Validated

Ryan Selkis, founder of Messari, has been a crypto investor, writer, and advocate since 2013. As someone who has witnessed multiple market cycles firsthand, Ryan is as optimistic as ever about the future of blockchain. Throughout this episode, Austin and Ryan find paradoxical silver linings in the tumult of 2022. Looking forward, they discuss how DC's views of crypto are changing, exciting new sectors within crypto like DeSoc and DePIN, and more.

DISCLAIMER The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor. 
 

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0:00 - Intro

1:19 - Web3 School in Sierra Leone

10:53 - An Artist and Monke Go to Washington

25:25 - How Compression Will Decimate Network Costs on Solana 

DISCLAIMER The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.

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0:00 - Intro

1:17 - Introduction to panelists

1:54 - How Solana’s infrastructure allows for scalability

4:45 - What creators are looking for in NFT platforms 

5:53 - Glass.xyz and the future of video NFTs

7:25 - Overview of participants in the NFT space

8:30 - What does future growth of the NFT market look like?

10:12 - The impact of tech behemoths on the NFT space

15:31 - Solana’s low network costs

16:40 - Panelists’ favorite NFT projects 

DISCLAIMER

The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.

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0:00 Intro

0:50 Intro to panelists and overview of the browser wars 

2:25 How do lessons from the browser wars apply to the wallet market? 

3:12 Differences between browsers and wallets 

6:00 The roles of wallets in the crypto ecosystem 

10:50 Will there be one wallet to rule them all? 

16:04 How the dominant mobile platforms will impact wallets

18:55 Lessons from Web 2 applicable to Web3 projects

25:25 What the future of wallets looks like

DISCLAIMER The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.

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0:00 Overview of ReFi

3:13 Intro to Emma, Ethan, and Shine Capital

4:37 Why Shine sees ReFi as a sound business investment 

7:10 Overview of how traditional carbon markets work

8:03 Breakdown of pricing in current carbon markets 

12:09 Shine’s thesis on how increased demand will impact carbon credit prices

12:51 Where increased demand will come from

13:53 More on how increased demand will impact carbon credit prices

15:13 More on Shine’s confidence in ReFi’s economic viability

17:57 Recap of discussion thus far

19:28 Speculations on the growth trajectory for carbon markets

22:35 ReFi market map

23:48 Current systems of MRV and why they’re inefficient 

25:28 How crypto can innovate traditional MRV

28:02 Opportunities for entrepreneurs in the ReFi space

31:25 Closing remarks 

DISCLAIMER The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.

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0:00 Overview of Carbon Markets and Crypto

2:45 Intro to Brendan and Patch

4:02 Intro to Matthew and Cerulean

6:05 What is a carbon credit?

7:25 Who are carbon credits for?

9:00 Voluntary/compliance market recap

10:40 Innovation in the voluntary carbon market

12:00 Why are carbon credits so hard to acquire?

13:34 Inefficiencies in the current OTC markets

14:17 Examples of carbon credit projects

15:15 Why do carbon credit prices vary so widely?

17:00 More on inefficiencies in the current voluntary markets

19:50 How blockchain will impact the supply side of the carbon market

21:35 Are corporate buyers interested in crypto carbon credits?

23:18 Carbon market scams

26:06 Profit margins in the carbon market

32:50 More on how blockchain will impact carbon credit supply

34:36 Closing remarks

DISCLAIMER The information on this podcast is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. The information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The information on this podcast is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional broker or financial advisor.

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0:09 - Episode overview

2:17 - Rolf Skar introduction and Greenpeace’s mission

4:39 - Daniel Hwang introduction

6:54 - Greenpeace’s history with energy-intensive crypto

8:24 - The Change the Code Coalition

12:32 - Why changing Bitcoin’s code might be feasible 

15:49 - What changing the code would entail

19:27 - What self-interested incentives are needed in order to change the code  

24:49 - How institutions with climate commitments address Bitcoin investments 

26:19 - The Blockchain Infrastructure Working Group

28:57 - Rolf’s impression of the Web3 community

31:37 - Closing remarks 

DISCLAIMER The content herein is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, options, futures, or other derivatives related to securities in any jurisdiction, nor should not be relied upon as advice to buy, sell or hold any of the foregoing. This content is intended to be general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional advisor. Solana Foundation Foundation and its agents, advisors, council members, officers and employees (the “Foundation Parties”) make no representation or warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy of the information herein and expressly disclaims any and all liability that may be based on such information or any errors or omissions therein. The Foundation Parties shall have no liability whatsoever, under contract, tort, trust or otherwise, to any person arising from or related to the content or any use of the information contained herein by you or any of your representatives.

 

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Amir Haleem (CEO, Nova Labs & Founder, Helium) talks with Austin about the Helium story and the current proposal to move Helium to the Solana blockchain.

0:00 - Introduction

1:05 - Origins of the Helium network

5:24 - Early challenges for Helium

7:19 - Helium’s unique growth and economic models compared to other blockchains

11:35 - The geo-specificity of Helium’s rewards

14:18 - Why Helium started on its own L1 

16:55 - Current disadvantages of Helium running on its own L1 

20:46 - Why the time is right for a Helium migration

24:28 - Why Solana is the best scaling solution for Helium

28:56 - Composability as parts of the Helium network move off chain

30:57 - Solana’s role in supporting amazing applications

32:12 - How a migration will help Helium reclaim its internal engineering power

34:36 - How the upcoming vote will impact Helium validators and hotspot operators

36:27 - How Helium’s migration will open up the Solana ecosystem to its community

37:36 - Recent developments in cellular networks

41:59 - How long will Helium’s migration onto Solana take, and what will it entail?

DISCLAIMER

The content herein is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, options, futures, or other derivatives related to securities in any jurisdiction, nor should not be relied upon as advice to buy, sell or hold any of the foregoing. This content is intended to be general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional advisor.  Solana Foundation Foundation and its agents, advisors, council members, officers and employees (the “Foundation Parties”) make no representation or warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy of the information herein and expressly disclaims any and all liability that may be based on such information or any errors or omissions therein. The Foundation Parties shall have no liability whatsoever, under contract, tort, trust or otherwise, to any person arising from or related to the content or any use of the information contained herein by you or any of your representatives.

Austin: I'm Austin. This is the Solana podcast. Today, we're talking with Amir Haleem, the founder of the Helium network and CEO of Nova Labs. Helium since its beginning has operated its own layer 1 blockchain, but in a process set forward several months ago, and which has sort of come to a community governance vote in HIP 70, the network is actually proposing switching from operating its own layer 1 to operating on another layer 1. Uh, in the details of HIP 70, the core developers and core contributors are recommending a move to the Solana blockchain as the new home for the Helium network. So we're gonna talk a bit about that today, some of the history of Helium, and how the network, uh, sets itself apart from other blockchains, uh, which is pretty interesting because it's based much more heavily on real world usage and physical hardware, as opposed to simply a software abstraction layer. So, Amir, welcome to the Solana Podcast. 

 

Amir: Hi, thanks for having me. 

Austin: Great to have you here. Um, so let's kind of start at the level set here. Um, where did the original idea for Helium come from? 

Amir: So Helium has been around as a company, uh, for a little while and we, uh, we always intended to try and build, really, a sensor network, that was the original intention, right? It's like, if you wanted to build a big, broad wireless network designed for sensors, you know, how, how would you do it? . Like, it, it felt clear to us that cellular wasn't going to be the right, uh, solution for things like tracking devices and environmental monitors and things like that. And so we set about trying to build kind of like people have called it an overlay network. I like to think of it as, as more like an alternative network to cellular for small things. Right? Like that's kind of the easiest way to think about it. Um, Bluetooth wouldn't really work for this wifi wouldn't work for it, you know? So we always. Had the intention of like, how do we build something very specifically for these kinds of devices? Um, we had a bunch of friends at the time building startups that needed that kind of connectivity. That was really the thrust of, of why we did any of this. And we, you know, we took a bunch of different turns and iterations of trying to do it in, I don't know what you would describe it as, the web two way, perhaps, right? Where we would spend a bunch of money and we would build the network ourselves. Um, and somewhere along the line, like we just kind of realized that we're we're just like a poor version of AT&T or something. Like we were trying to do, we're trying to do things the same way that AT&T would do it or an existing carrier would do it, except we, we don't have any money, relatively. And so it, it wasn't really until 2017, I, I think, that we started to pay attention to crypto in a more serious way.

Like embarrassingly, like I had just kind of ignored Bitcoin and Ethereum completely up until that time. Like, blockchain just kind of seemed like a buzzword, uh, that didn't make a lot of sense to me. I read the, the like Mastering Bitcoin book and my mind was kind of blown. Uh, and then I, you know, read the File Coin white paper, I think was the first time that we had seen. Kind of a proof of, of work model that like applied to a real thing, you know, it wasn't just, it wasn't just hashing and it wasn't, you know, just some kind of arbitrary use of compute power. It was actually like in file coin's case, if I can prove that I'm making file storage space available, then I'll, I'll get rewarded for that.

And so that was a big thrust for us to like, think about doing things in a different way, was like, okay, here's a model for how you might build a wireless network based on a crypto economic model. Um, and do it in a completely different kind of throw the traditional model on its head or turn it on its head. And that was really the start. Uh, we started building in 20 17, 2018, uh, and launched in 2019. Went from being very small, with 150, you know, deployed devices to close to a million now after, after only three years. So a lot happened in that three years, but that's kind of roughly the, the story of, of how we got to where we wanna be.

Austin: Yeah. So one of the things I really love about that story is it really tracks with, um, on a, on a much larger level, my own journey into blockchain, which is that, um, the utility reason was the reason that I actually first got into the space, which was I was working for a company and they thought the only way they could solve the problem was to build something on blockchain. And it, you know, seems very similar to sort of the way you guys examined a lot of different solutions and decided that that community ownership model is best expressed through, through blockchain. Um, so I think that's a really kind of interesting story. And one of the pieces I really like, I just find funny is I actually joined the Helium community far before I joined the Solana community. Um, I got, I got targeted with one of your ads back in the early days and actually bought, um, a few hotspots in, I think I actually, uh, I got in the discord and argued with Mark for a while about how this thing didn't make any sense and how it shouldn't exist or whatever. And there was no, there was no liquid token. And then, uh, you know, really got kind of, you know, as much used as you can get red pilled by a telco, uh, project, um, you know, really brought into the, the idea that this is really something that has a real interesting application in the real world out of it. 

Amir: Yeah. I, I remember you in the community in the early days. I mean, it was difficult at the start, right? Like, especially as a US based company, like, you've gotta be so careful from a regulatory point of view. And, and so I think some of the things that you kind of wanted to say, you couldn't say, and so, you're trying to explain what this was, I think was a little bit of a challenge, right? It's like, "buy this box and stick it in your window and earn this token." And that was kind of where we stopped. Right? Like we didn't, we didn't say anything more about, you know, what, what happens with the token after that, or, or what you could do with it and whether there would ever be a market for it. And, you know, we've been very careful to kind of stay away from all of that. But yeah, it grew like, like wildfire at some point. Like I, I remember at the start, it was very, very difficult to sell hotspots for like 500 bucks. And, you know, we were running a lot of ads are the ones that targeted you. Um, you know, we were giving away like pies and like doing promos for Valentine's day, you know, just said like, whatever scheme you could come up with to like try and get these things out the door, we were, we were doing it. And then at some point he just got its own momentum. And I remember taking, it took off from like 20 or 30,000 hotspots to hundreds of thousands. In what felt like no time. 

Austin: It's funny. I, I remember the pie. I, I couldn't remember, but I remember I was like, oh yeah, like you guys mailed me a pecan pie. I think for, cause I bought one around Thanksgiving.

Amir: Yeah. We had pies, we had cookies, literally anything we could think of that would like motivate people to buy the box was what we were doing at the start. And then, you know, you had COVID supply shortage stuff happened and it, it went from like, we're trying to give these things away to like the demand for them was insane and they were selling on eBay for like 10 grand in the used market. So yeah, it definitely been, been crazy to, to watch and a hell of a journey. 

Austin: Yeah. So one of the things that, uh, I've always found fascinating about helium is that both the growth model and the economic model are very different than any other blockchain out there. The primary function of a network like Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana is to be a software platform and to run well. Bitcoin's not a smart software platform in the same way, but Bitcoin is a scarce amount of supply. Ethereum and Solana are smart contract platforms that are designed for other people to build applications and services on top of. You know, apart from the fact that the helium blockchain will we'll get into a lot of the limitations of the existing L 1 right now, but the modeling is, is very different than what you'd see in any other network, because you are both rewarded for providing availability and then also of specific geographic coverage range and proving that you own, you can provide service within that range, and then also passing data through it. And this is one of the things that it took me a while to wrap my head around is like the real value here is on how do you reward the network infrastructure for simply existing and then creating an economic system to meter expenditures on pretty much anything that can be modeled economically as a flow system?

Amir: That was the learning really from looking at something like File Coin, right? Like that they had figured the same thing out, which was that if we can bootstrap the network by rewarding people for making file storage space available, then you can start the flywheel that way, right? I mean, arguably Bitcoin works this way, right? Like, they are delivering block rewards to miners for mining blocks, regardless of whether there are any transactions or like meaningful fees inside those blocks and it's the same, you know, the same kind of flywheel there in the sense, right? You have to sort of create the network first, um, before it can be taken advantage of, and in the case of a wireless network, that's particularly challenging, right? Because there's a threshold that you have to cross before someone really takes the network seriously. And, and by someone, I mean like a user of the network, right? Like a, a UPS or something that's looking to build like a logistics solution can't really consider doing it on a network like Helium until Helium is large enough and the coverage is ubiquitous enough that it works in most places. 

You've really got a very, very like difficult ramp at the start. And that's where I think this economic model has been the most powerful, right? The biggest innovation I think we came up with was proof of coverage, where we devised this scheme where hotspots, which are the equivalent of miniature cell towers basically, um, would transmit encrypted packets over the air and other hotspots would receive them, um, and that was kind of the proof, right? Like, are you where you say you are, are you signing things with the right private key? Uh, and that was the reward that's sort of like the Bitcoin mining reward equivalent, right? If you can prove that you are available to move traffic, then you're gonna get some reward for that. And then you're also gonna get more reward if you actually move traffic. And again, if I were to like, continue the Bitcoin analogy, the miners also get transaction fees for whatever transactions are in their blocks. And it's, it's, you know, similar kind of bootstrapping. I think, you know, that's one of the most powerful effects of, of crypto and, and one of the most interesting parts of, of using these crypto economic models is that you really get to bootstrap these networks in this completely different way.

I think when people have tried to build these community wireless networks in the past, it's been this kind of tit for tat model, right? Where you share your wifi network and you can use mine. Um, but that's just not that interesting, right? Like I want, I want to make money somewhere. I, I want to be a telco operator or I want to be an Airbnb host or I want to be a cab driver in the Uber model, you know, those were the sort of breakthroughs economically. And so I think crypto is a way of just sort of decentralizing and democratizing that same, that same effect. 

Austin: Yeah. It's interesting. Cuz with the File Coin analogy, you have a similar idea of a resource flow system where you reward both for availability and then for actual storage or in this case passing data. But you guys added, I mean, I'd say two quite difficult components to that. The first is, uh, you know, File Coin operates primarily in consolidated data centers, right? There's not many people running File Coin nodes at home because the economics are such that you really need large amounts of storage availability for that network. But there are penalizations on the Helium network. The rewards you get in New York city, uh, because it's so crowded are, are lower than the rewards you might get in like a, you know, a less dense urban environment. Um, so I think that's a really interesting component too, where you also have to account for overlapping coverage is incredibly desirable up to a certain point. At which point, then it becomes detrimental and you can't simply reward that system. So it's a, it's a much harder system to model than simply data availability where like, you know, an infinite number of replicas is infinitely desirable. There's obviously a diminishing utility there, but for here it's really, um, it's really different. So it's interesting. 

Amir: Yeah. It's, it's both difficult to, to model economically, but also challenging to educate, right? Like, because people kinda live wherever they live, and you have to sort of explain to people that, Hey, like being the 5001st, you know, hotspot in the greater New York area, not that useful, right? Like there are 5,000 others that are already there, you know, providing network coverage. And the redundancy is just not useful enough yet until there's, you know, significant amount of traffic. So it's such a new idea to build a telecom network this way that I think we've learned a ton about what users expect and what they do and how they behave. There's so much that can still be done. People are like, oh, congrats on, you know, all the success. And I'm like, it doesn't feel like we've accomplished anything yet. Like we're in, you know, 0.1% of the journey is complete at this point. Um, but yeah, I, I think, you know, our marketing team, especially I think did a phenomenal job of trying to like explain this in simple terms. And I think that was one of the other things that was important that we did well. We made crypto mining available to like random everyday people, right? Like it didn't, you didn't need to be in a data center. You didn't need some crazy like warehouse full of Asics. You know, like you, you literally could just stick this thing on a, on a window ledge and, and get going. And I think that was also a, a, a meaningful innovation. 

Austin: So I wanna get into, um, you know, the reason we're doing this call and podcast today and not, you. Four weeks from now, which is the HIP 70 proposal. Um, so let's start maybe with some of the history of Helium actually going forwards and deciding that the right model, at least to bootstrap the network was to build its own L1 and some of the learnings that you've had along that process that make you think now that the recommendation for the community is to migrate to a different L1.

Amir: Yeah. So when we started, I mean, it's important for everyone to sort of think about the timeframe here. Like when, when we started building it was 2017 and um, Ethereum was really the only smart contract platform that you could even contemplate using at the time. Um, I mean, this is so long ago in crypto terms that Anatoly was interviewing for a job at Helium.

Austin: What was he interviewing for?

Amir: I don't remember what the role was, but Solana didn't exist. And he had a, a white paper in the form of a Google doc that was for something called loom. And he had this proof of history idea. Yeah. So that's where we were, right. Just to like, kind of set the landscape. Thankfully he didn't take the job and he went and built Solana, which is, um, which I think was a net positive for, for everyone. Um, But that's kind of where we were, Ethereum was kind of the thing that, that you could use. Uh, and if it wasn't for Ethereum, you're, you're kind of on your own, right?

Like there were some other platforms where you could create a token. I think like stellar, perhaps, and even back then, we were worried that Ethereum would become too expensive. Like we weren't sure how to model the network in a way where the number of transactions was reasonable enough to, to not cost thousands of dollars a week. 

