Validated Solana Foundation

In this episode, Austin chats with Stephen Hess about the evolution of the Solana NFT ecosystem from the summer of 2021 to the present. Starting from the initial creation of the Solana NFT standard, Austin and Stephen reflect on recent technological advancements such as compressed NFTs, programmability, and the introduction of the "Core" standard. According to Stephen, the creation of "Core" represents a shift away from NFT standards toward more of a "digital asset protocol". The conversation also covers the Metaplex DAO's role in governance, controversies around features like programmable NFTs, the introduction of protocol fees, and more.

In this episode, Austin chats with Itai Turbahn (Dyanmic) about the future of web3 onboarding. Dynamic is building web3 authentication that allows crypto-enabled companies to seamlessly serve web3 natives and crypto novices alike through varying degrees of wallet abstraction. Over the course of the conversation, they discuss things like user management for multi-wallet users, tokenizing KYC, and the role of passkeys in web3 authentication.

In this episode, Austin chats with Andrey Falaleyev, CTO of Neon, an EVM that lets devs build and deploy dApps from EVM chains to Solana, all while maintaining compatibility with the EVM opcode set. Andrey discusses Neon's decentralization and security, elucidating technical details around how Neon's parallelization works. He also sheds light on the kinds of teams interested in building on or migrating over to Neon.

In this episode, Austin chats with Nitesh Nath of DFlow, a protocol that protects DEX liquidity against toxic order flows on Solana. According to Nitesh, users of DFlow will gain benefits such as tighter spreads, lower volatility, and more efficient price discovery, among others. He explains DFlow's unique system of "endorsers" for identifying types of order flow, presenting a long-term vision of sustainability for the protocol.

In this episode, Austin chats with Rushi Manche (Movement Labs) about bringing the Move programming language to Solana and other blockchains. They discuss some of the hype behind Move, such as its "built-in" security, and the inherent trade-offs that every programming language has. Rushi further explains topics like the difference between the Sui and Aptos versions of Move, how Movement Labs' parallelization works, and more. According to Rushi, the intuitiveness and flexibility of programming in Move will serve as an effective bridge for web2 developers to step into web3.

In this episode, Austin talks with David Taylor (Etherfuse) about tokenizing Mexican bonds and equities. By bringing these assets onchain, Etherfuse is drastically reducing global barriers to entry in emerging markets. David discusses the Mexican government's enthusiastic response to their partnership and how their success could set a precedent for other governments tokenizing their treasuries through Etherfuse. Beyond their flagship "stablebonds", David speculates on how developers will use Etherfuse's SDK to build protocols to bring other secure financial assets, such as 401Ks, onchain.