First Principles

Building something people want

We are not first time builders in crypto. We also did not get into crypto for the hype. We were in this space when no one knew what it was.

Product Market Fit is not a commonly used metric in crypto products, and very much narrative-driven just like any novel technological darling.

Yes, absolutely, we need to capture the narrative, but there were few strategic decisions we made to ensure the product outlasts narrative.

• PoS staking has unchallenged PMF, so in addition to restaking, our 1st layer infrastructure covers everything Marinade or JITO has built — single stake pool and MEV-boost yield. Unlike Eigenlayer, which does not have liquid staking, it does not generate revenue. Solana only has $4B in SOL staked, and the opportunity is a $80B market.

• We did not fundamentally agree with Eigenlayer’s technical architecture. So we re-architected, in a sense, restandardized restaking in the Solana land. Reusing stake as a way of securing network bandwidth for apps. We aim to become the de facto infrastructure for stake-weighted quality of service, and eventually, a core primitive of the Solana blockchain/consensus.

Building something that lasts

细水长流 - thin streams flow forever. It’s hard to not be hyped when there is good progress, especially in an industry like ours. But as an internal principle, we aim to be there for as long as Solana exists.

This requires consistency and persistence.

From hosting weekly engineering research presentations to submitting direct fixes to the Solana codebase, these are minor efforts that demonstrate to the team that building something that lasts will get us a lot farther than the short-term excitement.