:39 - Plans for deep linking
23:27 - The dApp store
27:31 - Plans for Solana pay
31:18 - Saga
33:16 - Expanding SMS to other devices and blockchains
38:54 - Working with TJ from Mountain Pay
40:18 - Where to connect with Steven and SMS
41:14 - Outro

Transcript

Brian (00:06):

Hey, everyone. And welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce my guest Steven Labor. Stephen is the lead software engineer for a suite of new Solana developer tools known as SMS. The Solana mobile stack. SMS was unveiled recently at NFT NYC alongside a flagship smartphone that will be powered by this new suite of technologies. Stephen, welcome to the show.

Steven (00:37):

Thanks Brian. Excited to be here.

Brian (00:39):

Thanks for coming on. We have a lot of ground to cover today. Couple really great announcements that you guys just released, but before we dive into all that, could you give us a brief background of who you are and how you became involved with building mobile software for so Solana?

Steven (00:52):

Sure. So I have been doing professional engineering now for round about 20 years, but about 15 of those have been spent working on phones in one fashion or another. Right after college, I kind of fell backwards into a job. I just crossed the road rom my university and started working for research in motion and back then worked on Blackberries back when they were cool. And since then I've had a long career building, all kinds of phones and software for phones. Few forays out into some other areas of consumer electronics, but I keep seeming to be dragged back into phones. So I must love it.

Brian (01:28):

Right before Solana. What were some of the companies you were just working at?

Steven (01:31):

When, when I took the call from Anatoly for this cool new, exciting opportunity for Solana mobile, I was sitting in a beige conference room at a very large company that likes to make very monochromatic products. And when he started selling me on what Solana labs was building here and the what the vision for the SAGA device was at the time under a very cool code name, but I was pretty quickly sold on that. And previous to that, I spent a few years working at Google, working on the Android products there. So like I said, long background, lots of different smartphones and phone software in there, but this is the most excited I've been about a phone project in a long, long time.

Brian (02:09):

Oh, that's awesome to hear. Most people who interact with crypto today do so on a desktop from a browser extension. Maybe they're signing with a ledger, maybe they're signing with a web wallet like Phantom. And on Solana specifically, mobile wallets only launched a little over six months ago. Why is the time right now for push into mobile and why SMS specifically?

Steven (02:29):

So this is actually exactly what the problem statement that convinced me that I should join Solana labs and help build this awesome product. Our phones are everything to us. They're our web browsers. They are cameras. We watch TV on them. We play games on them. They're the first place we go to for everything, they're even our alarm clocks now. And the fact that the Web 3.0 ecosystem just isn't present on our phones the same way it is on our desktops. That to me, is what really gets me excited and got me interested in building this. We're really at the square one here, as far as building for a rich ecosystem for Web 3.0 and for Solana on mobile devices. And we get to use this at use SAGA and use SMS. This is our stake in the ground.

Steven (03:13):

This is us saying, this is how we should be building for mobile devices. These are the user experiences we need to offer. These are the technologies we need to offer. And being on the ground floor of that, getting to build these fundamental building blocks and then giving them to the community. So the community can then go build all the great, amazing ideas that are honestly, things I would never have thought of. But when I look back at them, I'm like, wow. We have such a rich and exciting community of builders for Solana. That's what I'm most excited about for building SAGA and building the Solana mobile stack.

Brian (03:45):

That's awesome. Yeah. From Phantoms side, we've seen just in the last six months that even though that foundation for building mobile apps, isn't really there today, SMS hopefully will be able to lay this great foundation. Like you said, we've seen that mobile has been our fastest growing segment by far. So we're super excited for this as well. SMS covers a lot of new developer features here. It's kind of this umbrella term for this whole suite of products that you guys are building in your own words, what is SMS and how should developers be thinking about this new suite of tools?

Steven (04:17):

I think of it from two angles. So first of all, let me talk about it just briefly from a consumer angle. Or Web 3.0 ecosystem for consumers. Many of us are very in the know about what that means, but for some others, they may be a little less so. They're new to the space, they're still learning it. There's a lot of words and phrases and sayings and memes that are very unique to this ecosystem that people take a little while to get onboarded with. From a consumer perspective, SMS really allows them to understand what a phone offers in terms of its capabilities with Solana. And so it's really by participating in an ecosystem or on a device that has the SMS technologies on it, to a certain extent, they know what they're going to get there. They know they're going to get a device that is going to work well and is they're going to be able to fully participate in the Solana ecosystem.

Steven (05:06):

For developers, SMS is a collection of technologies, the big ones being, we have Seed Vault for secure key custody. We have mobile wallet adapter for connecting adapts to wallets. We have deeper richer integrations with the OS for Solana Pay, and then the Solana DAP store, which people are really, really excited about.

Steven (05:25):

And so from the developer perspective, we have this collection of tools which will continue to grow over time. We're going to put more libraries in there. We're going to have more samples for developers, and we're going to keep expanding on this initial set of technologies. And I'm happy to talk about each of those in detail, but as far as SMS for developers, we've got an SDK out now and we're going to be continuing to enhance that. And each of those technology offerings within SMS has value to offer to a different slice or a different segment of our developer ecosystem.

Brian (05:55):

That's awesome. They're very complimentary as well. Let's dive into each of them. So you mentioned four of those there. We have the Seed Vault. We have the mobile wallet adapter, the DAP store that you guys are launching and then better integrations around Solana Pay, which you guys recently unveiled earlier this year. Let's start with the Seed Vault. I feel like this is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Can you describe a little bit of more, like, what is the Seed Vault? Is it related to what a secure enclave is on iOS or a key store? How should people be thinking about this new term?

Steven (06:25):

So there's a pretty big gap between the level of security that a hardware wallet offers. Something like a device like a ledger or a treasure. Those are great devices, they're purpose built hardware, and they offer the maximum level of security for users. I think they do a fantastic job with that, but ultimately they are a little bit limited by the fact that they're a separate device. It needs to be connected to your wallet. It's got a very limited user interface in terms of LCD displays or buttons, et cetera. Whereas on the other end of the spectrum, we have the software wallets running on Android or iOS devices, like Phantom for example. User experience is top notch, but the environment that they're running in the Android or iOS high level operating systems, they are general purpose operating systems. They're connected to the network. They run other user code on them.

Steven (07:15):

And so while they can offer that great user experience because of the environment they operate in, they don't have that quite that same level of security as a hardware wallet would. Seed Vault allows us to bring a lot of those benefits that a hardware wallet is able to, in terms of custody of keys, in terms of taking advantage of extremely secure hardware on mobile phones. And bring those to the software wallets. And so I think that's actually an important point for Seed Vault. We aren't actually building any new or novel hardware into phones to bring this technology up to wallets. Instead, we're taking advantage of the very high secure elements that already exist on phones. And we're integrating those into the system layer and we're integrating Solana blockchain operations into the system to support these functionalities. So as a concrete example, when your seeds are sort of the root of all your secrets on the Solana blockchain, all your wallet accounts, all your private keys, everything is derived from those seeds.

Steven (08:13):

We use a secure element on SAGA to secure your seeds in a way that's very protected, even down to the level of forensic attacks. Those are the kind of attacks that would go on in like a lab. And they take your device apart and use all kinds of equipment to try to extract your secrets from that device. So we use the secure element, specialized hardware, very similar to the secure enclave that you would hear about on an iOS device, for example. And then we combine that with a very secure operating environment that is available on most Android devices. So it's called Arm Trust Zone, and it's an environment that is running below the level of Android. So everything the user sees and is used to seeing in terms of the Android operating system, there's actually another operating system running below that on the device, it's a very specialized environment.

Steven (09:02):

It's very secure and it's called Arm trust zone. We run a trusted application within that environment that cooperates with the secure element to do all of your signing operations. So all of your key derivations from that initial seed and all of the secure signing operations, based on that. Design transactions on behalf of the wallets that are running in the Android OS. We make use of a bunch of specialized secure technologies, such as secure input and secure display. So if you have a password associated with your seed, when you type in that password, you're actually not even typing that into Android. You're typing that into a specialized OS, highly secure. It actually takes over the display temporarily. And so that when you enter your password, it's only going into environment that is secure and ready to accept it. And then once we sign a transaction on behalf of the user, we hand that back to the wallet, for example, Phantom running in the Android operating system, and then Phantom takes that and is able to submit it to the Solana blockchain for processing.

Brian (10:04):

That's a great overview. Thanks for that. So is it safe to say from like an end user's perspective, is this a Seed Vault, essentially bringing the same security guarantees or even more than a traditional hardware wallet would, but with kind of an added ease of use component being that it's directly embedded into your phone.

Steven (10:21):

So the hardware wallets are designed from the ground up to be the most secure wallets possible. And so certain design choices that they've made such as not having network connectivity on them, their air gap devices and being designed with very, very optimized hardware specifically for security means that those are pretty much the perfect devices for the security of seed storage. But as we all know, the trade off comes in terms of the user experience.

Steven (10:48):

Seed Vault gets us most of the way there. We get to take advantage of secure elements for seed encryption and specialized processing environments. It's still running inside a general purpose device, which does have network connectivity, although the secure environments themselves on the device, don't. So cold storage wallets are definitely going to still have a place in the ecosystem for very, very secure storage of high value assets, high value wallets, for example, but Seed Vault gets us a substantial distance closer to that on phones. And it also does it in a way that remains readily available and easy for users to use. So this is Seed Vault is very much a day to day technology that will allow the users to bring a huge amount of security to their seeds and their keys while still maintaining all the usability of an Android device.

Brian (11:37):

That's fantastic. I think anyone who's been around in crypto long enough deeply understands that problem between security and ease of use trade off. Can this Seed Vault handle all types of signing or is it restricted in any way as to what types of transactions or messages this can sign?

Steven (11:53):

For the initial launch we're focused on the Solana chain. All the operations that are built into Seed Vault are all designed, are all the cryptographic operations that are necessary for key generation, key storage, and transaction signing on. That said, like I said before, we're not building any new hardware into phones to support this. We're making use of hardware, very, very secure hardware that was already present. This is a systems integration problem. And so we're building this really, really secure and specialized system deep into the OS below the level of Android so that users can have a secure Solana experience. But there's nothing that would stop us in the future from expanding this as well. So what I would say to users is, go to Solanamobile.com. We have a wait list there, but you can also leave comments as well. So please, if other chains are an area you have an interest in, that would be a great place to let us know about it.

Brian (12:45):

That's fantastic. And one final point on the Seed Vault, is it possible to import or export your keys to another phone or is this sea fault tied to essentially one device?

Steven (12:56):

So the Seed Vault will support the standard BIT 39 seed phrases. So those 12 or 24 word seed phrases that we're all intimately familiar with. A big part of key custody is understanding the importance of protecting your own keys. And so for users who... We strongly believe in self custody of keys and secrets with the SAGA device. And so when you first set up the device, the user will be guided through a process to either create a new seed or to import an existing seed. As part of that process, we'll be guiding the user to back up, write down in some, for example, a reference card, all of the words in their seed phrase. And store that somewhere safe and secure. That seed phrase can be used to recover your seed later. If you were to get another SAGA device, it could be used to import your seed into that other device.

Steven (13:47):

Or if you do already have wallets elsewhere, you can use that seed to import those other wallets into the SAGA. There is a security caveat that comes with that, which is that your seed is only as secure as the least secure place you've ever stored it. So our recommendation will be for users to go and create a brand new seed when they get the SAGA device. We've built this great Seed Vault, super high secure storage capabilities. And we would really like for users to add, to create new seeds. But we also understand that users may already have many accounts set up and they may want to add existing seeds into their Seed Vault to facilitate the transfer of their assets, to a brand new seed for the device. And so we will support both importing and exporting seeds on the SAGA device.

Brian (14:30):

So I think that does a really great job of laying the foundation for the Seed Vault. You mentioned SAGA, the flagship phone upon all this is built. There's three other technologies though that you guys have also bringing the market here as part of SMS.

Brian (14:43):

One of the next ones which I want to cover is the mobile wallet adapter. I think anyone who's used Solana both from a development perspective, or if they're just an end user is very familiar with the wallet adapter that we have on web. Does a great job of normalizing all the different wallets on Solana, making it really easy to just click and you see a drop down menu and it's easy to connect to your favorite wallet. What is the mobile wallet adapter? How do you say it differs from the web wallet adapter and what can users expect to be seeing when they interact with one of these?

Steven (15:12):

First of all, mobile wallet adapter is actually the one technology in all of SMS that I'm personally most excited about. It's the least flashy. It's something that users will hopefully never even know exists because it's such a fundamental and basic thing that users will assume that this is just how things are supposed to work. Mobile wallet adapter is an analog of the wallet adapter on the web that we all have come to know and love. It's the communication fabric by which we're going to bind dApps and wallets on mobile devices together. So on the web, you're used to visiting some DAP, clicking that connect wallet button, seeing a popup of the available wallets that you have installed in your browser. And just picking one and just getting this seamless transaction signing experience. Unfortunately, the same thing doesn't exist today on mobile devices, either on Android or on iOS devices for the Solana chain.

Steven (16:04):

And that I think is the number one thing that is holding back broad mobile adoption for Solana and for Web 3.0 on mobile devices. So just like we built a protocol and a plug-in interface for wallet adapter on the web. We're building something very similar on mobile devices. We're going to have a web socket based communication protocol that allows for dApps to connect to wallets wherever they are for signing transaction purposes. And that wherever they are, I think is the big key difference between transaction signing on mobile devices versus transaction signing on laptops or desktops. With the traditional wallet adapter, there's one environment that everything operates in, the web browser. And it's a great sandbox. It's a super rich set of tools. But on mobile devices, the ecosystem is a little bit broader there. We have dApps that will run in your web browser.

Steven (16:57):

Any mobile friendly dApps should be able to work on your mobile Chrome, just like they would work in desktop Chrome. You've got native applications that have run on the device as well, whether those are written in Kotlin or Java on an Android device, or a cross platform framework like Darden fluter or like react native. And then you also, a natural extension from there is saying, well, we've built this great wallet on these SMS devices with Seed Vault. Why can't this be my only wallet? Why do I even need to have a different wallet on every platform that I want to use dApps on? And so part of what we're building with mobile wallet adapter is the concept of remote signing as well. We got this phone, you've got a wallet on there. It has network connectivity. It is a great user interface.

Steven (17:42):

This should be able to act as a remote wallet for dApps that are running on other nearby mobile devices, or even on your nearby laptops and desktops. So mobile wallet adapter is a protocol and it's a fabric that's going to bind all of these things together with the initial release of SMS. We have a reference implementation that we've built for Android, but this is an area we see expanding beyond Android as well. So the mobile wallet adapter protocol was designed to be agnostic to the platform on which it's running. Any platform that has some of these standard web technologies like web sockets, for example, would be able to participate in the mobile wallet, adapter protocol.

Brian (18:19):

Yeah, that's fantastic. That's super exciting for us. You hit on a couple of things there. One of which I think I could sense your excitement over, was the ability to do this remote signing on your phone. You're interacting with a web app, either on another mobile device or potentially on your laptop. Is this similar to what wallet connect is on Ethereum? I know we haven't really had wallet connect yet on Solana on a major DAP. How is this essentially handling this connection? Is there some middle man server involved? How are you guys thinking about that?

Steven (18:49):

In principle, it is similar to the functionality provided by wallet connect. Though, I think, we've definitely made some design decisions in the mobile wallet adapter space to make it very suitable for operation on mobile devices. We've really optimized it for local use cases. And as part of that, one of the design decisions we've made is that we shouldn't have to reach out to an intermediate server during the signing process, if the operations that you're performing are those that can be done entirely locally on the device. And so let's just to give a concrete example, you have the Phantom wallet installed on the device. Let's say you wanted to use magic Eden through your Chrome web browser on that same device, because they're both running locally, there's no reason we should have to reach out to an intermediate server to make that connection between those two parties.

Steven (19:38):

And so we've split up the process into two phases. The first of which we call association, which answers the question of, well, how does the magic Eden running in the browser, how does it even know what wallets are available on the device? How does it start up the wallet so that it's in front of the user and the user has context of what's happening. And then how does it create an encrypted channel through which communications can happen? And so on Android, we've done that through an intent based scheme and then a Diffy helmet key exchange, but we've built the protocol in a flexible way so that we can add additional types of association in the future.

