Solana's Explosive Growth Just Hit Critical Mass with Nick Ducoff

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Currently settlement for a transaction on Solan it's about four
hundred milliseconds, but there's another new technology being built which
will re reduce that to about one hundred fifty milliseconds.
And the reason that is so important is two hundred
milliseconds is the point at which a human feels something
is generally instantaneous. Since the first Solona ETFs went live
a few weeks ago, they have seen inflows every single

(00:20):
trade and day since, and I think it really shows
the demand and interest in Solana, which is really exciting
to see.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Why did you pick Solana, you know, as opposed to
go work and there's a lot of blockchain projects out there.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Bilan is the fastest and cheapest, most scalable Layer one blockchain.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
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more about Uphold and all the great services they offer,
visit the link in the description. Hey folks, welcome into
the Thinking Crypto podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward and
joining me today is Nick Dukof, who is the head
of Institutional Growth at the Salona Foundation. Nick, great to
have you.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, Nick, I am excited to dive into the latest
and greatest around Solana. Lots happening in the Slana ecosystem,
but I would love to kick it off with your
background tell us a bit about yourself, where you're from,
and your professional background.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Sure well, thanks again for having me on the podcast.
Really excited to join you today. My name is Nick
dukov I, Lead Institutional Growth, Salona Foundation. I joined the
Salana Foundation in the summer of twenty twenty three, so
about six months after FTX, which was a really interesting
time to join Salana and it's incredible to see how
far the ecosystem has come since then. Prior to joining Solana,

(02:36):
I was a venture capitalist working at a Jill's Fund
leading crypto investments, and prior to that I had a
couple careers. But I started my career as a securities lawyer,
working out deals like the MySpace acquisition by Fox. I
then left the practice in twenty ten to take a
shot at entrepreneurship, and it was very fortunate that I

(02:57):
had a couple modest successes. I started a company with
some guys in twenty ten and we sold it in
twenty fourteen, and then I did another one in twenty
seventeen that we sold in twenty twenty one. And I
have been interested in crypto since the early twenty tens.

(03:18):
The co founders of my first company were actually big,
bigcoinners they started. They went on to start a company
called Unchained Capital, which is multi sig custody for bitcoin,
and that's what really sent me down the rabbit hole.
And then another friend of mine here in Boston, which
is where I live now, started a company called flip
Side Crypto in twenty seventeen, and that's what really got

(03:42):
me interested in the all chains. And then I also,
in between bitcoin and alts, was exposed to ethereum during
the mint. I was sitting next to a friend when
he bought ethereum in the in the auction, and you know,
I'll never forget it because I recall it. The price

(04:03):
went up every some period of time I don't remember.
You had to have bitcoin obviously to buy by ethan
the auction, and I had bitcoin and everything, and the
price had just doubled when I met up with him
at his apartment and I was like, ah, you know,
I missed, I missed the low price. And then this
was like, you know, I don't know pennies and ethereum token,

(04:23):
but it's incredible to see how the industry has come
along from there.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, amazing journey. Nick, you know, as a founder and
you exited those companies and you sold them and so forth,
and uh, you know, coming across crypto, you know, how
did you end up at? Why did you pick Solana
you know as a place to go work? And there's
a lot of blockchain projects out there. Maybe you can
tell a little a bit about, you know, for the
newcomers who are maybe watching and listen to this, what

(04:50):
is Solona and why is why is it better in
the others?

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah, so, so Solona is the fastest and cheapest, most
scalable layer one blockchain and uh with with the best
ecosystem too. I think that's really really important. It was
it was really clear to me when I was in
venture capital that the ecosystem that Solana had, you know,
been building and it was still very early. This is

(05:13):
like twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, was really sticky,
and the people that were building the Salona ecosystem were
there because you know, they really firmly believed that it
was the best technology and that they had you know,
the best approach to scalability. Of course, scalability on Salona

(05:36):
is at the layer one. There's no fragmentation of liquidity,
and that is really a key part of the Salona thesis,
which is all assets, same chain, global market participants twenty
four to seven. And I think we even saw that,
you know today, with the launch of Monad tokens on
the Salona network at the same time as they they

