Solana

"You just can't build a slow, expensive blockchain anymore." Solana founder @toly built a $47 billion network from an idea he couldn't sleep on. Two coffees and a beer at Cafe du Soleil in 2017, and he was up until 4 a.m., figuring out how to use proof of work to measure time. His parents escaped the USSR in the 90s with $50 to their name and landed in Chicago in their 40s. His mom was a pianist. His dad was a civil engineer who took blue-collar roofing jobs while getting his electrician certificates. His son did the circuit analysis homework for him. That 4 a.m. idea became proof of history, the core mechanism behind Solana. In this episode: 00:00:00 Trailer 00:01:06 Intro 00:01:17 Growing up in the Soviet Union 00:04:02 Immigrating to the United States 00:07:34 Career dreams and studying computer science 00:09:47 First startup and early lessons 00:11:19 13 years at Qualcomm 00:22:32 Meeting Raj and founding Solana 00:26:44 Fundraising and early investors 00:28:41 Surviving the FTX collapse 00:40:19 Solana's mission and impact 00:43:54 Using AI to run side projects 00:49:39 Hardest decisions as a leader 00:52:51 Outlook on crypto and Solana's future 00:59:22 Twitter, being public, and politics 01:05:52 Beliefs on human nature and life philosophy 01:09:34 Outro Full episode: youtu.be/oNk1KEdamcs

New episode of On The Road with @nickducoff Nick talks with @TFGolden from @BaillieGifford about the future of tokenization, regulation, and innovation in digital assets, with insights into Solana's role in London. Check out the full episode 👇

The Weekend Market Session is here on @Backpack. Until now, US equities were built around a fixed schedule. - 9:30am ET open. - 4:00pm ET close. - Weekends off. Crypto changes that. @solana changes that. With the launch of $SPCX, the market opened on a Friday and kept trading well into the weekend. The launch of @Backpack Securities was more successful than we could have possibly imagined. But the job's not done. As crypto rails continue to mature, there's still one missing piece. Still, no traditional brokerages allow you to trade 24/7 over the weekend. If you're not in crypto already, this might seem impossible. But it's not. Today, we're bringing weekend trading to Backpack with a brokerage native order book. The key point is simple: Users on @Backpack trade the same real US securities over the weekend as they trade during the week. - This is not a separate system. - It's not a different product. - It's the same stock on the same app in the same brokerage. - Now, with an additional liquidity source for the weekend. Naturally, weekend liquidity will be different from regular-hours liquidity. Spreads may be wider. Depth may be thinner. Price discovery will evolve. - This was true when extended hours started. - This was true when overnight trading started. - It is true here too. But the direction is clear. For us, getting DeFi right is one part of the equation. Getting the brokerage right and bringing the power of blockchains to traditional finance is the other part of the equation. Together, they must grow in tandem to be able to bring equity markets into their next phase. Backpack is doing to equities what Tether did to fiat: giving anyone with access to a wallet and an internet connection access to everything in a modern brokerage. The era of the neobrokerage is coming. Backpack is doing to weekends what Blue Ocean did for overnight trading: building a dedicated liquidity model for the time when traditional U.S. exchanges are closed. The era of 24/7 is coming. It's going to take a lot of time and energy to get this right. It won't happen overnight, but today, it begins. The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet.