Solana's Explosive Growth Just Hit Critical Mass with Nick Ducoff

is generally instantaneous. Since the first Solona ETFs went live a few weeks ago, they have seen inflows every single trade and day since, and I think it really shows the demand and interest in Solana, which is really exciting to see.

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includes Ripples, r L USD. You can earn up to five percent on that stable coin and five point two five percent on USBC. So if you'd like to learn more about Uphold and all the great services they offer, visit the link in the description. Hey folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward and joining me today is Nick Dukof, who is the head of Institutional Growth at the Salona Foundation. Nick, great to have you.

background tell us a bit about yourself, where you're from, and your professional background.

far the ecosystem has come since then. Prior to joining Solana, I was a venture capitalist working at a Jill's Fund leading crypto investments, and prior to that I had a couple careers. But I started my career as a securities lawyer, working out deals like the MySpace acquisition by Fox. I then left the practice in twenty ten to take a shot at entrepreneurship, and it was very fortunate that I

had a couple modest successes. I started a company with some guys in twenty ten and we sold it in twenty fourteen, and then I did another one in twenty seventeen that we sold in twenty twenty one. And I have been interested in crypto since the early twenty tens. The co founders of my first company were actually big, bigcoinners they started. They went on to start a company called Unchained Capital, which is multi sig custody for bitcoin, and that's what really sent me down the rabbit hole.

And then another friend of mine here in Boston, which is where I live now, started a company called flip Side Crypto in twenty seventeen, and that's what really got me interested in the all chains. And then I also, in between bitcoin and alts, was exposed to ethereum during the mint. I was sitting next to a friend when he bought ethereum in the in the auction, and you know, I'll never forget it because I recall it. The price went up every some period of time I don't remember.

You had to have bitcoin obviously to buy by ethan the auction, and I had bitcoin and everything, and the price had just doubled when I met up with him at his apartment and I was like, ah, you know, I missed, I missed the low price. And then this was like, you know, I don't know pennies and ethereum token, but it's incredible to see how the industry has come along from there.

did you end up at? Why did you pick Solana you know as a place to go work? And there's a lot of blockchain projects out there. Maybe you can tell a little a bit about, you know, for the newcomers who are maybe watching and listen to this, what is Solona and why is why is it better in the others?

been building and it was still very early. This is like twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, was really sticky, and the people that were building the Salona ecosystem were there because you know, they really firmly believed that it was the best technology and that they had you know, the best approach to scalability. Of course, scalability on Salona

is at the layer one. There's no fragmentation of liquidity, and that is really a key part of the Salona thesis, which is all assets, same chain, global market participants twenty four to seven. And I think we even saw that, you know today, with the launch of Monad tokens on the Salona network at the same time as they they were live everywhere else. And you know, some people may say, well, isn't that's kind of weird. You know, Monad is an

EVM chain. And the idea, though, is is is that Solana has been very consistent, you know, from its inception, which is all assets, one chain, you know, single liquidity venue, global art participants twenty for seven, all assets, I mean all assets, and it was just really clear to me that the people building on Solana were there because they really believed in technology, really believed in in in what

totally rushed and the founders had built. And then as a user, if you had ever used any blockchain, you know, in that twenty twenty one twenty two time frame, and then you use Solana, you're just like, this is wicked fast,

this is incredible. It's incredibly fast, it's incredibly cheap. The ux is just so good, and you know, it's funny, like, didn't in my opinion, take a genius to see that, but Solana has always been the underdolf, even then when it was so clear, you know, at least to me, that that Solana was building something that was really durable.

I have friends asking me, you know what, you're going to the Salona Foundation, you know, And this again was summer of twenty three and FTX it happened six months ago. But it's incredible the people that came before me, and there were many people that were building on Salona much before I joined the foundation, And boy do I give them a lot of credit because they really, they really got it. And I'm just so glad that they exposed me to it, because it's just an incredible it's an

incredible platform, it's an incredible ecosystem. It's an incredible place to build.