Steven (20:13):

For example, we have the ability to use QR codes for association. You can imagine scanning a QR code from your mobile phone, and that would encode all the information necessary to inform the two parties of each other. Or alternatively there're other standards we want to explore like web Bluetooth, which gives you a great way to only connect to devices that are in proximity with you.

Steven (20:35):

So in terms of security, it means that you can have a connection that also has a locality element to it, which would be really interesting when it comes to making use of very highly secure operations, like signing with your private keys for your wallet accounts.

Steven (20:50):

The second half of the protocol is connections, and we use web sockets. We create an encrypted channel, and then all of the operations that a user would make use of through wallet adapter today, authorizing adapt, signing transactions, sending transactions across the network. All of that has been created in the mobile wallet adapter protocol as well. And so that said, all together, whole bunch of technology running, hopefully invisibly to the user. And we're even building a plugin for regular wallet adapter, so that dApps are able to get support from mobile wallet adapter with just extremely, extremely small amount of work. Rebuild, select the right plugins for wallet adapter, make sure your DAP is mobile web friendly, and you'll be ready to go on day one.

Brian (21:34):

That's great. That's very elegant too, getting rid of the middleman server in that using just the local network. Personally having been at Phantom for a while. We've sensed the frustration in the mobile scene. A little bit, a lot of wallets today are kind of forced to have these in-app browsers, just given the state of mobile phones and given the state of the mobile phone industry. One thing that Phantom has done to get around this in particular, in interacting with native dApps is deep linking. Does mobile wallet DAP have any plans for deep linking? How are you guys thinking about handling those deep linking protocols?

Steven (22:07):

Yep. So I think number one, I think the deep linking protocols are a very elegant solution to getting over this problem of how do we break out of the world of browsers inside of wallets? I think that the browsers inside of wallets, I believe is a very expedient solution, but I believe it's a stepping stone on the way to having dApps in wallets, as full participants on a mobile device, using the user experience, paradigms and patterns that users are used to. So standalone native applications that are able to directly communicate with each other.

Steven (22:41):

The deep linking protocols, I think do a great job. They're very straightforward and do a great job for the use cases local to the device. And so I view those as a complimentary to mobile wallet adapter. Mobile wallet adapter is designed to handle both those use cases as well, but also the broader use cases of on and off device. And so I think that is where mobile wallet adapter can take the ecosystem even one more step forward is through separation of the transport layer from the association layer. We're able to design for use cases that extend beyond the device and extend beyond what the deep linking protocols are currently able to accomplish today.

Brian (23:21):

That's great. So we hit a lot here with the mobile wallet adapter that will be impacting how dApps and wallets interact with one another. You guys are also releasing another initiative that'll be impacting dApps. You guys are dubbing at the DAP store. The big takeaway here is that there won't be these rent extracting fees of 30% of all commerce in apps from some of the big players that we all know and love. Can you touch a little more on what this DAP store is? What some of the plans are for this and how current DAP developers should be thinking about this DAP store?

Steven (23:53):

Sure. So I have received more questions on the DAP store. It just goes to show how excited developers are for this. We're all very, very intimately familiar with some of the difficulties that are posed by the current app store ecosystems for mobile devices, Google Play store for Android and the App Store for apple. And they primarily fall into two categories. There is the policies aspect, what am I allowed to do? What am I not allowed to do? Is my app going to be approved for the store? Or am I going to be rejected for what often feels like an arbitrary reason? And then the second part of it is the economic angle. A 30% cut of fees is a pretty hard pill to swallow. And especially when we come to some of the use cases like purchases of digital goods, 30% fee pretty much is a nail in the coffin of trying to do, for example, an NFT like an auction house or a marketplace on a device like an iPhone, for example.

Steven (24:51):

And the Solana DAP store... This is our opportunity to change that. Our north star on this is that once DAP is installed the any further interactions between that DAP and the user are a matter between that DAP and the user, we're not going to be getting involved with like ongoing fees or anything of that nature. And in fact, we're making our DAP store no fee. So there won't be transaction fees in the store if users want to purchase apps or applications from the store. And like I said, once it's installed any further relationships are between the DAP and the user. We're very much building this in the model of a permissionless Web 3.0 experience.

Steven (25:32):

Now that said, I do want to touch on one really important area, which is the curation of the catalog. In my background, I did work for a couple years on an app store for mobile devices when I was at Microsoft. And I was a young, slightly naive engineer at that point. And I didn't really think that the curation problem would be that substantial. And I think that in fact, the trust and safety aspect of app stores is probably the single most important topic to look into. So at the beginning, we are going to be curating the contents of the app store, and we're going to be doing that to make sure that the contents are both useful to users, but also there's a huge amount of trust that goes into users when they use an app store into, who is the publisher and what are they doing to protect me.

Steven (26:21):

And so Solana labs will be curating the contents at the initial release, but we do have aspirations to involve the community in the curation of this app catalog. The community's involvement is always a huge area for Web 3.0 in areas like DAOs, for example, and we have the same aspirations for the Solana mobile and the Solana mobile DAP store.

Brian (26:45):

That's great. I think that's really important that you emphasize that from the start, setting expectations like that. In our experience, crypto can be really exciting. It's this new world, but also it's very permissionless and that is a sword that cuts both ways. We've seen that firsthand being a wallet. We actually now run, I believe the biggest block list of all spam NFTs and essentially scam domains on Solana. It's a huge, huge issue. It really is important to kind of nip that in the bud, especially for new users when they're just getting acquainted with this ecosystem. And we found in our experience we turned that block list, open source. We get community contributions from that, especially every day now. And I think whenever you're able to kind of leverage the power of the end users here, the community that's using this every day, that's a really great way to handle it.

Brian (27:33):

So we hit on a lot here. We just covered the DAP store. We also went over the Seed Vault, which leads the foundation for SMS, and then the mobile wallet adapter, which you're super excited about. We're super excited about that as well. There's one final component to this, which is Solana Pay. I think most people are familiar with Solana Pay at this point. It was unveiled earlier in Q2, I believe of 2022. There's a couple great use cases, around this around making point of sale, a lot easier, using SPL tokens on Solana, getting rid of middleman fees once again.

Brian (28:04):

But I also think Solana Pay might at this point, be a bit of a misnomer. I've seen some really great use cases leveraging Solana Pay with NFT ticketing. I know the mountain pay guys have built this great photo booth where you can snap a photo and then scan with your Phantom wallet and it mints into an NFT right on your phone. And that's all running on Solana Pay behind the scenes. What do you guys have planned for Solana Pay as it relates to mobile and SMS? What can you tell us about that today?

Steven (28:32):

Mobile devices, we carry them everywhere with us and they've in the last few years, people have really, really started to use mobile payment technologies. You've got, on Android devices you have Google Pay for example. And so we have these perfect devices that you carry with you and people are already used to interacting with in the real world to effectuate payments. And that's really what we're looking at for SMS and Solana Pay. We're actually not making any protocol changes at all to Solana Pay with the SMS stack. Instead, what we're doing is providing guidance on how wallet should integrate Solana Pay into the Android system. For many wallets, there's actually almost nothing to do here. Wallets like Phantom, do a great job of already integrating some of these best practices into Android devices. But by providing a set of best practices, we can really make sure that there's a standardized way by which users can expect their phone to work with Solana Pay. In terms of snapping QR codes, in terms of tapping your phone on NFC readers or in terms of interacting with Solana Pay links that are generated from within the mobile web browser.

Steven (29:40):

And so, by providing that set of best practices and providing samples on how to integrate Solana Pay, those best practices will give us a foundation by which we can expect that all of these real world Solana Pay interactions that users are going to be using with their phones will be consistent across devices. And by making it consistent, we give to the other side of the equation, those who are working on merchant terminals, for example, we give them an understanding or a base, if you will, on which they know that if they develop some of these Solana Pay technologies, for example, QR codes or NFCS in merchant terminals. They know that there's a base of devices that can take advantage of those.

Steven (30:21):

And so, so much of the Solana Pay is going to be building out this whole network of providers, software providers, both on the merchant side, as well as on mobile devices to make sure that users can pay with Solana Pay in the real world. Just like they're used to paying with say their credit cards using Google Pay. And quick note, Google pay will also be supported on the SAGA device. And so users should expect that their SAGA device will be their mechanism by which they can effectuate real world payments, whether it's through Solana Pay or through traditional payment networks.

Brian (30:56):

That's super exciting. So I think this is a great kind of overview we just did of SMS, the whole suite of developer tools that you guys are unveiling. You've hit on this a couple times though, though, there is a flagship phone that you guys are releasing, SAGA. This is separate from SMS, but it will be powered entirely by SMS, as well as traditional things you would expect from Android devices like Google Pay, which you mentioned.

Brian (31:20):

Let's talk a little bit more about SAGA. What is it like? I saw Anatoli up there on stage flashing it to the crowd. It looked pretty sleek. Would you say this is something that's purely for crypto natives, can ordinary people continue to use this for their favorite apps, say like TikTok or Instagram without noticing much of a difference. How would you characterize this phone broadly?

Steven (31:40):

We've designed the phone for crypto natives in mind, but it is a standard Android device in every other way. And so it's going to be a full GMS device, meaning it has Chrome. It has Gmail, it has the Google Play store. It has everything that users expect an Android device to do with the SMS stack added on top. And so there's a huge amount of value here that we're going to be able to give to the Sal Solana ecosystem to degens who live and breathe their Web 3.0 in crypto. But it's also going to be a flagship Android device. It's got 12 gigs of RAM five, 12 gigs of flash. It's got the latest and greatest Qualcomm snap drag and chip set, beautiful 6.67 inch O led display everything about this looks and feels like a flagship phone.

Steven (32:31):

We got that device in just before the event. And so he was able to hand it around a little bit, show some people, let them touch and feel it in person. And it's an impressive device. We have a great partner in Awesome in helping us build this device. And I am thrilled. I think that I don't know that there's any other hardware partner other than Awesome, who could have helped us realize this vision the way we've been able to realize it for the SAGA device. I've had the good fortune to have a prototype. I've been working on that for the last few months and I am thrilled for when people are able to get this device and hold it in their hands. It really does feel like a super, super premium, top end device

Brian (33:13):

Jealous. You're one of the lucky few that has the actual incarnation of this right now in their hand. What is the plan to expand SMS to additional devices though? We have SAGA, I saw, there's actually a huge backlog of pre-orders on this thing. But I'm sure a lot of people are kind of thinking themselves, well, I already have this Android phone, maybe a Google Pixel or Samsung device. Or maybe there're others who there's a lot of folks probably listening to this who are on iOS devices. What is that timeline like? Is this something you think could be running on iOS one day? How are you guys thinking about rolling this out kind of across broadly across the smartphone market?

Steven (33:50):

So we started our conversation on SMS talking about the collection of technologies. And that's, I think is really the point to hit on here, is that SMS isn't just one technology. It's a whole series of them. And each of them have slightly different applications and slightly different system needs in terms of integrating them. So all the way at one end of the spectrum, we have Seed Vault. For example, Seed Vault really needs the phone manufacturer to be directly involved in the systems integration process. It needs access to the secure element. It needs a trusted application that can run within the secure execution environment, arm trust zone, for example. And then it needs UI baked right into the system image, privileged UI that's able to make use of those lower layers that in the secure execution environments of the device.

Steven (34:40):

On the other end of the spectrum, we have technologies like mobile wallet, adapter and mobile wallet adapter actually doesn't have any hardware requirements at all. It's purely a protocol system between wallets and dApps for binding them together. And so mobile wallet adapter, the specification is currently in draft for that one. We're working with our wallet and DAP partners to finalize that, make sure we can take all of the ecosystem feedback so that when we do release it, it serves as broad a set of use cases as possible.

Steven (35:10):

But mobile wallet adapter will actually be available and ready to use before the SAGA launches. And so over time, what it means to be an SMS device really comes down to how many of these SMS technologies are integrated into that particular device. As I was saying, some of them do need deep integration. We would have to work directly with hardware manufacturers, the Seed Vault being the primary one of those. So it's a little bit hard to from a user standpoint, SMS has a certain branding associated with it, but from a technology standpoint, there's a whole spectrum of what an SMS device could look like.

Steven (35:45):

In terms of specific devices, I can't comment on that other than the fact that Awesome is an amazing partner. And we just view SAGA as the first step in many steps towards bringing all of SMS to mobile users. So that Web 3.0, really has a home with the Solana ecosystem on mobile devices. And then I just did also want to hit quickly on iOS. iOS is not as open a platform as Android is. And so some of these technologies, we just don't have the capability to independently build those into an iOS device.

Steven (36:18):

But we do also know how much consumers love iOS devices. And there's many people who we'd have to pry their fingers apart to get their iPhones out of their hands. And so technologies like mobile wallet adapter, we're designing them to make sure that they're not Android specific. There's things in there that we can do to make sure that becomes the fabric by which dApps and wallets communicate wherever they are, including on iOS devices. And so we're not forgetting about iOS and we want to make sure that as much of SMS as possible works on as many devices as possible, whether those are Android devices or iOS devices.

Brian (36:53):

Well, as speaking as somebody who's had a death grip on their iOS device for probably the last decade, I have to say, I am pre-ordering one. You guys have done a great job of convincing me. So I'm going team Android just for this. I'm super excited about it.

Steven (37:07):

That is great news. I want to hear your entire audience find me on Twitter and tell me the exact same thing. You'll make my week.

Brian (37:13):

That's great. So you hit a lot here about the plan for rolling SMS. Each of the four components broadly out across the smartphone market. You did a couple times though in our conversation hint at the idea that even though this is called SMS Solana mobile stack, really this could be applicable to a broad number of blockchains across the Web 3.0 ecosystem. How are you guys thinking about that problem? Are you guys going to be focused on Solana, is your core team focused on Solana for the time being, and you're inviting others in because it's open source? Is that the general framing of that? How are you guys thinking about unveiling this to Ethereum and potentially Bitcoin one day and more broadly across the Web 3.0 space?

Steven (37:52):

So we have a literal mountain of work to do to deliver the best Solana experience that we can on mobile devices. And so the Solana ecosystem remains firmly our goal right now. That said, I think I'll answer your question in two ways. This is an open phone and we would never try to prevent another chain for example, from being installed on this device. So while we are focusing on Solana, this is an Android device, everything that works on Android would work here. And we would never try to stop any of the other chains from participating on this device in all the normal ways.

Steven (38:26):

And then the other thing I would say there is, we're always interested to hear from the community. And so I think I mentioned it earlier in the podcast, but if you do have an interest, you can always go to Solanamobile.com, please while you're there place a pre-order, that would be awesome. But you can also register your interest in other things you would like to see on this device, whether those be features for the Solana chain or if you have interest in other chains, we'd love to hear about it.

Brian (38:50):

That's great. And one closing question, I think this is a good segue that we always ask to our guests, given your guys' focus on the Solana ecosystem, who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Steven (39:02):

Oh, that's a good one. So there's someone that I've had an opportunity to work with TJ from Mountain Pay and he has been contributing to the Solana Pay side of the ecosystem. And as crazy as it seems some days when I wake up and say, oh, all we're doing is taking on the mobile phone industry by building SAGA. I think of what TJ is doing. He's just looked around and he looks at all the incumbents in the payment space and says, yeah, I think I want to go head on in this space.

Steven (39:30):

So he's a great guy. Every time I've had the opportunity to chat with him, I've always left thinking like, wow, I didn't even think about that. And he's like... So I really admire him that both for the work he's doing and as well as for the guts to take on the space that he's taking on.

Brian (39:48):

Yeah. I couldn't agree more. His energy is pretty electric. I don't know how he does it. He's around at all the hacker houses at Mountain Dow, he's in the crowd and then he's got his headphones on banging away on his laptop and still shipping code. But yeah, he's got a great infectious energy and I think there's no one better to be taking on the Stripes and the PayPals and the big payments giants of the world. He's someone I would want to have in my corner for sure.

Brian (40:13):

Well, Steven, this has been a really great conversation. Thank you for going deep on SMS. I'm super excited about it. I'm ready to pre-order my SAGA right now. Where can people go to learn more, both about SMS and yourself? You mentioned your Twitter. I want to make sure that people can find you and ping you with their stories of how you're prying their iOSs out of their hands right here.

