Latest / CRYPTO 101 / Ep. 759 Solana Is Getting 40X Faster & Here's Why It Matters with SOL Strategies CEO
Transcript
- 0:08[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back everyone to the Crypto 101 podcast.
- 0:11[SPEAKER_00]: We hope all of you are having a fantastic morning or evening because no matter where you are in the world, you're certainly in the right place here today.
- 0:19[SPEAKER_00]: It's another very familiar guest when it comes to the show.
- 0:23[SPEAKER_00]: Someone who we love having on a rather his team on.
- 0:26[SPEAKER_00]: But Michael, it's good to have you here.
- 0:28[SPEAKER_00]: Michael Hubbard is the CEO of Soul Strategies, again, a familiar face friend of the podcast over here.
- 0:34[SPEAKER_00]: You heard from them just a little bit earlier this year.
- 0:37[SPEAKER_00]: We've had them on a couple of times before, but Michael, it's good to have you.
- 0:42[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks Brandon.
- 0:42[SPEAKER_00]: It's great to be back and thanks for having us on.
- 0:46[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, what we love here and from the team, you guys are one of the really the top leaders when it comes to Solana and staying active in that ecosystem and building on it.
- 0:56[SPEAKER_00]: We're excited to hear not only what your thoughts are on the Solana ecosystem, but how that's been advanced and what you've been dipping your toes into.
- 1:04[SPEAKER_00]: We know that there's been some big announcements and some
- 1:07[SPEAKER_00]: big things that you all have been working on.
- 1:09[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to spoil it.
- 1:09[SPEAKER_00]: We'll get into it during today's podcast.
- 1:12[SPEAKER_00]: But we talked to Max a little bit earlier this year.
- 1:15[SPEAKER_00]: Max Kaplan back in March, I think it was.
- 1:19[SPEAKER_00]: So catch us up to date.
- 1:20[SPEAKER_00]: Like what has soul strategies been up to in the meantime?
- 1:25[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, thanks.
- 1:25[SPEAKER_01]: It's been a wild six months I would say and a lot has been happening, not just with us, but overall, I think the industry has been moving along a quite rapid pace.
- 1:40[SPEAKER_01]: So things have obviously evolved and in a positive way, I think.
- 1:45[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the macro environment has definitely approved a little bit, but it's all strategies.
- 1:49[SPEAKER_01]: Our focus has been as always as we keep preaching our building while creating business.
- 1:55[SPEAKER_01]: Our focus has really been on building a business that is invested into the Solama ecosystem, not just holding a sole treasury, passively and kind of sitting back and watching it go up and down,
- 2:11[SPEAKER_01]: being engaged, participating in the ecosystem, contributing to it, and through that, over the years, we've built the validated infrastructure business, liquid-staking, which we don't just in January.
- 2:24[SPEAKER_01]: And since March, we've actually done two acquisitions, so that's really being quite the big change for us.
- 2:33[SPEAKER_01]: One of those was Dark Lake, which was a sliner start-up coming out of one of the Hacker Thun's building ZK, privacy tech, and some really great minds that have joined us out of that.
- 2:45[SPEAKER_01]: And the other was Houdini Swap, so Houdini Swap is a cross chain, private swap aggregator, allowing people to swap tokens between 120 different blockchains,
- 3:02[SPEAKER_01]: And that's, you know, being a big step up for us that you're kind of more of the use of facing consumer retail areas.
- 3:10[SPEAKER_01]: And that's yeah, that's been kind of what's been happening with us and where our focus has been.
- 3:15[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that was kind of the backtrack a little bit.
- 3:18[SPEAKER_00]: Something that you said there was that soul strategies is not just a treasury company.
- 3:25[SPEAKER_00]: And that's something that we talked with Max quite a bit about.
- 3:28[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's one of the big misunderstandings about what soul strategy is who you are, what you guys do, is that it's not simply just a treasury company where you guys buy Solana, you hold it, and you hope that it goes up over time.
- 3:41[SPEAKER_00]: you guys are really really integrated into the ecosystem as you just listed off.
- 3:47[SPEAKER_00]: But I want to get into this this Houdini swap acquisition that you just did.
- 3:52[SPEAKER_00]: You guys acquired Houdini swap back in June.
- 3:55[SPEAKER_00]: It recently cost I think it was $3 billion in cumulative swap volume with more than $260 million that have been processed there.
- 4:05[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what did you guys see in Houdini swap and maybe even just tell us I guess what it is at a high level before you do that, but what did you guys see there and what is it?
- 4:15[SPEAKER_01]: Well, actually, I just want to take a map of the step, even further back, you know, you mentioned your conversation with Max just now.
- 4:25[SPEAKER_01]: I think something that is really important is that the company has been shaped a lot by my max and by myself and others that joined it earlier on and we all come from a deep solider background in a max and I've both been involved with kind of personal projects that's a lot of many years I've been working on a solider for over five years so our entire
- 4:51[SPEAKER_01]: How do we recognize the value of the technology and not just the financial play?
- 4:57[SPEAKER_01]: And that kind of leads into, why, what we saw in Houdini swap, as well as Dark Lake, you know, the key thing here is that one was an acquisition we completed in April, which was Dark Lake, and then Houdini was on the first of June.
- 5:11[SPEAKER_01]: So very close together, and both were in the privacy space.
- 5:15[SPEAKER_01]: So the key here is that privacy is an area that we think has very high potential going forward.
- 5:23[SPEAKER_01]: The reason for that is blockchain adoption is any accelerating.
- 5:28[SPEAKER_01]: We see more and more.
- 5:29[SPEAKER_01]: new people and not just people as an individual but companies and institutions, banks, fund managers, all these intermediaries coming into the space.
- 5:42[SPEAKER_01]: And as they do that, they not only need a blockchain that is performing, that is fast, and that is cheap, which is what Solanas
- 5:50[SPEAKER_01]: but they also need to be able to move funds around.
- 5:54[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the key piece with Houdini that we see is not just the private spot, but the cross chain swap aspect, which is kind of like on an offramping, but within crypto, on an offramp, so don't have to be too in front of you.
- 6:07[SPEAKER_01]: So providing that mobility and liquidity in an art of different chains.
- 6:12[SPEAKER_01]: So that's a form of freedom as being able to actually get your money out or put money in.
- 6:17[SPEAKER_01]: And then the other aspect is privacy, privacy is so important.
- 6:20[SPEAKER_01]: So many people still have this misconception that a blockchain transaction is another must be default, which it isn't.
- 6:28[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, it's funny that you say that because I just talked to someone we just had an in person event like a couple weeks ago and on the plan over there was these there was this two different people it was a man and a woman they weren't a couple but they're both about the same age I'd say probably in their 60s
- 6:46[SPEAKER_00]: And they said the same thing, one of them is like, well, you know what?
