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[Music] Anatoli is the CEO of a little crypto project known as Solana, one of the fastest growing blockchains
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in the world. As CEO of Salana Labs, he's driving web 3 innovation. Black Rockck, the world's largest asset
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manager, expanded its $1.7 billion tokenized money market fund to Salana. Why don't we all switch to Salana? I
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mean, Salana sounds like it's actually commercial and the other guys sound like that they're antique. Everybody in the
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world should be your customer. Crypto will eventually win. It's inevitable. [Music]
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Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Salana co-founder Anatoli Yakaveno. [Music]
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There he is. Oh man, thanks for having me. You doing? Thank you. Welcome. Thank you.
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How much of a difference has David Sachs made in the first six months as cryptozar for your industry?
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Oh, it's been incredible. Um, I mean, I think it it's night and day. I don't know if the industry would have survived
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another four years of the Gendler regime. Um, the Genius Act, I think, is going to unlock, you know, people
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estimate 1 to10 trillion dollars worth of stable coins uh that are going to be on public permissionless chains. So if
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you kind of look at those charts who owns treasuries and people it's China, Japan etc. countries right now I think
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tether is somewhere around number five I think within 5 years the internet is going to be the largest holder of US
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treasuries. Yeah and and at such a scale that I think you know I'm an engineer I cannot honestly
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comprehend how that's going to change finance but I think it'll be transformative. upside downside. I mean,
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are there concerns there as well with that huge impact in democratization or are you kind of a, you know,
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libertarian, let the chips fall where they may, so to speak? I think um it's a huge opportunity to
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really accelerate American innovation and spread American finance around the world. I think we actually have the best
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financial system in the world. It's the most trusted, the most robust, the best regulatory environment for for what it's
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worth as well. Um, but it was built after World War II before the internet. So, its APIs are kind of like a fax
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machine based. What crypto is allowing, I think, is this new technology stack built on top of the internet that's
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completely western aligned. It's for transparency. It's for capitalism, but now we can actually interface western
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US-based finance to the rest of the world. And I I think America is going to benefit primarily from this like more
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dissimilar to our media business going around the world and you know infecting people's consciousness
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when you were getting Salana off the ground. How much of it was um a technical and architectural vision that
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you had versus maybe a set of trade-offs that you were trying to solve that ETH didn't fill or Bitcoin didn't fill and
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you said I'm just going to try and do this. I I think you know I can't speak for all
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founders but you know I think founders are driven by kind of crazy vision. They have to be a little bit insane. Um, so
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my insane vision is always this idea like imagine finance 20 to 50 years from now. The science fiction version of
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finance. What I imagine is a single giant ledger, a single computer for every market in the world. That means
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it's available in Nairobi, New York, in London, in Singapore. And all of these things are synchronized at the roundtrip
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time of speed of light through fiber around the world or, you know, through Elon satellites. That's 120
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milliseconds. So a dollar can be in New York, in London, in Singapore, in Nairobi in 120
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milliseconds. So velocity of money, velocity of assets are as fast as physics allow. Um, this is what
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nerdpilled me on building this like it's a physics problem. It's a massive finance problem. It's a really fun
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engineering low latency. And did you feel that you had missed it somehow? Um when I when I had my kind of
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Eureka moment and I did the back of the envelope calculation for design, I'm like, "Oh, this is a thousand times
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faster than ETH." And when I started talking to folks in the ETH community, they're focused on settlement.
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Settlement doesn't have these latency problems. You can do settlement in minutes and that's fine. So I always
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felt that, you know, Ethereum being world's settlement layer, Salana is the world's execution layer. Um, and you
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know, um, I, you know, so far so good. Yeah, so far so good. Execution is where all the money's made.
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So, I think we're on the right track. And, uh, a fast execution engine can also do settlement. That's kind of a
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feature. So, you've been, um, super critical about two projects. Uh, memecoins, even though they they do throw off, I
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think, some revenue for Salana, and also the idea of a crypto strategic reserve.