(05:57):
were live everywhere else. And you know, some people may say, well,
isn't that's kind of weird. You know, Monad is an
EVM chain. And the idea, though, is is is that
Solana has been very consistent, you know, from its inception,
which is all assets, one chain, you know, single liquidity venue,
global art participants twenty for seven, all assets, I mean

(06:19):
all assets, and it was just really clear to me
that the people building on Solana were there because they
really believed in technology, really believed in in in what
totally rushed and the founders had built. And then as
a user, if you had ever used any blockchain, you know,
in that twenty twenty one twenty two time frame, and
then you use Solana, you're just like, this is wicked fast,

(06:39):
this is incredible. It's incredibly fast, it's incredibly cheap. The
ux is just so good, and you know, it's funny, like,
didn't in my opinion, take a genius to see that,
but Solana has always been the underdolf, even then when
it was so clear, you know, at least to me,
that that Solana was building something that was really durable.

(07:00):
I have friends asking me, you know what, you're going
to the Salona Foundation, you know, And this again was
summer of twenty three and FTX it happened six months ago.
But it's incredible the people that came before me, and
there were many people that were building on Salona much
before I joined the foundation, And boy do I give
them a lot of credit because they really, they really

(07:20):
got it. And I'm just so glad that they exposed
me to it, because it's just an incredible it's an
incredible platform, it's an incredible ecosystem. It's an incredible place
to build.

Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah, for sure. And I remember years ago, Nick, I
was testing Solana, looking to build like a social token.
It had no value to it, and it was so
fast and so easy. So I can certainly attest to that.
So Nick, you know, you mentioned, you know, it's it's
a layer one and you have this ecosystem, you got
retail participants, people are doing NFTs, meme coins, pumped out
fund and all that, and you have institutions building on it.

(07:56):
So my question is how is Solana a to handle
the volume of transactions not just now but future as
there's more demand and more people come on chain.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
Yeah, that's a that's a great question. And so the
thing that makes Selana unique there's kind of two main things.
One is parallel execution and this is what really helps
with scalability. Currently, the theoretical throughput of the network is
about sixty five thousand transactions per second. And the there's
a new upgrade to the CAN. The new independent validator

(08:29):
client is being built called fired Answer by Jump Crypto,
and that has a million tps, which is more than
enough to handle you know, just I mean a million
can current transactions per second, which is more enough for
the NASDAC of the blockchain, which was which was the
founding vision of Solana. And then the second thing that's
really important is the fees. Is how does Salona keep

(08:49):
fees down even amidst you know this the scaling nature
of the utilization of the network, and this is thanks
to a concept called local fee markets. So on Ethereum
and other ev chains, they have this idea of global
fee markets. If there's a spike in demand, all of
the transaction fees for that network go up. And this
is what you saw in October during the flash crash,

(09:11):
where you know, it was hundreds, if not thousands of
dollars to transact on Ethereum, and then you know, in
some cases many tens of dollars to transact on Layer twos,
whereas on Solana the media and fee was still you know,
in the in the sets and normally Slona is one
thousandth of a cent per transaction. And that is really
imperative because it's not just about having low fees, but

(09:34):
it's having predictably low fees for institutions in particular that
need to know they need to be able to budget
for you know, what things are going to cost, to
know what they should charge for various products that they're
building on the blockchain.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah. Absolutely, Now you being head of institutional right grow
that is I'm curious, what are institutions building on slaoner
they took organizing money market funds or toognizing other types
of assets, and you know, what's what's the conversation been
like over the past year, given the change in the
regulatory environment and so forth.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
Yeah, so let's start with the change in the regulatory environment.
I can't say enough how important the passage of the
Genius Act bill was. Obviously, we have an incredibly blockchain
forward president in Donald Trump, who's who's done all kinds
of helpful things in the administrative branch, you know, the