- 6:48[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just not sure about this blockchain stuff, this crypto stuff.
- 6:52[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that it's all private and you can't see anything and you don't know what's happening and you don't know where it's going.
- 6:58[SPEAKER_00]: And the fact that it's just that way for everything.
- 7:00[SPEAKER_00]: I just have a hard time trusting that.
- 7:02[SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, I was sitting next to me and they go, well, what do you think?
- 7:05[SPEAKER_00]: I go, well, it's funny that you should say that.
- 7:08[SPEAKER_00]: And I explained it to them and they go, oh, look, I didn't know that.
- 7:12[SPEAKER_00]: there is that misconception out there and I think some people are just ignorant like they just don't know any better and I think that there are some people who just like to complain and kind of jab at the space but that that is something that's real out there so I had to intervene.
- 7:29[SPEAKER_01]: No, no for sure and I think it's kind of a complex space because there's a reason that we think blockchain is going to succeed as a technology and that reason is tightly linked to the fact that
- 7:43[SPEAKER_01]: So we value that that is a core attribute of blockchain technology.
- 7:49[SPEAKER_01]: It has to be public, which sounds contrary to it of two hours same privacy matters.
- 7:54[SPEAKER_01]: And the kind of answer there is that
- 7:58[SPEAKER_01]: You wanted to be public as far as possible.
- 8:01[SPEAKER_01]: The reason for that is you wanted to be censorship resistant.
- 8:04[SPEAKER_01]: You wanted to be neutral.
- 8:06[SPEAKER_01]: You don't want it to be controlled or sensitive any single entity or government or bank or institution.
- 8:13[SPEAKER_01]: So that you have sovereignty over your wealth over your money.
- 8:16[SPEAKER_01]: There's a core attributes of blockchain technology that are important that we believe in.
- 8:21[SPEAKER_01]: but having sovereignty over your wealth, of your money, owning your wealth, doesn't mean that you should have to tell everyone all the time what you're doing with it.
- 8:34[SPEAKER_01]: And that balancing act is so critical.
- 8:38[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it is.
- 8:39[SPEAKER_00]: And I think giving people the choice is what's important in what matters, right?
- 8:43[SPEAKER_00]: It's not saying that it's all or nothing, I think a big purpose of cryptocurrency and blockchain tech is to say, Hey, you have the choice.
- 8:50[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want to do something publicly?
- 8:51[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want to do something privately?
- 8:52[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want there to be an intermediary?
- 8:54[SPEAKER_00]: Do you not want there to be an intermediary?
- 8:56[SPEAKER_00]: You want different ways to do things and if so we're giving you the option to do things in different ways and that's what the freedom is the freedom isn't saying All well, everyone gets all access to everything the freedom is saying hey you have the choice to kind of do things your way and choose who's involved in who season and that's Holds mentally your choice.
- 9:12[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that there is a place here.
- 9:14[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's there's obviously a place for the public side, but you've seen a huge amount of attention shift to the private side
- 9:23[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I would really go back and say, I don't know if this is controversial.
- 9:26[SPEAKER_00]: I'd go back and say that ever since Gary Gensler left the SEC, privacy has been on the rise, right?
- 9:31[SPEAKER_00]: It's not getting chased down.
- 9:32[SPEAKER_00]: It's not getting hunted.
- 9:33[SPEAKER_00]: You're seeing people be able to innovate with it.
- 9:35[SPEAKER_00]: And privacy as a sector has exploded.
- 9:38[SPEAKER_00]: And if you don't believe me, look at the usage of it.
- 9:41[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I'll give a quick shout out here.
- 9:43[SPEAKER_00]: I guess, off-chain from from one a lot of people look at, um, but over just even the Z-cash, right?
- 9:47[SPEAKER_00]: You know, look at what's happened there.
- 9:49[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
- 9:50[SPEAKER_00]: And then
- 9:51[SPEAKER_00]: I would say that, you know, across the board, it's obviously not just them.
- 9:55[SPEAKER_00]: They've kind of exploded in a way, even though they've been around for a while, but privacy everywhere.
- 10:01[SPEAKER_00]: And like you're saying, on Solana, especially here, it's on the rise.
- 10:06[SPEAKER_00]: right?
- 10:08[SPEAKER_01]: No, absolutely.
- 10:09[SPEAKER_01]: And I think we see it in our own numbers.
- 10:13[SPEAKER_01]: If we look at Houdini, you know, we put out those numbers recently.
- 10:17[SPEAKER_01]: We did three billion lifetime volume on Houdini.
- 10:21[SPEAKER_01]: Just in in three months, we did $260 million in volume.
- 10:25[SPEAKER_01]: So we're quarter billion in in three months.
- 10:27[SPEAKER_01]: But more important is the trend.
- 10:30[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in June, we did a think about $64, 65 million dollars
- 10:35[SPEAKER_01]: and just now is September we did 89 million so we're seeing it clear up a trend.
- 10:42[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, would you say I guess?
- 10:46[SPEAKER_00]: How do you think privacy should be used?
- 10:48[SPEAKER_00]: Or how do you, how would you like to see it use or maybe how is it used the most when it comes to Solana, right?
- 10:53[SPEAKER_00]: Because different people will use privacy for different purposes.
- 10:56[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
- 10:57[SPEAKER_00]: But what do you think like the top reasons or genres or verticals are to kind of push forth the privacy industry inside and so on?
- 11:06[SPEAKER_01]: That's an excellent question, really.
- 11:08[SPEAKER_01]: Because people misunderstand privacy and they think when the fear is activities, what are you hiding, right?
- 11:14[SPEAKER_01]: I'll give you a really easy example.
- 11:16[SPEAKER_01]: If you go to the grocery store, you go to Whole Foods and you're buying yourself a pack of bananas.
- 11:23[SPEAKER_01]: And you go and you pay with your credit card.
- 11:26[SPEAKER_01]: With that credit card, you're not handing over a bundle of bank statements so that the cashier can go and see every other expense, every other place you've gone at-spits your money in the last 12 months.
- 11:36[SPEAKER_01]: Right now, if you make a crypto payment, that's what you're doing.
- 11:41[SPEAKER_01]: So I think that is one of the most obvious in our face use cases, which is as simple as, like, you're spending your money, you don't want to expose all your other financial history, financial patterns, spending patterns with that.
- 11:55[SPEAKER_01]: The other use case that we're seeing massive growth in is for businesses.
- 12:00[SPEAKER_01]: You know, more and more crypto native businesses are running their payroll on chain.
