Original Title: "David at Solana Breakpoint | Anatoly & Austin"

Compiled by: Joyce, BlockBeats

Editor's Note:

After Solana Breakpoint 2023, Blankless host David interviewed Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Solana Foundation's strategic director Austin Federa.

In the interview, the three discussed the evolution of Breakpoint, Solana's development over the past year, and the new product Fire Dancer launched by Solana. David also asked Anatoly and Austin about their views on the relationship between Solana and Ethereum, and further discussed issues related to Solana's governance. This interview was released on the Blankless official YouTube channel, and BlockBeats compiled the video content as follows:

David: I'm at Salana Breakpoint in Amsterdam, this is the third Breakpoint. The first Breakpoint was in Lisbon in the second half of 2021, at the peak of the bull market bubble, followed by Lisbon again in 2022, before the FTX crash. Now we're at a new venue, in Amsterdam for the third Solana Breakpoint. The atmosphere this time is a bit different, as we're currently in the trough of a bear market, but of course we may be coming out of it soon.

Many of those who participated in the 2021 Salana Breakpoint did not wait for the third Sohana Breakpoint when the price of SOL exceeded $200. Instead, new members make up the majority of the Salana community.

Over the past year, I have been curious about Solana and have tried to learn more about it. I believe that the proper way to understand it is not through the cryptocurrency community on Twitter or within the Ethereum community. I decided to come to Amsterdam early to personally understand Solana Breakpoint. In this episode, I had a conversation with Solana founder Anatole and Austin from the Solana Foundation, mainly to feel the atmosphere of Solana Breakpoint, understand the significance of this conference to the Solana community, and the reasons why people are interested in Solana in its current state.

I will do my best to compare these contents with the Ethereum world that the audience of this podcast may be familiar with. For example, Solana Fire Dancer is somewhat similar in importance to EIP 1559 or Ethereum merge, at least a major protocol upgrade that the Solana community is interested in. I will do my best to compare the evolution and progress in Solana and use Ethereum as a reference framework for better understanding by the audience. If you are interested in the latest situation of Solana, or if you were unable to attend Breakpoint and just want to get a feel for it, then this episode is for you.

Breakpoint's Development History

David: Please introduce Breakpoint?

Anatole & Austin: This is an annual conference hosted by the Salana Foundation, aimed at bringing the community together for discussions and dialogues on some important topics we are facing. Firstly, it is a developer conference, where we will also be releasing a lot of news and announcements.

The first Breakpoint was held in Lisbon in 2021. It just emerged from the epidemic, which is a bit like the origin of the Solana network, which appeared when the world was locked down. The idea was in the spring of 21, we were considering whether we could find a place in the world that could accommodate enough people to travel and gather all the people who had previously only built together online. Most of these people had never met before. And we hope to have 2,000 people come to Lisbon immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic.

David: What was the atmosphere like at the first Breakpoint?

Anatole & Austin: Just like Consensus 2017. Some developers contacted us and we gave a series of talks on security and programming. At the event, a group of people gathered together, trying to understand or pay attention to certain content. Like the hacker home, this concept received positive feedback after the event and we decided to continue organizing such small gatherings, forming a series of events around the world. Although during this time, the price of SOL may have reached its peak and started to decline, the activity of the developer community has been increasing. People continue to release code, build new products, and so on. In this year, the community formed a very strong core.

During the second Breakpoint, about 60 gaming companies participated in the game day. They were all releasing various new games and so on. The atmosphere on site was very good, and people were building all kinds of things. Then, at the end of the event, specifically at the closing party, I saw a lot of tweets about the FTX crash. This happened at the end of the event, not before. So I think the reason we are still here is because those developers stayed. They actually saw the value of this technology and continued to develop it. I think this is the true purpose of all these conferences, all these events, and hackathons.

David: So we are currently in the third Breakpoint of 2023. How would you describe the evolution of Breakpoint up until now?