(10:33):
which he controls. But what I think was particularly exciting
was that the legislative branch, in kind of a bipartisan action,
passed the Genius Act, which which made stable coins something
that everyone has very clear guidelines on which they can
build on. And that has really led, I think, to

(10:54):
an influx of institutional interest in the blockchain, and I
think the Clarity Act will only continue to to accelerate that.
But what are institutions doing on Solana? Well, you've got
all sorts of different institutions doing different kinds of things.
On the payment side, you've got the likes of Visa
and MasterCard and PayPal and Stripe Square cash App recently

(11:16):
also announced that they're using Solana PayPal on the tomization side.
On the asset management, you've got Hamilton Lane Breb and
Howard Apollo. On the private side, you've got you know,
black Rock, Van Eck, Franklin Templeton Wellington and others. On
the money fund side, you've got all sorts of commodities,

(11:37):
you know, gold, wine, art, even whiskey and everything under
the sun. You know, as as I mentioned when we
started the podcast, all assets, same liquidity venue, global market
that has spends twenty four seven. And so we're really
working to bring institutions on Solana with all different kinds

(11:58):
of assets. And then there's also so banks are building
on Salona as well. You've got Societe General which has
stable coin, fi Serve recently announced that they're building stable
coins on Solana. And then you've got money transmitters like
Western mean, who's who's building on Salona. So the institutional
utilization of Solona really runs the gamut, and I think

(12:19):
it's increasingly being seen as a place that institutions feel
incredibly comfortable building and are are increasingly choosing Salona as
a first chain or only chain that they're building on.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
Yeah, it's incredible adoption. And you mentioned the most recent
move was Western Union looking to launch their stable coin
on Solana, which which is incredible. You know, when these
institutions are using Solana, and this may be a question
that goes for every blockchain, you know, how are they
integrating it or plugging into solon. I'm curious about that

(12:51):
and maybe technical where you know, it may go over
the heads of some folks, but I'm curious, what is
the step of hitting the ground running from a conversation
to hitting the ground.

Speaker 1 (13:00):
Yeah, so I would say, you know, institutions take a
few different approaches to how they build on the blockchain.
It depends in part on you know, the level of
investment that they're able to make and also kind of
how technology, how comfortable they are with the new technologies.
So some some institutions you know, want to recruit and

(13:20):
and or train you know, current engineers that they have
and and have them you know, do the build eternally.
And then others, you know, might look to a partner,
like a tokenization partner, like on the stable point side
that could be a Circle or a Paxos or somebody
like that. Or on the tokenization side for real world

(13:41):
assets that could be you know, Securitized or Republic or
alpha Ledge or Sentrifuge or or somebody like that. And
it really depends on how quickly they want to move,
you know, do they want to build it in the house.
Do they want to maintain it in house? But but
I think that increasingly institutions are saying we have to

(14:01):
have this capability, we have to be on chain. And
that's really exciting to see because once these guys move,
they don't move fast, but once they move, they move
with size.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Oh. Absolutely, you mentioned earlier upgrades such as fire Dancer.
Correct me if I'm wrong. Is that live or is
that in the works?

Speaker 1 (14:19):
So fire Dancer is live partially on Maine. There's also
different versions of it that are live and being tested.
Fire Dancer will be I think fully live hopefully sometime
next year. I'm sure we'll get an update on that
next month in Abu Dhabi at our big conference Breakpoint, Tony,

(14:40):
I hope you're joining us and others listeners. We'd love
to see you in Abu Dhabi. Lots of alpha will
be shared at Breakpoint, as it always is.