Um, and so given that circumstance, we had a bunch of distributed systems guys on the team. We decided to like, build our own blockchain that we didn't fork anything. We just, you know, started from scratch. We, we borrowed where we could. Um, but effectively it is a novel sort of ground-up build. Um, and I think for the most part, it, it sort of did the job that it needed to do. Like, we designed a system that was like maximally decentralized, I would say. Right? There weren't even validators, like the whole network was running on these hotspots, which were raspberry pie powered devices. Like, so literally you had like the whole network was being validated by hundreds of thousands of like raspberry pies, which is in hindsight, really cool, but also in incredibly insane, uh, to, to pull off. And so, you know, the network has grown so much, we've learned so much about the, the decisions that we made we've realized I think a lot of the, the challenges of like being on your own island, right? Like you, you don't have any of the interoperability with, with some of the amazing projects that you see, like Solana, for example, uh, things like wallet support is harder, you know, like trying to get Ledger to adopt you and, you know, like all of those things which are kind of like table stakes for crypto at this point. Exchange listings, defi stuff, NFT, marketplaces, you know, like we don't have any of that stuff because we're like on an island and we're also trying to build wireless networks. And so we don't have time to do it. And so I've come to think of like blockchains as almost like the database or like cloud infrastructure layer of like web two, where you would be insane to like try and build your own sequel database or to try and bootstrap your own data center when you could just use AWS for nearly all applications. There are some cases where that's not true, but for the vast, vast majority, that is true. So now that we're in this sort of new era of, uh, infrastructure and you've got things like Solana, it no longer really makes any sense to like, try and maintain your own L1, given that our mission objective is to build wireless networks. . And that's, I think, just like the simplest way without getting into like a ton of technical detail, that's the simplest way of thinking about it is. There's a bunch of stuff that's very novel and unique about Helium, and none of it is to do with moving tokens around and like validating blocks. And, and so if you can outsource that work, you should. And I don't think we could in, in 2017, uh, but we certainly can now. And, and I, I definitely think Solana is the best place to be doing that work. 

Austin: Yeah. And I mean, Helium network to its credit, like, there are very few networks that could do something like run proof of coverage on chain. There's sort of this like strained analogy that you could say to like, you know, to go way back in the day, like Spark, and Sun Microsystems versus like an X 86 architecture, right? Like the, the thing that Helium is good at doing, it's incredibly good at doing and faster than really any other network could deliver that one specific thing. But as you're saying, the Helium network, it lacks any sort of smart contract support at this point, which is the foundation of really all the growth that we've seen in every other network. There's two networks that have that anyone cares about that exist, that don't have smart contracts, they're Bitcoin and their Helium right now. Um, so I think that's a pretty interesting kind of place to, to look at being in at this point. 

Amir: And it was a very calculated decision at the time. Like we, we knew the danger of having a smart contract environment. The sort of surface area of potential vulnerabilities was so large. And, and again, like we're trying to build a wireless network, like we're building hardware, we're building apps, we're building block explorers, we're building firmware. It's already a massive endeavor that could reasonably be three or four different companies worth of work. And so to add, like, you know, A smart contract platform and then try and like get integrations across like all of the different things, it it's just too much. People don't scale that way. Right? You need focus and I, I think a big part of the drive for HIP 70 is just for our team, but really the whole community, to get focused on what really matters, which are things like proof of coverage and data transfer and usage of the network and stuff like that. And really, again, not on like block validation or transaction validation and stuff like that, which is again, you kind of need it, but it's not differentiated on, on Helium anymore.

Austin: Looking specifically at, um, why the move is required so some of the things you, you talked about before, that sort of the network is at a place where it's hard for it to keep up with itself in, in some of those operations, but then, um, as you look at expanding into a network that does have smart contracts on it, that that can do more of these kind of features. What are sort of the, the, the benefits, the trade offs, like how, how is that process internally to come to a place where the consensus from a lot of the core developers, both of Helium foundation at Nova was like, it's time to do this thing now?

Amir: So a big part of like, what HIP 70 tries to do is, is also like rearchitect the way the network works. So as you kind of mentioned, everything is on chain today, and that has a lot of challenges in terms of, of how you scale it. Um, you've got a million hotspots beaconing and transactions that have to be validated all the time and, and the validation or the verification of those is reasonably complicated work from a computational point of view, so regardless of, of any move to a different network or a different L1, we had arrived at the conclusion that moving as much of this off chain as we could was probably the right thing to do for now. Um, so we could get the performance up, we could spend less time kind of firefighting the problems and, and really spend more time on like improving things, cuz there's a whole bunch of improvements and, and changes that we always wanted to make, but just had never really had the time to, to get through because of all the firefighting that we were doing. So, that's kind of one component of it, is thinking about like proof of coverage and data transfers being these off chain Oracles as, as we're describing them. Um, and so once you've kind of arrived at that design decision, you you're left with like, okay, what is it that the L1 does? And it, it really is just about, um, moving tokens around, right? It's like the Oracles will tell the, the L1, like, Hey, you, you know, these seven hotspots beaconed and these 25 hotspots witnessed, you need to pay out HNT to these owners. Um, and you, at that point, it's like, why would you maintain your own L1 just to do that? Right? Because you, you don't gain any of the upside of being part of a bigger community, like Solana. Those upsides are things like, you know, decentralized exchanges and this defi ecosystem and NFT marketplaces and, uh, exchange support and wallet support, and, you know, like all those things, uh, that you don't have. And you're still spending like a massive amount of engineering cycles, like maintaining your own L1 when really all the L1 does is move tokens from one place to another. So, really the fundamental design decision is like moving stuff off chain. And once you've done that, it's like, okay, why would you, why would you keep running an L1 if all it does is move tokens around. You should be on a platform where you get the benefit of like being part of this bigger ecosystem. 

And one of the other things I'm most excited about that we haven't talked about that much, or doesn't get talked about that much in the community is the ability for like other developers to contribute in a more meaningful way. Right? Like we wrote our L1 in Erlang, which is, you know, a powerful, but somewhat unique and quirky programming language. Um, WhatsApp is probably the, the biggest user of, of it that other people would would've heard of. But in general, it's kind of, you know, it's harder to find engineers that are Erlang people, uh, and it's harder for the community to contribute meaningfully as a result versus using something like Rust or, or being familiar with Anchor and other things on the Solana universe. Like, that will open the playing field significantly and allow more and more people to contribute and, and not be quite as dependent on the core team, you know, to do everything. So super excited about that part of things. 

Austin: Yeah. So let's, uh, let's cut to the chase a little bit on this. Why Solana? Why was the recommendation out of all of the different scaling solutions out there, um, and all the different blockchains that this, this could have been the recommendation of, what about Solana felt like the right thing to recommend to the community here?

Amir: There were a few things. And I, I know we're still, you know, putting out this sort of matrix of, of like all the options we looked at and, and how they, how they stacked up. But I think there were a few, like really, really important things. I mean, one was speed, you know, there's something really to be said about the fact that using Solana feels like using a web two app, um, especially in our environment where the kinds of users are not necessarily like typical of a crypto community. Like we have a lot of people for whom Helium is their first and only like interaction point, um, in crypto. And so having things feel like it isn't on a blockchain is, is really, really powerful. Right? So like when you add a hotspot to the network, it's just there, versus, you know, we have to manage these pending states and stuff like that because our transactions take over a minute. So speed is definitely one factor, especially if, when you start to think about the fact that you're kinda sharing this with a lot of other applications. 

Um, the choice of, of programming language was also quite important to, to us. So the fact that like Rust is kind of the, the environment of choice, um, in Solana at the smart contract level, I think was really, really important, both because we have a lot of understanding of Rust internally, uh, but it's an extremely popular language with like a big developer community on the Solana side as well. So I think attracting developers and, and sort of further decentralizing core development, um, is important and a popular program language is a big part of that. 

There's other more nuanced things like key compatibility, which don't get talked about much. So both Helium and Solana use the ED 25 519 curve, and that doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's hugely important because it means we can, we can map a Helium address to a Solana address without knowing the private key, which means that we can migrate the whole ledger without the user having to, like, intervene in any way. And so we were very, very, very afraid of any process that required the user to intervene or to like migrate their key or like do something because you might end up in this case where like there's orphaned, you know, tokens and like someone's on vacation or, you know, it's just a nightmare scenario. So that was a really huge part of it. And, and strangely there aren't that many blockchains where that is the native address type. Um, so that was a big part of it. 

Um, the fact that, you know, the Solana team is very focused on mobile was also a very big part of it. I think Solana is the only network I've seen that has any ambition specifically around mobile and what to do with phones with, with the SMS stack, which I, I think gonna be interesting. The fact that you guys have a phone also kind of interesting, like maybe there's some stuff we could do there where Saga phones are, you know, POC maps on the 5g network, like there's all, there's all kinds of potential crossover there. Um, you know, so stuff, stuff like that, the fact that we, we know the team, well, I think matters, uh, whether that's fair or not, uh, but the fact that we can access senior people, you know, whenever we might need them, I think is a, is a consideration. Um, so in, in general, I think Solana has probably the biggest and most active developer ecosystem and the best support of, you know, the best wallets. Um, and just, you know, there's just a whole range of stuff that sort of fits in that mold that I, I think matters is a great deal, but fundamentally, it's about, you know, speed it's about having a scalable or, or a sane looking scalability roadmap. I, I think those are what matter. And, and I, I think for the Helium folks, it's important to also just be aware that, um, We, we are only sort of relying on the L1 for the token movement part, like all the proof of coverage and all the data transfer is kind of off chain. And, and so, um, the choice of L1, it sort of matters a little bit less in that context, right? Like it's not so much, it's not, you're not trying to do so much on chain anymore. Um, so that, you know, that was also a big part of just thinking through the architecture, but yeah, we've been playing around with Solana now for a long time um, and super happy with it. it still kind of blows my mind how quickly transactions confirm. I, I just love that. I think people are gonna be blown away by, by it as well. 

Austin: Yeah. So, as parts of the network, move off chain, what does that mean for like, let's just say I'm a, I'm a, I'm a messaging protocol on Solana. And I would like to, uh, like I know a wallet address that is on a phone that has another messaging app set up. If I wanna actually transmit a data packet over the network, what would that look like from a composability standpoint? 

