This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily Bloomberg I Heard podcast, and I'm Stacy Marie Ishmael, Managing editor of Crypto for Bloomberg News. It's Monday, January nine. The collapse of ft X has had some obvious reverberations. It's creditors, most importantly aren't show if they'll ever get their money back. But the fall of Sam Bankman Freed's empire has also affected a blockchain network called Solana. One of the newer and buzzier players on the crypto scene, bank Win Freed was a champion of both the blockchain itself and of its associated token, Soul or Soul fd X and s Lawn Adventures even had a multimillion dollar fund to support crypto gaming and am to Research famously or infamously invested directly into that token. But what does the collapse of ft X mean for the future of this block chain and of that token. Bloomberg's Hannah Miller has been reporting on this and joins me. Now the narrative that they're really trying to push forward is that they've outgrown fd X, that they're more than fd X, and they want to move beyond this association In this episode, you'll hear excerpts from Hannah Miller's interviews with the founders of Salona, Anatolya Yoka Venko, and Roj Google. Hello, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me today. We're not going to talk about venture capital, but we are going to talk about a little blockchain, or supposed not so little anymore, called Solana, and what that blockchain and its founders and its native token have to do with Mr Bakman, Freed and all things f X. Yeah. So Salana came about as this blockchain that was supposed to be faster and cheaper to use than Ethereum. And yeah, its speed is its big selling point. And it was created by Anatoli Yakovenko, and he, you know, kind of put it together. It's actually named after Salana Beach in California, where he liked to surf. The blockchain really only just launched in the past few years. It's pretty young, especially in comparison to big names like Bitcoin and Ethereum, but it's really just shot up in in in Providence. Really. One of the people who kind of helped it, you know, get to this point was Sam Bankman Freed you know, he was a major champion of Salana in its early days. Why though, like what what you know, what was his interest in the founders in in the token, Like was it financial? Was it a partnership? Yeah, so we do know that he did have this relationship with the founders. He and Anatolely you know, would appear together at conferences, do virtual fireside chats um and SPF was really you know, pushing this forward as um you know, a great alternative to you know, things like ethereum and especially bitcoin. SPF is not a big Bitcoin fan. Think the bitcoin people are fun of FBF. Yes, yeah, it definitely goes two ways. But with Salona, you know, SPF took some big chances on it. So for example, f t x US has an n f T marketplace, and when you think of non hot fungible tokens, you think of ethereum. Like most n f T s are based on ethereum. But Bankman Fried chose to launch f t x s U s f t x U s s n f T marketplace on Salana. So that was like a really big stamp of approval for the blockchain. And it also has a lot of associations with gaming, and as we know SPF is a huge gamer. You know that he was playing games during calls with VC invest Ventric Capital Investors, and you know it's I think that was part of the blockchain's appeal to him as well. He also built sarum Um, which is a decentralized crypto exchange on Salana, and I always thought that was kind of interesting because because f t X was a centralized crypto exchange and saram is decentralized, it doesn't really seem to go together. So there's this idea in in crypto and when folks are talking about block chains of something called the blockchain tri lemma, which if you think about it as being kind of three legs of a triangle. On one side, you have this idea of speed. Is this thing fast or is it slow? You have this idea of scala bill pity. Can this scale up to handle really large volumes of things at once or is it more shall we say, bespook? And then is it really decentralized? Right like, are there lots of different relatively independent players contributing to the safety, security, stability of this platform or does it rely to an extreme degree on a concentrated group of entities as far as so where Salana is in this, you know, three legs of this triangle. You've mentioned speed, but what are the concerns, like, what are the sacrifices it's making in order to be that fast? Yeah, well, I think with Salana, one of the criticisms that sort of followed the blockchains since it's its inception, is that it's too centralized, that there aren't enough parties you know, verifying and adding transactions to the blockchain, and that actually makes it susceptible to attacks and not as secure. Um and we've also seen, you know, this is a blockchain that suffered multiple outages you know, in the past year. So that's another point of concern that this is just not a stable enough blockchain. So, yeah, maybe it does hit on speed and scalability, but I do think that there's still this lingering concern among