Anatole & Austin: Last year we had an event called Mev Camp, and many of the participants said they gained a lot of value from it, just like the community that focuses on high-performance chains. Therefore, they will officially run Mev Camp here as part of Breakpoint. Block Zero is a validator conference that started in advance. We saw Breakpoint start with 90% organized by the foundation, and this year it may be 65% organized by the foundation, and next year it may be 45%. This is a long journey. It can be said that the foundation's role here is only part of it, not all of it. The foundation is beginning to hand over the increasingly large core components of this conference to the ecosystem. The ecosystem of developers and builders is strong enough to organize large-scale events that attract their own audience, which is really great.

This year, there is more time than Breakpoint 1 and 2, so more emphasis is placed on visual effects. Our Foundation's Creative Director, Rose, played an important role in collaborating with Raj, and there is also an Event Director, Ellie, from Netflix. Therefore, the conference is improving in many ways, growing through more participants and greater decentralization.

There are also some new faces among the community members, most of whom are developers and engineers from other ecosystems. We are starting to see more and more people getting involved in researching the community and other networks, and taking Solana more seriously.

Solana Development and Its Relationship with Ethereum

David: What impact has the bear market over the past year had on the Solana community atmosphere?

Anatole: More gray hair (laughs). For me, this has been the most difficult year, a bit like the most painful year, because it's been so tough. It's not like a power outage or something where you have an engineering problem you want to solve and then you find yourself a little behind. But it's really cool to see so many people liking Solana, and I'll just keep putting out my code and products because that's what they're paying attention to, the people who really create all the value, like creating communities, they carry the whole network. I appreciate everyone who shows up.

Austin: Salana's DeFi has made great progress this year, and all the work planned for 2022 has already been launched this year. With the new version of Jupiter and the features it can achieve, such as Margin Fi and some new Orca products they have been building, they will be launched this week. I think it's not about thinking about DeFi 2.0, but focusing on the new generation of Salana DeFi and the team's work on multi-signature and code-based projects. When I see these teams persistently dedicated to Salana, still building and constantly launching impressive projects, it's a real test for me. They have done what everyone tells you to do, which is to persist in building during the downturn.

David: What are the community's current areas of focus?

Anatole: I think you can see from the focus between Solana's conference and Ethereum that the discussion on scalability has obviously decreased, right? Many companies are focusing on consumer-facing things. From my perspective and the messages of others, we have already solved the scalability problem. Therefore, we can focus on consumers and products as long as we attract people who believe or can verify that it is basically effective. I think the discussion in this area is much less compared to that. Focusing on consumers and products is really difficult. In contrast, building infrastructure is easier and easier to finance.

Overall, the excitement in the industry is shifting from scalability issues to the development of consumer products. The challenge and excitement lies in striving to achieve a fit between the product and the market, and continuously attracting users.

Austin: I believe what can excite the community is consumer-centric applications. The Solana community shares this understanding, that "we have been waiting for consumer-facing applications." So we are also focused on issues such as user experience, UI, regulation, and so on.

There is a kind of excuse-seeking mentality in the cryptocurrency industry. For example, there used to be a notion that we were ready to build consumer applications, but suddenly we couldn't continue because we couldn't use USDC in New York. However, many founders are attracted to the Slana ecosystem and are more inclined to say, "Well, I'm going to build it even if it's not exactly what I envisioned." For example, Sling was launched here yesterday. It is a peer-to-peer Venmo built on a stablecoin based on the US dollar. It cannot be used in New York, but the founders said, "Yes, it works in 30 countries, it's a bit of a shame that it doesn't work in New York." This is an atmosphere of "build and launch, then solve problems later." In many internet companies, people seem to be really worried about building perfect products before launching them, but the willingness to experiment in production has always been part of the non-consumer applications in the cryptocurrency industry, and now we see more of this turning towards consumers. I think this is a change.

