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🇺🇸/acc — Solana's American Revolution
Recorded: March 26, 2025 Duration: 1:11:21Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion highlights the organization of the Accelerate conference as a major event for showcasing tech innovation in the U.S., with a focus on token launches and community-driven initiatives. Significant investments, such as Stripe's $1.1 billion in stable coin teams, indicate strong fundraising activities. Innovations in blockchain technology are explored, including on-chain IPOs, tokenized equities, and new business models for community ownership. The conversation also addresses the need for modernization of financial systems in the U.S., emphasizing the potential for crypto to address existing inefficiencies.
Full Transcription
I'm gonna do.
...you're gonna do.
...you're gonna come out.
I'm on hold right now.
I'm on hold right now.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome to another edition of the Salana Incubator Twitter Spaces.
Bonus points, if anyone noticed what the music was that was playing in the old music, it was from Spirited Away in honor of all of the Studio Ghibli
images from chat GPT that are flying around.
For folks who aren't familiar, haven't joined one of these previously, I'm Emon Motamity.
I run the Salana Incubator program within Salana Labs.
A lot of these sessions that we've run to date have been predicated around bringing you
One of the teams from our incubator program,
maybe alongside a team from the ecosystem,
some folks from Solana Foundation,
to give you insight into one particular industry or vertical
that's happening within Web 3.
For this one, we decided to take a different route.
You all have probably seen a ton flying around Twitter,
around how now is the moment for Web3 in Solano within America.
You've seen Accelerates coming.
You've seen a lot about the shifting regulatory environment.
And so we wanted to dig into all of that.
And I think the link with the incubator as well is that a lot of the teams within the program
are also working toward real-world adoption within the US.
and are kind of at the nexus of this changing landscape.
And so to do that, we've brought in two folks from the Salana Foundation,
John Wong and Pedro.
Both of them are working hands-on with startups,
both US and globally to chat through this.
And I would love to have each of them introduce themselves really quickly as well,
John, if you want to kick it off first.
Yeah, hey everyone. My name is John. I run the engineering team here at the Salana Foundation.
I've been here for about three years now, and built everything from compressed entities to blinks
and a whole host of other things related to token extensions, and now organizing an amazing
conference here in New York City called Accelerate. Awesome. And Pedro, do you want to go next?
Hey everyone, extremely excited to be here.
My name is Pedro Miranda.
I run the consumer growth team.
At the Salana Foundation, John is often my, the bigger brain in most of these conversations.
I've been here for around two and a half years and making sure that the best consumer founders are on board at the salon, iterating, building cool, net new experiences, and also focused on high quality consumer token launches on chain.
Perfect, perfect. Thank you both. And I think the thing I'd love to start with, you know, if either of you want to jump in is why now? You know, crypto has been a thing for a long time. Obviously, we've had different companies based in America tried to spring up and make a splash within Web3. Why is now the moment that it feels like both foundation and sort of ecosystem-wide, we're making such a push in America?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think, John, do you want to go?
You go, you go.
I think there's a ton of, there's been a ton of pent up demand from American crypto founders that are, that we're building things inside the United States.
And, you know, we're going to talk about regulation.
Right.
as a result of regulatory uncertainty often went abroad or were limiting themselves in terms of what they can and can build inside American borders.
But the new administration...
And also an organization that we're doing internally with regards to different community
groups.
We want to organize a lot of this demand and energy from American founders and folks in the
United States to actually focus on innovation inside the United States.
So amazing work that John is doing with accelerate the major conference end of May in
New York City showcasing.
American tech innovation, and then also different community groups all across the United States, from New York, the Bay Area to Austin.
We're really organizing and capitalizing on this amazing energy set forward by the ecosystem.
John, I'm not sure what you want to add.
Yeah, I'll put, I'll sort of like,
talk about the converse.
Over the last few years, there's been a pretty, pretty like,
there's been a dearth of clarity around what you can and can't build here in the United States.
I've had multiple conversations with the founders that straight up considered having to move or
or shut down their businesses because of that lack of clarity.
Now, I don't think we have any more clarity now than we do four years ago,
but I think with the administration change and general,
it seems like a desire to set the rules straight,
whether it's related to stable coin,
which is actually a fundamentally important component to all of the things that are happening.
All of these things, plus the fact that we've had builders in the United States for a
for a long time.
It's not like this is a sudden change.
It's more like these people have been here.
We've been building for a long time.
And now it's just an opportunity to be a little bit more public
about what we're building and what sort of businesses
can be built here in the United States.
Yeah, I was going to ask on the note that, you know, there's a lot of excitement on the regulatory side, but still maybe some hesitation or waiting to see what might actually happen.
Given, you know, the feeling is from a actual substantive perspective, we see shifts coming, but tangibly maybe not a ton has changed so far.
I'm curious, have you guys seen any changes from like a founder?
Yeah.
perspective, either from a mentality perspective or people are now more comfortable founding in the U.S.?
What have you guys actually seen on the ground in terms of how this is affected founders?
It's a good question. I think there's a few things. So we see this happening not just in the Solana ecosystem, but across
a number of different chains where people are starting to build really fascinating new
primitives, right? Whether it's things like on-chain IPOs, that sort of stuff. We see big players
like the Robin Hoods of the world leaning into crypto and understanding the value. We also see teams
like Stripe, you know, spending, you know, a cool 1.1 bill on stable coin teams, right? And even teams
in the Salani ecosystem are getting acquired like iron and and helio, right?
Stable coin payments, folks.
So I think there is a signal that there's a demand from the enterprise side.
And that's when I think about, you know, what is the founder doing?
It's that there is a potential and opportunity to make a big business impact.
So those are all points towards, hey, there is a story to be said around crypto as it relates to a bunch of businesses.
And it's really about figuring out which market to address in the near term and which ones are going to ultimately come out in the long term.