Amir: I mean, it's, it's a really interesting question. Um, there's gonna be sort of a difference between. The physical network, right? So the, the actual sort of air network and what ends up being composable like on chain, and those are gonna be kind of interesting things to watch. Like we, we intend to, to make as much data available on chain as possible without trying to do all the computation there. So any other application that wanted to take advantage of the fact that it was known where a packet was sent, for example, should be able to do that. Um, but they are kind of two different networks. Like one is a physical like air network and the other is, um, the blockchain network for want of a better way of describing it. But there should be a lot of ways for existing Solana ecosystem applications to take advantage of the fact that you now have like a location aware source of data. I'm not sure if there is one on Solana. And certainly there's a, maybe there's a way for step in users to also be POC, like participants on helium. Like why not? Right. They're already out there doing stuff. Um, so there there's all sorts of potential there. And, and I think part of what excites me about platforms, you don't exactly know what people are gonna do with it.

You just sort of give them the tools and they just kind of go off and, and build whatever they need. Um, so I'm excited for that. Just like sort of opening up the creativity and allowing people to like build stuff that, that we don't have to be prescriptive about, I think is a big deal. 

Austin: Yeah. It's, it's funny. You talk about that way. That's one of like the guiding principles of how the foundation approaches some of this development as well, which is, like, the role the foundation is to, is to create and invest in base level infrastructure that makes it possible for anyone to build anything on top of the network. Um, and so like, this is kind of exactly what you're talking about, where it's like, if, if the base layer isn't actually, what's integral to Helium's success, if it's the network effect, if it's the ability to, you know, have high availability and meet the uptime requirements of like major clients and users and that sort of thing, then like, why would you focus on that base layer? And, you know, from, from the foundation's perspective, uh, you know, if we're focused on the base layer, why would we build the application layer? And so, uh, it it's a nice, um, you know, there there's that old sort of saying about like, If it doesn't make your beer better, you know, have someone else do it. I think this comes from like Anheuser Bush back in the, in the day. Right. Whereas they outsourced everything except making the beer. And that's sort of that process here of like, as much as you can strip away of what's required to focus on making Helium the best networks it can be. Um, why wouldn't you do that? Yeah. 

Amir: Yeah. I, I think, um, that's exactly the way that I've been thinking about it for, for a while now, which is, is, you know, you've got a whole team there and a whole ecosystem that is just focused on making the best possible L1 basically, right? Like, so the whole mission objective, and there's so much for us as a team, but also as the helium community to do on, on the Helium side, um, now being able to just focus on that is, is just gonna be like a gigantic weight of our shoulders. Like if I had to guess we probably spent 60, 70% of our engineering time on L1 related things. Like it may be even more than that, honestly. Um, So, if you think about it that way, like you sort of reclaim like 70 or 80% or whatever the number is of, of your engineering brain power, to be able to spend on things like proof of coverage and reliable data transfer. Uh, and then, you know, from a customer centric point of view, the network gets more stable that way, right? Like we're able to spend more resources on like making the network useful and usable, uh, and less on, you know, block production, basically. Which is a very, very hard problem to, to do well and to do its scale. So I'm, I'm thrilled by the notion of, of being able to just focus on. On wireless networks cause that's, that's really what we're, we're here for. And there's so much good stuff coming, um, that I wish I could talk about today, but gimme another six days or whatever, and we'll be, we'll be able to talk about it. 

Austin: Yeah, totally. So when you're looking at things that like users can expect changes for here, I mean, part of it is, is in some ways, not much, right? If you're talking about address compatibility, uh, one day, if this, if this hit passes, um, users will simply have their HNT represented or IOT or mobile represented as an SPL token on Solana, as opposed to being, uh, you know, a token on the relying L1. Um, but apart from that, you know, uh, there's a validator network that's currently maintained on the IOT side of things. Uh, that's not necessarily needed anymore. Um, so there's a whole bunch of like, you know, internal Helium community changes that are also related to this sort of thing. But, uh, you know, one, one thing I guess I haven't heard, talked about much is, you know, the rewards that validators are getting what actually happens to them in HIP 70 once it passes?

Amir: Yeah. Today it's 6.8, 5%. I think of all the H and T that gets created is going to validates today. Um, and they get paid that to effectively run the infrastructure and secure the network. In this model, because we are kind of moving to be an L2 ,uh, and you already have Solana validators at the L1, like we no longer need to like dedicate 6.8% of the HNT inflation, uh, to securing the network anymore. Right? So that's 6.85%, which I think is around 2 million HNT a year at the current emissions rate is now back in the pool, right? Like it's back in the pool that goes to, you know, hotspot operators, for example. Right. So that's another 2 million HNT going back into, into that universe, which, which is a huge win, like you're right. There's not that many people talking about that part of it. Uh, but using that HNT to pay for security is necessary in the current system and not necessary in, in the new design. Uh, so that's a big win to be able to, to get, get that HNT back into their hands of the people building the network, arguably. Um, and then from a user point of view, as you pointed out, I mean, most users on Helium today are using our wallet app, cuz it's kind of the only one that, that I think people trust. Um, and one day you're just gonna open it and you'll still see your HNT balance. It will just be on Solana instead of on helium's L1 you probably won't even notice except for the fact that your address looks different. Uh, but you'll still have your same 12 or 24 words. Um, your balance will still be the same, you know, like nothing really will change from, from that point of view, except the fact that you can now send that HNT to your Phantom wallet, or you can send it to a Serum exchange or you do whatever you want with it really within the Solana ecosystem. But, um, it shouldn't feel, it shouldn't feel like anything's happened other other than everything's faster. 

Austin: Yeah. Well, it's, it's funny because, you know, Like there's no defi on Helium at this moment, so this entire world of, you know, yield farming and vaults products and being able to take out loans against a helium balance just doesn't really exist nowadays in that ecosystem. And, you know, small things too, like when the validators were launched, like it's a hard 10,000 token delegation and there's no ability to delegate stake to another validator. Like there is in most other networks. A lot of these pieces seem like they make a lot more sense once the, once the transition takes place and you're able to kind of take these things that important structural developments, but sort of set them aside as saying like they've served their purpose, the network's going into its next phase. We can set aside some of this stuff, reclaim some of those rewards for node operators and kind of keep the, the process going. Um, at the same time you, uh, you know, there's an acquisition of freedom fi that took place as well. Was this sort of, part of the calculus about like, oh, if we're, if we're transitioning L1s, we can free up engineering time to work on stuff that maybe isn't quite as well supported in the world, like hardware. 

Amir: Yeah, a little bit. I mean, you know, Helium had spent a lot of time in the IOT universe, so we're pretty well acquainted with that world. Like we understood all the technology, all the hardware, all the protocols, um, you know, we'd experimented with it all over the years. And so we understood the universe of IOT, I think intimately. Um, on the cellular side, you know, even when we wrote the white paper back in 2017 or 2018, like, you know, we had in there that we wanna explore using this same set of tactics, basically for other wireless networks, right? Whether they be cellular or wifi or, or whatever, they may be. Um, and again, just like the sort of L1 landscape has evolved over time, the cellular landscape has probably evolved the most significantly over time specifically because you've got access to, uh, something called CBRS, which is the citizens band radio service.

It's an unlicensed block of spectrum that the FCC made available a few years ago, um, that makes it possible for people like us to run a cellular network in an unlicensed band. And usually that's a huge moat, right? Like you've gotta spend, you know, a hundred billion dollars buying spectrum or whatever, before you can run a cell network. But now there's a pretty decent chunk of Spectrum that you can use, uh, to do that. And, and arguably as importantly, like all the major handset vendors support CBRS, right? So if you have an iPhone newer than an iPhone 11, or you have a galaxy S 20 above or a Pixel 5 or above, um, your handset already works in this citizen's band radio service block of spectrum, you don't have to do anything.

So. Those were two like huge developments. And then, you know, as a result of that, there's a bunch of open source protocol stacks that, that you can now use without having to build them yourself like Magma. And so those were developments that just like, kind of the L1 landscape had shifted like dramatically since we started building Helium. And we had been so busy building Helium that we, we just, quite frankly, hadn't had time to learn what we needed to learn about how to do this in a cellular domain. And so we started talking to the freedom fi team a couple years ago, um, kind of they found us, I think, really because they were building private LTE networks, but had bigger ambitions. They wanted to figure out how to build bigger, bigger than private LTE networks. Um, and so the, you know, it felt like it made sense. They had deep expertise in doing this. They had spent the last two or three years understanding CBRS, understanding cellular, understanding what it took to like negotiate deals with carriers, uh, to operate networks in different environments. Like, they've done a lot in their, in their time, um, and we kind of understood how to do the other part of it, which was motivate the economic build out of a network. Um, so it kind of made sense that way. And, um, but yeah, I think part of it is, is being able to focus now on the network side and not so much on the blockchain side, I think is. It's kind of like a superpower for, for us basically, right? Like we, we can shed ourselves of a lot of attention. I mean, even when you add people, like, you know, your attention is still dragged away when you know, there's firefighting and there's problems and there's things that you want to change. Um, so it's not like you just add more people and the problem goes away. Those people also get distracted by, you know, L1 related things. And so I think being able to, to focus on, on what we do is going to be a, a huge win and freedom fi is a huge part of that because they, they bring with them this, this expertise set that we just didn't have, uh, internally and quite frankly, just didn't have time to, to, to learn. 

