How to Make an NFT Market for Traders | Richard Wu & Ilja Moisejevs

Transcript

the Grand Vision for tensor the oneliner is we want to become the financial stack for nfts on Salon going into 2024 we have some big plans to essentially open up the protocol and invite every single developer out there who's really interested in salana right now who's perhaps even already building on salana to build on top of our protocols we want to be the fundamental liquidity layer for nfts all right everyone so on Empire you obviously know that we talk a lot about the institutions coming into crypto and that is why we are super excited to share that we are hosting the digital asset Summit we posted this since 2019 it's coming up in London March 18th to 20th don't miss your chance to get ahead of the curve you can get 20% off with

code Empire 20 we'll see you in London welcome everyone uh we have a very special episode one that I've been wanting to do for a while because um you know I always like to bring on Founders that I use it um their products on The Daily and you know you've heard us talk about tensor uh it is an amazing product I use it I love it this is not an endorsement or anything but I just uh you know they've built a beautiful product where you can go and collect uh jpegs and so really excited to have both Ilia and Richard the co-founders of tensor um welcome guys thanks for having us good to be here great so why don't we get started with intros and then the origin story of what uh LED you both to decide to start an nft Marketplace um in

salana yeah so I guess uh we had a I don't even know if it's weird anymore but we basically met online um during the covid crisis uh I guess everything was happening online and we kind of had similar interests met on the YC Forum talked about crypto decided that we wanted to build something together um ended up building like an oracle product for one of the salana hackathons decided that we were a great team and that we should qu with our jobs and work on this full-time and yeah I guess two years later here we are building dener yeah to add on to that I was basically working a trafi job uh I was doing like Quant research bit of software engineering at a quantitative tra training firm kind of got bored during covid because I was working from home didn't have too much

like social interaction so I was just like okay why not why not go on a tender for co-founders and just like try to find a co-founder to work on our startup together and so you you mentioned why combinators so in the forums you basically both of you independently had this idea that about nfts and wanted to do something in the space or how did you kind of go through quote unquote this idea Maze and and F finding each other down this path I think it it started with Richard just dropping me a DM saying hey like your GitHub looks interesting sounds like you're interested in crypto I'm interested in crypto do you want to chat and then we did like a pretty long call maybe about two hours and just kind of shuffled ideas back and forth um it was pretty Broad at that point like nfds defi lots of stuff but we did sort of

have one idea that stood out to us and that was the nftd pricing Oracle and the reason it stood out to us was because we basically had or like I guess I knew a couple guys that were saying they would pay for that and we thought okay well that's a great signal you know if somebody wants to pay for a product then maybe we should build it and also seemed like a pretty low lift idea to build um like we knew we would basically get it done in a in a month or two and that's exactly what happened we built it in a month or two the only difference is that when we actually did build it nobody wanted to pay for it so that was when we figured out that we were a good team but the idea had to change and at this point

was it clear and obvious to you that you wanted to do it in build this product in salana um you know this is you mentioned covid U salana activity at the time was fairly limited it is certainly not what it is today I'm curious what you know if you decided to build on salana if so why and or how was that process so from my perspective when I was doing uh you know my full-time job at the trading firm I had a lot of like friends who were like really big into crypto and they obviously talked to all their other Trader friends at like you know jump at Jan Street um at the time like Alam and they basically all said hey look there's this new blockchain that is much faster and is very

different from ethereum and the the vision of salana was becoming the NASDAQ right of the world where was permissionless it was Global everyone had the same latency to all the different validators and so no one had like um it wasn't like trafi where hft firms who had the best tech had the best talent got like Priority Access to the markets I thought that was like super appeeling um so at the time I had interest in salana and building on salana but I wasn't fully deep into salana yet that's sort of when and you know I hit up Ilia on on Y combinator and funny enough he had been building on sonana for like a year and so we just started chatting about like crypto started chatting about like salana nfts defi uh long story short he he read pill me into like taking the making the jump and actually building on salana got it

and maybe if you can comment on just the process of building on salana you mentioned that you build the the pricing Oracle I was looking at the time also at doing this obviously being so critical for like nft Lending markets but you mentioned that you built that fairly quickly talk to us in about the evolution of then pivoting and transitioning into building what tzer is today and also if you could comment on the experience of building on salana at a perhaps an earlier time where repos and the tools were not as perhaps as as accessible as they are today yeah so salana being younger than ethereum obviously was and probably still is more raw so so you kind of need to deal with like lower level stuff when you're building on it versus uh ethereum

but as our friend our money likes to say if you show up and there's already docks you're too late and I I kind of think that's true I think like as a developer you basically want to show up to a place where there's like nothing but like the core infrastructure that has been built because that's how you know you're early that doesn't mean you're right but it doesn't mean you're early and so for us when we started building on Salon it was exactly like that like nothing worked if you wanted to figure how something works uh you just go Source dive there's no docks probably still has no docks to be honest for many things so I think that was that the other thing where salana is very different to ethereum is the amount of data it produces salana because it's so fast and monolithic is very data

hungry and what that meant for our Oracle product was that we basically have to think pretty carefully about data storage and caching and moving data around and making it available really fast and that problem was a lot more acute on salana versus ethereum um so yeah that's probably how it was different and maybe Richard you can jump in and tell us the the actual story of building tensor itself what it is today I mean as far as I can remember you guys were a very lean team maybe it was just you two I I think you're not a large team today but you are for all intents and purposes the leading U nft Marketplace in in Sal that was not the case I think when you started building

there were others there's always competition but you guys have you know we see this story time and time again very lean teams in crypto that are are able to iterate quickly and win market share in a very dramatic and fast manner so would love to just get the the inside scoop into that and how that process what was going in your head of hey there's because oftentimes when founders come to me they say they get really worried when they drop like you know a news article drop and says new funding new project in Founders some Founders really take it and get paranoid about it um but others just are like it's fine you know it's a big Market it just sort of validates it U you guys were building at a time where there's already competition um but I'm I'm just really curious what was going on into your head and and how kind of a very lean team as