So Nick, you know, you mentioned, you know, it's it's a layer one and you have this ecosystem, you got retail participants, people are doing NFTs, meme coins, pumped out fund and all that, and you have institutions building on it. So my question is how is Solana a to handle the volume of transactions not just now but future as there's more demand and more people come on chain.

a new upgrade to the CAN. The new independent validator client is being built called fired Answer by Jump Crypto, and that has a million tps, which is more than enough to handle you know, just I mean a million can current transactions per second, which is more enough for the NASDAC of the blockchain, which was which was the founding vision of Solana. And then the second thing that's

really important is the fees. Is how does Salona keep fees down even amidst you know this the scaling nature of the utilization of the network, and this is thanks to a concept called local fee markets. So on Ethereum and other ev chains, they have this idea of global fee markets. If there's a spike in demand, all of

the transaction fees for that network go up. And this is what you saw in October during the flash crash, where you know, it was hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to transact on Ethereum, and then you know, in some cases many tens of dollars to transact on Layer twos, whereas on Solana the media and fee was still you know, in the in the sets and normally Slona is one

thousandth of a cent per transaction. And that is really imperative because it's not just about having low fees, but it's having predictably low fees for institutions in particular that need to know they need to be able to budget for you know, what things are going to cost, to know what they should charge for various products that they're building on the blockchain.

which he controls. But what I think was particularly exciting was that the legislative branch, in kind of a bipartisan action, passed the Genius Act, which which made stable coins something that everyone has very clear guidelines on which they can build on. And that has really led, I think, to an influx of institutional interest in the blockchain, and I think the Clarity Act will only continue to to accelerate that.

But what are institutions doing on Solana? Well, you've got all sorts of different institutions doing different kinds of things. On the payment side, you've got the likes of Visa and MasterCard and PayPal and Stripe Square cash App recently also announced that they're using Solana PayPal on the tomization side. On the asset management, you've got Hamilton Lane Breb and Howard Apollo. On the private side, you've got you know,

black Rock, Van Eck, Franklin Templeton Wellington and others. On the money fund side, you've got all sorts of commodities, you know, gold, wine, art, even whiskey and everything under the sun. You know, as as I mentioned when we started the podcast, all assets, same liquidity venue, global market that has spends twenty four seven. And so we're really working to bring institutions on Solana with all different kinds of assets. And then there's also so banks are building

on Salona as well. You've got Societe General which has stable coin, fi Serve recently announced that they're building stable coins on Solana. And then you've got money transmitters like

Western mean, who's who's building on Salona. So the institutional utilization of Solona really runs the gamut, and I think it's increasingly being seen as a place that institutions feel incredibly comfortable building and are are increasingly choosing Salona as a first chain or only chain that they're building on.

institutions are using Solana, and this may be a question that goes for every blockchain, you know, how are they integrating it or plugging into solon. I'm curious about that and maybe technical where you know, it may go over the heads of some folks, but I'm curious, what is the step of hitting the ground running from a conversation to hitting the ground.

And then others, you know, might look to a partner, like a tokenization partner, like on the stable point side that could be a Circle or a Paxos or somebody like that. Or on the tokenization side for real world assets that could be you know, Securitized or Republic or alpha Ledge or Sentrifuge or or somebody like that. And it really depends on how quickly they want to move, you know, do they want to build it in the house.

Do they want to maintain it in house? But but I think that increasingly institutions are saying we have to have this capability, we have to be on chain. And that's really exciting to see because once these guys move, they don't move fast, but once they move, they move with size.

you know? As far as your vision board, so to speak, for twenty thirty, let's say five years from now, what's Salon I may look like. What do the adoption of retail applications, but also institutions.

know that it is doing that. Right as a user, we want applications built on Solana to be as fast and performant as any other application, and I think you're seeing that increasingly, where you know, people will use a dex or they'll use you know, per peer, you know, payments app and they're just amazed that it's even you know, blockchain underneath, because it just feels so fast, almost instantaneous.

