Solana Validated - The Anatoly Yakovenko Episode

In this episode, Austin has a freeform conversation with Anatoly Yakovenko about the state of Solana. Beyond the cliches of the past, present, and future of the network, Austin and Toly explore higher level ideas such as design philosophy, hardware limitations, balancing new features with network performance, AI and blockchain, and much more.

0:00 - Intro
1:10 - Toly’s perspective on Solana’s first major outage
4:04 - Trade-offs between new vs. conservative tech
5:35 - The importance of solving multiple hard problems at once
7:29 - Solana’s design philosophies
12:09 - Use cases where both speed and a global state are simultaneously needed
14:05 - Solana’s evolution from launch to the present
16:18 -Optimizing hardware limitations
19:59 - How Toly’s time at Qualcomm influenced Solana’s design
22:00 - Solana’s design risks (and why those risks were taken)
24:20 - The necessity of differentiation
25:16 - Improvements to the network not envisioned from the onset
26:58 - Balancing new features with continued network performance
30:53 - Enshrining vs. not
34:18 - Arguments for and against Solana's lack of enshrinement
38:31 - Predictions around AI and blockchain
41:33 - The importance of focusing on use cases that already work (payments)
44:23 - Are ads coming for web3?
45:28 - What the Solana ecosystem needs more (and less) of