Special: Solana (with CEO Anatoly Yakovenko)

We sit down with the hottest new protocol layer in crypto today:
Solana, and its cofounder Anatoly Yakovenko, who is the CEO of
Solana Labs. If you listened to our Ethereum episode or follow
crypto even at a cursory level, you've likely heard of Solana and
its ability to scale transactions thousands of times higher than
Ethereum. And, unlike other so-called "ETH killers", Solana is
doing so in production today with large and real applications. We
dive into the project's history coming out of the 2017-18 crypto
winter, how it works and what's ahead now that they've recently
raised $314m (yes that is Pi $million) from a16z and Polychain
Capital, with their native SOL tokens currently trading at a
market cap around $10B (!). 


Sponsors:


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Sentry: https://bit.ly/acquiredsentry

Anthropic: https://bit.ly/acquiredclaude25






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Topics covered:


Anatoly's background as a wireless engineer at Qualcomm, and
how it led to a fundamental discovery of how to improve crypto
system scalability

Solana's role in the crypto protocol ecosystem and why
there's a need for it (and why it can and will exist) alongside
Ethereum versus "killing" it

Starting Solana during the 2017-18 crypto winter, and how it
forced them to focus just on building and shipping versus raising
and posturing

Bootstrapping adoption with the mining community (Solana's
"true believers") and the early and ardent support they provided

Where Solana falls on the Vitalik "Scalability - Security -
Decentralization" trilemma, and why Solana's superpower of
maintaining composability is so attractive



Links:


Solana: https://solana.com

Solana on Twitter: https://twitter.com/solana

Solana Hackathon submissions:
https://airtable.com/shriNT26cAZeDJagn/tbl5fZ4E1BBbVAttW



FTX: https://ftx.us

Audius: https://audius.co



 Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed
in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is
intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You
should do your own research and make your own independent
decisions when considering any financial transactions.