Speaker 2 (14:48):
That's exciting. We'll talk offline about that. I would love
to attend. You know, what are you and the team
you know? As far as your vision board, so to speak,
for twenty thirty, let's say five years from now, what's
Salon I may look like. What do the adoption of
retail applications, but also institutions.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
Yeah, so I think Salona is powering the financial Internet
in twenty thirty, and you may or may not even
know that it is doing that. Right as a user,
we want applications built on Solana to be as fast
and performant as any other application, and I think you're
seeing that increasingly, where you know, people will use a

(15:24):
dex or they'll use you know, per peer, you know,
payments app and they're just amazed that it's even you know,
blockchain underneath, because it just feels so fast, almost instantaneous.
And currently settlement for a transaction on Solon it's about
four hundred milliseconds, but there's a new technology and other
new technology being built called out and Glow, which will

(15:47):
reduce that to about one hundred fifty milliseconds. And the
reason that is so important is two hundred milliseconds is
the point at which a human feels something is generally instantaneous.
So we're going from something that's already really really fast
to something that to the human eye will appear as
nearly instantaneous. And you know, that's that's really exciting. And

(16:08):
I think twenty thirty, you know, virtually every financial application
on the Internet will be powered on Solana.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
So on that note, Nick, the transition for many companies
from Web two to Web three, it's in the progress,
right and there's still people who are skeptics. They're still
on the fence. So I'm curious what your strategy is
to approach some of these companies, you know, like the
Googles and the facebooks and and other you know, companies
that are running primarily Web two. And to your point,
you know, eventually people won't know Solona is powering the

(16:37):
back end, just that it works right at the end
of the day, the average Joe and Jane. So I'm curious,
how are you. I don't know if you can reveal this,
but what's your pitch to these folks, Like, Hey, you
need to get on here. This is this is what's happening.
Not necessarily you have to advertise it to the end consumer,
but you have to build it into your background.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
Yeah, well, I think it's it's really simple. If you
are a large institution, you wanted to be early in
the cloud, you wanted to be early in mobile, you
wanted to be early in social and now I think
you want to be early in blockchain, and I think
it is still early. You know, if you look at
who accrued, you know, market share, Aws, Cloud, you know Facebook,

(17:18):
you know social and then mobile, Apple and Google. Right,
and you want to be early in blockchain? I think
you know the visas, the paypals, the squares, you know,
the Western unions, the black Rocks, the Franklin Timpletons. These
folks that are building on the blockchain. Now you'll see

(17:41):
them really I think benefit from that in terms of,
you know, their their market performance over the coming years.

Speaker 2 (17:51):
And then certainly payments has been something that's really been
at the forefront of innovation when it comes to blockchain
and so forth. Right, But what about tracking certain things
on the blockchain or putting certain data and information? How
where do you see that at? This is a hard

(18:11):
question to answer because it's very open end. You know,
different industries operated in different ways. But what do you
see folks looking at beyond payments to do other things
like I don't know, supply chain management and things like that. Yeah, listen,
I think I think blockchain has all sorts of really
interesting use cases and I think you know, we've seen
innovation and experimentation, you know, in lots of different utility

(18:36):
of the blockchain. I think where it's got unequivocally clear
product market fit is for financial rails. Right.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
We've seen this with stable coins. There's now three hundred
plus billion dollars of stable coins on chain. We've seen
this with art of u A. There's now thirty billion
plus in art of vua on chain. And these these
numbers are growing extraordinarily. I'm sure we'll get to a
trillion dollars some stable points next year and one hundred
billion dollars of our w A. And I think that's

(19:05):
where there's unequivocally clear a product our g iFIT and
why you're seeing you know, financial institutions in particular, you know,
coming coming to the blockchain very very quickly.

Speaker 2 (19:17):
Now institutions they very much care about security and privacy,
right and not having certain data out there to the
open and in a while. So how does Solana meet
that need?

Speaker 1 (19:27):
Yeah, Well, so there's kind of two ways. One there's
the protocol itself and then there's third party applications built
on top of the protocol. Okay, so the protocol itself, Uh,
there's there's a token program that was released last year
called Token extensions and token extensions has UH the ability

(19:48):
to add various configuration settings to to tokens that are
issued on in the Salon of blockchain. One of those
is this idea of confidential balances, and PayPal actually uses
this token extension for their p y u s D
stable coin. So if I send you uh y u
s d stable coin tony, other people won't be able

(20:11):
to see how much I sent you. They'll see that
I sent you as the stable coin, but they won't
be able or they they'll see that wallet A sent
wallet b p y u s D, but they won't
be able to see the amount that was transferred. And
there's all sorts of ways also to you know, make

(20:32):
wallets difficult to identify as to who is the owner.
So for example, like if you send something from Coinbase
to your phantom wallet, and then something from your phantom
wallet back to Coinbase, and and then you send that
from Coinbase somewhere else, UH, you won't be able to
really be able to track you know, who who all
that was sent to if you're looking at the public ledger.