- 12:05[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, you've got 10, 20, 30 or 500 employees who knows and you want to pay them in USDC, USDT or whatever they want to take.
- 12:17[SPEAKER_01]: Do you want them seeing all the payments to all other employees?
- 12:20[SPEAKER_01]: Even if they don't see the names on the crypto wallets, right?
- 12:24[SPEAKER_01]: They can say,
- 12:27[SPEAKER_01]: And then somehow they start keeping an eye on it.
- 12:31[SPEAKER_01]: Some of they can do anonymize it.
- 12:32[SPEAKER_01]: They're calling us them for $10 for a coffee.
- 12:35[SPEAKER_01]: And now they see that there's water belongs to that colleague.
- 12:37[SPEAKER_01]: And now they can see how much they're getting paid, my payroll.
- 12:40[SPEAKER_01]: And they can see where it's coming from.
- 12:42[SPEAKER_01]: So they see exactly how much money their employer has.
- 12:45[SPEAKER_01]: So now they can go and negotiate for a pair of eyes because they say, hey, look, you've got 3 million in your account.
- 12:50[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
- 12:51[SPEAKER_01]: You mean actually 10%.
- 12:52[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the use case we're seeing, you know,
- 12:58[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I love that example because everywhere everyone always talks about oh, there's going to be institutional adoption is going to be tokenization is going to be all these different things, right?
- 13:09[SPEAKER_00]: But
- 13:11[SPEAKER_00]: It's it's hard to imagine a world where right now you obviously can't do a lot of the things that you just said where it's like oh you can't view how much money your employer has here and there and where it's stored and how much they're sending you and how much that person is earning you know that it just you can't do that in today's world and so it's almost ironic that we talk about all this going to be this mass institutional adoption and there's going to be all these things happening.
- 13:35[SPEAKER_00]: but we don't have that form of the private infrastructure there yet.
- 13:39[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that that's where the build out is happening.
- 13:41[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously there's the buzzwords, which we hear a lot about.
- 13:44[SPEAKER_00]: And we believe in, right?
- 13:45[SPEAKER_00]: We like tokenization, we like stable coins, we like these defy, we like these different things.
- 13:51[SPEAKER_00]: and they're getting their infrastructure built out, but I think people have started to realize, hey, if there's going to be true institutional scaling here, some things are just going to have to be private, love it, hate it, that's just the way it is.
- 14:03[SPEAKER_00]: Institutions are going to want some things private, even if it's not everything.
- 14:07[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that's what we're seeing right now is we're seeing the bill out of the privacy side of the market.
- 14:13[SPEAKER_00]: And it's hard to imagine that we're close to the finish line there.
- 14:16[SPEAKER_00]: I think that there's a lot more to do.
- 14:18[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that shows here a little bit of the future site and the vision that you guys have at soul strategies to say, hey, we understand that there's a lot that that's going to need to go into this.
- 14:28[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a lot of potential for this at all.
- 14:32[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I was reading one of the reports on Houdini recently, and it was saying that private swaps represented nearly three quarters, almost 75 percent of its August volume, which is pretty, that's a lot, right?
- 14:48[SPEAKER_00]: Because we were just talking about how it's hitting these record amounts, and then on top of that about three fourths of it, or private swaps, right?
- 14:55[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
- 14:55[SPEAKER_00]: What does that tell you?
- 14:57[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think it just shows that that's where the demand is.
- 15:00[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not just private, but it's also interesting to see what the split is between cross-chain and same-chain swaps.
- 15:08[SPEAKER_01]: So on who do you know, you can go from, you know, solve to solve.
- 15:11[SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to actually swap between different tokens.
- 15:13[SPEAKER_01]: You can send effectively, but during it privately.
- 15:16[SPEAKER_01]: And we're seeing a quite a big split between those two, with both of them having having good shares.
- 15:25[SPEAKER_01]: the answer there is really like, okay, so we see people are going from, you know, let's say USDC on base to USDT on ETH or Solana.
- 15:35[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's the core demand that they have, right?
- 15:40[SPEAKER_01]: They have an asset on in place why X and they want to get to in different asset on place Y. Yeah, that's the the base need.
- 15:48[SPEAKER_01]: Now, they can do that various ways.
- 15:50[SPEAKER_01]: They can use it
- 15:54[SPEAKER_01]: But if they can do it privately, they're going to do it privately, right?
- 15:57[SPEAKER_01]: Like, why would you choose to do it openly if you can do it privately?
- 16:01[SPEAKER_01]: And that's really, I think what the mindset is is that we see more and more people choose privacy, understand why privacy is important.
- 16:11[SPEAKER_01]: And then just to your other point, during the buildout, the way I kind of picture it is that we're building a skyscraper here.
- 16:18[SPEAKER_01]: and we're just finishing the basement.
- 16:21[SPEAKER_01]: And we're doing a really boring thing.
- 16:22[SPEAKER_01]: It's like we're plastic.
- 16:23[SPEAKER_01]: We're putting in like sewer pipes.
- 16:26[SPEAKER_01]: Which is not something anyone really wants to talk about.
- 16:28[SPEAKER_01]: Like everyone's waiting with the penthouse.
- 16:31[SPEAKER_01]: well we can't get to the penthouse before you've built the basement and that's something we keep kind of talking about and trying to explain and as a public company you know we talk a lot to kind of track-fi investors who are that deep into the blockchain ecosystem and everyone wants to kind of do like well we know do a shiny product do something
- 16:53[SPEAKER_01]: a heart and popular and you know we keep trying to hammer home this point is that our focus really is building that foundation because those flaws on top that skyscrapers coming and we want to have the foundation that that is built upon.
- 17:11[SPEAKER_00]: Is there anything else in regards to the privacy side or who do any swamp that we missed?
- 17:17[SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk to you definitely about some other sectors and the greater Solana ecosystem.
- 17:21[SPEAKER_00]: But before we move on, is there anything else there that you think is worth noting?
- 17:26[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, I think, you know, so generally, who Dini Pay is our product for kind of stink payments, that's something that we see massive growth and I think that's just pointing to something.
- 17:39[SPEAKER_00]: It explains who Dini Pay versus like who Dini Swapman, I guess how those are different, what they're used.
- 17:43[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so who Dini Pay is basically like a Van Mauer request.
- 17:47[SPEAKER_01]: Right, so you're in your friend guard for drinks and, you know, they owe you $30.
- 17:51[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I guess these days is one drink, but you go and you want to pay them.
- 17:57[SPEAKER_01]: Are you want them to pay you?
- 17:58[SPEAKER_01]: I don't like you.
- 17:59[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe you want you as DC on base, right, or you want ETC or whatever.
- 18:04[SPEAKER_01]: So you can go and you can create a payment request.