people within the crypto industry. And how do the founders because they have to deal with a few lingering concerns right now, including you know, the elephant in the room of their perceived association with Sam Bankman Freed. You interviewed them quite extensively, like how would you summarize where their heads were at in that interview. Yeah, so I think it did hurt them on a personal level, and it totally spoke about being in shock. You know that he couldn't really square what happened with FDx with you know, how he knew Sam Bankman freed to be like put the two together. In my head, still, I'm still trying to like square what I perceived them to be and like what actually happened. It just feels really really jarring here Salona's rod Google. Yeah. Same. I think you know, everybody in the industry that knew Sam, and especially the other people at ft X, there were a lot of really good people that um you know that that worked with f t X and and worked even within ft X UM and I think even they are are just totally shocked. I don't think anybody knew that the you know, the problems in that organization would would be. The narrative that they're really trying to push forward is that they've outgrown ft X, that they're more than f t X, and they want to move beyond this association and that there is great things, there are great things happening on the blockchain, that there are still you know, projects and teams committed to Salana, but it wasn't It was tough, tough to talk to them about it. I mean, they had their big conference in Lisbon around this time, around when you know, the stuff started coming out about f t X, and they sort of realized the magnitude of us on the way home, on the flight home from their Breakpoint conference and the conference they felt had been a huge success, but this just sort of dampened everything really great. And then in a flight back we started seeing the news of like ftxploring up and like finance buying them and not buying them, and this like fallout of that was really hard to square with like the energy that we felt during the conference. But like the last basically right after that, a lot of people in the industry, they're they're really still grappling with what happened here. As part of that grappling, is there anything that they said they would do differently, Like do they feel confident I'm going to use our favorite phrase in the underlying technology of the blockchain, or are there changes that they need to make too, for example, address the concerns about the lack of decentralization. I think they percent feel confident in the underlying technology, and I feel like that's they think that's what's going to carry them through. Um. You know that they believe that there are amazing decentralized projects being built on Salana and that this will mitigate, you know, the risk of centralized sentities like f t X, you know, potentially taking advantage of people. Up next more with Bloomberg reports Hannah Miller on the future of Salana, one of ft x's most champion blockchain networks. We'll be right back. So, still a couple of days before bank man freed officially, you know, files for officially filed for bankruptcy. But when he was engaged in a very public sess of Twitter conversations with the CEO of finance, it all feels like history. But it was the last couple of months. So, but Salana had been declining pretty significantly that week. You know, they were down like multiple percentage points in a given day, and then over the course of the seventies, including following the bankruptcy, you know, tens of percents at a time. Do they think that the Salona token is going to come back? You know, where people just worried about the prospects for a post bankman freed future, Like, where does their optimism for the pricing come from? Yeah, So when I asked them about you know this these massive declines in you know, the price of soul, uh, they said they don't really care about token price or they don't comment on it. They don't comment on it publicly. And you know that there's more to blockchain than just token price, that it's really all about the technology underlying it. But they did point out that ethereum has gone down a lot too, so I think they want to make that clear. So it's uh, you know, but I think it's hard to separate the two. I mean, the token is for a lot of people, how they know about the blockchain. It's you know, what they used to trade on it, that's what they associate with it. So I do think it's hard to separate the two. And and whatever way you look at it, there's just been this huge decline since it's all time high in one I mean, you go from hundreds of dollars to you know, around ten dollars, and that that's a that's a hard thing to to argue against. You know, it's hard. It's hard to argue against that being a bad thing for your the overall image of your blockchain. Now you mentioned n f t s, and you know the fact that bank when Trade and f t X and sort of backed n f t s on Salana. But as you've also been reporting, the overall n f T market is not doing super well. Is the Solana n f T markets an outlier in anyway? Is it's you