yourself was able to really pull off what you what you did and what you have done yep for context uh basically it was me and Ilia hacking away in a co-working private office for about eight months until we raised our seed round and then started hiring people now we're about I want to say 10 full-time maybe 11 I miss I lost crack I lost count because we started like signing a bunch of people like in the last two weeks so a lot of growth happening but we're up to like 10 11 people I would say um you know to be to be completely honest right off the bat like we were basically just cowboys and like just like developers and like hackers who had zero data infrastructure like zero professional data infrastructure experience and we

basically chose one of the harder products to build in the nft space a Marketplace that required a ton of sorry excuse my language a lot of a lot of like data pipelines getting getting data to the frontend in real time and working on salana which like IL mentioned there's a lot of data coming in this is like Web Two scale data pipelines that we had to build and we had zero experience I think what separated us from maybe other builders at the time was that we were Scrappy we focused on what really mattered which was building a differentiated product that we had pretty good conviction in um that had some experience that was 10x better in one dimension and for us that was building a product that was 10x better

for the Pro Trader and at the time it was like very non-consensus or very like you know counter consensus where a lot of people thought like nfts are Collectibles they should be traded on an eBay like interface and and you know trying to add trading view charts trying to add an order book view to nfts is completely missing the point but we felt different like we had a pretty like we had a strong Trader background and we felt that this is exactly what most people in this market are doing right now they're trading nfts and maybe flipping it for a profit in and out like 100 times a day and you know existing players were not seeing that and we felt that that was our opportunity basically our beach head to building a differentiated nft Marketplace and then sort of like getting and more market share as we introduce like more

Innovative products like our amm and then eventually our amm plus like nft listing side by side and of course we have like a lot of other features now yeah definitely and and so you you start building it um how at what point did you understand that there was validation there in the in salana you know I think obviously y was an investor in blur and Pac-Man described it very succinctly like openc is not going to do this at least in the ethereum camp he said there needs to be a a a nft Marketplace for Traders which it sounds like you guys have done that that Playbook but how you know when you start building that I'm curious like what were some of the metrics uh that you started

to understand okay there's definitely something here and was there anything in the process that made you question like the viability of the product where there were kind of road maps like hiccups along the road that you know made kind of second guess this thesis oh boy it's easier to say what uh what what didn't make a second guess the thesis because I guess ever since we started building uh it was kind of down only like FTX happened a lot of people gave up on salana uh nft Market as a whole was kind of looking worse and worse and it was all layering together it's like okay you're building on a chain most people telling you is gonna die you're building a product most people think don't make sense um it it it wasn't pretty for a long time I think the only thing that kept us going were actually our customers uh so early on we

got like 50 100 guys excited and then they told you know a couple of their friends and then we had 200 guys and then maybe like 300 guys and it kind of stayed at that level for a long time for like months and months and months it didn't grow to like thousands for a while but those 300 guys they would like be in rdms every day and they'd be like man like how did I live without this and it's just like what are you going to do you're not going to stop shipping you're like okay well I don't know 300 people like it maybe there's like more um so honestly for the longest time it was just kind of like raw conviction it was just like okay these guys they're the market they're validation Just Gonna Keep building and shipping and I think the turning point for us was just about

this time last year when we started seeing real traction um I think that was probably like the culmination of enough features being built but also the word spreading that there's this new Marketplace that is more optimized for trading um and people liked it you know people just showed up and they liked it and it worked and it was fast and at the time like others weren't so I think it was just a combination of those things that led us to keep building do you have any point I mean you're right I mean you you went through uh you had an incredible Vantage Point into what was the near death or apparent near death of salana and then the resurge over the last year um did you at any point consider transitioning moving to another chain um and also more

generally um you know would love to just take this opportunity to talk about um what was what did it feel like and what was this kind of transition over the last year of the kind of the the rise of salana from your standpoint 100% I think we we considered moving chains many many times in fact we even considered pivoting outside of nfts entirely just because we felt that yes we've built this amazing aggregator at the time and then it turned into a Marketplace for you know the couple hundred guys maybe a thousand people thousand daily actors active users at the time but we felt like it was a pretty tough battle especially after FTX when we felt that people from the

outside basically saw salana as a dead chain right and that perception that people like lock into their mind is very difficult to change once they latch onto it so the biggest worry after FTX was not that salana the tech was bad or that in fact even like users leaving salana itself when they're already in it the biggest threat to us was people not coming into salana ever again creators projects even people who are looking to collect nfts we were afraid that they would never touch salana again again because of what happened and of course like from the inside we still saw a thriving organic community of nft Traders on our platform trading nfts back and forth every single day in fact I think the the wallet count and the

volume was at like all-time highs during that diff you know denominated in Soul but that was like that was basically a little like evidence for us that we should maybe keep going and see it through you know a couple more months um hopefully the market recovers hopefully salon you know gets rid of that this sort of unfair negative narrative around it and maybe there's a bit of light at the end of tunnel that we can work towards and I think like in hindsight it obviously worked out at the time of course our conviction was wavering especially when 9 N Out of 10 VCS were telling us to switch chains and that's hard right when you're raising a round no one wants to give you money the only money that we got into tensor during the seed round initially was from those you know couple hundred users you know 50 of them

decided to put in a small check into us to keep the the lights running and keep our AWS servers running and that was enough to uh for us to basically bridge that you know bridge that a tough time yeah um at any point do you see tensor expanding into other ecosystems um or would you or are you just really solely focused on salana I think there we're solely focused on Solana we sort of believe in the verticalized approach rather than horizontal approach so the horizontal approach is you go and try to build the same product on every chain the verticalized approach is you try and

build multiple products that are hopefully synergistic on the same chain I think maybe I even heard this on Empire but I think at some point you guys said like hey blockchains are like countries and I actually think that's a very opt analogy because there's there's this sort of like patriotism around blockchains and like if you were starting a fintech company today let's say You're Building A Bank would you go and start your bank in five countries and try to build a shallow product in each one or would you try to build the best product in the one country that you live in and then maybe at some point you have a branch somewhere else I think that's probably how we're thinking about the world where at this point dener has one Mission and one Mission only and that is to build the best trading experience for nfts on salana