- 18:07[SPEAKER_01]: You can choose the asset you want to receive and amount.
- 18:11[SPEAKER_01]: and it'll generate a link that you send to them and they can use the link to pay you, but they can pay you in any asset on any of our supported blockchains.
- 18:18[SPEAKER_01]: So you can, you know, use the sole or whatever to pay and they receive what they want to receive.
- 18:27[SPEAKER_01]: The swap is all handled and there's no link between send and recipient.
- 18:32[SPEAKER_01]: So, this is, you know, great for, for invoice payments for businesses, it's great for kind of peer to peer, the Venmo type requests, so that's space where we've seen Massive Growth.
- 18:43[SPEAKER_01]: And just generally also in the API space, who Denise got, we have some people don't know this.
- 18:49[SPEAKER_01]: We've got a full API that anyone can go to the website, sign up on the partner portal.
- 18:56[SPEAKER_01]: Look at the docs and get started and integrate into their product, into their front end, and we're seeing massive growth in that API usage and API integrations.
- 19:06[SPEAKER_00]: Well.
- 19:08[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I think like if you look at even Venmo, right?
- 19:12[SPEAKER_00]: Even Venmo has a private mode or it's like, all right, do you want everyone to see everything that you sent?
- 19:16[SPEAKER_00]: Who you sent it to, how much it is your whole history?
- 19:19[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, no, you know, even they have a privacy side of that.
- 19:21[SPEAKER_00]: So again, it's just like the logical step of how can we scale this to the way that the current institutional side already uses this stuff?
- 19:29[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
- 19:29[SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, it really sounds like that's what you all are doing.
- 19:32[SPEAKER_00]: It's saying, how can we get to that level?
- 19:36[SPEAKER_01]: And one other thing I just want to mention as well was it's a question that we get quite often.
- 19:41[SPEAKER_01]: You know, our company name is Soul Strategies.
- 19:44[SPEAKER_01]: We've always been focused on the Lana, why have we gone in a quiet business that is operating in this cross-chain space?
- 19:52[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, for us it makes a lot of sense that fits into our thesis very well, which is really that it's about that mobility of funds.
- 20:01[SPEAKER_01]: the success of Salana depends on funds being able to move it in order.
- 20:07[SPEAKER_01]: And
- 20:09[SPEAKER_01]: providing that service and owning those rails, that infrastructure ties really well into kind of the valid therapies, the state and peace where it's all about owning kind of the underlying rails, did everything operates on.
- 20:22[SPEAKER_01]: But also 55% of our volume actually touches Solana.
- 20:27[SPEAKER_01]: That's one of the biggest blockchains in our ecosystem that has been used.
- 20:33[SPEAKER_01]: whether it's on a single lake, or it's a sold-to-soul, or salana, salana swap.
- 20:40[SPEAKER_01]: So we seem as a volume there, but it's really about enabling the mobility of fun, because if you build a mode and you try and track funds into a single blockchain ecosystem, that blockchain ecosystem is going to weather a day.
- 20:52[SPEAKER_01]: So being able to move funds in and out is what enables that growth.
- 20:58[SPEAKER_00]: Well, yeah, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there.
- 21:01[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's smart, right?
- 21:03[SPEAKER_00]: It is, from the moment, I think, regardless of if you're a Maxi or this or that, like, at this moment, it is a multi-chain ecosystem, right?
- 21:11[SPEAKER_00]: You have Bitcoin, you have Ethereum, you have all the L2s, you have Solonium, you have all these other L1s.
- 21:16[SPEAKER_00]: There's just a lot out there, so I think it's smart to be able to position yourself.
- 21:20[SPEAKER_00]: And say, hey, let's give everyone access and stuff.
- 21:23[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, at the end of the day, maybe you can kind of guide them and say, hey, this is why we believe and maybe Solana.
- 21:29[SPEAKER_00]: And this is why we really likes Solana.
- 21:31[SPEAKER_00]: But I think being able to serve as everyone is okay, right?
- 21:35[SPEAKER_00]: You can have maybe a favorite or preferred option.
- 21:39[SPEAKER_00]: Well, still interacting with other things.
- 21:41[SPEAKER_00]: So
- 21:42[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, overall, we like that.
- 21:44[SPEAKER_00]: You know, over here, we like it all, right?
- 21:46[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we're not maxes in one way or the other.
- 21:48[SPEAKER_00]: We love Solana.
- 21:49[SPEAKER_00]: And so why we have you guys on here a couple of times a year.
- 21:52[SPEAKER_00]: We love to stay in up to date with the ecosystem.
- 21:53[SPEAKER_00]: But we talked to the eat guys too.
- 21:55[SPEAKER_00]: We talked to some of the most of those developers.
- 21:57[SPEAKER_00]: We talked to some of, you know, even the earliest Bitcoin developers, and we just like getting inside everyone's head to understand like why they're doing what they're doing and what they're seeing and I think it helps the listeners out there who are coming in here, who, you know, work a full time job and don't have time to invest into all of the different things that are going on, then kind of come on here and say, oh, okay, so this is why those builders are doing this is I guess why privacy is getting popular.
- 22:25[SPEAKER_00]: because I think to them at home, it's okay what feels like privacy was just all said blowing up again and they might not understand the why behind it.
- 22:32[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that this helps paint a pretty clear picture for them.
- 22:35[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, well, let's go into some of the other parts, I guess, within just the Solana ecosystem here.
- 22:43[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, again, obviously, you guys are big Solana bowls, hence the name Soul Strategies.
- 22:48[SPEAKER_00]: What
- 22:51[SPEAKER_00]: things that you're noticing on Solana, maybe some of the other areas that are or picking your attention here.
- 22:58[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's very interesting to see kind of the phases of the kind of macro environment on Solana.
- 23:05[SPEAKER_01]: There's very distinct kind of trends that we see.
- 23:09[SPEAKER_01]: You know, about six to 12 months ago, the big trend was proper AMM's proprietary automated market makers.
- 23:17[SPEAKER_01]: It was all the rage and how they were changing market structure, improving swaps.
- 23:22[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the reality is that the best place to trade Solana to USD is on chain on Solana.
- 23:29[SPEAKER_01]: You get better spreads, better execution than you would go into a centralized exchange, which isn't sane, frankly.
- 23:37[SPEAKER_01]: But right now, the big focus in the Solana ecosystem is on performance.
- 23:42[SPEAKER_01]: It's a performance of the always top of mind in Solana.
- 23:46[SPEAKER_01]: What I really love about,
- 23:49[SPEAKER_01]: The ecosystem there from the start, the mindset of the core developers has always been about the status quo is never enough like we always have to evolve and it's I think that is something and it's true of other blockchains to just to be clear it's not like any blockchain is completely static.