know, in line with the rest of you know, the Ethereum based tokens. Is it is it seeing better or worse performance. N f t is based on Salona have taken hits as well. And also thing I want to point out is is actually too prominent projects that have their n f t s based on Salana are actually migrating over to Ethereum and Polygon. So and that was just announced recently. So it is interesting to kind of see that maybe some projects have had their confidence shaken in the Salona blockchain. So as much as you know, these founders say the underlying technology is strong, you know the fact that you have projects leaving that's not a good thing. That's not a good thing. Yeah, And with with n f t s in general, I mean, you know, there is this big question are they just a fat? Is this a dead fat now? Because sales are down so enormously and there's such a mistrust um within the crypto community in general now and actually this this just happened, but Magic Eden, which is the top n FD marketplace on Salona, has just had major purity issues, you know, where they've actually had to work out bugs that people were buying fake n f T s. You know, it's it's not a good look right now, and it's especially not a good look going to three, which I think has to be a reset here for all of the digital asset industry. I mean, I just saw someone tweet it's time to build, and I was like, really, are we still doing this? Yeah? I think I think that would be that would probably be a useful thing for for various folks in the industry to consider. But on on the point of reflection, there was an absolutely to me revealing line in the story that you wrote about your interview with the Salona founders, and it was the idea that one of the reasons that they think they'll be fine is because people in crypto have very short memories. Now, on the one hand, yes, we have certainly seen folks and projects, shall we say, rehabilitate themselves under many different circumstances and guys is on the other hand, it does look like folks in crypto are more than willing to hold a grudge for a very very long time. Where does there kind of belief in the eternal sunshine, as it were, um of the crypto mind come from? Yeah, well, Raj go call. You know, he made this point that crypto has overcome a lot of adversity in the past. You know, if you look at Bitcoin, there's Mount Cox and that took forever to resolve. But you know Bitcoin is still around, Bitcoin still, you know, still here. But I think in this scenario it's it's quite different. You know, Crypto has become more mainstream. You know, your grandmother knows what bitcoin is now. And even though crypto is more popular and more well known now, there's also this huge trade off that every misstep happens on a bigger scale. You know, people are gonna seize on the headlines. They're going to kind of lap up what's happening here. You know, there there are people who are actively excited about this downfall. So yes, even though there have been these setbacks, in the past, I don't think there's been anything on the scale of FTX. And the fact of the matter is, like Sam bankman Fried was so well known and loved by a lot of people, and a lot of people looked up to him, and the fact that you know, his his empire has collapsed is just causing a ripple effect across everything in the industry. And Salana is no exception here. And I know they've looked, you know, like there's been a lot of talk about using Salana and gaming and you know, actually f t X an Alometer research supported a bunch of projects, including games that are based on Salana. But I think it's there's still a pretty long road ahead in terms of, you know, proving that this is the blockchain to use for a specific set of use cases. Yeah, I mean, they want to conquer all of DeFi de centralized finance, and you know, when I asked where the future of Salana lives, they they have a very you know, big vision and they want to hit all of all of DEFY and who knows, maybe you know, with the fear around centralized densities caused by the collapse of fd X, people will migrate towards the centralized finance to a greater degree. We don't know, but I think that's sort of what they're banking on right now. Well, I think certainly one story we'll be keeping an eye on is whether a blockchain with a reputation for being too centralized can successfully convince people it should be a backbone of decentralized finance. So interesting times. Thank you as always, Hannah. You can find more of Hannah Miller's reporting on the Bloomberg terminal Adam Bloomberg dot com, and you'll sometimes find her in our twice weekly newsletter, Bloomberg Crypto. Be sure to sign up. This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Send us your comments, questions or suggestions for the show to Crypto at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of Bloomberg Crypto is Vicky very Galina. Our senior producer is Janet Babin. Our producers are Mohammed Farouk and Sharon Barriro. Our associate producers are Ty Butler and Moses on them. Desta wonder At is our engineer. Original music by Leo Sidron. I'm Stacy Mariashmal. We'll be back tomorrow.