 It's fascinating to think about, um, that perspective too, like if you think of like, uh, like Rakuten in Japan, like they're, they're now a fully software defined cell phone network that's using ORAN and not relying on, uh, you know, single vendor lock in, and you kind of extrapolate that full and, you know, part of the, the success of, I think the helium I OT network was you could take a Helium brain and plug it into an existing LoRaWAN gateway system and suddenly, you know, all these devices would light up and be able to talk to the network and kind of stay online, and you can see kind of a future where, uh, you know, the, the 5g and cell phone carrier network has that same kind of multiplication effect behind it. Um, but you know, I would say that's a, that's a topic we can dive into on another day. 

Austin: As we look at like HIP 70, um, you know, if this thing, uh, passes, which, you know, the vote at this point is I think about 81% in favor, um, so pretty strong support at this point in the process, which is, you know, midday, Wednesday, um, what does that actual implementation migration process looks like? Is this, uh, just like an Ethereum merge processwhere we'll see it take three or four years to really come to fruition, or are we talking about a, a much more quick process here? 

Amir: I mean, I would love to try and get it done by the end of the year.

Austin: Um, it's a lot quicker than three or four years. 

Amir: Yeah. I know everyone listening is probably, yeah. There's no, no chance of that. But, um, I, I think there is a chance of it. I mean, we we've been, uh, already spending quite a lot of time on the Oracle side of the problem, which, which I think is the most complicated part of the equation, which is, you know, moving proof of coverage and data transfer accounting off chain. So sort of like untangling it from the L1. Um, to me, that's by far the hardest part of the problem. And, and as I kind of mentioned, we were heading down that path anyway. So a decent amount of work has already gone in there. So that, that makes me optimistic that there's a chance to hit that.

Um, the Solana side of it, there's still a bunch of work to do there, you know? So, so there's now three tokens in the Helium ecosystem. There's HNT, IOT, and MOBILE. So there's some work around, you know, like how those are emitted and, you know, you need to be able to redeem IOT and MOBILE for HNT whenever you want. So there's certainly work to do on the Solana side as well. Um, but it doesn't, it doesn't feel out of the question to, to me that there's a working version of this by the end of the year. Um, and then there's some migration details to, you know, figure out, but we've already got a pretty good head start on that. Like, I think on a test net somewhere, we have the entire ledger exported and imported as an SPL. Um, so you know, that, like I said, that was a hugely important part of the problem for us, was like, how do we make this like seamless to, to the user? And, and I think we've, we've successfully been able to prove that to ourselves.

Um, there's also gonna be an airdrop of SOL tokens to all the HNT holders, um, so that they can cover, you know, roughly a hundred transactions worth of, of transactions. Cause that was another concern coming outta the community is that, Hey, we need this like, even though it's a fractional amount of, SOL you know, people now have to like ,buy SOL or acquire it and a lot of, again, a lot of our users are not crypto literate in any way. Um, so making that easy for, for people I, I think is super important. So now they don't really have to think about it. Um, and I expect once we sort of introduce them to the Solana world, they're gonna have a field day and start playing around with all kinds of other stuff. Um, but yeah, that, that's kind of where we're focused is like, how do we, how do we make this as seamless as possible? Um, and make it such that, you know, an existing Helium user is just thrilled by the time it's done basically, right? Like POC works better. Data transfer works better. Transactions are faster and they have more stuff to, to do with their, with their HNT.

Austin: Yeah. I mean, I think for, for helium users who are, are listening to this, uh, one transaction on salon is $0.00025 to, to send on the network. So, uh, you know, if you're getting a hundred transactions worth, uh, unfortunately it's not exactly a down payment, but it's definitely enough to, to do a lot of transfers on the network and experience some of the, uh, you know, the fun things you can do in both Solana defi as, as well as just interacting with the ecosystem in general.

Well, Amir, thank you for coming on the Solana podcast. 

Amir: Yeah. Thanks for having me look forward to, uh, hopefully being back sometime soon. 

Austin: Yeah. We'll have to, uh, have you at Breakpoint as well to talk a little bit more about this. 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anatoly welcomes Jason Keats (Founder & Chief Hooligan, OSOM) to the podcast to talk about his epic career building hardware, the Solana Saga phone and all things mobile and web3. Pre-order the Saga now at solanamobile.com

00:09 - Intro

00:25 - Background

03:27 - Working at Apple

08:07 - The Gem Phone

10:15 - Privacy at Essential

12:24 - Building for Mobile

15:52 - Hardware he wants to build

17:07 - Crypto x Cars

19:02 - Do Apple or Google care about hardware and crypto?

21:08 - Innovation in hardware

21:56 - The saga phone

22:56 - The manufacturing process

26:29 - How to start building

27:56 - Working with start ups

29:15 - The innovation cycle in hardware

30:36 - Privacy features

32:42 - Working with non-crypto people

36:08 - Outro

DISCLAIMER

The content herein is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. Those who appear in the content may have a financial interest in any projects referenced, and any content herein is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.  This content is intended to be general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional advisor.

Anatoly (00:09):

Hey, folks. This is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today, I have Jason Keats with me who's the CEO and co-founder of OSOM. Welcome.

Jason (00:18):

Hey, how's it going? Glad to be here. Glad to chat everything we've been working on finally.

Anatoly (00:22):

Yeah. Me too. It's been kind of a crazy journey. You have an awesome background. Do you mind just sharing it?

Jason (00:32):

Yeah. I've had a very, weird hardware background throughout my career. When I left Berkeley, I decided I wanted to go build something. I didn't want to sit in front of a computer all day. Well, my degree is in astrophysics from Berkeley. And then I went on to work on solar panels. And that was-

Anatoly (00:54):

Like...

Jason (00:54):

What was that?

Anatoly (00:55):

Yeah. How did you get from astrophysics to hardware?

Jason (00:59):

So my senior year, my professor asked me to... He knew I had access to a machine shop because I was working with the Formula SAE, which is a student racing program. So they knew I had access to a machine shop and they wanted to make parts for telescopes. So I offered and said, "Hey, I can do that." So instead of being a traditional GSI or something like that, I was the monkey who machined random parts. And that was a lot more fun. At the end of the day, instead of having a program, I was like, "I have a thing. It's built." And that was it. I wanted to build things.

Anatoly (01:39):

That's awesome. How did you get into astrophysics then? What was the reason for getting into astrophysics?

Jason (01:48):

I just wanted to be able to say, I was... It was a rocket scientist was the logic I had, 18-year-old me had. Little did I know that wasn't exactly how that worked, but it sure sounded cool. And nowadays it just sounds really cool to say, "Oh, I have a degree in astrophysics from Berkeley."

Anatoly (02:05):

That does sound really cool. So what happened after? You build telescopes, right?

Jason (02:10):

Yeah. I built little bits and bobs for telescopes. I didn't want to get a real job, so I started a motorcycle company that was a complete disaster. Not a complete disaster, but it was pretty rough. I learned a lot about running a company there. Basically, I learned all the things you're not supposed to do.

Anatoly (02:29):

I mean, that's the first one, right? You're supposed to do that.

Jason (02:33):

Yeah. I'm glad it didn't hurt me too badly. And then I ended up being a consultant for a company in Silicon Valley. It was like a design engineering consultancy and they put me on to Solyndra, which was a solar panel company. And that was a very fun couple of years building some really interesting technology and honing the skills that I use today and some of the ethos that I still use today because one of the things we were trying to do was how do you make a solar panel easier to install, because right now it's quite a time consuming process. So my goal was to design a solar array that could be installed with no tools and we were successful in that.

Anatoly (03:14):

That's awesome. That's awesome. I'm going to keep saying that the whole episode.

Jason (03:22):

Two years on of creating the name and it still doesn't get old. So eventually Solyndra went belly up unfortunately, that could be 10 podcasts probably as to what happened there. But my boss at the time was like, "Cool, we need to go over to Apple right away." So I think that was a Wednesday, the company went bankrupt and on Monday I was working on secret projects at Apple.

Anatoly (03:50):

Cool. So there's like a period of how many years of what you can't talk about.

Jason (03:55):

A few years actually. And actually I know for a fact that the program is still ongoing and is still super secret.

Anatoly (04:02):

Cool. That's pretty cool. What did you work on at Apple that you can talk about?

Jason (04:09):

So when I started Apple, my first project was on Mac PD doing the last generation of the MacBook Air, which I mean, people still review that as one of the best laptops ever made. And I'm still quite proud of that. It was a very difficult project with a very small team, but it was very successful. And at some point in between MacBook Air and the little tiny MacBook, I was asked to help on a small project with Jony Ive which was the Leica infrared camera. And it was myself and one other mechanical engineer working with the ID team, designing this, what was supposed to be a two or three-week project. And six months later, I had my own office where we were doing prototypes of little tiny bits and pieces because Jony wanted it perfect. And that really kind of made my career at Apple was working on that project with the studio directly.

Anatoly (05:01):

Is that camera like something you can buy now?

Jason (05:03):

I mean, if you got a few million bucks. No, we only made one camera and it was purchased at auction for around $2 million if I recall correctly. I think it's on display somewhere. It was super cool. It had so many bits and pieces that were just absolutely ridiculous. The whole thing was handmade. My favorite little anecdote about that is it needed to be... The tolerances were so tight that it needed to be hand assembled in a very particular way. And so if the owner who currently has it decides it needs to be repaired or refurbished, for whatever reason, if they decide to actually to use a $2 million camera, there's a little post it inside that says, "Call Jason," with my phone number.

Anatoly (05:52):

Eventually you're going to get like a call at 3:00 AM.

Jason (05:55):

Oh, yeah. I do know who has it. And we do travel in the same circle, so I'm sure there's a day where I'll be like, "Hey, I built your camera." Yeah, that was fun. And then from there I joined iPad which was a whole other journey and learning a little bit more about mobile having come from solar panels and motorcycles, and desktop products, and laptops into iPad was a lot of fun. And my first real claim to fame in iPad was leading architecture on the original iPad Pro, which is the original 12.9 inch iPad.

