Latest / CRYPTO 101 / Ep. 718 Solana State of the Union: Why Trillions Are Coming to Solana

Transcript

Ep. 718 Solana State of the Union: Why Trillions Are Coming to Solana · CRYPTO 101

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: All right, everyone, welcome back to the crypto 101 podcast.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: We hope everyone is having a fantastic morning or evening, because no matter where you're coming in from, you're certainly in the right place here today.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Man, what a time in the markets.
• 0:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know a lot of us are tuning in.
• 0:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have a lot of questions, you're wondering what's going on.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's really one of the big points of this podcast is because we like looking at the technicals, the fundamentals, what's happening behind the scenes,
• 0:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: whether it's institutional people or more institutional facing clients, more retail focused you name it, and we like to bring in the leaders from the space and break down not only what they're working on, but what they're seeing and who they're talking to and what the future looks like so that you all can use this information in a very condensed format to kind of create your own idea.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: of what you think the future of crypto looks like.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now we're a little bit biased.
• 0:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: We think that the crypto future is very bright.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we love talking to different leading projects in the crypto space.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so today's podcast is going to be very special.
• 1:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because we have one of the leaders from one of the leading crypto projects out there to talk about what's happening here with Solana and the Solana Foundation.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I want to give a warm welcome to Katherine Gou,
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: uh... she is the head of product digital assets over at the salon foundation she spent six years at visa including as the head of institutional client solutions where she focused on tokenization and digital payments Catherine welcome and we're stoked to talk to you thank you so much friend and for this well uh... what will welcome them still excited to be on this call
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, we're a huge fans of all different areas of the crypto industry over here.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: What we do is we don't just focus on one specific vertical or one specific project.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: We believe in a multi-chain world, you know, if we want to call it that.
• 1:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: But something that we are very bullish on is Solana, right?
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're not Maxis, but we really, really do like what puts Solana in the Solana Foundation or doing and what they're working on.
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'll tell you what, the last year or so Solana has been just consistently on fire.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I feel like every time I log into my ex or I go to different different new sources, I see new headlines about Solana, whether it's you know, dexactivity, user activity, stable coins reaching new highs in terms of market cap and usage and different institutions coming on and partnering with Solana and building on chain.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot going on and so I think that that goes past a lot of people.
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: People who don't look
• 2:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: behind the scenes, people who don't look at the on-screen metrics, they maybe miss out on a lot of that.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to talk about that.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're also going to talk about the markets and of course what you're working on and a lot of the other stuff that's happening.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: But before we begin, let's just start from the very beginning.
• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: As I said earlier, you are with these, you're with arguably one of if not the largest
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, payment solution services and credit solution services in the world, you could have gone anywhere, you could have done anything.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: You could have gone to any side of crypto and any project in crypto.
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: What narrowed down the decision for you to say, I want to work at Salana Foundation?
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I think to your point, Salana.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: is probably at the very forefront and the very epicenter of a lot of the things going on right now because I think for the past 10 years or so, you know, we know that the crypto industry has matured a lot and there's certainly has been a lot more sort of concentration in terms of growth happening across only a selected number of chains.
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And to me, Solana is the most exciting one.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I was choosing between the different options, what stood out to me, the most is this vision about having
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: internet capital market, right, is trying to serve that 5 billion people in the world for different kind of use cases of financial applications and that's what Solana is all about.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: For me personally, I always wanted to be kind of involved in the most innovative tech and to really bring that financial evolution to the world like through product and has, you know, be at the right place and also
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and I guess I'm very lucky enough to find this right, talk to you for me.
• 4:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: So digging into the role of what you're doing over at Solana Foundation a little bit more, what goes into the role of being head of digital assets and products and everything that you're working on over there, what have you been working on lately?
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I would actually just say that the product role itself is relatively new for the foundation, right?
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think, and I don't think there's many different foundations out there that actually have a dedicated product team.
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, how do we think about product from a foundation perspective?