Yeah, I think I'm actually, I'm more excited on the experimentation and, you know,
the willingness of founders to put interesting things on chain, whether it be grassroots, user-generated content or pre-existing Spotify tracks, or, you know, people using bonding curves to actually fund physical merch and doing, you know, revenue shares back to the artists.
The design space is just wide open now in terms of what folks are trying and what folks are working on.
And I think that's really exciting.
I think before in crypto, we really limited ourselves, the amount of shots on goals that we're able to do.
But I really think that there has been, you talked about substance, I'm on.
I actually will take the personally and the other side that I think vibes are really important.
I think people make decisions and shift expectations based on vibes.
And even before market structure regulation comes or stable coin legislation,
I think founders are making their decisions collectively based on the vibe shift that is happening.
And I'm all for it because I think that's how we're going to unlock these interesting use cases such as time.
Not fun, right?
Being able to tokenize time and create interesting new primitives such as a Web3 calendar that is actually more efficient than what we have today in the traditional Web2 world.
The vibes are good. I like it as a headline here for founders in America and I think in Web 3 more broadly.
Pedro, I wanted to get into one other thing you said really quickly, which is you talked a little bit about, you know, it's not just accelerate that's happening in the U.S.
It's also kind of a bit more around. I think you mentioned like organizing the efforts of the founders in the U.S. and giving them the support they might need.
Do you mind elaborating on that a little bit more?
Yeah, this is a great, this is also a great point for John because he's been organizing a lot of these, a lot of these, you know, Made in America. He's been on a podcasting influencer era Blitz. But we really want to operationalize and have a space from a bottoms up approach where American founders can can be.
can meet up with other founders, students, developers, growth leads, and whatnot,
you know, everywhere from Olmite in Texas to the port in Miami. And I think it's both a
physical space, right, where folks can co-work and commingle and meet folks where
where they can actually, you know, discuss ideas, but it's also, you know, digitally, right?
Like creating that space where folks can apply for microgrants and organize events and whatnot.
I think that's what we mean by, you know, organization and having a community-driven approach.
I'll let John add some details as he's been at the forefront at a lot of that organizing and tactical work.
Yeah, I think this is one of those, again, one of those things where it's like, these teams
have been here, right?
These cities have been.
been around, there's been ecosystem teams that have worked in these areas, but we haven't had a, we haven't had the United States of like figuring I've had to coordinate across all them.
And I think with this, this set of live streams that we've been doing, it's called Salonar Across America.
We're highlighting some of the, honestly, like inspirational communities.
community hubs that have already existed in places like Miami, who's currently doing their
shipweek event, all the way through to Texas, where we have three different cities that are all
doing different kinds of events, as well as obviously minds and down, right, the OG of all
of these community hubs. And there's plenty more, right? We have folks in Boston. We have folks in
L.A. We have folks in New York. Miami, Chicago. There's a new new group that just got a
picked up after watching the first episode in Seattle.
And we have another city or state that's launching...
next week during our third episode.
So just in the course of a few weeks,
we're seeing that there's a lot of folks
that are excited to organize in the community,
to hang out, spend time with each other,
and just like, just vibe.
So that's been really great.
And I think for me personally, I live here in New York City.
We have a beautiful office.
We've been here for a couple of years now.
And maybe you visited an event here and there.
Someone had the ability to organize it.
But we really found some guests on the fire there.
We've relaunched at a skyline, very similar to the port
and Mountain Dow and want to make it a community hub.
We have a beautiful event space.
like the Salina Labs incubator, working out of this space.
And I think it's amazing because, you know, to me, New York City is really like a locus for a lot of the crypto ecosystem, not just Solana.
So all of these things to say, like I think the in-person vibes are absolutely critical to building together, right?
And if there's anything we do in blockchain, it's to build together.
So we should do that in person as well.
And John, if someone's sitting there listening, you know, in the U.S., they're hearing about different cities getting activated in different ways, what's the best way for them to follow along and get involved?
Yeah, I mean, Kaiser, who used to work with us at the Salon Foundation now,
running Vortex in Texas is a great person to chat with.
He's been thinking a lot about this through his company, All Might.
Obviously, you can reach out to anyone at the Salon Foundation,
or just find your local chapter, get involved, just hang out,
see what's there.
And we're actually organizing a
across the country concurrent event where everyone has an event the same night.
So you can just vibe with the entire country at the same time.
It's coming up in a few weeks.
I won't spoil the date, but, you know, there's opportunities to get involved there.
And just plus one for the notion of in person, you know, it's at the core of everything we do with Incubator.
If anyone listening in is ever in New York and wants to meet with the cohort, definitely feel free to shoot me a DM.
And then on top of that, I think, you know, either Pedro or John mentioned the institutional side and how the institutions are here as well.
I think that's definitely something we've seen throughout this cohort and that we've brought in probably at this point, you know, 15 or 20 different financial institutions.
We had...
Das Digital Assets Summit last week where folks were sort of engaging with Web3 teams.
And so not only just from the founder perspective, not only just from the regulatory
perspective, but also from the institutional perspective, it seems like a lot of maybe
to use Pedro's words, a lot of good vibes are converging.
And folks are, you know, finally who ready to dip their toes in where maybe they were
reluctant in the past.
And I think that the common link for all this stuff, um,
We've danced around it a bit in this conversation, but one of the nexus we want to have for all this stuff is the accelerate conference coming up in May.
So, John, do you want to just share a little bit about what the accelerate conference is for folks who are unfamiliar?
Yeah, absolutely.
So as Eman has already kind of talked about, there's a renewed energy around Kripsov here in the United States.
And...
one of the things that we wanted to do to capture it is to do what Salada,
you know, does incredibly well, which is to run a great event.
Now, with any good events, you need a few different things.
You need a time, you need a place, you need an organizer, and you need an audience that,
all fit together to make it make that just a special experience.
And we have all of that in spades.
So in New York, in May, in Manhattan, you know, is the intersection of finance, technology, and culture, all of which show up right on the blockchain.
Right? So Accelerate is breakpoint scale,
certainly expecting about 3,000 folks joining us in New York City.