Steven (40:35):

To find out more about the SAGA and about SMS hit up Solanamobile.com. We've got links in there to the Solana mobile Twitter, our discord community, discord.gg/solanamobile, as well as you can find a link to the mobile stack SDK, which is all in the open on GitHub. So I would say those are the best places to go to learn more about SMS and SAGA. Please join us in discord. We're a friendly community. I'm there. I hang out there. I answer questions there. Lots of people from my team as well. So looking forward to seeing all kinds of people from your audience, join our discord and help us build a really cool community around SMS and SAGA.

Brian (41:16):

I can't wait. Steven Laver. Thank you for your time. This has been great.

Steven (41:20):

Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Grace 'Ori' Kwan (Orca Co-Founder) joins The Zeitgeist to discuss design at Orca and how she approaches building for the Web3 ecosystem. 

Show Notes

00:05 - Intro
00:39 - Ori’s background / working at IDEO
04:20 - Human centered design in Crypto
06:03 - The design process at Orca
07:37 - Sourcing for UX research
09:11 - The culture at Orca
10:28 - Qualitative vs quantitative feedback
11:55 - Orca’s success
12:55 - The magic bar
14:02 - Branding
14:26 - Whirlpools 
17:31 - Who is the target user?
19:07 - Branding in Crypto
20:50 - Advice for designers looking to crack into Web 3.0
22:01 - Building a new product at Orca
23:10 - Climate impact work at Orca
24:47 - Working with co-founder, Yutaro

Transcript

Jisi (00:06):

Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers and designers who are pushing the Web 3.0 Industry forward. I'm Jisi Guo, design lead at Phantom, and I'm incredibly excited to introduce Grace Ori Kwan. Ori is the co-founder of Orca, the most user-friendly decentralized exchange on Solana. Ori, thanks so much for being with us today.

Ori (00:27):

Really a pleasure.

Jisi (00:28):

Yeah, you are actually in Japan. Am I correct?

Ori (00:32):

Yeah, I'm currently in Japan. I usually bounce around a lot, but lucky enough to be here for the spring.

Jisi (00:37):

Nice. That's amazing. Tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get exposed to crypto and Web 3.0?

Ori (00:45):

It's a funny story, actually. I was never really into crypto for most of my life. In fact, I was one of those people who really didn't care about money in any form besides just using it to survive. But it all really happened during COVID where actually in Tokyo I moved into a shared house, which is pretty common in Tokyo actually, where adults who are looking for a more communal living place will move into this type of shared apartment situation. Right across the hall from me was my co-founder, Yutaro. One thing led to another with COVID and the lockdown. We were all bored, and we were like, "Should we try building something together?" Yutaro was like, "Well, if we're going to build something, I'm only interested if it's crypto," and so it went from there.

Jisi (01:33):

Wow. That's insane. That's awesome. How did you start, were there different side projects that you started with, or was Orca the first project that you thought of?

Ori (01:45):

It definitely was not. We went in with zero intention of ever starting a company. I think because my background's from Stanford, everyone's like, "Oh, you probably wanted to be an entrepreneur your whole life," but that's totally not the case. I didn't really have that plan. I'd always seen an entrepreneurial lifestyle as very tiring and probably something that I wouldn't be suited for. So it really was just like, "Hey, let's start hacking on some projects on the side." Our first project, which we sometimes joke about was really just a little weekend thing. We made it like a little quiz that told you which crypto you were. It was supposed to be one of those Facebook shareable ones.

Ori (02:20):

Then it led to hacking on apps and Ethereum. Then, when defi summer came and the gas fees became really insane on Ethereum, that's when we started really taking notice of the other options available and landed on Solana.

Jisi (02:34):

Nice. That's amazing. What crypto were you on that quiz? I'm just curious.

Ori (02:41):

I think I was Bitcoin. Yeah. Maybe I was more traditionally minded at the time.

Jisi (02:47):

You were the OG. Nice.

Ori (02:49):

Yeah.

Jisi (02:51):

Yeah. Well, it's pretty nice to chat with you because a lot of people know you as a design founder within crypto, and it seems like there are very few designers within Web 3.0 and you previously even have experience working at IDEO. Could you tell me a little bit about that?

Ori (03:10):

For sure, yeah. IDEO was actually a culture shock for me, because I had spent my entire career before that more in engineering-driven places, and I started my career as an engineer. I studied computer science, worked at Coursera, really building fronted applications on the web. Then it was in New York that I started working across design and engineering, this feeling like I wanted to be kind of higher up in the decision-making process, higher up in ensuring that the products we were developing were really going to be useful to people. But at IDEO, it's not entirely a consulting business, but I was working on the consulting side and especially in IDEO Tokyo, that particular office, a lot of it was really about inspiring clients, which is an art in itself.

Ori (03:56):

I learned so much about storytelling, about working with different types of clients and people who have very different mindsets and backgrounds, but it was not as much about shipping products that are really used by people every single day. I quickly learned that my passion is creating products that real people are getting real value out of, which led me to crypto, because nobody is here in crypto just to play around or be inspired necessarily. People want results is my sense of the space.

Jisi (04:30):

Yeah, for sure. I recently read your op-ed in CoinDesk and it was really interesting. You were talking a lot about bringing human-centered design to crypto. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Ori (04:50):

Yeah. Thank you so much for reading the op-ed. It was actually my first time writing one for this type of magazine, so it was really a fun experience, fun and stressful. But human-centered design, it's a fuzzy thing, but really what I think of it as is focusing on building products that solve needs for people, which sounds so obvious. But when you look at many technology products, especially crypto products, you can really see how the design is accommodating the technology.

Ori (05:20):

As an engineer, it's very easy for me to see how "Oh, well the data structure or the data is structured in this way and it's being returned from the API in this way, so let's just build a UI that spits that out with as little effort as possible to transform that into something that humans can actually make sense of, which results in people just thinking crypto is scary and complicated." At the end of the day, what I think human-centered design is about is keeping in touch with humans throughout the entire process, starting your design and product building journey by thinking about something humans need, continually showing your wire frames, your high-fi designs to people, getting their feedback and thinking very deeply about what the type of person you're trying to build for is.

Jisi (06:04):

Yeah, that's amazing. That's especially relevant because Orca as a DEX, it's a complicated subject matter, but you're known as one of the most easy-to-use DEXs on Solana and being able to really hone in on the user and make that more approachable is super relevant. Could you talk a little bit about the design process that you use at Orca and how do you get insights into what users are trying to do and to make something that they want?

Ori (06:36):

It all starts with interviews. That sounds very formal, but a lot of the time it's really just like my co-worker's friend who happens to really fit the profile of who we're trying to target, and sometimes I like to categorize it this way. For example, we have this friend of a friend like Humphrey, who's a little bit of a Degen, but maybe it doesn't have that many hours a day to spend. So sometimes I'd be like, "Oh, we're designing for a Humphrey right now," or, "We're designing for an Elise right now." So I'll start by like finding the type of people who we think we are trying to cater to and just having a conversation with them.

Ori (07:08):

I think the art of design research is something that I've been very blessed to have experience by working at small startups where designers wear every single hat. So it is about asking these open-ended questions to really just understand what really makes people tick? What they're really looking for, and you won't necessarily get that by just showing someone a design. I think starting actually without even a piece of visual to come from is usually where I begin, so it becomes very exploratory, but then it's about distilling the insights from that open-ended conversation, understanding the needs. Then I go into wire framing, talking to people again, getting feedback, and rinse and repeat all the way until we have hi-fi designs that we deem good enough; not perfect, but good enough.

Jisi (07:54):

Yeah. It seems like you have identified people that are your target personas and you're able to interview them and maybe even observe them and give feedback directly from them, which is amazing. It feels like it's difficult to do that kind of UX research within crypto because a lot of times users are anonymous or you're not quite sure what cohort they may be in. Are there any tips or tricks that you've had and enable to sourcing for that UX research?

Ori (08:25):

I don't hold our candidate sourcing to the same level of fidelity that a very large firm might, because I think it's honestly not necessary. A lot of the types of people that we're looking for are often in our circles, just because maybe I wasn't, but certainly Yutaro and a lot of our team are just in these circles of Degens who love to spend time on this stuff. I think just talking to maybe three to five people usually get a pretty good representative sample, just keeping in mind that everyone carries their own bias and not necessarily trying to identify Humphrey's particular needs and build exactly for those, but more to identify the larger patterns, and also to practice the general design research practices of encouraging the person to speak their mind, encouraging the person to say critical things. I do avoid, I guess, interviewing usually first-degree connections. Someone you're a little bit too good of friends with, I think can affect the results, but someone who is mostly a stranger, but is a friend of a friend is usually fine.

Jisi (09:33):

Yeah. I think that really makes sense, and especially when you're building a product that you yourself use, you can do some testing through people within the company or people that are friends of friends, and so that's pretty nice. I'm curious, how have you been able to instill this design culture within Orca as a whole?

Ori (09:55):

Yeah. I think that question is actually funny to me in a way, because I think everyone at Orca embraces the ethos of user friendliness and it's something that they're very passionate about, but actually nobody else does design at Orca. I'm the only person who does any of the design, and so in some ways, it's actually a design monoculture, I guess, because it's mostly me, which in some ways, is shocking to me that I could just design this thing and put it out there and people would love it, because it hasn't gone through endless rounds of design review, and there isn't a design boss telling me what I should tweak, which is actually very new to me.

Ori (10:34):

I guess what the culture that I've tried to instill, which I think is, you could call it a human-centered design culture as well, is just being accepting of our mistakes and this culture that everything is a trial and error, which I think I really learned actually from my engineering manager at this startup I worked at in New York called Button, where everything he'd do, he'd be like, "Okay, we're just going to try this. It's a two-way door. We'll put it out there for two weeks, and if it doesn't work out, we'll just go back the other way." I try to instill that in everything, and when I share designs with the company, I'm not like, "This is the right way," but I'm like, "This is what we're trying."

Jisi (11:11):

When you get that feedback, is it mostly qualitative or quantitative? How do you gauge where to go off from those initial designs?

Ori (11:23):

I would say it's mostly qualitative in the past. We're getting more and more quantitative in our analysis, starting to look more at things like daily active wallets, starting to look more at geographic breakdowns, et cetera. But one of the things about DeFi is that there is no KYC, so it's impossible to know in a very precise way what your users are doing. I think for a giant product like Facebook, it makes more sense to get really granular with things like AB testing. But honestly, I think what's carried Orca the farthest is leaning very heavily on intuition and that's something that I believe we'll continue to do.

Jisi (12:01):

Yeah. I would imagine it'd be hard to lean on data as well. There's a lot of spikes and changes in those patterns that it's hard to attribute to certain things. More recently, today is the number four exchange across all chains for total volume.

Ori (12:19):

It's mind blowing, right? We're-

Jisi (12:21):

Yeah.

Ori (12:21):

... what is it, 15? Not even 15 months old and kind of up there. We hit number three, I think, a day or two ago as well, and that's like flipping with Uniswap and PancakeSwap. For someone like me, I couldn't tell you what Ethereum was three years ago. It really goes to show that the space has changed, and I think it's starting to embrace a much wider audience.

Jisi (12:44):

It's so amazing, so definitely congratulations there. Also, just daily active users, like it's crossed 100,000 thresholds, so that's amazing as well.

Ori (12:54):

Thank you. Yeah. A lot of people, they're asking me, "Where is this spike coming from?" To be honest, in some ways it's like, I just tweeted about this recently, but it's UX in a different sense of developer experience, because I think we've created this SDK that developers find to be very user friendly. We've created this brand through our communications, through our community managers of having great support, and those things are also part of the user-friendly package that builds this brand that people ultimately trust and want to use, including other apps that integrate Orca under the hood.

Jisi (13:29):

Yeah, that's definitely true. I think developers are definitely a huge subset of your customer base and providing a good SDK is great design for them. It just adds the flywheel of more users finding Orca through DAP or more adapt or learning about Orca. You mentioned the brand, I think there's a lot of things that you've done really well like having the Magic Bar and making sure that you're showing that this is the best price, just reassuring users, so that's definitely building a lot of brand loyalty there.

Ori (14:01):

Thank you. Yeah. It's the most fun part of building a company for me, I think, is actually just building the product that, again, people are using every single day, regardless of whether they know that they're using it or not. Whenever I'm asked, "How did you come up with the Magic Bar? How did you come up with the Fair Price Indicator?" It really was just research either observing people using other AMMs. I remember watching people price compare when using Uniswap and saying, "Why are we making people do this? The point of technology is to automate the things that people don't want to do." So whenever we can do that, I do aim to include that in the product.

Jisi (14:42):

Yeah. That's definitely really interesting, because I think if you were to ask someone, they might not have told you that they're doing all these price comparisons, or ask for that feature, but being able to observe them directly, you were able to hone in that they were doing that comparing across prices. Branding it too is super interesting as well.

Ori (15:03):

Yeah. Branding, I would say, it's like a hobby. It's my favorite part is naming things of like, "All right, what are we going to call our liquidity mining program? Well, it's a little farming. It's all ocean themes, so let's call it Aquafarms." It's like that's my that's my hobby is coming up with names for things, but it's such a pleasure to actually do it, right?

Jisi (15:24):

Yeah. Well tell us a little bit about your new product Whirlpools and concentrated liquidity.

Ori (15:32):

I would be very happy to. It's pretty mind-boggling, to be honest, like what on earth is concentrated liquidity, right? It's just like this jargon, but I think at the end of the day, what Whirlpools is really just more advanced AMM technology that the average person doesn't really have to understand, except that it gives better prices on trades. Now, if we're going to peek under the hood and you ask, "Okay, well where do those better prices come from?" Then the answer would be, more efficient deployment of capital from liquidity providers, which is still really jargon-y. So if we peel that back a little bit more, I think what it means is that people who are providing liquidity can choose to provide their liquidity for a particular price range. So on a normal constant product, AMM, liquidity providers are forced to service trades at any price.

Ori (16:25):

Regardless of whether one SOL is 100 USDC or one SOL is 500 USDC or 3 USDC, liquidity providers for SOL USDC have to provide those trades. But instead, on a concentrated liquidity pool, like a Whirlpool, you could say, "I'm only going to provide trades when the price is between 100 and 120." Then, if you imagine on that curve before where your liquidity was spread out all across the curve, now all of that liquidity is concentrated in just that 100 to 120 buckets. These buckets in these price ranges are little mini AMMs. So each of these little mini AMMs has more liquidity than if it was across all of them, which allows this liquidity to be more impactful when it comes to providing better prices on trades. Hopefully, that makes sense. I know it's a little abstract.

Jisi (17:17):

Yeah, definitely. Seems like you get a much better yield and you have a little bit more leverage with the amount of capital that you can provide by choosing that range. How does Orca help users determine what's the best range to choose?

Ori (17:32):

Minimally, I would say. I think this is one thing where we've taken a deliberately moderate path. We don't mandate the price range. We do provide some presets that people can select, because one thing I observed from users on Uniswap v3, which is, of course, the OG concentrated liquidity AMM is that many people, even very sophisticated folks would just get to the point of choosing a price range and then be like, "I don't freaking know," and then just give up. So I think even just giving someone like a reasonable default, it might not be the most optimal, but a reasonable default is pretty good. So we give defaults based on things like volatility over the last 30 days, or over the last X days, which are generally a reasonable place to start. Then we give a very lightweight suggestion of, "With this kind of price range, you'll want to rebalance your position more often, or less often." But ultimately, the folks who are very competitive about it are almost always going to go custom.

Jisi (18:30):

Yeah, definitely the presets and having a recommended thing from Orca is definitely really useful. Obviously, concentrated liquidity is something really complex, but Orca is making it more intuitive to understand. How do you find the sweet spot of that kind of abstraction when you're catering to your users that may be more crypto native and some of them may be new to crypto, how do you find the right point to extract complexity and simplify?

Ori (19:00):

This is where we come back to that discussion of, "Who's our target user right now?" Our target user for concentrated liquidity is not my dad, very sweet, still doesn't really understand what Orca is; knows it's a coin, not much more. We're not trying to convert people like him to become liquidity providers right now. So when we are thinking about something like Whirlpools, it's folks who maybe have a bit of experience with liquidity provision already on a constant product AMM, all the way to people who have already been very sophisticated market makers on order books, or on concentrated liquidity AMM elsewhere. It's from there that you can imagine, "Okay, what vocabulary does this person who already does constant product AMM provision have? What do we need to teach them in order to get them onto concentrated liquidity?" That's where we have a progressive reveal approach in our UI. Not everybody loves tool tips. I fully admit that they're not elegant or beautiful, but they do serve a purpose of allowing someone to gain extra information when they want it without cluttering the UI.