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because certainly we're not trying to just build like a commercial product that is not the goal because this is the ecosystem, right?
• 5:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: They build many different versions of product to serve different type of clients.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think from a foundation perspective, as we're thinking about product, it's more akin to a government building, public infrastructure.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's kind of the same analogy because in order that the goal of Solana Foundation has always been to promote the growth of Solana as a whole, we want Solana to win at all different fronts.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for me coming in with a focus on digital assets,
• 5:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: pieces of public infrastructure is required for people like banks, payment companies, asset managers, all these sort of financial institutions to come and build on the Solana, what's missing public infrastructure that we need to do, so then other ecosystem players can then debiliting on top of these public infrastructure.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So a really good example is last week we just shipped a new product that I've been leading for the past three months to get this out is called Solana Developer Platform.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Super excited and we're getting lots of really strong feedbacks and people's interest following the announcement.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what Solana Developer Platform is all about is
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's entirely API driven platform powered by more than 20 different infrared providers under the hood from the ecosystem that will enable any financial institution to build their desired product directly on Solana.
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if I just unpack that a little bit, what I'm saying is basically
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know, as of today, a financial institution wants to build on chain, you've got to have a very good sense about the blockchain infrastructure, all the way from, you know, what is a noting infrastructure look like to how does this particular smart contract work, well, how do I understand the protocol design specifically in order to, you know, achieve my desired product requirement?
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now,
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: That takes a lot of time for enterprises to really get the no-house, right?
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's also just hard for them to say to have a dedicated salon a team just from day one.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in order for them to start iterating on these ideas and actually start building a lot faster,
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our goal is to abstract away a lot of these back and complexities, and as you can see this is something a piece of public infrastructure, right?
• 7:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because we just want to help them to make their lives easier to start building on Solana.
• 7:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So how do we do that?
• 7:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: We convert everything into APIs, right?
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if you just want to start building on Solana today, you don't have to figure out the noting for structure yourself.
• 7:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: We provide the un-
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: and point API for you so that it's rotating between like a selected number of blockchain node in for providers that we partner with so that they can start transacting our Solana.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Another example is some custody site, which custodian provider should you be choosing from whether it's a custodial, non-custodial, embedded well-resistant range of options.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: not how about we just give you a many of options and you can select anywhere you want and you can experiment between different experiences.
• 8:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's once again what we have created within SDP.
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the whole goal is that you know they can just start doing things from day one and that's our goal for so I'm not developing a platform.
• 8:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you guys ever try to steer maybe the direction of what you think Solana should be focused on?
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've seen a lot of movement.
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there's clearly growing stable coin activity.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Solana's been used a lot for deep in or decentralized physical infrastructure.
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: When you look at raw, dex activity, obviously things like meme coins have been very successful.
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's all these different verticals, but you guys ever look at the market and say hey, we want to inspire or push development towards X, Y, or Z.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a very good question.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think the answer is no, we do not dictate what use cases should be billed and how they should be billed on Solana, noting that, you know, of course, it's a completely neutral permissionless network anything could happen right.
• 9:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think a good example is just when Solana was first invented, totally his ideas, this is going to be the NASDAQ.
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: of thing tonight, right?
• 9:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's how he's being built.
• 9:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the first principle is more about how do we want things for structure to look like?
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I, it needs to be highly performant, it needs to be highly scalable and highly reliable.
• 9:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, does it actually become the NASDAQ immediately?
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The answer is no, because for a long period it's the, the NFT and then it's the meme coin, no one predicted that, but it just happened organically, but
• 9:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: What's important is to actually test the network through put and resiliency through all these different faces of evolution and just works, right, and I think that's the really important thing.
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, like what we're doing now is we want to pave the path so that if institutional adoption can happen, we want to ensure that they have the right pieces of infrastructure as well as the ecosystem around it.
• 10:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: But to push a one way or another, I think it's very much a market force in and of itself.
• 10:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that makes sense.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And people always wonder that, right?