But it's maybe a little bit different than breakpoint
in the sense that the content is hopefully trying to expand us beyond
just Salon, right?
Solana and crypto, crypto adjacent, which is all the things I mentioned before.
And given the nature of the folks that are in New York City, engaging with financial
institution makers, engaging with policymakers and regulators, engaging with end consumer builders,
right? So I think it's going to be a showcase of Solana and much more on the world's biggest stage.
And I think it's just a great opportunity to not just like, you know, see all of these things and feel and touch these things, but to accelerate, to really get started on organizing in the community and building out and making sure that we're elevating the conversation beyond just the chill zone and to really talk about the things that matter in the long run.
Yeah, I just want to add, I think a plus one on that this is a vision setting conference, right?
This is different than Breakpoint in the sense that we do want to make inroads with
you know, influential folks that are not necessarily on crypto Twitter every day.
So we're bringing the best and the brightest from crypto, from Solana.
But also, as John mentioned, from the policy side, from the institutional side, right?
Themes and values that are crypto-adjacent.
but also are very relevant to where we are going as the Solana ecosystem in the next five to 10 years.
So it is going to be an amazing TLDR vision setting event.
Highly, highly recommend everyone attend and get tickets.
You can follow the Solana conference handle on Twitter or just search up Solana Accelerate on Google to find more information.
And you mentioned the real focus here is really to help accelerate progress within the U.S.
And granted, you know, some folks who are listening in maybe aren't able to travel to New York,
aren't able to attend Accelerate.
And we mentioned some of the stuff going on in different cities.
But if someone's sitting there thinking, hey, I would love to help accelerate, you know,
Solana's foothold and impact within the U.S.,
What are the best ways for them to do that?
Yeah, it's a great question.
So just specifically, I think this is one of the more unfortunate parts about why maybe
Breakpoint has never been in the US is for visa issues and other things like that.
For better for worse, the US is not actually an easy place to get to for this international
group of folks.
And to be clear, it's not just about the United States.
It's about United States and the impact across the world.
So we do want to engage as many people as possible.
to really, again, elevate the conversations around
Solana and the product of the ecosystem.
There's a few things.
One is that there will be a live stream so you can catch all this stuff.
Our general core belief here is that we live in a very digital native world.
All of this content gets cut within three hours, right?
Not three days, not three weeks, three hours.
So you'll be able to see this stuff as soon as it happens basically by the time you wake up
in different places in the world.
Now, in the lead up to accelerate, there's plenty of opportunities to join in.
As I mentioned, Salonra across America, got plenty of these regional teams that are building things.
There's plenty of events that are happening before Accelerate, including one of the Consensus, Toronto.
There's a hackathon going on.
All of these things feed towards a pretty clear vision that I want to get across at Accelerate,
which is when someone shows up, maybe they've seen Salana, maybe they've, you know,
traded some, you know, meme coins or something like that.
But they never realized there's something of substance behind all of the technology.
I want them to show up and see and feel that it's a vibrant community and ecosystem, right?
And that happens not just in person, but, you know, through the lead-up.
right the digital lead up the marketing ahead of time it's also what happens afterwards right
salinas just is about the tech certainly but it's just as much about the vibes and i think what i
want people to take away is hey
hey, there's actually something really interesting happening here.
And actually, my dream is like someone, you know, on Wall Street,
who has, you know, prototypical day job says, hey, I'm curious about what's going on,
going to take the subway down, and they show up, they see all this stuff,
they quit their job, and they join Web3.
It doesn't even have to be in Salama, right?
But they see that there's something of just great value, the way that we see these things, right?
Right? And that is a multifaceted experience that's not just in person.
So I think for folks that are not in the United States or maybe can't make it to accelerate for whatever reason, share the news.
I think is always a good way to do this.
But also, look, if you know a friend, if you have someone in your network, maybe they've been sidelined, maybe they've never been able to go to a Solana event because they couldn't go to Lisbon or Amsterdam or Singapore, buy them a ticket.
right we have buy one get one free through the end of march have them experience it for themselves
right and really see what salon is about i've actually um i'll actually take a a different approach here
is you know john mentioned that slana is of course about the tech but more importantly
we're just as important about the community and i think you know wanting to get involved
always tell people just to have a bias for action right so if you are in a place in the united states that
does not have a Salana community in, you know,
Solana in the USA, right?
Reach out to someone and the other communities,
whether it be, you know, the Port,
Solv Austin, or anyone at the Salana Foundation,
and let's get a community set up, right?
You could be a leader, no matter how small your community is,
not only in the United States, but abroad.
If there's any reason why you can't attend Accelerate,
you know, for visa issues or anything,
I'm actually very, John and I are very bullish on, like, on non-conference events.
So like non-accelerator or non-breakpoints, right?
Hosting parallel events globally, we would love to support that.
Any energy on Solana on innovation and on this vision setting theme that we have, the better.
And we would love to encourage going forward.
Awesome. Thank you both.
Switching away slightly from Accelerates specifically, though we're still kind of covering similar topics.
John, you mentioned your dream is for the Wall Street guy to come in, see some of the stuff happening in the ecosystem, quit his job, jump into Web 3.
And you know, you guys spend a lot of your times, you know, helping win over hearts and minds.
I'm curious for someone, you know, crypto curious or even a crypto skeptic who comes in and is like, hey, you know, what?
What is this crypto thing all about?
Are there certain projects, you know, companies that you guys point them to?
Is there one or two that comes to mind that you feel like is really helpful to just illustrate the sort of impact crypto can have and help some of those skeptics, you know, quote unquote, get it?
Yeah, I mean, partially, it's like, well, that's what we're putting on stage, right?
And consumer products, these are not like vaporware things.
Like one of my requirements as the organizer is this thing has to be loud, right?
You got to be able to use this thing.
And in a lot of cases, the audience for those products may not be the crypto native,
may not ultimately be someone that needs to understand what a seed phrase is to be able to benefit from crypto.