Jisi (20:08):

Yeah, definitely. I think that reassurance and that extra education is pretty important, but it's nice to keep things simple as well. What are some of the biggest challenges you see in crypto in terms of user experience?

Ori (20:21):

The biggest challenges I see, well, I think there's two. Actually, one that I'd love to highlight just because we talked about branding already is just the branding of crypto. It's terrible. It's so off-putting, I think, to the average person, like very sci-fi just very complex jargon and terms and mining and proof of what have you. I think all of these very complicated terms and all of these very technology-oriented terms can be very scary for people, and so just overcoming that. Even the name crypto alone, think of the term like digital money versus cryptocurrency.

Ori (21:01):

Cryptocurrency is so much scarier, so I think first just getting people over the hurdle into thinking that they're smart enough to use crypto is one thing. Then second, I'd say DeFi has its own set of challenges. Compared to something centralized where there's KYC, there's usually more of an insurance fund for users. With crypto, it's like you're just thrown out into the water and you better swim. If you lose your private key, it sucks to suck. So I think creating a more gradual bridge for people is a huge challenge.

Jisi (21:34):

Yeah. That makes sense. It seems like crypto needs to hire its own copywriter or someone in branding, and then also just more education, more, more on ramps to becoming full Degen instead of learning by yourself and making those huge mistakes, but ones that you do remember.

Ori (21:54):

Yeah. Even the term Degen, I think, is very telling. It requires such an investment of effort to learn to use this stuff.

Jisi (22:03):

Definitely. Yeah. I have a question, there's a lot of designers that are in Web 2.0 and they want to crack into Web 3.0. That was actually one of your points in your op-ed in, in that there are a lot of design patterns or design decisions that were pushed forward by Web 2.0 that could be brought into Web 3.0. I'm curious, what kind of advice would you give to a designer that's looking to crack into Web 3.0 That may potentially have some Web 2.0 experience building?

Ori (22:31):

First is to, of course, learn about crypto, Defi, Web 3.0. People will find it a lot easier to onboard you into their Web 3.0 company if you don't have to ask all the questions about the basics, and there's tons of free resources about this nowadays. I'm part of a couple of communities online that really target towards beginners with their educational resources. Your experience as a Web 2.0 designer is incredibly valuable, and I think anyone in the crypto space knows that crypto companies desperately want to hire designers nowadays, but just can't necessarily find them. So I think if you come with a clear interest in breaking into Web 3.0 and also with just a little bit of due diligence, knowing the basic concepts, you'll be pretty much welcome with open arms.

Jisi (23:18):

Nice. I'm curious, looking ahead, what are you most excited to build at Orca?

Ori (23:24):

Good question. Yeah. I've spent the past couple of months, obviously, building Whirlpools, which is this super technical product. Looking forward, I'd love to spend some time building a much less technical product, or at least a product that looks a lot less technical on the surface; something that could potentially black box some of the complexity and open back up some of these opportunities to people who are maybe just starting out, or maybe just a little bit nervous about dipping their toes into crypto. I don't have very specific plans to share yet, but that's definitely where we're thinking nowadays and I feel like we're in a good position to potentially build out something very different than what you might normally see in Defi.

Jisi (24:13):

Nice. Well, that sounds super aligned to the Orca brand and seems like a really good place for orca. Also, dipping your toes is probably a good tagline with the whole ocean theme.

Ori (24:26):

Yeah. One day I'm going to run out of ocean puns, but I'm not done yet. 

Jisi (24:31):

Speaking of ocean theme, could you talk a little bit about some of the climate impact work that you're doing with Orca?

Ori (24:38):

I would love to. The Impact Fund, it's like my child, I suppose. I just really love to see where it's grown into, but it really was the result of just a conversation that I had with Yutaro one day, because I've spent a lot of my career in the past really focused on just impact work; whether that's ed tech or trying to work in FinTech for developing countries, that type of thing. One thing I worried about with crypto is, "Is my time really being spent to make the world a better place?" I've become convinced that building out essential infrastructure for crypto is, in its own way, a good thing. Having influence in this space to try to push it in a positive direction is a good thing, but I wanted something a bit more concrete.

Ori (25:24):

When I floated the idea of just directly donating a portion of all of our training fees to charity, I was actually really pleasantly surprised to find that everybody was very much in support of it, like Yutaro, our advisors, even our legal council, they were like, "Yeah, great. I love it," and so we do do that. We donate a portion of every single trade that goes through Orca. A little bit of those fees go to charity and it's over a million dollars accumulated to date, and so we'll be donating those to charities that are focused on climate change and sustainability, which is both what I think is the most pressing problem facing the world today, and something that happens to be very aligned with Orca's marine brand. So it's something I'm very, very proud that we have the opportunity to do.

Jisi (26:09):

Yeah, that's amazing. It's definitely super aligned to the brand and definitely a great thing that Orca is pushing as a company for our closing question, who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Ori (26:23):

This is totally a cop out and a shill, but the first thing that comes to my mind really is my co-founder, Yutaro. I think often I get a lot of the spotlight just because, well, I'm much more talkative than he is, and people, I think easy to talk about human-centered design and all that we're at. But he's really the brains behind the operation. And also the one who's invited us all in into crypto. When people ask, "How did you start learning about crypto?" I think back, and I'm like, "I was so lucky that whenever I had any question, I would just ask Yutaro.

Ori (26:57):

He would very patiently and excitedly just tell me all about it. He has these deep roots working for the Ethereum Foundation, and so I think those are something that was very respected. In Solana, it's not about this tribal, "It must be Ethereum." "It must be Bitcoin." "It must be Solana," but really more of this holistic look that he has into the ecosystem and where it's going to go. I think the fact that he saw Solana back in September 2020 and said, "This is the place to build," and was absolutely correct just says it all.

Jisi (27:28):

Yeah, definitely. We would love to have him on the podcast as well one day. That would be amazing.

Ori (27:35):

Yeah, you should totally bring him on. He was also voted in the share house that we live together, best voice mail by our co-living mates. He has a great podcast voice, so I'm sure you'll have a great time talking to him.

Jisi (27:49):

I like hearing him in the Orca demo videos.

Ori (27:54):

Oh, I'll tell him that. I think he'll be like, "Oh, that's interesting," but actually very happy under the hood.

Jisi (28:01):

For sure. All right. Well, thanks so much for coming to the podcast, Ori. It was great to meet you. If you like to check out Orca, you can access the Dex at orca.so and at Twitter @Orca_so. You can find Ori on Twitter @Oritheorca.

Ori (28:19):

Thanks so much. This was a really fun conversation.

Jisi (28:22):

Yeah, for sure. Thanks so much. Have a great day.

Ori (28:24):

You too.

Jisi (28:25):

Bye-bye.

Sidney Zhang (Magic Eden CTO) joins The Zeitgeist to discuss his personal story to crypto and how Magic Eden scaled their way into becoming the top Solana NFT marketplace.

Show Notes

00:42 - Intro / Background
08:46 - What prompted creating Magic Eden on Solana
11:53 - Picking up rust and working in solana
13:57 - Magic Eden: From underdog to behemoth
16:52 - Building at Magic Eden
20:35 - Engineering challenges that were faced
23:01 - What they look for in engineers
27:35 - Evolution of NFTs
29:19 - Builders he admires in the space

Transcript

Brian (00:05):

Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom and I'm super excited to introduce Sidney Zang. Syd is the co-founder in CTO of Magic Eden, the leading NFT marketplace on Solana. Syd, how's it going?

Syd (00:29):

Yeah, very good. Thank you for having us.

Brian (00:31):

Thanks so much for being on the show. I'm really excited to talk to you today about what you guys have built with Magic Eden. I'd love to start though if you could give us a little bit of background on who you are and what you were up to before you got started in this space.

Syd (00:43):

Yeah. My name's Sidney. I'm the CEO of Magic Eden. I'll go from the beginning. Actually, when I first graduated from college, I actually started my first crypto company right after college in 2013. At that time, I was the co-organizer of the San Francisco Bitcoin Developer Meetup Group.

Syd (01:01):

And so generally, I was really, really into crypto culture, especially crypto developer culture. I was also contributor to some of the crypto libraries that were used at the time. Funnily enough, my collaborator on the library is JP, the founder of Exodus Wallet, which is a very large wallet.

Brian (01:20):

Oh no way!

Syd (01:20):

Yeah. And JP actually slept in my living room when he was in SF, but shout-out to JP. So at that time, I was really also into crypto consumer products. And at that time, smart contract was just a concept that was coming up. But obviously, there was nothing. The Bitcoin scripting language obviously was not Turing complete, so you couldn't really do much. And so we created a lot of consumer apps that we thought was interesting at the time. We created a second Bitcoin tipper bot where the first tipper bot was on Reddit.

Syd (01:59):

The second tipper bot was on Twitter, and that was the one that we made. Our users started spamming celebrities with Bitcoin tips to create awareness for Bitcoin. That was kind of fun, but ultimately, there wasn't much traction. Another thing that I did was the first big crypto browser wallet, Chrome extension wallet, we built the very first one.

Brian (02:20):

Oh, wow.

Syd (02:22):

No one had started at that point. It was kind of magical. It was really nice, the experience. But eventually, we shut it down because we thought no one would ever be able to make money from a crypto browser wallet like that. Just how can a crypto browser wallet ever be a business, right? It's not possible. So we gave up on that, even though it was really, really cool.

Brian (02:42):

How far we've come on that.

Syd (02:43):

How far we've come, right, since then. And then also back then, I really started thinking about NFT at the time. It wasn't called NFT at the time. It was basically like Bitcoin had this bite code called OP_RETURN that allows you to put 80 bytes of data in there.

Syd (03:02):

It's going to be copyright, so let's hash the image and put the bites into those 80 bites. Obviously, nobody used it, but I thought it was cool to put image on the chain. We created this thing called LoveBlock. And the slogan was like, "Roses are red. Violets are purple. Diamonds are bullshit, but the blockchain is forever."

Syd (03:27):

And so people put love letters in there because the blockchain is forever, so your love would be forever. That obviously also didn't get traction. It was big for a day on Valentine's Day, and then it died the next day.

Brian (03:37):

Big on Valentine's day. Yeah.

Syd (03:39):

So we built a lot of things-

Brian (03:40):

Oh, that's amazing.

Syd (03:41):

... that... That got a lot of attention on Hacker News. That was big for a day, and then it will just inevitably die a few days later. Yeah. And then eventually, I was like, "Wow, it's really hard to do consumer on crypto unless you run an exchange.

Syd (03:58):

So I was like, "You know what? I am going to build a developer API because there are so many developers and they will come up with a consumer product." And because I was a co-organizer of the Bitcoin Developer Meetup Group, it was really natural for me to do that.

Syd (04:12):

So I did that, raised a little bit of money, obviously spent all the money. And as it turns out, the fact that I wasn't able to build a consumer product, nobody else could either. So we ended with all this developer using our API that also couldn't make money and couldn't pay us.

Syd (04:31):

So eventually, the Bitcoin developer API also was not successful. I ran out of money. I had to borrow money from my girlfriend, who is my wife now. So luckily, that worked out.

Brian (04:43):

Nice.

Syd (04:43):

I actually never pay her back because we forgot. 

 

Brian (04:52):

Your gift is probably on the blockchain for her though to still see.

Syd (04:52):

And I ended up living on a boat for a little bit because I was so poor. It's funny, the owner of the boat, Nate, actually works at Magic Eden now.

Brian (05:02):

Wow.

Syd (05:03):

Anyway, it's a long, long place-

Brian (05:05):

What a story.

Syd (05:05):

Yeah. So I was on the boat for a bit in the Alameda Marina. And then eventually, I was like, "Wow, man." I was just bitter about crypto. I was like, "Fuck, crypto sucks."

Syd (05:16):

I was like, "I need a break from crypto," and it was like during the deep bear market at that time.

Brian (05:20):

What year was this?

Syd (05:21):

I think by the time, I think it was 2015 that I left crypto. I joined Uber.

Brian (05:27):

It's one of the earlier bear markets before.

Syd (05:28):

Yeah, that's right.

Brian (05:28):

Yeah. Everyone knows the 2015 one.

Syd (05:31):

Yeah, yeah. I started in 2013. No, I actually started in 2012. Because buying marijuana in Australia where I'm from, I'm from Australia, buying marijuana in Australia was very illegal. And so the best way to buy marijuana as a college student was using Bitcoin.

Syd (05:46):

And so that's how I go into the space. But at the same time, I was very... I had a lot of libertarian kind of leaning. And so the idea of a non-inflationary currency really appealed to me. Anyway, so then 2015, I joined Uber Eats as one of the first engineers there before Uber Eats was a thing. We built Uber Eats.

Brian (06:10):

Yeah.

Syd (06:10):

Uber Eats obviously grew from nothing to like $50 billion GMV or something ridiculous. Right?

Brian (06:18):

I heard you were in the room at the time when it was just a Figma file essentially.

Syd (06:22):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was. I don't know if it was Figma actually. I think at that time, people didn't use Figma. I think it was-

Syd (06:27):

Yeah. I think they probably used something else, and I can't remember what it was, so yeah. So I would stay with Uber Eats for a few years. I learned a lot there. I was primarily working on all the machine learning initiatives.

Brian (06:39):

Okay.

Syd (06:40):

Ranking, recommendation, search, discovery, little bit pricing, all those things. And then after that, I transitioned. I transferred to ATG, which stands for Advanced Technologies Group, was like the self-driving research lab in... The lab was based out of Toronto.

Syd (06:59):

And so there, I was a research manager. I focused on computer vision. I focused on prediction towards them with a little bit simulation as well. Then after that, I went to Facebook. I was at Facebook AI. And at that time... The whole time, I was just watching crypto, buying tokens, trying to make sense of the madness, but also really exciting at the time.

Syd (07:21):

And then when NFT... But I always really wanted to do something in crypto consumer because that was like what really appealed to me. And I was like, "Hey, I'm not going to go back into crypto until there's a consumer opportunity." And that was something that I really care about.

Syd (07:36):

And then NFT started to take off. And I remember when NFT took off, it was almost like... At one time, I was like, "Fuck, I like all these things." I thought about this in 2013. And then at the same time, how it's happening is nothing like what I thought would happen in 2013.

Brian (07:56):

Right.

Syd (07:56):

I thought about crypto gaming in 2013, but I would never have thought like Game Fire, Symphony. All these things are never... just out of this world. And I was like, "This is just fascinating." And at that point, I was just really sold.

Syd (08:10):

Even though I was at Facebook, honestly, I was like, "Oh, this is amazing." I was just obsessed over  it. And then soon afterwards, I left Facebook and then we started Magic Eden and the rest is history.

Brian (08:21):

The rest is history.

Syd (08:21):

Yeah.

Brian (08:22):

That's great. So somewhere along that journey from the 2015 bear market, you being an early Uber Eats employee and then joined the Facebook, you leveled up, you got out of the houseboat in Alameda, I assume.

Syd (08:33):

Not a houseboat. It was a 24-foot sailing boat that was really small.

Brian (08:39):

Yeah. Amazing. And so at this time, after the 2018 bear market, obviously, there was a lot of activity on Ethereum. What made you pull the trigger to actually start Magic Eden? And why did you pick Solana of all blockchains at the time?

Syd (08:55):

You know, first of all, I think there are a few things, like the stars need to align for you to start a company. And my co-founder, the CEO, Jack, was working at FTX at the time. He was at Google before. Joshen was a product manager at Coinbase. He was employee number two at dYdX.

Syd (09:11):

And then Rex, I've known Rex for very, very long time, always a big crypto degen since I met him at Uber. And so the four of us... And Jack and I, we've known each other since high school. We actually met each other in math tutoring.

Brian (09:26):

Oh, no way.

Syd (09:26):

Which is a very Asian way to meet someone.

Brian (09:29):

Well, you guys are both from Australia. Is that correct too?

Syd (09:31):

From Australia. That's right. Yeah. We're both from Melbourne, went to the same math tutor, Dr. Heath, math coaching.

Brian (09:36):

Wow.

Syd (09:37):

So we've just been talking about crypto for years. We're like, "We want to start something." Right? And so I feel like it's just like we've been paying attention for a long time. That's why the first thing, which is that opportunities come every once in a blue moon.