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because they see different blockchains, maybe excel at different things.
• 10:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they've looked at the growth that Solana is seeing.
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: They said, I wonder if that's intentional.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is there a push to make this happen?
• 10:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it happening naturally?
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it raw curiosity and interest from some of these different project creators or maybe institutions?
• 10:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that kind of answers the question of it seems like it's kind of naturally moving in that direction.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is that correct?
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, if you look at some of the newer our ones and stuff like of course with the capital you race that there's a transfer you to To incentivize and to bootstrap some of the initial use cases, but it doesn't matter whichever chain is like ultimately.
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, people will vote with their money and the actual wallet like what they want to do with it.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think after the initial phase, to whatever long-lasting use cases that would actually make sense is very much driven by the market and the participants in it.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: What do you think some of the more underrated sectors of Solana are, one that you're seeing activity, you're seeing attention, you're seeing building on, but maybe the general public, it's gone relatively unnoticed, it's newer, something like that, but it's something where because you're so plugged in, obviously you guys are very close with what's going on, something that you feel is just underrated at the moment.
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It could be multiple areas.
• 11:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's several things, but I would say, for me, of course, I focus on the institutional the addresses, so my perspective on that is, what's underrated from a Solana ecosystem is actually coming from privacy and compliance.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's something underrated.
• 11:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let me tell you why, because when we have conversations with financial institutions, I think there's a long-standing misconception in the world that Solana has been a retouching, and that's all there is.
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reality is very, very different.
• 12:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even without talking about privacy and compliance today, Solana, you have Western Union, Visa, MasterCard, JP Morgan, all these major financial institutions
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, then the next level of argument is, well, it is completely permissionless, you know, a popular misconception that banks like to talk about is, you know, a North Korean validator could just validate the transaction therefore I cannot participate on a public permissionless chain.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, that is a misconception why, because there's a lot of, even though the infrastructure itself is completely permissionless, that is not to say that there are not, no tools that
• 12:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: the privacy that you can desire.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we actually just recently launched a white paper around specifically around privacy on Solana.
• 13:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's critical to kind of start addressing a lot of these, I guess lack of awareness if you will, because I think what's important, privacy is a very, very critical component.
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you've seen this, right?
• 13:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like I think going to 2026, all the major VCs, all the major voices are talking about privacy.
• 13:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's a right
• 13:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know, we anticipate 2026 is going to be the year of tokenization the year for for which institutional adoption really takes place and for them to be actually transacting probably on chain, privacy is just a prerequisite that you can't negotiate with and therefore I think every single chain is putting a lot of effort into that.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: privacy is hard as well.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the sense that when I say I want my transaction is private, it might mean very different from how you think about to construct your own private transactions.
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, in a way, it's impossible to provide a single privacy solution.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: that could serve for all purposes.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, if someone offers you that, I would just say double check the actual underlying technology and to really think about it critically.
• 14:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because privacy in my mind is very much the spectrum of things, right?
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the very extreme end, you have zero privacy, which is actually, I guess, is not true because I'm blockchain.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Majority of the things, in fact, all of the transaction by default is pseudonymous
• 14:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: addresses already in these, you know, random strings that people can't really tell who that probably address belongs to.
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But of course, with technology you can detect the identity underlying.
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, on the other extreme of the privacy is what we call total secrecy, in the sense, I want to hide both the value as well as the identity of that specific transaction.
• 14:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now,
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, a JP Morgan might have a very different requirement from fidelity and once it trade saying repo might be very different from doing a student loan on the other end So how do you cater for all these different product requirements?
• 15:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think on Solana, that's why we create a many of options if you will For which everything is modular by design in the sense that we have something available on the smart contract level that would support something what we call confidentiality
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, Katherine is sending money to Brendan, you know, our dresses are still just our public dresses.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the actual amount and your balances as well as my balances are completely hidden from the view of the main net.