- 24:05[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's something that is overlooked by a lot of kind of retail folks that maybe aren't as deep into the kind of inner workings of some of the blockchains, is that the blockchains are changing.
- 24:17[SPEAKER_01]: They're not kind of static one thing that never evolves.
- 24:22[SPEAKER_01]: But Solana is changing
- 24:28[SPEAKER_01]: You know, a couple of quick matrix block times on Solana have come down from 400 milliseconds to whenever this comes out, I think we're probably at 200 milliseconds.
- 24:41[SPEAKER_01]: I'd probably like to deal tomorrow that is happening, but essentially what that means is that
- 24:47[SPEAKER_01]: A block is a group of transactions, the batch of transactions, and not insular and a block can be anywhere between 100 to a couple of files of transactions, usually it's like 2000 transactions.
- 24:59[SPEAKER_01]: Normally, every block is 400 milliseconds apart, so just a number of half a second.
- 25:04[SPEAKER_01]: that has been gradually decreasing over the last month.
- 25:07[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't step, so 350, 300 milliseconds, 250, and now 200 milliseconds.
- 25:12[SPEAKER_01]: So they doubling the speed effectively over the blockchain, which is crazy.
- 25:17[SPEAKER_01]: I can hear driving along on the highway at 50 miles an hour, imagine now you're doing a hundred.
- 25:22[SPEAKER_01]: It's a big difference.
- 25:24[SPEAKER_01]: So basically, instead of every 4.000 milliseconds, you have 2,000 transactions like you'd have 2,000 transactions, they would turn them in a second.
- 25:32[SPEAKER_01]: That's one piece.
- 25:33[SPEAKER_01]: The other is just about two weeks ago.
- 25:35[SPEAKER_01]: There was a feature that was activated on Solana, called TXV1 transaction version 1, which countered two to least actually the second version of transactions.
- 25:47[SPEAKER_01]: V0, that's starting from zero being the original one.
- 25:51[SPEAKER_01]: And then actually a larger transaction, we four times as large.
- 25:55[SPEAKER_01]: So when we say, like, as large, like, people are like, OK, so what we can say $40 instead of $10.
- 26:01[SPEAKER_01]: Now that's not what we mean.
- 26:03[SPEAKER_01]: A transaction on Solana is a set of instructions.
- 26:05[SPEAKER_01]: So it could be sending money from one place to another.
- 26:08[SPEAKER_01]: It could be opening an escrow card, it could be buying an NFT, it could be interacting with any kind of defy protocol.
- 26:16[SPEAKER_01]: But the size of instruction, the amount of instructions that you can fit into a single transaction has quite droopled.
- 26:22[SPEAKER_01]: So four times as much from one megabyte to four megabytes.
- 26:27[SPEAKER_01]: So that's a massive growth.
- 26:29[SPEAKER_01]: And so now you can do twice as fast blocks, four times as much transactions.
- 26:34[SPEAKER_01]: And then the other piece is that the size of a block is bounded by something called computer units, which is basically how complicated is a transaction to execute?
- 26:44[SPEAKER_01]: So if I'm just sending $10, that's really easy for a computer to calculate.
- 26:49[SPEAKER_01]: But if I'm going and I'm depositing acid A into a defy protocol and I'm borrowing acid B and maybe acid C, that's a more complex transaction.
- 26:57[SPEAKER_01]: So a few of those can be executed in the same block before there's a limit, right?
- 27:03[SPEAKER_01]: That limit has also more than doubled in the last year.
- 27:07[SPEAKER_01]: So blocks are twice as large, transactions are four times as large, and the blocks are twice as fast.
- 27:13[SPEAKER_01]: That's all happened in the last year.
- 27:15[SPEAKER_01]: Now what's happening in the next few weeks is even bigger.
- 27:19[SPEAKER_01]: There's a new consensus upgrade that's happening called AlpineGlo.
- 27:24[SPEAKER_01]: So if we look at something in blockchain, we talk about its funality.
- 27:29[SPEAKER_01]: Anality is how long does it take for a transaction to be completely irrevocable, meaning you can never change the outcome or and you can be absolutely certain that the transaction has been executed on some other that takes 32 blocks currently, 32 blocks at four numberless seconds is about 12 seconds, two numberless seconds, six seconds, okay.
- 27:48[SPEAKER_01]: So Alpine Glow is a completely new way of calculating finality that's reducing that to 150
- 27:57[SPEAKER_01]: So we're reducing it not to 10%, not to 5%, but to about 2.5% of the time that it takes before that.
- 28:06[SPEAKER_01]: And 1.5% of the time it took just a month ago.
- 28:10[SPEAKER_01]: So that's like a 40x speed up of the blockchain.
- 28:16[SPEAKER_00]: It's really cool to see crypto scale as time goes on.
- 28:20[SPEAKER_00]: I remember we would talk forever ago back in the space.
- 28:27[SPEAKER_00]: Just about how like slow things are, and people always say, oh, how could we ever get to a point where there could be adoption in this in that?
- 28:34[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's so slow.
- 28:35[SPEAKER_00]: And then they look at Bitcoin in the old days.
- 28:37[SPEAKER_00]: They look at Ethereum in the old days.
- 28:38[SPEAKER_00]: They look at the pricing.
- 28:40[SPEAKER_00]: And now, the cool thing is that growth and acceleration
- 28:45[SPEAKER_00]: increases with like how much we've already scaled if that makes sense.
- 28:50[SPEAKER_00]: Like there is this exponential curve for how how rapidly things are evolving and advancing and it's like, all right, it's a big deal if we go from.
- 29:00[SPEAKER_00]: You know, from, from, I don't know if it takes a minute to 30 seconds and then from 30 seconds to 15 seconds and then 15 seconds to seven seconds and then now we're getting the to the point where we can't even use seconds anymore, we're talking about milliseconds and then we're talking about going from a fraction of a second and milliseconds to an even lower fraction and
- 29:23[SPEAKER_00]: Again, the rate at which it scales from here is exponential and I think that's important because when you go from 10 seconds to 5 seconds, it's still like, okay, well, and oh, that's all right, but what if we go from half a second to 100th of a second, so okay, now you're talking real usable scale will speed at that point and
- 29:45[SPEAKER_00]: Again, if fascinates me, I've been in this space for about a decade just on the reporting side and seeing this happen it always just makes me chuckle because I think if you would have if you would have been able to put yourself in a time machine and go back and tell people this you know what 10 years ago they would have been like, oh, like, yeah, maybe we'll get there we got some big hurdles to get through and then here we are and it's just it never ceases to put a smile on my face.