David: What types of consumer-facing applications are worth paying attention to if people want to explore them?

Anatole: The newly launched Sling is very interesting. Drip House is creating free NFT collectibles that are time-limited rather than quantity-limited, which is particularly interesting to me. There is also Helium's $5 mobile plan.

Austin: The Fuse account abstract wallet is also quite cool, you can basically set up multiple devices that belong to your own multi-signature. I think to achieve these, the team needs a lot of design work and consideration of complex user experience, integrating them into a product that can improve security and usability is quite rare.

David: What do you think about the long-term relationship between Salana and Ethereum?

Austin: First of all, I don't think we should see Ethereum as a direct competitor. Of course, I think there are many different ways to build things based on Ethereum and things based on Salana. I know there are some interesting ideas about using Solana as L2, and I hope to see people who use Ethereum also use Salana to do what they do best.

Actually, Code Wallet has already built a similar system. They have established a complete LTU (Layer 2) architecture on Salana to ensure that even if the Salana mainnet is offline, they can still conduct transactions.

In this case, they maintain their own Merkle tree so that they can update a large amount of information offline, and once network block production resumes, they can push these changes. These are some use cases for maintaining offline functionality and ensuring continuous transfers.

Austin: Salana's governance model is very different from other network operating models. Many networks either have no governance or have direct token-weighted governance. In Salana, validators are a voting group, and their voting rights are proportional to their equity weight. Therefore, if you disagree with a validator's vote, you can pledge your tokens to another validator. Considering that Salana's unbinding period is about two and a half to three days, this is a fairly fast operation that can change the voting method. This is partly because we launched the SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) program this year, which is basically similar to SIP or EIP and ERC. Now there are similar programs on Salana, which is great. Governance discussions arise because we have multiple validator clients and suddenly there is no single source of truth, right?

David: "What is Solana?" The question has never been answered.

Austin: To be precise, Salana has been a Github repository for a long time, right? And Ethereum is no longer just a Github repository, but multiple Github repositories that you can all run. If you want to make changes, there must be a process here. For example, the Prism team cannot just YOLO (meaning to try boldly) a change, and the Lighthouse team cannot just YOLO a change.

Therefore, governance is actually a side effect of this process. I believe that this process means we need a more formal process to accept proposals, because now the Fire Dancer team, Gedo team, Solana Labs team, the SIG team building another validator client, and other teams that may join later to build clients and state proofs, they all must, even if they disagree, at least know that this will happen and reach some kind of majority consensus on the adoption of this proposal.

However, the real adoption began with Justin Bonds, who was initially very surprised by this. Salana's governance is actually quite powerful in terms of functional activation and adoption. Therefore, unless 80% of the equity is upgraded, new features or versions of the network cannot be activated. Therefore, we have very good implicit governance. We do not currently have good explicit governance, which is the focus of all these discussions.

David: Yes, I think in the Ethereum world, it may correspond to a meeting of all core developers, or someone like Tim Bako. Hey, here's an EIP, let's discuss it for six months, right? This is part of what Salana is developing, and it's still in the early stages.

Austin: In the past two years, it has indeed been relatively weak. However, for example, 7064 has begun to be able to do state proof and lightweight client work. There are about 500 comments in the Github repository, and engineers have been discussing these issues back and forth in terms of architecture and design. But the real work was not completed until the past nine months, and I think a lot of the previous work was done on Discord. Discord is difficult to track, so it has moved to Github and other places. Discord is useful in solving temporary short-term problems, but it is difficult to use to solve long-term problems.

Next Breakpoint may be held in Singapore

David: What is your next focus after preparing Breakpoint?

Austin: One of the next major projects I will be working on is the promotion and ecosystem coordination of Token 2022. We did a lot of work last year to ensure good ecosystem support. In addition, there are some teams researching a proposal for the RWA standard, so I will be responsible for managing a part of that process. The events team will begin preparing for Breakpoint 2024.

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