• 15:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if anyone who want to track or who or me, you know, like you or me, who we are and how much money we are transacting with one another, there will have no way of knowing that.
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's something we can enable ready directly from
• 15:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: of course we have stronger level of privacy, whether that's say what we call private execution environment, called counter that is available also on today as well as
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: ZK language that you can write your own applications on top of that.
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's all available directly from Solana the network.
• 16:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And on top of that, we have a range of different privacy companies building actively.
• 16:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: People like RCM, Ambrer, Zama, Inc. and the likes.
• 16:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: So my point is going back to your question.
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is one of the underrated one?
• 16:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think privacy and compliance is actually one of the underrated.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've seen many different podcasts before that they like to pitch Solana again some other more let's say permissioned institutional driven chains and saying that Solana doesn't have the privacy which frankly is not true and we're trying to do also a better job to create more sort of technology toolings for enterprise builders to be able to leverage but you know we also want to do a lot more education around this area of what does privacy and what does compliance actually means
• 16:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I think both of those areas are very important right when you you look at both of those privacy has been on the up and up since the pretty much I mean, since the new administration since different regulations have changed and privacy has been a little bit more.
• 17:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'd say favorable, and you don't have to worry about getting in trouble.
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to worry about different lawsuits.
• 17:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you've seen privacy on the rise here, and there's been more of a demand for it.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think there's two sides to privacy, right?
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's ultimate privacy, which is just saying, we want everything to be private no matter what.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then there's privacy specifically with regulation and mind for institutional use.
• 17:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what we've seen a lot of demand of, is saying, we need just certain degrees of this in order for institutions to use it the way that they want to and still remain compliant.
• 17:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've seen you talk about why you think certain institutions are lagging in their crypto adoption, and why sooner rather than later, you think that trillions of dollars are poised to flow on chain, what are you seeing in regards to what's happening, maybe from an institutional perspective?
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think...
• 18:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, 2025 clearly is the Yale stablecoins, just because of genius act.
• 18:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And every major single bank that I've spoken with, they're all just from a very top-down, like, executive level, are talking about stablecoins.
• 18:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that trend has slightly shifted into 2026, because...
• 18:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stablecoin in and off itself is not a product.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is liquidity, it is money, right?
• 18:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So then the next question is, what do you use these money for?
• 18:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: So then the focus I think going to 2026 is more focus on the other end of spectrum, which is generally speaking tokenization as a whole.
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's a very big trend because tokenization has been that underlying theme.
• 18:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I will say starting 2223, which is why at these I started building this product, or these are tokenized as a platform precisely because of the beginning of tokenization.
• 18:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I do think with the progress, a lot of the positive progress happened in regulatory landscape.
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It just gives so much more confidence and clarity, right?
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: No point tended there, but clarity in terms of institutions who really get a sense of
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: How can I treat different crypto assets or different digital assets on my balance sheet and therefore what can I do with it?
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm really hopeful like going to the rest of 2026 and of course into 27 We're going to see trillions of dollars of assets being tokenized I think there's a huge demand that underlies a lot of the private credit market front And we are still continuing to see a lot more sort of same money market funds these kind of vanilla sort of
• 19:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: repo, government bonds and being brought on shape.
• 19:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in my mind, especially given a lot of these bigger macro economic underlying, I think the search for yield is going to be even higher.
• 19:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And hence, I think that's going to just be more sort of demand in terms of like, where can I plug my money in there for the different type of tokenization that could take place?
• 19:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: So let's stir the pot a little bit here.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to make the people in the comment section.
• 20:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to pin them against each other with this question.
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there's this wave coming of adoption.
• 20:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: We talk stable coins.
• 20:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: We talk to institutional.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: We talk to organization all these different areas.
• 20:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: What do you say to to win the people over and say Solana is the place for this?
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because everyone has an opinion saying, oh, it should just be Bitcoin or oh, Ethereum's the place or Cantons been really popular with some of these things lately.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then there's, you know, different chains that focus on different things, right?