This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily Bloomberg I Heard podcast, and I'm Stacy Marie Ishmael, Managing editor of Crypto for Bloomberg News. It's Monday, January nine. The collapse of ft X has had some obvious reverberations. It's creditors, most importantly aren't show if they'll ever get their money back. But the fall of Sam Bankman Freed's empire has also affected a blockchain network called Solana. One of the newer and buzzier players on the crypto scene, bank Win Freed was a champion of both the blockchain itself and of its associated token, Soul or Soul fd X and s Lawn Adventures even had a multimillion dollar fund to support crypto gaming and am to Research famously or infamously invested directly into that token. But what does the collapse of ft X mean for the future of this block chain and of that token. Bloomberg's Hannah Miller has been reporting on this and joins me. Now the narrative that they're really trying to push forward is that they've outgrown fd X, that they're more than fd X, and they want to move beyond this association In this episode, you'll hear excerpts from Hannah Miller's interviews with the founders of Salona, Anatolya Yoka Venko, and Roj Google. Hello, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me today. We're not going to talk about venture capital, but we are going to talk about a little blockchain, or supposed not so little anymore, called Solana, and what that blockchain and its founders and its native token have to do with Mr Bakman, Freed and all things f X. Yeah. So Salana came about as this blockchain that was supposed to be faster and cheaper to use than Ethereum. And yeah, its speed is its big selling point. And it was created by Anatoli Yakovenko, and he, you know, kind of put it together. It's actually named after Salana Beach in California, where he liked to surf. The blockchain really only just launched in the past few years. It's pretty young, especially in comparison to big names like Bitcoin and Ethereum, but it's really just shot up in in in Providence. Really. One of the people who kind of helped it, you know, get to this point was Sam Bankman Freed you know, he was a major champion of Salana in its early days. Why though, like what what you know, what was his interest in the founders in in the token, Like was it financial? Was it a partnership? Yeah, so we do know that he did have this relationship with the founders. He and Anatolely you know, would appear together at conferences, do virtual fireside chats um and SPF was really you know, pushing this forward as um you know, a great alternative to you know, things like ethereum and especially bitcoin. SPF is not a big Bitcoin fan. Think the bitcoin people are fun of FBF. Yes, yeah, it definitely goes two ways. But with Salona, you know, SPF took some big chances on it. So for example, f t x US has an n f T marketplace, and when you think of non hot fungible tokens, you think of ethereum. Like most n f T s are based on ethereum. But Bankman Fried chose to launch f t x s U s f t x U s s n f T marketplace on Salana. So that was like a really big stamp of approval for the blockchain. And it also has a lot of associations with gaming, and as we know SPF is a huge gamer. You know that he was playing games during calls with VC invest Ventric Capital Investors, and you know it's I think that was part of the blockchain's appeal to him as well. He also built sarum Um, which is a decentralized crypto exchange on Salana, and I always thought that was kind of interesting because because f t X was a centralized crypto exchange and saram is decentralized, it doesn't really seem to go together. So there's this idea in in crypto and when folks are talking about block chains of something called the blockchain tri lemma, which if you think about it as being kind of three legs of a triangle. On one side, you have this idea of speed. Is this thing fast or is it slow? You have this idea of scala bill pity. Can this scale up to handle really large volumes of things at once or is it more shall we say, bespook? And then is it really decentralized? Right like, are there lots of different relatively independent players contributing to the safety, security, stability of this platform or does it rely to an extreme degree on a concentrated group of entities as far as so where Salana is in this, you know, three legs of this triangle. You've mentioned speed, but what are the concerns, like, what are the sacrifices it's making in order to be that fast? Yeah, well, I think with Salana, one of the criticisms that sort of followed the blockchains since it's its inception, is that it's too centralized, that there aren't enough parties you know, verifying and adding transactions to the blockchain, and that actually makes it susceptible to attacks and not as secure. Um and we've also seen, you know, this is a blockchain that suffered multiple outages you know, in the past year. So that's another point of concern that this is just not a stable enough blockchain. So, yeah, maybe it does hit on speed and scalability, but I do think that there's still this lingering concern among