- 30:10[SPEAKER_01]: No, absolutely.
- 30:10[SPEAKER_01]: It takes me back to that basement example earlier, I told building the foundation.
- 30:15[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what's happening here.
- 30:18[SPEAKER_01]: Just last week, we were at the Dazdeck in New York and Times Square.
- 30:22[SPEAKER_01]: And talk to them about some of their plans for kind of 24, well, not 24, seven, but I think they're doing 24, five or 23, five trading.
- 30:30[SPEAKER_01]: Come in.
- 30:36[SPEAKER_00]: I was going to say they talked about both, I think they're like from my understanding, they want to do 23, 5 and 24, 5 first and then once they get that, like solidified and strong, they're open towards moving to 24, 7 eventually, which is crazy.
- 30:51[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and with that tokenization as well, they're thinking about it, they're talking about it.
- 30:56[SPEAKER_01]: And so really when we look at kind of the foundation, the basement that we're building here, and the skyscraper that's coming on top, what we're preparing for is NASDAQ itself at some point, saying, hey, let's execute trains on chain.
- 31:10[SPEAKER_01]: we're already seeing it with all the various RWA's.
- 31:14[SPEAKER_01]: We have x-docs, we have security ties, we have super-state, we have all these companies that are building tokenized, securities and tokenized stocks.
- 31:25[SPEAKER_01]: More and more of that's happening.
- 31:26[SPEAKER_01]: We've got kind of agentic payments, agentic actions.
- 31:30[SPEAKER_01]: So a lot of on-chain activity is actually
- 31:36[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
- 31:36[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I want to touch on one of the things that you just said when it comes to the NASDAQ and stocks and tokenization because one of the longer-term ideas that you discuss is this idea of bringing traditional securities on-chain and potentially even tokenizing soul strategies on stock at some point in the future.
- 31:56[SPEAKER_00]: We've seen a big push for this recently.
- 32:00[SPEAKER_00]: I want to get your thoughts on that sector, which you kind of are touched on, but I also want to talk to you about these new CFTC and SEC exemptions when it comes to tokenization because that kind of ties into this.
- 32:12[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the space is seen massive advancement just on the last month, again, things are happening so rapidly.
- 32:20[SPEAKER_01]: A year ago, we were talking heavily about tokenization.
- 32:23[SPEAKER_01]: I think it was kind of the buzzword over the first half of 2025.
- 32:27[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
- 32:28[SPEAKER_01]: And everyone was really excited about it.
- 32:31[SPEAKER_01]: I think people still are, but there was a bit of a slowdown in the second half of last year because
- 32:38[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone was anticipating some kind of exemption from the ACC at ended up taking a little longer to come because of clarity.
- 32:46[SPEAKER_01]: I think the ACC was holding back in the hopes that clarity act was going to come through.
- 32:50[SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately, clarity act is still stuck.
- 32:53[SPEAKER_01]: It hasn't mean defeated.
- 32:54[SPEAKER_01]: It's not failed.
- 32:55[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it failed that word recently.
- 32:58[SPEAKER_01]: And some people think that that means it's done for.
- 33:01[SPEAKER_01]: I think we'll see another iteration of clarity act in the future.
- 33:05[SPEAKER_01]: But in the meantime, now we've been given some guidance.
- 33:09[SPEAKER_01]: And when we say tokenization, RWA stocks, securities, all these things, we have to take a step back and think about it from first principles.
- 33:20[SPEAKER_01]: Like, why does it matter?
- 33:22[SPEAKER_01]: Why should we care?
- 33:23[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
- 33:24[SPEAKER_01]: And one piece of it is that it goes back to what we talked about earlier about kind of owning your own wealth, sovereignty argument.
- 33:32[SPEAKER_01]: But being clear, I, as well, securities generally are very regulated.
- 33:38[SPEAKER_01]: They're managed by intermediaries, transfer agents.
- 33:43[SPEAKER_01]: So at the end of the day, there's always going to be some off-chain components to it.
- 33:49[SPEAKER_01]: But then, only your wealth also means controlling how you spend it and how you hard into acts with, right?
- 33:54[SPEAKER_01]: So if you're selling your stocks or you buying stocks,
- 34:00[SPEAKER_01]: Um, we will interact with, because any of these other places, you don't really have transparency into how that order is being rooted, who is executing, who's on the other side of the trade.
- 34:12[SPEAKER_01]: What intermediaries are seeing the order flow potentially acting on it.
- 34:16[SPEAKER_01]: How do you get their execution?
- 34:18[SPEAKER_01]: That's a big piece of it.
- 34:21[SPEAKER_01]: The other aspect that excites me as a non-American, you know, I'm South African originally I live in New Zealand now, and these are countries that we know very English speaking, somewhat US-centric in how we look at, like we attack with other companies, we watch Netflix, we watch American TV shows.
- 34:43[SPEAKER_01]: Most people, when they look about their, I think about their retirement savings, I think about putting money aside, the holy grail is investing in the S&P 500, right?
- 34:52[SPEAKER_01]: The U.S. economy.
- 34:54[SPEAKER_01]: The biggest growing economy in the world.
- 34:57[SPEAKER_01]: So how do you do that when you're in one of these countries?
- 34:59[SPEAKER_01]: It's not as easy as it is for those in the U.S. Then some places it's still relatively straightforward, but usually kind of go through your bank.
- 35:07[SPEAKER_01]: You pay really high brokerage fees.
- 35:11[SPEAKER_01]: Other countries with strict exchange controls make it really difficult to buy U.S. stocks.
- 35:17[SPEAKER_01]: And that is the use case that I find really exciting.
- 35:19[SPEAKER_01]: If you're someone in Brazil or a Mumbai or in Bangkok, and you know you're planning your retirement, you've got 30 years of working on a fair head, you want to start setting aside money, hotling.
- 35:31[SPEAKER_01]: How do you get access to the US economy, to the global economy, or any particular stock that you're interested in at low friction,
- 35:44[SPEAKER_01]: doing that through some kind of trans-fied bank-based brokerage with a four-dollar transaction fee doesn't make sense.
- 35:51[SPEAKER_01]: And that's really a massive use case for tokenization that I think is often overlooked in part, because I think a lot of industries are very US-centric, so this isn't a use case for the average show that.
- 36:02[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
- 36:04[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, it's I use that exact same example because a lot of people don't realize that they don't realize that if you are in different parts of the world, it's not easy to just go out and buy USB stocks, but you want access to the number one financial.
- 36:21[SPEAKER_00]: In the world and you want to be able to get exposure to that and this is kind of an easy way to do that.
- 36:26[SPEAKER_00]: So it benefits both people, right?
