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Solana Across America: Road to Accelerate! Episode 3 -- LIVE
Recorded: April 1, 2025 Duration: 1:01:55Space Recording
Short Summary
Solana Across America is experiencing significant growth with new project launches such as Solana Miami and Bluegrass DAO. The Accelerate event is set to showcase innovations in the ecosystem. Time.fun introduces a novel concept by tokenizing time, allowing for unique interactions and charitable contributions.
Full Transcription
Welcome to the video. Thank you. that i'm muted what's up everybody episode three of solana across america welcome all 5 p.m eastern
it has been a long day i've been on zoom actually not at all today so this is the first video call
uh you know but it's a wonderful time to be in the Solana ecosystem. It is weird weather here in New York City, but you know what?
That's just how it goes.
Got an AO from CloudKing.Saga.
Welcome to the stream.
We've got a packed agenda for you all today.
Man, the growth of Solana Across America is a sight to behold.
It feels like every time we've new announcements new launches new cities all
across the united states i'm thinking we should get an island though i think like solana hawaii
sounds pretty good uh there's plenty of other islands puerto rico i'm sure there's something there. But we got, like I said, packed agenda today.
If my co-host could ever figure out his stream yard, then we could get started.
But yeah, I know.
It's kind of, I wish it wasn't like that.
Let's take a look.
Who is hyped up?
Oh, Solana Island.
I got some comments already. Who is hyped up? Oh, it's Alana Island.
I got some comments already.
This is amazing.
Hype for Accelerate.
Yes, plenty of Accelerate.
It's weird.
Every time someone says Accelerate in the office, you have to repeat it.
It's like Accelerate, Accelerate, Accelerate, Accelerate, Accelerate.
Hi, everyone.
Yes, get it up in the comments.
Waiting a couple minutes here. Not for people to join. Who cares about that? This thing is getting recorded. I'm waiting for Kaiser. He's just. That's always the case. Sometimes he's muted, sometimes I'm muted, sometimes
my setup's weird. Who knows? Thank you everyone for showing up. I have plenty of folks on
the stream. I wish we could get started and show the people what to do. Hmm. Where is this guy? Okay, we're just gonna get
started. Let's go ahead and do this without him. And oh, he's
there. He's also muted. Because like, like a complete fool.
Hey, sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This time. Well, first of
all, you forgot your cue. But beyond that, we you know, I'm so sorry. What's the excuse this time? Well, first of all, you forgot your cue. But beyond that, we, you know, I'm sorry I'm late.
I was just, I got into a staring contest with Mount Rushmore.
JFK blinked first.
You know what I'm saying?
JFK is not on Mount Rushmore.
Shut up, John.
This is America.
Let's get this rocking.
This is Salon Across the USA.
Salon Across America.
I forget what the name
of the show is it doesn't matter we're gonna do this live we're gonna have a good time today we're
gonna talk about the growth of salon in the united states greatest country in the world by the way
god did that god did uh john are we ready to get this thing started we need an eagle cry eagle cry
there we go.
Let's do this thing.
Let's get the train rolling.
Let's do it.
Were you able to hear me during the rock music?
Because I told a really good joke.
Just want to make sure.
No, it just wasn't funny.
Oh, all right.
Cool.
Understood.
All right.
Let's get this thing rolling.
Okay, let's do this.
So we got a wonderful agenda for everyone today.
My stream yard is not letting me add my slides.
It's up for me.
I see it.
I think it's a skill issue.
We got 2,000 people watching, John.
I don't know if you knew.
People are excited about America.
Good morning, Title Dow. How's it going?
Good morning, Title Dow.
How's it going?
What would you name a meme coin? Nice try.
You're not... Nope. You're not getting the coin out of us.
I would name it... No, I'm just kidding.
Laugh my ass off. Yeah, that's my life.
Honestly, it's kind of sad. Sorry. We get dark there.
Have you tried getting good, John? John, have you considered not sucking? Someone's asking in chat.
Oh, John left me. All right. I guess we're doing a standup routine. John. I'm back. All right. Thank you.
Thank God.
JFK.
Okay.
It's called ETH. Nice. Somebody said the meme point is called ETH. Nice. That's funny.
That's a good joke. Come up here next time.
All right. All right. All right. We've got to get back on track.
Let's roll it.
What are we rolling?
Get those slides up.
Yep. There we go.
There we go.
Solana Across America, episode three.
Thank you, everyone, for tuning in for another comedic episode
with myself and Kaiser.
Who are we?
My name is John.
I run the engineering team here at the Solana Foundation. Been here three years and you know it's a good time kaiser you do you
kaiser uh my name my name is kaiser sorry i don't know why i just said my name kaiser like a
pokemon uh i i am the founder and president of all my uh media company dedicated to accelerating us
leadership in crypto.
I think everything is downstream of culture, whether it's policy, the desire to change policy, politics, all of those things.
And so the way that we enact change is through culture and by being, you know, you try to be anywhere near as cool as I am.
So that's my mission.
And I love Solana.
Solana's got a special place in my heart.
I think it's the future of finance.
And so that's why we're here.
We're going to help highlight the growth of Solana
across the United States of America.
Great.
It's good.
You said that twice.
What we're covering today, we've got a packed agenda.
We're going to talk about Solana Miami.
Jealous of all the folks participating in Ship Week V2.
It's great to see the day-by-day recaps.
So we got Justin joining us from the Gito Cabal
to really cover everything there.
We're going to introduce our newest group from Kentucky,
Touching Bluegrass.
We've got a couple of folks there.
That's really awesome and a special event.
We got a little bit of a sneak peek behind the scenes
of Accelerate from our one and only ninja ellie who's
going to give us all the things that we need to know about accelerate um we're gonna have some
time to talk a little bit about uh you know hopefully if college shows up and i paid enough
time that maybe he'll show up uh we'll also cover a couple of new things uh in the solana usa ecosystem uh and do all of that
but uh before we do that kazi do we got we have a little surprise for the uh folks at home we do
i'm so glad you asked i was uh you know i had a vision in my dreams and it looked a little
something like this let's get the show started sorry wrong video let's say wrong video
it's this one Let's get the show started. Sorry, wrong video. Wrong video.