(20:54):
So long story short is you can use kind of
the existing capabilities of the Salon protocol you know, to
do a lot of what you're talking about with respect
to confidentiality and privacy. But then there's also third party
providers like RCM and Umbra that are adding additional confidentiality

(21:15):
and privacy at the application layer, and and so I
think you'll see both. But you know, Salona is a public,
permissionless blockchain, and so by nature, you know, all data is.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Accessible via block explorer. Oh for sure, look to your point,
you can see a transaction happen, but you may not
know the details, right right, Yeah, talk to us a
bit about bridging to let's say, private chains, because we
see some of these institutions they have their wall garden
permission private blockchains, but they want to communicate with public blockchains.

(21:53):
What are you seeing on that front? And is it
easy for them to plug into salonim.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yeah, So, I mean there's an number of bridges that
connect to private blockchains and public blockchains. I think among
them are you know, chain link, wormhole, I believe, uh,
layer zero as well. So for example, if you're looking
to connect you know, JP Morgan connects us to Solana

(22:20):
or to another public blockchain like base, you can use
something like chain link to do that. Of course, the
private blockchain needs to allow the data to be passed,
you know, because that's the whole idea they control, you know,
their their networks. But I think you are going to

(22:40):
see an increasing move towards interoperability. What what I'm hearing
is institutions, you know, ultimately want to settle on public
blockchains and that's where the liquidity is. And so I
think I think that's, you know, one of the many
reasons you're going to see more institutions come to Solana Nick.

Speaker 2 (22:59):
I don't know if you sure these thoughts, but it's
amazing to see at in for the ward is capitulation.
But many of these institutions, they tried to bypass the
public blockchains for years, build their own version, you know.
JP Morgan did a private version of etherorem Quorum or
whatever they call it. But now they realize, to your point,
the liquidities on the public blockchains and they want to
settle it there.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
Well. So, I in fairness to the institutions that were
building on private blockchains, I think it was as much
because of the lack of regulatory clarity. You know, until
January twentieth of this year, crypto was a four letter
word in the United States, and you know, that has

(23:39):
been just an absolute sea change in you know, where
what institutions can do. You know, in the United States
they could do things you know, in other markets, in
Switzerland and Singapore and and and and in some other
markets as well where there where there were more friendly regulators,
but in the US they really couldn't. And and many

(24:00):
of the institutions that are global, of course are also
UH in many cases have a US presence, and they
didn't want to, you know, create any issues with the
SEC or OCC or whoever their regulators were. But now
that that they you know, have a green light, you know,
the cars are absolutely racing around the track to build

(24:22):
on public blockchains.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yeah, it's amazing to see how things have changed on
that front. Now there's been a lot of demand for
Solona as an asset for ETPs as well as digital
asset treasury companies. Tell us a bit about those products
that are being going live and how you've been interacting
with those folks.

Speaker 1 (24:39):
Yeah, so that's another really exciting development that again, you know,
I think was really made possible this year thanks to
friendlier regulation, UH specifically the SEC in in in that instance.
So the way that I look at it is the
ETFs or ways for people to access the soul token
pass and dat's are a way for people to access

(25:03):
UH this oul token, you know, in more of an
actively managed vehicle, and so on the ETF side, UH
a couple of weeks ago the first ones came out
for Solana. Bit Wise and Grayscale were the first two
to launch with staking, and then a number followed van K,
Canary and Fidelity UH just this past week, and there's

(25:26):
a few others that are filed I believe Franklin, Templeton
and Vesco maybe some others. And then on the DAT side,
Forward Industries raised one point sixty five billion dollars to
deploy into Solana and then into DeFi Strategies, and there's
a number of other dats as well. The Salona Company
sold me Upex, DeFi dev sold Strategies and and others,