Jason (06:31):

It was a lot of fun because we got to try a lot of different things. A funny story there though, that totally you know and a lot of people who follow me know, I'm huge into racing in cars and I do a lot of silly things. We actually built in carbon fiber speaker caps inside the iPad Pro. Apple marketing made this big spiel about, "Oh, it's different. It does this, it does that." That's all BS. It's because I like carbon fiber because I like race cars and that's why we used it. I'm sure there's some marketing guy going no, but that's the honest truth is to why there are carbon fiber speaker caps in the iPad pro.

Anatoly (07:07):

I thought those are so cool. I ride bikes. All the cool bikes are carbon fiber.

Jason (07:17):

Let's see. I don't think I have one here. I had one somewhere. I had the caps and everything, but it was a lot of work and it was a lot of fun. It was really interesting, but I got really sick of the bureaucracy at Apple. It wasn't for me. One day somebody was interviewing for my team at Apple, and they told me about what was going on Playground, which was Andy Rubin's new incubator. And I thought that was super, super interesting. So I just straight up cold called Andy on LinkedIn and was like, "Hey, I've done this stuff. I'm interested in getting out of the Apple ecosystem. Let's talk."

Jason (07:53):

And the next day I got a call from their recruiter and I went and interviewed a week later and they were like, "Hey, we have something. We can't tell you anything about it, but can you wait, like two months and we're going to give you a job. I said, "Cool." So for that two months, I went off and worked on Apple Maps, which was everybody goes, "What the hell were you doing on Apple Maps?" I was designing all the things you see, like the rooftop boxes and the things that went in the planes and the balloons that went up in the sky. We built some really weird stuff to capture images for Apple Maps.

Anatoly (08:26):

That's cool. Wow. I mean, there is a hardware component to Apple Maps that people don't don't realize.

Jason (08:33):

Oh, yeah. All that stuff has to be captured somewhere. I mean, there's warehouses full of hard drives of people having to still go through that data and make sure it's okay to use. And warehouses and warehouses full of hard drives.

Anatoly (08:49):

Yeah, I can imagine.

Jason (08:52):

So, yeah, after Apple, I went and joined Andy Rubin at what was... What were we called? We were called Ninja Army for the first five months. And then eventually became known as Essential. I was technically the first hire, but the second employee at Essential and was there from the very beginning to the very end. It was a hell of a ride. We built the Essential PH1, which was a really, really, really exceptional piece of hardware with some pretty crap software on it, unfortunately.

Jason (09:19):

Particularly the camera side needed a lot of work and unfortunately was released too early. And we could argue for days about what the reason was, but ultimately that was the end result of that. And we never managed to bring another product to market despite building some really cool hardware there.

Anatoly (09:38):

So yeah, man, launching hardware is hard. Why did you decide to do this again?

Jason (09:47):

The biggest product that we built... Or the coolest product. No, that was actually the smallest. The coolest product we designed at Essential was Project Gem. And we are working on that up until the very end. And that was so revolutionary in the terms of mobile experience in which taught all of us that there was really an opportunity here. There was still things to be done and new things to be invented and new ways of interacting to be made available.

Jason (10:13):

So when Essential went out of business, when Andy told me that was that, it was obvious to me that I need to take this opportunity now. I'm going to do it. I have a team available that I know is now all unemployed and let's keep them together and build something really, really cool.

Jason (10:29):

So I grabbed the key team members and then kept a few on the back burner while we raised money, and we got to the point where we were ready to rock and start building a new phone. So while the first phone is a little more traditional device, I think in the future, we're going to have some really crazy things to build with you guys.

Anatoly (10:49):

Yeah. I have no doubts. The gem thing was a pretty weird piece of hardware. Right? It kind of looked almost like totally made out of glass.

Jason (11:03):

Yeah. So this is one of those things that I love showing off in person is that glass phone. It was a glass uni body, which has never been done in a cell phone before. The overall shape was... I mean, the best description is either a candy bar mixed with an Apple TV remote and...

Anatoly (11:21):

Yeah.

Jason (11:22):

Yeah. That's a great description. Piece of glass, size of a candy bar that kind of looks like an Apple TV remote.

Jason (11:28):

Yeah, exactly. But it was all one piece of glass. Even the camera bump, the flash, everything was a continuous piece of glass. And every hardware engineer I've shown that to goes, "How did you make this? And how did you manage to achieve the tolerances required to build that?" And it took a lot of work with our good friends at Corning and a third party in China. But we were able to build them. And there's a couple of them in existence. I think they're all in Andy's garage still, except for the two that are in my possession still. And they work.

Jason (12:00):

Some of the issues we were encountering was that GMS wouldn't... We wouldn't be approved for GMS with that device. So we were going to have to do some new and novel use cases there and come up with all new ways to interact with the device.

Anatoly (12:17):

So awesome you guys started with a really strong focus on privacy. Yeah. Was that your decision or something that was just you guys wanted to do at Essential anyways?

Jason (12:31):

No, that was definitely my decision and the decision of the team. We looked at what killed, Essential. A big part of that was a lack of focus other than building cool stuff. And that only gets you so far. There needs to be a reason why your customers want to join our adventure rather than go with a Samsung, or LG, or HTC, or Motorola or whatever was available at that time.

Jason (12:54):

So we realized that a big problem facing everybody today is a lack of consumer privacy. And that's when we came to the conclusion that we could actually address that as an OEM.

Anatoly (13:06):

And that's a really tough challenge because you still probably want to keep Google services around.

Jason (13:14):

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean-

Anatoly (13:16):

Do you think... Yeah, go ahead.

Jason (13:18):

No, I was going to say it's a great segue into what things that people keep asking us since we announced our partnership is when we decided to say, "Okay, we're going to build a privacy centric phone, there have been privacy centric devices attempted in the past, but they were too extreme. By cutting out GMS, by cutting out Android in some cases, you were left with a device that was so private, nobody would use it, which yeah, it works as a privacy device, but you don't sell any.

Jason (13:43):

I mean, I know for a fact that there are two different phone manufacturers who sold less than a thousand devices, despite putting tens of millions of dollars into it because we all use the same suppliers. So the suppliers are excellent sources of information. And so I know for a fact that one of them was like, "Oh, we only shipped a thousand speakers to that company."

Jason (14:06):

So what we said was, "We're going to give you control and we're going to give the user control and we're going to give them options and they can make the choice as to how much they want to share or not share." And if they want to use Twitter, and Facebook, and Instagram and every Google service, then at least they have knowledge that they're doing that and is less secure than not doing it. Or they are consciously making that decision.

Anatoly (14:31):

Yeah. Go ahead.

Jason (14:33):

And that goes to what we've talked about is we're going to do the same with all the Solana mobile stack that we're integrating into the phone. We're not taking anything away. We're giving users an excellent device, a high-end flagship device that gives them more options and more choice in how they use it and what they use it for.

Anatoly (14:52):

Yeah. If you've been a web 3.0 dev, you've been building applications and you've never started with like, "I need to collect a username and an email and a password." That concept doesn't exist. Right?

Jason (15:09):

Yeah.

Anatoly (15:09):

That's something that being building like in crypto for the last four years, I almost forgot how to build traditional applications. And when I had to remember, I was like, "Oh man, yeah, there just doesn't seem a way to build privacy without really starting from the ground up and building a whole new set of applications that people actually use. Right? And they deliver value to those users. People use them because they love them. But you need to start from the ground up. And that's really hard because getting product market fit, building applications and then competing with existing services is just like a uphill climb.

Jason (15:54):

Yeah, absolutely. Building that community, which was what made our partnership so beautiful is you have that community and you have that development group that really wants to be actively involved and emotionally involved, and that's super exciting for us to be like, "Hey, let's give you a piece of hardware that you can call home too."

Anatoly (16:12):

Yeah. I mean, this is the first time, honestly, I've seen anyone tweet that they will stop using an Apple product and switch to Android.

Jason (16:21):

That is exciting. If we can crack 5% instead of the standard 4%, I will be absolutely ecstatic.

Anatoly (16:29):

Yep. That would be awesome. Yeah, I remember when the iPhone launch and that was a real watershed moment. A lot of us, I was working on BREW and a lot of us were actually, like, felt really frustrated with the mobile industry because we had all these ideas. We wanted to build rich applications that are easy to code and totally different kind of UIs, dynamic UIs and stuff. And these big telcos would give us like 200-page spec of what a phone should look like because they their customers. And there was like this moment where Apple announced this thing and Steve Jobs showed, "Look, there's a browser. It's a real internet." It's just not this [inaudible 00:17:15]. It's not the mobile web that... I don't know if people remember what that even looked on a LG flip phone.

Jason (17:25):

I do.

Anatoly (17:25):

That was a big deal. I don't know if we're there yet with crypto. I don't know if there's a single application or anything like that when people open up and they're like, "Oh wow, this is it." Because obviously when Apple announced the iPhone, it was already after the internet. It was big. Right? Everybody was already using the internet and there was this obvious gap between desktop and mobile. But I think when people actually pay with tokens for their day to day stuff and all that whole loop works and it, and it's beautiful and it doesn't suck, I think that might like open up people to new ideas of what we can do with crypto on a mobile device that actually supports it natively.

Jason (18:18):

Yeah. The day that both of our parents can go and shop with tokens will be a watershed moment for crypto.

Anatoly (18:32):

Yeah. I am really excited about that.

Jason (18:33):

Yeah. When I think about the potential there, I mean you and I have talked about it a few times. It's immense and almost a little bit intimidating and staggering what the obvious potential is there.