It's this one.
Solana across America.
Let's go.
Dope.
All right.
Let's kick it off. Justin, let's get you onto this stage what's going on guys welcome justin i i don't know if i should be here i don't know if i can
match the energy of this show i feel like i'm a little out of place you can fix that real quick
just shotgun a budweiser you know what i mean your light beer I mean I'm as American as
it gets but this show might be more American than me this is this is intense it's a caricature of
America Justin welcome to the show appreciate you taking the time you're gonna be covering a lot of
stuff but before all that you got to tell us who you are and why you're here um yeah justin knox i am on the marketing team at jito
nope you managed to meet yourself got muted still technical difficulty hold on we got
we got a thing for this no we can't get you there you go you're back okay there you go
this is a show full of technical difficulties.
We'll push through.
I'm on the marketing team at Gito.
I run a podcast called MidCurve, which is like a Gito podcast.
We do everything from events to videos to content to partnerships, everything.
Started a little Gito cult called MidCurve, which we'll talk about later.
But yeah, that's why I'm here.
That's awesome. Welcome to the show, Justin.
We definitely got to get on a mid curve guys,
or I feel like that's the, the quid pro quo here.
We trade off podcasts, you know,
we would love to have you on mid curve. It'd be amazing. And actually we can do a live mid curve session at accelerate becauseate because Gito has a – I think we have a coffee shop at the event or in the venue.
So we'll be there filming some stuff.
So you guys should swing by for sure.
Awesome.
Looking forward to it.
All right, Justin, you guys have had a pretty eventful week in Miami
and broadly for the Didica Ball.
Let's start with Miami.
Tell us a little bit about Ship Week.
How'd that go?
Ship Week went pretty well, I think.
So to back up a little bit,
there's something called The Port in Miami,
which is a co-working space,
like Solana co-working space.
Anyone can sign up and join and work from there.
It was started by three guys,
but one of them is the co-founder of Gito Zanos.
So I was there a few weeks ago. It's actually a pretty awesome place. And this last week,
they hosted something called Ship Week. I think I got some stats from them. There was about 100
attendees, 25 speakers, four side events. It was actually a pretty successful week. But yeah,
it was, I don't know. know what else you guys want to know about
it that's that's a pretty good ratio of attendees to speakers you know it's always important
sometimes there's more speakers than attendees and that's a problem yeah and i mean the speakers
were like legitimate i mean uh metadial asymmetric uh switchboard was there frictionless acid dash i get in a bunch of them but it was
it was a good time i think it was um yeah a lot of alpha to be had if you if you showed up
that's great what are some of the things that got shipped i saw a few things on twitter but
i actually haven't caught up with zano that i wasn't in at ship week, but Zano has been giving me the update.
So I don't know if you want to know what,
what actually got shipped though,
check out Seg's Twitter account.
Cause he's always posting from,
from the port.
Seg fault doctor on,
on Twitter.
So check it out.
Well,
Justin,
tell us a little bit about the Jito Cabal.
What's going on with that?
Okay. So Jito Cabal, Man, where do I even start? I think that the idea came about because I was
watching a lot of Mr. Beast videos, trying to figure out the psychology behind why he's so
addictive. And yeah, I had this idea a while ago. And actually, the idea was crystallized when I
talked to, I don't know if you guys know who the intern is, Monad intern. Um, but yeah, he is, it was great. Like bouncing ideas off of him.
Essentially what I came up with was I wanted to create a group of like hardcore cult leaders or
cultists around Gito and more broadly the Solana community, people who like actually care about
what we're doing and what Solana is doing. And and so the way that works is you sign up on the um wait list you get added to
a private telegram chat there will never be more than 200 people in this telegram chat
um and every friday we cut the people who are least engaged the top the bottom 20 and we add
bottom 20 and we add 20 new people to the cabal. And so there's like a, you know, a weekly purge.
And well, I guess the way to stay in the cabal is to stay engaged and to add value.
So that's the basics of it. We also run games, we have partnerships, so we've been given away.
We've been partnering with other teams in the space people like rec tech um we're doing stuff with a few others which i won't name yet
um maybe something with full on a seeker i don't know maybe something with accelerate
um but yeah it's it's been pretty cool so far that's a cool mechanic i like that uh you know
the relegation or the purge as as you call it. It's quite cool.
What does it mean to be engaged?
Like, what are people doing?
How are they getting involved here?
So the first thing that they're doing is they're just, like, talking.
There's no lurking.
And so there's a couple rules to the cabal.
If you are lurking, we have a bot setup that tracks all your engagement,
and there's rankings within the cabal.
If you're the bottom 20, you're just just not engaging you're going to get cut if you act like a bot and you just spam you're going to get cut um i'll just purge you immediately um so that's
kind of what it looks like the the second part is um these are people who actually care i think
about what we're doing at gito and just again again, like I said, the broader Solana community.
And so we have them posting. I mean, I haven't even really asked them to, but a lot of people are just posting educational content on Twitter. So we're tracking that as well. So that's what
it looks like. That's how you earn points. That's how you level up. There's other side quests
that are coming up that people will go on to earn extra you know xp but that's that's the
basics of it that's a pretty cool system how did you come up with the like the the whole relegation
system and like thinking about like that whole process it was it was honestly watching mr beast
mr beast games so there's there i i realized and i won't go into like the whole psychology of why he's so addictive,
but he like, he really figured it out.
One thing that he does is, I mean, obviously there's this scarcity factor, right?
So that is, that's helpful.
Just being part of something bigger than yourself and there have only been a limited amount of spots is,
you know, it's enough to incentivize people um especially when you're part of something like you know GEO who's doing something I think pretty big um but then on top of that there's
other games that I that we're coming up with like I don't know if you guys know what a prisoner
dilemma game is but yeah you don't know what a dilemma game is? No, can you do a quick overview?
A quick overview is, and again, just to add some color here,
the game has to be very simple.
So like when you're working with a community,
you want to add the least amount of friction possible.
So everything we're doing in the Cabal is very, very simple.
Like I'm not asking anyone to like write a thesis or anything like that.