(25:51):
and you know, I think it's great that there's all
these teams now that are in large institutions like Fidelity
and and and and n K and and b guys
that are out there really educating the market about h Solana,
and I think that will only bring more and more
people into the Salona ecosystem. You know, if they invest
in Solana and they haven't used the blockchain, maybe that'll

(26:12):
drive them to you know, download a fine and wallet,
try it out and really see how incredible it is,
you know, to use Solana.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
Yeah, that's a great point. Those are great on ramps. Great,
uh you know, way for folks that dip their their
toes in the water, right and before they plunge in.
And I've heard, you know, from a few folks anecdotally
that you know, who have bought let's say ETFs and
they're like, yeah, I want to go see if I
can set up a wallet and do some cool things
defy you know, any any type of Web three activity

(26:40):
and things like that.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
Absolutely well, by the way, if you want to mention
that since the first Salona ETFs went live a few
weeks ago, they have seen inflows every single trade and
day since. So while Bitcoin and ethereum have had outflows
to the tunes of billions of dollars, Solana has seen
nothing but inflows that I think it really shows the
demand and interest in Solana, which is really exciting to see.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
Oh. Absolutely, yeah. I've been tracking some of the et
inflows and you know, my friends a bit wise looking
at b Soul and all that. So, yeah, it's really exciting.
What's on your role map that you can share. I
know some things might be on the wrap, but I'm
curious what you got, you know, maybe twenty twenty six
and things like that.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
Yeah, So one of the things that I say all
the time is it's it's you know, Solana has been
true to the same North Star vision since inception, which is,
you know, all assets trading twenty four to seven globally
anybody can can trade in a single liquidity venue. And
and so we're just going to keep doing it. We're

(27:44):
just gonna keep doing it. You're gonna see more assets,
You've got to see more applications, You're going to see
more tokens, and and we're going to continue to attract
you know, the best founders and builders and institutions in
the world to build on Solana such that you know,
in twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven, and twenty thirty
and beyond, you know, there'll be more assets, more liquidity,

(28:05):
more counter parties for you to build with together in
the salon of ecosystem.

Speaker 2 (28:13):
So Nick, you know, it's amazing to see the adoption
of Solana and all the things that are happening. And
you know, in regards to the market structure building, I
think you alluded to it earlier. Do you foresee that
once that is passed into law there may be an
explosion of innovation and building on slana that some people
might still be on the sidelines waiting for that clarity.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
Yeah, I think so. I think every piece of legislation
that that moves crypto in the blockchain, you know, kind
of further into acceptance, into general acceptance is better. But
I think we also have a lot to work with
even if Clarity Act isn't passed. So I think that,

(28:56):
you know, the big puzzle pieces are in place, you know,
thanks to the Trump administration for institutions to build on
the blockchain. Just this past week, those who see shed
light on how babies can hold you know, small amounts
of tokens to you know, make transactions on the blockchain,

(29:18):
And I think that's great. And so I think you're
gonna continue to see you know, administrative action to help
clarify what institutions and others can do on the blockchain,
even the absence of the Clarity Act. Legislation. But I do,
of course hope we see the clarity acts. As you know,
more legislation provides even clearer guidelines and rules and a

(29:38):
level playing field for everyone to build on. And anything
that happens here domestically in the United States drives innovation
everywhere else in the world forward. So, you know, really
exciting to see that the US is now leading innovation
on blockchain versus you know, making it difficult for builders
to to grow their companies on the blockchain.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Now we're seeing blockchain is starting to penetrate different industries
and aspects of life. And I'm curious, what do you
guys see down the line. And this is a hard
question to answer, right, you know, is it the gaming world,
is it social media? I don't know what that may be.
But what do you think might be the next driver
of adoption and building?