we want to become the fundamental liquidity layer for nfts that every single dab Builds on top of um and I think until that vision is completely realized which probably is years away I don't think we're going to be shopping chains just doesn't make sense focus is everything for a small startup and I think that's that's our Focus I see you nodding Richard as well I want to I want to double click on that Grand Vision you could look at the product today and say well what else is there to build and I teased at you guys yesterday on Twitter around you know collecting is a very social experience certainly trading is as well what else can you build you have a ton of

attention I think I don't know if you've made this assessment but from all the protocols that exist in salana I would probably guess that Jupiter um and you guys are probably the most like active in terms of attention in terms of like activity I may be wrong but I am curious like what is that Grand Vision like what what else can you build what else can you capitalize on um the Grand Vision for tensor the oneliner is we want to become the financial stack for nfts on salana I think there is so maybe TR do some context we initially chose nfts as sort of the vertical we would build in not because

you know we were degenerate jpeg flippers and like you know we liked like jpegs a lot it was because we felt that there was this massive opportunity to build interesting Financial Primitives in this space that no one has really done well I think that's what got us excited you know we're more from the trafi background and so we felt that you know no one I mean basically the only financial ization of nfts was like trading and maybe a bit of borrowing and lending we felt that there was such a massive amount of green space that we could build a really big platform company protocol whatever you call it just on the idea that a lot of things in the future will be tokenized as nfts and as with many things in crypto they'll be financialized and we want to

become maybe some people don't like this TR but the super protocol for all the financialization you might do with nfts on Sal I think what's interesting is going into 2024 we have some big plans to essentially open up the protocol and invite every single developer out there who's really interested in salana right now who's perhaps even already building on salana to build on top of our protocols we want to be the fundamental liquidity layer for nfts and introduce other Financial Peres Beyond just like spot trading in the case of a Marketplace so you can imagine that there might be you know some form of insurance nfts we'll build a protocol for that and you as the DAP developer could build an interesting Insurance product on top of the the tensor protocol that maybe like talks to that

Marketplace and all that liquidity shared between both protocols so that you don't you don't have Capital inefficient Traders right all the liquidity is within one protocol that's basically our plan for 2024 is to get as many developers to build on top of our protocols yeah yeah I've always felt that people sometimes miss the mark around certainly right now the activity is around art but it is super interesting because if you solve art which is probably the most like um heterogeneous kind of type of nft like in terms of traits and like 10,000 Collections and there's hundreds of traits like whereas if you solve really difficult problems and build Primitives around liquidity for these type of very diverse and unique assets non fundable

assets then you can probably extend that to other easier type of nfts right and even develop very like new primitive sort defi as we think about it right like think about Parcels of land within a certain zip code it's it's far easier to kind of do that right you kind of understand that but nothing really stopping you from extending the same kind of logic into other nfts real world Assets Now I want to get your take on that like do you right now we see all the activity on these collections um what is kind of your thinking around other type of non-art nfts is that something that you're interested in is that something that you see growing in the near future um or is that something

that you're probably going to leave for another developer like Parcels of the world to kind of figure out and then maybe integrate with tensor I think the answer is probably a little bit of both so I don't think we will try to go after every use case there's probably some use cases that we will want to build ourselves but there's also many use cases that we have no expertise in for example we're working with a company called baxes uh and they do alcohol in the blockchain like we don't know anything about that world but they do really really well and where we come in as their partner is we provide the trading infrastructure for all of their nfts to trade and I think what you said is actually 100% correct which is you build this infrastructure and you battle test it with almost like toy use cases like Collectibles art you know the

silly stuff because the silly stuff like if something goes wrong I mean yes it's unpleasant but at the end of the day you didn't lose someone's you know like Bond or or or or House State on the blockchain and then once it's battle tested and it's been there for years and that Lindy effect has kicked in then that's when you going to bring on a lot of the more serious assets on chain I think the other thing to to be mindful of is these more serious assets come with a lot more compliance requirements and that world is coming like that world is it's just the real world right like you can't assume that you know blockchain is going to be compliance free for the for the rest of your life so I think having infrastructure in place already that's

working functional when you have to layer those additional things on top is way easier than trying to build the infrastructure battle tested all the way from Ground Zero and having to deal with all the compliance stuff at the same time so I just think it's an evolution just like the internet evolved from silly pictures and videos to you know everything it does today I think crypto and blockchains will basically do the same the way I see it is that tensor isn't a bet on what kind of interesting applications that people will come up with and how we predict that interesting application I think it's nice it helps our helps guide our intuition and helps guide maybe some of the products that we build but I think what tensor is betting on is nft as a form factor will be a popular form factor in crypto and a lot of things

will move from The Real World into crypto and we essentially get exposed to all of that upside so you can imagine that if the world hypothetically uh instead of running 99% on trafi Rails it becomes you know 50% on crypto rails you can imagine that there's so many things in the world world that you might want to move into crypto and they're just inherently non-fungible like a car right every car has a VIN number has a model you know you name it can't be a fungible token it has to be an nft houses obvious most obvious example literally anything that they can think of in real world will probably be a non-fungible token when it becomes tokenized in crypto and like there there needs to be infrastructure for that especially Financial

infrastructure because that's what crypto unlocks is this permissionless financial system system that anyone be can become a lender anyone can become an LP and basically unlocks liquidity globally and permissionless so I think that's like super exciting and I mean I'd be lying to you if I told you I I knew what the next thing coming is for nfts but as long as there is I like so I don't know if you know Chow from Alliance he made this likea analogy a while ago like Deens are the early adopters of crypto and they're the ones who will bootstrap all the you know Capital that needs to come in to build the infrastructure and I think right now we're just catering to the Deens making sure they're happy making sure that tensor stays relevant making sure that we can fund development of all of this

infrastructure that we're building yeah yeah certainly like you know hear block works of the world really get excited about tokenization the real challenges going back to your earlier days of of building oracles for nfts I think at some point when you start bringing on and trying to stitch together you know atoms and bits you know the physical world in a digital tokenized context there certainly needs to be some arbitration some layer that touches real world right when you start tokenizing not only treasuries but cars and and and Parcels of land and whatnot like that that becomes just more challenging um to to do but certainly not impossible I think all you can do now is probably just build the infrastructure for for Pure only digital

