Solana founder's latest AMA: Vision, coin price, and Ethereum
Every 10 years, Solana's throughput will increase by more than 32 times.Compilation: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
On December 12, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko held an open AMA on the social media platform Warpcast based on Farcaster.
During the several hours of interaction, the community posed many interesting questions to Anatoly, covering topics such as the development of Solana itself, its relationship with Ethereum, views on Layer 1 competition, personal preferences for application layer innovations, and more. Anatoly selected some of these questions for concise yet serious answers.
Below are some meaningful (or significant) Q&A excerpts selected by Odaily Planet Daily.
1: About Personal Motivation
Q: What is your motivation for creating Solana?
Anatoly: I am an operating system enthusiast (Note: Anatoly defines Solana as an operating system). In the late 90s, I was deeply attracted to the open-source movement and Linux, so for the past 20 years, I have been dedicated to solving these tricky system problems and have derived endless joy from it.
2: About Differences with Ethereum
Q: Besides cheaper gas fees, what unique and valuable things can be done on Solana today that cannot be done on Ethereum?
Anatoly: I think the trading routing of Jupiter indeed shows some obvious design differences. Because it is a single atomic state machine, all market liquidity is aggregated together, even for transactions as small as 20 cents.
3: About Lessons from Failure
Q: What is the most valuable failure you've experienced? What did you learn from it?
Anatoly: The competition in consumer hardware (Note: perhaps referring to the Saga phone?) is extremely fierce. Network effects need to cater to individual interests.
4: About Other Layer 1s
Q: Now that we have Ethereum and Solana, does the world still need other Layer 1s?
Anatoly: Why should I stop aspiring systems engineers from building their own designs?
5: About Solana's Vision
Q: What is your vision for Solana? What do you think it will look like in 5/10/50 years?
Anatoly: Throughput increases by more than 32 times every 10 years.
6: About AI
Q: How has your view on artificial intelligence changed compared to the same time last year?
Anatoly: The technology is good enough now; with enough data, it can accurately predict what I would say 99.99% of the time.
7: About Target Users
Q: Who are Solana's target users? Has this changed over time?
Anatoly: They are developers; Solana is an operating system. My parents should never care about what kind of operating system they are using, but they should enjoy the applications built on it. Therefore, our goal is to maximize developers' productivity.
8: About Mutual Learning with Ethereum
Q: What can Solana developers learn from Ethereum developers, and what can Ethereum developers learn from Solana developers?
Anatoly: I hope Solana developers can open-source first and then move along an immutable roadmap; as for Ethereum, their hardware performance doubles every two years, and the technology they use should also achieve doubling.
9: About Dapps
Q: What are the 3-5 applications you use most frequently on Solana?
Anatoly: Sollinked, Tiplink, USDC, Sphere Payments.
10: About Future Outlook
Q: What is your outlook on industry development in the next 7-10 years?
Anatoly: A large number of consumer-facing Web3 applications will emerge. I have no clues to share, but it could be payment applications or something similar to Depin/Helium. For example, if the last cycle was the transition from cypherpunks to hoodies, this cycle will be the transition from hoodies to suits.
11: About Business Models
Q: What kind of business models do you hope to see in the crypto industry?
Anatoly: For example, Helium, first find something that users are willing to pay a high price for, and try to build a new protocol around it to create cheaper/faster products.
12: About Decentralization
Q: What do you think is the best way to measure the decentralization of a blockchain network?
Anatoly: I think once a network achieves permissionless access, meaning basically anyone can participate in any part of it, the truly important metric is how many people genuinely care and are willing to participate. This is not much related to the number of nodes, stakeholders, or other factors.
13: About "Time Rewind"
Q: If you could start over and redesign Solana today, what would you most want to change?
Anatoly: There is too much technical debt; I really wish we could have used asynchronous execution from the beginning.
14: About Industry Criticism
Q: What initiatives in the industry are considered common sense but you believe are wrong?
Anatoly: Grants programs; I don't know why every project runs one, but they basically never work.
15: About Layer 2
Q: Do you think Solana will adopt more Layer 2 solutions in the future?
Anatoly: There is nothing stopping developers from trying Layer 2 unless the fees on Layer 1 are so low that a generic Layer 2 is not commercially viable.
16: About Witch Attacks
Q: You recently criticized airdrops and supported "pre-buying." Will this lower people's expectations for Dapp usage? Do you think witch attacks are net negative?
Anatoly: Yes, witch attacks can be net negative, especially regarding the distribution of governance tokens; which users do you really want to participate in governance?
17: About Challenges
Q: What is the biggest challenge facing Solana?
Anatoly: Stability and currently having only a single codebase. Firedancer is developing a second client. So everything is improving; I just hope it can be faster.
18: About the Saga Phone
Q: How does Solana view its phone project Saga recently? A full-stack crypto phone is a promising vision, and I'm curious if you can provide more insights based on what you know so far.
Anatoly: The competition in consumer hardware is really, really fierce. I think the competitive gap in security advantages of crypto-generated seed phrases has narrowed significantly. I still hope for a mobile app distribution channel that can directly target all NFT users, thus avoiding Google and Apple taxes.
19: About SOL's Price
Q: If the price of SOL were to multiply by 10 or 100 at the protocol and functional level, what impact would that have on Solana?
Anatoly: It shouldn't have much impact on the protocol. In fact, I think using the native token as a system currency creates a series of negative effects; everything becomes a reflection of the macro environment. I hope the economy is actually driven by RWA, so that the revenue of companies (projects) can be predictable.
20: Again on Ethereum
Q: How do you view the relationship between Solana and Ethereum? Is it like Apple and Android? Do you see other public chains as competitors?
Anatoly: I think there is functional overlap between us, so there is definitely competition. But different public chains have completely different design philosophies, so seeing the R&D work done by the Ethereum team and trying to apply those experiences to completely different goals is really exciting to me.