It's just like, let's play this one choice game. Let's do one thing and let's just have fun and like vibe
together. Right. But the prisoner dilemma game is like, it's a game where you can, if you screw
over someone else, it benefits you. So, um, uh, an example would be like, I'll just take an example
to Mr. Beast games. It's like, there's this row of people and the money on the on the ticker is going up one person can hit the button and take the
money but it will eliminate everyone in that row um or if no one hits the button and you run out
of time everyone stays in the game and you have a chance to compete for five million dollars
so there's like these these like psychological games that he plays and they're super fun to watch
for obvious reasons yeah the game theory of this just just sounds super entertaining
uh i yeah man i want i want to have more in irl versions of this stuff that sounds pretty fun
it would be really fun and I've thought about this,
to do different activations around a breakpoint or accelerate or whatever
where you can play these games live in person,
give away certain prizes, like the Seeker, for example,
if you had a phone, you could do that.
But I think people are...
I mean, obviously, Mr. Beast is is like i wasn't even a mr beast
fan i don't even really watch his stuff but he's obviously doing something right when it comes to
building community i like the sound effects we're adding here by the way that's great um so so yeah
if you guys again you guys want to plan something around accelerate or around you know whatever i'm
guys want to plan something around accelerate or around you know whatever i'm i'm open to uh
to get it going absolutely well justin uh any last thoughts about jito and what the folks
should know about all some of the work that you're going to be doing uh now and in the future
yeah there's a lot going on at jito we obviously have a lot going on, especially in the background. I don't know. People, I think people don't really realize how involved Gito is with Solana or how integral we
are to the Solana ecosystem. And because a lot of what we do is kind of in the background,
like a little further removed from the retail level, but stuff is coming. I can't talk about
a lot of it. However, I think a focus, and again, if you want to know more about like what's coming i would
suggest go reading i think it's um buffalo or lucas the founder of gito just wrote a new blog
post you can go check that out um he was just on a podcast recently we can check it out we have a
new podcast with anza coming out um and where he'll talk about more of this stuff but the focus
for gito has and i think always will be to make Solana better. So any way that we can
make Solana better, we will do it. And I think the focus this coming year is going to be just
being very transparent with everything. So again, I can't really talk about much, but a lot of that
is coming. The other thing I would say is like, we're, um, our new, uh, CLO, Rebecca is heavily involved in,
on Hill in DC, working on some interesting stuff there. And I'm sure you guys have seen
rumblings on Twitter about that. So, um, yeah, excited for all of that.
That's amazing. Rebecca's a beast. Gito team, uh, just unmatched in the, uh, Solana ecosystem.
Any last thoughts, Kaiser? Gito team just unmatched in the Solana ecosystem.
Any last thoughts, Kaiser?
Yeah, I had a few thoughts.
So first of all, thanks.
I thought you'd never ask.
I work well as a bookend, you know what I mean? Because if you let me in in the middle,
I'm going to take everything off rails.
But so John knows what he's doing.
So first of all, I love how you pressure John live
to bring you on and make you part of Accelerate.
I think that was beautiful.
That was Americanly done. That's a new saying part of accelerate. I think that was beautiful. That was,
that was Americanly done.
That's a new saying.
We're going to make that a thing.
And then another thing is I love,
dude,
Miami ship week is so important because we,
we get caught up in like trading and making money off of coins.
And that's like,
not the point of crypto.
You know what I mean?
Also ship week is just way catchier than like Miami broke week.
So you guys did a good job with that.
And the prisoners dilemma thing, you know, it sounds fun.
I do that every day on pump.fun.
So, you know, I'm a huge fan of that.
Good job, guys.
I love it.
God bless America.
Thanks for coming on, Justin.
Thank you, Justin.
See you soon.
All right.
The real alpha is in our private chat where i make all the funny jokes and
not talk about them i will point out if you go back in time and you look kaiser unmuted himself
to crack a beer off screen like it wasn't even it's like you know when people like unmute from
zoom and then sneeze and you're like okay bro come on you gotta keep it interesting you know
yeah i don't know what you guys are talking about
have no clue okay we are rolling uh it is not an arizona it is no that was his first drink
this is the second drink okay no this is also an arizona i'm just like you know diabetes is uh
in my future they're not trading cards you don't need to collect them okay so we are rolling to our newest addition to the solana america stable wow
yeah really relevant incredible wow i see what you did there so good so good it's now on the
internet forever uh is kentucky and i'm happy to sorry that was about your joke, not the content. Sorry.
I'm very happy to welcome onto stage Carrie and Josh Rosenthal.
Wonderful.
Let's go. Welcome, everybody.
And would love to quickly have everyone introduce themselves and tell us what's going on here.
I'll go with Carrie first.
Yeah, I'm Carrie.
I'm the co-founder and resident janitor of Vaxxas.
Hey, Josh Rosenthal, just a guy in Kentucky.
Just a guy smoking.
Well, great to meet you both.
Thank you for coming on. Obviously, she was on the stream last week, but I think you might have to remind folks what Baxis is a little bit, Carrie, here. And then for more fine and rare vintage whiskeys. We've been around for three years. I started and built totally on Solana and Grass Dow really is just
our ability to make like community down in Kentucky where the birthplace of bourbon and
all things amazing and horse racing and smoking and drinking really is. And so what really part beyond just the bottle marketplace, we also,
one of the things that we really cared about was, okay, how do we actually tie these like physical
assets, these bottles to the NFT on chain, right? Like how do we make it so you don't really have
to trust us when we talk about like real world assets and like actually bringing utility to the
space? Like how do we do that?
Right. How do we like kind of turbocharge this like super ancient industry of whiskey and of alcohol technology?
And so we started putting IoT sensors in our vaults using the helium network and using which we all know and love for free cell phone plans.
They can also do more like long range cellular network as well.
And so we took that technology and then we're able to put that into rickhouses in Kentucky,
where they're actually maturing barrels.
And then not only can we create a bottle marketplace, but also barrels on chain,
which then becomes an uncorrelated asset class.
And so that's what we're building.
And so we're launching Bluegrass DAO.
Yeah, it's totally the mood.
Basically, Josh's setting the vibe
for all of what Bluegrass DAO actually is.
And so we went down to the Kentucky Derby last year.
That was like celebration of like our seed round.