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What about those two projects um tweak you a bit? Um I think primarily we could not p
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predict what's going to happen on chain. We called it blockchain and NASDAQ speed. That was our tagline and the idea
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was always how do we get stocks and bonds and treasuries and real world assets on chain from all around the
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world to be traded by everybody around the world. Um, but it turns out that is a much harder legal and regulation
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problem than it is an engineering problem. But anybody in the world can create markets for anything, including
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memecoins, including NFTs. And those things took off. I think in part because of how slow regulation was to catch up,
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which makes it annoying that those are the things that come out instead of your true mission.
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Yep. We saw we saw Dena from NASDAQ here yesterday. she announced the tokenization of uh securities that we're
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going to trade on the exchange. There seem to be a lot of regulated exchanges and businesses that come from that kind
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of deeply regulated background starting to experiment with blockchain technology. Do you think they're going
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to be advantaged or disadvantaged given where they're coming from? Does the lock
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in with regulators, the relationship with regulators, lock in with the market participants give them some leg up or do
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you think that the disruptors are ultimately going to be able to operate more freely and more quickly? This is
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the big challenge. Um I think the advantage that we have that we are very nimble and we can operate everywhere in
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the world. The advantage that they have is that they're already regulated. They're they're already operating with
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those assets that we want on chain in United States but they don't have global availability. NASDAQ is still in its
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little sandbox. Um so we'll see what happens. I think once the regulators allow uh public keys like cryptography
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to manage and transfer assets that's the interface that you can wrap around and start moving fund you know start moving
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anything from inside NASDAQ to Salana and vice versa like once that interface exists I think you kind of the genies
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out of the bottle you know the the toothpast is out of the tube. Do you ever meet with the regulated
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exchanges and are there ways to kind of build integration and partnership that benefits both?
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Of course. Yeah. So we've we've talked to folks I think across the spectrum from banks to regulated exchanges and
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and regulators themselves. Salana is fundamentally a protocol. It's like an email standard. It's a bunch of
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software. Um the people that run it don't report to me. I can't fire them. So I can't stop it if I wanted to. Um,
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and if we succeed, if the protocol is awesome and globally synchronous and super fast, NASDAQ would make more money
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by just running a Salana node and integrating with it more directly. So, like to me, it's ultimately a win-win.
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We're never going to build an exchange that is on boarding US institutionals and serving US customers. We want NASDAQ
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to do that and to run it on Salana, and that would be great. There's um there's a common claim by the masses, meaning uh
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masses meaning not everybody that's sort of all in on crypto that it's still extremely complicated to understand. You
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know, even if it's like just minting and burning or you know, yield farming, you
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say it to just like the norm core person and their eyes glaze over. Um what's the
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turn in the abstraction of all of this stuff that makes crypto truly ma mass market? I actually think that the human
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brain has to change to adjust to it. I agree with you. It's really complicated. But I landed in the States in 1992 from
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the USSR effectively. And there's no way my parents could understand what a web link was,
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right? So it it's all whenever you have a new technology, it just takes people a
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long time to adopt it and build a mental model for it. But now they do. They understand the web after years of of
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using it. So I think as stable coins proliferate to the back office in a lot of companies, people will figure out,
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oh, this secret key is actually really important. I need hardware. I need PKI. I need trusted displays. All all of the
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security stuff. And they will build a mental model for cryptography having true ownership over something that is
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globally transferable. I saw a chart recently that showed that the number of L1 and L2 projects keep
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growing year-over-year over like the last three or four years. Why is that happening?
