Compile - Odaily
Translator - Azuma
On December 12, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko conducted an open AMA on Warpcast, a social media platform based on Farcaster.
During the hours-long interaction, the community raised many interesting questions to Anatoly, including Solana’s own development, its relationship with Ethereum, its views on Layer 1 competition, personal preference for application layer innovation, etc. Anatoly Some questions were also selected and answered in a concise but serious manner.
Below are some more meaningful (or meaningful) QA content selected by Odaily.
1: About personal motivation
Q: What was your motivation (to create Solana)?
Anatoly: I am a fan of operating systems (Note: Anatoly defines Solana as an operating system). I was fascinated by the open source movement and Linux in the late 1990s, so Ive had a lot of fun solving these tough system problems for the past 20 years.
2: About the differences with Ethereum
Q: In addition to cheaper gas, what unique and valuable things can be done on Solana today that can’t be done on Ethereum?
Anatoly: I think Jupiters transaction routing does show some clear design differences. Because it is a single atomic state machine, all market liquidity is aggregated, even 20-cent trades.
3: Lessons learned from failure
Q: What is your most valuable failure? What did you learn from this?
Anatoly: Competition in consumer hardware (note: maybe youre talking about Saga phones?) is very, very fierce. Network effects are required to satisfy personal interests.
4: About other Layer 1
Q: Now that we have Ethereum and Solana, does the world need other Layer 1?
Anatoly: Why should I prevent 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 the next 5/10/50 years?
Anatoly: Throughput increases by more than 32 times every 10 years.
6: About AI
Q: How have your views on artificial intelligence changed compared to the same period last year?
Anatoly: The technology is good enough that, given enough data, it can accurately predict what I will say 99.99% of the time.
7: About target users
Q: Who is Solana’s target user? Has this been measured to change?
Anatoly: is a developer, Solana is an operating system. My parents should never care what 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: 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 forward along an immutable roadmap; as for Ethereum, the performance of hardware will double every two years, and the technology they use should also double. Times the matter.
9: About Dapp
Q: What are your 3-5 most commonly used applications on Solana?
Anatoly：Sollinked、Tiplink、USDC、Sphere Payments。
10: About future prospects
Q: What is your outlook for the industry development in the next 7-10 years?
Anatoly: A large number of To C Web3 applications have emerged. I dont have any clues to share, but it could be a payment app, or something similar to Depin/Helium. For example, if the previous cycle was the transition from cypherpunks to hoodies, this cycle will be the transition from hoodies to suits.
11: About business model
Q: What kind of business model do you hope to see in the Crypto industry?
Anatoly: Like Helium, first find something that users are willing to pay a high price for, and try to build a new protocol around it to make 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 web becomes permissionless, meaning basically anyone can participate in any part of it, then the really important metric will be how many people actually care and are willing to participate. This has little to do with the number of nodes, number of stakeholders, or other factors.
13: About turning back time
Q: If you were asked to redesign Solana from scratch today, what would you most want to change?
Anatoly: There is too much technical debt. I really wish that asynchronous execution could be used from the beginning.
14: About industry criticism
Q: What initiatives in the industry are considered common sense, but you think are wrong?
Anatoly: Grants program, not sure why every project runs one, but they basically never work.
15: About Layer 2
Q: Do you think Solana will use more Layer 2-based solutions in the future?
Anatoly: There is nothing to prevent developers from trying Layer 2, unless the cost above Layer 1 is so low that a general Layer 2 is not commercially viable.
16: About witch attacks
Q: You have recently criticized airdrops and supported the “pre-buying” form. Will this lower people’s expectations for using Dapps? Do you think witch attacks are a net negative?
Anatoly: Yes, Sybil attacks can be a net negative, especially for the distribution of governance tokens. Which users do you want to actually participate in governance?
17: About the challenge
Q: What is the biggest challenge Solana faces?
Anatoly: Stability and having only a single code base for now. Firedancer is developing a second client. So everything is improving, I just wish this would be faster.
18: About Saga mobile phone
Q: How did Solana see its mobile phone project Saga recently? Full-stack encrypted phones are a promising vision, and Im curious if you can provide more insight into what youve learned so far.
Anatoly: Competition in consumer hardware is really, really fierce. I think cryptographically generated seed phrases have closed quite a bit of the competitive gap in terms of security advantages. I still hope there will be a mobile app distribution channel that can go directly to all NFT users, thereby avoiding Google tax and Apple tax.
19: About the currency price of SOL
Q: At the protocol and functional level, if the price of SOL is multiplied by 10 or 100 times, what impact will it have on Solana?
Anatoly: This should have no impact on the protocol. In fact, I think using native tokens as system currencies will have a series of negative effects, and everything will become a reflection of the macro environment. I hope the economy is actually driven by RWA so that company (project) revenue is predictable.
20: Let’s talk about Ethereum again
Q: How do you see the relationship between Solana and Ethereum being like Apple and Android? Do you see other public chains as your competitors?
Anatoly: I think there is functional overlap between us, so we are definitely competitive with each other. But different public chains have very different design philosophies, so its really exciting for me to see the RD work that the Ethereum team has done and try to apply those experiences to completely different goals.