people within the crypto industry. And how do the founders because they have to deal with a few lingering concerns right now, including you know, the elephant in the room of their perceived association with Sam Bankman Freed. You interviewed them quite extensively, like how would you summarize where their heads were at in that interview. Yeah, so I think it did hurt them on a personal level, and it totally spoke about being in shock. You know that he couldn't really square what happened with FDx with you know, how he knew Sam Bankman freed to be like put the two together. In my head, still, I'm still trying to like square what I perceived them to be and like what actually happened. It just feels really really jarring here Salona's rod Google. Yeah. Same. I think you know, everybody in the industry that knew Sam, and especially the other people at ft X, there were a lot of really good people that um you know that that worked with f t X and and worked even within ft X UM and I think even they are are just totally shocked. I don't think anybody knew that the you know, the problems in that organization would would be. The narrative that they're really trying to push forward is that they've outgrown ft X, that they're more than f t X, and they want to move beyond this association and that there is great things, there are great things happening on the blockchain, that there are still you know, projects and teams committed to Salana, but it wasn't It was tough, tough to talk to them about it. I mean, they had their big conference in Lisbon around this time, around when you know, the stuff started coming out about f t X, and they sort of realized the magnitude of us on the way home, on the flight home from their Breakpoint conference and the conference they felt had been a huge success, but this just sort of dampened everything really great. And then in a flight back we started seeing the news of like ftxploring up and like finance buying them and not buying them, and this like fallout of that was really hard to square with like the energy that we felt during the conference. But like the last basically right after that, a lot of people in the industry, they're they're really still grappling with what happened here. As part of that grappling, is there anything that they said they would do differently, Like do they feel confident I'm going to use our favorite phrase in the underlying technology of the blockchain, or are there changes that they need to make too, for example, address the concerns about the lack of decentralization. I think they percent feel confident in the underlying technology, and I feel like that's they think that's what's going to carry them through. Um. You know that they believe that there are amazing decentralized projects being built on Salana and that this will mitigate, you know, the risk of centralized sentities like f t X, you know, potentially taking advantage of people. Up next more with Bloomberg reports Hannah Miller on the future of Salana, one of ft x's most champion blockchain networks. We'll be right back. So, still a couple of days before bank man freed officially, you know, files for officially filed for bankruptcy. But when he was engaged in a very public sess of Twitter conversations with the CEO of finance, it all feels like history. But it was the last couple of months. So, but Salana had been declining pretty significantly that week. You know, they were down like multiple percentage points in a given day, and then over the course of the seventies, including following the bankruptcy, you know, tens of percents at a time. Do they think that the Salona token is going to come back? You know, where people just worried about the prospects for a post bankman freed future, Like, where does their optimism for the pricing come from? Yeah, So when I asked them about you know this these massive declines in you know, the price of soul, uh, they said they don't really care about token price or they don't comment on it. They don't comment on it publicly. And you know that there's more to blockchain than just token price, that it's really all about the technology underlying it. But they did point out that ethereum has gone down a lot too, so I think they want to make that clear. So it's uh, you know, but I think it's hard to separate the two. I mean, the token is for a lot of people, how they know about the blockchain. It's you know, what they used to trade on it, that's what they associate with it. So I do think it's hard to separate the two. And and whatever way you look at it, there's just been this huge decline since it's all time high in one I mean, you go from hundreds of dollars to you know, around ten dollars, and that that's a that's a hard thing to to argue against. You know, it's hard. It's hard to argue against that being a bad thing for your the overall image of your blockchain. Now you mentioned n f t s, and you know the fact that bank when Trade and f t X and sort of backed n f t s on Salana. But as you've also been reporting, the overall n f T market is not doing super well. Is the Solana n f T markets an outlier in anyway? Is it's you