And then this year is really just like
the kicking off of Bluegrass DAO.
We've been in pilot with what we're calling
the Athena Project,
which is this whole IoT sensor thing. And now we is really just like the kicking off of Bluegrass. We've been in pilot with what we're calling the Athena project, which is this whole IoT sensor thing.
And now we just really want to like build and grow this community down there.
So we're having Solana, some folks from like Solana Foundation coming down.
There's going to be a summit between like May 1st and May 3rd.
We're going to be going on like a shooting day where we're shooting things.
Josh can tell you more about that. And we're going to be doing prizes and things like that. There's going to be some like some bounty set up through super team to like win and then get tickets to like the general admission for the Derby. So we're just having this like huge sort of like kickoff event to really, really get it going.
Dude, this is a vibe. Like, this is actually the most American thing that I've heard on the stream.
And Kaiser is one of the co-hosts. So this is awesome. Dr. Rosenthal, tell us what's going on.
How did you get into all this?
Yeah, I mean, more important than my story is actually what we're doing down here in Kentucky.
And like, one way to think about this is, it's not just another stop, you know, on a road trip to New York.
Right. That's cool. If another city starts something that's great, another notch in the belt.
But this is unique in the sense that it's not otherwise possible.
Like the distilleries, the bourbon is made here nowhere else.
And literally, you know, having Solana and Maxis come down here and kick off the staff is a testament to the long tail of crypto's possibilities.
It's not just recreating, you know, kind of the world that was and redoing finance and
communication. All that's nice. Like, that's cool. But the idea is it gets an economic substrate
to people everywhere, you know, heterogeneously, little pockets of the weird, the unusual,
and the historic. It makes it financially viable and ties them into a broader global elite
community, which is what I'm essentially here for.
Like, you know, basically, you know, weird things and places all along the edges, like bourbon's
only here. And, you know, there's some historical reasons. It's cool. It was America's first
currency back in the Whiskey Rebellion. That's what we used before the dollar. It was peer-to-peer
finance. People planted so they could distill. It was a call option. It's how farmers literally,
you know, had insurance, basically. It wasn't call option. It's how farmers literally had insurance basically.
It wasn't possible to feed the early colonies
without bourbon in other words.
And like basically the community around it
is not just a nice to have.
Like if you view crypto is an increasingly participatory
form of capital formation,
harkening back not just to LLC and fractional equity,
but to anybody able to invest their time and attention and interest in something,
meeting this genre of technology in the community isn't just a nice to have.
It's actually intrinsic to the enterprise itself.
It lets you be you.
You follow your, not just your hopes and dreams,
but it's a new type of capitalism, or not crony capitalism,
but back to the early Renaissance capitalism.
Your vocation can be getting into bourbon and trading and making a living on it using basses for example you're helping yourself your family
and your neighbor in your country like that vocation is really wild we're hosting the event
in the long hill building it's an old bourbon bar around since 1860 and kentucky celebrating you know
the 151st running of the derby this bourbon bar was slated to get torn into mini storage and parking
right we ran a helium node like back in 1718 and financed the whole historical renovation and
turned rub dens and heroin dens into a mixed-use community center and anyone could do it like
basically running a phone app no coding necessary that's like the power of economic generation to be
able to build community and like in that sense it's actually like really wild. We're glad it's finally coming back.
And we were early founders in AI
and sold some things to MIT spinouts.
I got into crypto in 17 and we're first money in with,
you know, right after Saxon's guys with MultiCoin
and sponsored Solana down in Miami and Chicago.
And it's nice to see it coming home to Kentucky.
The way it's possible is like by tying it to an economic use case,
like you're watching history in full,
not just in America, but globally, right?
Like helium, like we're biased
because that's how we ran the building,
but you know, the free phone plan,
and we used to work in healthcare,
but the free phone plan is better social and public good
than all of Medicare and Medicaid put together.
It's something they were unable to crack.
A helium that cracked through like an economic model.
Or Vaxxas, like elite global talent carrying others,
New York folks coming into town in Kentucky.
Because it's here, like crypto is like allowing us,
and specifically Solana,
has this unique focus on generative capitalism.
It's like unbelievable.
And when we first started investing way back when,
you know, their local, local,
you know, kind of bourbon funds are in barrels.
And they're basically rent seeking and predatory.
And we just didn't invest in them
because we don't like it.
Had a bad vibe, hurt the distillers, hurt the drinkers.
And so we had hope, this is back 17, 18,
when Solana's coming on,
we'd hope that someday we'd be able to see something like this.
And sure enough, like, Baxxas is here and here you see it.
Like in some ways, and I'm biased on it for a variety
of reasons reasons but like
it might be the most important or at least one of the most important companies or
or movements idea of having a truly uncorrelated asset that that doesn't happen at a tam that's like
trillions it's all it's mixing magnitude orders all global finance being able to do that peer to
peer the way we did it back risky rebellion it's all coming full circle so we're ecstatic to have people out for the derby and watch this thing
if they're running we'll have horses photo finish guys are doing stuff we'll have helium yes we'll
do skeet shooting we'll do tactical pistol probably have some monster trucks running around too
that was awesome i just I like I would just like to add not that I can
follow that at all but
when Josh and Melanie called us like in
January and they were like hey like I know we did the derby
last year we should probably start planning the derby
for this year and we were just chatting
about it and we were like oh like what if we set up this thing
and like what if we got like this more like community to
come down because like we need folks to like help us
just do these installs at distilleries anyways and like you know a lot
of and they have this awesome building and we're like oh yeah it's like very like america you know
it's like pipes and it's good it's all this stuff and we're like what if we called it like
salana americana and then the next week like i will show the group chat receipts like salana americana
came out you're like we need a different, we can't do it like this anymore.
Yeah, so think about that.
It's like ties with affinity and ties with buying.
Like, so Baptist has to be here because, you know, they're global operators,
elite talent.
They have to be here because of bourbon's made here.
And so they're going to come down and, you know, launch this Bluegrass DAO.
So kind of quarterly meetings, meetups, tastings, open hours,
working with elite global founders.
And we've done some stuff too.
We'll be there hanging out on the edges as well. And people in Kentucky that are interested in that
or in the broader area have access to this. In no other world do you have access to that, right?