And I think that's a realistic, but
At least my own realistic take on where I see crypto adoption happening, especially at the institutional level, is abstracting some of the harder parts away and providing some of the capabilities.
That being said, yeah, obviously there will be kiosks and things that people can make use of.
There's a handful of ones that I think are really interesting.
I think LULO has a really fantastic product, right?
There's a number of different surfaces that bring it up, but like, look,
like people have money.
They want to gain interest on it.
There is a really clean experience there.
And it's like.
It's approachable in the sense that it's a stable coin.
It's not this volatile thing that people may be skeptical about.
So that's one product that I like.
Do you want to, John, sorry, for folks who are unfamiliar, do you want to explain what Lulo is and what it does?
Yeah, absolutely.
So Lulow is a product where you deposit stable coins.
They handle finding the best yield for you.
They can push it around to different protocols, lending protocols.
And as long as you're okay with that sort of risk profile, you can generally get a better return on that sort of like parking your stable coins on chain than you would in your average bank account.
And the only way they can do this is because it's a staple coin,
because it's on a blockchain, right?
Now, as a user, you don't really need to care about which blockchain it is,
other than that, like, Salon is fast and cheap.
Great, makes it easy to do these things.
But they just wrap it up in a really easy to use experience.
The second one that I think is also fantastic is one that I've been using a lot lately
called time.fun.
Now, this is maybe right on the edge of like, okay, you know, someone who's a cryptosceptic understanding what's going on here.
But the ability to tokenize your time has a lot of different ramifications.
So time dot fund, basically as a creator, you can, you know, provide a surface to send a message or, you know,
schedule a phone call or something like that,
and you pay with your tokens, you pay with your time, right?
And that time is a token that can trade like any other market asset.
But what's interesting about it is that it gives a really strong signal
do the person whose time is being tokenized as to sort of people's desire to utilize their time.
For example, like Toli, Anatoly, the founder of Solana, uses this to filter through, you know,
he has thousands of messages.
He's able to filter through that and get to the really important ones and make sure they get a solid reply.
I do the same thing, right?
Like where I just, you know, have so many inbound messages, it's a good way to filter.
And, you know, all the proceeds go to nonprofit.
So, you know, it's not like it's me making money, but it's a way to deter like and filter
through a lot of different messages.
And what's cool about that the tokenization of time is that it's not limited to just time.
Right.
Their website.
You could go and inject this into the ability to schedule time via your calendar, right?
right if you really wanted to so there's a lot of cool things that you can do on top of this
that's um that blockchain and composability really helps facilitate i'm sure pager has a long list
of other products that i'm sure you want to talk about yeah yeah it was like put me in um john i'm
really surprised you didn't mention baxus as your as your as your uh drink of choice but i can i can talk about that um
especially for someone in in tradfai you know who loves whiskey uh baxus is an amazing product uh built on
salana they're um they tokenize whiskey and honestly it's it's just a it's a global marketplace for
for buying and selling and storing uh valuable spirits and what
What I love about the platform, it's Baxys.com, if you all can go check it out, is it feels like a traditional, you know, like Web 2 collectibles platform.
But under the hood, they really leverage these composable pieces of the slot of blockchain that John was talking about, right?
So...
Every whiskey bottle is tokenized as an NFT.
And what that enables, to John's point, is composability,
whether it be collateralizing your whiskey for loans or trading it.
And then they also leverage another project called Helium,
which essentially uses IoT technology to prove
proof of location, right?
Like that the bottles are actually there.
And I think that's like a great example of a lot of projects on Solana that are leveraging the technology, the infrastructure that we are already have in place and are just enhancing.
the consumer experience by building on chain.
Another one is one near and dear in my heart.
It's called Drip House.
It's a platform that allows any creator to spin up a collectibles channel to gamify.
distributing collectibles to their audience.
And what I love about their platform is the gamification
of these collectibles is what makes it really unique.
So what I mean by gamification is
Um, you can essentially say, hey, listen, if you donate, you know, X amount of money, uh, to my channel, I'll give you, you know, this rare collectible.
Or if, you know, we can do a flash auction that lasts for an hour, um, for this like very special collectible.
And that could be redeemed for, say, you know, meeting with the creator or a physical, um, or a physical merch design.
That's pretty exclusive.
Yeah.
And why it's like only possible on Solana is that the average donation size is 14 cents.
And they've paid out over $3 million to their creators on their platform over the past year and a half.
And when you look at average donation sizes in traditional creator platforms in Web 2 and from like a total GMV,
these micro transactions that scale to a sense of abundance is just like not possible on traditional financial rails today.
So I think, you know, just to summarize, I'll just focus on those two for now.
It's one, companies are leveraging Solana to, you know, enhance the current Web 2 experience and who might abstract away blockchain completely.
And then two.
Companies who are leveraging the differentiators of Solana, in this case, it'll be cheap micropayments, to actually unlock a new consumer space that just isn't possible today in the traditional Web2 world.
Really great examples. Thanks, guys.
And yeah, I think it is important to highlight these sort of real world use cases for Web3,
especially given at least folks who are in crypto, Twitter, in the ecosystem.
We often see a lot that's kind of really predicated on already being within Salon and being within Web3.
But obviously, everyone's goal is to expand beyond that and to drive real world adoption of crypto.
One of the things we did with the incubator, this cohort,
is we explicitly decided that every company within the cohort was going to be working toward a real-world use case of Web 3 of Solana rather than just being focused on the existing Web 3 ecosystem.
We had some of that in cohort 1 with Shaga in the cloud gaming space and espresso cash in payments and remittances.
But this cohort, we're very lucky to have sort of all six focused on that front.
And maybe one example, I'll just give, given you guys focus more on some consumer examples,
Easy Labs is a great example of a team within our cohort that's working to eliminate payment processing fees for merchants.
And the way they're doing this is actually really interesting.