Syd (09:56):

But the people who are ready to go at that moment are the people that capture the opportunity. And we've just been looking at it for a very long time. We keep following it. So that's probably the first thing. And then there's a question on Solana.

Syd (10:06):

I think our thesis was very much that NFT is what's going to take crypto to mainstream even though, I think, crypto in general is now breaking the same barrier, right? What Coinbase is doing, which is amazing what Crypto.com's doing, what Binance is doing and, to some extent to... and what FTX is doing, crypto is breaking the sound barrier.

Syd (10:31):

But I think ultimately, NFT is going to be that thing that's going to take crypto to the mainstream.

Brian (10:36):

Yeah.

Syd (10:37):

That's when it's going to be like Phantom's going to have... Phantom Wallet's going to have a hundred million users, you know? And then I think a lot of them would be using it because of NFT. Right?

Brian (10:46):

Right.

Syd (10:48):

And I think that for a consumer experience to make sense, I think that the speed of the chain, the chain being designed not to be cheesy web scale, is really, really important. And I think that's what attracted us to Solana.

Syd (11:06):

Even though the ecosystem, the developer ecosystem was raw at the time, it's just a... I would say it's an ecosystem, was just full of energy and the foundation had been very, very warm to us and help us and so on. And I think all these have been very important reasons for why we chose Solana over any other chains.

Brian (11:26):

Yeah. I think that resonates very well with our founding story as well here at Phantom and why we chose a similar path as you guys for similar reasons. You touched on a little bit about how at the start, the developer ecosystem was very raw. And Solana is and still... or was and still is very different than EBM or what you were doing in the earlier days with Bitcoin.

Brian (11:49):

Can you talk a little bit about how that learning process was for you? Obviously, you had a ton of experience from way back in the day. But coming from a Web2 environment, Facebook, Uber, how was picking up ROSS and trying to build your first program on Solana? What did you use to get started?

Syd (12:06):

Oh, Rust isn't hard. Rust is an amazing language. It's probably like Solana smart contract self. They're just nuances. We used Anchor since the beginning, shout to Amani. Amazing. Amazing.

Brian (12:18):

Yeah, putting the industry on his back.

Syd (12:19):

Yeah, and just carrying the industry on his back. I think that when you run into issues, the error message didn't make sense.

Brian (12:30):

Yeah.

Syd (12:32):

Like, "Oh. Well, something broke, 0X75." You're like, "What?" And we just ran into stuff like that. But I think that's the power of open source, right? We just stuck into the core. And if you dig enough, you'll find what's going on.

Syd (12:44):

We're very lucky to have just great people with us along the way, like shout to Andrew from Zeta Market where he really help us a lot from the beginning. Without Andrew, I think there would be no Magic Eden.

Syd (12:56):

And yeah, we crunch really hard at the beginning and we shipped the first product after coding for 10 days.

Brian (13:02):

And when was this? Was this around the end of the summer in 2021?

Syd (13:05):

Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And we just crunched really hard for 10 days, and then we shipped. And that was how we got started.

Brian (13:15):

Wow.

Syd (13:15):

At that time, there was already very entrenched competition where Solana, DigitalEyes, they were doing... Collectively, they were doing over like a hundred-something million dollars a month-

Brian (13:26):

Yeah. I remember those days.

Syd (13:28):

... in GMV at that time. So they were really, really big. The network effects were very, very strong. Yeah. And it was in that environment that we started. Yeah.

Brian (13:37):

Yeah. I remember those days. You only had one or two mints a day, if that too. So the NFT space was very small. You felt like you could keep track of every project and who was what, and there was just a few…

Syd (13:50):

Not anymore.

Brian (13:50):

Yeah, not anymore. And there was just a few projects or a few marketplaces. But as you said, Solana and a few others just were dominant in market share. How do you guys think that you guys rose to where you are now? You guys basically were an underdog to start. You're an absolute behemoth today. What would you attribute to that success?

Syd (14:16):

I think just to show our company a little bit and talk about culture values, we have four culture values. And the first culture value that we have is customer obsession. The second culture value we have is Web 3.0 over Web 2.0. And what does that mean? Right?

Syd (14:29):

That means that from the very beginning, we knew that it's very important to be in touch with Google culture. And of course, each chain is a little bit different but Solana is definitely like a deep, deep crypto culture, has a deep crypto culture.

Syd (14:45):

I think in crypto community, it's extremely important. Being customer-obsessed, being community-obsessed was that thing that... And I think it sounds cheesy in hindsight. It's like, "Duh." Right.

Brian (14:59):

Mm-hmm.

Syd (15:00):

But actually, when you focus on that, it propagates what you do every single day, you know?

Brian (15:06):

Right.

Syd (15:06):

What we do when the times are good, what we do when we fuck up, when we mess up, we certainly had a fair share of disasters, being honest, being transparent, being obsessed over the customer, their experience, embracing communities. Right?

Syd (15:22):

A lot of the marketplaces at the time were very like... They were like a boys club almost, right?

Brian (15:30):

Mm-hmm.

Syd (15:31):

They were only... The marketplace will only work with you unless you give them a bunch of money or they need to suck up to you before they work with you. There were a lot of that at the time, and we came in and we just went to community first. And all these things, I think, just sound really cheesy now, but it's definitely very true at the time.

Syd (15:53):

And the other thing that I would say that's really cheesy is it really is the little things that matter. It's the things that we did every single day that then gradually build up our reputation and our trust with the users. To the program's point, I read this article that he wrote a long time ago. It's like, "Do the things that don't scale."

Syd (16:15):

And we really focused on doing things that don't scale at the beginning. And the interesting thing is that if you focus on doing things that don't scale and you do it enough, and if you're smart, you'll find a way to make them scale too.

Brian (16:27):

Yeah. Right.

Syd (16:29):

But anyway, I think very cheesy, but also very true. And I think all these truism, cheesy truisms, they become cheesy because it's so true.

Brian (16:38):

Right.

Syd (16:39):

So if... Yeah.

Brian (16:41):

And that's Paul Graham of Y Combinator who coined that phrase and obviously, he's seen probably more startups do that than anybody alive today.

Syd (16:49):

For sure.

Brian (16:50):

That's amazing. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about how you guys build products at Magic Eden. Obviously, you're the CTO. What is the engineering culture like? How do you guys decide what to build, who builds it? There's a ton going on. You guys have a lot of products. Can you shed a little light on what that process is like for you guys?

Syd (17:08):

Yeah. I think I would probably talk about a few things. One is how do we drive prioritization? The second is how do we organize our team? And then the third thing that I'll probably emphasize on is how do we... Autonomy. What does autonomy mean to me? Right?

Syd (17:28):

And I'm hinting because our teams are generally very autonomous. They get a lot of power over what they do. One is like prioritization. Generally, prioritization is driven in the way that's ideas are generally very bottom-up and prioritization will drive very hard top down.

Syd (17:44):

I think all the founders, we generally have a very opinionated division for how we want to take this. And we use metrics as a prioritization framework, and we drive towards that. And that's how we then make decisions on a resourcing standpoint like what to work on, what not to work on.

Syd (18:01):

But more importantly, I would say generally, startups are all about execution. You can do the same thing, but someone else will do better than you. Right? And marketplaces certainly are not really about who has the most longest checklist of features, right?

Syd (18:20):

Generally, every marketplace quickly are feature parity with each other. But how you do it, how you execute really matters. And in this case, we do have product managers in the company. But I would say that a senior engineer and a senior designer at Magic Eden, they're in parallel, a junior product manager too.

Syd (18:39):

We really make sure that our engineers and designers, they own the user journey and they care about the user journey. And it's up to them to produce a really good user journey. We make our product managers back off from the details and let the engineers and designer drive the details.

Syd (18:56):

And we formed this thing called squads or pods where the squad is a self-contained organization that is led autonomously by a lead. And within a squad, it's very full stack. For example, in a squad, building a feature, marketing person will be in there.

Syd (19:13):

If there's any partnership that we're doing, a partnership person will be in there, for example. And as such, each squad operates like a startup within Magic Eden, and just their goal is a sub-goal of Magic Eden's overall goals. Right? And so that actually allows us to ship really fast, operate really quickly.

Brian (19:33):

Yep.

Syd (19:33):

And I think the last thing that I would probably mention is the word autonomy. I think people love the word autonomy, and that's how companies use that word to hire people. But autonomy to me is not really about autonomy at all.

Syd (19:51):

To me, autonomy is about what to do when things go wrong and being okay with that. We really do give trust to our engineers and our designers to make decisions to ship. And then if things go wrong, fix it. And the only thing that... I joke about it, but the only thing I ask our team is like, "Hey, we trust you to make judgment calls. That's why we hire you because we trust your judgment calls. 


 

Brian (20:18):

Yeah. Right.

Syd (20:18):

We just want you to be correct? 70% of the time.

 

Brian (20:21):

Yeah.

Syd (20:23):

"So also, don't make this... Don't be the decision maker and be wrong 80% of the time too. Right?" But-

Brian (20:29):

Right.

Syd (20:29):

But those are some of the, I would say, important points in how we run the eng team.

Brian (20:34):

Yeah. Prioritizing shipping over asking for permission.

Brian (20:37):

How has that worked for you guys as you guys have scaled? What are some of the biggest engineering challenges that you have come up against? Do you think it'll persist throughout the lifetime of Magic Eden, or do you see a need for this to change? How has scale brought this to the front for you guys?

Syd (20:55):

Companies like TikTok still operates like this today. And TikTok have thousands of engineers, right? They still operate this way today. And I will say that Facebook... We know a lot of early Facebookers. Facebook operated this way for a very, very long time as well.

Syd (21:13):

And I think the squad model does scale. At least it will scale to the point... to the range of having hundreds of engineers and still have this kind of squad model. The first time I heard this squad model is from Ryan Sokol. Ryan Sokol is a mentor and investor of mine. He runs engineering at DoorDash, used to run engineering for Uber Eats.

Brian (21:32):

Okay.

Syd (21:32):

The engineering team, I think it's about 2,000 engineers or something like that.

Brian (21:36):

Wow.

Syd (21:37):

And even them, they still run a squad model till today. Not to the extent we do it, because our squads are even looser than them. Each month, we form new squads. Their squads are more stable, but they still do this till today, to some extent, not as deep as we are, but I think this will scale.

Syd (21:56):

In terms of engineering challenges, I would say that people that follow Magic Eden know that in January, we had a string of outages. We really got that under control now, and thank you to the community for sticking with us. And then now, Solana, TPS, you guys, you guys must feel it too. Right?

Syd (22:21):

I think along the way, we do have periods of challenges like that. But I see that using the word challenge is almost the wrong word. It's really privileges. We're lucky to be in this position.

Brian (22:33):

Yeah. I like that.

Syd (22:35):

And it's all thanks to our community.

Brian (22:37):

Yeah. No, I think that comes back to what you said earlier too about how it takes so much work, doing the little things every day to earn that trust. And you can lose that trust of the community very quick. But I agree. I think both our companies are in a position now.

Brian (22:50):

Solana, as it's hitting the mainstream, there's a lot we can do to really lead the way and help-

Syd (22:55):

Yeah.

Brian (22:56):

... best practices, help this thing scale and communicate that well and be good stewards of the community here.

Syd (23:02):

Yeah.

Brian (23:05):

You mentioned a little bit. Your team's growing, you have these pods, you rotate a lot. What do you look for as you guys are growing? What do you look for in an engineer who decides, "I want to work in Magic Eden"? I imagine you took on... You mentioned being a self-starter and having that autonomy. Is that one of the main things you guys look for?

Syd (23:26):

Yeah. I think one of the... I told you two out of four cultural values. The fourth cultural value that we have is a champion's mindset. And what does that mean? Right? I think that running a marketplace is really hard, for real, like-

Brian (23:47):

Yeah.

Syd (23:48):

You know? You might not realize just how hard it is to run a marketplace. It's really, really hard. And what's harder than running a secondary marketplace is running a primary marketplace when we have a Launchpad product. That's even harder.

Brian (24:02):

And running both together at the same time.

Syd (24:04):

Yeah. They're really, really, really difficult. On Solana, there're like 10, 15 Launchpad copycats that saw our success in Launchpad and they try to copy us. Many of them are shutting down. Many of them are not doing as well as they might hope or like... And the reason is actually, this is very, very difficult.

Syd (24:26):

It's much harder than it looks on the outside. All this stuff is very simple. But simplicity is actually like... There's enormous amount of work to hide the complexity, to be simple on the front end.

Brian (24:38):

Yes.

Syd (24:39):

And I think that when we hire engineers, we look for... I say this other times like first and foremost, I look for heart over experience. I look for talent over experience. And what I mean by that is that high is this willingness to win. You know?

Brian (24:58):

Yeah.

Syd (24:58):

And the willingness to really... Understanding what the user wants is a very tedious thing to do. You got to put a lot of work to figure that out, and you need to be willing to put in the work. You need to be willing to move quickly because crypto moves really quickly.

Syd (25:15):

You need to be willing to get out your comfort zone and move around, do new things all the time. And then at the same time, we also really look for people with raw talents. They're engineers in the company, they're very young, but they're just extraordinarily talented.

Syd (25:30):

And you can tell that they're the people that given the opportunity, they'll be better than someone with 10 years of experience. And we really look for those people too. And lastly, we do have... We don't have a conveyor belt. We think about team composition.

Syd (25:46):

And I think in many ways, Google, Facebook, Uber, worked in all these companies, they have a very com conveyor belt process for hiring. It's just like they hire the same people overall. Again, they don't care about what each person's good at or like, or whatever. They just chuck them on a team and just soldiers. Right?

Brian (26:04):

Mm-hmm.

Syd (26:05):

We really think about team composition. You know, we have engineers here that are very degen. We also hire a lot of people from Google. I'm going to say hi to the Google Ads team. Thank you for giving us so many people. We have a lot of people from Facebook. So we have a very diverse range of people that come from very diverse backgrounds.

Syd (26:25):

And that diversity is what allows us to compose the team. And some people are a lot more product-conscious. Some people might not care that much about product, but they're just very good at dealing with scale. And we have all of those people too, so yeah.

Brian (26:39):

That's great. You mentioned accountability, you mentioned customer obsession, you mentioned mindset of a champion. Is there a fourth that I didn't get hint to that?

Syd (26:48):

Oh, no. So it is customer obsession. It is Web 3.0 over Web 2.0, really embrace Web3.0.

Brian (26:54):

Web 3.0 over Web 2.0.

Syd (26:54):

It is champion's mindset and it is unity and ownership.

Brian (26:58):

Okay.

Syd (27:00):

And this, I'm going to give credit to Jack. Jack, before Google, he was at BCG, Boston Consulting Group 

Brian (27:07):

This is the CEO of Magic Eden.

Syd (27:08):

Yeah. Yeah. That's a management consulting firm. And at Google, he was in strategy and then in product. And he was self-confessed as a reorg specialist. And he's done probably 20 reorgs more and he realized just as a company scales, people can start competing with each other within the company instead of uniting as a team to compete with your competitors.

Syd (27:33):

Instead of trying to deliver the best experience for your user and focus on your own community, people can start thinking about how do you create, then grab, carve out your own thing. Right? And so we very intentionally make that as part of culture value. And there's a lot that we do to make sure that we unite as a team to deliver an experience for our user and be better than our competitors so that we earn our users' trust. Right? Yeah.

Brian (28:01):

That's great. So looking ahead here for a little bit, how do you see the NFT space evolving? What are you most excited about ?

Syd (28:12):

I think that the most important use case today in NFT is obviously community and PFP, and then that, then [inaudible] utility, right? That, to me, I'm extremely bullish on. I think that that's obviously something that's like this need for community and being a part of a community and then having an ownership as an entry to the community, but also being able to transfer that to someone else is extremely valuable.

Syd (28:44):

I think that what's coming is going to be... in terms of next big caliber is going to be gaming.

Brian (28:49):

Gaming. Yeah.

Syd (28:50):

And you can see that we have Eden Games, which is a completely gaming-focused NFT experience. Soon, we'll release a market report like a Q1 lookback, and we're going to talk a lot about gaming. So guys, look out for our Q1 report.

Brian (29:05):

Nice.

Syd (29:05):

And we're going to talk a lot about gaming. We work with many, many game studios yet to launch. And if you know you're a game studio, that you're looking on any chain, that you're thinking about this, come say hi. Reach out to us anytime. And I think there's just so much exciting stuff that's coming that you will see in the next two, three months. Yeah.