If you're coding, that's fine, but also hardware operating. It's literally unbelievable in terms
of mutual reciprocity, right? You're helping yourself and you're helping others and you're helping the ecosystem. It's not altruism. It's like
capitalistic altruism, like very much in line with a lot of the American history stuff.
This is fantastic. You should absolutely earn your first crypto. You should definitely tokenize
your bottles and use them as currencies. And we should bring back the whiskey rebellion of some sort. The Kentucky Derby sounds just amazing. How do people learn more? How do people, you know,
join in and participate? Yeah, totally. Follow us on Twitter,
just back Cisco on Twitter. We're going to be posting updates over like the next couple of
weeks and about like all the bounties that we're running. Katie, all the bounties that we're running,
everything that's coming up,
like more information about the actual event.
We're gonna be doing prizes for general admission tickets.
And we're just gonna be there,
like I'm gonna be there for like the first week before.
And then we're gonna be doing like quarterly events
and stuff like that.
So if you're local in Louisville or in Lexington,
let us know.
And yeah, Twitter's just the best place.
Even if you're not, you should come down.
Like people don't understand Derby. It's like Super Bowl
meets Mardi Gras. It's over a million people.
It makes the Super Bowl look like
a Canadian thing, right?
They have monster trucks out there. It's crazy.
It's absolutely wild.
It's cosplay and bow ties and drinking
mint juleps. It has to be on your
bucket list. It's amazing.
I just know they give you extra
points if your hat is progressively bigger every time you show up they do oh is that a thing that's cool yeah
it is a thing it gets pretty big kaiser what do you think first of all amen okay that was beautiful
everything you just said is beautiful um got me feeling a little patriotic
that's what we're going to be doing in kentucky i mean i just i
don't know i love it you know it speaks to my heart it's it's i love that solana kentucky is
becoming a thing completely independent like all these communities across the usa that's how we do
everything here uh but you know guns whiskey crypto it's like my Twitter feed coming to life and also my um yeah uh hopefully not all of your
crypto Twitter is gonna come yeah please no do you not want to see your feed dude you sure uh
and then um and then yeah I don't know can't wait can't wait to stake my soul and drink whiskey at
the same time accidentally shoot my validator for voting wrong on simd oh 228 whatever it's
fine we'll talk about that later but yeah you made a lot of great points it was beautiful and also i love that you talked about real
capitalism and not not not cronyism because i make that point all the time we don't even really
have true capitalism is altruistic by nature and and competitive we'll we'll get into that when
we're drunk on whiskey in kentucky can't wait to see you there awesome thank you so much team
bluegrass dow just getting launched uh follow them
backsis co on twitter and learn more about the derby carry and dr rosenthal thank you so much
thank you thanks guys go team go team all right we are flitting right along uh to uh kentucky is
flying too wow that's actually that's good yo that that should just be the Wow, that's actually... That's good.
Yo, that should just be the motto.
Yeah, that's an ad.
Should trademark that.
That's pretty good.
We are rolling right along to get a little behind-the-scenes peek
of the thing that people have been talking about,
Accelerate.
So welcome to the stage.
Kelly Putskis. Hey, friends. Welcome to the stage, Ellie Patease.
Hey, friends.
Hey, Ellie.
This is a very important one.
All right.
Welcome, Ellie.
I'm so happy to have you on here.
It's been so long since I've seen you.
It's been almost 30 minutes. Ellie, tell us who you are and give us something about Accelerate.
Hello, beautiful people. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. I'm Ellie Petiz, the Solana Foundation. I'm the resident events ninja, along with Miss
Amy, who's not on the call, but a shout out to her as well. And all the hard work
that's going into this along with the production team, but really excited to talk to you about
Accelerate. If you don't know about Accelerate, you should know, and you will know by the end of
this call. But first, before we jump into that, Bax's bourbon tasting, Kentucky Derby, mini
Kentucky Derby, maybe at Accelerate, just throwing that out there. Happy to help make that happen,
Bax's team, if you'd like to co-join on that. But I'm super pumped and I love fashion. So I would love to
also wear a ridiculously huge hat with all sorts of adornments. But back to Accelerate. We can
bring it there though. I'm really excited to connect with you all. Yeah, there we go. I was
hoping for some sort of sound effects. Thank you so much. Yeah, sorry, it's a little slow. My bad.
I appreciate that.
But, John, if you wouldn't mind sliding in, we're going to kick off with, you know, Solana's taking over a full week in New York.
I'm here in the motherland right now.
I'm in New York right now.
And every time I come here, I'm even more pumped.
I'm actually out here for final site visits for Accelerate, which I'm really excited about.
But we're going to start off with Scalar Dye.
And, you know, the ecosystem, love you guys.
We have the greatest ecosystem.
I might be a little biased, but I'm just going to say it.
We do.
Everyone is starting to actually.
Leading into Accelerate.
As I said, we're taking over a full week.
We're starting with scale or die, which is Monday and Tuesday, May 19th through 20th.
It's going to be taking place at the convene
2025 Liberty Street location.
We have two floors, John,
if you wouldn't mind sliding in, awesome.
We have the first floor is gonna be
where the general session is gonna be taking place.
That's gonna be programmed by the Solana Dev Engineering team
and many awesome folks that will be speaking on that stage.
We're expecting about 1200 folks to come through.
This is a developer focus conference.
We have several track rooms that different teams will be
activating that will have different focus topics over the two days.
Then we have the downspare space,
which is basically going to be just a dev hub for conversation connections,
similar to the Hacker House vibes, but a little bit more elevated.
Really excited about that. Really excited to see how that program is coming together. connection similar to like the Hacker House vibes but a little bit more elevated so really excited
about that really excited to see how that program is coming together I was able to connect with
Solomon earlier but that's coming together really nicely so that's going to be the start of the week
there's a lot of teams that are activating in between there is a gap day on the 21st but I
know that there's going to be a DeFi day there's a pay fi day there's a lot of other teams that
are activating folks that are on the call. If you're thinking about activating or collaborating with other teams to activate, please get in touch with
the Skyline NYC team to get that on the site because eventually we're going to be building out
the Accelerate site as well and putting site events because we know that lots of teams are
kind of collaborating and activating leading into this. And then we're going to continue on
to ship or die. I should talk about merch a little bit because I know some of you voted
on X when I threw it up there, but we will have separate merch. We are bringing in a zipper hoodie.