- 36:28[SPEAKER_00]: The people can get access to this and the people who are orchestrating this can can kind of capitalize on that opportunity.
- 36:36[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a win-win where I think both sides do benefit, which is exciting.
- 36:42[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, looking at it from the issue as perspective, right?
- 36:47[SPEAKER_01]: We're an aspect trader company, we're trading on the CSE, and from our perspective, we want more shareholders, right?
- 36:55[SPEAKER_01]: We want more voices, we want people to see what we're building, believe in our mission, join us on that ride, and having our stock available to more markets and more investors is appealing to us.
- 37:07[SPEAKER_01]: It just makes sense from our aspects.
- 37:11[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that it does, you know, one of the other things I wanted to talk about before we let you go is I wanted to get into the Solana economics.
- 37:19[SPEAKER_00]: This is a topic that's fascinating, right?
- 37:22[SPEAKER_00]: Because we've seen different people of different opinions on this.
- 37:25[SPEAKER_00]: I think I actually side more with you.
- 37:27[SPEAKER_00]: But there's been basically these ongoing debates about reducing Solana's inflation.
- 37:33[SPEAKER_00]: I believe you stand on the side of you think that Solana's inflation should be reduced.
- 37:38[SPEAKER_00]: Am I right there?
- 37:39[SPEAKER_00]: Or where do you stand on that?
- 37:41[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we did vote in favor of the recent proposal and the previous one, which ultimately failed with the the recent one part, was to double the disinflation rate.
- 37:53[SPEAKER_01]: So basically just steepening the curve.
- 37:56[SPEAKER_01]: But there's a lot of misunderstandings around the economics and the inflation.
- 38:02[SPEAKER_01]: So, while that is how we voted and where we stand, I want to caveat that and kind of explain why, whether it is in what the broader kind of context is.
- 38:14[SPEAKER_01]: Inflation on Solana, people often will quote numbers like 6% or something like that.
- 38:19[SPEAKER_01]: It's like 4% right now.
- 38:21[SPEAKER_01]: But what it is really, inflation is a transfer of wealth from unstaked soul to staked soul, right?
- 38:29[SPEAKER_01]: UNI, we can buy soul, we can stake it with our favorite validator, which is Soul Strategies, of course.
- 38:35[SPEAKER_01]: And then we earn staking rewards.
- 38:38[SPEAKER_01]: And those staking rewards are newly created soul that are created by the protocol.
- 38:42[SPEAKER_01]: And all it means is that if you're staking, you're not getting diluted, you're not losing to inflation, but you're getting new tokens.
- 38:49[SPEAKER_01]: and you're actually gaining because you're getting the share of tokens of all the soil in existence, but not all of the soil is stacked.
- 38:57[SPEAKER_01]: That's why it's taking rewards are 6% or 5% and inflation is 4%.
- 39:01[SPEAKER_01]: So you're actually making a profit because you're getting that share that the unsteaked soil should be earning, but it is.
- 39:07[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
- 39:08[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the first thing.
- 39:10[SPEAKER_01]: Now, the second thing is people say inflation is harming the value of soul, of the token soul, or I'm not the son of a bunch.
- 39:18[SPEAKER_01]: And these are two different things that we also have to be clear about.
- 39:21[SPEAKER_01]: Now, it may be true to some degree, but I disagree with this severity to which it's true.
- 39:26[SPEAKER_01]: There's this argument that was made last year famous, he called the leaky bucket argument.
- 39:32[SPEAKER_01]: which is essentially that people earn statement rewards, so their own taxes, so then they sell soul to pay the taxes and that causes downward pressure on the soul.
- 39:42[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, first of all, we've, I think it's been established now that staying rewards in many places, and liquid staying rewards in particular are not taxable on receipt.
- 39:53[SPEAKER_01]: It's only under disposal.
- 39:57[SPEAKER_01]: Don't quote me on that, not tax advice, disclaimers.
- 40:01[SPEAKER_01]: But the amount of forced selling from that is in consequential to the total volume of sole trading that occurs globally on a daily basis.
- 40:12[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I still think it makes sense to reduce inflation and to accelerate the reduction, but I think most of that is probably a superficial or aesthetic argument.
- 40:22[SPEAKER_01]: Those people think it matters.
- 40:25[SPEAKER_01]: Whether we reduce it or not, in terms of pure economic mathematical terms, I'm not convinced that it has a significant impact.
- 40:35[SPEAKER_00]: The example that I've seen from people when it comes to this is they say we'll look at the market cap from the 2020 run to the 2024-2025 run, right?
- 40:44[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's market cap peaked out at around 70-ish million.
- 40:49[SPEAKER_00]: I think that can 2021.
- 40:50[SPEAKER_00]: And then it's market cap was nearly double that when it came to 2024-2025.
- 40:55[SPEAKER_00]: For that 2025 peak, it was at a 135-said million.
- 40:57[SPEAKER_00]: I met billion.
- 41:02[SPEAKER_00]: So the market cap there almost doubled, but obviously you didn't see that doubling in terms of price.
- 41:07[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the example that I had had always heard from people.
- 41:11[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, is that the right way to look at it?
- 41:12[SPEAKER_00]: Because if that is the case, then there's some impact from inflation, but maybe that's just not the right way to look at it.
- 41:20[SPEAKER_01]: It's not, it's not.
- 41:22[SPEAKER_01]: And I'll explain why exactly.
- 41:23[SPEAKER_01]: And this is a, like it's a, it's a mistake.
- 41:32[SPEAKER_01]: So the issue is that when Solana launched, there was like any blockchain-made launches there's kind of like an air drop, there's an early sale validator's got to buy some VCs, got to buy some famously Solana, we'll complain about it as the VC chain, right?
- 41:50[SPEAKER_01]: And then some were set aside for the foundation.
- 41:53[SPEAKER_01]: So the foundation got a whole bunch of soil which was used to stay to support validators to fund ecosystem development and that still sits with the foundation.
- 42:03[SPEAKER_01]: Now the mistake is that if you look in the source code of the Solana block chain, the foundation addresses were marked as non-circulating.
- 42:15[SPEAKER_01]: And so the question, the issue with market cap is really a question of circulating supply.
- 42:21[SPEAKER_01]: If we look at the total supply of salana, not just circulating, total supply, all so-and-existent, so-all launched with 500 million sold in 2020, March 2020.
- 42:33[SPEAKER_01]: They burned 10-11 million a month or two later because of some mess-up with the liquidity with Binance, which was also a big controversy at the time, overblown a little bit.
- 42:44[SPEAKER_01]: And now we can see on chain right now there's about 600, I don't know the exact number.
- 42:50[SPEAKER_01]: If I had to guess, I think about 620 million.