stuff um um I'm curious in in this journey just talking a little bit about to give people an idea of how people use tensor today so there's a multiple collections we can talk about which ones you like or which ones really took off in the earlier days like madlads and you have your own torans and qu and a bunch of others um but like what what are most people doing today on the platform um you know yeah I think think there's kind of two ways people use tensor uh so one is almost like a Bloomberg terminal you just got to keep it open to track the market a lot of people tell us they use it that way uh I think it's just because you know us being Traders we managed to back a lot of data in a small amount of

screen space um I think people like that so i' be lying if I didn't tell you I have a tab open here with a you know tensor that's awesome I love that that's awesome so yeah but I think you know it starts there like you ship something that's differentiated and people want and all of a sudden you you have your initial user base um so that's probably the first way I think the second way is basically actually trading uh so buying selling um Market making we have like uh this basically like way of setting up a market making pool where you can both buy and sell and uh what we tried doing with all those features is streamlining them to be both fast and also kind of operational in bulk so you know instead of you having to list and buy one nft at a time you can do 100 nfts at a time and

everything's like has a slider and it's just like a lot faster we optimize the entire platform to have as few clicks as possible um and so I think people like that right like people just want to trade back and forth um you know ape into their favorite collections so probably those are the two main ways people use tensor today we are going to be introducing onethird feature um in January um which we can't talk about just yet but uh we think that it'll basically unlock a new interesting Financial use case and what is the motivation for like um buying something in like you can sweep a collection so say that you really like something but you have like a you're from a TR from a Trader mindset not a collector right because if you're

a collector you know I go specifically like like when I bought my first Toran I I went out to you guys and say hey what do you like and I love the hoodie one with hooks and so like I I just love that that to me is I don't think is a representative experience of the you most perhaps users uh another part of my dun brain said oh I really like this collection what is the best way to if I think if my thesis says nfts will continue to grow in salana uh and by virtue of there's just more activity users are just coming I see this as a chain where is more retail friendly because fees by the way are negligible and so you know you can do all these much more velocity so what's the best way so I'm thinking okay maybe I'll sweep 50 torans or whatever and you

can do that slider you know and do it um but then you can do sounds like obviously you can you can stake a Toran which is not I think I think it's only unique for torians but you can provide liquidity and you're kind of incentivizing that like how many users stop at just sweeping and then putting on alerts to saying okay if the collection goes up 20% I'm going to off load that or I'm going to provide liquidity um I'm curious like what percentage of the users are going the full step of providing liquidity and what is kind of their rationale to do that today I would say most people who are trading on tensor by number of wallets

or number of users are not actively providing liquidity like they would on like uh an amm like a like a Unis swap or an orca on most people are in fact just sweeping for example or even just buying individual nfts or selling nfts like listing them on the market or selling them into a bit the people that actually do liquidity provisioning are probably the bit the more sophisticated um like super shadowy coders they might have like uh you know an interest in writing scripts writing Bots and they might you know try to make a bit of money you know Pocket Change Maybe like a living sometimes by providing liquidity on tensor that just means like you know buying low selling high and doing that many many times a

day and you know over time you accumulate enough fees I think what's interesting about rui is that it enables both the former type of user as well as the latter type of user I think that's something that like we we stumble upon over time and and that is we have both a light mode on our app as well as a pro mode on our app and that was something we introduced like quite a while ago and we just like okay A lot of people are complaining to us saying that our Pro UI which was like the Bloomberg terminal was way too complex you know sometimes they don't want to see the the trading view chart they don't want to see the order book they just want to see the jpegs and have real-time data access and that's basically our light mode is it looks like your eBay interface but everything is fast you can do things in bulk and

everything happens in real time so you don't end up with like stale listings which was common place when we initially got into the space and so yeah like these DG they're using the light mode and then they have the sophisticated guys who are using the pro mode providing liquidity so that they can buy and sell for you know a very small spread all right everyone so we talk a lot about the institutions coming into crypto on Empire Santi and I are both headed out to London March 18th to 20th for blockworks is e8th ever digital asset Summit D this is an Institutional buttoned up conference that we've hosted since 2019 I like to joke that it is probably the last remaining kind of suit and tie event in crypto people are still

wearing suit and tie it's pretty funny you'll actually hear from a lot of the largest institutions in the world coming from Standard Charter FIS JP Morgan framework folks coming out winter mute vanc Goldman Sachs there are a couple big themes of this conference one Bitcoin Catalyst the having and the spot ETF two A View From the buy side three rw's tokenization and stable coins four Global regulatory Frameworks five institutional infrastructure including Banking and payments and six the macro case for crypto if you have anything to do with the institutional side of crypto you have to be there Santi and I got you back we hooked you up with a 20% off code it is Empire 20 there is a little competition running internally at blockworks to see who can drive the most

number of tickets so help Santi and I out register with our code and you get 20% off that is Empire 20 during this process uh of like Fast iteration because I think the product as I think about how much it evolved you sounds like you guys were constantly like listening to your customers these kind of loyal St a thousand fans and iterating on that were there any features that you felt feel today that you got terribly wrong and conversely where there's some features once you introduce them were a huge unlock to kind of stimulate a particular kpi that you're you know focused on I think the amm when we first shipped it was a little too complicated for many

people we kind of had to go on quite a few spaces and explain how it works um but I think like yeah it was just a process of iteration and like honestly the thing I'm most grateful for is that we were building through the bear because we actually had time to sit down with users and users had time to sit down with us it's kind of getting a little crazy right now like there's basically like a new nftg standard every two days that we have to integrate and there's like a new nft type every two days that somebody invents which is like cool and awesome but that basically means you you don't have time to like actually talk to users anymore so I think like for any Founders listening building in the bear is the best thing you can do because you actually get full