I know a few people tagged me in on X recently that they're really excited that we're bringing
in a zipper hoodie for the dev. So those of you that are attending Shipper Dye, excuse me, Scaler Dye will be getting
those zip up hoodies.
We'll have a separate one for Shipper Dye, but really excited about Shipper Dye.
Completely different focus.
But that build is similar to like, I mean, it's basically a mini break point in the US
for the very first time.
We'll have two stages.
So giving you a sneak peek, really double downing on the America
theme. The main stage is going to be East Coast representing New York and then West Coast will be
the product stage that will be in San Francisco. You will literally walk through the Golden Gate
Bridge to get into the stage, but giving you a sneak peek here. We'll also have winks and nods
to DC from the regulatory and policy front, as well as Chicago from the trading side of things.
So you'll feel that in the vibe of the space, the decor in the space.
Those that are activating, I know the Gito team kind of get a shout out that they're going to be activating one of the coffee shops.
We'll have three different coffee hubs that will have different themes by the teams that are activating within the city that they're activating in.
So you'll definitely have to stay
fueled and connect with them in those spaces. And then the food and beverage, all the way down the
food and beverage, you'll be eating in the Fisherman's Wharf. We're also activating the
outside space. I'm really hoping that it's, we're double downing that it's going to be very beautiful.
It's right before Memorial Day weekend. So we're going to have that kind of like outdoor
elevated garden vibe. We're also going to be bringing in VC speed dating as well for a lot
of those founders in the space that are getting ready to raise or looking for feedback. So we're
incorporating a lot of those different elements throughout the build, but you'll have a nice
balance of indoor and outdoor. Hopefully the weather will be very beautiful in the space.
So that's outside, just overview again, space vibes, as I mentioned, the winks and nods to San
Francisco where the Silicon Valley, the heart of and nods to San Francisco where the you know
Silicon Valley the heart of that started so a lot of the product talks will be on that stage
and then we have the Chicago vibes that will be woven in between excuse me New York and Chicago
arguably they both say they have the best hot dog but I'm going to give it to Chicago because that
is where the dogs are from um And then there's a little bit
of a vibe of the New York build. So you'll see winks and nods throughout the space, which is
really exciting, as well as the art that we're going to be activating leading into this and as
well as outside of it. So I'm really excited about that. And then just a couple of shout outs too.
If you haven't visited the website, there's a lot of great information on there. Like obviously how to get your tickets,
where to get your tickets, travel.
I've had a lot of folks ping me about either needing letters
for visas as well as just hotels, like where to stay.
Please take advantage of those.
Our team has negotiated rates.
Those will expire soon.
So if you haven't already booked your accommodations,
if you haven't gotten your ticket, please do so. Don't be charging the party like Breakpoint. There's no crying in baseball. And
a lot of folks that showed up that didn't have tickets, unfortunately, we sold out. So
highly recommend taking advantage of that now. We are going to be offering some bigger packages too
for teams. We've had a lot of people reach out, hey, we want to also extend this to our community.
Could we do bulk tickets? Reach out to our team. We'd love to work with you to make that happen
so that you can also extend that to your community.
And then again, another plug for side events.
The Skylane team is really activating New York,
which is really becoming the crypto hub in the US.
And there's a lot of awesome events that are taking place.
So if you know that you're planning to activate
or co-activate with others,
let's get that on the website.
But shout out to all the teams that are showing up
and all those that are going to be speaking and just everyone that's coming along this journey with us.
We're really excited to see you all in New York and can't wait to activate with you all soon.
Guys, I don't think anyone knows just how freaking awesome Ellie is at her job. This,
every single event over the last, just hacker houses all over the world,
breakpoints all over the world. These are S tier events. You will absolutely not want to miss it.
So please get your ticket now. I do not want to be having to wave people in or try and sneak
somebody in. It's not going to happen. They're not going to let me. Kaiser, any last thoughts
for Ellie? I was just going to say the same exact thing. I think people don't realize Ellie,
she's a lot like the George Washington of crypto events, if you think about it.
You know, except instead of crossing the Delaware, she crosses like waves of massive
bullshit in order to make incredible things happen despite, you know, a sea of stupidity,
which in a lot of ways is like crypto in general. But yeah, so L-E-U-R crypto. Let's put it that way.
You know what? It's for the community, by the community. I love you all. Honestly,
every day I wake up and I'm super excited to support you all and ignite you all. And I'm
really excited that we're doing this together in the US. So thank you, everyone that's activating
with us and is just showing up. Can't wait to see you all in New York.
Let's do it. Likewise. Thank you, Ellie, for's activating with us and is just showing up. Can't wait to see you all in New York. Let's do it.
Likewise.
Thank you, Ellie, for coming and joining us on Salon Across America.
Bye, y'all.
Thank you, Ellie.
Love Ellie.
Right.
I know.
Just amazing.
Very exciting.
New York.
Yeah.
The legend.
Actually, we should just make our own Mount Rushmore, bro.
Yeah.
No, that's true.
It should be like four times. Oh, no. Everything is in this. Actually, we should just make our own Mount Rushmore, bro. Yeah, no, that's true.
It'd just be like me four times.
Oh, no.
Ellie, Amy.
Yeah, that's what I was going to say.
I was going to say that same thing.
What?
Right.
Okay, we are rolling right along to our next section. This is one of my favorite teams in the ecosystem.
They're also new to Solana, but they've just had an incredible launch.
Everything seems to be rolling their way.
Super happy to welcome onto stage the cause, who is one of the founders of time.fun.
Cause, can you hear us, brother?
I can. How are you guys?
Doing great. Welcome. how are you guys doing absolutely wonderful how are you good that was an awesome
preview by ellie um gets me really excited to come to new york you're gonna make it bro
i am i am i already bought my tickets i'm trying to so i'll be there i'm trying to see if
pedro can come as well but yeah we're really excited to to show up
i'm excited to have you there cause look uh i might be you know deeply familiar with your
product but other people might not be tell us a little bit about time.fun yeah yeah sure um so
what we're trying to do is something really abstract and kind of crazy when you think about it, but we're trying to tokenize this concept of time, right?
