 What's up, everyone? It's Giovanni here from Breakpoint in Lisbon. I have the pleasure to be joined by Anatoly Jacovienko, the CEO of Solana Labs. How are you doing, Anatoly? Great. Awesome. So let's start with a very basic question. So we know that now everyone is focusing on Web3, like in terms of a new buzzword that is going around in the space. What do you think is the role of Solana? What do you think is the role that Solana will play in Web3? Well, I think it's kind of interesting that we see the DeFi primitives and all these kind of more complicated financial things now become part of a standard developer's web stack, just another tool. And I think Solana is the cheapest, fastest place to run those tools. And where I see the pioneers of that that have proven that out, folks like Audius already have 6 million users. I think they do about half a million transactions per day. The reason they can do that, store likes and follows and plays on a network like Solana is because it's cheap. And I wanted to ask you about the concept of censorship resistance. So you are very much focused on this concept. You think that it's central in the way you developed Solana. So what does censorship resistance mean to you? Yeah, this is like a very financial term. What this means is that I can send and receive information within a very short amount of time and I'm guaranteed that nobody can interfere with that. Whether ordering of information or withhold it or make a decision before I receive it. And to us, that's a very kind of engineering problem. How do we get that process globally, a global state machine to synchronize within 4 milliseconds? So Solana is designed almost specifically just for that. And as far as I understand it has to do with cryptography so with the possibility to send a message and be sure that that message will get to the receiver in the same way as you sent it in the first place, right? Yeah, except the interesting part here is that the receiver is the entire globe. It's everybody in the world all at once. So how do you guarantee that? You know, go look at our GitHub. It's a bunch of code. And if you had to point out what are the limitations that still face Solana from a technical standpoint what would those limitations be? You know, as an operating system it's very young so it takes 10 years to build an OAS for real. I had the pleasure of doing that at Qualcomm when working in the first mobile operating systems and a lot of the work is now in the tooling and the application development and building better frameworks libraries. You know, it should be easy for somebody to port a new virtual machine. It took me and folks about a year. You know, what if the next set of developers need Java running or .NET? How long is that going to take to port? So what I want to see in the next five years is for Solana to be a full-featured operating system that developers have the kind of ease of use that today they have with Linux or Windows. And it's curious, so you were talking about a time frame of five years. What do you think about in terms of users? How many users we are talking about in a time frame of five years? What do you think? A billion users. I think it's possible. The difference with Web 3 and Web 2 and Web 1 is that those cycles are getting shorter and shorter. You know, we now have the internet to really scale and grow. The challenges, of course, are people, right? How long is it going to take for normal people to understand what cryptography is, what it means to store a seed word, how to deal with that, how to deal with signature verification? You know, when somebody displays a request to sign, what that means to a person that's never done that before? So implications of all of that are going to take a bit of time to work out. You know, but I'm super excited to work on that with folks like Brave, where we can iterate on the entire stack vertically integrated from a mobile browser down to, you know, the URL bar, right? That can, you know, start doing some anti-fishing heuristics there, plus the trusted display that displays out to the user. It's a lot of work, right? But, you know, I'm excited for the challenge. Yeah, and I think that another challenge maybe is also the challenge of security. So we know that in September, Solana was faced by some technical issues. It was down, the network was down for a few hours. 17 hour bug. Yeah, 17 hour bugs. And a lot of people have been talking about it. They've been asking you questions about it. So what do you think? You said that those kind of bugs are some sort of inevitable in the sense that the network is run by volunteers that needs different incentives. And so how are we supposed to entrust the Solana network with billions of dollars if those things could still happen in the future? So the core of what decentralization provides is that as long as there's one, a single honest party out of all of them, that the network can continue soundly. So no matter what happens, right, government decides to censor all of the data centers that Solana validators operate in. The internet has a massive outage and a PGP router that shuts down two thirds of it. Those things may sometimes require human intervention to unblock, but that process of unblocking it is cryptographically secure and as long as there's one honest copy available of the ledger, the network will continue. So you can actually think of it as a 17 hour block. You mean like that, okay we can face these problems, we can fix them with not much, no risk to the safety or funds or anything like that, but it is effectively, as if application developers or users experienced a block that took 17 hours to complete. We are seeing a lot of talks about the competition between Solana and Ethereum. Do you see it as a competition? I don't know, right? Is Linux competing with BSD? Or Windows? Yes, sort of no. There's feature overlap, obviously. I think the core thing that I've always realized is that myself as somebody that grew up with Linux and being part of that community, just as a teenager, that's where I really learned what it means to code, what open source projects look like. It's impossible to kill an open source project because as long as there's people that want to work on the stuff like Solana over the weekend, there's nothing anybody can do to stop them. That's really that kind of idea of community-driven open source development. The media loves that narrative, the ETH killer narrative, but it's just a bunch of people writing code, like some people like Ross, some people like Solidity. We'll see what happens, whether the applications built on Solana will have more users or the ones built on Ethereum L2. I designed Solana with the architecture in mind to be the fastest, cheapest global state machine, and I think that's the one humans want the most. I was talking to one of the co-founders of Polygon, which is a Layer 2 solution built on top of Ethereum. He was saying that according to his vision in the long term, there is space just for one Layer 1 solution. Of course, he said that Layer 1 is going to be Ethereum. How could you comment on that kind of statements? I think the core of what we're building is actually empowering people with cryptography, but the real Layer 1 is the elliptical curve. Imagine a billion people that can actually sign, they know how to sign, they know what they're doing when they're signing things, at least at the level that people know how to click a link in a browser or what a URL is. They understand the web, they have a mental model for it, even though they don't know how the browser technology works, but they've already built that mental model. If we get to that stage where there's a billion people that can do that with cryptography, it doesn't really matter what Layer 1 they're going to use. A bunch of smart engineers will figure out some fast way to coordinate them, but it's the fact that they can sign, that they now have that power. That's the real thing that we're building. One last question. You said yesterday, during one of your panels, that one of the main challenges that Solana is facing is the logical but it's of a social nature. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah. If you look at our testnet, it is the most censorship-resistant network in the world, because it's very easy to coordinate a stake way to cross 2,000 nodes in a testnet because you control all of it. You have the incentive to demonstrate that. For that to propagate to mainnet, that requires everybody that's participating in mainnet to understand what that means, what censorship-resistant means, why they care about it, and what are the benefits to them, both individually in that action and globally for the network itself. That's just, again, a process of teaching people why are they in the space, what is this all about? It's slowly happening, but it's happening. I'm excited to see what this looks like a year from now.