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Um, I think I think because this what what need are they filling? Well, I think the opportunity is so big
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to be the Google of finance, right? If you're like the one place for all of finance, all markets run. That is a
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massive opportunity. So, I think people are going to keep launching L1's and L2s
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and all competitive. They're all competing with Salana and that's fine. I love competition. Uh, until somebody
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wins it. Um, I think as long as we're laser focused on improving the product, making it faster, cheaper, more
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reliable, we have a really good shot of of actually becoming that global execution engine that's serving all of
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finance. Outside of finance, what do you think is the vertical that has the most promise
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over the next 5 years in crypto or in general? in crypto, whether it's for Salana or any crypto
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project, where do you think people aren't putting enough attention? Um, I think all the stuff that people
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have tried, it's kind of like early 90 days experimentation, frontster, all of those things failed until there was a
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critical mass of people that understood how the web works and then Facebook took
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off. So I think even the weird experiments with NFTTS being a way to create a community of artists to build a
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movie or story and create true new IP all that will happen just 5 years from now or 10 years once we hit critical
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map. So a lot of false starts and somewhere in that graveyard you might find some
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really good ideas. Absolutely. Just like what happened and then the social network concept always seemed to
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me to be such a winner. you know, whether it would be like a dig or a Reddit format where you could vote
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things up with a cryptocurrency. Your comments were somehow related to that. And there were a couple of little
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experiments I remember looking at for investment, but candidly I didn't think the founders would pull it off and I was
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right in that case. Is that the one that you think could break out if Elon put into X, Dogecoin, or put in Salana and
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there was some sort of currency inherent to the objects and the behaviors? I personally think that you could build a
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competitive product to Tik Tok with crypto if the magic you caught that kind of lightning in a bottle because the
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monetization mechanism with crypto is so different than the ad-based one and the
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ad-based one kind of creates this forcing function for a lot of spam and duplication to ride to the top.
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How would that work? Just describe your product thinking there that that new kind of experience. How do you think it
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would work? I think you're kind of seeing some of these things play out with memecoins where you have creators
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that are associated with a coin that continues to have uh market cap and traction. And now the regulatory
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environment isn't here yet to clearly tie the success of that creator to the value of that coin. You need to remove a
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whole bunch of bottlenecks there. But the product exists. People watch that particular creator stream and go buy
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that coin. Like once it's once it is actually looks like an investment thing that Jason would be like okay I have all
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legal protection to actually put money in here. I think this is related to the financing
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question I was asking Neil and Ari about which is can creators raise funding this
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way and then can they deploy that funding but then the coin holders can actually have equity in that project and
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in the performance of that project over time rather than it just be you know if if the regulatory environment changes
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like people have been dancing around this but like there's this project that I love Clanosaurus is these cute little
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dinosaurs that are they've like kids love it looks like a Pixar dinosaur they've won awards for their animations
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and they raised funding because they created this collective set of of dinos. Now, it would be awesome if those dinos
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could actually have copyright and revenue association in the future, but like we can't do that yet, and that's
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frustrating, but it could totally happen once we have enough clarity. Well, just imagine like we we bought
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collectibles and if we all bought Marvel comics when we were, you know, younger,
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but we had equity in Marvel and 30, 40 years later those characters hit and you own Could be Beast. I mean, it could be
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Mr. Beast or it could also be the next creator. Like, you're watching an up and cominging creator. You want to bet on
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that? Is that the next piece Sax is working on? Is that the um the Clarity Act is the big piece.
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It's kind of a big piece of Explain it for everybody. Yeah. So, um again, I'm an engineer. This is
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from my lens is raising money in the US and trying to launch a token. Uh we raised a seat seed in a round. It was
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about 14 million bucks, which is amazing. It was, you know, like outright crazy success for a new a first-time
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founder. I had to spend two million of that on lawyer fees, which is a more than 10% of my runway to figure out how
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to launch a token in United States. And because I have kids in the US, this is my home, never leaving it. So, I had to
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do it in America. A lot of founders actually just left to do it outside of the US. So the Clarity Act is a whole
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bunch of complicated legislation to try to minimize hopefully that cost to make it much easier for founders to launch.