So making anyone's time tradable, ownable, and programmable.
So that's the really high level look at things. somewhat a social platform where you as a user can come to the platform,
buy minutes of a creator's time, and then either use that to invest.
If you think, you know, the value of that person's time is going up in the future,
or you can use it to actually get access to that creator.
So we see a lot of people,
we actually see a lot of builders right now using the product to a,
get in touch with people like totally or mert or chow and
imran from alliance um or just you know be involved in group chats on the platform but
you can think of it really like a platform for fan engagement for creators um and for users to
just get instant access with you know someone that they you know want to get in touch with so
that's what you see today hopefully in future, you see other use cases as well
where people are building on top of tokenized time
and building cool little niche platforms
separate from time.fun itself.
I'm curious about that one.
What are some of the cool ideas that you've heard so far?
Yeah, yeah.
So I'm really interested in things like gated streaming platforms, right?
So maybe it's open to everyone, but only time holders can ask questions or come on stage.
Also interested in things such as freelance platforms.
So if you're looking for developers within the Solana ecosystem, maybe you go to some specific application where the market values the
developers time, right. And you can hire them for your projects.
And then kind of wacky ideas. This is one I always bring up, but it's,
it's so interesting to me and, you know, it's probably in the future, but
perhaps Hollywood studios hiring actors and actresses, right, on a dedicated sort of private
platform. And then, you know, it's always a risk hiring someone for something. So this concept of
tokenized time, right? You could perhaps hire someone and then just to hedge any downside risk,
like open up a small short position on their time. I always bring that up, but that's like when you really start imagining where this can
go, that's maybe where the future is, where you're like, you're shorting someone just
in case something goes wrong.
So yeah, those are just some of the applications.
People have more ideas, but yeah, hopefully in the future we see cool ideas like that
with the concept of tokenized time.
Dude, shorting someone if you
could short someone real time that's man that's just so nefarious it's like not a dislike it's
like actively i'm rooting for you yeah yeah because i mean if you think about it today if
you want to short someone like maybe like elon musk for example you go and you short tesla
right um but what if they have like private companies?
You can't really do that.
So by shorting someone's time, you're pretty much capturing anything that they do, right?
If they get bad press, their companies aren't doing well, anything, right?
You can just short their time and that's it.
It should capture that market.
Well, anyone who's listening, please short my time because clearly this is probably
not going to go as well as I wanted to cause you launched a new product called auctions tell us
more about that yeah yeah sure so I think to keep the platform somewhat interesting we have to launch
products that are kind of unique to each
creator right to allow them to say i want to do x y and z and i want something like a catch-all
product that encapsulates that um so auctions were really interesting to me because many years ago
i think warren buffett stopped it now but he used to auction off a lunch with him every year and the
last year that he did it i believe it's his auction finalized
that around 19 million dollars or something to have just one sit-down
lunch with him so that was always interesting to me to follow along so I
wanted something like that on the platform itself as well so we launched
auctions pretty recently we've had some good ones uh everything from like you know tweets to auctioning off your apartment
um and then lastly totally who has a amazing auction um if anyone that is listening to this
if you're building on solana i highly recommend checking out this auction but yeah totally is
auctioning off and x live stream for three winners in his auction where you can basically pitch your product or anything that you're working on, get live feedback from him, and then also obviously get exposure to probably the thousands of people that will be watching this live or in the replay recording.
But yeah, auctions are really open-ended.
Creators can do whatever they'd like.
I think ZeroX Designer just launched his today, which is him kind of reviewing your product and
making a new screen for you. So really interested to see where auctions go, because honestly,
I don't know what some of these people are doing. I just kind of see a new auction created,
and I go check it out. It's really cool what people are coming up with.
It's just an awesome outlet for a lot of folks.
And as you mentioned, like time is the one resource that we all have the same amount of.
I know that like my Telegram messages get completely overwhelmed.
So, you know, although sometimes I feel a little bad being like, Hey, like hit me
on time.fun for 18 cents.
But, you know, I think some of maybe one of the things that a lot of creator, maybe like
social five teams like yourselves, you know, the thing that a creator is worried about
is like dumping on, on their, on retail.
Like, but I know you added in this really cool feature around charities like
how is that going how much how much money has gone through that so far yeah yeah so we enabled
the ability for creators to automatically donate to a non-profit of their choice uh and it's really
cool to see some people have 10 of their earnings all the way up to 100%. And I think we have close to about $300,000
all dedicated towards nonprofits.
We will be announcing some cool partnership
in regards to donations probably next week,
but I'm not sure, but definitely soon.
But yeah, I mean, it's awesome that a creators can
earn off of answering somewhat random people or people are just reaching out to them and then be
also um yeah donating to a good cause as well so we have around 12 or 13 non-profits listed right
now obviously we want to expand that and just have all nonprofits listed. But yeah,
so far, I'm really happy seeing $300,000. That's kind of wild in just the first month. We're only
a little bit over a month since launch. That's brilliant, dude. The teams do crank in.
The platform's awesome. People have always great things to say. Kaiser, what do you think?
Dude, this is so awesome.
You know, as they say, time is money.
I don't know if you've used that yet.
You can go ahead and send a...
That's right on our homepage.
Oh, my bad.
Didn't look.
But either way, you can send me like 1% of the tokens.
Anyways, I don't know.
Love a lot of what you're doing genuinely.
You know, innovations around like the financialization of time,
just in general.
I didn't know about a lot of this stuff.
I didn't know you can like short people's time.
That's so, that's so clever.
You know, charity, that's another really great use case.
Being able, making, making really important people like me
accessible to the everyday plebs, you know, that usually I would just like step over on the street,
throw bags of pennies at.
What are you looking at, John?
What do you mean?
I know.
I just, sorry.
I was, I just opened a short on your time just now.
So, sorry, bro.
Tricked you.
Short squeeze.
Got him.
