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bankless_Davids_Take__What_I_Learned_at_Solana_Breakpoint

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Speaker A: Bankless Nation welcome to David's takes. David's takes is a semi regular segment on bankless where I write an article for the Bankless newsletter and I read it to you here on the Bankless podcast. For all of you out there like me, who can't read or just prefer audio content, this take is everything I learned at Solana Breakpoint. Dear Bankless nation, I just returned for my fifth and last conference tour of 2024. The pursuit of knowledge, relationships and experiences takes me to some interesting places all over the world, and I am blessed that I'm able to turn my travels into interesting content for you. The Bankless Nation this last tour was a little bit different than my typical crypto conference endeavors. For the first time ever, I went to a non ethereum conference, and I'm not talking about a generalist conference like permissionless, which covers the entire industry. I went to Solana Breakpoint, which is produced by the Solana foundation. Much like how Devconnect or Devcon is organized by the Ethereum foundation, it's hard for me to get a sense of reality these days as Elon continually changes the Twitter algorithm and the Internet. Meta has shown the exploitability of web, two platforms to optimize for engagement. As someone with deep ties to the Ethereum community, my only perceptions of Solana is through Twitter, which is a terrible lens for viewing anything these days and especially in crypto where tribes continually to fight in the arena of crypto Twitter to distort perception to their favor. So my ethereum circles view Solana from the outside. Crypto Twitter can't provide a true reality of Solana, so what is there left for me to do other than to go to breakpoint myself and get the vibe straight from the source? Bankless nation. Here is everything I learned at Solana Breakpoint, but first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible super fast. We're going to speedrun these. Here we go. The first thing I wanted to learn while attending Solana breakpoint is who is the Solana community? This was my main area of inquiry. Who does the Solana ecosystem attract and why? What is the makeup of the Solana community? The answer is very clearly a split between low level systems engineers and investors. Solana has attracted a community of engineers that Ethereum was not able to nerd snipe. These are x Apple x Tesla x SpaceX type of engineers who are familiar with the relationship between hardware and software. They are highly technical optimizers with experience in their field. Before coming to Solana. Solana provides them the clay that they can work with in a capacity that makes sense to them and in ways Ethereum did not. In fact, some of the priorities of the Ethereum community likely appear nonsensical and a waste of time to these types of engineers, who have already been imprinted by their past work and experiences before entering crypto in the last cycle. This dichotomy is probably why Chris Bernitski identifies Ethereum as optimists or ideologically motivated, and the Solana community are pragmatists. To me, the pragmatists of crypto likely find a cozy home in the space between hardware and software, as that is the layer in which crypto networks operate in which the ideologically motivated focus was more exclusively at the open source software side of things, software almost exclusively where values and governance and identity can be codified. If someone whose perception of the world is dominated through the lens of crypto Twitter heard that I David was going to Solana breakpoint, they would probably grab their popcorn and think, ooh, David's going behind enemy lines. In reality, the Solana community is just another crypto community. The average person that makes up crypto tribes do not think in these tribal terms. Hackers go to both Ethereum and Solana hackathons, and then they also go to Starknet and Nier and Chainlink hackathons, too. Some builders choose to stay in one ecosystem because they found a problem that they would like to commit to. I met teams like this, like the teams from Marinade Finance, a Solana staking automation platform, and I met two of the dev duos behind Tiny Dancer, the main effort behind developing a Solana lite client. Both teams expressed me their appreciation from the content that they've received from bankless over the years and the tiny dancer duo specifically for getting them into crypto in the first place. These interactions that I receive at crypto conferences, in which people tell me that they got into crypto through the content that Ryan and I have produced on this podcast, and the gratitude that they have for the guidance they've received along the way, is something that is endlessly motivating for what we do here at bankless. Every time I take a trip to a conference, I come back with pockets full of memories that I immediately have to node sync with Ryan about. Because if he didn't have me to share the difference in vibes that exist between the in real life conferences and the fake Internet arena of