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can look at what is it?
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tethers new, I think it was called stable.
• 20:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and that one, and then, you know, you have all these different tokenization projects.
• 20:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, not to get to into the weeds.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's all these different opinions about, hey, you should look here or there.
• 20:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Give us your argument as to say, no, Solana is the place for the institutions.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the place for these different verticals, you know, given, I guess the pitch.
• 20:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think what stand us about Solana is liquidity.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: No one can beat Solana on liquidity.
• 21:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what's really important is both the depth of that liquidity as well as the diversity of that.
• 21:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what I mean by that is on Solana is, and you don't see that in every single chain is that, Solana truly has been a general purpose chain, right?
• 21:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've said it, is neutral, is permissionless.
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is general purpose.
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And hence, throughout the years of evolution, you have both a very rich,
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: side of retail liquidity as well as institutional.
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's super important.
• 21:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when you talk to any financial institution, they'll understand, right?
• 21:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because diversification of race is super important.
• 21:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that you can't sort of just manufacture that.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: It really takes time and really battle-tested, I guess, evolutions to get to this stage.
• 21:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And hence, I think the most valuable thing about Salana is
• 21:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: is on that liquidity.
• 21:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And on top of that, I think Solana beats, as you said in the intro, it is ranked number one across many metrics.
• 21:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: But you look at the underlying principle what Solana is all about.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is extremely, extremely high-performance.
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's going to be super important for a lot of the
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: the financial institutions.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: You mentioned Kentucky, I don't even think Kendan published the TPS publicly, which is interesting, but I think to the point what we're competing, right, is on that highly performant and coming from these I understand that very well in the sense you have to be highly scalable and highly reliable, right, and that's what Salana is trying to replicate as well.
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've got to give that base a
• 22:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: kind of a requirements done.
• 22:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then on top of that, we can add other tooling and stuff to improve on that experience.
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: But to satisfy the scalability being battle tested and being resilient, takes time, takes a lot of technology, hard core like engineering to get there.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And even before I join Salana, I think what really strikes me, you know, going to kind of conferences like breakpoint is really that tech focus sort of mindset stood out, right?
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: on the actual technology improvements, and even as I'm speaking today, right?
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Solana is already the fastest change because the actual throughput, I'm not talking about theoretical throughput, the actual throughput today, we're already seeing over 2,000 TPS, which is twice as high as visas actual throughput today.
• 23:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: But even going forward into this year, we're going to have another
• 23:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: a finality settlement from 400 milliseconds to 150 milliseconds.
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, this is a race to like, if to zero, that's what I'm saying, and the significance of that is equivalent to when Ethereum has upgraded from proof-of-work to proof-of-state.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's what we're trying to going to be doing later, very soon, with Alpen Glow to reduce it to 150 milliseconds.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: How do you put maybe an analogy together for 150 milliseconds?
• 23:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you're going to compare that to something that people would know, maybe it's like the average credit card transaction or like Venmo or something like that.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like how does it compare or what kind of comparison can we make?
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a good question.
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: I should don't have the specific numbers.
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Starts in terms of the reference points, but I do know that, for example, by the time you tap your credit card, and you see that off, right?
• 24:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It usually takes up to a few seconds, but sometimes it's very fast.
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just a few milliseconds.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's the speed of requirement from a traffic perspective on a centralized database, right?
• 24:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's not forget that.
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: But now we're achieving as good if we're even better on a decentralized one.
• 24:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think most of us have gone to the store.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've tapped our card.
• 24:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: The as long as it's able to happen that fast, that's normal.
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm used to my card half the time I have a visa card.
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have a couple of them.
• 24:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'll go in a matter of which one I use.
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: It'll tap.
• 24:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: It'll give me like a little swirling circle for at least a couple of seconds.
• 24:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm standing there, twittling my thumbs.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not a big deal, but it's still a couple of seconds.
• 24:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think so long as it is faster or competitive with that.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, people won't see the difference.