No, yeah. But also, I mean mean just being one of the few apps that
you know uh you use crypto in a way that makes sense and you're you're doing something that's
actually useful it's not just like you know the the typical nonsense that people make with crypto
and that's kind of what uh the world is heading toward uh I believe is you know people actually
building things that affect the the everyday lives of people around the world. So love it. Big respect. Glad we got to meet you. I hope to see you at Accelerate.
Also, no, I'll see you both.
Sounds good. Thank you so much, Kaz, for coming on. And the site is time.fun. Go check it out.
Go chat with people. You can short my time there. Thank you so much, Kaz.
No problem. Take care, guys. Thank you, Kaz. people you can short my time there thank you so much cause no problem take care guys thank
you cause all righty that was cool yeah yeah i should search but this time yeah we're just
spending so much time on this live stream i don't wanna i'm not gonna say what i was
gonna say next okay we are going to the next thing uh we leaked this a few times
uh but we have finally figured out what we are doing solana across america uh there we have a
nationwide meetup happening april 23rd it's a wednesday find your local chapter uh but wouldn't
it be nice if you could see a geographical representation of where the cities are?
What a great idea, dude.
Great idea.
I mean, everyone's bad at geography, so I'm happy.
America joke.
That's a little.com with our little map there with a list of all the luma events of things happening all across
america and we're going to list all these cities out because look if you are not covered by one of
these cities you are the one that is supposed to be organizing the events so i'm going to go west
to east seattle san francisco los angeles salt lake city houston dallas austin chicago kentucky miami
new york and boston look we have cities all around the country that will be running events
on april 23rd so hit your local chapter go hang out feel the vibes, talk about Accelerate. Oh, guess what?
We're going to give away some Accelerate tickets at those events.
So definitely go hit those events.
Go win a ticket or two to Accelerate.
And, you know, just as a reminder, the reason why we're all here,
Solana Accelerate, as Ellie mentioned, May 19th to 23rd,
it's a two-part conference. First one is Scale or Die. Second one is Ship or Die. And in between,
plenty of fun side events. And, you know, I think this is, it's just been such a fascinating
experience, Accelerate. I think thinking at the highest level about how we bring the conversation
to the highest possible, like, I don't know, elevation for tech, policy, finance. Kristen
Smith just joined the Solana Policy Institute. Miller, who used to run DeFi Education Fund, is part of the Solana Policy Institute.
What?
This is just, we're at a different level right now.
And we can never forget to be underdogs.
I think that's really important.
But knowing what I know about the speakers that we've confirmed for this event, you are not going to want to miss it.
Accelerate is going to be just a fantastic, fantastic event.
Obviously, Ellie is behind it, but it's just going to gather the best and brightest across the entire crypto ecosystem, not just on Solana.
I'm very excited for all that.
You can check out Solana.com slashana.com to see a list of the
confirmed speakers
have CFTC commissioner on there
there's some cool people on there
I got crypto dad
Mr. Giancarlo
talking about the digital dollar
I'm just
this is exciting man
it's cool
every time we stream
I think another city is about to pop up I hope someone hits my DMs to get another one of these cities in. I'm telling you, Hawaii's
got to do it. Oh my God, please. I would love that. Let's make it explicit. Guys, if you're
in the chat, if you go to usa.solana.com and you don't see a local Solana community that's within
a reasonable distance of you, start it. What are you waiting for? This is yours. You are Solana community that's like within a reasonable distance of you, start it. What are you waiting
for? This is yours. Solana. You are Solana. We are Solana. I'm Solana. You know what I mean?
It's pretty much me, but we're doing this together. So reach out to us. We'll help you out. We'll
give you all the resources, all the knowledge we have, anything that we have to offer, we will
help you make it happen. So start thinking, start thinking big,
start thinking big, start organizing. Uh, we got other ones that are not on the map just yet.
We have so many Solana people in Denver. Somebody please save us. Denver, the DMV. We have folks
all around the country that know about Solana and want to hang out with one another. So please reach out.
Let's get you listed.
Let's get some events on there.
Join us April 23rd for the nationwide day of meetups.
We've got to find a better name for this.
A little bit of a mouthful.
It's like there's an Independence Day, something in there.
Ooh, yeah.
The Freedom Day or... Independence. Something. We. The freedom freedom day or independence.
Something. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Maybe one of you
will figure it out. Solana across America.
That's the name of this
live stream is
already Solana across America, but maybe we can
reuse it.
Solana Americana is kind of cool.
Solana America. Okay. We will figure
this out.
It's been an absolute pleasure, Kaiser.
Thank you to everyone who has tuned in.
Don't forget to buy your tickets to Accelerate in May.
And Kaiser, what's left?
What's left for the rest of the folks that are watching?
I think there's actually just one more.
First of all, dude, you're killing it with the slides.
If you think back to our first stream, you had no clue what you were doing you were really
messing up the whole show actually yeah uh but i know you're doing a great job and also i think
we wanted to there was one more slide no that doesn't matter anymore okay cool um yeah that's
it let's let's end it on the Accelerate promo video.
And let's also just remind everyone, you know, Solana is limitless in growth because you
are limitless in potential.
Think big.
Don't be bound by any sort of creative limits.
It can be whatever you want to be.
Don't even worry about what things have happened in the past and need to emulate it. I mean, obviously, be intelligent about applying learnings from the past and things
like that. But this is a blank canvas for all of us to build together. Solana is a lot like America
in the sense that there's no one in charge. It's a conglomerate of many different leaders doing
their own thing, experimenting with different models different models competing but at the same time under one banner of alliance that makes us all grow and accelerate
to higher heights that was pretty good i just did i did that on my out off the top of my head
um you're kind of brother you you couldn't have said it better myself. Roll it. Thank you so much for joining us for episode three of Solana Across America.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us.
Accelerate.
There's nothing more American than innovation.
The automobile.
Flight.
Introducing the U. Flight.
Landing on the moon.
It's in the American DNA.
And it's what makes America great.
But now, it's time to...
Accelerate.
A week-long celebration of New American Tech, coming May 19th through the 23rd in New York City.
Two conferences in one, taking over the city at the center of the American crypto renaissance. Scale or Die, an educational event for developers on the bleeding edge of moving data at the
speed of light.
Ship or Die, a massive conference celebrating new American products and builders and the
past, present and future of American tech.
American innovation is back. It's time to
change the world.