Crypto Twitter, he wouldn't know about the immense amount of positivity and good vibes that exists in the in real life context of crypto, no matter what the conference is. This is all to say that the in real life Solana community is not that much different from the in real life Ethereum community, and it's the much more extreme Internet leaders of both communities that define the Internet native identities of these ecosystems. So what was the vibe of Solana breakpoint? This is the third Solana breakpoint to occur, the first being at the absolute froth of the 2021 market when sole price was literally at its $250 plus picotop. And then the second Solana breakpoint was the week before FTX crashed. It's safe to say that Solana Breakpoint has never really been hosted under stable conditions up until now. This third Solana breakpoint is the first time that breakpoint has been hosted after the excitement from the bull market is gone and the scar that is SBF has left. In my opinion, it's the first time that Solana has been able to get true signal from the community that breakpoint attracts, since in prior years it was drowned out by froth and scammers in the Solana ecosystem. If you can't remember, the Solana app layer during the 2021 bull market was not a safe place to beat. I wasn't at these first two breakpoints, so I'm kind of shooting from the hip here. These are takes that I've generated after talking to those who did go to these breakpoints. For these reasons. This third rendition of Solana breakpoint interested me the most. It felt like the best time to actually go get signal about Solana that wasn't drowned out by short term tourists that Solana attracted during the bull. The vibe of Solana breakpoint had notes that was familiar with my early days of Ethereum, but with some additional different flavors as well. First, there was a pretty clear sense that the Solana community feels like they're sitting on gold. They know that they've got something the world will one day want, and this sense of pre rich conviction was definitely present. I wouldn't say that this vibe was ubiquitous. It was definitely expressed by a minority where the rest of the conference attendees were more indifferent to that aspect, but it was present nonetheless. This vibe naturally brought in a sense of optimism and excitement for the future, which I definitely remember feeling during the novelty of my early Ethereum days, especially during my early years at ETH Denver 2018 and 2019. The production of Solana Breakpoint also stood out to me. It was extremely Apple like in the polish branding and programming to the point that the creative director of the Solana foundation must have been doing that intentionally. This also checks out, since Apple's products are known for maximizing the capabilities and synergies between hardware and software. The vibe matches the content featured on the main stage was all about scaling, scaling, scaling. If there's one bit of Solana breakpoint content to consume to catch the vibe, it's the hour and a half opening presentation by a various handful of Solana leaders. It was hosted on Halloween, which is why Anatoly is in a green dragon costume. It was also funny to hear direct jabs at Ethereum articulated during the keynote presentation. At a handful of instances, jokes about not needing any layers and jabs at Ethereum alignment are actually a pretty core part of Solana DNA at this point, I would say this is the part in which crypto Twitter has bled into Solana culture, and it's the part that I find the least resonance with. I think the Solana identity has largely been shaped by having to survive post FTX collapse in the Ethereum community, twisting the knife about the rampant extraction culture in the Solana app layer, and the claimed incoherence of the monolithic scaling strategy. The Ethereum community was not nice to Solana in the time in which Solana was down bad the most. And it was at this moment when the Solana community grit its teeth, dug in chewed glass, and then dug itself out of the narrative shithole it found itself in. The narrative around Solana was so bad post FTX that it became existential. VC's stopped funding Solana based projects just based on the fact that it was building on Solana. The sole market cap was at $4 billion, less than half of the 2018 to 2019 ETH market cap, bottom of $10 billion in which Ethereum was also faced with an existential concern about its ability to fund itself. I'm pretty sure this is when Solana leadership took a direct, hands on approach to fixing the Solana narrative, since it was the thing that was threatening the Solana project the most. This is when the Mert reply guy ratio army started to kick in, and when you would find Anatoly replying to literally every single tweet about Solana, good or bad. And this is when Solana learned that it could develop narratives and memes that could revitalize the community around it. And then it did. To their credit, it totally worked. The narrative around Solana has found new meaning, new heights, and an insane level engagement on Twitter. And to our fault, our being the Ethereum community by attempting to, quote, finish Solana off by conflating