They're working kind of within the existing payment process or landscape where, you know,
folks who are accepting credit cards can still accept credit cards.
They don't have to move away from that system.
And so from a consumer standpoint, the consumer still comes in, you know, swipes their credit
card when they make a payment.
What easy does is they instantly transfer the payment into stable coins, put those stable
coins into yield-bearing assets.
And depending on, you know, let's say the merchant normally waits a week to get their cash flow back from that payment.
During that week with Easy, that merchant is just going to be generating yield while they still wait for that cash to come through.
And that yield is used to offset the end payment processing fees.
And so just subtle ways of using Web3, both to sort of benefit impact change in the real world, but also ideally in ways that, you know, in this example, the consumer has no idea they're participating in a Web3 ecosystem.
Yeah.
On the flip side, though, we talked a little bit around consumer adoption and the ways that consumers or institutions or other folks might interact with Web3.
Now that we're making this big U.S. push, obviously there's potentially many more founders who are sitting there thinking, hey, I have an idea.
Maybe I'm already building a company.
Right.
And maybe I should incorporate Web3.
I should incorporate Solana into what I'm building.
How do you guys, are there certain heuristics that you encourage founders to think about when making that decision of, hey, should you or should you not incorporate Web3 into your product?
And are certain products or companies better suited for that than others?
It's a great question.
I mean, we talk to so many different companies across a number of different verticals.
But, you know, I think the...
It's not quite easy, but the first place to start for a lot of folks is the payments and stable coins.
For a couple of reasons, one is like internal bookkeeping around these things.
I think it's just vastly improved using stable coins settlement periods, especially between vendors, is just much better.
There's still a long tail of, there's still a lot of work to make sure that consumers have stable coins.
And so that kind of product is a little bit more difficult.
But just as you explained how easy works, like that's where you get a lot of efficiency gains,
right?
Being able to arbitrage rather long settlement times between things like credit card companies,
those are all great opportunities.
And honestly, I would be, maybe I'm too bold, but basically every company, uh,
as a stable coin something or rather that they should be thinking about, right?
Like full stop.
And I think that really is the best place to start.
Now for other companies that are exploring,
building maybe more any consumer products using blockchain.
I think it's understanding where the value of composability is and understanding a little
bit more about where things like NFTs can fit in to that story.
Now, I'm not saying like NFTs, like, go sell this NFT, like, that's how you're going
to make money.
It's the ability to have the permissionless partnership of like, how do you share information
in a reasonable way across different partners?
how a Miles program might look like, where it's rather hard to do this in Web 2, but a lot easier
to do in Web 3, where you can have a product that has tons of partnerships that work really
well because they share wallet addresses.
They share entities that are in those different places.
Hop-paws there, I think I'm curious to hear what Pager says, and I'll probably think of something
afterwards.
Yeah, it's, I'm fixing on John's comment around efficiency gains.
I think from like a very simple, from a very simple high level, it's can you replace your...
current accounting system or internal payment system with a blockchain, right?
So you see a lot of these brokerage services today.
A lot of folks have come out publicly saying, hey, I have a crypto offering, product offering.
I also have a traditional equity product offering.
and my crypto product offering is around 90% cheaper to run just because the infra of running that business
is the blockchain it are these public blockchains so i think from like an efficiency gain perspective
the really low-hanging fruit is you know instead of running your own um
really complex internal accounting system, whether it be a point system that you have to redeem for dollars and you have to pay out through payment processing and credit card fees. Can you put that on chain leveraging like, you know, public blockchain infrastructure?
to actually operationalize these efficiency gains.
So like going back to the trip example, right,
it's these micropayments that they would not have been able to do before.
I think they use sphere for their tipping system,
which is a good payment processing.
crypto native company, it's those types of gains that I'm actually truly excited about.
And then I would say with regards to tokens, just because we, you know, we are talking about
Solana here. I'm particularly interested around, you know, how do tokens like bootstrap, like new
ecosystems in terms of like, you know, say you're a local coffee shop and you want to offer
and you want to offer incentive for folks who are customers at like a yoga studio to come over and, you know,
you know, like try your coffee, like being able to issue tokens a subset of customers,
I think is extremely interesting. And that's, you know, that comes with like public data and being fully on chain.
But I really think those efficiency gains is actually really key heuristic here.
Really helpful. Thanks, guys.
Switching gears a little bit.
Pager, you mentioned the part of the goal of Accelerate is to really kind of brainstorm and set the themes for what the next five to 10 years of Solana, of Solana within the U.S. could look like.
You know, if the founder is sitting there today thinking about, hey, what are what are the some of the things I can be?
working on or where is the puck going in the next five to 10 years that I can sort of like
skate toward. I'm curious if you guys have certain, you know, early themes that that you're
thinking about that maybe you guys are excited to explore further and accelerate.
Yeah. I'm personally very excited about capital formation on chain. So what that, what that means
is, you know, I think like meme coins and these...
social assets on Solana are a great V-0 of community capital formation.
When you look at the traditional cycle of how capital is raised and distributed, it's
usually through a very archaic, a ton of paperwork cycle from a business's perspective.
But if small businesses are actually able to leverage the blockchain to actually go public
earlier on in their life cycle, they get access to a wider pool of capital much earlier on so that they can scale, they can invest in in operations, hire more people.
But then more importantly, because it's on chain, they could actually give back to their community through a loyalty program, right?
Like I think the loyalty programs of the future
my personal thesis and hope is that they look and feel like a traditional Starbucks
Stars loyalty program, but behind the hood, there's a sense of ownership, right? Like, what if you
actually, you know, can own a part of your local coffee shop a small amount by being a power
patron of that coffee shop? So I think themes around
community ownerships of businesses and how they can incentivize folks to
to transact and encourage more commerce is something that I'm really excited about.
And I think, you know,
market structure reform needs to happen for that to become a reality.
But the technology is there on Solana, right?
Whether it be through token extensions and other, you know, cool configurations on chain,
I'm personally excited about that.