And currently settlement for a transaction on Solon it's about four hundred milliseconds, but there's a new technology and other new technology being built called out and Glow, which will reduce that to about one hundred fifty milliseconds. And the reason that is so important is two hundred milliseconds is the point at which a human feels something is generally instantaneous. So we're going from something that's already really really fast to something that to the human eye will appear as

nearly instantaneous. And you know, that's that's really exciting. And I think twenty thirty, you know, virtually every financial application on the Internet will be powered on Solana.

from Web two to Web three, it's in the progress, right and there's still people who are skeptics. They're still on the fence. So I'm curious what your strategy is to approach some of these companies, you know, like the Googles and the facebooks and and other you know, companies that are running primarily Web two. And to your point, you know, eventually people won't know Solona is powering the back end, just that it works right at the end of the day, the average Joe and Jane. So I'm curious,

how are you. I don't know if you can reveal this, but what's your pitch to these folks, Like, Hey, you need to get on here. This is this is what's happening. Not necessarily you have to advertise it to the end consumer, but you have to build it into your background.

and you want to be early in blockchain? I think you know the visas, the paypals, the squares, you know, the Western unions, the black Rocks, the Franklin Timpletons. These folks that are building on the blockchain. Now you'll see them really I think benefit from that in terms of, you know, their their market performance over the coming years.

at the forefront of innovation when it comes to blockchain and so forth. Right, But what about tracking certain things on the blockchain or putting certain data and information? How where do you see that at? This is a hard question to answer because it's very open end. You know, different industries operated in different ways. But what do you see folks looking at beyond payments to do other things

like I don't know, supply chain management and things like that. Yeah, listen, I think I think blockchain has all sorts of really interesting use cases and I think you know, we've seen innovation and experimentation, you know, in lots of different utility of the blockchain. I think where it's got unequivocally clear product market fit is for financial rails. Right.

numbers are growing extraordinarily. I'm sure we'll get to a trillion dollars some stable points next year and one hundred billion dollars of our w A. And I think that's where there's unequivocally clear a product our g iFIT and why you're seeing you know, financial institutions in particular, you know, coming coming to the blockchain very very quickly.

right and not having certain data out there to the open and in a while. So how does Solana meet that need?

issued on in the Salon of blockchain. One of those is this idea of confidential balances, and PayPal actually uses this token extension for their p y u s D stable coin. So if I send you uh y u s d stable coin tony, other people won't be able to see how much I sent you. They'll see that I sent you as the stable coin, but they won't be able or they they'll see that wallet A sent wallet b p y u s D, but they won't

be able to see the amount that was transferred. And there's all sorts of ways also to you know, make wallets difficult to identify as to who is the owner. So for example, like if you send something from Coinbase to your phantom wallet, and then something from your phantom wallet back to Coinbase, and and then you send that from Coinbase somewhere else, UH, you won't be able to really be able to track you know, who who all that was sent to if you're looking at the public ledger.

So long story short is you can use kind of the existing capabilities of the Salon protocol you know, to do a lot of what you're talking about with respect to confidentiality and privacy. But then there's also third party providers like RCM and Umbra that are adding additional confidentiality and privacy at the application layer, and and so I think you'll see both. But you know, Salona is a public, permissionless blockchain, and so by nature, you know, all data is.

something like chain link to do that. Of course, the private blockchain needs to allow the data to be passed, you know, because that's the whole idea they control, you know, their their networks. But I think you are going to see an increasing move towards interoperability. What what I'm hearing is institutions, you know, ultimately want to settle on public

blockchains and that's where the liquidity is. And so I think I think that's, you know, one of the many reasons you're going to see more institutions come to Solana Nick.

amazing to see at in for the ward is capitulation. But many of these institutions, they tried to bypass the public blockchains for years, build their own version, you know. JP Morgan did a private version of etherorem Quorum or whatever they call it. But now they realize, to your point, the liquidities on the public blockchains and they want to settle it there.

what institutions can do. You know, in the United States they could do things you know, in other markets, in Switzerland and Singapore and and and and in some other markets as well where there where there were more friendly regulators, but in the US they really couldn't. And and many of the institutions that are global, of course are also UH in many cases have a US presence, and they didn't want to, you know, create any issues with the

SEC or OCC or whoever their regulators were. But now that that they you know, have a green light, you know, the cars are absolutely racing around the track to build on public blockchains.

