Will Solana Be the Execution Layer and Ethereum the Settlement Layer? - Ep.294

11/30/21 • 68 min

On Unchained, two co-founders of Solana Labs, Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, dive deeply into the Solana ecosystem, discussing everything from the price of SOL to the Solana network outage to the competition between Ethereum and Solana. Show highlights:

why Raj thinks SOL’s market cap grew from $86 million to $68 billion in less than a year
Anatoly’s and Raj’s background and how they found themselves working together to build Solana
why Anatoly thinks Solana will be a general-purpose blockchain rather than specializing in gaming or high frequency trading
Anatoly’s goal to make Solana the first billion-user blockchain
why Raj thinks NFTs on Solana have been so popular
why, in the opinion of Raj and Anatoly, Solana’s purpose has shifted away from high-frequency trading
how NFTs could replace ads
why “everything is DeFi”
how Solana Labs plans to allocate the recent $314 million funding round it raised
what lessons Anatoly learned from the 18-hour September network outage
technically speaking, what happened to cause Solana’s network outage
why Anatoly believes that outages, at this stage, aren’t necessarily a bad thing
whether “trading mercenaries” dominated at Solana Breakpoint
why developers are interested in building on Solana
how Solana and Ethereum compare as execution and settlement layers
why Raj doesn’t like framing competition between Solana and Ethereum as a fight
how Anatoly views the competition between Ethereum and Solana
whether the arrival of Neon Labs, which is bringing EVM to Solana, could lead to developers leaving Ethereum
how NFTs and Phantom wallets are bringing in new users for Solana
whether Raj and Anatoly would roll back Solana if something like Ethereum’s DAO hack were to occur
why Solana has the competitive advantage in throughput, according to Anatoly
what would happen if FTX cofounder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried gave up on Solana
their predictions for Solana five years from now