Solana's latest AMA: the plight of Saga's mobile phone, the competition with ETH, the impact of the SOL currency price on the protocol...

Compile | Odaily Planet Daily

Translator | Azuma

On December 12, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko conducted an open AMA on Warpcast, a Farcaster-based social media platform.

During the hours-long interaction, the community asked Anatoly many interesting questions, including Solana’s own development, relationship with ETH, perceptions of Layer 1 competition, personal preference for application layer innovation, and so on.

Below, some of the more meaningful (or meaningful) Q&A content has been selected by Odaily.

1 : About personal motivation

Q: What was your motivation for [Solana]?

Anatoly: I’m an OS obsessive. In the late '90s, I was fascinated by the open source movement and Linux, so I’ve spent the last 20 years working on and having fun solving these tough system problems.

2 : About the difference with ETH Fang

Q: In addition to cheaper gas, what other unique and valuable things can be done on Solana today that can’t be done on ETH shops?

Anatoly: I think Jupiter’s transaction routing does show some noticeable differences in design. Because it’s a single atomic state machine, all market liquidity is aggregated, even for 20-cent trades.

3: About the lessons of failure

Q: What was your most rewarding failure? What did you learn from it?

Anatoly: The competition for consumer hardware is very, very high. Network effects need to satisfy individual interests.

4: About other Layer 1s

Q: Now that we have ETH Shop and Solana, does the world need other Layer 1s?

Anatoly: Why should I stop aspiring systems engineers from building their own designs?

5 : A vision for Solana

Q: What is your vision for Solana, and what do you think it will look like in the next 5/10/50 years?

Anatoly: More than 32x increase in throughput every 10 years.

6: About AI

Q: How have your views on AI changed compared to the same period last year?

Anatoly: The technology is good enough that with enough data, it can accurately predict what I’m going to say 99.99% of the time.

7: About the target user

Q: Who is Solana’s target audience, and has this changed?

Anatoly: It’s a developer, Solana is an operating system. My parents should never care what kind of operating system they use, but they should love the apps built on it. Therefore, our goal is to make developers as productive as possible.

8 : Mutual learning with ETH

Q: What can Solana developers learn from ETH developers, and what can ETH developers learn from Solana?

Anatoly: I want the developers of Solana to open source first and then move along an immutable roadmap, and as for ETH, every two years the performance of the hardware doubles, and the technology they use doubles.

9 : About Dapps

Q: What are your top 3-5 apps on Solana?

Anatoly：Sollinked、Tiplink、USDC、 Sphere Payments。

10 : About the future outlook

Q: What is your outlook for the industry in the next 7-10 years?

Anatoly: A large number of To C Web3 applications have emerged. I don’t have any clues to share, but maybe it’s a payment app, or something like Depin/Helium. For example, if the last round of the cycle was the transition from cypherpunks to hoodies, this round will be the transition from hoodies to suits.

11: About the business model

Q: What kind of business model would you like to see in the crypto industry?

Anatoly: Helium, for example, starts by finding something that users are willing to pay a premium for and trying to build a new protocol around it that makes a cheaper/faster product.

12: About decentralization

Q: What do you think is the best way to measure the decentralization of a blockchain network?

Anatoly: I think once the network is permissionless, which means that basically anyone can participate in any part of it, then the really important metric is how many people actually care and want to participate. This has little to do with the number of nodes, the number of stakeholders, or other factors.

13 : About “Time Lapse”

Q: If you had to redesign Solana from scratch today, what would you most like to change?

Anatoly: There’s so much technical debt, I wish I could use asynchronous execution in the first place.

14 : On the critique of the industry

Q: What initiatives in the industry are considered common sense, but you think they are wrong?

Anatoly: The Grants program, 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-based solutions in the future?

Anatoly: There’s nothing stopping developers from trying Layer 2 unless the fees on top of Layer 1 are so low that a general-purpose Layer 2 isn’t commercially viable.

16: About Sybil attacks

Q: You’ve recently criticized airdrops in favor of a “pre-buying” format. Does this lower people’s expectations for the use of Dapps? Do you think Sybil attacks are net negative?

Anatoly: Yes, a Sybil attack can be a net negative, especially for the distribution of governance tokens, but which users do you want to actually participate in governance?

17: About the challenge

Q: What was the biggest challenge facing Solana?

Anatoly: Stability and a single codebase for now. Firedancer is working on a second client. So everything is improving, and I just wish it could be a little bit faster.

18 : About the Saga phone

Q: How did Solana see its mobile phone project, Saga, lately? The full-stack encrypted phone is a promising vision, and I’m curious if you can provide more insight into what we’ve learned so far.

Anatoly: The competition for consumer hardware is really, really fierce. I think cryptographically generated seed phrases have narrowed the competitive gap quite a bit in terms of security benefits. I would still like to have a distribution channel for the mobile app that can be directly targeted to all NFT users, thus circumventing the Google tax and the Apple tax.

19 : About the price of SOL

Q: At the protocol and feature level, how does the price of SOL multiply by 10 or 100 times affect Solana?

Anatoly: It shouldn’t have much impact on the protocol. In fact, I think that having the native token as the system currency will have a series of negative effects, and everything will become a reflection of the macro environment. I want the economy to be actually RWA-driven, so that the company’s (project’s) revenue is predictable.

20 : Let’s talk about ETH again

Q: How do you see the relationship between Solana and ETH, like Apple and Android, and do you see other public chains as your competitors?

Anatoly: I think there’s functional overlap between us, so it’s definitely competitive with each other. But different public chains are very different in terms of design concepts, so it’s really exciting to see the R&D work done by the ETH team and try to apply that experience to a completely different goal.