Anatoly (18:45):

So what kind of hardware, what else do you want to build besides a phone? You don't have to announce anything, but you personally as somebody that's a super hardware nerd, if you had infinite budget, and could do whatever you want, what would you build?

Jason (19:02):

Number one, I want to bring back Project GEM. I loved using that phone and I'm probably the only person on Earth that used that phone regularly for a while because I wanted to make sure it was great. And that thing worked so much better than anybody ever gave a potential credit for, as a small side device, as something you could toss in your pocket, in your bag and not think about. It was beautiful. I mean, for me, designing a piece of hardware has to also be very physically attractive and I think that was the most beautiful thing I've ever designed.

Jason (19:31):

I do want to see the expansion of using your mobile devices, be it your watch or your phone interacting with the automotive sector. Obviously, we've chatted about it before. I have a problem when it comes to cars. Oh, wait. Nobody can see what I just pointed at. So I think the inner relationship between mobile, crypto, and automotive is even earlier than anything else in crypto, but there's a hell an opportunity there. And thankfully, a lot of the automotive companies are starting to catch on and realize there's different potential there.

Anatoly (20:13):

What would be like a hardware integration between mobile and cars?

Jason (20:18):

I mean, we've already patented this idea. So I will talk about it freely now, is the ability to track all your history of your vehicle. And when you sell your vehicle, you have everything written to the blockchain. The NFT itself will simply be a photo or a connection to the title, which is held somewhere else. But you can guarantee that if somebody sends you a NFT of a title, that it is tied to a physical object, which we've already patented that as well.

Anatoly (20:47):

So you want like the miles like the RPMs, like the actual raw data. I don't know what else you got. I'm not a car person.

Jason (20:56):

Like the service history or the maintenance history, the sales history. Do you know if the mile... You can guarantee that the miles weren't rolled back. You can know if it went through any... What do they call... Oh, when they call you to bring the car back in. Oh, recall notices. Anything with service was done. That's a real utility of that technology.

Anatoly (21:24):

Cool. And the kind of cars that people would really want this for like collectibles, like classic cars that you're getting what you're paying for.

Jason (21:34):

Yeah, I think so. But also with your average Toyota or Civic, at least you know what the history was on that car. Was it repaired? Was it damaged at any given point? There is utility across the board.

Anatoly (21:45):

Cool.

Jason (21:46):

And then especially-

Anatoly (21:47):

Yeah, I can...

Jason (21:47):

Last thing on that one, especially, if we go into the collectibles, like being able to take a cut down the road. Okay. I sell the car to you. You sell it to somebody else and I can take a fraction of a percent of that sale is pretty awesome.

Anatoly (22:00):

If you're the person restoring the car. Right?

Jason (22:03):

Yeah.

Anatoly (22:03):

And you did this... Yeah, that's actually like, I think been... It's weird that model has never been replicated in the real world, but works so well with NFTs.

Jason (22:16):

Yeah. Exactly.

Anatoly (22:19):

That's a use case that I think is way under explored for stuff like that, for physical art.

Jason (22:26):

Yeah. It's one of the things that we patented early on was the connection between a physical and digital assets.

Anatoly (22:40):

Do you think Apple or Google care about what we're doing right now? Is this like reached anyone's decision-making yet or is this still-

Jason (22:49):

I know for a fact that our name has come up in both those companies, because I know a lot of people at the highest level. One of my good friends is an SVP at Apple and he texted me. He's like, "They're talking about you in an executive meeting." I was like, "Cool. I've made it in life. Are they talking about suing me though?" I'm sure Google has people thinking about it and worrying about it. I mean, obviously Google is still a partner because we are a GMS device and they are thrilled to have us. It's like being an advocate for the Android ecosystem.

Anatoly (23:26):

Oh yeah, absolutely. I think if we convert people from iOS to Android, Google should be like making parades for OSOM. It's a lot of...

Jason (23:37):

I'm serious, I haven't asked yet, but I should ask them like, "Hey, if we convert more than the standard 4%, do I get a bonus from Google?" That'd be nice.

Anatoly (23:43):

Yeah. Absolutely. I'm not too worried. They're so big that it doesn't seem like there's anything to worry about because they're just like, it's like worrying about, I don't know, nation state at this point.

Jason (24:02):

Yeah, exactly.

Anatoly (24:03):

For a startup, it's such a big competitor that it's not even a competitor.

Jason (24:08):

Yeah. And I think the companies that people often compare us to, or talk about us, nothing or... What's it? Oppo and OnePlus. One of the things that I've tried to do is make sure I have a good relationship with those companies as well, because it's kind of silly for a bunch of startups to be fighting over the scraps instead of taking swings at Apple, Google and Samsung in terms of device sales.

Anatoly (24:31):

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, OnePlus made some awesome devices too. That was really cool to see them launch. When I was working at Android at Qualcomm, there was just always like this huge gap between quality and innovation in terms of like how the device looks and feels and they were able to really push the limits there. Yeah.

Jason (24:53):

Well, I think our next devices will be pushing some new limits, which will be a lot of fun.

Anatoly (24:58):

Yeah. I guess, do you think like mobile... Because it's so big, is there still room to innovate in terms of hardware?

Jason (25:14):

Yes.

Anatoly (25:15):

Besides like on the standard daily driver.

Jason (25:19):

Yeah. I spend a lot of time actually. Now, that I'm the CEO and I have other teams of people now working for me pushing vision, I can spend a little more time thinking about how I want to change that interaction of device, what new technologies are out there, or even what new use cases of existing technologies there are.

Jason (25:38):

So I have been working on something wholly new for how we interact with our devices in a way that I think people will naturally enjoy using it. It's a bit of technology that'll change how you actually touch and use your device, but it'll be done in a form factor in a manner that makes it approachable. And it's not foldable because I think that's kind of silly most of the time.

Anatoly (26:06):

Yeah. Foldables, not also not sure about them. I really like the steel on the Saga phone.

Jason (26:14):

Yeah.

Anatoly (26:15):

Why did you guys pick steel?

Jason (26:17):

Two reasons. Number one, we didn't want to go titanium like we did on the Essential phone. It was a little too exactly the same, but we couldn't go to aluminum because it just doesn't have the same touch. It doesn't have the same feel. It doesn't have the same strength. It doesn't have the same feel, which I want to feel a premium device when I pick up a phone that I engineered. An aluminum loses that a little bit. It's not stiff enough for my taste.

Jason (26:41):

So we landed on steel for the housing and then we landed on ceramic because we still did want a little tie back to Essential, but also because it does feel premium, it looks premium. It's not paint, it's not glass. It's real ceramic. It's incredibly tough. It's very hard and it does well and drop while also allowing to be RF transparent and just, I mean, ultimately looking and feeling super premium to your fingers.

Anatoly (27:09):

When you make those decisions, how many logistics need to change? How many companies, suppliers, machines, how big of a process is that?

Jason (27:24):

Less now than it was five years ago, but it's because I have the team behind me that is incredibly capable of making it happen where we have a ridiculous Rolodex, a contact list for everybody under 25 of people to call for different materials and different processes. The big one is, as you saw in the first EVT devices. First stainless devices, they were quite heavy. So one of the big changes we had to do was we had to optimize for aluminum on the very, very first prototypes. We switched to stainless, but we didn't change our cutter pass. We didn't change our processes. So into the current build, we've made a lot of changes to ensure that we bring the weight down just the right amount, but still have a super strong device.

Anatoly (28:11):

Are those separate companies like the company that makes the cutters and stamps the thing and puts on the ceramic. If you went from ceramic to glass, how big of a logistical nightmare is that?

Jason (28:25):

If we switched over to glass, it's a different company that would manufacture and process the material. And then because it's glass, we'd have to also find a paint shop to paint the device. Whereas ceramic has that color baked in, literally.

Anatoly (28:40):

Got it. That makes sense. Okay. So you have to do like a bunch of work. It's not just one company that you go to and they're like, "Sure, we can do everything."

Jason (28:51):

Yeah, that doesn't exist as much as we'd love to. It's all over the place in Asia. Prior to the pandemic, I probably would've spent the last 10 months living in and out of China.

Anatoly (29:02):

And most of the stuff is in China or all over Asia at this point?

Jason (29:07):

A lot of the supply chain comes out of China, but that doesn't mean we're manufacturing there. We have plants or factories both in China and in Vietnam, but it's still all in Asia.

Anatoly (29:18):

Got it. Is there any chance for that stuff to ever happen in the US or is it just like the world is like manufacturing shifted irreparably?

Jason (29:33):

I have had a few conversations with the Canadian government about this. I think the US will be still quite difficult, but in Canada might be possible. But the biggest issue is all the subcomponents are still made in Asia. So even if you were doing final assembly in North America, you'd still have to ship all the individual components from Asia. Your SOC is going to come out of TSMC, which is in Taipei. Your memory is going to come out of Korea. The display will come out of either Indonesia or China and there's no manufacturing plants for all those components anywhere in the Western world.

Anatoly (30:13):

Actually manufacturing those components in the Western world is impossible. Right? Why is it impossible?

Jason (30:18):

I mean, just the billions of dollars required would be cost prohibitive to build those plants. Those fab houses are huge and would take years to build.

Anatoly (30:30):

And that's because things have gotten so specialized in displays and everything that it's just like, "Yeah. It's basically Intel like level kind of commitment."

Jason (30:40):

Oh, yeah. I mean, you're talking massive, massive. And even the ones that are good at it already have issues now at the scales we're talking about. Like the four nanometer process, which is used to build the chip we're using in Saga is there are only two companies in the world that even understand how to make the fab devices to make those chips.

Anatoly (30:59):

Yeah. This is the Tungsten droplet, right?

