Solana CEO Interview: From Garage Startup to Top Public Chain, Talking about Solana’s Past and Future

Original author: symbiote

Original translation: TechFlow

Interview source:

Daniel Albert (CEO at Solana Foundation) - Full interview

I researched an interview with $SOL CEO Daniel Albert and found some shocking information. Here is the past and future of the Solana Foundation.

Why did Daniel join Solana?

• Daniel has been following the cryptocurrency industry since 2017 and joined Solana full-time in 2019. All of Solana’s co-founders and most of its early developers came from Qualcomm.

Qualcomm Background

• Qualcomm is a large technology company that produces chips for mobile phones and mobile networks. Daniel did not initially join Solana immediately because he was working in Antarctica at the time. But later in 2019, he finally agreed and joined Solana along with 10-12 other people.

Solana in 2019

• In 2019, Solana had a small office in San Francisco, but they worked primarily in Gregs basement that summer. There, they first learned about the hardware requirements for validators and assembled the first validator. At the time, the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) was still a prototype.

Early Development of SOL

• SOL is known for its super-fast consensus mechanism and transaction processing speed. These features were tested in Gregs home in the early days. Later, they moved the equipment to the data center and installed it in the rack, which was also the first physical installation of SOL validators.

About parallel execution of transactions

• Parallel execution of transactions is the main reason for SOLs high TPS (transactions per second). SOLs consensus mechanism is very different from many EVM-compatible networks, and the parallel execution engine allows Solanas environment to scale with hardware, thereby improving processing efficiency.

• When executing parallel tasks, higher parallelism can be achieved over time simply by applying more cores.

• As long as people continue to use the Internet and the competition between Intel, AMD and Nvidia continues, chips will get faster and data transmission speeds will continue to increase.

• Solana’s speed will also continue to improve.

What is Firedancer?

• Firedancer is probably the most exciting blockchain project on the Solana network right now.

• Currently, there are two main validators in the SOL network, and Firedancer is a brand new client.

• This client looks at the hardware at the lowest level.

No other project focuses on hardware optimization like Firedancer

• They removed many bottlenecks, giving this new validator a huge performance advantage.

• Firedancer may launch mainnet in 2024.

Token Extension

• The Token extension is a set of smart contracts. There was originally only one token program on Solana, namely SPL (Solana Program Library).

• It is very difficult to get more advanced features for your token, but through token extensions, many functions and behavioral logic can be implemented by a smart contract.

Will this model replace standard SPL?

• This is an extension of the standard, SPL is not going away.

• People are expected to continue using it for a long time.

• These features can coexist on the network.

How does Meme Coin impact the Solana ecosystem?

• Overall, meme coins are a healthy phenomenon.

• First, they are fun, and Solana itself is simple, fast, and cheap.

• Second, meme coins provide fertile ground for experimentation, just like NFTs.

Re-staking boom

• Daniel is neutral on re-staking on Solana.

• This concept can be applied in many ways.

• But due to the different architectures of Ethereum and Solana, some people may fall into certain thinking traps.

in conclusion

• Solana’s speed will continue to increase.

• Firedancer is going to be a really great and unique project.

• Solana will not experience the re-staking boom effect like Ethereum did.

• The Token extension will make it easier to create advanced functionality for tokens.