Brian (29:26):

I couldn't agree more. We're super excited for gaming and so much else that this space has in store for us., 

Syd (29:34):

Out of all the gaming marketplaces, we probably have the largest gaming focus. And certainly in Solana, vast majority of gaming NFT happens on Magic Eden, and we want to continue that way, and yeah.

Brian (29:55):

That's great. Super exciting stuff. Well, Syd, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for your time. Just before we go, I'd love to ask you this question. Who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem.

 

Syd (30:14):

I think we have to start with Anatoly and Raj for creating the Solana ecosystem. I think that there are a lot of decisions, small decisions, technical decisions that they make that were just like, "That's right." That makes Solana scale and also just made it... I would say very easy to work with if you want to operate a scale. And I think that's really important.

Syd (30:31):

I really also very admire the Phantom team. Seriously. Obviously, we've been in the trenches since the beginning. We've known each other for a long time. But just seeing how the Phantom team operates, how the Phantom team executes is quite inspirational. And it's lucky to be able to call myself a compatriot, that we really grew together since the beginning. Yeah?

Brian (30:55):

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Syd (30:56):

It's really crazy. And then thank you so much for having me on this podcast. Awesome.

Brian (31:02):

Likewise. Well, the feelings mutual. We really admire you guys. Thank you for what you do, driving this industry forward, and thanks for being the first guest here on the pod.

Syd (31:11):

Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye.

Ben Chow (Jupiter Exchange Co-Founder) joins The Zeitgeist to discuss Jupiter's role in the Solana ecosystem powering swap infrastructure.

Show Notes

0:44 - Intro / Background
05:04 - How does Jupiter work?
08:44 - Jupiter integration in Phantom
13:26 - Keeping up with the new liquidity innovations
15:47 - What's the process of Jupiter Integration
21:18 - Who is using Jupiter?
24:44 - The Growing Solana Ecosystem
26:04 - What is the vision for Jupiter?
28:44 - Favorite Builders in the space
32:28 - Contact info

References

• Saber
• Orca
• Raydium
• Friktion

Transcript

Brian (00:06):

Hey everyone, and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight founders, developers and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce Ben Chow. Ben is the co-founder of Jupiter, the largest decentralized exchange aggregator on Solana, powering tens of millions of dollars in swaps every day. Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben (00:30):

Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

Brian (00:33):

Thanks for coming on. And so we have a lot to cover today, including an exciting announcement between Phantom and Jupiter. But before that, could you give us a brief overview of who you are and how you came to be involved with Jupiter?

Ben (00:44):

Sure, yeah. So hi everyone, my name is Ben. I'm one of the co-founders of Jupiter. I became involved in Jupiter actually through a few good friends of mine, Megan and Shawn. Probably unlike many people, I am relatively new to crypto, although at this point in time, I feel like an ancient person. The world moves. I think I've gone through a couple of cycles and a few different crypto projects, so it's been an amazing roller coaster ride of sorts.

Ben (01:13):

But as for my background, I'm a ex-IDEO product designer and longtime serial entrepreneur and startup founder. I've worked in a number of fields to be honest. Probably the most successful ones was that I was actually an early social gaming pioneer. I helped build a social gaming startup that was True Venture backed and later got acquired by Disney played him in a roll up.

Ben (01:37):

More recently, before Jupiter I was the co-founder CEO of a top 100 social app on the iOS store, and I also happen to have several patents and a lot of work in the medical product space. Probably the coolest one was I did an augmented reality surgical navigation system for cataract surgeons that we took to market, which was very cool.

Ben (02:03):

I would say the core team on Jupiter is pretty experienced. Megan and Shawn are probably the OG DeFi folks. They were a founding team or strategic advisor to InstadApp, RAPBTC, Kyber, Blockfolio, and a number of others. And I feel grateful and fortunate that they looped me in when they were thinking about building on Solana. So we're a pretty veteran team. We've all done a number of companies, a number of products. I feel very thankful that Solana is both an incredible ecosystem to build on, and this is an incredible time to be a builder. There's just so much value you can give because we're all super early, but also everyone is really smart, very talented, really great to work with. So it's just been an amazing time.

Brian (02:53):

So you have this wealth of startup experience across a ton of different domains. Was Solana your first blockchain ecosystem that you really sunk your teeth into and got involved with?

Ben (03:03):

Yes. Solana actually is my first. I don't have the stories that people have about Ethereum or Binance, and I don't have as much background in those. I really only know Solana very well. At the same time, I've also had to come up to speed on DeFi and crypto in general. So I have this really interesting depth of knowledge in a certain area, but not as much broad experience. Like when people talk about 2017 and the crypto winter, I didn't have those kind of experiences. I can talk shop now a little bit more around aggregation indexes, concentrated liquidity, derivatives, perpetuals, all sorts of stuff. I think one of the things that attracts me to crypto is that for any of the things I've always done, I just love to deep dive into a problem domain and learn as much as I can. And crypto is like this endless deep well of things you can learn.

Brian (04:02):

Yeah, the rabbit hole.

Ben (04:04):

Yeah. Literally, probably the deepest rabbit hole I've ever been in. And I've been in several. Doing surgical navigation systems are like this combination of understanding the business model, the user experience, the biomedical, the biophysical, every single layer of it is needed to really do something very interesting and cool. And the same can be said even more so with crypto.

Brian (04:33):

No, I agree a hundred percent. It's an endless learning experience. And so you mentioned your background. Back in the day you were at IDEO as a product designer. Most people, I would say, know Jupiter today because of the website you guys host at jup.ag. You guys have a really slick few clicks and you're swapping the best rate between different tokens on Solana. But you guys also offer a couple other ways to interface with Jupiter. Can you speak a little bit to how Jupiter works under the hood and how both users and developers can interact with what you guys have built?

Ben (05:04):

So we have an SDK and a API, and our vision for how we see Jupiter and how it relates to the rest of the ecosystem is that we want to be the swap infrastructure for all of Solana. And the single place that any project developer or user can easily access all of the liquidity and discover the best price trades for any token that they want to trade on in Solana. What that means is that if you're a developer... And I would say one reason why we've gotten a huge traction on developers building on top of Jupiter is that we make it really easy to do not only trades, but arbitrage trading. So if you're using our API, it's actually one of the easiest things you can do because it's language platform agnostic. It's literally one REST API call to get the best price routes, and then another API call to also get the transaction objects you need to send to actually do the swap.

Ben (06:12):

On the SDK side, it's a little bit more involved, but it's about three or four steps. You just have to load up the library and then put in your trade that you want and compute the routes. Right now, computing all the routes is done off chain and offline, and the reason for that is that we integrate currently 15 DEXs on Solana. And what that means is, basically we connect and route every single market there is on Solana. So you can think of all of Solana's liquidity as one big virtual DEX, and we have to create the routes for all that. That means that there's tons of routes, thousands and thousands of routes. And calculating the best price between all of them is actually computationally expensive and something that is very very hard to do on-chain. And so that is done in our SDK off-chain, and our API also leverages our SDK. So whenever we make improvements to our SDK, our API automatically gets them.

Ben (07:13):

There's a lot of work that happens on a daily basis. One, to optimize the routing algorithm, to make it more performant. Because as you can imagine, anytime you increase the number of tokens, and there are thousands of tokens on Solana, anytime there's new liquidity sources for those tokens, the complexity grows exponentially. So the number of permutations and combinations of routes grows ever greater, and calculating them in a way that's very fast for users. In some ways, a lot of market opportunities and best price routes don't live very long, right? So the route itself could be best price for only a block or a couple blocks before someone else snatches it. You want to be able to calculate these things very, very quickly. And so we do a lot of work optimizing the computation for it, and then also there's a lot of infrastructure work for anyone using the API to be able to make sure that it scales and is performant for all the people who are using the API.

Brian (08:21):

So I'd love to dig in more of the details, but before we do, we do have an exciting announcement to bring up today. And that is at the time that this show is being recorded, Phantom is set to release its brand new in-app swapper that's powered by Jupiter. We're super excited about this because it opens up a huge wide range of new markets and gives our users the best possible price across all pairs they're interested in trading. Can you guys speak a little bit to this integration and what this means for DeFi on Solana?

Ben (08:48):

So basically I think along with our mission, what it means to be a swap infrastructure, is that there's actually just a lot of work to make all this liquidity and any token available for anyone. What we want to do is make it easy for any project or any wallet to access this liquidity as simply and as seamlessly and as easy as possible. And that is so you can support the rich number of use cases there are for swaps, which could be streaming payments, being able to, if you're streaming a token that the recipient can receive the token in the token of their choice at the best rate possible. This is like purchasing NFTs, being able to purchase NFTs with any token, not just SOL or whatever the collections token is.

Ben (09:35):

If you don't have those things to be able to do that easily, simply in one click to power payments... So Solana payments, we work with MtnPay to help facilitate that. So you can purchase anything with any token that you have, not just USDC, but the person the recipient can receive in the token that they want, whether it's USDC or SOL or whatever, but someone can pay with the token that they want. So facilitating these interactions, that means that the simple thing that most developers do is they connect with one DEX, right? But that DEX may not have the best rates. That DEX may not have all the tokens.

Ben (10:15):

So a lot of tokens don't launch on every DEX. They launch on, it could be a Serum market or, or maybe a Raydium permissionless pool. And so being able to look at where the liquidity is, where the rates are, and make sure that people can easily access that with one API call or using our SDK is really important. And again, as Solana grows, as the number of tokens grow, as the number of projects come along, as a new markets come online, this stuff gets harder and harder, and more so because the latest DEXs that are coming online are actually much more complicated than the constant product AMMs that Solana first launched with.

Ben (11:00):

So we're seeing concentrated liquidity market makers, we're seeing proactive market makers, which are using Pyth or other price oracles to enable their market making. These things are very complicated to deal with and to integrate on top of them, but the reason to use them is that they offer amazing prices. So LIFINITY is one of the DEXs that we integrate with, along with Crema and Orca whirlpools, and their ability to give you competitive great prices for some of the popular token swaps is amazing.

Ben (11:38):

Because they have a lot more dependencies and they're a little bit more complicated, there are issues and there are corner cases to deal with. For example, because LIFINITY relies on a price oracle, in times of congestion that oracle could get behind and not be updated, and thus their ability to market make is hampered. Along with that, since everything is really early, we're usually the first people to work with anyone's SDK. It's usually in the early stages, and so doing things like having a really nice way to handle these errors and surface them to users where it makes sense to them, like, "Why is this something happening?" is an important job, and we're generally becoming sort of the interface between integrators and DEXs in terms of helping people like troubleshoot where bugs are in order to provide the best user experience for the end user.

Brian (12:38):

No, I think that user experience is everything at the end of the day, and that's why we're super excited about this integration. I remember a time on Solana when it was so simple, I could just open up maybe Saber, Orca, Raydium, a few other DEXs and have them all on one screen, and I could just compare different prices. But as you said, there's been a complete Cambrian explosion in different markets and different types of markets. And so you guys are doing great work to normalize that and make that a great user experience for everybody.

Brian (13:05):

Just real quick. You hit on a couple different types of these types of markets. AMMs, the classic example, and then there's concentrated liquidity, Orca's whirlpools have been a huge success recently. Solana's also unique in that we have central limit order books on chain, Serum. And then there's this concept also of professional market makers giving liquidity. Is there any other types of liquidity that you guys are aggregating, and how are you keeping up with these new innovations that are happening?

Ben (13:31):

There are a lot of interesting things going on. Probably the next set of integrations that will be more interesting for folks is that we are starting to integrate directly with minting and staking programs and not just liquidity pools. And the benefit there for folks is that normally these routes will have either no to very low slippage. So if you wanted to, for example, go from SOL to mSOL and you wanted to convert a million dollars worth of it, usually if it's in a pool, there's a great deal of slippage. But with these direct minting routes, there's almost none. Also, a lot of these minting, staking routes will have zero to low fees as well, because you're working directly with the protocol itself and there's no need to... A lot of times the fees are an incentive for LPs to deposit their liquidity and give them some incentive. If you're talking directly to the protocol itself, there's no need to take fees per se. So they could be zero to low things. So there's some really cool advantages.

Brian (14:47):

And you guys don't add a fee also, correct? You guys don't add a fee any of your trades.

Ben (14:52):

We also take zero fees, yes. We take a very long term view with Solana. We think it's super early. We want to grow the volumes in Solana. We want to grow Solana itself as well. And also we're very focused on making sure we deliver the absolute best price swaps to you, and charging a fee on top of DEX fees is not in our interest. We're not really here to extract value, more to give value to end users, developers and anyone that we work with.

Brian (15:25):

I think we're very aligned on the long term vision and the potential of Solana there. So what is the ultimate process like for integrating these new markets? I imagine, given the scale of your guys' infrastructure, it must be a fairly manual process to review these and normalize different markets. Is there a plan at all to make this in a way in the future where this could be a semi-permissionless thing, where people can add their own markets to Jupiter, or how complex is that integration today?

Ben (15:52):

For the most part, we've automated everything. So it's really not possible to manually check everything. If there's liquidity on Solana and a token in the token registry, we have it listed on Jupiter within minutes. And that's because we built out the infrastructure to automate everything as much as possible. So for instance, what that means is that for any DEX we aggregate with, we ask if they can provide an API on their markets that they are adding or removing. But because it's early days, not everyone has an API, so we have to do very interesting things, like if it's an open source SDK that the DEX has, we'll crawl the GitHub repo to see what markets they've added to the SDK. Whatever we can do to automate, we have done.

Ben (16:39):

Part of the promise that we have for Jupiter is the best token selection. So that means if there's some hot token that launches anywhere on Solana, that we've a DEX that we've integrated, we want you to be able to trade it instantly. And that's reason why any project can integrate with us. So if you integrate with us and you're a wallet and all of a sudden, some token blows up, you know that if you're using Jupiter, we've got it, and we've got the best price trades for it. There's a lot of infra work that happens on a daily basis. And again, I don't think anyone should have to replicate this work. So the goal for us to be infrastructure is that, look, you shouldn't have to worry about new tokens. You shouldn't have to worry about performance on routing or where the best price is, or what these dependencies and errors are from these DEXs.

Ben (17:34):

If you use Jupiter, our goal is to abstract away a lot of these things. So for you, it's just, "Okay, I want to trade this token. Give me the best route. Let me trade it." Now, we're still early. So I would say there's a lot of work to be done, again, not just on our part in our SDK, but for us as an interface to other DEXs and helping them discover what their bugs are, helping them have the right way of surfacing those errors to users in a way that makes sense to them. And then maybe giving users and integrators a choice of what kind of things that they prefer.

Ben (18:15):

For example, we've been learning that not everyone cares about best price. There are some people that are more like, "Look, I don't need best price. What I would like is like a route that would fail less often." So for example, Serum's liquidity being an essential limit order book is not very predictable compared to an AMM, right? So if you have tight slippage settings, as a trader, your trades may fail more often, whereas you'd really just want to make the trade. And so some folks may be like, "Well, if the best price is on Serum, I'd be okay with maybe not the best price if it's on a constant product AMM or something that I know if I do the trade, it's more likely to succeed." If you're one of those traders, we want to give you that option.

Brian (19:07):

Yeah, that's great. You know, you've hit on a lot here. One, just being the sheer complexity of what you guys do, given that just the exponential number of new routes that are coming online. You guys also, I believe you allow for multi hops between different routes, right? So it's not just, if I want to go SOL to USDC, I have to go find that pair. You can find an intermediary, same mSOL and then go to USDC. Is that right?

Ben (19:30):

Yes. So we support multi hop routes. Right now, it is up to two hops. And the benefit there is that one, if there's no direct market, you will still be able to swap between the tokens that you want in one transaction. So you don't have to do it manually in two or more. The other benefit is that it just so happens that you get the best prices by hopping through an intermediary. Because in Solana, the gas fees are so low, hopping through markets is very cheap. And a lot of markets that are either highly volatile or have some price inefficiencies allow you to route through them in order to get more token, really.

Ben (20:18):

Part of the complexity is actually just finding all these routes. So if you move to two hops, now the number of permutations is even more. And I would say, actually, one of the things that we're working on as a future roadmap item is actually to go beyond two hops. So more than two, say three hops. That's going to allow anyone to access even better price savings and, of course, increase the computation load. But what we're finding ways to optimize on that.