I'm really curious to hear what John has to say about this because he talks to a lot of other cool enterprises and verticals, too.
Yeah, I mean, I was going to say internet capital markets too, but I think like, honestly, I see blockchain eating tradfi and the amount of institutions that we've talked to, certainly varying levels of understanding about where it fits into their business.
But there's just some critical components that will happen there.
You know, in the near term, this is not even five to ten years.
Things like tokenized equities are going to start taking off.
And people ask why, like, why is this better than Robin Hood or whatever that exists today?
One, obviously, like, you don't have a system that's clearing 24-5, you have a system that's clearing 24-7, right?
You have the ability to have access, you know, provided you can do things like KYC access across the world, right?
Right.
And you can compose those in different and interesting ways.
I think that's also another unique component where now you can create all sorts of new financial primitives on top of these existing assets and just make them more approachable and more useful assets, honestly.
access to different kinds of companies.
I love the access to local businesses kind of thing.
That's just a great way to sort of,
at least combat and sort of benefit from things
like gentrification.
It's just like not an investment vehicle that exists today
that we need to create.
In the next five to 10 years, though, I think it's like understanding, you know, right now it feels like there's a couple of areas of products that seem like they are working really well.
Payments, stable coins, feel greedy darn close to something that you could call product market fit.
Deepen is a completely new area that honestly will allow teams to work at very high leverage to be able to combat the sort of the big slower incumbents in the space.
Everything beyond that need to experiment more, right?
Need to really understand the value proposition for people, right?
Self custody is one of those things that we aspire to,
but we'll continue to require education.
But as new standards get developed, like things like past keys,
this will be much more approachable for users.
So what did it look like if a billion people suddenly have self-custody?
What does that mean in terms of ramifications for the financial market for,
uh, did an increasingly, a world where our identity is increasingly digitally native.
All of these things, um,
can feel short-sighted in the crypto cycle because people spend a lot of time looking at their feet,
looking at like, hey, like, what's going to get me to the next three months?
Sometimes we need to talk about the next five years, right?
Like thinking about, okay, should we even do this, right?
Or how do we do this in a responsible way?
And I think that's where Accelerate is an opportunity to not just say like, okay, here's my thing,
but here's how we can succeed together.
right, knowing that we're still quite early in the journey of making any of this thing and being
successful in any of these kinds of products. Thanks, guys. And I think Pedro, you also earlier
mentioned IPOs on chain. It's something that I've heard, I'm sure other folks have heard in
other circles. But what do what do sort of on-chain IPOs mean specifically to you guys?
This is definitely a John Quartz.
Yeah, I can do this one.
Yeah, I could talk about my personal hopes.
But, like, John, one thing that I think was a really good point is, like, the social ramifications of on-chain IPOs and, you know, businesses going public locally.
I think that is something that is often under explored.
Like, there are really huge non-crypto-native community.
like very local neighborhood, tangible benefits of having businesses go public and being
ownable by local community members is such a cool, like, you know, like social, political
unlock.
I haven't even thought about that, John.
That's so cool.
Yeah, I think, I mean, that's going to happen in a lot of different jurisdictions.
And it's really about setting the rules and making sure that these things are, you know,
that there's just broader access to these vehicles because, like, look, the accredited investor role,
I don't, I don't, this is the long topic, but the accredited investor rules are rough for anyone
that's, you know, not in a well-paying job.
So basically that, that cordons you off from any sort of like, uh,
high, high leverage opportunities.
There's risks involved, right?
That's the thing that we need to talk about is consumer protection, all that sort of stuff.
Okay, so when I talk about IPS, there's two things as it relates to tokenized equity,
stock, securities, that sort of stuff is you have the digital twin, which is like take
your whatever Tesla or Apple stock and put that on chain and allow that to trade in different
ways.
That's interesting.
Certainly not something that hasn't been done before, right?
There's teams that are already doing this.
and for different reasons.
And so it's really about how you handle distribution
and make it like a much better value proposition
than just using your existing investment app, right?
The digital native version, though,
is the thing that's more interesting,
which is in most digital twin situations,
the ledger of truth, the source of truth of that share
is some paperwork that,
ultimately has a different accounting system.
Now, I'm not saying there's no paperwork for a digital native version of it,
but the point is the token on that blockchain is the source of truth.
Right. And this is fundamentally different than we've seen shares be represented in any other context.
It's an opportunity to, one, allow for things like daily dividends related to your stocks.
But it's also a way to provide access to a broad spot of folks, right?
Again, following the rules, accreditation, whatever it is.
but facilitating it through the blockchain and not a rather antiquated system for ledgering and accounting that is, again, antiquated.
So it is an interesting exploration because it's just as much about the legal ramifications as it is the technology.
I think the technology is there.
It's really just about how they all fit together to make sure that it fits the rules within, at least this country and many other countries besides the U.S.
Awesome. Thanks a lot, John. One of the things we'll do now, I have one more question, but I'll just say to the group, we can we can open it up for audience Q&A. So feel free to raise your hand if you have a question. I will say if anyone's, you know, raising their hand to show a product, we, you know,
you know, mute you and get you off stage pretty quickly. This is meant to be just, you know,
a question for John and Pedro on the topic rather than, you know, shilling something that
you're working on. But I guess the last question on my end, and maybe it's kind of a summary of
what everything we've talked about today, you know, I think for a long time, not only was the
argument sort of against crypto in the US, was it predicated on
the regulatory side of things. I also feel like there was an argument predicated around this point that
one of the reasons we haven't seen widespread adoption in the U.S. on top of regulation is that
we have really solid financial rails in the U.S. We have trust in our financial system,
trust in the government. Obviously, people can argue politics, but general trust in the government
as well, as compared to other countries where you might have
hyperinflation or you might have, you know, more dodgy financial rails or maybe a more corrupt
government. And so having, you know, decentralized financial infrastructure in those countries could
be, you know, much more beneficial and potentially why we've seen broader adoption other places
than in the U.S.
