Special: Solana (with CEO Anatoly Yakovenko)

We sit down with the hottest new protocol layer in crypto today: Solana, and its cofounder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko. If you listened to our Ethereum episode or follow crypto even at a cursory level, you've likely heard of Solana and its ability to scale transactions thousands of times higher than Ethereum. And, unlike other so-called "ETH killers", Solana is doing so in production today with large and real applications. We dive into the project's history coming out of the 2017-18 crypto winter, how it works and what's ahead now that they've recently raised $314m (yes that is Pi $million) from a16z and Polychain Capital, with their native SOL tokens currently trading at a market cap around $10B (!). If you love Acquired and want more, join our LP Community for access to over 50 LP-only episodes, monthly Zoom calls, and live access for big events like our Book Clubs. We can't wait to see you there. Join here at: https://acquired.fm/lp/ Sponsors: Thanks to SoftBank Latin America for being our presenting sponsor for this special episode. SoftBank has truly been the first and best large capital allocator in the Latin American startup ecosystem, and we are very excited to work with and learn from them over the rest of 2021. If you are an entrepreneur, employee, other investor or simply someone who's interested in learning about the best young companies in LatAm right now, get in touch with them at: https://bit.ly/acquiredsoftbanklatam and tell them that you heard about them on Acquired. Shu's Twitter (which we highly recommend following!): https://twitter.com/snyatta Paulo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulo-passoni-67195/ Thank you as well to Modern Treasury and to Fundrise. You can learn more about them at: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury (and you can find our reverse interview with them at https://www.moderntreasury.com/acquired ) https://bit.ly/acquiredfundrise Topics covered: Anatoly's background as a wireless engineer at Qualcomm, and how it led to a fundamental discovery of how to improve crypto system scalability Solana's role in the crypto protocol ecosystem and why there's a need for it (and why it can and will exist) alongside Ethereum versus "killing" it Starting Solana during the 2017-18 crypto winter, and how it forced them to focus just on building and shipping versus raising and posturing Bootstrapping adoption with the mining community (Solana's "true believers") and the early and ardent support they provided Where Solana falls on the Vitalik "Scalability - Security - Decentralization" trilemma, and why Solana's superpower of maintaining composability is so attractive Links: Solana: https://solana.com Solana on Twitter: https://twitter.com/solana Solana Hackathon submissions: https://airtable.com/shriNT26cAZeDJagn/tbl5fZ4E1BBbVAttW FTX: https://ftx.us Audius: https://audius.co Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.