Brian (20:48):

So you guys have a wide range of users who are using this product. You hit a lot on the users who want the best price. This is probably your everyday retail trader like you or I who just wants to swap between different tokens. You also hit on the trader that just wants to be able to fail less. I imagine you have professional traders looking potentially to arbitrage via Jupiter. And then you also have this incredible SDK. I saw you guys recently announced you have over 42,000 downloads on this thing. Can you speak a little bit to who has been integrating these SDKs? Are these power users? Are these other dApps on Solana? And who is your kind of ideal consumer for these developer tools that you're building?

Ben (21:26):

So actually since that announcement, we're now at over 52,000 downloads.

Brian (21:33):

Two announcements on this podcast. I love it, breaking 50k.

Ben (21:36):

Yeah. So, you know the surprising thing, I mean, we have a lot of different folks who use us. I know of VCs who are using Jupiter to use them for arbitrage trading or playing with arbitrage trading. But the most surprising one is actually new developers, literally developers who are new to developing, and they are new to developing on Solana. And I know this because we spend a good deal of time supporting them and trying to help them out. We've lowered the bar for people who are interested in arbitrage trading. And so now it's just easier for, for folks to get more involved and actually learn to code. People are learning to code, so that's been a surprising thing to see. And there's nothing like free money really to draw people to learn to code.

Brian (22:32):

Right, to incentivize a new skill.

Ben (22:34):

Yeah. For us, we want to support anyone who wants to use Jupiter. And probably the more interesting ones are projects that have really interesting use cases. Obviously wallets are an amazing use case for us because you're at a really incredible touchpoint, a very close touchpoint with users. We're really excited about payments. I think while payments is early, it's got a huge potential. And letting anyone buy anything with any token is just super cool. And it doesn't have to be payments. It could be anything. I mentioned NFTs before, but we have a few projects that are doing stuff to make it easier to deposit into vaults. So Friktion uses us because a lot of their vaults take one type of asset, but the user may not have that asset. So why should they come to Jupiter swap, go back to that thing?

Ben (23:31):

By integrating us, their user gets to stay more on that site. It's fewer clicks, it's a quicker transaction. And because they're using Jupiter, and we want to make Jupiter work for our partners, we allow any partner to easily add their own sort of platform fee so that swaps can be a revenue source for them. And so actually, Friktion, I think they've done a good bit of volume just by adding Jupiter and having that as a revenue source. And there's a few others too. Like some DeFi Land was an early launch partner with us. So if you're swapping anything in their game, you're using Jupiter. We're starting to see some more interesting things come out of this.

Brian (24:15):

Yeah, I think this highlights two interesting things about Solana in particular. One, the composable nature, obviously. If you're doing something in Friktion with your portfolio management or you're playing a game with DeFi, it's as easy as just adding another instruction essentially, to swap into Jupiter. But then you also hit on another piece that I think doesn't get highlighted enough. This dovetails nicely with your story, that there's a lot of folks who Solana is their first experience at all in crypto, or as you highlighted, maybe ever even coding, which is, I think a really neat opportunity, bringing in new people with new perspectives on what this technology can do. It's pretty great.

Ben (24:52):

I really see Solana as the practical blockchain, right? It's the one that's going to be accessible for most retail users because it's cheap and fast, but also it's just got a great developer ecosystem of people building games and NFTs that are also just as accessible to the non-crypto enthusiast person. They're like, "Oh, I just want to play a cool game." Or, "I really love this NFT project," or something, "This collection." And to be able to do it with this great, fast, user experience, I feel like it's a hallmark of Solana. It's less about theoretical white papers and more about, "How can I build this great experience for someone to be able to engage with crypto in some way?"

Brian (25:40):

Yeah. Practical and also building something that users actually love and they enjoy using. So we've hit on a lot today. You guys are integrated across tons of different dApps. You have professional traders using you guys, VCs using you guys. Now with Phantom, we're making this super easy for anybody to swap an extension or on mobile on their phone, get the best price. What is the ultimate vision in your mind for Jupiter? Is this something that will always remain an aggregator, and is cross-chain something that would ever be on the horizon for you guys?

Ben (26:13):

Good question. A lot of people ask us this question. Currently, we work with some great partners to support the cross-chain use case. I'm not going to rule out cross-chain. There's definitely ways to do it. We're, I would say, a pretty lean team by choice. We just have really good people and I don't think anyone really wants to scale this into a big company with middle managers or anything. We just really like working with good people who are awesome at a lot of things and just moving fast. And because of that, the things that I think give us pause about cross-chain, at least for me, and this is something that we think about a lot is how to execute well on these things.

Ben (26:56):

And beyond the tech, the bigger thing to really tackle if you're going to do, cross-chain or multi-chain is how do you build a community on all these different chains, and without scaling to huge sizes? And so that's one reason why I think we work with partners, because it allows us to focus on what we do really well, and it allows us to focus and invest in the Solana ecosystem and the users and the community in Solana. We've got an amazing community, and it's because we spent time with them, and we invest in them, and try to give value to them. And I know the other ecosystems and communities on the other chains are very different. And so I don't know if we have yet a model for how to be very successful in those other chains and staying, operating the way we are currently operating.

Ben (27:49):

It doesn't preclude us from... It could be we figure out something, some way that really works for us and go after it. But for right now, we've got some great partners and we'd rather work with them. And that allows us to focus. I can't say this enough. I think great teams focus, because there's a lot of attractive, shiny new opportunities out there. And what would it be if we weren't relentless in our focus to give best price swaps for people, to make sure that we're always integrating to make sure that we're always improving the performance, to make sure that we're solving these issues. If we went off and chased after some shiny new thing, we really wouldn't be infrastructure. There's a lot of projects and users who depend on us. And so we want to make sure we can continue to deliver on that promise.

Brian (28:38):

Well, I think you guys have done an incredible job so far delivering on that promise. I know you guys are very highly respected in the Solana ecosystem, which brings us here to our final question we ask all our guests. Who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Ben (28:53):

Besides you guys? Can I plug you guys? I mean, look, I'm going to plug you guys because, look. We're big fans of Phantom. I'll give another one, but I do want to say, I'm really personally very excited about our integration and work together. I think you guys have built by far one of the simplest and best wallet experiences out there. One reason why I'm really excited about our partnership is that I think you guys have taken that same simplicity and applied it to Jupiter and our integration, so not only do your users get the power and benefits of Jupiter's ability to get you the best priced token trades, but in a really simple interface that is very accessible for people who are not crypto natives, who don't know what slippage is, who don't know what price impact is, who, who don't know about the various DEXs or how these things work. And what they really want is just to be able to trade from one token that they have to something they heard is pretty awesome or they're really interested in.

Ben (29:57):

So I'm really excited personally for this integration. That said, separately, I will give a shout out to some other folks we really respect as builders. We're big fans of Friktion. I love their vibe as builders. And the new thing for me being in crypto is how important vibe is. So I don't think I've ever said that in any other industry or any other thing ever, but some of our best partners are just people that we vibe with. We get along. We share values around building. We share values and how we think about things. And it's funny to say these things here, but it makes so much sense now. And I feel one reason why I enjoy working in this space so much is that I never used to think about, do I share values with a partner?

Ben (30:49):

It's just more like, "Hey, is this valuable to you? Am I valuable? Are you valuable to me? Okay, let's do something." But now it's not just about are you doing something where there's mutual benefit, but do we share the same long term value? And a lot of this is mainly around, are you looking to extract value from the ecosystem? Are you looking to build value, give value to others and just build and ship? So I think Friktion is a great one.

Ben (31:18):

I've been also a fan of the Orca team for a long time. Also recently, we had STEPN on as an AMA and got to deep dive with Jan, one of the co-founders and have huge respect for that team and their journey as builders. For those who don't know those guys STEPN came about because they failed to raise funding. It was a bad time in the market for them, and so they had the ship. That was it. That was the answer. We can't raise money, so we got to build. We don't have enough time or resources to build a full game. Let's build this simpler thing.

Brian (31:58):

Yeah, the focus there.

Ben (31:59):

That focus and that urgency of shipping and building is great, is really, really great. And so I have huge respect for that.

Brian (32:09):

Well, you mentioned a bunch of great teams there. I know the feeling is mutual on Phantom's side, both between you guys and also you hit on Friktion, on STEPN, and Orca, many others as well, too many to list in this ecosystem. But yeah, the long term alignment, the focus, I think these are all great things that we believe in a hundred percent. Ben, this was a fantastic discussion. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We'd love to have you on again some time. Maybe we can check in on how the swapper's doing. In the meantime, how can people get in touch with Jupiter and how can they learn more about what you guys are building?

Ben (32:38):

Yeah, you can follow us on Twitter. So we're @JupiterExchange. I highly recommend anyone to join our Discord and our community there. We've got a fantastic community. You can join through discord.jup, jup.ag. Usually our community has the first look on any new announcement or any new cool thing that we have. We also are very, very responsive. The team is listening and responding all the time, both to developer and users. And a lot of the things that you see on Jupiter today came from the community, and a lot of the partnerships also came from the community. So we listen very closely and we also have good discussions with folks. And so if you get involved, you will have a very strong voice in where the future of Jupiter goes. So really encourage people to join the community.

Brian (33:33):

I love that. That's a great way to end it. Thanks so much, Ben.

Ben (33:36):

Sure. Thank you.

Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana Labs Co-Founder) joins The Zeitgeist to discuss the current state of Solana and the ways in which the team is working to improve protocol performance.  

SHOW NOTES

00:39 - Origin Story

01:59 - How his role evolved at Solana

03:42 - New initiatives at Solana

04:59 - NFTs

06:37 - How to improve performance

12:31 - What is Solana's North Star?

15:48 - Growth and Nakamoto coefficient

19:47 - Developer ecosystem

23:31 - Craziest idea built on Solana

24:35 -  Builders he admires

REFERENCES

Saber

Mango Markets

Orca

Anchor

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Brian Friel (00:00):

Hey everyone, and welcome to Zeitgeist, the show where we interview the founders, developers and designers who are pushing the Web 3.0 Space forward. I'm Brian Friel, Developer Relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to have on the show today, none other than the man, the myth, the legend himself, Anatoly Yakovenko. Anatoly, how's it going?

Anatoly Yakovenko (00:22):

Hey, it's going well, thank you for having me.

Brian Friel (00:25):

Thanks for being on the show. You know, I think most folks know your story if they're very familiar with the Solana space. You are the founder of Solana. We do have some people who are listening to this show who are more familiar with the Ethereum world. Would you mind giving a quick moment to walk us through your background and how you got started with Solana?

Anatoly Yakovenko (00:40):

Yeah. So I'm an engineer by trade. I spent most of my career at Qualcomm, and I was there from super early days working on these like flip phones, if anybody remembers those. I was a Core Kernel engineer on Brew, which was, I think one, one of the first mobile operating systems with an App Store. Really the first, I think mobile platform where developers build anything, and this was pre-iOS, pre-Android.

Anatoly Yakovenko (01:05):

I was there for like almost 14 years. My last project was like building optimizations for augmented reality. And then around 2017, this big boom and crypto happened. I think the first really big Bitcoin price movements happened during that year. And it was obvious that Bitcoin was too slow for the kind of stuff that the narratives that people were talking about at the time, such as like global payments and things like that. That's what really got me interested in the space because I saw an opportunity to apply all the things that I learned at Qualcomm, from optimizations and wireless protocols and everything else to crypto.

Brian Friel (01:46):

So in the early days, if you take a look at the Git commit history on Solana, the protocol, you were a pretty heavy code contributor. How has your role evolved since starting the project? And what would you say is like your main focus today?

Anatoly Yakovenko (02:00):

Yeah, those early days were hard because I had to raise money and kind of be the CEO, which is effectively sales, but also I'm a really strong IC and losing one IC, it sucks, right for like a small startup? So I was coding and sometimes like 2:00, 3:00 in the morning, I would just be awake, still building stuff and burning the candle on both ends.

Anatoly Yakovenko (02:27):

As the network got stood up around like 2020, once we started growing the team, when we got a bit of traction in 2020, it's just my initial contributions were not as impactful as ... I'm now like one out of 20 contributors instead of like one out of 10. And that amount of like effort that I can put in ended up being not as important as me doing everything else that I can do as like the CEO of Labs.

Brian Friel (02:53):

So you guys obviously had a very explosive summer, 2021. NFT trading on Solana, I'm not sure if you would've predicted that your global state machine would be the perfect mechanism for trading JPEGs on the internet.

Anatoly Yakovenko (03:06):

No. Yeah, that's been wild.

Brian Friel (03:10):

I would say it's funny because a lot of people initially wrote off Solana because it wasn't EDM compatible. There was a myriad of reasons why it wouldn't take off. It seems like today you guys have the opposite problem where there's so much demand, everyone wants to use it.

Brian Friel (03:25):

I know you have a couple initiatives in the works now, some of that being quick, some stake weight, and then there's a fee prioritization mechanism coming in. How are those initiatives going generally? And do you foresee this as being a big step for the network or is this a really an iterative phase where you guys are going to continue to scale in various projects?

Anatoly Yakovenko (03:43):

Yeah, we designed this network. I mean, initially the slide deck literally said blockchain and NASDAQ speed and there was this big vision of something like serum running on it and being the price discovery for all of the world's stuff that needs trading. And that was like the first use case that we actually had any success with.

Anatoly Yakovenko (04:01):

The folks from FTX, that incubated serum, they looked at the network and they were like, "Okay, this is designed for the kind of exchange that we know how to build and trade. So why don't we see what happens?" And when NFT started taking off, it didn't make sense to me. But I could tell that a lot of people, like humans were interested in them instead of trading. A large number of people were interested in them. And that's a really important thing, like product market fit can be measured in many different ways. If you're speaking trading it could be volumes or TVL, but it's really, really important to really connect it to a person.

Anatoly Yakovenko (04:39):

And the more people you have in any of these effectively web based networks, people want to call it Web 3.0 or Web 2.0, or whatever, it's still the web. The more people you have using it, I think the more value you're actually creating for the world and that's really, really important. So Metaplex was incubated in Solana and it just allowed people to launch NFT projects.

Anatoly Yakovenko (04:59):

And we saw that at that time and now Ethereum gas fees were really so expensive that it was effectively impossible for any small artist to pony up like hundreds of thousands of dollars to go deploy like 10,000 NFT project and mint them and like have their users pay these ridiculous gas fees.

Anatoly Yakovenko (05:20):

So a lot of people just started messing around on Solana and they started getting traction and like making more money than normal artists creators make in a year in a single NFT mint. And that really changed like everything, for them and for us. So that's been just awesome to watch. Because NFTs have value, that has led to a different kind of traffic than we anticipated where there's now bots that spend a lot of money on egress, like a hundred gigabit worth of egress to try to snag a NFT mint.

Anatoly Yakovenko (05:55):

And the network can handle that most of the time. But sometimes it can't. So now we've been working on – if you've been following Solana, I'm sure you've heard like there's outages or congestion. Basically what happens is you have a known event, financial event, like an NFT mint or an IDO, but most of the time it's an NFT mint. And bots start sending so much traffic before this event to try to basically maximize their probability of them getting all the NFTs or most of them by stuffing all the leaders with packets and that prevents other packets from landing.

Anatoly Yakovenko (06:31):

And sometimes like the last one, it may uncover some unknown memory issue, where the memory and the validator starts growing and they start shutting down. And therefore, when more than a third of them run out of memory, you end up losing a quorum and therefore consensus halts. So it's effectively the greatest bug bounty free, like DDOS testing, not the best kind of DDOS testing that money can buy.

Anatoly Yakovenko (06:58):

It's really, really hard to even get a hundred gigabit worth of traffic like at Google. Your typical network that you deploy at Google for your private network inside their servers does not go to a hundred gigabit, it goes to one gigabit. So the kind of things that you see in the wild is really, really, even hard to simulate.

Brian Friel (07:15):

Yeah. You're testing and prod essentially.

Anatoly Yakovenko (07:17):

Right. And that's always the case. We have like a big testing effort and team and like a massive test net that's even bigger than the main net to try to simulate all these corner cases. Everything that you do in the lab gets really tested for real when you ship to prod.

Anatoly Yakovenko (07:37):

So the major change that we need to do is actually prevent them from sending that many packets. And there's a bunch of ways to do that. TCP has been the classic solution, but it has a lot of problems with latency and managing connections.

