This year, you know, there's been a lot of excitement again around Solana.
Some of it, I think may be due to Bonk, which is a little bit silly, but still
fun to talk about. A lot of it due to Saga, which is a new
phone that you've come out. Talk to us about what what you make of
the price action. Well, I don't really focus on price, but
I think the thing that is exciting, as you mentioned, like bomb also and FTSE
is these may look like toys to know casual passer by, but they are stress
testing, real financial infrastructure that supports very serious use cases
like helium that migrated to Salina from its own block chain as a million and a
half hot spots around the world that create a decentralized five g network
that's much cheaper for your average user to sign up to.
And even new applications like high mapper that couldn't exist without
Solana's performance. Google API is for maps or one of the
most expensive in the world, and this is a decentralized version of that where
drivers are populating it and earning money tokens through through dash cams.
So, you know, these toys are kind of the most visible and viral thing.
They're sort of like the tick tock videos of crypto.
But underneath, it's really stress testing the emperor.
All right. So in terms of stress testing, you know,
we have seen network breakdowns in the past, kind of cast a shadow over
the asset. We have seen, you know, frustration over
congestion, frustration over gas fees. I mean, on the theory and block chain, I
think one user paid like one hundred and sixty thousand dollars for one
transaction. What are you seeing as the result of
these stress tests on your block chain? Yeah.
So it's important to delineate between high fees, which for most users could be
considered unavailability or an average. And then, you know, halting a block
reduction. So on Solana, the fees never really go
up substantially. Nowhere near one hundred fifty six
thousand dollars, which is that transaction you on May 8 on Solana?
It's about 10 dollars for a million transactions.
And it's always been that way at this point.
Most performance, high performance kind of next generation block chains have had
some outages a lot in the last 70 days. It's had 100 percent uptime even through
multiple of these use cases spiking in parallel.
So a lot of fun. I went through the gauntlet earlier than
most. We saw the largest influxes of hundreds
of thousands of users concurrently bot spamming the network.
High frequency trading firms really trying to get at these assets and flip
them in the last year. And now it's quite battle hardened with
things like local fee markets that we see on networks like Miriam.
They're having their first outages for the first time in the last week.
And in the times that they are working, the larger ones are very, very
expensive. So, you know, our thesis is that that
has been a big prohibitive factor in onboarding normal users that maybe just
have one hundred dollars or three thousand dollars to play with in crypto.
And that's one of the issues we're very focused on solving.
OK, so that's kind of the average user or the smaller users, I do wonder about
your marquee users or clients, because of course we all know about the
relationship that did exist between Alameda and FTSE and Solana.
In the absence of that, who are your marquee clients now?
How are you attracting them? If you had difficulty in that.
I think the network effects of Solana have gotten to a point where, you know,
I don't have to have a conversation with really impressive builders, investors
and participants in the financial ecosystem.
Nobody at Solana Foundation really needs to do things like render.
It's a very big established render network that's used in Hollywood for
opening scenes of things like Game of Thrones.
They have a decentralized network of GP use and a marketplace for accessing
them. And that community voted to move to
Solana on its own volition. Same thing with helium and same thing
with builders like I've mapper. What we see with institutionalise is I
think across the whole industry there is sort of a pullback and a lot of
hesitancy, as you guys discussed with with Nick Carter earlier.
That's something that's on is not immune to.
But this is why the thesis for Salon has always been a focus on, you know, just
an order of magnitude or more of a larger user base and what it takes to
build a product that normal people actually can use.
And we're seeing that happen now. Salon has got the most daily active
addresses of any network at around 500000, which is still low, but it's
consistently high for a blocking network.
And finally, just looking toward the future, A.I.
is now the buzzword of the year. It seems how is the one labs thinking
about artificial intelligence? How do you see this fitting fitting into
the future? Ultimately.
Sure. I think as with most verticals, it's
multifaceted. So I mentioned render earlier those
Leighton GP you implies people's houses and their computers that are getting
activated for the render network. They can be used not just for or jobs,
but for also training and inference on on A.I.
networks. So a lot of labs also launched a plug in
projects CBT for accessing the network. This is just another step in making it
that much easier to interact with the brain and feel like you're maybe
speaking to an advisor or a co-pilot pilot that's
helping you navigate the chain and its assets.
I think we're still at very early stages.
Some of the most exciting but surprising stuff is what comes out of NAFTA.
These are brands that have ambitions to become the next Disney or Marvel.
And using AI to populate the characters, the story, the law and even generate
some of the art are very early stages. But some of these brands have gone on to
sign deals with Def Jam Records and large studios like of animation.
They could be the next Pixar is and it could be all off the back of generative
A.I..