attention uh both yourself and off your users we sure think of any features that we shipped that were like a huge hit off the bad trying to think I think with all things when it comes to product it's weird because sometimes when we think a feature will be a killer hit may take a pretty long time for it to like ramp up and like Get Enough usage people start talking about it and then more and more people start using it actively whereas like stuff that we thought you know is just a you know a nice to have feature but isn't a big hit um that actually getss a lot of excitement if you would start talking about it I would say it can point to any specific feature that was like a hit maybe that tells you

something about like building products and that is you don't always need to build that killer feature that will 10x your user base overnight I think Building Product especially what we were doing with the marketplace is almost like slow continual iteration where we always Loop the user back in and they back and try to figure out what what is the next thing that maybe they want but they don't really know how to you know tangibly you know put into sentences how can we preempt that and how can we build that feature into our product and offer this to them and the next time they show up they'll be like oh wow there's this cool new feature that I didn't even know I need it but now I'm using it every single day and it's it's like a lot of those in a short amount of times like we would do basically feature releases every single

week we would basically like deploy the prod like five times a day just push like get push and it just like goes onto the production site and then we just had like a bunch of these like neat features that all add up to creating a pretty interesting product experience yeah definitely um I I guess uh as it relates to just I want to go back to to building during difficult times and um you know raising money and where you are now and certainly bull markets really pull you can pull you in a million directions um as we you alluded to I think Yia like there's just so much that you can do how do you maintain a certain

level of focus um around building and not overextending perhaps um you know as you think about like the next year you've you've had this initial success you have these customers like um I'm curious like like how you think about just building through this period staying focused adding features like um does does anything change uh building it a bear to building now to having way more customers um I'm curious from your standpoint or is it just like look it's we're going to continue to do things as we have before and it worked and so you know we shouldn't really change we just grow the team and it's you

know yeah I think the demon you have to fight change I think during the bare Market you're like you can't fall asleep because you're worried everything's going to zero and that you're actually wasting your time during the bull market you can't fall asleep because there's too much fomo and the thing that you know like you have like 17 things that you want to add into the product then you basically don't have time and I think the answer unfortunately is um you just have to develop judgment over time right and just like call things that you think are good and and hope that your bets are correct like there's there's no way you can build everything in um especially as the bull market is going to get crazier and crazier and crazier you just have to pick battles um

and you have to learn from your mistakes right I think the one thing again I'm grateful for is like we basically had two years almost two years with our users to get to know them and so I like to think that we have a good understanding of how different features are going to hit like we may not know if it's going to be a blowa away success or a success well probably have like an idea okay this is going to be minor this be major type of thing um so yeah I think it's just about training your neural net you know inside your head making a bunch of mistakes and hopefully becoming better over time um in terms of Standards U I want to go back to that a bit obviously my understanding is metaplex like the dominant standard it has been for a while you say you're you're you're looking at integrating other standards

I'm curious if you could go deeper into that so the most obvious standard that we recently integrated was the inscription standard they're you know by the LI Flex guys uh it's also like just uh I think I think it's one Dev maybe Tom um who just hacked hacked this together yeah I think it was a couple maybe and he hacked it together you know a couple of them hacked it together like probably over like a two three month period and all of a sudden it just like took off right like they were in the right place at the right time there was all of this inscription fomo from Bitcoin and oros and all of that attention all that uh excitement came into salana as soon as salana started

going up people said okay salana is going to be the next ethereum and what is something that is cool that you can do with nfts that you know came out of a recent Trend and that is inscriptions and so now people are inscribing or putting like nft data on chain on salana even though there's no like it's not a necessity but it's like another fun novel thing that people can do with nfts and I think that goes back to like why a lot of people are trading things in crypto right now and that is because there is some new idea new narrative new mechanic that people latch on to and it's fun to participate in these games because you don't know what you don't know what's going to happen novel things tend to be unpredictable and so you almost feel like you're getting in um

with a with a Level Playing Field and every one can participate in this fun new game that people are playing together and trying to like figure out for the first time so I think it really appeals to like gamer gamer types like us um because you're essentially playing this new game that just came out and everyone in the world is trying to play it and there's money involved yeah absolutely yeah it's it's certainly fun I mean um in terms of in inscriptions maybe for the uh less sophisticated listeners out there could you just comment very quickly on uh what inscriptions are how they're kind of different from your typical nft and how much of the activity today in salana you know inscriptions are taking down blockchains um because the activity is just balloon right um I'm curious how much activity in the platform today is

like inscriptions versus just your traditional nft standard like non- inscription Yeah so basically an nft is actually two things under the hood it's a private key that lets you control it um and it it's a bunch of data so when you go in an nft Marketplace you obviously see the picture that data needs to be stored somewhere very often for what most people think of nfts that data doesn't live on the blockchain it would be too expensive to store that it could it could live somewhere else it could live on R weave ipfs sometimes even AWS um and then what lives on the blockchain is just a pointer to that data and that pointer whoever controls the nft or like owns the nft actually owns

so that's what's like a classical nft the difference for inscriptions is that the data itself lives on the blockchain I think inscriptions really took off with like ordinals on bitcoin because of the mechanics that are necessary on bitcoin to minted nft You could argue that on other blockchains like salana like ethereum you don't really need inscriptions but there's something magical about having your entire nft data live on the blockchain itself and by way like inscriptions existed for a while so there were experiments I think even with like art blocks and I think even buks maybe are inscribed on on the ethereum blockchain um so it's not like this is a completely new concept it's just that now it sort of like hid that inflection point and a lot of people got

excited about them um now to your second question I think in terms of activity to be honest there have been days where like over 50% of trading volume for nfds is inscriptions so you know it's it's exciting there's there's a lot of people that are interested and I guess the other interesting thing is we think that the people trading these things are actually a new user segment because we see that in our user numbers that went up when inscriptions became popular and they tend to be more Asia focused uh rather than kind of Western focused so it's kind of interesting it's like almost a new trend that brings in new users um and I guess like spreads nfts to new parts of the population yeah absolutely I think the the the way I think about is script is

there's just more certainty and there is now a possibility to be more specific opinionated about a particular uh part of the block like for instance for Bitcoin of course once you have the happening there are certain moments right where you want to append your data to a particular Satoshi I think of like imagine being the the Genesis block well an inscription for that would be much rarer right than your typical kind of inscription on any given block and so it just becomes what is commoditized block space now you add a whole another dimension of bidding for a particular like appending data to a particular like uh like block uh and and and a piece within that block and so it just becomes like pretty awesome to uh to see uh you know to your point around

