Welcome to The Chopping Block! Crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news in the digital asset industry. In this episode, Anatoly Yakovenko, Tsar of Solana, joins the show to discuss the use cases of Solana, whether it’s actually a blockchain, how Solana scales, and much more! 

Show topics:

• What Anatoly thinks of Andre Cronje's opinion that Solana is not a blockchain
• Why Solana has had so many instances of downtime
• Whether Solana is the NASDAQ of blockchains
• Why Solana changed its approach to fee markets and how it is different from other blockchains
• Why Anatoly is bearish on generic Layer2s
• How to prevent a mempool to blow up
• Whether Anatoly is pro app-chains
• Why Anatoly would have had Solana build a fee model from the start
• What proof of history is and what its problems are 
• How vertical scaling and horizontal scaling differ
• What the use cases of Solana are 
• Why Solana decided to build the SAGA phone
• How a web3 phone enables new ways of innovation
• Why Solana doesn’t see Avalanche or BSC or other EVM chains as competitors but Mysten and Aptos
• Why the execution environment is where all innovation happens
• Why Tarun thinks rollups on Solana is a good idea
• Whether EVM could work on Solana and why Anatoly cares less about EVM on Solana than Solidity
• What Anatoly’s biggest lessons from building Solana are
• Why Haseeb admires Anatoly and what the similarities are between him and Vitalik
• What Anatoly advises people who are building in crypto

Hosts

• Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly Capital
• https://twitter.com/hosseeb
• Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly Capital
• https://twitter.com/tomhschmidt
• Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures
• https://twitter.com/tarunchitra 
• Robert Leshner, founder of Compound 
• https://twitter.com/rleshner 

Guest: Anatoly Yakovenko

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/aeyakovenko

Episode Links

Solana

• Serum: https://www.projectserum.com/
• Some of the Solana outages and consequences: 
• September 2021: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/09/14/solana-validators-ready-potential-restart-amid-blockchain-outage/
• January 2022: https://www.theblock.co/post/131278/traders-are-complaining-about-solanas-performance-raising-questions-about-its-status-as-a-wall-street-darling 
• May 2022: https://www.theblock.co/linked/144639/solana-restarted-after-seven-hour-outage-caused-by-surge-of-transactions 
• Solana’s blockchain clock 30 minutes behind: https://www.theblock.co/post/149112/solanas-blockchain-clock-loses-track-of-time-now-running-30-minutes-behind 
• June 2022: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/06/02/solana-halted-by-bug-linked-to-certain-cold-storage-transactions/
• Popularity of NFTs on Solana: https://www.theblock.co/post/153214/magic-eden-raises-series-b-funding-solana-nft-unicorn
• Solana phone
• https://solana.com/news/saga-reveal
• https://dune.com/queries/952048/1656567
• https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/06/23/solana-labs-is-building-a-web3-mobile-phone/ 
• Fee market: https://www.reddit.com/r/solana/comments/u3p8xc/eli3_solana_fee_market/
• Aptos/Mysten: 
• https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/07/11/web-3-startup-mysten-labs-aiming-for-2b-valuation-in-latest-funding-report/
• https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/05/31/paypal-ventures-invested-in-team-reviving-diem-blockchain/
• Paper on Proof of History: https://www.shoup.net/papers/poh.pdf

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