know, in line with the rest of you know, the Ethereum based tokens. Is it is it seeing better or worse performance. N f t is based on Salona have taken hits as well. And also thing I want to point out is is actually too prominent projects that have their n f t s based on Salana are actually migrating over to Ethereum and Polygon. So and that was just announced recently. So it is interesting to kind of see that maybe some projects have had their confidence shaken in the Salona blockchain. So as much as you know, these founders say the underlying technology is strong, you know the fact that you have projects leaving that's not a good thing. That's not a good thing. Yeah, And with with n f t s in general, I mean, you know, there is this big question are they just a fat? Is this a dead fat now? Because sales are down so enormously and there's such a mistrust um within the crypto community in general now and actually this this just happened, but Magic Eden, which is the top n FD marketplace on Salona, has just had major purity issues, you know, where they've actually had to work out bugs that people were buying fake n f T s. You know, it's it's not a good look right now, and it's especially not a good look going to three, which I think has to be a reset here for all of the digital asset industry. I mean, I just saw someone tweet it's time to build, and I was like, really, are we still doing this? Yeah? I think I think that would be that would probably be a useful thing for for various folks in the industry to consider. But on on the point of reflection, there was an absolutely to me revealing line in the story that you wrote about your interview with the Salona founders, and it was the idea that one of the reasons that they think they'll be fine is because people in crypto have very short memories. Now, on the one hand, yes, we have certainly seen folks and projects, shall we say, rehabilitate themselves under many different circumstances and guys is on the other hand, it does look like folks in crypto are more than willing to hold a grudge for a very very long time. Where does there kind of belief in the eternal sunshine, as it were, um of the crypto mind come from? Yeah, well, Raj go call. You know, he made this point that crypto has overcome a lot of adversity in the past. You know, if you look at Bitcoin, there's Mount Cox and that took forever to resolve. But you know Bitcoin is still around, Bitcoin still, you know, still here. But I think in this scenario it's it's quite different. You know, Crypto has become more mainstream. You know, your grandmother knows what bitcoin is now. And even though crypto is more popular and more well known now, there's also this huge trade off that every misstep happens on a bigger scale. You know, people are gonna seize on the headlines. They're going to kind of lap up what's happening here. You know, there there are people who are actively excited about this downfall. So yes, even though there have been these setbacks, in the past, I don't think there's been anything on the scale of FTX. And the fact of the matter is, like Sam bankman Fried was so well known and loved by a lot of people, and a lot of people looked up to him, and the fact that you know, his his empire has collapsed is just causing a ripple effect across everything in the industry. And Salana is no exception here. And I know they've looked, you know, like there's been a lot of talk about using Salana and gaming and you know, actually f t X an Alometer research supported a bunch of projects, including games that are based on Salana. But I think it's there's still a pretty long road ahead in terms of, you know, proving that this is the blockchain to use for a specific set of use cases. Yeah, I mean, they want to conquer all of DeFi de centralized finance, and you know, when I asked where the future of Salana lives, they they have a very you know, big vision and they want to hit all of all of DEFY and who knows, maybe you know, with the fear around centralized densities caused by the collapse of fd X, people will migrate towards the centralized finance to a greater degree. We don't know, but I think that's sort of what they're banking on right now. Well, I think certainly one story we'll be keeping an eye on is whether a blockchain with a reputation for being too centralized can successfully convince people it should be a backbone of decentralized finance. So interesting times. Thank you as always, Hannah. You can find more of Hannah Miller's reporting on the Bloomberg terminal Adam Bloomberg dot com, and you'll sometimes find her in our twice weekly newsletter, Bloomberg Crypto. Be sure to sign up. This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Send us your comments, questions or suggestions for the show to Crypto at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of Bloomberg Crypto is Vicky very Galina. Our senior producer is Janet Babin. Our producers are Mohammed Farouk and Sharon Barriro. Our associate producers are Ty Butler and Moses on them. Desta wonder At is our engineer. Original music by Leo Sidron. I'm Stacy Mariashmal. We'll be back tomorrow.