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It's far too much friction right now. Provides clarity. Our um our partner David Saxs launched a
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company a few years ago that was trying to tie crypto to real estate like a real
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world asset. Tell us about what that movement is all about and what the utility is that that is there if it
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works. So um people want real world assets on on chain because there's demand for um in DeFi for non-correlated
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assets. Like if if everything that is in crypto, all this innovation around risk
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management in real time between you know borrows and and lenders, it's useless because if everything's a memecoin,
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everything's correlated. It'll all crash at the same time. There's no hedging, right? And the only free lunch in in
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finance is uncorrelated assets if you have true hedging. So we need real estate, bonds, insurance, whatever have
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you that has oil. Exactly. Commodities, but like even California fire insurance. It would be
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awesome to put that on chain because then people could actually buy insurance. Um all those assets if Thank
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you. All those assets, if they exist in this kind of global synchronized giant state
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machine environment, can all be used together to reduce risk for the entire system because they're uncorrelated and
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that's actually the the only free lunch you can get in finance. Um, so there's a
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lot of demand for them and the technology is there to leverage them. Now we just need kind of the regulatory
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side to catch up. Can I um change tracks a little bit? You're an engineer. You work in
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cryptography. Have you visited quantum projects? What do you think's the state of development in quantum computing?
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Everyone's got a different story. How much is kind of hype in marketing? How much is real? And what do you think is
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going to happen over what period of time? Honest answer, I feel like 50/50 within
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5 years there is a quantum breakthrough. And part of that is because of how fast
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AI define breakthrough like you can run short algorithm. You we we should migrate Bitcoin to a
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quantum resistance signature scheme. Um this is my bet and this is because we're
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just so many technologies are converging right now and this asymptoic rate AI and
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how fast is accelerating going from a research paper to an implementation is is like astounding. Um so I would I
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would try to encourage folks to speed things up. My key for this is Google and Apple adopt a quantum resistant
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cryptographic stack. this is the time to go migrate because now the consumer side
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of it is effectively solved and you don't have to kind of so you watch where Google's going.
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Yeah. But yeah, I would I I think the the people you should be worried if you're in the field, but for the general
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public, quantum computing is such a massive unlock in terms of how much we can process that it's going to be as big
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of a wealth creator if if we pull it off as AI. So I think this is to me like a lot of work, engineering work. We have
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the right people to do it, but like for everyone else, it should be like a huge opportunity.
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But to your point, the the reports on the breakthroughs on the Willow project at Google are driven by AI modeling and
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AI is unlocking a lot of the capabilities to make it real, which seems to be an accelerator. It's pretty
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powerful. What's the intersection of all of of that world of just AI in general and
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crypto? Um, this is a funny thing to ask because um, I feel like AI is going to be
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everywhere and crypto is going to be everywhere, but where those lines cross is just really, really hard to pinpoint.
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I don't want to say something lame like, oh, we have agents sending money around
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because that's kind of obvious. Um, I mean, I think the first attempt was to kind of say maybe there are distributed
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networks of compute and maybe we can run distributed learning or distributed inference, but those projects really
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haven't taken off and really generated any momentum. Yeah, not yet. And again, because
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they're competing with a data center that is all colloccated, that is funded with traditional finance and and those
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things like and yeah, you can put those assets on chain and that that's a lot of
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ways how I think things are going to integrate. Probably the most kind of like singularity bet we can make is you
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have an agent that is a creator that is like an ex personality that you can interface with tokens and buy into and
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pay for the GPUs. That could be fun. But Bitcoin has turned out to be surprisingly resilient. Um and but now
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we're starting to see certain players uh corner the market on large percentages of it. And that was never supposed to
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happen. So if something like Micro Strategy owns 6% that's actually maybe 50% more than that
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because there's so many dead coins out there. Does that worry you the centralization of Bitcoin and does that
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mean there's an opportunity to start the game a new? Um I think Bitcoin is resilient to these
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entities collapsing. Now it's not going to be without painful risk that in terms
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of like people that own Bitcoin, but the thing is it'll survive that and all the
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properties of Bitcoin that people value will remain through that transition. So if you really value Bitcoin, you should
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see that as like an opportunity to own more of it. So even if somebody were to own 20 or 30%.