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that is what we're working towards here saying, how can we create an even faster or a better product or service than what we already have in an existence?
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's what we're reaching here is that we have reached the point where we have the ability to do something that is at par with what we have if not significantly better than what we have from a speed, from a fee, from whatever you look at, infrastructure, privacy, security, a lot of the things that you've already mentioned
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the big reasons why I like Solana is it is had an unprecedented ability to prove that it has true scalability.
• 25:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: What I mean by that is lots of chains that have come on the podcast.
• 25:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, we like all different blockchains over here guys, but a lot of chains have come on, a lot of different projects have come on and they've announced, oh, we have this crazy high ability to process transactions super fast super cheap, but it's all in theory.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it supports that through actually doing it.
• 26:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: The other ones are just saying, hey, we can do this.
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've simulated this.
• 26:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Solana is the one saying, no, we are handling by far the most, and we're holding up, and it's still cheap, and it's still fast, and it works.
• 26:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's one of the reasons why I have been drawn to Solana more, is seeing that as transactions have gone, inactivity has gone parabolic, it has been able to keep up with it.
• 26:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So well, and handle it so well, whereas we've yet to see that with a lot of other maybe competitors if we even want to call it that and I think institutions from my perspective from what the ones that we've talked to.
• 26:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: They tell us the same thing, they say we like the scalability because it's proven and we've seen this.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And while there are other quote-unquote solutions out there, they just haven't been stressed tested to the same degree that Solana is.
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you'd be surprised.
• 27:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you're an avid listener of the podcast, I've asked some of these asset managers, some of the ETF providers, different people from the Tradby space banks.
• 27:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I've asked them, like, hey, what are you most interested in?
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And maybe I won't say the name, but we had someone here on a recent podcast, you know, multi-hundred billion dollar sometimes trillion dollar different banks and asset managers and several of them have said Solana Solana is what we are the most interested in, which is fascinating because in the past you've seen them be the most interested maybe in Ethereum or maybe use Ethereum the most.
• 27:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: on chain, but Solana here again in the last years made a huge stride to change that.
• 27:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I'm not surprised in the sense Ethereum is the incumbent.
• 27:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is always the entry point.
• 27:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you know, when I started learning about blockchain, you got to start learning about solidity to begin with and EVM construction and all of that.
• 27:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think for majority of the people, that's true.
• 28:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think what's interesting, by the way, that I
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, it's different is AI, by the way, because you don't need to worry about the different sort of SVM versus EVM or another thing.
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just, you use your AI, you can really kind of get plugged in pretty quickly, that run like ramp up to get your knowledge up to speed, I think, has shrunk significantly.
• 28:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do think also just, um...
• 28:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: everything you said and you know what I highlighted that salana is very, very focused on the tech and I think that's what's beautiful about it, right?
• 28:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because if it's purely like a corporate chain or anything and just focus on getting institution, getting brand names, I don't think that's going to last because ultimately is the technology that's going to differentiate.
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: one thing from another and I think the world is converging many different ways from AI from you know crypto and everything else and we're really trying to do the best we can on these front and we're paying a lot of attention also on how can we make Solana sort of very AI native and you've probably have seen a lot of the metrics on x4 or two we're ready to over took base as the number one chain to transact x4 to which has been significant time we're doing wrapping integration with MPPS stuff like that to ensure that Solana is always staying on top of all of these.
• 29:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I have a little bit of an off script to question here, but one of the things that I noticed with Solana is that it's made, and I talked to some token holders about this, but it's made these huge leaps and it's accomplishments and it's abilities and it's just statistics and, you know, right, we've talked a lot about it.
• 29:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: clear, fundamental growth in success.
• 29:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the frustrations that I've seen from more of the retail side is saying, when you look at the reflection of price, it feels as if there is a disconnect from seeing all of this growth in all of this success, but yet price feels like it's beaten down and you can look at all of crypto right now and it's everywhere, right?
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not just Solana.