Jason (31:04):

Yeah.

Anatoly (31:04):

You have like a droplet that refracts UV light.

Jason (31:08):

Honestly, I'm not that familiar with that process, but yeah, it is crazy, crazy. It's tough to explain to people how tiny four nanometers is. And then how many traces they have to put down in a tiny little chip that we're going to put in your phone and makes everything work.

Anatoly (31:29):

How do you find these places? How do you start? If you were like a 18-year-old that's like, "Hey, I want to build cool shit, build cool electronics," how would you start?

Jason (31:44):

I think if I were starting today, I would try to find the R&D team at either Google or Apple or a startup like OSOM and just go like, "Hey, I want to be your man on the ground in Asia and I want to grow my network. I want to go out there with a completely open mind and just be like everybody teach me." Which is how I really got out there. I said, "I don't know what I'm doing on some of this stuff." But I am a sponge. I will sit here and learn from the best and I will be super polite because I see... That was one of the things that used to bug me a lot is I saw Western people acting like jackasses with their Eastern counterparts.

Jason (32:23):

Now they get nowhere and I made it at a point to always, always, always be polite, always say, "Look, I'm here to learn. Let me help you. If I know something that I can share, I'm going to go out of my way to share it." And that has enabled me to have amazing relationships with the CEOs of all these fantastic supply companies.

Anatoly (32:43):

It's basically like a relationship thing and you have to know what they can build and know what they do well and stuff.

Jason (32:50):

Yeah. And go in there with an open mind and sometimes an open wallet. That always opens some doors and expect to try to make it a back and forth. Because you get a lot further if you can say, "Hey, let me offer you some of my knowledge in exchange for some of your knowledge."

Anatoly (33:07):

How open are they to startups custom work with these small scale projects? Because my imagination is that like they only work with Google and they want to sell a hundred million units or whatever.

Jason (33:20):

Yeah. That's the other hard part. And that comes later on once you have those relationships because it doesn't matter who you are. If you don't have that existing relationship, they're going to laugh you out of the building, if they even let you in the door.

Anatoly (33:34):

Yeah. Makes sense. If you're building, if you dream of building awesome hardware, I guess you got to start like work for somebody like OSOM or R&D team. That's pretty good advice.

Jason (33:52):

I think it's the only way to build those relationships, so you know who to call. And I think a big part of it is it's not always the CEO you need to talk to. You need to talk to his right hand guy. You need to talk to the CTO. You need to know the right person to talk to at each company, and it changes a little bit. You'll you learn who the movers and shakers are, the people who can actually make things happen for you. And that's where it gets super interesting. And it takes boots on the ground to learn that.

Anatoly (34:20):

So I imagine that's still true for big companies, as you get bigger, you still just need to keep those relationships going.

Jason (34:29):

If you want to innovate, you need to. If you just want to just keep grinding out the same BS you've been doing for 20 years, they'll usually just give you the C team and you can just grind and nobody moves anything.

Anatoly (34:41):

Yeah. The innovation part is hard. How long is the innovation cycle and hardware?

Jason (34:50):

Anywhere from days to years, right? I have been on the back side of things where it's like, "Oh, I have an idea. Actually, that was super easy to implement." Okay, let's do it. It's done. But I've also... Making the glass housing for GEM was an 18-month project to get the tolerance that we need to hold. For everybody who's listening, you need to hold 100 microns is pretty standard, which a 10th of a millimeter. Very, very-

Anatoly (35:19):

How many human hairs is that?

Jason (35:22):

Less than one. So we need to hold those tolerances on piece of glass and how glass is manufactured is that you literally take a molded part and cook it down into a shape. And you can imagine trying to hold... Like if you're baking something in your oven and trying to get it to stay within a 10th of a millimeter, it's never going to happen. So we had to help both Corning and our third party invent new technologies to achieve that result.

Anatoly (35:52):

That's really cool. That's pretty cool. Are people using these technologies anywhere else? Or is this something that is basically just only was built for GEM?

Jason (36:06):

I think they're still using... There's not a lot of applications where you need a deep draw, weird aspect ratio glass part, but I know they're using it for two and a half D or even light 3D shapes, that at least allowed them to make 3D shapes that weren't as extreme as GEM in a more factory friendly manner.

Anatoly (36:28):

Super goal.

Jason (36:31):

Yeah. I could talk about random manufacturing for hours.

Anatoly (36:35):

You guys also have like a pretty awesome software team.

Jason (36:39):

Yeah.

Anatoly (36:40):

And you guys did a lot of work in actually adding privacy features to the Android stack.

Jason (36:45):

Yeah.

Anatoly (36:46):

What are these privacy features?

Jason (36:49):

I'd love to have Gary answer that question if he were here. But mostly what we wanted to do is allow the user to just be more aware of where their data is going and how it's being treated by any webpage they go, any app they use and alert them if more data than they expect is going out and a place where they can work within their device, where they can guarantee that nothing is going out that they don't control, which we haven't named yet because somebody stole our name.

Jason (37:21):

And then the other one that I love that I cannot wait to use more of is what we called lockdown, but then Google used that name for what they were doing. But the ability to just turn off any module on the phone when you want to.

Anatoly (37:35):

And what do you mean by module?

Jason (37:39):

So right now, I think in lockdown mode that Google offers you can turn off the camera and mic. But we can turn off the camera, the mic, the antennas, the USB port, whatever. A module is any piece of hardware on the device we can individually completely disable that.

Anatoly (37:59):

That's really cool. Does the user have a physical notification that that thing is turned off? Are there like LEDs or something that light up?

Jason (38:10):

Yeah. We're still working on that with your team as to what those notifications will look like, what that UI and UX looks like. But yeah, there are both physical haptic feedback as well as visual feedback.

Anatoly (38:22):

Can you turn off GPS and things like that and other sensors. Or I guess the GPS radio. I don't know how baked in those are these days.

Jason (38:32):

It's actually super, super, super baked in. One of our investors is an Apple employee. And I was explaining to him like, "Look, man, you can put your phone in an airplane mode." That GPS is still working. And he's like BS. And I'm like, "No, no, no. Watch, watch, watch. Put your phone in airplane mode." And we were on a bicycle ride. "Go bike 100 yards down the road and see your phone is still tracking you." And he's like, "What the hell?" And the next day he invested.

Anatoly (39:01):

How has it been like getting folks like... You guys work with mostly non-crypto people, up until you met me?

Jason (39:10):

You. Yeah, basically.

Anatoly (39:14):

Yeah. What has that conversation been like? What has been their reaction?

Jason (39:19):

It's been all over the map. It says there were some very vocal, negative people outside of the company, which I completely expected and doesn't really bug me at all. We had surprising support within the company, to be honest. I think I told you, I fully expected 10 to 20% of the company to be like, "Ah, screw this. This is ridiculous." And we really only had one person do that. And then the counter to that, the amount of support where people were like, "No, this is exciting. This is the next generation of mobile will be built on web 3.0. And I think the definition of web 3.0 remains fairly fluid and we get to be involved with really defining what that actually means to the end user.

Anatoly (40:03):

Yeah. I think this is like a huge opportunity for us to set the standards and really push for privacy first and just build something that can be a really good base. The bricks that web 3.0 is built on.

Jason (40:19):

Exactly.

Anatoly (40:21):

I guess, what was like the detractors? What was like the any points that they brought up that you think were interesting or worthwhile?

Jason (40:30):

I think that was the biggest thing is none of the negative comments I heard were worth that much because it was the standard anti-crypto comments, which is like, "Oh, I don't believe in it. This is scam. I don't see it." And I was like, "Okay, I'm not going to try to fight anybody over that. That's fine." People thought Facebook was stupid. Frankly, I still think Facebook is a little stupid, but they sure are worth billions and billions and billions of dollars. So there is a market for it.

Anatoly (40:56):

Yeah. It was really hard for me too, to accept, to believe in Facebook in those early days too. But in my mind that is like the quintessential internet company, more so than Google. Because it was really like... All they're doing is connecting people. And that's a very weird thing to think about that, that could be worth half a trillion dollars or whatever it is these days.

Jason (41:22):

Who knows? They're probably more than that.

Anatoly (41:24):

I have this analogy that Facebook has a social graph where you have to hop through people. Right? You're connected through some intermediaries, but crypto, it's all public keys, super connected or like a single censorship resistant message bus. Everybody in the world is now in like a single chat, basically, which is why it's a bit chaotic.

Jason (41:46):

Yeah. But I also see why... It's kind of interesting because you have that community, everybody is connected, which is inherently non-private, but it is also... Everybody in that group has a strong desire to keep certain things private. And it's that ability to choose what you keep private when you don't keep private, which makes this partnership so incredibly powerful.

Anatoly (42:05):

So obviously, a public data structure is really strong forcing function for developers to understand that this data is public, therefore I need to minimize how much it collects. It's almost like if all your interactions are over a public database, then you really, really try to know the least amount of the users that you need. And I think that's just been kind of a design constraint on web 3.0 devs from day one. And you forget about web 2.0 that you need to create cookies and store people's passwords and stuff like that.

Jason (42:46):

Yeah. And I think what we're going to bring to the fore for web 3.0 is that improved user experience and that UI. I mean, you and I have chat about it almost daily lately about the issues around that. And having a piece of hardware that can bypass a lot of the frustration that's there right now is huge.

Anatoly (43:05):

Agreed. Well, thank you, Jason, for being here. It's been awesome talking to you.

Jason (43:10):

Absolutely.

Anatoly (43:10):

I'm super excited to work with you. It's going to be great. Folks, if you've been listening, go to solanamobile.com and pre-order the Saga.

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