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It seems like there are people who actually have this intent. That's why I'm asking. Yeah. Um, I think as long as
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it's an open global competition for to acquire Bitcoin and anyone can participate in that and we don't end up
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in some kind of regulated nightmare, you know, like you can't acquire gold or something like in the 70s, um, I think
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Bitcoin would survive those kinds of shocks. Is Bitcoin valuable enough now where
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it makes sense for I guess North Korea does this but I was just going to generalize and say like state sponsored
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ways of either trying to penetrate it, hack it, take individual accounts like it just seems like there's an an
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emergent trend here of this. It is um its beauty is that it's the simplest protocol you can build because
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it is focused on just settlement. It's very easy to understand from an engineering point of view and uh proof
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of work is kind of a I don't know it is a brilliant it's masterpiece yeah it's a
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masterpiece in terms of like elegance and simplicity and it's very robust to I think all sorts of attacks. Now, that
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doesn't mean that, you know, you can't have an attack that could cause, you know, roll back that's unexpected, but I
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think it's extremely hard to pull off. Very unlikely, and the internet is so super connected that it can
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automatically kind of respond and take action. I actually meant more just like, you
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know, states targeting accounts that have large Bitcoin holdings and trying to figure out who owns them and then
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just basically getting them to give them the coins. Yeah. the those kind of state sponsored
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wrench attacks. Um I think what like we should do live living in the in the west is really have
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strong opinions about property rights and how important they are and how foundational they are to wealth creation
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in in the west and America. Completely agree with this and this is our best defense.
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I completely agree with this and be hyper transparent who owns the coins because then it's like you can't take
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away something that everybody knows you own. But when you try to hide your ownership of it, more likely it's easier
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for somebody to take it away. I I think privacy is a right. So it's somebody's right to to be able to do
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that. But I think our best bet in, you know, wealth creation is actually defending these rights and defending the
00:22:02
right of somebody to to own Bitcoin if they want to. It's extraordinary that it hasn't been
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hacked with so much at stake. Maybe you could speak to it as just a an architect
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yourself and and it is. it. The reason it hasn't been hacked is because it's so simple and you
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know as an engineer you always strive for simplicity to achieve a certain outcome. You can't always always achieve
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that. Salana is much more complicated because the outcome we're striving is hyper performance and it's just hard. So
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like Salana is much more complicated as a result of that. But Bitcoin is designed for a very simple settlement
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layer that is I think you know the coolest thing the coolest piece of software written in the last 20 years is
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I would say the Bitcoin like Nakamoto implementation there's been an enormous um reanimation
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in the ETH market recently where do you think that comes from is that market driven and speculatively driven or do
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you think that there's a a fundamental reimagining of where ETH lives in you know between Bitcoin over here and
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Salana over here. Um, I'm a honestly a huge fan of Ethereum. Like I think Vitalik is an
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amazing person, amazing engineer, and has a very strong vision. It's very different from my vision for Salana, and
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it's really cool to see those two play out. Uh, if I could predict what I do could cause a price change, I I'd be a
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lot more successful. Well, you've been pretty successful, too. But right we it it's just really
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really hard to attribute the work that you do. Okay. So look your transaction network
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is quite liquid. It's going to become more and more and more as you have more validators, more clients, all that
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stuff. Um another market that seems has built a monopoly or a duopoly around transactions who's a little bit at risk
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is Visa and Mastercard. What do you think about that? My my like uh contrary opinion is that I think Visa and
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Mastercard are more technology companies and if you look at their like profit margin on the gross payment volume it's
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like 10 basis points. It's like vapor. I think the the issuer and receiver bank those are
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the most disruptible pieces on there because their profit margins are like 2% like much much bigger right and Visa is
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a technology company that owns end to end the customer. If they could remove the banks out of the loop and just do
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stable coin transfers behind the scenes, I think they become a lot more successful and they can do a lot more
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for, you know, a lot less. Long stable coin, short banks. That I not an investor, but maybe
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Chimoth seems like a good premise. I can't comment on this. So that's a yes. Everybody, everybody
00:24:41
short the bank. Everybody telling you to do this. This is financial advice. Unless it doesn't work out.
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[Applause] Thank you so much. [Applause] Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. You're awesome, dude.
00:25:02
Appreciate it.