Speaker 1 (30:21):
I mean barely scratching the surface in terms of like
the the use case for you know, the Internet, capital markets,
for you know, financial assets on chain today, and so
I think it's you know, really widening, widening the wedge
that we have there. You know, there's just so much

(30:42):
more to go. Like I said, there's only thirty billion
of RWA on chain. There's something like three plus trillion
dollars of investable assets maybe more on Earth. So you're
talking about one percent penetration at most today, and so
I think, you know, we're going to see a lot
more of that as well as other use cases too.

(31:04):
But I think that where there's clear product market fit,
you'll see more and more people come in and build
that out further such that, you know, over the next
few years, I really think you'll be able to do
pretty much any financial transaction of any kind on Solana.
You could pretty much do that already, but I think
you'll you'll really be able to do that increasingly over
the next few years.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Oh absolutely, Nick, I gotta ask you about the market, man,
it's been brutal. We've been in a pretty big correction
and everybody is getting a little bit dismade. What is
your personal outlook is have we topped out? I know,
you know you're a builder, so long term this is
this is a blimp right on the on the screen here,
But you know, what would you say, are we topped

(31:48):
out or there's more to go? In twenty twenty six?

Speaker 1 (31:50):
You know, I'm a permeable Tony I'm always bullish. I
think I think we're so early, it's just crazy. So
you know, I I try not to pay attention to
short term movements in in in the market, and and
just look at, you know, where we are today versus

(32:10):
where we were a few years ago, versus where I
think we'll be, you know, in in the next few years.
And I think we're gonna be higher.

Speaker 2 (32:18):
Yeah, it seems like, you know, crypto is certainly following
the liquidity cycle as kind of like all you know,
assets on the macro and I guess we just got
to be patient. But the building continues that there's a
lot of great stuff on the horizon. You know, there
was a question I wanted to ask in it is
escaping me? Okay, here we go. I'm curious if anyone
is building let's say that digital identity uh on Solana

(32:42):
that you can share. I know, some things may be
on the tops.

Speaker 1 (32:45):
So there there there is an initiative called the Solana
Attestation Service, which makes it really easy for folks to
connect identity, you know, to their projects on Solana. And
I believe if you googles on at testation service, there's
a landing page on Salona dot com where you can
learn more about that.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
Okay, got it? Yeah, because you know, one of the
things one of the pain points I experienced, and I
think a lot of people, it's impersonations online and not
being able to have blockchain verified social profiles. And you've
got scammers they create one hundred versions of you and
messaging people trying to scam people. But also, if I
can have my digital identity all in one app, and

(33:26):
you know, it's interoppable everywhere, that would make my life
a lot easier and I'm sure many people as well.

Speaker 1 (33:30):
Yeah, I think we'll get going in that direction.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
All right. Well, as things progress there, I'm going to
have to have you back on to talk about it.

Speaker 1 (33:37):
We should have one of my engineering colleagues who can
share all the ins and outs of it.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
Perfect. Perfect, So Nick, got some wrap up questions here
for you. First, if you could create your own metaverse,
will the theme be so I'm a big tennis player
and I this was actually pretty cool back in the
you know, when NFTs were really popping. The Australian Open,
which is the first Grand Slam tennis tournament of the
calendar year. It's in January.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
You could buy an NFT for the Australian Open, which
was a square of the tennis court and if the
last point of the match fell on your square, they
would send you the ball. But they had a watching
party for the Australian Open for NFT holders in the metaphorse.
And I can't remember which metaverse project it was, if

(34:23):
it was a sandbox or another one, but I did it,
you know, and it was kind of cool. So yeah,
tennis and the metaverse. Nice rapid fire questions, favorite food,
favorite food avocado, favorite musician or band Pearl Jam, favorite
movie clue, favorite book Snow Leopard by Peter Matheson.

Speaker 2 (34:48):
And when you're not working at the Salona Foundation, what
are you doing for fun?

Speaker 1 (34:51):
I'm playing tennis or with my kids.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
Nice Nick, great stuff, pleasure chatting with you. I'm looking
forward to the future. Up bates, Aron Salana, thank you
so much for joining me. Thanks so much for having me.

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