Solana is the financial infra powering the token supercycle. We're building toward a future where the internet capital market becomes the biggest capital market. More thoughts here:

I think this is one of the hardest jobs in the foundation, and even maybe the ecosystem. Every day is a bipolar mix of elation and doomerism and everything in between. You need someone whose thumb typing speed alone is so prolific it hits X rate limits. Condolences to anyone who hopes or thinks Vib is going anywhere… he’s digging his heels in further. He’s been doing double duty leading product and marketing for the Foundation and is turning all of his considerable talents to product. And yes he’s retaining his X creds 😬😬😬😬 Lucky to have so many 🐐 on this team.

Everything the Foundation does rolls up to two objectives: 1/ attract the best talent to Solana, 2/ attract capital to Solana. Capital is necessary to attract talent. Talent is necessary to attract capital. Neither stands alone. "King making" is short sighted and self limiting: it caps how much of either can form. The other extreme, “credible neutrality”, sounds like high-minded fairness. In practice it’s great for code but comes up short applied to humans, whose express role is to exercise judgment, at risk of fallibility. Aspiring to eliminate the need for taste, judgment, and leadership doesn’t remove human judgment. It pushes it into the shadows. The principle we operate on is open meritocracy: actively facilitate competition, let the market decide. No one is bigger than the market - for capital, for talent, or for users. On perps, the ecosystem (and the Foundation) holds many views, argued hard and usually reconciled. Sometimes what surfaces publicly are a subset of voices rather than the settled position. In actuality, the Foundation has always supported diversity across the perps builder ecosystem. The public perps program and frontier traders are two of the more recent efforts. I don’t think our socials presence has fully represented the actual diversity of support or range of perspectives on perps. (This will change). The claim that only one team in Solana can build fully on chain perps is just not true. Many have taken on the challenge in recent months. Perps are very hard to build fully on chain, and fully on chain is more valuable to the future of DeFi (and Solana) than pool trading, off chain execution, or any number of alternative architectures. Dydx first attempted this in 2017. Nearly 10 years on, our industry is still working on it and Solana is very very close. You can be clear-eyed that not all architectures are equal and still be welcoming to everyone who comes to build here. Entrepreneurship is a brutal battle. Most attempts fail, for all kinds of reasons. The presence or absence of RTs aren’t high on that list. Our job is to try to attract the best talent and capital to Solana to compete. The Foundation doesn’t decide who succeeds or fails - the market does.

career advice for people trying to break into crypto: - go to events, but skip the lines to talk to "top" folks. toly is a genuinely open and helpful dude, but he has 10,000 people in line to talk to him. instead find the "head of ___" person at the protocols you like. they have space to help you, are always on the lookout for talent, and you might actually be able to add value for them. - commit visibly to one ecosystem. @solana is the best place to do it, but even if you go elsewhere, double down. the industry is still tribal (for better or worse) and reputation compounds most when you stay put. - stop cold dming. mostly a waste of time. get warm intros. if you can't find a path to a warm intro, reconsider reaching out until you have one. - be the node in your city. run the meetup, host the dinner, start the group chat. organizers meet everyone by default. this is the singlest greatest "hack" to building your reputation, but no one does it because its time consuming, difficult, and has the potential for embarrassment if no one shows up. - pick a lane. the industry is finally big enough to reward specialists. go deep on a sector (be the tokenized fund expert) or a skill (be the incentive design person). "interested in crypto" is not a lane. - actually use the products. daily. most applicants have never touched the thing they want to work on, and it shows in the first five minutes. this should be obvious, but for some reason it is not. (obligatory shill: using @JupiterExchange is the best way to build up knowledge of multiple products at once) - proof of work beats resume, always. a dune dashboard, a tool, a teardown of a protocol's onboarding flow. one artifact that circulates does more than 100 applications. - hunt bounties and grant programs. @SuperteamEarn is the best on-ramp on solana. it pays you while you build the proof-of-work. - optimize for the team, not the token. every good team has a diaspora, and it hires. - ~1 hour a day on twitter drafting real replies. not "gm". showing up thoughtfully in other people's replies is the cheapest reputation you will ever buy. - get involved when it's quiet. bear markets are the best entry points. everyone else applies at the top. and obviously: join @superteam + talk to @SuperteamTalent

STOP IMPROVING PERFORMANCE!! many ppl have seriously told me this. “artificial scarcity will increase fees” we’re not listening. Solana is not here to make blockspace expensive. we’re here to eat finance

BREAKING: Morgan Stanley launches a Solana ETP, $MSOL, on NYSE Arca. Their first crypto ETP pulled $381M in months. SOL now sits inside a $14B product suite, staked, with every reward passed to investors.

🚨BREAKING: @Solana is set to increase its mainnet block compute limit by 66% in less than 24 hours, from 60M to 100M CUs, with SIMD-0286 scheduled to activate at the start of Epoch 1009.

Almost everything in crypto that failed the first time will eventually work sometime in the future. Bitcoin looked like it had failed many times in the past. The same will happen with NFTs, creator tokens, DAOs, gaming, TCRs, onchain reputation, rebase tokens, decentralized storage etc As time passes each of these ideas will make even more sense. I just think we’re still too early for many of them, and we don’t quite understand the need yet. But eventually it’ll make sense.

Open source for critical technology may just be the one thing that everyone - east and west - can agree on, both coming from selfish and competitive reasons yet landing on the same conclusion One way to understand why is: because open source means max distribution potential. And for those on the competitive shortlist, distribution wins over near term profits particularly in early stages of growth. I think this is applicable to our debates within blockchain from recent years (“users don’t care about decentralization”; “we prioritize commercial competitiveness over open source”) In the long term blockchain will also necessarily converge on open source, decentralization, global accessibility as well Where ideology becomes pragmatic strategy

I've been loudly pushing back on the corp-chain FUD that MEV makes permissionless networks un-useable for traditional fin'l tx's. My article in @traders_tweets today lays out the full rebuttal. Open networks have won out every time; they'll win again now.

"openness may be one of the most important paths to AI safety and security" — @a16z, @bfl_ai, @Box, @CrowdStrike, @Dell, @huggingface, @IBM, @linuxfoundation, @Meta, @Microsoft, @MistralAI, @mozilla, @nvidia, @PalantirTech, @perplexity_ai, @Replit, @ycombinator + more

.@calilyliu on what Solana set out to build from the very beginning: "The long-term value proposition has always been to be this financial infrastructure that everybody on the internet can use." "Some people forget that the title of the Bitcoin white paper is not digital gold. It's a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. And that's what Solana set out to build from the very beginning." "As the industry has moved into tokenized RWAs, the hero asset class is equities. And when you look at equities and what's happening on the internet, you've got 24/7 trading, billions of dollars of volume throughout the weekend, and sometimes we're even doing more volume on Solana than the NASDAQ is doing on a Monday."