• 30:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the other thing is, obviously, the Solana Foundation doesn't control the price.
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: silly.
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: It'd be defeat the purpose if you guys could just manipulate price wherever you'd want, and I think it would still more fear and less faith.
• 30:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there is this disconnect with I think the real retail side seeing so much growth in us talking about how well it's doing, and then not seeing price reflect that.
• 30:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, one of the things that I've looked at as a potential catalyst in
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: When you look at Solana's 2021, 2022 cycle peak, and then you look at our most recent kind of all-time high in peak, you have price action moving, you know, somewhat higher, not that far away from its prior cycles peak, but you have its market cap doubling, which to me says, hey, if market cap is doubling, but price action is, you know, barely moving higher than its prior cycles peak, that means that there's probably some inflation,
• 31:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: What do you think about a proposal to maybe reducing that or bringing that down or maybe more buyback models or burn models or something that
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: that helps the token appreciate with this success.
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because I think the average person would look and say, okay, well, if we're seeing this much success, we would like the token to be able to see a stronger benefit from the wild success that it's getting.
• 31:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think we're setting ourselves up for long term.
• 31:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: for like a long-term scenario of that.
• 31:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: But has that ever been something that maybe the salon of foundation has talked about internally?
• 31:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Any of those things, you know, whether it is.
• 31:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I have seen inflation lower.
• 31:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think I was looking at it for last year and it was right around 4% and it's been, you know, much higher than that in the past.
• 31:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's not like it hasn't come down.
• 31:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: But when looking at maybe reducing inflation or buybacks or burns or all these different things that can maybe make the token
• 32:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: more closely correlated to some of these things that are happening.
• 32:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like is that ever been a talking point on your end on the teaser?
• 32:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Certainly not on my end, because maybe it's other parts of the foundation, but I haven't really digged into a lot of the token economics specifically from all of these burning activities.
• 32:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: What I can say as a economist by training right,
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you see inflation in any economy or such, I think the best way to combat it is productivity growth.
• 32:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is in the long run how you will win.
• 32:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's just basically translating to what we're doing right here.
• 32:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because if anything, I think there's going to be a lagging indicator.
• 32:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the more we can build during the down cycle, I think the more upside it will be in the future.
• 32:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And again, if everyone's raise a focus on the actual product on actual technology,
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the only way to win in the long run and hence I'm, you know, I think it's fine.
• 32:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like I personally day to day, I don't really look at price fluctuation much.
• 33:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just because I think everyone should recognize way in a very tough, big macro economic downturn right now.
• 33:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we're soon probably going to get into bigger macro inflation as well.
• 33:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of these things is going to conflate.
• 33:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: with one another and you look at the crypto segment in and of itself is probably going to be like several rounds of knock-in effect that was translated you know from what's happening to your political e-mail and then all the way down to the crypto prices.
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's totally fair.
• 33:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, now I'm going to ask you an even harder question, which is going to be to pick your favorite children within Solana.
• 33:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you're allowed to do this, but I'll throw it at you.
• 33:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you can't answer it, let us know.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you have any favorite project or cool stand-out projects that you're seeing on the Solana side.
• 33:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you're like, hey, I really like what they're doing.
• 33:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're always looking, again, we're huge fans of Solana over here.
• 33:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're always looking to get more plugged in.
• 33:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I don't know, any standouts for you specifically.
• 34:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to pick my favorite, just as you said, it's bad-have-a for Paris, you know, choose the favorite child.
• 34:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I did mention previously that there's a lot of cool projects on the privacy side, that's kind of like spring up.
• 34:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think they're super, super interesting.
• 34:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was like at a Josset summit last week, and so, you know, on the panel, it was with Eric from Kenton and also with Yenik from, um,
• 34:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: RCEM is doing really interesting stuff and they're building directly on Solana, they're using multi-party computation technology to enable a lot of the the privacy features.
