SUURI FOCKING-PÄIVÄ

On my way home from Breakpoint. A few reflections on the event and Solana generally 👇 This was my first Breakpoint and I have to say, I was incredibly impressed. The production values are about as good as I’ve seen them. It’s impeccably organised and incredibly well curated. I sat and watched like 12 hours of content, at least, across the 3 days and it was all very high quality. Short punchy product and tech updates and with some quirky debate style formats that were fun. The vibes were really great. A few others have pointed this out, but it is a younger more enthusiastic crowd than your typical Ethereum conference. And it does somehow feel more inclusive and open. Outside of a Bonk dog here and there, it is completely un-degen. In fact, I am constantly surprised by how hardcore engineering focussed and technical a lot of Solana discourse is. The MEV Day and Block Zero mini-confs before Breakpoint were two of the highest alpha meetings I’ve ever been to. There are strong memes at the ecosystem level, Internet Capital Markets, IBRL etc these permeate all the talks and actually shape the tech materially. The forthcoming upgrades including Alpenglow, MCP and Jito’s BAM are all genuinely exiting advancements of frontier blockchain tech that are genuinely pushing the space forward. It has not, so far at least, turned into an insane side event slop bonanza. This has frankly got a bit silly in recent years with projects blowing eye watering sums of money playing swanky booze bribery attention games. All the events I went to here were ran as collaborations, sponsored and co-organised by several ecosystem projects rather than singular “look at me” type deals. Generally, this is the vibe I see across the ecosystem. It’s a more “we’re in it together” non-zero mentality than the more fragmented tangential ecosystem L2 and piggybacking alt-L1 city scale mega confs that the likes of ETHCC and Devcon have turned in to. I could probably make the argument that this is a kind of sociotechnical reification of the more monolithic architecture of the chain, but I’ll save you the anthropology. In any case, I like it. I’ve been to other chain specific conferences before for “contender” L1s and they feel much smaller, closed and niche than this. There is a kind of scale but focussed, massive but coherent thing going on that’s really rather interesting. Generally, I’m having a lot of fun in the Solana eco. It’s been the most high octane full throttle year of my career, the work is interesting, engaging, challenging but fun. I get to hang out and work with the Jito team who are just incredible, talented people and just generally super nice to be around. I’ve also got to work at the protocol level itself on the “Solana Constitution” governance framework and met a huge amount of the validators, foundation team and key stakeholders across the eco. Everyone is just strikingly high competence and hungry to win. It’s everything you’d want to see at the frontier of this emerging technology. Regardless of token prices this is all exceptionally bullish IMO. trillions