That sort of leads to the question of like, hey, are there things in the US that still actually are meaningful problems, low hanging fruit that crypto could address?
And I think basically what we've said for the last 50 minutes is yes, and you guys have given a lot of great examples.
But just curious to summarize, like, is that kind of your guys is your guys is feeling?
Let me, I want to add one more thing on the IPOs thing.
IPOs really should be a process.
And so there's certainly a moment from which a company goes public,
but there's many stages before that.
And that's also another opportunity to innovate in terms of access
to those earlier last stages.
To answer your question in mind,
this is like actually really important because we have a very closed off view
in the US as to like what payments looks like in the rest of the world.
I'll give you a concrete example.
I was listening to this podcast from John Stewart.
And, you know, he's talking with Mark Cuban about payments and stuff like that.
And he's going on with that.
So payments using crypto and what problems it solves related to things like, you know,
fees and all that sort of stuff.
And at the end, you know, after that, after Cuban goes off, um,
it's him and the producers, and they joke about this.
They're like, oh, yeah, I've never had an issue swiping my credit card.
You know, why is this a problem?
Or they joke, hey, like, haven't you heard of Western Union?
And to me, I'm like, dude, like, one, only like if you look at the sort of proportional
usage of money in the United States, credit cards are very much a coastal elite thing.
Like, we all use them all the time because we're at the coastal elites, right?
So, like, I think that's the thing that people don't see is that debit cards are the
the sort of predominant use case for payments.
And it's a great budgeting tool for a lot of folks, right?
And so that's one area.
The second area is like this international payments thing.
Like, should we, are we okay with people paying hand over fist in fees to send money from,
one place to the other via Western Union,
the answer is probably no, but people don't think about it that way, right?
And that's the hard part here where if we always frame
crypto's benefits in terms of negative externalities that like that don't affect everyone,
then it's harder to relate to.
I tend to try and find like some more positive versions of all this stuff.
But I do think like the cross-border payments use case is the is the one that I think the most people will benefit from in the near term.
And it's just not a thing that everyone does, right?
But your bank will end up doing it on your behalf anyway when you swipe your credit card and do a thing.
And so I think that's just mostly like where I want to make sure people really question their own biases.
Now, in the United States, you know, there's a very different set of modalities compared to other countries.
India's payment rails are incredible.
right, their top tier, S-tier payment rails.
They don't need those kinds of things.
In places like APAC, the use of QR codes to facilitate payments is very widespread.
And it's actually much, much easier than in the U.S.
So even though we think we have it good, honestly, it's pretty bad.
in the United States. And unless you're just, you know, spending credit and revolving your debt
all the time, like everyone is made to do because of, you know, credit card points, like,
that's the set of problems that I think people should be solving for. I think that, and maybe
Pager can expand on this, too, it's like there's a whole, you know, set of things around financing and, like,
something called pay-fi, which allows you to, again, arbitrage settlement times.
You can help with micro-investing with creators.
There's a whole host of things that are great financial products that you can use here in the United States,
but people just don't evaluate these things in this way.
Anyway, I'll leave it to Pedro to talk a little bit about more of those things.
Yeah, it's almost laughable talking about the American domestic payment system because it's stuck in the 1970s.
John mentioned India.
I'm originally from Brazil where we had PICS, which, you know, if you don't know what PICS is, it's a real-time 24-7 instant settlement money system that's actually created and supported by the central bank.
and when you compare that to the United States,
you know, ACH transfers still takes one to three days
and wires don't run overnight, nor on weekends,
which is just insane.
And it's universally adopted,
and it's actually helped Brazil have the,
the,
the most banked population out of any emerging market country by far.
So I think it is a very privileged coastal elite problem to say that we do not need crypto in the United States.
We arguably need crypto domestically in the United States for payments more than any other country,
funny enough, just because we have so much tech and operational debt.
And then, you know, I think the argument against...
The argument against instituting, you know,
crypto or stable coins for domestic payment systems like,
okay, like why the Fed could do something like PICS.
And the Fed is trying to do something like PICS called Fed Now.
to a, you know, more friction than in Brazil, but that's kind of due to kind of more business logic than anything.
But, you know, you still need it for cross-border payments.
Emerging market countries, Brazil, India, although their domestic payment system is amazing, they have not solved cross-border settlement.
And, you know, blockchains are an awesome coordination rail for that.
So I think, like, the United States has a long way to go with regards to modernizing the current financial system.
And the vision that Solana offers and hopefully what we can offer at Accelerate at the end of May are the low-hanging fruit opportunities that Solana offers without the crypto Twitter jargon that, you know, we are so used to.
Fascinating perspective, guys. Thank you.
We'd love to start bringing some of the audience up.
I think we have D-Gen with the hand raised, so why don't we bring you up as speaker.
Reminder, no shilling. You'll get kicked off pretty quickly.
But D-Gen, why don't you go ahead?
Thank you for having me up.
And I spoke to you before.
I wanted to thank you and Pedro for being so accessible and pointing new guys in the right direction.
The skyline events are huge asset to anyone that's trying to get into the space.
It was my first one that I attended and it was.
beyond welcoming. So I host some Airbnbs in the area. You guys were mentioning how it's hard for some people out of the country to access them. If anyone wants to, you know, come in to an event and if I could help out with that, I know time. That fun was hosting auctions for like places to stay or things like that. You know, if anything that could help in that sense, let me know. And, you know,
It's been hard for us to like find a dev.
So I just wanted to throw this question out there because they're so hard to come by and they're in demand.
I've been trying to, you know, learn and teach myself some of these languages.
Do you have like a go-to for either a course or to...
teach yourself in what language would you suggest doing that in for someone trying to get into this?
Yeah, I would take a look at if you go to slana.com slash developers is a whole bunch of boot camps there,
both for Rust as well as the JavaScript side of things.
The vast majority of teams that I talk to actually don't need to know Rust at all.
They can reuse existing smart contracts on chain.