• 34:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think, for example, that that's just interesting to take note of, but as I said, there's a range of different privacy solutions happening, whether that's NPC, FHE, and other TE related solutions is all happening.
• 34:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: at different pace.
• 34:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: To me what I care about, especially is, you know, what does that look like for institutional adoption, right?
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because I think to other, to some extent, a lot of the, the, the sort of crypto fan of mindset is still that cyberpunk mentality, which is fine.
• 35:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think you need a different set of mindset and narratives as you're approaching institutions, because they come from a very different perspective.
• 35:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they need to understand how that relates to the existing business practice.
• 35:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I think the ability to translate a lot of the cool privacy as this example into pragmatic, practical things.
• 35:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: That traffic really can adopt from day one and can satisfy the only internal kind of stakeholders.
• 35:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's the boring stuff, but that's kind of the important thing to ensure in order for us to actually get more and more institutional adoption.
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a good point.
• 35:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, people always raise the question, like, what do institutions want to see and what are they looking for?
• 35:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And man, we got to talk a lot about it.
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: As we wrap up here, what else is on maybe the calendar?
• 36:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, we're looking at the course of the next year here, what do you want to see the most?
• 36:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: What are you working on the most?
• 36:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: What kind of spoilers here?
• 36:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can you give to everyone?
• 36:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think there's a lot more to come through the salon on development platform as we evolve the different versions of it.
• 36:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: We do want to be very ambitious and who knows maybe it will become a product we maintain down the road right now is very much a sandbox.
• 36:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what I mean by that is under STP there's three different modules, issuance which is all about tokenization, then it's payments, then it's trading.
• 36:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trading is not yet available right now, so it's a big push for us in latering to the year to get that trading module right.
• 36:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if anything, trading is probably the most complex construct, because you need to really understand the market structure and to get the right players and set up.
• 36:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: in place.
• 36:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm really excited about that, but even within the existing modules, you know, specifically, say on payments, I think there's a lot of queen evations we can do to sort of say replicate the existing experiences, whether that's say reward programs, callbacks, or like, you know, having subscriptions and stuff like that.
• 37:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: These are all fairly easy things, but we do want to add these kind of cool features, so then when a traffic fire enterprise come in to start leveraging these solutions, they're like, wow, this exactly what I can already do today, but I can do it on chain and then
• 37:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm really excited about that.
• 37:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think other than that, I would focus probably on that intersection between AI and crypto.
• 37:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even though I would definitely still think about this as a very like zero to one kind of beginning point.
• 37:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: If we can get it right from the beginning, I really, you know, Solana is well positioned as being the settlement layer for a lot of these agentic machine to machine payments.
• 37:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Starting from day one, I think we have a very high upside down the road to attract a lot of these agents coming on chain and start doing whatever they want.
• 38:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Katherine, we appreciate your time.
• 38:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: So many different amazing things that we got the talk about here today.
• 38:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know that the audience is always interested in what's happening, not only with the Solana Foundation, but the whole Solana ecosystem itself.
• 38:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we appreciate your time for listeners out there, who want to get more plugged in.
• 38:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: They want to follow what you're doing.
• 38:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: They want to follow what the Solana Foundation is doing.
• 38:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where can we kind of point them towards?
• 38:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, we actually have several places now.
• 38:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: So a cool website, I would point to is payments.org.
• 38:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you go into that website, it's all about Solana.
• 38:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's actually a really cool live demo you can click.
• 38:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that actually goes back to our previous discussion.
• 38:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: How quickly is the transaction Solana?
• 38:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once you click on that, you'll get us as how quickly that is.
• 38:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's just on public website together with Solana.com.
• 38:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Personally, you can follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn.
• 38:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's pretty straightforward.
• 38:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you just type my name, you should be able to find me.
• 38:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: awesome.
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll Katherine.
• 38:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Once again, thank you so much for joining us.
• 39:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: We appreciate your time.
• 39:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we'll have to have you back soon.
• 39:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much, Brendan.
• 39:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Great talking to you.