Asia I think it's really taken off dramatically in in China and some of these places so I'm kind of not surprised um um I guess um I mean I know you mentioned that you didn't want to comment much on these new features that are coming out but uh maybe uh if you can talk about the type of users that you don't think you have captured yet uh and just talking generally about Trends um user Trends uh volume wise uh you know there's all these folks commenting now like Solana seeing more activity than any other chain out there on the deck side I'm curious how that Stacks up on the nft side um how yeah maybe we could

just have a general discussion around user Trends and what you've observed over these chaotic like past couple of months where salana just has gone parabolic yeah there are a couple of trends that we saw in the past couple of months I think one of them that we didn't talk too much about was actually uh the introduction of like compressed nfts and specifically a project called drip on salana they started doing a ton of free art drops like entirely free you show up you connect your wallet and every single day or I think every single week you can subscribe to like certain artists or certain creators and you'll get their art Dru that actually brought in a ton of people from uh like southeast Asia basically places where uh the cost of living is much lower and so people are almost like getting a kick

out of getting these like free airdrops that are maybe worth like a penny or two which is insignificant to most people in the west but it's actually fun to accumulate these drops and potentially even get like a legendary drop which is worth you know at the time like 0.5 to One Soul was pretty typical and that's like pretty significant to someone in in that part of the world right where you're getting basically 4040 US dollars maybe like 80 us now uh just for showing up and subscribing to an artist and looking at their art that's one user Trend that we saw I think it's going to come back I actually think that is a very bullish signal for salana being able to appeal to uh appeal to users across the world even if they come from very low cost living areas and that's

because salana is just cheap it's fast you're not paying you know on the lowend like $5 in gas fees on the highend like 50 maybe $500 during a mint you don't even have to think about gas fees and I think that's that has that's that's like a non that's table Stakes for people in lower cost of living areas the other Trend that we're seeing is more Asian adoption I think that's coming through ordos I think that's going to come with uh essentially creators getting more interested in salana this like up up up and cominging L1 and them wanting to do art drops them wanting to do collections on salana I think for us the user segment that we're more interested in are all the crypto native users are still on the sidelines of salana who haven't taken that jump yet that leap

yet because maybe they they thought you know salana was going to go to zero during FTX and they've essentially just said okay I'm gonna stay on eth I'm G to trade you know bour I'm GNA trade pudgy Penguins I'm not going to touch salana but what's interesting something that's interesting that we're seeing with these eth users who are coming over slowly but surely um is that once they experience salana and trading salana nfts on tensor they're at attitude completely changes right salana is no longer this all L1 that was backed byf but it was this it's this all L1 that can power the future of finance and has one of the best user experiences if not the best user experience right now so I think that's really compelling I think we can on board a ton more eth users to salana and hopefully they start trading nfts on

tensor yeah it' be really interesting to observe uh it'd probably be difficult to do but in a perfect world you'd want to see how many trades does a user do on ethereum L1 or L2 or L3 and how much once they come over to salana how much more trades do they do because fees are just negligible it's just you know and you you know I certainly anecdotally personally and having talked to a lot of more eth heavy folks that start using something like Jupiter they're like wow uh all of a sudden I'm doing way more stuff uh you know you can there's all these really nice features uh some of which

are kind of quotequote only possible in salana um like like I talked to the drip guys truly like his comment was to your point even if we wanted to do this on an L2 it would have been possible like it's just uh it wouldn't be a viable business model so compressed nfts become such an important kind of like for them the the negligible fees just become essential to their business model right but yeah I don't know if you have some like Insight or kind of data points around like how much more of this unlocking of consumer activity is happening because once you discover salana you don't really want to go back and you don't really accept paying any sort of fees that are not noticeable uh and then so you stay

right that's actually exactly how I got into salana so during the last bow Market I sort of got interested in like 2019 and if you remember remember back then like for you to do a simple interaction with like the curve contract would cost you like you know 500 bucks and you know I wasn't the bajillion here 500 bucks was a lot of money to me so I was like I can't do this so I went and started like even if it were five bucks yeah that's still a lot right like that's a lot of money yeah um and so I started doing it on salana and then I was like oh man I kind of like feel bad now about doing anything on E it just feels painful you know like you're like losing money um so yeah I think I think that's spot on I mean I was just gonna add like

you know you asked about Trends I think the biggest overarching Trend we're seeing in salana is people are just not afraid to experiment with stuff like all the you know DJ coins and DJ inscriptions and this and that um it's all fun in games but it's actually pretty interesting experiments under the hood like there's a guy who basically built a minting uh process where you Mint one and a deer block because blocks in Salon are super fast they're about 400 milliseconds it would take you a couple hours to M out like a 10,000 nft collection and let's say there's like 50 traders that uh tried to bet on the nft during a block they all bet the same amount uh one of them gets it so it's like randomized but then all of that amount that was collected is used to bid

on that same nft as a it's just like placed on a Marketplace as a bid and so it's like a interesting minting process that you can't bought because it's very systematic like you have to participate in in as many blocks as you want to and as soon as there are enough traders that have been on nft so that the EV of the nft is where you think it should be you're basically not betting anywhere right so like those kind of experiments we're just like seeing so many of them right now because just like so easy and so cheap and so and like yeah people just want to try stuff I think that's really the biggest thing that's all has going for it right now it's just like fun you know people want to try stuff yeah no absolutely um as you think about you know being where you are today

as one of of the leading projects um I guess maybe take this opportunity to talk more generally about salana you know as a a blockchain like what what do you think as a builder Solana needs to gets really right and we've talked a little bit about that but more so I want to get more on the what can salana do right uh because no blockchain is perfect right and so from your standpoint like what do you want to see or what are some of the things that you think are going to be essential for salana to maintain its position as the more the most retail or just the most friendly um blockchain like this sort of 10x faster cheaper and better and better encompasses many things security