- 42:52[SPEAKER_01]: Sol in existence.
- 42:54[SPEAKER_01]: So in six and a half years, it's gone from 500 million to 620 million.
- 43:00[SPEAKER_01]: So what's that about 25% inflation and six years?
- 43:05[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's average of 4% a year, right?
- 43:08[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but yeah, but that.
- 43:14[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's because the circulating supply is what's changed.
- 43:18[SPEAKER_01]: What happened was a launch of 500 million, but let's say 200 million is marked as non-circulating supply.
- 43:27[SPEAKER_01]: Because effectively, the foundation so is set aside, it's used for staking validators.
- 43:33[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of the VC so was locked up for many years, so that's also considered non-circulating at the time when it launched.
- 43:41[SPEAKER_01]: So now you only have 300 million solders actually circulating and that's what's being used to calculate the market cap over the years that has unlocked so the circulating supply has doubled but the actual saw and existence has not and that's actually the source of that difference.
- 44:00[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not necessarily the inflation rate that is causing that expansion.
- 44:05[SPEAKER_00]: It's coming from other sources that maybe aren't as consistent or routine as the regular inflation rate.
- 44:13[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it's a mix, right?
- 44:15[SPEAKER_01]: It's a mistake to have defined it as non-socrating, because the foe was not locked.
- 44:22[SPEAKER_01]: Your relationship was never locked.
- 44:24[SPEAKER_01]: So it wasn't non-socrating.
- 44:26[SPEAKER_01]: It's an arbitrary definition.
- 44:28[SPEAKER_01]: So, if you look at fully diluted market cap, yeah, that difference is much smaller, and that's really the value we should be using.
- 44:35[SPEAKER_00]: Got it.
- 44:36[SPEAKER_00]: I think that that makes sense.
- 44:38[SPEAKER_00]: I think that that makes sense, and that's something that we've seen in talks with an our communities people have talked about it.
- 44:44[SPEAKER_00]: So, I think that just that conversation helps put things in perspective for people and helps them.
- 44:50[SPEAKER_00]: I think look at things the right way because it is easy to just look at those numbers or see a Twitter post or an exposed and be like, oh, well, I'm going to get all up in arms and and front or because of that, but that definitely helps paint the perspective a little bit more there.
- 45:07[SPEAKER_00]: Are there?
- 45:07[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you go.
- 45:08[SPEAKER_00]: Are there?
- 45:09[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, God.
- 45:09[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
- 45:10[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sorry.
- 45:10[SPEAKER_01]: I just want to say if you go to just to the Solana Explorer explorer dot Solana dot com.
- 45:16[SPEAKER_01]: And it takes a couple seconds but on the top left it loads the supply data and I'll tell you the percentage circulating.
- 45:21[SPEAKER_01]: And the sentence is all right there and you can see exactly kind of what the numbers are because these are baked into the chain, into the way that the code calculates its own supply.
- 45:33[SPEAKER_01]: And as a validator, that's why I know about this because, you know, we've looked at the source code me and literally, when it launched, there was a list of wallets, which are the foundation wallets that were marked, these are non-circulating.
- 45:46[SPEAKER_01]: And that's why I say it's arbitrary.
- 45:48[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
- 45:48[SPEAKER_01]: So they're not locked.
- 45:49[SPEAKER_01]: It's not how clear to base unlock them.
- 45:52[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
- 45:53[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there are any other tokenomic changes that you think should happen or that you'd want to see happen?
- 46:01[SPEAKER_01]: It's tricky.
- 46:01[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:02[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:02[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:03[SPEAKER_00]: There was another part.
- 46:04[SPEAKER_00]: There was another part.
- 46:05[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:05[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:07[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:07[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:08[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:08[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:09[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:10[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:11[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:12[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:13[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:13[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:14[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:15[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:16[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:17[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:18[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:19[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:20[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:21[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:22[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:24[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:24[SPEAKER_01]: There was another part.
- 46:26[SPEAKER_01]: But a proposal we had recently, which we voted for in panel having some second thoughts on, but it's the resource-based fee, which is effectively that the cost of a transaction should directly correlate to the complexity of the transaction, which is not the case at the moment on Solana.
- 46:49[SPEAKER_01]: The way it was proposed, I think had some flaws, but in principle, I think that is a good direction to think about how that should be pressed.
- 47:00[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
- 47:01[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I got one more question for you.
- 47:03[SPEAKER_00]: We appreciate your time.
- 47:06[SPEAKER_00]: As we may be moving to this next stage of the market, right?
- 47:10[SPEAKER_00]: People are calling it the next cycle, the next run, the next stage, whatever you want to call it.
- 47:14[SPEAKER_00]: I guess as we move into this next area for crypto is a hole in, in this case, Solana specifically, what do you think fuels Solana?
- 47:23[SPEAKER_00]: What do you think acts as that catalyst for Solana that really propels it to where I think a lot of people want it to be and into that next stage of the future?
- 47:34[SPEAKER_01]: That's a great question.
- 47:35[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's really, it's the community.
- 47:37[SPEAKER_01]: There's such a strong community of builders around Solana and such a sense of kind of, you know, we're building something really important and valuable here, that sense of purpose.
- 47:51[SPEAKER_01]: where, you know, it's really builders that are focused on a mission and a mission that is not just means and NFTs, but a mission of building something real for the financial system.
- 48:03[SPEAKER_01]: And that I think is driving interest, but also belief into the ecosystem.
- 48:09[SPEAKER_01]: And you see institutions and these big organizations that are saying, well, where do we build, where do we go?
- 48:15[SPEAKER_01]: And they see, hey, they're
- 48:21[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, they're backing themselves back in the chain.
- 48:24[SPEAKER_01]: That's where we should be focusing.
- 48:27[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
- 48:28[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Michael, listen, we appreciate your time.
- 48:32[SPEAKER_00]: Where can people get more involved?
- 48:33[SPEAKER_00]: If they want to learn about, or learn more about what you're doing, and what soul strategies is doing, where can they follow you along for?
- 48:41[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so, I mean, our website obviously SoulStrategy.io.
- 48:44[SPEAKER_01]: They can follow us on X, the SoulStrategy's account, my X, which is just Michael, I'm just going to have it.
- 48:51[SPEAKER_01]: And WhoDiniSwap.com to check out WhoDiniSwap as well.
- 48:55[SPEAKER_00]: Perfect.
- 48:56[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you heard it here first, everyone.
- 48:59[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you all for tuning in.
- 49:00[SPEAKER_00]: This has been another great episode of The Crypto 101 Podcast.
- 49:03[SPEAKER_00]: And we'll see all of you at the same time, same place next week.
- 49:07[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you once again.
- 49:08[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.