On my first day of working at Solana Labs, I rode an inner tube down a whitewater river with the team.
By the end of that ride, we were sore just about everywhere — scratched and bruised from the rocks and trees we crashed into. But, despite the eddies, rapids, and the fact that we got the wind knocked out of us a few times, we still made it.
I’ve been thinking about that lately.
I joined the team at Solana Labs in the summer of 2019, as an intern. Before arriving at Solana, I had already spent 2 years working in crypto. All three of those previous jobs had begun as internships and turned into full-time work loads. In my work at Solana, as an intern, then full-time employee, I rode the wave of Solana’s success all the way up and, now, down.
From 2019 through early 2022, I helped grow the community from less than 10,000 to its 2.2 million now. I was there before we had a wallet. Before the first dApp. Before mainnet.
There’s a key problem at the heart of Solana, something I wish that the voices in our ecosystem would say out loud.
I’ll say it.
What exists in the Solana ecosystem now was created by the need to build everything fast — launch the network before Labs ran out of cash, ride the wave of the crypto expansion, and create an ecosystem at parity with other, older siblings in record time.
As a result, we have a massive cultural debt in our community. One that must be repaid.
Solana’s story began after Anatoly’s sleepless night drinking two coffees and a beer, which produced proof of history, the white paper, and a vision the initial team would gather to realize into the first network client.
If Bitcoin was uncensorable money, Ethereum was programmable, uncensorable money, then Solana was programmable, uncensorable money at the speed of NASDAQ.
I joined Solana Labs in 2019 because of the exceptional people working there, and the grand technological vision. The north star — 60,000 transactions per second, now rebranded as consensus at the speed of light — honestly seemed like a joke. It was a level of ambition that I didn’t see often in the crypto ecosystem at the time. I honestly didn’t think we’d be able to do it.
And for a while… it didn’t seem like we would. The months leading up to 2020 were dark. Many don’t know that Labs had to lay off a third of the core protocol engineers — the people that brought proof of history and Sealevel to life — some of the cofounders closest friends. In January of ‘20, we had single-digit months to launch.
We were a startup, by all definitions of the word. Things were messy. Some people couldn’t take the workload or the uncertainty. But the core team knew that what we were working on was groundbreaking.
With a bit of grit, Solana launched, even though it did in March of 2020. The Soft Launch Protocol, which was the prelude to Mainnet Beta, successfully birthed a chipper, sputtering network. On our terminals, we saw slots and transactions progressing. The initial validators — who supported the network throughout testnet and helped find bugs throughout the multi-month launch procedure — became some of Solana’s closest supporters. Most of them still are.
The next year was a whirlwind. We pitched and pitched to countless companies to build — and bet — on us. We assembled a fancy logo wall on the website, but knew that real usage on the network was nearly nonexistent. We built the first dApp, Break, which Anatoly still loves. We launched on exchanges — and minus a couple of hiccups — gathered liquidity and distributed our token to a growing community that could see the beginning of something exciting.
In the fall of 2020, we met the FTX team. Sam and the core devs at Alameda understood the potential immediately, and took the chance on us. In just a few weeks, Serum, a decentralized exchange with a central limit order book, launched. Around this same time, the first hackathon — that would eventually produce Zeta Markets, Mango, Phantom, and countless other ecosystem companies — took place. Solana finally had a web wallet, Sollet, even though it was a little jank.
And in the start of 2021 — just one year after Labs had to lay off a third of the team — the real momentum started to pick up. The criticized token economics came to the test with the infamous bullish unlock. SBF, the market making community, and Solana Labs’ shrewd business development team flipped the narrative for the future of the network. We had everything we needed to go ballistic.
We did that, too.
NFTs launched in the summer of ‘21 after a few-week sprint from the BD and product engineering team. Metaplex launched at Bitcoin Miami, the first time we were able to leave our houses since the beginning of the pandemic.
The rest of the year is a bit of a blur. Degen Ape Academy. Candy Machine. SMB. Saber. Magic Eden. Fractal. The Chicago Hacker House. Aurory. And all this momentum, coinciding with the greatest monetary bull market the world has seen, crescendoed at Breakpoint 2021, the first time the Solana ecosystem gathered together to celebrate our wins.
None of the community had gathered in person before that conference. You can imagine what ensued.
People loved that event. They partied together. They were realizing the connections they’d made with people thousands of miles away. They were euphoric.
Both the macroeconomic — and crypto — tides began to change after Lisbon. Some claim Solana extended the bull market of 2021 with its orchestration. Others can say it started the bear market of 2022, too.
I’ll say what everyone is feeling: this year fucking sucked. From the longest-standing community members leaving, to the most bullish of Solana supporters burning out with network halt after network halt; from the unfortunate protocol hacks to the childish community members. It was painful.
Breakpoint 2022, though, was bigger than ever. The energy was electric. Everyone there, despite the pain we’d suffered with countless rugs and scams, still believed. I spent much of 2022 traveling to crypto conferences all around the world. I’d never seen one like Breakpoint 2022. The ecosystem was firing on all cylinders.
The day after Breakpoint 2022, FTX announced it was going bankrupt.
That was the real shot to the chest that I think we all needed.
I still believe in this community. I believe in the network. The engineers. The community members who love it.
There are so many things we did right in the first three years of Solana’s existence: executing on the grand vision of the technology, creating an elevated brand, attracting long-term believers through bottoms-up business development and network support. We’ve had a lot of wins: partnerships that were timely. Decisions that led to billions of dollars of sales in art. Some memeable moments.
But now is the time to pay our cultural and identity based debt. The collectors are here. People are struggling.
The Solana network, technologically, continues to improve. With Firedancer, Solana Mobile, and countless other cross-ecosystem initiatives, the core flame that we all gather around continues to burn. We can deliver on the tech. We’ve done it before. But now, we must culturally evolve. The community is lacking clear, mature voices and leaders. It’s also lacking an identity.
I’m young. And even I know there are a lot of leaders in the community who are pretty childish. (Believe me, I’m working on this too.)
You can’t have a coherent community unless you have a coherent culture. When you don’t have values, you attract valueless people.
Now, those people are leaving in droves. For everyone left: it’s time to be unabashedly candid about the ways this ecosystem can improve.
We’ve got to put an end to our massive ecosystem FDVs. An end to predatory, investor-first token economics. An end to rampant conflicts of interest and insider dealing. An end to always chasing the shiny object rather than polishing the one you have in your hand. An end to hasty partnerships and transient community leaders. An end to copying rather than creating. And an end to Solana Labs and Solana Foundation being the most influential organizations in this community.
Sometimes we lose sight of what is actually happening when we’re in the middle of things.
The values and behavior that brought Solana to this point? It’s not going to take us to the next checkpoint.
I still believe in this lime-green and purple colored blockchain. I’ve believed in it from the moment I saw the people building it. How they still drive used cars and bike to work. How they light up when they realize they can do something new with the runtime. How they are here, building, after everything we’ve been through.
We’ve already lapped everyone else dozens of times over with the tech. Let’s make sure we get the rest of it right — at whatever pace it takes.