friendliness and and and a number of things um so yeah maybe you know we we we can spend a little bit of time on that yeah uh I was actually watching your episode with know uh on like the OS OSI model monolith versus or I guess integrated versus modular um and sort of the trade-offs there related to that point I think what salana offers is Simplicity from a mental model for a builder you don't have to think about building on this L2 which isn't you know directly main that but it's this L2 that has evm but then it has a DA it uses a DA layer that's on a different chain like Lea or you know I

think there's a couple of others um it's not too much for a builder to think about and like you're thinking like okay yes there's this complicated modular system what am I trading off here like what are some of the assumptions I'm making and there are probably a number of security assumptions or just like efficiency assumptions that you're making um that you don't necessarily have to think about when you're building on Salon everything is integrated together you can essentially do endtoend optimization of the system and it just gets faster at every single point Point as the core devs continue working on it so that's like one nice to have like it's it's more nebulous because it's sort of in the background I think the one thing that salana needs to get right and I think it's they're working on it for sure is the developer experience

around building smart contracts on salana as well as the developer experience with dealing uh with this much data I think for most blockchain devs coming from the evm space they've never had to deal with 500 600 transactions per second right that that's like unheard of on mayet well that is unheard of on mayet that's like unheard of on most l2s and I think you have to be a pretty good engineer if you want to like basically build everything from scratch kind of like what we did or you have to have like the aptitude to learn all of that stuff on the Fly I think there are a lot of good companies and projects that are trying to make this easier um like anchor is one of the more the most common uh developer framework or I guess framework to use

build Salon programs and they've done a pretty good job in simplifying a lot of the complexities with building Salon programs but I would say uh there's definitely room for improvement and it could get a ton better we just need more developers building building better tooling um I think this is all to say that it's not for not that we have this more complicated developer experience compared to solidity and evm and that's because in order to get such great performance and throughput on the Chain itself you have to make the developer experience a bit more hardcore that makes sense it's kind of like writing in C++ like a low-level language versus writing in Python yes in Python you could write a script that does a bunch of stuff that would take you maybe 10

times as long to do it in C++ and that's because in C++ you have to deal with memory management you have to deal with like Hardware knowledge maybe like some like archaic compiler optimizations and that's kind of like the same thing that salana is going through because you want that performance across this entire blockchain you need to trade off certain developer um things that you have to think about as a developer yeah I think developer experience is probably the main thing where salana needs to do a bit of work maybe the other one is I think the community needs to become a little more mature I think right now a sort of a salonas community can be a little like hot and fast sometimes and think as with any technology you know the more successful you become the more

you start thinking about reliability resilience in the case of blockchains often open source that's something we're thinking about for kind of beginning of next year I think many Sal projects are thinking about that right now um but look that's that's a normal kind of gradual evolutionary process right as the community succeeds and becomes more uh more mature and kind of thinks more about things then I think teams also have a more mature attitude so I think that's going to come I'm not too worried about that seeing good signs yeah yeah look I mean I think it's normal any Community goes through some level of euphoria once you have a near-death experience and just feels great to come out the other end and saying okay like we stuck through it and

but I I do see a lot of when I talk to the core team Ben and and aoli and you know just I think they're very much grounded and I think they understand that there's still a lot of work to be done um I'm particularly when I see that like I just could it's just very exciting certainly you have the Matt you know like the the the the manlet you know there's a lot of Twitter is always kind of a very loud and uh I think U loud voices are are always a thing but they're not very representative of times of the real core builders that just keep building and keep their head down but just the the the posture and the commentary and the vision I think is very clear from the salana team like the

core team and I got to imagine I'm a terrible Builder but if you're a builder like just seeing that is probably very comforting and gives you a lot of confidence to keep building on this ecosystem like hey they're building fire dancer and that's coming and that's going to have a huge Improvement for liveness and resiliency and I think um For Better or For Worse it's just a more integrated team right it's just you can probably go to them and maybe even make proposals whereas if you try to do that in ethereum it be just difficult because it's just farther along and you have to there's not like one still Central kind of core team that is building right there's just these different kind of units that you have to the coordination problem is is harder to to make improvements and and put forth theps right but um yeah I think it's going

through a very magic yeah I think doly is is a really good leader like ux was definitely part of the reason I switched to salana and other part was just you know watching him talk about his vision and seeing that okay there was something there like I guess what excited me about salana was that he was not trying to replicate what existed with like a little twist it was a fundamentally different way of seeing the world and that way was grounded in hardcore engineering and having somebody who has the technical chops to have a vision like that and then has the guts to go and execute that vision and then I think as the last year showed has the guts to survive through literally the worst wave of fud possible oh man I mean people like that are one in a million so I

think I think we're lucky to have him like human Raj have really been uh spearheading salana and um I think inspiring the enre community yeah well I know we're bumping up on time and I want to be mindful of you I want to go through um before I I go to a fire round set of questions I don't know if there's anything else that you guys want to touch on that we haven't covered during this segment I think 2024 is going to be our biggest year ever I think we saw massive growth we went from 0% market share beginning of this year to I think 70% 70 80% sometimes I think 2024 is going to be different in that uh you know we're not necessarily trying to prove oursel anymore on salana and like try to essentially make ourselves into someone because we're no

one before I think what's going to be much more important for us to focus on is growing the pie and then getting more people to build on top of us so we don't have to BU try to build everything and become you know the super app which usually tends not to go well you know unless you're in like China and you have the backing of like the government for reat um so I think pushing towards decentralization open source and getting other people to build on top of us is our biggest goal for 2024 IIA anything else no I think that's it we just want more developers building cool stuff and uh we're going to be here to support them amazing well I uh this been a fascinating discussion I was like to end

it with a fire round set of questions um so both of you should answer uh both uh no more than five seconds um or I'll cut you off I promise so the first one is would you do this all over again oh boy uh probably if I knew everything I know no I feel the answer to that question is The Grass Is Always Greener but it's not um so I would say yes I would say yes I think going through the the glass chewing all over again because I think the the reward is worth it I think it's an unfair fire round question but so we'll be leaning on this I've heard so many founders say you there's needs to