Solana with FTX as much as possible. The Ethereum community has a large role in creating the negative environment that Solana had to rebuild itself in. Now, Solana has emerged from the bear market still intact, and the entire Solana project now understands Ethereum to be no friend of it, and as a result, we find jabs and shade thrown at Ethereum on the main stage of Solana's yearly conference. I'm likely focusing too much on this aspect, but the collective psychology of crypto tribes is one of the things that fascinates me the most about this industry. And while I often find myself playing tribal games just like everyone else, it's also a reminder of how we can all be better, even if our layer ones are fundamentally in direct competition with each other. So what is Solana excited about? There's one answer that stands head and shoulders above the rest to the question what is Solana community excited about? And that is Fire dancer. Fire Dancer is a brand new Solana client built by the Jump Crypto team. The original Solana client, built by the Solana foundation, has a bunch of tech debt and is generally unoptimized. The firedancer client is promised to bring a massive improvement to Solana network performance. Jump crypto, as a vision of jump Capital are all highly technical engineers and traders, so if anyone can build a Solana client that is optimized for high frequency trading type activities, it's them. The fire dancer client can be considered a big network upgrade to Solana Solana 2.0, if you will, akin to the ethereum excitement as something like EIP 1559 or the merge, except focus on performance. The fire dancer testnet was announced at Breakpoint, much to the excitement of the entire community. Exploring what this means for Solana and validator economics is something outside of my knowledge, and perhaps something we can explore on bankless. But the TL doctor is that Solana gets huge performance upgrades. At least that's what I'm told. Firedancer also unlocks a hugely important property of Solana, which is becoming a multi client network. Single client networks are fragile and prone to downtime. With Firedancer, Solana gets a second client, meaningfully increasing its robustness. Granted, having a network that is one part firedancer and one part the older Solana client from the foundation is actually not going to work, since the whole network will be bottlenecked by the older client. But in my conversation with Austin, he said that the suggested architecture is that the firedancer client operators run the older Solana client as a fallback, with Firedancer as the primary. So you run both, but fire dancer is the one that's really live. And then if there's a bug in fire dancer, then you switch back over to the old one. Kind of like the idea of if an escalator breaks, it just turns into stairs. The other thing that I thought was interesting that I saw out of Solana breakpoint was Solana's Token 22 package. Software package nothing to do with Token 2049. Token 22 is a token software enhancement package that comes out of the box for Solana, and it was developed in the year 2022 and released in 2023, which is why it's named like that. This software package brings a ton of additional functionality to Solana tokens, including custom permissions and confidential transactions, aka privacy, which is pretty cool. It's pretty damn cool. They have privacy on the layer one. It's not privacy on the layer one. It's like opt in confidential transactions. It's like conditional privacy. And then the custom permissions is you can create a permissioned environment for certain rule sets. For further rabbit holes on what makes the Solana community excited, listen to the second half of my conversation with Austin and Anatoly at breakpoint. In conclusion, am I bullish Solana? Solana has certainly captured more of my attention lately. So what's the deal? Is bankless finally bullish on Solana? Or is David's attention truly being captured by the Solana community engagement attacking him inside of the arena of Twitter narrative warfare campaigns of which Solana has learned with deadly precision in the last year? Or is it something else? To be honest, I don't have an answer here. Chris Brunsky recently attempted to try and shoehorn me into either bullish or bearish soul on Twitter, which I was frustrated by how I intend on engaging with the Solana community in the future. I will let the future decide. I do know that I vibe with the Ethereum community at a very deep level and the part of the spirit of Ethereum I find meaningfully absent in the Solana community. It was disheartening to see a fully packed room during a panel conversation on Solana validator economics. And then when the next panel came to discuss the future of Solana community governance, the room totally emptied out. Perhaps it was as if the Solana project has never meaningfully invested in community ownership and meaningful decentralization. So why would anyone attend a panel about governance? Or maybe these conversations are just getting started and I'm selling this part of Solana short. Time will tell. As for now, that was everything I learned at salon breakpoint. Thanks for listening.