So I would just take a look at, they have a really great boot camp.
Also shout out to Turbine 3.
That's another developer boot camp that you can take a look at.
And they have a great program.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Thank you for the question, D-Gen.
Next up we have corruption.
So corruption, you're up here.
You're muted.
Feel free to unmute.
Ask a question.
And corruption has moved themselves back to the audience.
So why don't we go with magic balls over there?
And John, I know you have a hard stop.
Let me just thank you now for joining in, as always.
Really, really helpful.
We'll go with this last question.
We'll probably wrap it up after that.
Sounds good.
All right, Balls, you're on stage.
Feel free to unmute Ask Away.
Hey, thanks for bringing me up on stage.
So I'll listen to the conversation, very, very intriguing.
One of the issues that I noticed with the adoption narratives is having a customer-facing product that people are,
comfortable interfacing with.
So when we look at the low income folks that come into the crypto space,
they're not looking at the $100, $200 Solana as an entry point.
Their entry point is really things like Doge, Shebe,
things of that nature.
So I think that if we had some type of mechanism that can,
when we think about mass adoption,
the majority of America is not wealthy individuals that can afford
that level of expense.
having a way to pivot from a meme coin entry into like a payment system to say, okay, you're coming into the space because you're familiar with the narrative of a doge or a shebe or whatever the equivalent is.
But there's a way that...
to use that as a payment mechanism because the education portion of crypto is really what's lacking.
Like we saw in El Salvador, the adoption kind of faltered because it was kind of a forced thing.
And they didn't have the mechanisms to educate the mass population, the low-income people about how this really works.
But where people learn about crypto is by the affordable purchase.
interacting with that a full purchase for a fraction of a penny.
And then they transition into, I understand it.
So let me hold the native token that actually retains value and grows over time,
moving from the speculative asset to the larger asset.
So what I've been looking at and just kind of trying to be a thought leader in the space
is I'm looking for the chain that's willing to create a narrative
around meme coins, I have an idea called real world impact,
where the chain facilitates the grouping of meme coin tokens
that will help the adoption of crypto
because those tokens are associated to a real world impact initiative.
So if we can get a narrative like on coin market cap, for example,
that says these are the unchain meme coins
that are public facing to the lowest level investor,
but also facilitates the adoption
and the utilization of Salon as a payment rail.
And there's a categorization to sort the safe to use
you know, mean points that actually have staying power because they're, you know,
associated with some type of real world impact initiative that's endorsed by Solana.
Because really, I think that mass adoption is not going to happen at the folks that can afford
to buy one or two Solana.
It's going to happen at the people who have an accessible asset that they can then transition
into, you know, everyday use cases.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you for the question for there.
Pedro, do you want to take that one?
Yeah, I'll say two things.
One, on the tech side, the medium transaction cost for salon transaction is a subset, right?
So the ability to for apps and platforms to actually sponsor platform-based experiences to actually make it gasless or even free, it is possible today and it is happening on Solana today.
And then two, with regards to meme coins, I'm personally excited about meme coins as an onboarding mechanism for folks to actually stay in the ecosystem and be sticky.
The data suggests that that's true from like a retention rate perspective, right?
You know, from meme coin, for meme coin launches and communities, folks.
Yeah.
folks, you know, buy stable coins, on board their assets, onto Solana, they take out a defy
loan, they play Star Atlas on chain. There is high retention rate there. And meme coins on
Solana are, I think, you know, being used for good. I think that narrative is extremely interesting.
Bonk is an amazing example of that, right? Where they're...
They're a culture coin now where they've ascended to be this dog coin where they have an awesome dog shelter donation program where they're actually helping, you know, stray dogs find shelter through bonk, like through their nonprofit foundation.
So I think, you know, from a cultural perspective, that is already happening on...
Salana, right? And I think from an endorsement, there is no, just like an FYI, right? Like the Salana is in the community, you know, like the Salana Foundation or Salon Labs, whatever. There's no one entity that is setting the narrative here. It is folks and teams.
such as Bonk that are able to actually make positive, proactive change in the world.
And we do want to encourage and see that happening throughout the SANA ecosystem.
Awesome. Thanks, La Pedro.
We're a little bit over. So we'll go ahead and we'll wrap up right now.
Pedro, I'm curious. I know you, if you have to jump right now, feel free to go.
I was just going to give you the opportunity to share any last words on the topic with the audience if you want.
Yeah, no, I have to run, but to reiterate on everything that we spoke about,
please everyone get involved in Accelerate and your community, whether it be in the United States or abroad,
if you're interested in Accelerate, you know, go buy a ticket.
It's buy one, get one free until the end of the month.
It's slana.com slash accelerate.
I want to say thank you to Eamon, the Salana Labs.
incubator program and everyone.
This has been an awesome experience and hope everyone has a great day.
Awesome. Thanks a lot for that, Pedro.
And yeah, as Pedro mentioned, thanks a lot for everyone for listening in.
Some other things that are coming up,
especially for those who are in New York,
we have the Salana Incubator demo day happening next Thursday.
So feel free to just check out the incubator Twitter handle,
which is up here on stage,
and you'll find a Luma link where you can RSVP for that.
As I mentioned earlier, the cohort is here in New York
until April 11th.
The teams are working on some pretty incredible stuff.
And so if you're ever interested in getting involved,
want to meet with the cohort, feel free to shoot me a DM.
And then otherwise, we're doing these spaces each week,
bringing you different perspectives,
different verticals, different founders to kind of hone in
on the Solana ecosystem and all the amazing things
that are happening.
So feel free to tune in for a future one of those.
Once again, I'm Eamon Motamity.
I run this on incubator program within Solana Labs.
Big thanks to John and Pedro for joining the session today.
I think it was a really good one exploring what's happening in America and in crypto more
globally and broadly and how both folks can get involved and how founders should think about
the decision of incorporating or not incorporating Web 3 or Solana.
So thank you again for everyone for joining and hope everyone has a great rest of your day.