be some level of insanity and and like negligence around like what it will take especially to build in this space to go through this uh but anyways um yeah it's always refreshing to hear because it is really difficult to build in crypto I think even more so than traditional so let's we'll stick to easier questions less philosophical I guess uh what is your favorite collection or JPEG that you own or may not own well I mean it has to be a Toran that's not real question that was a layup Richard if I wasn't choosing obviously torans uh mads I think they're quality builders I think they represent what every salana nft collection should aspire to and which is building cool not being afraid to be vocal and

just like growing the pie right they've grown salana so much during their mint this is the backpack team right Armani and yep Armani TR yeah I I did a PLL recently on Twitter that said like what would you collect and there were four options the first one was the The Saga phone which as we now know is like you're well in the money um the other one torans was another option mattas was a third and then the other one's like other and then you had clay aurus and a few others but number one was The Saga phone because I think people are just speculating on the value of this thing it's going for like 5,000 on eBay and the value retail is like 600 uh and then the second was MBS to your point and then torians um uh what else maybe parting question

let's make it fun how many hours of sleep are you getting yeah last night not that many because there were blow-offs in production and so that's why we look a little tired but normally we try to get at Place six seven I guess yeah it fluctuates idealistically eight right um obviously that never almost never happens so I think I think getting sleep is important because making decisions is hard and important and you need to be clear-headed and awake to make those important decisions yeah how big will the team be at the end of 2024 my bet is between 10 and 20 I think is where we want to end up you're eight

today you're a 10 today about 10 about 10 I think uh we're we're generally believe Believers in like small teams I think teams like dydx like very small very focused you know Rockstar Engineers like we love love that model yeah Richard I'm I'm gonna give a cheeky answer here hopefully a thousand because uh hopefully a thousand developers start building on top of tenser and they're all part yeah nice I like that um last one biggest uh life hack that you implemented in 2023 to increase your Wellness happiness sense of fulfillment whatever it is okay I'm gonna get a lot of for

this one but it's gonna be cold showers two minutes in the morning two three minutes in the morning it's we have this like joke inside the team we always like ask each other did you take a cold shower today but I actually think it works like it really helps just a shower not not a plunge ideally if you can do that I mean I just don't have a big enough but yeah we're we're both going to get because a lot of like influencers are not doing this but I've been doing cold plunges forever and they reduce like for me it's just critical the signs behind reducing inflammation and Recovery is there but yeah yeah we'll get for it no matter what uh Richard I have a pretty boring answer um more practical but just silencing all your notifications during the day because I think yes there important

things uh actually well there's some things we don't silence like the high priority chats that we have with our team yeah but I think you can get so caught up especially if you're starting to see a lot of in down in like the bull market just constantly see a notification and try to respond to it and you just become completely you're contact switching every two seconds and that's impossible to get any yeah yeah oh can I throw one more in that I think is like yeah yeah sure uh pick two days on the calendar and make them your call days that's the two days you take calls on the other three days no calls and just code on the other three days that has been just like super productive I definitely agree with that I I Implement that started implementing

that more uh being more judicious with your calendar um okay well maybe one more why not um because you met online um and you you know in this quirky manner which is so representative of Co probably like 90% of the people in crypto that I talk to I've never met in person that may be a good thing actually I don't know um but um what is something that you didn't know about the other that was like the biggest surprise I'm gonna pick on Richard here first yeah I was gonna say I didn't realize uh I mean this is my or I'm I'm the same thing too but uh Ilia is a huge Deen as well and uh I think it goes back to he said he played a lot of like World

of Warcraft and like mm R fuggs I also played like RuneScape and like story and bunch of like degenerate like mm RPGs when I was little so I think I think it's it's cool to see that someone as uh levelheaded and clearheaded also be a complete regen in a good way at the same time yeah I think Deens get a bad rep but uh there's just so much behind it a Deen uh that is you know admirable I think well I think a dejan is a little bit of what I'm Fair word because it has this negative connotation to it but if you actually think about it like people who like took a ship across the ocean to America probably were deons right like you have to be a Dean to do that so really another word for that is

explorers you know like people who are excited to try new things in life and U I think that's cool I I'm perfectly fine people call me tan I actually wear that I think there's a compliment uh and anyone thinks otherwise can politely off um IIA what did discover uh from from Richard yeah I think obviously when you meet somebody online like you can only ask them that many questions over the camera to like get to know them and I think we had like a bit of an understanding that we like similarish uh in like many ways but it kind of like became a little crazy when I flew over and we're like you know like how like in Fallout or in some game you have these sliders that you have where like characters I think our sliders are pretty aligned like in many ways like

about the same risk appetite about the same level of imation about the same level of like temper you know like all these things but they really matter when you're operating in an environment like full of vagueness and you have to make Split Second decisions and like turn the company around on a dime and like being able to turn around to the person and know that what's going on inside their brain is pretty similar to what's going on inside of your brain and so you guys can kind of like wink wink like very quickly agree on something just get to work um I think is basically invaluable and I didn't expect that like kind of crazy you don't find somebody like that as far as I can tell and I've invested in many it's it's really hard to find that um so anyways guys this has been a real treat I would love hearing

the inside story at a moment in time where you know it was just really difficult to build in salana and it's now in more people's minds right and I think they will appreciate how hard it was um because then it's so easy to then now say oh it was just so obvious and and whatnot but it really wasn't I think and you guys really had a front row seat in a and you built uh a really cool and unique product so I I hope that you continue to execute and maybe at some point we'll have you on to talk about more features that are coming out I'll certainly be paying attention um so really appreciate you coming on and and sharing your story it was great to hear it thanks for having us on this was fun do this yeah was fun yeah thanks was fun he everyone thank you so much for

watching today's episode really hope you enjoyed it we wanted to take a second to just remind you about our upcoming digital asset Summit in London March 18th to 20th Santi and I got your back seats are limited and we hooked you up with a 20% off discount code it is Empire 20 if you heard it earlier in the podcast there's a little competition running at blockworks to see who can drive the most number of tickets so when you register for the digital asset Summit make sure you use our code Empire 20 see you in [Music] London [Music]