Solona as an asset for ETPs as well as digital asset treasury companies. Tell us a bit about those products that are being going live and how you've been interacting with those folks.

for Solana. Bit Wise and Grayscale were the first two to launch with staking, and then a number followed van K, Canary and Fidelity UH just this past week, and there's a few others that are filed I believe Franklin, Templeton and Vesco maybe some others. And then on the DAT side, Forward Industries raised one point sixty five billion dollars to deploy into Solana and then into DeFi Strategies, and there's

a number of other dats as well. The Salona Company sold me Upex, DeFi dev sold Strategies and and others, and you know, I think it's great that there's all these teams now that are in large institutions like Fidelity and and and and n K and and b guys that are out there really educating the market about h Solana, and I think that will only bring more and more

people into the Salona ecosystem. You know, if they invest in Solana and they haven't used the blockchain, maybe that'll drive them to you know, download a fine and wallet, try it out and really see how incredible it is, you know, to use Solana.

What's on your role map that you can share. I know some things might be on the wrap, but I'm curious what you got, you know, maybe twenty twenty six and things like that.

just gonna keep doing it. You're gonna see more assets, You've got to see more applications, You're going to see more tokens, and and we're going to continue to attract you know, the best founders and builders and institutions in the world to build on Solana such that you know, in twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven, and twenty thirty and beyond, you know, there'll be more assets, more liquidity, more counter parties for you to build with together in the salon of ecosystem.

the blockchain. Just this past week, those who see shed light on how babies can hold you know, small amounts of tokens to you know, make transactions on the blockchain, And I think that's great. And so I think you're gonna continue to see you know, administrative action to help clarify what institutions and others can do on the blockchain, even the absence of the Clarity Act. Legislation. But I do,

of course hope we see the clarity acts. As you know, more legislation provides even clearer guidelines and rules and a level playing field for everyone to build on. And anything that happens here domestically in the United States drives innovation everywhere else in the world forward. So, you know, really exciting to see that the US is now leading innovation on blockchain versus you know, making it difficult for builders to to grow their companies on the blockchain.

and aspects of life. And I'm curious, what do you guys see down the line. And this is a hard question to answer, right, you know, is it the gaming world, is it social media? I don't know what that may be. But what do you think might be the next driver of adoption and building?

dollars of investable assets maybe more on Earth. So you're talking about one percent penetration at most today, and so I think, you know, we're going to see a lot more of that as well as other use cases too. But I think that where there's clear product market fit, you'll see more and more people come in and build that out further such that, you know, over the next few years, I really think you'll be able to do pretty much any financial transaction of any kind on Solana.

You could pretty much do that already, but I think you'll you'll really be able to do that increasingly over the next few years.

it's been brutal. We've been in a pretty big correction and everybody is getting a little bit dismade. What is your personal outlook is have we topped out? I know, you know you're a builder, so long term this is this is a blimp right on the on the screen here, But you know, what would you say, are we topped out or there's more to go? In twenty twenty six?

for you. First, if you could create your own metaverse, will the theme be so I'm a big tennis player and I this was actually pretty cool back in the you know, when NFTs were really popping. The Australian Open, which is the first Grand Slam tennis tournament of the calendar year. It's in January.

tennis and the metaverse. Nice rapid fire questions, favorite food, favorite food avocado, favorite musician or band Pearl Jam, favorite movie clue, favorite book Snow Leopard by Peter Matheson.