Brian Friel (07:50):

Right. And you guys use UDP Today.

Anatoly Yakovenko (07:52):

We use UDP Today, which is what traders prefer. So all the exchanges, like when you get high connectivity from CME or an ISE, you get UDP. And you can manage it for most of the time, but at some points like at a hundred gigabit, you basically have to like decide, "Okay, we're going to spend 10,000 bucks, a validator and put these appliances in there that can drop maybe close to like a terabit worth of traffic really, really quickly and filter packets. Or we build a software solution."

Anatoly Yakovenko (08:24):

In theory, QUIC can be as fast as UDP. In practice, that implementation and testing it, rolling it out, takes time. So over the last release, the 1.10 release, our engineers, plus the folks from like Blockdaemon [inaudible 00:08:40] one have been working on rolling out the quick implementation. And it looks like finally, like 1.10 is going to roll out to main net.

Anatoly Yakovenko (08:47):

I think the slow release is going to, roll out is going to start this week, but you need like, you really need three pieces. So this is kind of a complicated problem. So if you have QUIC, you can limit how many packets any IP address can send, but bots can, then we were going to get a million IPs and they'll all send a couple transactions per second each because they really want those NFTs.

Brian Friel (09:08):

Yeah. And then you're playing Whack Em' All with the IP addresses.

Anatoly Yakovenko (09:11):

Right. So the second fix, that's also 1.10, but I would say it's not as perfect as I would like it, but mostly there, is being able to limit the amount of traffic; people send an aggregate by stake weight. So if you're not staked, you get the least amount of bandwidth. But if you are staked, then you have let's say 0.5% of the stake, you're guaranteed that all the other stake are on stake notes, can't star view. So you can at least send half of a percent of bandwidth at any time. So that's the second part.

Anatoly Yakovenko (09:45):

And then the third part is that as information moves from, let's say, RPC nodes or other nodes, and like propagates to the leader, including like these intermediate hops, we need to make sure that it's prioritized not by first and first out, because then again, that will also lead to bots just trying to be the first packet in any given event, but by fee.

Anatoly Yakovenko (10:10):

Right? So this is where we need to add fee markets, which is something that will force bots to spend money instead of packets. And it's a bit more complicated to add fee markets in Solana. If you've ever programmed in Solana, you'll quickly realize that it's really different from Ethereum. And the main difference is that – you have one giant state machine like you do in Ethereum, so there's no charting on state, but each transaction has to specify what state it's going to read and what state it's going to write. Which means that you don't have this global fee for a block. You technically kind of end up having fees for state.

Anatoly Yakovenko (10:45):

So you have a single NFT mint with a single account, like a state account that represents that NFT market. And everybody wants to trade on it. So the fees accessing that particular state need to go up because you can only schedule so many transactions to access that thing. But that doesn't mean that the block is full. You can actually start adding more events into the block that don't touch that part of the state.

Brian Friel (11:11):

And you can touch other parts of the state in parallel and at a lower fee.

Anatoly Yakovenko (11:15):

Exactly. So it's kind of like, think of it as a bunch of buckets, and you want to fill the highest contented bucket with the highest paying transactions, but then you also want to fill the other buckets. So it's this multi-headed queue problem. There's no perfect solution for it. So it's, every solution is a heuristic. Which makes it both kind of complicated and easy, that you're never going to be perfect. So you can ship stuff. You can't ship things, but because it's heuristic, there's always like corner cases and you got to be careful about if any of them can be exploited between all of these hops.

Anatoly Yakovenko (11:52):

Partial solution to that is also rolling out. But I think given how complex all these three pieces are, we need like, we'll probably need the 1.11 release to stabilize everything.

Brian Friel (12:02):

That makes sense.

Anatoly Yakovenko (12:03):

I'm glad that at least like these 0.XX versions of this stuff is out and like finally is actually rolling out.

Brian Friel (12:09):

This kind of highlights what I always found Solana to be refreshing, especially compared to older blockchains. You know, you mentioned Bitcoin when you were first in back in the day is that, you guys have taken this very practical approach to “how do we scale?”, and have these iterative solutions. Do you have like a defining lighthouse that kind of guides this development cycle? Is it about being like the fastest and the cheapest chain or what is your priorities here?

Anatoly Yakovenko (12:32):

So there's this fundamental idea like that goes back to the roots, blockchain and NASDAQ speed. Imagine like all of these computers around the world, they all hold state. And that state is synchronized within a certain amount of time. And that time in theory can be as low as halfway around the world, like about 120 milliseconds.

Anatoly Yakovenko (12:52):

So this is the one giant piece of state that represents every price in the world. And it's a point of reference for price discovery. And in theory, even if you have something like NASDAQ or CME that trade at like sub one microsecond, because news still has to travel around the world. You have some event that happens in Singapore. It's got to go through the same fiber cables as everything else. That news wire is going to travel at the same speed as a state, as a transaction in Solana.

Anatoly Yakovenko (13:21):

So by the time you see it on your Bloomberg terminal and CME, you'll actually see the price reflected in both markets. And that means that like this set of nodes run by volunteers with open source software can be competitive at the most important core part of finance with like NASDAQ with CME.

Anatoly Yakovenko (13:41):

So that's really the goal. Can we get it to that level where it's propagating information around the world, synchronizing it at the speed of light? So that's the north star. So ...

Brian Friel (13:51):

And I love that. That's great.

Anatoly Yakovenko (13:53):

It's hard. It's a hard problem, but it's, I think there's clear reason that this thing is really useful to the world if it exists and even in the state, it exists now, it's extremely useful because I think this idea of open cheap price discovery is really important for DeFi and Web 3.0. You look at something like NFTs. I think under the hood NFTs are DeFi, you have a smart contract that decides who gets what based on royalty, secondary trading and all these other things.

Anatoly Yakovenko (14:24):

And it's a different business model for making money on the web. It's one that doesn't involve the Ad Exchange, a centralized Ad Exchange that Google runs. It doesn't have any intermediaries. It's between the creators and the community that they're serving. So I think it's, as early as it is, and I'm looking at these things and thinking these are like early bulletin boards, I can see that I think in 10, 15 years, the way that people make money on the web is going to be 99%, no intermediaries like through these kinds of networks and applications and almost none on through like the advertisement channels.

Brian Friel (15:02):

Yeah. That makes sense.

Anatoly Yakovenko (15:03):

That to me, I think is like huge. If this like transforms the web, that's awesome.

Brian Friel (15:09):

Yeah, totally. Changes human behavior, fundamentally. So you spoke a lot about the human side of these people who are using the network, but there is a human side also to the people who are running the nodes that secure this network here. And there's a common misconception out there that Solana is this big and fast chain, but there's a few nodes that's powering this network.

Brian Friel (15:30):

You've spoken a lot about this term, the Nakamoto Coefficient, which is essentially the number of nodes that would have to collude to make the blockchain stop working in some capacity. How has this Nakamoto Coefficient been evolving since Solana's launch? And is there anything that you guys are doing at labs that are catalyzing this kind of growth in this Nakamoto Coefficient?

Anatoly Yakovenko (15:49):

Yeah. We started with like the Nakamoto Coefficient around like six or seven in those early days. And now it's 24 and that may sound like a small number, but when you look at Bitcoin, it takes about six mining pools to get to 51%, an Ethereum, I think three or maybe four, something like that mining pools, ETH2 stake distribution is even worse. It's like Lido, might be Lido plus one exchange, Kraken or Binance might cross it.

Anatoly Yakovenko (16:17):

And it's both important and not as important as people think. So the core part of where security comes from these networks is actually in the sheer number of nodes, because fundamentally like when high level catastrophic event happens, a bunch of machines get corrupted. As long as one of them can recover the data, that data contains cryptographic signatures from everyone else in the network. They can validate that that data's correct, and the network can recover.

Anatoly Yakovenko (16:47):

So you only need one out of many. And this is true about every BFD system, even Bitcoin, if all the Bitcoin ledgers are destroyed, doesn't matter how much cash power was securing it, Bitcoin is gone. So what's important is the number of copies of the Bitcoin ledger, and the same thing with ETH2 – it's a bit more complicated with ETH2 because they do the sub sampling thing, but effectively you need enough of the ETH2 validators to survive. So you can recover a full copy of the state.

Anatoly Yakovenko (17:17):

So that number is really, really what matters. And when you talk about the state concentration, Nakamoto Coefficient, that has impact on real time censorship. So if, for example, like Kraken and Lido decided to start dropping transactions, they could right now, you know, given the state distribution on ETH2, but the community can basically fork them all out. They can effectively tell them, because you're misbehaving.

Brian Friel (17:45):

You're breaking the social contract.

Anatoly Yakovenko (17:47):

Yeah, you're breaking the social contract. You can actually be kicked out. And that's, I think, kind of that action of last resort, it’s what really protects these networks. But given that you still want the Nakamoto Coefficient as large as possible, because I think, in the long term, especially for trading systems, you might not see this direct censorship. If the purpose of blockchain is to be these open marketplaces and the top three crypto exchanges can decide the order of events in the global open marketplace, there's probably perverse incentives there for them to not make this network the best marketplace in the world, because it's eating their lunch.

Brian Friel (18:28):

Yeah. We've reinvented payment for order flow here.

Anatoly Yakovenko (18:31):

Right. And that's really hard to enforce and may not even be intentional. Right? You may have somebody, some product manager at Coinbase that doesn't know what they're doing, that simply says, "Hey, I made these performance improvements to how we run nodes, and now our customers are earning more money." It may even not be like totally malicious. This is where I think that Nakamoto Coefficient actually matters in the long term.

Anatoly Yakovenko (18:59):

So Solana and Avalanche probably have the two highest, I forget what Avalanche is at, but basically it's much, much better than eight or three or four, whatever we see on Bitcoin and Ethereum these days.

Brian Friel (19:10):

So switching gears just real quick, we talked a lot about the network, but from an end user and from a validate perspective, one final piece of this is the developers who are actually building the applications. So the programs that run on this. You know, I mentioned earlier that Solana was kind of written off by a lot of people, especially in the ETH community, that there was no EDM-compatible, like native bridge over there, Chase Barker, lovingly calls, everyone who develops on Solana “Glass Eaters”. Has this kind of developer ecosystem that I view as very genuine to Solana, has this surprised you guys, do you foresee this continuing to grow separate from Ethereum? Are they going to merge, at some point remain specialized?

Anatoly Yakovenko (19:48):

It surprised me how quickly it happened. So me as an engineer, I don't like Solidity because it's not a well designed language. And the EVM is not a well designed virtual machine. And I have spent like a career working on virtual machines. So I get like an allergic reaction looking at its insides, and like, this is worse than like the first versions of Java, of the JVM.

Brian Friel (20:14):

Yeah. Hard to be inspired.

Anatoly Yakovenko (20:16):

So I kind of knew like when we made a bet on Rust, that was intentional and we didn't have enough funds to pursue like supporting VM, which I think we would've, if we did, and that probably saved us, because we had to pick like, what is actually core and important to Solana, and like, if we had to pick the one thing that we were building, it had to be differentiated from like, it had to actually showcase the most important thing about the network and that's performance. And you really, really can't write high performance code in Solidity or EVM.

Anatoly Yakovenko (20:49):

And Rust was just a, kind of a natural fit because it is a modern systems language with a lot of tools to build high performance software. So that was a bet that we made. And I knew that there's enough engineers out there that are like me that are naturally curious. They want to build a new stack. Oftentimes, like in my career, I would switch stacks every two years simply because I just got bored of the tools I was using.

Anatoly Yakovenko (21:15):

But I didn't realize, I didn't expect how quickly that would happen. And like how passionate people like became about it. Even though our initial version of the SDK was really, really bare bones. This is where this idea of eating glass came out of is that like, in those days you had to write everything by hand, all this deserialization calls by hand. There was like, the binary format was like unsafeCast. So you would do a cast of the data structure directly. There was no ideal and-

Brian Friel (21:46):

Wow. How far we've come with Armani and Anchor.

Anatoly Yakovenko (21:49):

Armani basically was like, "This is terrible. I'm either going to, like, I'm either going to quit or like, I need to fix it."

Brian Friel (21:58):

Or I'm going to put the whole ecosystem on my back, which he essentially did.

Anatoly Yakovenko (22:01):

Yeah. Yep. So he took on that role and I knew there was going to be one of those engineers eventually. This ... because I would've been that person, like, five years back in my career, I would've like, "F this. This is like terrible. I know how to fix it. So I'm just going to spend a week building the tools," but it was really, it would've been really, really hard for us to do it internally because it's easier to build those tools when you're building the product that's using them and not when you're like trying to supply them. I don't know if that makes sense.

Brian Friel (22:33):

You might be too close to it being, working on the protocol and not-

Anatoly Yakovenko (22:35):

Exactly.

Brian Friel (22:36):

... not like a consumer.

Anatoly Yakovenko (22:37):

So when you're like building the product, like an application, you know exactly what your needs are and you know what to prioritize and when I'm building the operating system, I'm just trying to be hypothetical. Well, the hypothetical application where the hypothetical engineer needs this and the requirements are just never right. Like it they're always wrong, basically.

Anatoly Yakovenko (22:57):

So, this is why I think it was really – the reason Anchor is successful is because Armani was building a product and he like, kind of knew exactly what he needed. And I think when looking at Anchor, I would've made totally different choices if I was building it. And I don't think it would've been as good in the end.

Brian Friel (23:14):

Oh, okay. I was going to say, has Armani heard that? But that's a nice compliment to throw in there at the end. Well, so wrapping up here a little bit, two last questions for you. One that we want to know here at Phantom is, what is the craziest idea or project that you've heard about that could be built on Solana?

Anatoly Yakovenko (23:32):

Serum, I mean is still definitely crazy to me, it's like a central limit order book that Jump is market making on, on a decentralized blockchain. That's pretty wild. I think there's a ton of games and payments and all this other stuff that's coming out.

Anatoly Yakovenko (23:46):

I think one of the wilder ones – there was the SolDate thing at one of the hackathons, which was a dating app. It didn't go anywhere. But people were like thinking outside of the box, which I thought was ...

Brian Friel (24:00):

Oh man.

Anatoly Yakovenko (24:03):

The games, I think like Aurory is like finally shipping, like workable parts of the game. I think that is really cool. And obviously like Star Atlas is such a huge ambitious project, that like, it's pretty wild to think that somebody's going to build from the ground up purely funded by NFT sales, like a AAA game, like at the level of EVE Online. So that, those are really, really ambitious.

Brian Friel (24:30):

And then our closing question here, who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Anatoly Yakovenko (24:35):

So Armani obviously, but I want to like give a shout out to somebody else. I think, the Saber and the Mango guys. So Ian and Max and Daffy, I think have been just as important in like building a lot of tooling and onboarding devs, and you know, they're just awesome folks that are like constantly building things. So it's really cool to see them continuously shipping products. Even like when DeFi's up or DeFi's down, like when you look at the broader market, they're still building things and shipping things and that's kind of the most important thing.

Brian Friel (25:10):

Yeah. And that's Ian and Dylan from Saber, which is an automated market maker for stable pairs, and Mango Markets is a perps trading platform, a central limit order book in Solana.

Anatoly Yakovenko (25:20):

There's so many like the Orca team. When we first talked to them, they're like, "We want to build a really usable DEX for humans." And that was their whole vision. And you look at their daily active user numbers, it like shot up, I think more than Uniswap now.

Brian Friel (25:38):

Yeah. Oh, it's insane. Yeah. They're on a crazy growth trajectory now. I think that speaks to their UX. I will say just that one last note on the Saber brothers, there was a fable story of how they were sleeping in the Solana office at one point just shipping code. And I came in there and I saw for myself the mattresses in the meeting rooms there. I think we've all grown up since then.

Anatoly Yakovenko (26:01):

Yeah. A little bit.

Brian Friel (26:01):

That might be a thing of the past, but a little bit of lore for Solana development history there.

Anatoly Yakovenko (26:05):

Yeah.

Brian Friel (26:06):

That's great.

Anatoly Yakovenko (26:08):

When you're in that part of the office, you can still smell their spirit.

Brian Friel (26:14):

I love it. And it's totally, this is a really great discussion. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Everyone, very appreciative of what you built here at Solana.

Anatoly Yakovenko (26:23):

For sure.

Brian Friel (26:23):

So thank you for what you do.

Anatoly Yakovenko (26:25):

For sure. Thank you so much. Take care.